biography europe

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 240 pages. This stylish book re-creates the charmed life of two American expatriates in France at the turn of the 20th century-the noted artist Walter Gay and his wife, Matilda, whose glittering social circle included John Singer Sargent, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and many other artists and aristocrats. Narrated by witty excerpts from Matilda Gay's recently discovered journal, and richly illustrated with Walter Gay's remarkable, sought-after paintings of the rooms in which they and their friends lived, in Paris, Fontainebleau, Venice, and elsewhere, A Charmed Couple offers an intimate glimpse of a long-gone social milieu whose hold on the popular imagination continues to this day. WILLIAM RIEDER is a curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Author of numerous articles, most on European furniture, in such journals as Architectural Digest, Connoisseur, and Antiques, he lives in New York City. 128 illustrations, 55 in full color, 81/2 x 101/2".

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. Berkeley, University of California Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 617 pages. An enlarged and revised edition of the 1974 book. This biography begins not with one of the universally known incidents of Alexander's life, but with an account of his father, Philip of Macedonia, whose many-territoried empire was the first on the continent of Europe to have an effectively centralized government and military. What Philip and Macedonia had to offer, Alexander made his own, but Philip and Macedonia also made Alexander form an important context for understanding Alexander himself. Yet his origins and training do not fully explain the man. For the general reader, the book, redolent with gritty details and fully aware of Alexander's darker side, offers a gripping tale of Alexander's career. Full backnotes, fourteen maps, and chronological and genealogical tables serve readers with more specialized interests. Mild foxing to text block, clean copy.

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. Somogy Editions D'Art , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Still in publisher's shrinkwrap. Full color exhibition catalogue of the new retrospective exhibition of Saint-Gaudens' work, the first in Europe since 1900. Venues include the Muse des Augustins, in Toulouse (February 2-May 30, 1999), and the Muse national de la Cooperation Franco-Americaine, at Blrencourt (June 26-October 18, 1999). The artwork covers Saint-Gaudens' entire career, from the cameos done during his youth, to sophisticated portrait reliefs, public monuments and coins. The essays contribute new scholarship on the sculptor's career and art, including his decorative art designs for Tiffany's, personalized pencil caricatures for friends, and the development of the monument to Charles Stewart Parnell in Dublin, the last public monument Saint-Gaudens saw to completion.

Hardcover. London, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 194 pages. This is the first book to document the short yet prolific artistic career of fashion photographer and filmmaker Tom Kublin, and a celebration of his creative union with Cristobal Balenciaga during the fashion house's postwar heyday in Paris. More than 140 photographs and film stills by Kublin capture the golden age of Balenciaga couture in the 1950s and 1960s, from the impeccable elegance of the collection shoots - including exclusive film footage of Balenciaga himself at work - to striking covers and editorials for high-profile magazines. The book begins with a foreword by the photographer's daughter, Maria Kublin, and continues with a biography by Ana Balda, charting Kublin's career, his place in the artistic milieu of the European avant-garde, and his working relationship with Cristobal Balenciaga. Miren Vives, head of the Cristobal Balenciaga Museum, also contributes. Clean copy in publisher's shrinkwrap. Remainder line to bottom edge.

Hardcover. London, Peter Owen , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 256 pages. An acclaimed and most unusual biography of Baudelaire, showing him ensnared by his passions for poetry, prostitutes, and drugs.A crucial link between romanticism and modernism, Charles Baudelaire is a pivotal figure in European literature and thought. His influence on modern poetry is immense. In the English language, where his literary reputation is less well known, it is his link with drug culture that gives him contemporary resonance. It is commonly known that Baudelaire used opium. Many writers have described him as being addicted to the drug, but none of his biographers, Frank Hilton argues, has fully understood the effect of opiate addiction on the personality and, in the case of Baudelaire, the extent to which it damaged his life and work. In this original contribution to Baudelaire studies Hilton contends that the drug is at the root of all Baudelaire's problems and in particular--something that constantly tormented him--his chronic inability to apply himself to any prolonged creative work. Unquestionably, there is significantly more to Baudelaire than his opium addiction. But a proper awareness of what it did to the poet helps to illuminate those puzzling aspects of his life and behavior that were not previously understood. Written with the general reader in mind, Baudelaire in Chains will give those who know little or nothing about him a comprehensive picture of his life. To those who know a great deal it will present him in an unexpected light.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 245 pages, b&w illustrations, index. He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter." Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today." Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts--including Scarface,Twentieth Century, and Notorious--Ben Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine's Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared "child of the century" came to embody much that defined America--especially Jewish America--in his time. Hecht's fame has dimmed with the decades, but Adina Hoffman's vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman--critically acclaimed biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics--is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes.

