His historic career as an aviator made Charles Lindbergh one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best-selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step--the Lindy Hop--that he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. This oddest of couples--one a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies--joined forces in 1930 driven by a shared and secret dream: to conquer death and attain immortality.

Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Madman, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement and equally large character flaws challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences--personal, professional, and political--that neither man anticipated.

Oscar Wilde s American tour turned him into an international star. In one eventful year, Wilde traveled 15,000 miles, hitting 29 of the country s 30 largest cities, delivering 150 lectures, giving more than 100 newspaper interviews, and visiting Walt Whitman, Henry James, Ulysses S. Grant, and Jefferson Davis. His lectures were one part educational theater, two parts vaudeville act. Soon he rivaled the queen in popularity. More amazing still, he had published nothing of note when the tour began; by trading on his renown, Wilde pioneered a route to celebrity that still works today. Structured around nine lasting principles of fame creation devised by Wilde, this lively narrative biography reveals Wilde as the true inventor of celebrity culture. Expertly blending Wilde s charming wit with details of nineteenth-century America, David M. Friedman turns the story of Wilde s life into a remarkable tale of travel and transformation, comedy and capitalism, ego and excess."