955 results for First Friends

Now in paperback, here is the critically acclaimed, best-selling biography of one of Hollywood's legendary stars. Burt Lancaster is known to audiences around the world as the electrifying performer of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, From Here to Eternity, and Birdman of Alcatraz, among many others. Kate Buford brings to life his vivid, memorable on-screen…

"The ultimate in art is self-expression, not escape."-Duke Ellington In this fascinating portrait of one of America's greatest musical legends, longtime friend and jazz historian Stanley Dance recounts the life of the incomparable Duke Ellington in his own words and in the words of the artists who played along with him: longtime co-composer Billy Strayhorn,…

Years after her death Maria Callas remains one of the most renowned and compelling of all divas. Although much has been written about Callas the prima donna, the consummate stage magician, and the tragic lover of Aristotle Onassis, this is the first account of Maria the woman by someone who was close to her. Stancioff,…

The history of the Chieftains over the last thirty-five years is the remarkable tale of how an unlikely group of enthusiasts came together to rescue some of the world's most beautiful music from near-extinction, brought it to an audience of millions, and became stars. Based on exclusive and extensive interviews with all the band's members,…

The clash at Chancellorsville in 1863 was an enormously complex ten-day campaign. At its conclusion, General Joseph Hooker, the confident commander of the Army of the Potomac, was in disgrace, while Confederate General Robert E. Lee had won a decisive victory but at the loss of the irreplaceable "Stonewall" Jackson, killed by friendly fire.At age…

Stanley Kubrick, director of the acclaimed films Path of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, is arguably one of the greatest American filmmakers. Yet, despite being hailed as "a giant" by Orson Welles, little is known about the reclusive director. Stanley Kubrick--the first full-length…

Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic, Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers. Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure as fully human and fallible, while confirming his enormous stature both as a man and a writer. Cronin explores how the sporty schoolboy of solid Protestant bourgeois stock…

German poet, dramatist, novelist, translator, scientist, and musician, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was the last universal genius of the West and a master of world literature, the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust. Nowhere else can one encounter a more penetrating, many-sided, and personal Goethe than in the extraordinary…

"Genius, egotist, mythomaniac, sexual rebel, master of media manipulation, the legendary Wright comes alive in all his cantankerous complexity. . . . A delight from cover to cover."--KirkusFrank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is often described as the greatest of American architects. His works-among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum--earned…

This is the first complete, critical biography of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), one of America's finest playwrights and the author of (among many important works) The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Night of the Iguana. Award-winning biographer Donald Spoto gives us…

Pink Floyd has produced some of the most celebrated rock music of all time: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall, and, recently, The Division Bell.Pink Floyd through the Eyes of . . . collects the best writing from critics and connoisseurs like David Fricke, Reober Christgau, Nick…

When Fort Sumter fell in 1861, Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) was an obscure clerk in Galena, Illinois, without influential friends and lacking a reputation for success. Yet within three years this man rose to command the Union armies, and just over a year later secured the defeat of the Confederacy. How can this emergence be…

"Friedman has captured the excitement of the artist at work--the tortuous groping towards an idea and the sense of fulfillment in its ultimate creation. It is, indeed, a definitive biography. It is documented. It is solid. But best of all, it is lively."--Chicago TribuneNowhere is the complex and destructive painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) revealed with…

This fascinating collection of intimate letters from and to Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) illuminates the character and personality of the President of the Confederacy. These letters (the majority appearing fully in print for the first time) range widely over one of the most turbulent periods in American history, from his fifteenth year to his death at…

Leonard Feather's autobiography is also the story of jazz over the last half-century. Since arriving in New York from London in 1935, he has managed to distinguish himself as a producer, composer, pianist, and one of the music's most acute critics. He was one of the first to champion the innovations of bebop in the…

Karl Geiringer's biography of Brahms is generally regarded as the finest study of the composer ever published in any language. It is based upon the great body of material in the archives of the Viennese Society of Friends, for which Dr. Geiringer was curator from 1930-1938, and which contains more than a thousand letters written…

In 1933 Irving Berlin wrote to composer-lyricist Cole Porter, ”I am mad about Night and Day.” Millions of others throughout the world have been ”mad about” that Porter gem, as well as dozens of others, including, to name just a few, Begin the Beguine, From This Moment On, It's De-Lovely, Just One of Those Things,…

More than to any other musician, the credit for the birth of modern jazz belongs to Charles "Yardbird" Parker--known to his friends and fans simply as "Bird."Parker's virtuoso technique, melodic genius, and inspired improvisations helped launch a whole new era in jazz, an era that began with bop and culminated in the "cool" or modern…

Infinite Potential is the first biography of David Bohm—brilliant physicist, explorer of consciousness, student of Oppenheimer, friend to Einstein, and enemy of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although he battled bouts of crippling depression, Bohm proved to be one of the twentieth century's most original thinkers, influencing the fields of physics, philosophy, psychology, language,…