From National Book Award winner Ron Chernow, a landmark biography of George Washington. In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. With a breadth and depth matched by no other one-volume life of Washington, this crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president. Despite the reverence his name inspires, Washington remains a lifeless waxwork for many Americans, worthy but dull. A laconic man of granite self-control, he often arouses more respect than affection. In this groundbreaking work, based on massive research, Chernow dashes forever the stereotype of a stolid, unemotional man. A strapping six feet, Washington was a celebrated horseman, elegant dancer, and tireless hunter, with a fiercely guarded emotional life. Chernow brings to vivid life a dashing, passionate man of fiery opinions and many moods. Probing his private life, he explores his fraught relationship with his crusty mother, his youthful infatuation with the married Sally Fairfax, and his often conflicted feelings toward his adopted children and grandchildren. He also provides a lavishly detailed portrait of his marriage to Martha and his complex behavior as a slave master. At the same time, Washington is an astute and surprising portrait of a canny political genius who knew how to inspire people. Not only did Washington gather around himself the foremost figures of the age, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, but he also brilliantly orchestrated their actions to shape the new federal government, define the separation of powers, and establish the office of the presidency. In this unique biography, Ron Chernow takes us on a page-turning journey through all the formative events of America's founding. With a dramatic sweep worthy of its giant subject, Washington is a magisterial work from one of our most elegant storytellers.
The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2010: "In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer." With this sobering statistic, physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee begins his comprehensive and eloquent "biography" of one of the most virulent diseases of our time. An exhaustive account of cancer's origins, The Emperor of All Maladies illustrates how modern treatments--multi-pronged chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, as well as preventative care--came into existence thanks to a century's worth of research, trials, and small, essential breakthroughs around the globe. While The Emperor of All Maladies is rich with the science and history behind the fight against cancer, it is also a meditation on illness, medical ethics, and the complex, intertwining lives of doctors and patients. Mukherjee's profound compassion--for cancer patients, their families, as well as the oncologists who, all too often, can offer little hope--makes this book a very human history of an elusive and complicated disease
The Perfect King The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
He ordered his uncle to be beheaded; he usurped his father's throne; he started a war which lasted for more than a hundred years, and taxed his people more than any other previous king. Yet for centuries Edward III was celebrated as the greatest king England had ever had, and three hundred years after his death it was said that his kingship was perhaps the greatest that the world had ever known.
In this first full study of the man's character and life, Dr Ian Mortimer shows how Edward personally provided the impetus for much of the drama of his fifty-year reign. In particular he shows how Edward did more than any other monarch before or since to create the English nation as we know it today. Edward overcame the tyranny of his guardians at the age of seventeen,and then set about developing a new form of awe-inspiring chivalric kingship. Under him the feudal kingdom of England became a highly organised, sophisticated nation, capable of raising large revenues and deploying a new type of projectile-based warfare, and without question the most important military nation in Europe. Yet under his rule England itself experienced its longest period of domestic peace in the middle ages, giving rise to a massive increase of the nation's wealth through the wool trade, with huge consequences for society, art and architecture. It is also to Edward that we owe our system of parliamentary representation, our local justice system, our national flag and the English language as the 'tongue of the nation'
All this leads us to wonder why he is normally overlooked in a list of England's greatest kings. The answer is simple: nineteenth century historians saw in him the opportunity to decry a warmonger, and painted himas a self-seeking, rapacious, tax-gathering conquerer. Yet as this book shows, beneath the strong warrior king was a compassionate, conscientious and often merciful man, resolute yet devoted to his wife, friends and family. Through his personal relationships, he emerges as a strikingly modern figure, to whom many will be able to relate. That is not surprising, as the majority of Englishmen alive today are descended from him. He is therefore a father of both the English nation and the English people, and consequently stands alongside William I as one of the two most important medieval figures in the history of England.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is noted for his novelsAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
Three Cups of Tea:One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One School at a Time byGreg Mortenson,David Oliver Relin
Hardcover: 338 pages
Publisher: Viking Penguin (March 2, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670034827
ISBN-13: 978-0670034826
This is an as-told-to biography of American Greg Mortenson, who has devoted his life to building schools in the remotest mountains of Pakistan. After a failed attempt to scale the earth's second highest peak, K2, he stumbles into an isolated mountain village, where he resolves to repay the generosity of the village leader and his people by building them a school. Mortenson's struggle to fulfill that promise and then committing himself to fund raising and building many more schools, for both boys and girls in this Muslim country, is the central subject of this long, well detailed book. Rising gamely to meet all obstacles, including his own naivte, errors in judgment, and lack of financial resources, Mortenson falls back on skills and values learned as the son of Lutheran missionaries in Africa. Along the way he encounters others who have the money, the connections, and the abilities to help him on his mission, in both the U.S. and Pakistan. There are frustrations that would discourage the best of us, and there are sudden unexpected turns of fortune that rescue his efforts from oblivion. The book is a lesson in how a real field of dreams comes into being, and it is a quiet rebuff to those who seek change and order in the world's trouble spots through shock-and-awe military might.
