Since 1996, Richard Brookhiser has devoted himself to recovering the Founding for modern Americans. The creators of our democracy had both the temptations and the shortcomings of all men, combined with the talents and idealism of the truly great. Among them, no Founding Father demonstrates the combination of temptations and talents quite so vividly as the least known of the greats, Gouverneur Morris.

His story is one that should be known by every American -- after all, he drafted the Constitution, and his hand lies behind many of its most important phrases. Yet he has been lost in the shadows of the Founders who became presidents and faces on our currency. As Brookhiser shows in this sparkling narrative, Morris's story is not only crucial to the Founding, it is also one of the most entertaining and instructive of all. Gouverneur Morris, more than Washington, Jefferson, or even Franklin, is the Founding Father whose story can most readily touch our hearts, and whose character is most sorely needed today.

He was a witty, peg-legged ladies' man. He was an eyewitness to two revolutions (American and French) who joked with George Washington, shared a mistress with Talleyrand, and lost friends to the guillotine. In his spare time he gave New York City its street grid and New York State the Erie Canal. His keen mind and his light, sure touch helped make our Constitution the most enduring fundamental set of laws in the world. In his private life, he suited himself; pleased the ladies until, at age fifty-seven, he settled down with one lady (and pleased her); and lived the life of a gentleman, for whom grace and humanity were as important as birth. He kept his good humor through war, mobs, arson, death, and two accidents that burned the flesh from one of his arms and cut off one of his legs below the knee.

Above all, he had the gift of a sunny disposition that allowed him to keep his head in any troubles. We have much to learn from him, and much pleasure to take in his company.

Also found within are practical lessons on successful life by over fifty leading thinkers. This volume solves the problem of how to bring our hopes to fruition, and if it shall be the means of awakening aspirations for success along noble lines in the minds of the young men and women of our land; if it shall arouse greater zeal, or give new courage to any faltering traveler, or if it shall arrest any careless feet from going astray, then the great aim and purpose of the book and its writers will be accomplished, and the noble men and women whose portraits, principles, and careers are here set forth, will live anew in other lives, bringing such blessing to the individual and to the world. Illustrated with over 400 photo-engraved portraits.

There are few works emanating from Africa, which may be construed as child studies, and even fewer reference works on this subject. There can be little dispute however, that issues such as child labour, child soldiers, and the disaffection of youth in Africa must be considered from context-specific and local perspectives, as well as from 'universal' or standardised positions. Hence the value of this text, a concise annotated bibliography, which is constructed from literature on children and childhood, from or about Africa, published between 1995 and 2000. The bibliography presents the major works from the anthropological, sociological and psychological literatures pertaining to child studies, extracts from the political sciences and economics, and key theoretical texts from other parts of the world.

From his unique perspective of having known many of the actors and actresses about whom he writes, silent film historian Anthony Slide creates vivid portraits of the careers and often eccentric lives of 100 players from the American silent film industry. He profiles the era's shining stars such as Lillian Gish and Blanche Sweet; leading men including William Bakewell and Robert Harron; gifted leading ladies such as Laura La Plante and Alice Terry; ingenues like Mary Astor and Mary Brian; and even Hollywood's most famous extra, Bess Flowers.

Although each original essay is accompanied by significant documentation and an extensive bibliography, Silent Players is not simply a reference book or encyclopedic recitation of facts culled from the pages of fan magazines and trade periodicals. It contains a series of insightful portraits of the characters who symbolize an original and pioneering era in motion history and explores their unique talents and extraordinary private lives.

Slide offers a potentially revisionist view of many of the stars he profiles, repudiating the status of some and restoring to fame others who have slipped from view. He personally interviewed many of his subjects and knew several of them intimately, putting him in a distinctive position to tell their true stories.

