biography education

Hardcover. Holland MI, Hope College , 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 554 pages. Memorial biography of a beloved teacher of literature at Hope College in Maryland.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with edge wear, short closed tears. The first full-length biography--and likely the authoritative one for years to come--of the flamboyant black congressman who, as civil-rights gadfly and as libertine, exemplified the gap between our nation's ideals and practices that was given a name in Gunnar Myrdal's ``American Dilemma.'' Blessed with good looks, eloquence, and a bully pulpit (he succeeded his father as head of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the nation's largest black congregation), Powell became ``Mr. Civil Rights'' in the pre-King era by combining agitation and electoral politics. As congressman from Harlem, Powell denounced racist southern colleagues and introduced the ``Powell Amendment'' to deny federal funds to projects or organizations that practiced discrimination. In 1960, he became chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, then the strongest position ever held by a black in the US government. Columbia Univ. political-science professor Hamilton also highlights how the Democratic politician became a thorn in the side of ally and foe alike. Powell was a maverick seldom bound by party (he endorsed Eisenhower for President), duty (a high absentee rate), or conventional morality. Inevitably, after an income-tax evasion trial, a suit filed by a Harlem resident he called a ``bag woman,'' and a European junket with two attractive female aides, Powell was stripped of his chairmanship by the House of Representatives despite his cry of double standards for white counterparts. Blending scholarship and ironic detachment, an admirably balanced treatment of a politician who provoked anything but objectivity during his Marion Barry-like career.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 259 pages, b&w, some color illustrations. Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was an enormously influential artist and nurturer of artists even though his accomplishments are often overshadowed by his role as Georgia O'Keeffe's husband. This new book from celebrated biographer Phyllis Rose reconsiders Stieglitz as a revolutionary force in the history of American art.Born in New Jersey, Stieglitz at age eighteen went to study in Germany, where his father, a wool merchant and painter, insisted he would get a proper education. After returning to America, he became one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame. By the time he was sixty, he gave up photography and devoted himself to selling and promoting art. His first gallery, 291, was the first American gallery to show works by Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, and other great European modernists. His galleries were not dealerships so much as open universities, where he introduced European modern art to Americans and nurtured an appreciation of American art among American artists. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Hodder and Stoughton, reprint, 1891, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt flower design on front cover. 480 pages, with a frontispiece portrait + a folding color map in rear. Appears to be INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on a bookplate inside front cover with a New Year's greeting and dated Dec 31 1891. Alexander Murdoch Mackay was a missionary, a teacher and an engineer who contributed tremendously to Christianity and education in Uganda. As a youth, he left Scotland and committed his life to preaching the word of God to the people of Uganda. He introduced vocational training, taught practical skills and laid the foundation of education in the Church of Uganda. He introduced a printing press which he used to print the Luganda version of the Holy Bible. Light shelf wear, fraying to top of spine.

Hardcover. NY, Dutton, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 496 pages. Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. Whimsical and wonderful, his work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. The silly, simple rhymes are a bottomless well of magic, his illustrations timeless favorites because, quite simply, he makes us laugh. The Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, Horton, and so many more, are his troupe of beloved, and uniquely Seussian, creations.Theodor Geisel, however, had a second, more radical side. It is there that the allure and fasciation of his Dr. Seuss alter ego begins. He had a successful career as an advertising man and then as a political cartoonist, his personal convictions appearing, not always subtly, throughout his books--remember the environmentalist of The Lorax? Geisel was a complicated man on an important mission. He introduced generations to the wonders of reading while teaching young people about empathy and how to treat others well. Agonizing over word choices and rhymes, touching up drawings sometimes for years, he upheld a rigorous standard of perfection for his work. Geisel took his responsibility as a writer for children seriously, talking down to no reader, no matter how small. And with classics like Green Eggs and Ham, and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Geisel delighted them while they learned. Suddenly, reading became fun.

Hardcover. Indianapolis/NY, Bobbs-Merrill, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket, 490 pages, b&w frontis. Rush, the Philadelphia doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence, was an energetic, ambitious man given to devising reforms and, as the author puts it, meddling in politics. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and London, meeting Hume, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, et al. and, Hawke thinks, solidifying his republican disposition. Back in Pennsylvania he agitated for independence, made friends with John Adams, urged Paine to write Common Sense, and entered Congress. Apart from the recurrent epidemics of the age, the practice of military medicine and propaganda for resuming debt payments occupied Rush during the war; afterwards he turned to progressive education, speculated in land, fought paper money, equivocally supported the abolition of slavery, declared that tobacco is unhealthful, and boosted the Constitution before it was even written. Dust jacket chipped, faded in parts, clean internally.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 237 pages, in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Memoir of an African-American woman when she was a student at a formerly all white male private prep school.