Writer David Relin's worshipful account of Mortenson's career draws heavily on "Parade"-style drama, suspense, and sentiment. At times readers may yearn for more objectivity and wonder how much Relin might be glossing over his subject. Still, the story has a momentum of its own, and you read on, as Mortenson's fragile achievements are threatened by other forces set loose by the anti-West indoctrination of Saudi-funded madrassah schools, the emergence of the Talibabn, and the post-9/11 attacks on Afghanistan. Recommended for readers who enjoy heartfelt and inspiring stories of unusual achievement by heroically generous individuals.
For the past twenty-five years, no one has been better at revealing secrets than Oprah Winfrey. On what is arguably the most influential show in television history, she has gotten her guests—often the biggest celebrities in the world—to bare their love lives, explore their painful pasts, admit their transgressions, reveal their pleasures, and explore their demons. In turn, Oprah has repeatedly allowed her audience to share in her own life story, opening up about the sexual abuse in her past and discussing her romantic relationships, her weight problems, her spiritual beliefs, her charitable donations, and her strongly held views on the state of the world.
After a quarter of a century of the Oprah-ization of America, can there be any more secrets left to reveal? Yes. Because Oprah has met her match.
Kitty Kelley has, over the same period of time, fearlessly and relentlessly investigated and written about the world’s most revered icons: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, England’s Royal Family, and the Bush dynasty. In her #1 bestselling biographies, she has exposed truths and exploded myths to uncover the real human beings that exist behind their manufactured facades.
Turning her reportorial sights on Oprah, Kelley has now given us an unvarnished look at the stories Oprah’s told and the life she’s led. Kelley has talked to Oprah’s closest family members and business associates. She has obtained court records, birth certificates, financial and tax records, and even copies of Oprah’s legendary (and punishing) confidentiality agreements. She has probed every aspect of Oprah Winfrey’s life, and it is as if she’s written the most extraordinary segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show ever filmed—one in which Oprah herself is finally and fully revealed.
There is a case to be made, and it is certainly made in this book, that Oprah Winfrey is an important, and even great, figure of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But there is also a case to be made that even greatness needs to be examined and put under a microscope. Fact must be separated from myth, truth from hype. Kitty Kelley has made that separation, showing both sides of Oprah as they have never been shown before. In doing so she has written a psychologically perceptive and meticulously researched book that will surprise and thrill everyone who reads it.
The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry Euan Ferguson The Observer, Sunday 19 September 2010
The second volume of Stephen Fry's memoirs recalls his Cambridge years and rise to fame in perfect prose and excruciating honesty
Well, Kerry Katona Vol III this ain't. And it's possible that Mr Fry even wrote all of it himself.
That Stephen Fry needs no introduction is what he has always wanted. He is writing today, of course, from a position of fame, but the period which this, the second volume of his autobiography, covers is the decade or so after he'd done his shameful late-teen jail stint for credit-card theft, and made it, despite his appetites, his addiction, his self-admitted "slyness", to Cambridge, last of his last chances, and with the world before him to either trample or embrace.
What follows is many things: a grand reminiscence of college and theatre and comedyland in the 1980s, with tone-perfect showbiz anecdotes, and genuine readerly excitement as we try to forget that we know what happened next; a rehabilitation, for Fry himself, as he finds himself becoming genuinely popular, and genuinely good at some things – acting of a limited sort, sketch-writing, hard, hard work – rather than just "being clever". And through all of it he tells us, with exemplary and often exruciating honesty, of his crippling self-doubts, his needinesses, the greed of his addictions, his drive, shallow though he knew it was, for fame. What Fry does, essentially, is tell us who he really is. He knows he's always been seen, by friends and enemies alike, as confident, quintessentially English, languorously zing-full of bons mots, at ease in any surroundings. Inside, he says, there's an often terrified half-Jew poof, horrified by the unattractiveness of his body, unable to smile sweetly without looking smug, knowing he's been given a second chance and filled with terror at the thought of blowing it.