This book shows how the book "Acts and Monuments, or Book of Martyrs," by John Foxe, made possible most of the great works of genius which followed it, which themselves were written and composed by a very few people operating under various pseudonyms. Contents: William Shakespeare, Henry Wriothesley, Robert Devereux, William Herbert, Ben Jonson, Mary Stuart, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Tennyson, Sir Hall Caine, Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel L. Clemens, Shakespeare's grave and monument; Shakespeare's wall monument.

Outlines the lives and achievements of some 19,000 of the most influential men and women from almost every country in the world. From heads of state, politicians, religious leaders and ambassadors, to the eminent and successful in business, finance, technology, film, music, fashion, sport, literature and the performing arts. * Entries are included on merit and achievement * Fully updated every year to ensure accuracy * Provides invaluable information on the headline makers * Replaces numerous single-nation directories saving you time and money in your research * Includes the CD-ROM version with its powerful search facilities, attractively laid out screens and clear on-screen instructions.

THE THINKERS, THE THOUGHTS, AND THE THEORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD WE LIVE IN.

With A World of Ideas, you can get to the bottom of the big bang theory; find out where Freud's ideas were coming from, and where Einstein's might take us; demystify surrealism and structuralism, communism and capitalism. Prepared with the assistance of an academic board of leading scholars, this invaluable reference includes

- Hundreds of entries, alphabetically arranged, with key words and concepts highlighted and cross-referenced--more than two thousand in all
- A special emphasis on multicultural influences and contemporary thought
- A comprehensive index giving easy access to all essential terms and names

A World of Ideas is an indispensable resource for the curious reader.

This major new reference book presents more than 700 biographies of Shakespeare's contemporaries and richly illustrates the variety and complexity of the life of the period he lived. With its useful glossary of unusual terms, and extensive cross-references, this invaluable book emphasizes the cultural continuity between the last phase of Elizabethan England and the Jacobean age, and the authors also pay attention to American connections. This extensive and detailed study will be invaluable to all those interested in Shakespeare and his times.

In this powerful new collection, the author of two of the most celebrated memoirs in recent years presents the autobiographical writings of 14 of her English-speaking predecessors and contemporaries. The women who tell their stories in Written By Herself, Vol. II represent three generations, four continents, and a range of experience that is equaled only by the diversity with which they transform life into literature.
Here are England's Vera Brittain, commemorating the deaths of the men she loved in the carnage of World War I; Emma Mashinini, who endured imprisonment and torture as a labor organizer in South Africa; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the daughter of Indian aristocracy who became an architect of her country's independence; and Edith Mirante, the wisecracking American whose passion for justice took her to the opium trails of Burma. Collected in this stirring volume, their voices demonstrate the ways in which women strive for power, inclusion, and autonomy-- and never fail to move, inspire, and instruct us.
Contributors include: Margery Perham, Isak Dinesen, Shudha Mazumdar, Vivian Gornick, Vera Brittain, Elspeth Huxley, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Angelica Garnett, Emma Mashinini, Meena Alexander, Edith Mirante, Mary Benson, and Ruth First.

"Belongs on the shelf of classics about surviving degradation with dignity and even humor." Time
In March 1985, Terry Anderson was swept up in the violent conflict of a turbulent era. At the mercy of Shiite captors for nearly seven years, he lived in chains, wondering fearfully if each day would be his last. But his spirit soared beyond captivity, and he never gave up. Nor did those who loved him. And now, a free man again, he tells the harrowing and poignant story of a hostage's survival and final triumph.

"From the Paperback edition."

Great movements have leaders and leaders have moments when commitments are made, when new attitudes are formed, when new directions are chosen, and when distant visions are transformed into realities. This inspirational book examines some of these important times--occasions when notable people, during moments of crisis and insight, found the grace and strength to change our world for the better, forever.

Compiled by one of the foremost experts on the Alamo, Bill Groneman, Alamo Defenders - A Genealogy: The People and Their Words provides an in-depth look at the individuals who fought and died at the Alamo. Groneman brings to life the people and their stories that have previously been all but lost to history. The information he has compiled is this book is vital to students and researchers interested in the Alamo and events that took place in 1836. From personal accounts to extensive footnotes and a bibliography, Groneman provides updates to previously published information regarding the Alamo and also brings new information to light.

