biography

Hardcover. Dallas TX, Spence Publishing Company, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with light fading to spine, 224 pages. One of the twentieth century's most widely read writers and its most influential Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis has nevertheless eluded the understanding of the numerous scholars who have approached him only as a religious thinker and man of letters. A new book by a leading Lewis authority explores the full range of his manifold genius and finds for the first time the surprising secret of Lewis's enduring literary and spiritual achievement. It will astonish Lewis's admirers and critics alike to learn that he was far from the settled convert he appeared to be. Yet this very unsettledness, which Lewis himself found alarming, was the source of the appealing tension in his work and of his unrelenting commitment to his apologetic vocation. It was in the service of this vocation that he exercised his overarching rhetorical genius-a dazzling adroitness at suiting word, voice, and argument to a particular purpose-always militant, compelling, and persuasive. As Professor Como explores Lewis's hitherto uncharted inner landscape-the core of both his spiritual insight and his intellectual greatness-there emerges a more complex and integrated figure than we have known before. Clean copy.

NY, Abrams, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 367 pages. Brassai: The Eye of Paris is both the catalog of an exhibition of Brassai's photographs organized by the Houston Fine Arts Museum and a valuable biography of the artist. In 1932, only three years after he purchased his first camera (a Leica), Brassai published a portfolio of 64 photos titled Paris by Night that caused an immediate sensation. His lively eye (seen in an enigmatic photograph at the beginning of the book) captured fresh, unique images of the city and its citizens. Fascinated by the underworld, he moved easily among gangsters and prostitutes in bars and bordellos; he was equally at home among the fashionable and wealthy, and just as devastating in his depiction of them. He used magnesium flares for low-contrast shadows, catching his subjects in natural poses at significant moments. The wide range of Brassai's work is suggested by his formal nudes, which have an affinity with Edward Weston's, and his informal portraits, which remind viewers of Diane Arbus, who admired his work. Brassai was a central figure in the intellectual and artistic circles of Montparnasse that made Paris the most exciting city in the world during the 1930s. In a long essay that includes lively anecdotes of the photographer's relationships with Picasso, Henry Miller, Kertesz, and many other luminaries, the author re-creates the aesthetic and philosophical ferment of the period. Brassai: The Eye of Paris recognizes the artist's talents in five different media--photography, filmmaking, sculpture, writing, and drawing--but focuses on what he is best known for: lyrical and penetrating photographs of the City of Light.

Hardcover. Boston, Bulfinch Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 319 pages, mostly b&w photographs (some color), essays by 7 contributors including Henry Miller. Preface by Jean-Jacques Aillagon. Text essays excerpted from the work of Brassai himself as well as contributions from his wife Mme. Gilberte Brassi and close friends Roger Grenier, Henry Miller, Jacques Prevert and Werner Spies. End-matter includes Biography, Bibliography, Exhibitions and List of Illustrations. Illustrated with 308 photographs, 14 of which are in color. Stated first American edition. A presentation of Brassi's art from his nude drawings and sculpture to his fascination with graffiti but principally featuring on his photographs of nocturnal Paris and the demimonde creatures which inhabited its streets. Remainder mark to top edge, otherwise clean. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color illustrations by Egielski. Very nice, clean condition. Wittily sending up the "child prodigy'' (if not biography, history, and high seriousness itself), Yorinks and Egielski trace the course of Minski's genius. A child of the 18th Century, Minski prankishly ``discovers'' gravity and electricity, soon followed by his serene introduction of the telephone, airplane, automobile, aspirin, light bulb, etc. Leonardo da Vinci appears in 18th-Century Vienna to applaud Minski's ``noodle.'' But when Minski hears the (historical) Farinelli sing, he labors feverishly on a formula to transform himself from scientist to artist, and achieves a triumphant apotheosis as ``unequaled singer.'' Egielski's exuberantly detailed, warmly colored pictures make the most of the anachronisms, the caricatures, and the Old World setting.

Hardcover. US, Atlas & Co, 6th, 2008, 240 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, 1st thus, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards. no dust jacket issued. Originally published in a different form in 1977 by Belier Press, this collection of comics by Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author/artist of "Maus," presents the seminal works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today. Revised and re-issued in 2008, with an introduction that's almost as long as the book it introduces, and certainly autobiographically intimate and daring. Clean, very good.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st thus, 2008, Hardcover, pictorial boards. no dust jacket issued. Originally published in a different form in 1977 by Belier Press, this collection of comics by Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author/artist of "Maus," presents the seminal works that changed how comics are made and appreciated today. Revised and re-issued in 2008, with an introduction that's almost as long as the book it introduces, and certainly autobiographically intimate and daring. Clean, very good.