Even he knows he's straying towards reader-unfriendly territory by spending three pages exploring his personal angsts during a time when, say, he's just had his first play put on at the fringe, or been head-hunted for a new radio show. So he gets his retaliation in first, explaining why he's explaining it all, and making it even more fascinating, before giving us another story about a BBC producer, or how musicals get written, or his tennis-match theory of sitcoms and thus why the very first Black Adder didn't work. The mix is perfect.
The first half, essentially, is college, back in the days when it was generally accepted that education was about much more than learning things. He admits he was blessed with a fine memory, an ease with quotes which helped him sail exams, but much of his real education, the expansion of his hinterland, took place "in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink." Admittedly, and he admits it, he had decent enough frolicking/ learning companions, chief among them Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, but back then, remember, they were just friends. Fry also, talking of those days, pulls off the near-impossible in managing to make you feel sorry for the most lucky, privileged souls on Earth: young people, during May Week at Cambridge, punting and swimming and in love and in puddles of champagne. Sorry for them, that is, in an et in arcadia ego way: the memento mori reminder that so many of the rest of us can say – "I, too, was young once" – and that these nymphs will so soon be fat and disappointed and 50. OK, sorry for them a little.
The first half, which ends with his revue picking up the first-ever Perrier, ends thus: "A year and a half earlier I had been on probation. Lost… in dense blackness of an unfriendly forest thick with brambles, treacherous undergrowth and hostile creatures of my own making. Somehow, somewhere I had seen or been offered a path out and had found myself stumbling into open, sunlit country."
As success bestrode success, he grew more easily into what people always saw him as: "Like many masks this smiling, placid one has become so tight a fit that it might be said to have rewritten the features of whatever true face once screamed behind it. Were it not that it is just a mask and that the feelings underneath are as they always were."
He's not without bite, but it's careful. If there's a target it's batted away with logic and a catspaw, but no claws. The sourness of Simon Gray and his great friend-enemy Harold Pinter depressed him. Even here there's not so much viciousness as intellectual confusion, which turns into a pleasingly spirited demolition of the meanness of their great influence, FR Leavis. Fry, who famously walked out of Cell Mates, wasn't invited to Gray's funeral. He's also confused, a little, about a few colleagues such as Robbie Coltrane and Alexei Sayle, and their reactions (or reported reactions) to him: essentially, anti-nob prejudice. Fry's turning of the tables is done with courtesy and logic, and again makes you think. The only true sin in Fry's world is incuriosity. He doesn't despise people who don't know anything, but he despises, truly despises, the fact that they don't want to know anything, ever.
He is apologetically unapologetic, or perhaps it's the other way round, for his own 80s years of ostentation, as the money began to flow in. He now cringes gleefully to recall the Paul Smith shirts and exciting new croissants to which he and Hugh treat each other after the latest ludicrously lucrative eight minutes' work of Soho voice-over, the Kings Road swaggering, the membership of St James's clubs, the cars. It doesn't take a man of his powers of self-analysis to conclude that he was basically waving his own many new credit cards around at this time, just to say: "Look, I didn't steal them. I'm here under my own steam." He tells us of his babbling excitement upon the invention of the Apple Macintosh, his next addiction (the Twitter stuff will doubtless be in one of the next books; but, believe me, for some of us the adoration of the Mac was the same thing back then, if more exclusive); and of his celibacy, for work was his latest addiction and he loathed the hostile judging eyes of the disco gay scene.
This is, above all else, a thoughtful book. And namedroppy too, and funny, and marbled with melancholy throughout. Its camaraderie of tone lets it wear its learning lightly yet leaves you with a hoaching number of new insights, new ways of looking at things, from snobbery to reality-TV contestants. The mask is now firmly on, and he grows into it each day, not least early last week in the Festival Hall, at his mammoth broadcast book launch, when he strode on stage as if lent – no, willingly given, for ever – the confidence of half of England, and was welcomed with the roars and love of the other half. Yet this book is a painfully honest attempt to tear the mask aside, for us. We are, if we are not damnably incurious, splendidly the better for it.