The twentieth century's greatest American dissenter has written a study of the five men whose own dissents helped shape the western world -- Socrates, Galileo, Tom Paine, Wendell Phillips, and Gandhi. Conformity to custom, Mr. Thomas believes, is essential to the human community; it provides a base for judgment and security, Progress, however, depends on those who go beyond custom in search of the truth and thus cause us to reappraise our loyalties. Heresy, then, is the growing part of the social tree. Mr. Thomas has chosen men whose dissents were not born of rebellious natures, subjective tensions, or mystic convictions that a new conformity should replace the old. Rather their dissents were forced upon them by their discovery of truth. They were men whose dissents led to progress in the evolution of man's society. Socrates, the first civil libertarian who paid for his beliefs with his life but led mankind into the revelations of logic; Galileo, a conformist at heart whose acknowledgment of observable truths forced dissent upon him; Tom Paine, catalyst of the American Revolution, yet a man of peace; Gandhi, perhaps the most effective dissenter of modern history; and Wendell Phillips, patrician, man of inherited wealth, and almost forgotten as one of the greatest abolitionists. Mr. Thomas tells their stories and excitement and with deep awareness of the implications for our time.

The first biographical dictionary of its kind in any Western language, this pioneering work provides short, information-packed entries for approximately 1,800 Chinese artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In recent years interest in modern Chinese art has spread across the globe. Public and private collections are being formed; courses in modern Chinese art are offered in many universities and museums. At the same time, the number of practicing artists in China and the amount of published material have greatly increased. Michael Sullivan's pathbreaking book "Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China," published in 1996, included a biographical index of some eight hundred artists. This volume includes more than twice that number, with entries that have been revised, expanded, and brought up to date. Illustrated with portraits and photographs of more than seventy leading artists, this comprehensive, convenient reference will be an essential tool for anyone interested in the study or collection of modern Chinese art.

The 173rd annual edition of the internationally respected and renowned source book of information on people of influence and interest in every area of public life.

Who's Who 2021 is the 173rd edition of the world's longest established and most comprehensive general reference book, brought right up to date for the year ahead. The first autobiographical reference book in the world and, after 172 years, still the most accurate and reliable resource for information supplied and checked by the entrants themselves.

This first installment of the new multi-volume Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading recounts Dr. Alan Gribben's fascinating 45-year search for surviving volumes from the large library assembled by Twain and his family. That collection of more than 3,000 titles was dispersed through impromptu donations and abrupt public auctions, but over the years nearly a thousand volumes have been recovered. Gribben's research also encompasses many hundreds of other books, stories, essays, poems, songs, plays, operas, newspapers, and magazines with which Mark Twain was demonstrably familiar. Gribben published the original edition of Mark Twain's Library in 1980. Hailed by the eminent Twain scholar Louis J. Budd as "a superb job that will last for generations," the work nevertheless soon went out of print and for three decades has been a hard-to-find item on the rare book market. Meanwhile, over a distinguished career of writing, teaching, and research on Twain, Gribben continued to annotate, revise, and expand the content such that it has become his life's masterwork. Thoroughly revised, enlarged, and retitled, Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading now reappears, to greatly expand our comprehension of the incomparable author's reading tastes and influences. Volume I traces Twain's extensive use of public libraries. It identifies Twain's favorite works, but also reveals his strong dislikes-Chapter 10 is devoted to his "Library of Literary Hogwash," specimens of atrocious poetry and prose that he delighted in ridiculing. In describing Twain's habit of annotating his library books, Gribben reveals his methods of detecting forged autographs and marginal notes that have fooled booksellers, collectors, and libraries. The volume's 25 chapters trace from various perspectives the patterns of Twain's voracious reading and relate what he read to his own literary outpouring. A "Critical Bibliography" evaluates the numerous scholarly books and articles that have studied Twain's reading, and an index guides readers to the volume's diverse subjects. Twain enjoyed cultivating a public image as a largely unread natural talent; on occasion he even denied being acquainted with titles that he had owned, inscribed, and annotated in his own personal library. He convinced many friends and interviewers that he had no appetite for fiction, poetry, drama, or belles-lettres, yet Gribben reveals volumes of evidence to the contrary. He examines this unlettered pose that Twain affected and speculates about the reasons behind it. In reality, whether Twain was memorizing the classic writings of ancient Rome or the more contemporary works of Milton, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Tennyson-or, for that matter, quoting from the best-selling fiction and poetry of his day-he exhibited a lifelong hunger to overcome the brevity of his formal education. Several of Gribben's chapters explore the connections between Twain's knowledge of authors such as Malory, Shakespeare, Poe, and Browning, and his own literary works, group readings, and family activities. Volumes II and III of Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading will be released in 2019 and will deliver an "Annotated Catalog" arranged from A to Z, documenting in detail the staggering scope of Twain's reading. - book is one-of-a-kind, a monumental project, representing 45 years of research - scholarship of the book is impeccable, by writer internationally known in the Twain community - publisher has a much-publicized association with Alan Gribben; in 2011 we released the highly controversial NewSouth Edition of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, edited by Dr. Gribben - Twain is among our more popular 19th-century American writers, and works about him are often of literary interest