Softcover. Cambridge [England] ; New York, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 389 pages. Minor wear to edges of cover. Previous owner's inscription on front flyleaf. Slight foxing on top edge. Inside is bright, clean and unmarked. A nice copy.

Hardcover. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1st Edition, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 346 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket with only minor wear. Clean, unmarked and tight copy.

Softcover. Baltimore, Gateway Press, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 164 pages, b&w illustrations. SIGNED BY HAAS on the title page. This is the story of a 19th century German-American industrialist who made his fortune manufacturing hard rubber combs thanks to his friendship with Charles Goodyear and his invention, vulcanized rubber. Poppenhusen founded a town, College Point, New York, and became a much-loved philanthropist funding churches, libraries and an educational institute that is today both a National and New York City landmark, the Institute that bears his name. He was an innovator in education introducing the first free kindergarten for his workers and the people of the town, perhaps the first corporate day care facility in the U.S. He made the catastrophic mistake of getting involved in the railroads in the late 1860's and used his vast fortune to bring about the consolidation of what has come down to us today as the Long Island Railroad.

Hardcover. NY, Putnam, 1st , 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. 259 pages. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. With these interwoven autobiographical essays, Geoffrey Wolff, author of the acclaimed The Duke of Deception, recounts the moral (and immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father, as he offers his spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life: from wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases to a concupiscent career teaching literature in Istanbul; from a victory over the chaos of drink to a life-affirming surrender to the majesty of the Matterhorn; and from a foundering friendship to the transcending love of family.

Hardcover. NY, Penguin Press, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 256 pages, b&w photos. For Bill Cunningham, New York City was the land of freedom, glamour, and, above all, style. Growing up in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston, secretly trying on his sister's dresses and spending his evenings after school in the city's chicest boutiques, Bill dreamed of a life dedicated to fashion. But his desires were a source of shame for his family, and after dropping out of Harvard, he had to fight them tooth-and-nail to pursue his love. When he arrived in New York, he reveled in people-watching. He spent his nights at opera openings and gate-crashing extravagant balls, where he would take note of the styles, new and old, watching how the gowns moved, how the jewels hung, how the hair laid on each head. This was his education, and the birth of the democratic and exuberant taste that he came to be famous for as a photographer for The New York Times. After two style mavens took Bill under their wing, his creativity thrived and he made a name for himself as a designer. Taking on the alias William J.--because designing under his family's name would have been a disgrace to his parents--Bill became one of the era's most outlandish and celebrated hat designers, catering to movie stars, heiresses, and artists alike. Bill's mission was to bring happiness to the world by making women an inspiration to themselves and everyone who saw them. These were halcyon days when fashion was all he ate and drank. When he was broke and hungry he'd stroll past the store windows on Fifth Avenue and feed himself on beautiful things. Fashion Climbing is the story of a young man striving to be the person he was born to be: a true original. But although he was one of the city's most recognized and treasured figures, Bill was also one of its most guarded. Written with his infectious joy and one-of-a-kind voice, this memoir was polished, neatly typewritten, and safely stored away in his lifetime. He held off on sharing it--and himself--until his passing. Between these covers, is an education in style, an effervescent tale of a bohemian world as it once was, and a final gift to the readers of one of New York's great characters.

hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 448 pages. Black & white photos and illustrations. Like new. Purely out of artistic ambition, Armenian-American abstract painter Gorky (1895-1948; born in Turkey as Vostanig Adoian) fabricated a new identity, complete with an Ivy League education and personal histories with master artists, on arriving in the United States. Spender (Within Tuscany), who is married to Gorky's oldst daughter, unhesitatingly exposes the painter's many "tall tales." He also assesses Gorky's difficulty in arriving at his own aesthetic until late in life in terms of both the artist's ties to the artistic patriarchs of the previous generation, the Surrealists (including Breton, Duchamp and Brancusi) and his complex status as a forerunner who eventually became alienated from the New York Abstract Expressionists (particularly de Kooning and Rothko). Spender derives much information from anecdotal sources, including an interview with de Kooning, and assumes a chatty tone in dealing with other artists. But he becomes increasingly less sympathetic to Gorky, whose last years are presented from the perspectives of Spender's wife and her mother. Nonetheless, painting constantly despite failing health, family problems and critical indifference, Gorky's frustrations are heartbreaking. Equally compelling is the window opened on New York's art scene when it was still a small clique. Gorky was so in love with the "artist" archetype that he not only lied about himself but also plagiarized anecdotes, artistic statements, love letters and possibly even his own suicide note. Spender preserves the personal dimensions of his subject while demonstrating that the painter should have adopted a youthful declaration. "I shall be a great artist or if not a great crook"as his motto. 90 b&w illustrations.