Hardcover. New York, University Books, 1st, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 312 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations. Marble cover boards, red quarter cloth, gilt title on spine. Red endpapers. Top edge dyed. Previous owner's inscription on title page. Some slight tanning to a few pages from age. Dust jacket unclipped, has some chipping and agewear (see images). Binding good. Spine straight. Pages unmarked. The biography of the European eighteenth century occultist and Mason, Count Allesandro di Cagliostro.

Hardcover. New York, Vendome Press, 1st US, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 384 pages. Black & white illustrations. Clean, tight copy in an unclipped dust jacket. In this beautiful volume, the glorious life of the incomparable Coco Chanel shines again through hundreds of illustrations and the lively prose of Edmonde Charles-Roux, her official biographer and close friend.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 606 pages. In this definitive biography of Chester B. Himes (1909-1984), Lawrence P. Jackson uses exclusive interviews and unrestricted access to Himes's full archives to portray a controversial American writer whose novels unflinchingly confront sex, racism, and black identity. Himes brutally rendered racial politics in the best-selling novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, but he became famous for his Harlem detective series, including Cotton Comes to Harlem. A serious literary tastemaker in his day, Himes had friendships-sometimes uneasy-with such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Carl Van Vechten, and Richard Wright. Jackson's scholarship and astute commentary illuminates Himes's improbable life-his middle-class origins, his eight years in prison, his painful odyssey as a black World War II-era artist, and his escape to Europe for success. More than ten years in the writing, Jackson's biography restores the legacy of a fascinating maverick caught between his aspirations for commercial success and his disturbing, vivid portraits of the United States. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, George Routledge and Sons, Reprint, 1867, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes. Translated by Thomas Johnes. 102 engravings. 3/4 blue leather & patterned paper on boards, Spine with gilt & raised bands. All edges gilt. Previous owner's name stamp on front end paper. Volume 1 - 640 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked text. Volume 2 - 552 pages. Light wear. Clean, unmarked pages.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would "invigorate" the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America's race problems. Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. Philippa grew up under the adoring andinquisitive eyes of an entire nation and soon became the role model and inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the "little Harlem genius." Suffering the double sting of racismand gender bias, Philippa had been rejected by the elite classical music milieu in the United States and forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a world-class performer and composer. She traveled throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia performing for kings, queens, and presidents. By then Philippa had added a second career as an author and foreign correspondent reporting on events around the globe--from Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lamberene to the turbulent Asian theater of the 1960s. She would give a command performance for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium one day, and hide from the Viet Cong among the ancient graves of the Annam kings another.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 516 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. This volume documents Fenn's prolific career from the 1860s until his death in 1911. Sue Rainey also recounts his adventurous sketching trips in the western United States, Europe, and the Middle East, which enhanced his reputation for depicting far-flung places at a time when the nation was taking a more prominent role on the world stage.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 516 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. This volume documents Fenn's prolific career from the 1860s until his death in 1911. Sue Rainey also recounts his adventurous sketching trips in the western United States, Europe, and the Middle East, which enhanced his reputation for depicting far-flung places at a time when the nation was taking a more prominent role on the world stage.

Softcover. Burlington IA, Craftsman Press , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pictorial wraps, 190 pages, b&w illustrations. An infantryman's memoir of World War II in Europe's waning months. INSCRIBED BY BIED on half-title page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Florence, Flor & Findel, 3rd, 1907, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 254 pages. Tipped in illustrations and photographs. Age discoloration to pages, beveled brown leather over covers with three bands on spine continued on front and back cover ending in flor de lis decoration. Rubbing all edges. front and rear hinge cracked.