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. These Profiles are literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, and are unrivalled in their range, their variety of style, and their embrace of humanity.

Who's Who in the Roman World is a wide-ranging biographical survey of one of the greatest civilizations in history. Covering a period from the 5th century BC to AD 364, this is an authoritative and hugely enjoyable guide to an era which continues to fascinate today. The figures included come from all walks of Roman life and include some of history's most famous - not to mention infamous - figures as well as hitherto little-known, but no less fascinating, characters. These include :
* the notorious emperors - Caligula; Nero; Elagabalus; Commodus
* the great poets, philosophers and historians - Virgil; Tacitus; Seneca; Ovid
* the brilliant politicians and soldiers - Hannibal; Scipio; Caesar; Mark Antony; Constantine
* noteworthy citizens - Acte, mistress of Nero; Catiline, the revolutionary; Spartacus, champion of the slaves; Gaius Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily.
The inclusion of cross-referencing, a glossary of terms, select bibliographies, maps, genealogies and an author's preface complete what is at once a superb reference resource and an enormously entertaining read.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203425995

An edition of fragments of Henry Fielding's unpublished treatise on eighteenth-century law, which were displayed at an exhibition at Houghton Library in 1987, including fragments from Harvard, Yale, and the Hyde Collection, now also at Harvard.

To succeed as an actor is a rare feat. To succeed as a deaf actor is nothing short of amazing. Lessons in Laughter is the story of Bernard Bragg and his astonishing lifelong achievements in the performing arts. Born deaf of deaf parents, Bernard Bragg has won international renown as an actor, director, playwright, and lecturer. Lessons in Laughter recounts in stories that are humorous, painful, touching, and outrageous, the growth of his dream of using the beauty of sign language to act. He starred in his own television show "The Quiet Man," helped found The National Theatre of the Deaf, and has traveled worldwide to teach his acting methods.

Who's Who 2023 is the 175th edition of the world's longest established and most comprehensive general reference book, brought right up to date for the year ahead. The first autobiographical reference book in the world and, after 174 years, still the most accurate and reliable resource for information on people of influence and interest in every area of public life. Each edition is heavily updated using information supplied and checked by the entrants themselves, alongside research from many other independent sources. The book provides biographical information for people from all areas of society, including government, law, medicine, business, the church, media and the arts, with details not only of entrants' careers, but also their family, education, recreations and clubs. The 2023 edition includes more than 33,000 autobiographical entries, including approximately 600 new entries, an obituaries section, listing the entrants who have died since the previous edition, and a two-page Royal Family section.