Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

The book contains stories on various subjects, starting with the contemplations of passengers in an airplane during a fictitious flight on various situations in their life, through the memories captured by ZS during his study and work, as well as stories based on pub talks and on the imagination of the author.

In No life of my own, Frank Chikane, one of the leading figures in the Christian resistance to apartheid, recounts his life – beginning with his childhood, growing up black under apartheid, and continuing through his call to the Christian ministry. He tells of his family's increasing involvement in the struggle against apartheid and of disapproval and suspension from his own church. He relates a harrowing story of harassment, detention and firebombing, torture and exile – and his return, despite death threats and further detention, to South Africa to continue the fight. Through it all, one thing is clear: he is a man whose faith compels and sustains him in a courageous and selfless journey toward freedom.

In a career that spanned nearly five decades, Dorothy Fields penned the words to more than four hundred songs, among them mega-hits such as "On the Sunny Side of the Street," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "The Way You Look Tonight," and "If My Friends could See Me Now." While Fields's name may be known mainly to connoisseurs, her contributions to our popular culture--indeed, our national consciousness--have been remarkable.
In I Feel a Song Coming On, Charlotte Greenspan offers the most complete, serious treatment of Fields's life and work to date, tracing her rise to prominence in a male-dominated world. Born in 1904 into a show business family--her father, Lou Fields, was a famed vaudeville comedian turned Broadway producer--Fields first teamed with songwriter Jimmy McHugh in the late 1920s and went on to a series of Hollywood collaborations with Jerome Kern, including the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Swing Time. With her brother Herbert, she co-authored the books for several of Cole Porter's Broadway shows, as well as for Irving Berlin's phenomenally successful Annie Get Your Gun. More stage hits would follow, among them Redhead and Sweet Charity, as Fields remained active right up to her death in 1974. Fields's lyrics--colloquial, urbane, sometimes slangy, sometimes sensuous--won her high praise from later generation songwriters including Stephen Sondheim and Fred Ebb, and her stellar career opened a path for other women in her profession, among them Betty Comden, Dory Previn, and Marilyn Bergman.
Meticulously researched and filled with sharp insights, this lively biography not only illuminates Fields's life but also offers unique insights into the golden ageof popular song.

The first sweeping, legacy-defining history of the entire Obama presidency. Finalist of the PROSE Award for Best Book in Biography & Autobiography by the Association of American Publishers In The Black President, the first interpretative, grand-narrative history of Barack Obama's presidency in its entirety, Claude A. Clegg III situates the former president in his dynamic, inspirational, yet contentious political context. He captures the America that made Obama's White House years possible, while insightfully rendering the America that resolutely resisted the idea of a Black chief executive, thus making conceivable the ascent of the most unlikely of his successors. In elucidating the Obama moment in American politics and culture, this book is also, at its core, a sweeping exploration of the Obama presidency's historical environment, impact, and meaning for African Americans-the tens of millions of people from every walk of life who collectively were his staunchest group of supporters and who most starkly experienced both the euphoric triumphs and dispiriting shortcomings of his years in office. In Obama's own words, his White House years were "the best of times and worst of times" for Black America. Clegg is vitally concerned with the veracity of this claim, along with how Obama engaged the aspirations, struggles, and disappointments of his most loyal constituency and how representative segments of Black America engaged, experienced, and interpreted his historic presidency. Clegg draws on an expansive archive of materials, including government records and reports, interviews, speeches, memoirs, and insider accounts, in order to examine Obama's complicated upbringing and early political ambitions, his delicate navigation of matters of race, the nature and impacts of his administration's policies and politics, the inspired but also carefully choreographed symbolism of his presidency (and Michelle Obama's role), and the spectrum of allies and enemies that he made along the way. The successes and the aspirations of the Obama era, Clegg argues, are explicitly connected to our current racist, toxic political discourse. Combining lively prose with a balanced, nonpartisan portrait of Obama's successes and failures, The Black President will be required reading not only for historians, politics junkies, and Obama fans but also for anyone seeking to understand America's contemporary struggles with inequality, prejudice, and fear.