Hardcover. Boston, John P Jewett and Company, 1st, 1856, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, embossed brown cloth with gilt lettering on spine. Stated "Fourth Thousand" on title page, 418 pages. Early women's rights advocate Harriot K Hunt, considered the first female doctor in the United States. After two refusals to have her study at the Harvard Medical School, she received a private medical education and practiced with an emphasis on prevention of disease. She was a dedicated advocate for women as professionals and as an educated populace. A very early advocate for changes to voting rights and property rights for women. Each year when she paid her taxes, in fact, she issued a "taxation without representation" protest. An intriguing look at attitudes and treatment of early women's rights advocates from a well-educated and outspoken women. Light fraying to top and bottom of spine, name on inside front cover, ownership stamp to blank leaf preceding half-title page.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 430 pages. In this book, backed by a wealth of new research, the author tells for the first time the story of the career of Eugenio Pacelli, the man who as Pius XII was Pope during the Second World War and arguably the most powerful churchman in modern history. Adding to the continuing debate about collective guilt and the Holocaust this is an extraordinary and explosive history. In the first decade of the century, as a brilliant young lawyer, Pacelli helped shape an ideology of unprecedented papal power; during the 1920s he employed cunning and moral blackmail to impose that power in Germany. In 1933 Hitler became his perfect negotiating partner and a concordat was established that granted religious and educational advantages to the Catholic Church in exchange for Catholic withdrawal from social and political action. This 'voluntary' abdication of political Catholicism imposed from Rome facilitated the rise of Nazism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Hanover NH, University Press of New England, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 362 pages. This is the first full-scale biography of Nathan Smith -- medical pioneer, founder of Dartmouth Medical School and cofounder of three other medical schools (Yale, Vermont, and Bowdoin), and progenitor of a long line of physicians. Smith was a central figure in early American medical education, from 1787 when he began practicing in New Hampshire, to his death in New Haven in 1829. In his day, Smith was probably the nation's leading physician, surgeon, and medical educator, and well ahead of his time in insisting that doctors practice "watchful waiting" and emphasizing patient-centered care. In the process of telling Smith's life and story, authors Hayward and Putnam fill out in new ways the picture of medical treatment and medical education in post-Colonial America.

Hardcover. New York, Flatiron Books, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 304 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. Black and white photographs throughout. A tight copy.

Hardcover. Seatle, WA, Fantagraphics Books, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 160 pages. Hardcover with no issued dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to cover boards. Color pictures throughout. This is a deluxe, full-color, coffee table book biography; the first of one of America's greatest storytellers. It's filled with beautifully reproduced artwork from the comic books Little Lulu, and his creations Melvin Monster and Thirteen(Going on Eighteen); rare drawings and cartoons; and never-before-seen photographs. Bill Schelly tells Stanley's life story through interviews with his family, friends, and colleagues: his childhood in Harlem and the Bronx, life with his strict Irish Catholic mother, his education at Parsons, his first job as an animator at Max Fleischer Studios, and his years working as a commercial artist, before finding his true metier in comic books during World War II (while battling clinical depression and alcoholism).

Hardcover. Boston, New England Publishing Company, 1st, 1879, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth, 373 pages. Illustrated with 2 black & white plates. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, New England Publishing Company, 1st Edition, 1879, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 373 pages. Hardcover. Front hinge cracked. Frontispiece (b/w) is disconnected from binding and laid in. Ex library book with expected markings, labels, etc. Brown cover boards, gilt title on spine and front cover boards with black decoration. Fold out copy of original poem written by hand by author. Account of the life and education of Laura Bridgman (1829-1889), who was the first blind-deaf person to receive a formal education and whose longtime residence at the Perkins Institution for the Blind influenced a generation of students, including Anne Sullivan (who went on to fame as Helen Keller's teacher).

Hardcover. NY, The Free Press, 2nd pr., 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 654 pages, b&w illustrations. A portrait of one of the twentieth-century's most influential philosophers draws on previously unpublished letters and writings to describe Wittgenstein's youth, education, private life, and major works. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Quadrangle/ NY Times, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 206 pages. Purple top-stain. An interesting account of what it's like to work erecting multi-story high rise buildings in a city like New York. Clean copy.

Hardcover. University of Washington Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 285 pages. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence includes essays by eight distinguished art historians examining the ways in which Jacob Lawrence's art speaks so powerfully to different audiences. It is the first multi-author, in-depth probe of the artist's entire career: the nature of his work, his education, the critical climate in which he worked, and his use of materials and techniques. It reproduces, in full color, more than 200 works, most of which have not been published in color, or at all, in other books on the artist.

Hardcover. NY, Twayne Publishers, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 271 pages, b&w photographs. An account of the author's trip to French Equatorial Africa and Albert Schweitzer's jungle hospital (Lambarene), the author's stay there and conversations with Dr. Schweitzer. The author convinced Schweitzer to lend his name to an educational movement in the U.S. (the nominal reason for the trip), and states that he believes Schweitzer is a much needed Prophet of the divided Western world. Clean, bright copy.