Hardcover. New York , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 260 pages, illustrations in color and b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Lucian Freud's paintings are instantly recognizable: often shocking and disturbing, his portraits convey a profound yet compelling sense of discomfort. Freud was twice married and the father of at least a dozen children, and his numerous relationships with women were the subject of much gossip-but the man himself remained a mystery. An intensely private individual (during his lifetime he prevented two planned biographies from being published), Freud's life, as well as his art, invites questions that have had no answer-until now.In Breakfast with Lucian, Geordie Greig, one of a few close friends who regularly had breakfast with the painter during the last years of his life, tells an insider's account-accessible, engaging, revealing-of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating, enigmatic, and controversial artists. Greig, who has studied his subject's work at length, unravels the tangled thread of a life lived on Freud's own uncompromising terms. Based on private conversations in which Freud held forth on everything from first love to gambling debts to the paintings of Velazquez, and informed by interviews with friends, lovers, and some of the artist's children who have never before spoken publicly about their relationships with the painter, this is a deeply personal memoir that is illuminated by a keen appreciation of Freud's art.

Hardcover. London, Metheun, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 192 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Illustrated in color and b&w. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages. This comprehensive biography presents the achievements of Brion Gysin, a multi-faceted artist whose work has influenced performers such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Recalling the heady atmosphere of the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s, it features first-hand reminiscences by contemporaries, plus a biographical essay and chronological listings. productive literary collaboration with William Burroughs. As well as looking at his work as a sound poet and performance artist, it features reproductions of his paintings and graphics, and examples of his permutated poems and other writings.

Softcover. NY, Thames & Hudson, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 240 pages. This comprehensive biography presents the achievements of Brion Gysin, a multi-faceted artist whose work has influenced performers such as David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Recalling the heady atmosphere of the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s, it features first-hand reminiscences by contemporaries, plus a biographical essay and chronological listings. productive literary collaboration with William Burroughs. As well as looking at his work as a sound poet and performance artist, it features reproductions of his paintings and graphics, and examples of his permutated poems and other writings.

Hardcover. NY, Citadel Press, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 246 pages, b&w illustrations. Indiana-born Vivian Gordon fluttered to New York in 1920 looking for fame and fortune. Before long, the flame-haired chorus girl parlayed her youth, beauty, and ambition into more profitable means as a tough and glamorous symbol of Prohibition-era excess. She was a speakeasy owner, blackmailer, high-end escort, extortionist, racketeer, and con woman. But given her dangerously intimate associations, Vivian was also a woman who knew too much and who rightfully feared for her life. On February 26, 1931, Vivian's bludgeoned and garroted body was found dumped in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. Now, in the first in-depth biography of its kind, Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano unravels her tumultuous life and the headline-making murder that became an obsession for many. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Philadelphia, David McKay Company, 1st, 1929, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 133 pages, illustrated throughout with tipped in b&w plates by M. Boutet De Monvel. Purple cloth with gilt titles. Sun-fade to covers, light tanning to pages opposite plates, else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. N. P., Privately Printed, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in stapled wrappers, 25 pages. 1/750 copies. Minor wear to covers, else a lovely little pamphlet in excellent shape. An address given to the Friends of the Brown University Libraries.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 487 pages. First full-length biography of Walter in English. Black boards, gray cloth spine with silver titles, illustrated dust jacket, 32 pages of b&w photographic plates on glossy paper. Slight rubbing to dust jacket, clean boards, pages crisp and unmarked; a very clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Oklahoma Heritage Assn., 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 324 pages, b&w illustrations. SIGNED BY CO-AUTHOR THOMPSON on the title page.Bryce Harlow was one of the most extraordinary political figures in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. He served four presidents with great honor and distinction. His word was his bond. With his gentle manner and Oklahoma drawl, Harlow advised Presidents on more public issues than perhaps anyone in American history.Dr. Henry Kissinger says Harlow spent his entire adult life studying the ways of Washington, D.C., alternating between participant and observer. Harlow had a deep sense for the Presidency, its power, its majesty, and the awful responsibility it imposes. Clean, unread copy.