In 1982, at the age of just twenty-three and halfway through her architecture studies, Elspeth Beard left her family and friends in London and set off on a 35,000-mile solo adventure around the world on her 1974 BMW R60/6. Reeling from a recent breakup and with only limited savings from her pub job, a tent, a few clothes and some tools, all packed on the back of her bike, she was determined to prove herself. She had ridden bikes since her teens and was well travelled. But nothing could prepare her for what lay ahead. When she returned to London nearly two and a half years later she was stones lighter and decades wiser. She'd ridden through unforgiving landscapes and countries ravaged by war, witnessed civil uprisings that forced her to fake documents, and fended off sexual attacks, biker gangs and corrupt police convinced she was trafficking drugs. She'd survived life-threatening illnesses, personal loss and brutal accidents that had left permanent scars and a black hole in her memory. And she'd fallen in love with two very different men. In an age before email, the internet, mobile phones, satnavs and, in some parts of the world, readily available and reliable maps, Elspeth achieved something that would still seem remarkable today. Told with honesty and wit, this is the extraordinary and moving story of a unique and life-changing adventure.

By day Percy Monkman (1892 to 1986) worked in the same Bradford bank for 40 years, ending up as chief cashier. Everything else about Percy was totally unconventional. By night, at weekends, on holidays he transformed himself into an entertainer, actor, artist and cartoonist whose work was regularly acclaimed by the public and held in great respect by colleagues. Percy was highly creative, talented and energetic, a man who achieved high standards in all his artistic activities. The eldest of five boys, he was born into a humble working-class family and attended school until he was nearly 14. After a couple of office jobs, at 16 he passed a banking examination and started to work at Becketts Bank (later acquired by the Westminster Bank). Unexpectedly, the First World War gave Percy an opportunity for a new life that he grasped firmly with both hands. He spent much of the war as a comedian in an entertainment troupe that ran concert party shows for soldiers just behind the front line. Back in civilian life he continued his entertainment career with great success throughout the interwar years. In the Second World War he was back at entertaining the troops, this time groups of returning servicemen across Yorkshire. In 1935 Percy joined the Bradford Civic Playhouse and became a fixture in the cast for over 20 years. Here, in one of the best amateur theatres in the country, he played in many diverse productions, usually in comic roles. Alongside entertaining and acting, Percy developed his third creative passion of watercolour painting. He took advantage of every opportunity to paint, usually landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales. When he retired from the bank in 1952, he was able to devote all his time to this passion, which he described as 'fanatic, dedicated and impulsive'. Largely self-taught, he believed strongly in being part of a community of like-minded painters so that he could learn from them. The Bradford Arts Club gave him this network for all his adult life. He exhibited widely and sold most of his paintings. When the mood took him, he was also a talented cartoonist whose works were sometimes published. A committed family man, Percy also built a large number of life-long friends, who were a fascinating mixture of people from all walks of life, with similar passions for entertaining, acting and painting, often eccentrics and sometimes very well connected in Bradford society. His most significant friendship was with JB Priestley, his exact contemporary and England's most famous man of letters in the 20th century. Percy's extraordinary life of achievement is a unique record of social history, reflecting life in 20th century Bradford. Sadly, this is now largely a lost world. This affectionate and comprehensive biography by his grandson, illustrated with over 90 images, is both a visual delight and a joy to read, including high quality reproductions of some of Percy's most famous paintings.

In the summer of 1893, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an engineering marvel was unveiled and immediately captured the world's attention. It was a towering, web-like giant wheel, standing upright and rotating high above the city. Several stories taller than any existing American building, the Ferris Wheel carried adventure-seeking passengers to the dizzying height of 264 feet and provided panoramic views never before possible. George W. G. Ferris Jr. and his wheel helped usher America - eager to identify itself with ingenuity, entrepreneurialism, and innovation - into the 20th century. Yet the very wheel that came to define George Ferris in the end consumed him, leaving him ruined. This book is the first full-length biography of George Ferris. He was a civil engineer, an inventor, and a pioneer for his development of structural steel in bridge building. ""Circles in the Sky"" chronicles the life of the man responsible for creating, designing, and building the Ferris Wheel, the only structure of its time to rival the Eiffel Tower. It is, at the same time, the story of the Ferris clan, one of the nation's oldest and most fascinating families. The London Eye, erected in 1999 to welcome the new millennium, the Star of Nanchang, and most recently, the Singapore Flyer, have revived our love affair with Ferris wheels. Circles in the Sky will enchant anyone interested in engineering marvels, history, and the Ferris wheel, which reminds us that America was built by dreamers and innovators such as George W. G. Ferris Jr.

