Biographies & Memoirs
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Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: China Miéville
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Liveright; 1 edition (2013, Feb 4th).
Pages: 272
A final statement from the greatest clairvoyant of twentieth-century literature.Never before published in America, this revelatory autobiography—hailed as “fascinating [and] amazingly lucid” (Guardian)—charts the remarkable story of James Graham Ballard, a man described by Martin Amis as “the most original English writer of the last century.” Beginning with his Shanghai childhood, Miracles of Life guides us from the deprivations of Lunghua Camp during World War II, which provide the back story for his best-selling Empire of the Sun, to his arrival in war-torn England and his emergence as “the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity” (Observer). With prose of characteristic precision, Ballard movingly recalls his first attempts at science fiction, the 1970 American pulping of The Atrocity Exhibition—which sprang from his fascination with JFK conspiracy theories—and his life as a single father after the premature death of his wife. more
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Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Allen Barra
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Crown Archetype (2013, Apr 2nd).
Pages: 496
Acclaimed sportswriter Allen Barra exposes the uncanny parallels--and lifelong friendship--between two of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field. Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They possessed virtually the same talents and played the same position. They were both products of generations of baseball-playing families, for whom the game was the only escape from a lifetime of brutal manual labor. Both were nearly crushed by the weight of the outsized expectations placed on them, first by their families and later by America. Both lived secret lives far different from those their fans knew. What their fans also didn't know was that the two men shared a close personal friendship--and that each was the only man who could truly understand the other's experience. more
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Read My Lips: Stories of a Hollywood Life
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Sally Kellerman
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Weinstein Books (2013, Apr 30th).
Pages: 272
Sally Kellerman’s portrayal of Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H remains a landmark performance. Throughout her long career Kellerman has been a real dame—honest, down-to-earth, sultry, funny, and unfiltered. In READ MY LIPS, Kellerman shares colorful tales of her years as an up-and-coming actress in the early 60s, when Hollywood was a small neighborhood full of chance encounters. To pay for acting classes (ten dollars each, alongside the likes of Jack Nicholson) she waited tables at a coffee house on the Sunset Strip that was a hangout for Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Warren Beatty. While she watered her lawn one morning in her bathrobe, Ringo Starr stopped in his convertible to say he’d just moved into the neighborhood and she should drop by; during the Vietnam War, she dated Henry Kissinger. more
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Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Kate Hubbard
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper (2013, Apr 30th).
Pages: 432
During her sixty-three-year reign, Queen Victoria gathered around herself a household dedicated to her service. For some, royal employment was the defining experience of their lives; for others it came as an unwelcome duty or as a prelude to greater things. Serving Victoria follows the lives of six members of her household, from the governess to the royal children, from her maid of honor to her chaplain and her personal physician.Drawing on their letters and diaries—many hitherto unpublished—Serving Victoria offers a unique insight into the Victorian court, with all its frustrations and absurdities, as well as the Queen herself, sitting squarely at its center. Seen through the eyes of her household as she traveled among Windsor, Osborne, and Balmoral, and to the French and Belgian courts, Victoria emerges as more vulnerable, more emotional, more selfish, more comical, than the austere figure depicted in her famous portraits. more
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And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: David Neiwert
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Nation Books (2013, Mar 26th).
Pages: 336
It began with a frantic 911 call from a woman in a dusty Arizona border town. A gang claiming to be affiliated with the Border Patrol had shot her husband and daughter. It was initially assumed that the murders were products of border drug wars ravaging the Southwest until the leader of one of the more prominent offshoots of the Minutemen movement was arrested for plotting the home invasion as part of a scheme to finance a violent antigovernment border militia.And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing to the Dark Side of the American Border is award-winning journalist David Neiwert's riveting account of the life and death of America's Minutemen--and the terrifying story and psychology of movement leader Shawna Forde. A compulsive and brilliant portrait of cold-blooded killers and true believers, And Hell Followed With Her is at once a horrifying crime story and a frontline report on America's nativist foot soldiers. more
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Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Nancy Rubin Stuart
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Beacon Press (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages: 272
The story of two Revolutionary–era teenagers who defy their Loyalist families to marry radical patriots, Henry Knox and Benedict Arnold, and are forever changed When Peggy Shippen, the celebrated blonde belle of Philadelphia, married American military hero Benedict Arnold in 1779, she anticipated a life of fame and fortune, but financial debts and political intrigues prompted her to conspire with her treasonous husband against George Washington and the American Revolution. In spite of her commendable efforts to rehabilitate her husband’s name, Peggy Shippen continues to be remembered as a traitor bride. Peggy’s patriotic counterpart was Lucy Flucker, the spirited and voluptuous brunette, who in 1774 defied her wealthy Tory parents by marrying a poor Boston bookbinder simply for love. more
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Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Jack McCallum
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books (2013, Apr 9th).
Pages: 400
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum delivers the untold story of the greatest team ever assembled: the 1992 U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Team. As a writer for Sports Illustrated, McCallum enjoyed a courtside seat for the most exciting basketball spectacle on earth, covering the Dream Team from its inception to the gold medal ceremony in Barcelona. Drawing on fresh interviews with the players, McCallum provides the definitive account of the Dream Team phenomenon. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the controversial selection process. He takes us inside the team’s Olympic suites for late-night card games and bull sessions where superstars like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird debated the finer points of basketball. more
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Al Pacino: Anatomy of an Actor
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Karina Longworth
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Phaidon Press (2013, May 21st).
Pages:
192 S. more
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Marlon Brando: Anatomy of An Actor
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Florence Colombani
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Phaidon Press (2013, May 21st).
Pages:
Anatomy of an Actor titles are comprehensive studies on the craft of the world's greatest actors, through the analysis of ten of their most iconic roles. The authors examine why and how these famous actors have become some of the most respected and influential in the film world. Each title is divided into 10 chapters, each one dedicated to a specific role and fully documented with film stills, on-set photography and film sequences. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition. more
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Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: William Styron
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Modern Library (2007, Jan 23rd).
Pages: 96
A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.From the Trade Paperback edition. more
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