Hardcover. Lyons Press, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 249 pages, b&w illustrations. William McGarvey "Bullet Bill" Dudley (December 24, 1921 - February 4, 2010) led a thrilling career as a professional American football player in the National Football League for the Pittsburgh Steelers, Detroit Lions, and Washington Redskins. With humble beginnings in Bluefield, Virginia he made the football team his junior year, and in 1938 he kicked a 35-yard field goal in the season's finale. Dudley was drafted in the 1942 NFL Draft with the first overall pick by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1966 and the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame in 1972. During the 1942 season, he led the league in rushing with 696 yards on 162 carries and was then named to the All-Pro team. Steve Stinson revisits his father-in-law's journey from Bluefield, Virginia through his retirement from the NFL and shares everything he brought to communities in between each pivotal moment in Dudley's life. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Times Books, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket that shows fading, 360 pages, b&w illustrations, endpaper maps. General John Burgoyne was a British army officer, politician and dramatist. He first saw action during the Seven Years' War when he participated in several battles, mostly notably during the Portugal Campaign of 1762. Burgoyne is best known for his role in the American War of Independence. During the Saratoga campaign he surrendered his army of 5,000 men to the American troops on October 17, 1777. Appointed to command a force designated to capture Albany and end the rebellion, Burgoyne advanced from Canada but soon found himself surrounded and outnumbered. He fought two battles at Saratoga, but was forced to open negotiations with Horatio Gates. Although he agreed to a convention, on 17 October 1777, which would allow his troops to return home, this was subsequently revoked and his men were made prisoners. Burgoyne faced criticism when he returned to Britain, and never held another active command. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 514 pages, b&w illustrations, in a bright dust jacket. Biography of Union general Ambrose Burnside, reassessing his reputation as an "incompetent leader" by viewing his entire career as a soldier during the war: along the Carolina coast, at Antietam, and his capture of Knoxville in East Tennessee, while still recognizing the debacle at Fredericksburg.

Hardcover. NY, Burt Franklin, reprint, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Blue cloth covers, 89 pages, reprint of the 1892 edition

Hardcover. New York, Newmarket Press, 1st US, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 289 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. An tour of Buster Keaton's life and art. Mild rubbing to dust jacket. Creasing to dust jacket front flap. Includes 40 black-and-white photographs. Unmarked. Bright and clean; a tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Delacorte Press, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY GEYER on the front fly leaf. What is it like to cover revolutions and interview the great revolutionary figures of our time? This lively firsthand account of one of our most eminent foreign correspondents, the first American woman journalist to cover the world on such a scale, provides a glimpse into this glamorous, rewarding, exhausting, and grueling life. About the Author: Georgie Anne Geyer was a foreign correspondent, an author and biographer, and a syndicated columnist for half a century. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 320 pages. In the voluminous scholarship that's been written on Paul Cezanne, little has been said about the twenty-four portraits in oil that Cezanne made of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Cezanne, over an extended twenty-year period. In Cezanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Susan Sidlauskas breaks new ground, focusing on these paintings as a group and looking particularly at the differences that render many of them unrecognizable as the same person. She argues that Cezanne sidestepped the conventional goals of portraiture-he avoids representing a consistent, identifiable physiognomy or conventional feminine postures and does not portray the subject's inner life-making lack of fixedness itself his subject, which leads him ultimately to a radical reformulation of modern portraiture. Sidlauskas also upends the notion of Mme Cezanne as the irrelevant and absent spouse. Instead she reveals Hortense Fiquet Cezanne as a presence so crucial to the artist that she became the essential "other" to his ever-evolving "self." Coupling historical texts from philosophy, psychology, and physiology with more recent writings from women's and gender studies, cognitive psychology, and visual culture, Sidlauskas demonstrates that Mme Cezanne offered intimacy at arm's length for the painter who has been dubbed "the lone wolf of Aix."

Hardcover. NY, PublicAffairs, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The legendary television star tells the backstage stories of the classic comedy of Your Show of Shows, Caesar's Hour , and other landmark programs. It is no exaggeration to say that without Sid Caesar, comedy in America would have been a lot less funny. He was the star and guiding force behind Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour , two of the most innovative programs in the Golden Age of Television, and the writers and stars of those shows went on to create the plays, movies, and sitcoms that we now think of as classic American comedy. So many of our greatest comedy writers - Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen -were part of Sid Caesar's creative troupe. Sid was a master not only of comedic performance, but also of developing characters that the audience could relate to, finding the humor in ordinary situations rather than through vaudeville-type gags. His was a comedy truly drawn from the human condition. Caesar's Hours is Sid Caesar 's artistic autobiography, his account of how these great routines were fashioned and performed, and the interactions that gave birth to them. He takes us inside the famed writers' room, the rehearsal studios, and onto the stage itself, where some of the funniest moments in television history came to life. To read his book is to learn why his intelligent and sensitive brand of humor resonates so much with us, even half a century later. Remainder line to bottom edge otherwise clean.