Hardcover. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 480 pages. Although he is referred to as a "genius" more often than any other scholar of his period, Edward Sapir has received no full-scale biography since his death in 1939. At long last, Regna Darnell provides a comprehensive assessment of the life, ideas, and wide-ranging interests of this remarkable man. Sapir, the foremost linguist and anthropologist of his generation, contributed substantially to the professionalization of linguistics as an independent discipline. He was the first to apply comparative Indo-European methods to the study of American Indian languages, on which he conducted extensive fieldwork. His theoretical work on the relationship of the individual personality to culture remains fundamental to culture theory in anthropology, as does his insistence on the symbolic nature of culture and the importance of culture as understood by its members, in their own words.Sapir became the first professional anthropologist in Canada and teacher of a whole generation of linguists and anthropologists at Chicago and Yale. Holding to a humanistic view of anthropology (his own work included poetry and literary criticism), he was the most articulate spokesman for the interdisciplinary social science of the late 1920s and 1930s. In both linguistics and anthropology Sapir is a revered master whose ideas continue to inspire discussion and research. A sixteen-volume Collected Works is now in progress. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust dacket with minor wear, unclipped. Durkheim was a turn of the century French sociologist who argued that society is largely responsible for shaping an individual's moral values. He was largely critical of laissez-faire capitalism, arguing that society needed to be morally reconstructed. Lukes' comprehensive biography tells the story of Durkheim's life: how he responded to his critics, and how he tried to make his way in the academic world of pre-WWI Europe. Lukes examines Durkheim's work in its historical context, and offers a critical examination of it as well. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 1970, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, 272 pages. Hardcover. Red cloth cover with gilt titles. Black & white illustrations. Dust jacket with tears, creasing along edges. Clean, unmarked pages.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 381 pages. From the beginning of World War II through the early days of Vietnam, groundbreaking female photojournalist and war correspondent Dickey Chapelle chased dangerous assignments her male colleagues wouldn't touch, pioneering a radical style of reporting that focused on the humanity of the oppressed. She documented conditions across Eastern Europe in the wake of the Second World War. She marched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail with the South Vietnamese Army and across the Sierra Maestra Mountains with Castro. She was the first reporter accredited with the Algerian National Liberation Front, and survived torture in a communist Hungarian prison. She dove out of planes, faked her own kidnapping, and endured the mockery of male associates, before ultimately dying on assignment in Vietnam with the Marines in 1965, the first American female journalist killed while covering combat. Small remainder dot on bottom edge otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 224 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, like new copy still in publishers shrink wrap. Over 200 duotone images throughout. Tight copy. Born in Cork, Ireland, Frank Browne (1880-1960) was both a distinguished Jesuit and an accomplished photographer. At age 17, before commencing his studies for the priesthood, he embarked on a tour of Europe armed with a camera. Browne quickly discovered a strong affinity for photography, and continued to take photographs throughout his life. It was not until 1985, however-when Father Edward O'Donnell SJ discovered a large trunk in the Irish Jesuit Provincial's House and found it packed with negatives and photographs-that Browne was catapulted to international fame. Father Browne's remarkable life is recorded in the superb selection of images presented in this book. With wit and a sharp eye, he observed 20th-century Ireland; life as a Jesuit priest; his experience as a passenger on the first leg of the voyage of the Titanic in 1912; and his later travels throughout Europe, Egypt, Yemen, Ceylon, and Australia. This handsome, copiously illustrated volume offers a complete survey of the photographic work of an exceptional man.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 482 pages with index. The first sustained analysis of the cult of the legendary Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian revolutionary leader and popular hero, was among the best-known figures of the nineteenth century. This book seeks to examine his life and the making of his cult, to assess its impact, and understand its surprising success. For thirty years Garibaldi was involved in every combative event in Italy. His greatest moment came in 1860, when he defended a revolution in Sicily and provoked the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy, the overthrow of papal power in central Italy, and the creation of the Italian nation state. It made him a global icon, representing strength, bravery, manliness, saintliness, and a spirit of adventure. Handsome, flamboyant, and sexually attractive, he was worshiped in life and became a cult figure after his death in 1882. Lucy Riall shows that the emerging cult of Garibaldi was initially conceived by revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the status quo, that it was also the result of a collaborative effort involving writers, artists, actors, and publishers, and that it became genuinely and enduringly popular among a broad public. 33 b&w illustrations.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover on a lightly worn dust jacket, 641 pages, b&w illustrations. This is the first full-length biography of the man historian Michael Beschloss calls the keystone figure in the history of American intelligence. Allen Dulles (1893-1969) served in the Office of Strategic Services in Europe during WWII and was named director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1953, serving under Eisenhower and Kennedy. In an overlong, sometimes tedious narrative, Grose (Israel in the Mind of America) describes how Dulles oversaw the firm establishment of the CIA in the Washington power structure during the Eisenhower years (his older brother, John Foster Dulles, was then the Secretary of State), only to be forced out after the CIA's failure in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Later appointed to the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, Dulles became its most diligent member, according to Grose, and a supporter of the view that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Other controversial issues explored include Dulles's exploitation of ex-Nazi Reinhard Gehler's spy network in the early years of the Cold War, and whether JFK authorized, or even knew about, CIA attempts to liquidate Castro. Grose delves unenlighteningly into Dulles's shortcomings as husband and father; he kept a mistress or two and spent little time at home.