A rich fund of anecdotes drawn from the authora s time as an airline pilot and manager which spanned a forty year career, starting in the 1960s. Roughly tracing the authora s career, each story paints a different picture, be it be of a pilot, his faults and foibles, an experience the author had, a management problem and more. The backdrop is aviation but many of these stories could just as easily be transposed to a different setting. Most, but not all, have a strong flavour of humour and/or irony running through them. In todaya s world of political correctness and in a society otherwise constrained by litigious lawyers and an overbearing press many of these [mostly amusing] stories almost defy belief. Such has the world, and the world of aviation, moved on, few of the present crop of young pilots flying today would believe what went on behind closed doors. And neither would the rest of us!

Timothy Snyder opens a new path in the understanding of modern nationalism and twentieth-century socialism by presenting the often overlooked life of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, an important Polish thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century. During his brief life in Poland, Paris, and Vienna, Kelles-Krauz influenced or infuriated most of the leaders of the various socialist movements of Central Europe and France. His central ideas ultimately were not accepted by the socialist mainstream at the time of his death. However, a century later, we see that they anticipated late twentieth-century understanding on the importance of nationalism as a social force and the parameters of socialism in political theory and praxis. Kelles-Krauz was one of the only theoreticians of his age to advocate Jewish national rights as being equivalent to, for example, Polish national rights, and he correctly saw the struggle for national sovereignty as being central to future events in Europe. This was the first major monograph in English devoted to Kelles-Krauz, and it includes maps and personal photographs of Kelles-Krauz, his colleagues, and his family.

Losing is not a word in Jannie Mouton's vocabulary. One of South Africa's greatest success stories, Jannie Mouton built his business from scratch after getting fired at age 48. Straight-talking Mouton tells the inside story of how he started PSG, turning it into a triumphant success in only 15 years. Today the companies he is involved in have a market capitalisation of R61 billion. Known in the industry for being difficult, Mouton nevertheless has a soft heart and a passion for poetry. Outspoken and not scared of controversy, Jannie Mouton has only once managed to sack an employee himself. In this title, Jannie Mouton spills the beans on what really went on behind the scenes. He talks openly of even the most controversial transactions he has been involved in. With his typical honesty and humour, he freely shares his business and investment advice.

The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France between the English summers of 1919 and 1920. It was a time of intense personal reassessment and distress. Mansfield's relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that rich and enduring partner'ship through its severest trial. This was a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of possibilities that her illness entailed. Without flamboyance or fuss, she felt it necessary to discard earlier loyalties and even friendships, as she sought for a spiritual standpoint that might turn her illness to less negative ends. As she put it, 'One must be ... continually giving & receiving, and shedding & renewing, & examining & trying to place'. For all the grimness of this period of her life, Mansfield's letters still offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading - an invaluable record of a `modern' woman and her time.

Hannah Dines and Jess Leyden are two perfectly normal, brilliant women. One, a world record-holding athlete and a Paralympian on the trike. The other, a multiple age-group world champion and one of the most promising rowers Great Britain has to offer. In the five years (yes, that's right) between Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, they will face cancer scares, crushing defeats, and the biggest global health crisis in a century. They will get dropped, they will get injured, and they will win medals. They will spend the best years of their lives knowing that at any moment, it could all come crashing down. That all the training, all the sacrifice could be in vain, wasted effort as a pandemic raged. That maybe these could be the years that will shape their finest hour - or that maybe, after everything that they've been through, it could all still be snatched away at the last...

Hey you guys, it’s Leslie. I’m excited to share my story with you.

Now, I’m gonna be honest: Some of the details might be vague because a b*tch is fifty-five and she’s smoked a ton of weed. But while bits might be a touch hazy, I can promise you the underlying truth is REAL. Whether I’m talking about my childhood growing up in the South, my early stand-up days driving from gig to gig through the darkest parts of our country and praying I wouldn’t get murdered, what Chris Rock told Lorne Michaels, that time I wanted to shoot Whoopi Goldberg on SNL, and yeah, I’ll tell you all about Ghostbusters and the nudes and Supermarket Sweep and The Daily Show . . . I’m sharing it all in these pages. It’s not easy being a woman in comedy, especially when you’re a tall-*ss Black woman with a trumpet voice. I have to fight so that no one takes me for granted, and no one takes advantage. These are the stories that explain why. (Cue the Law & Order theme.)