biography

Hardcover. New York, Harmony Books, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 346 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, tight copy. Black and white pictures throughout.

Hardcover. NY, Abrams, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The director Michael Cimino (1939-2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven's Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. Originally budgeted at $11 million, Cimino's sprawling western went off the rails in Montana. The picture grew longer and longer, and the budget ballooned to over $40 million. When it was finally released, Heaven's Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era.Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven's Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton's Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker. Based on extensive interviews with Cimino's peers and collaborators and enemies and friends, most of whom have never spoken before, it unravels the enigmas and falsehoods, many perpetrated by the director himself, which surround his life, and sheds new light on his extraordinary career. This is a story of the making of art, the business of Hollywood, and the costs of ambition, both financial and personal.

Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The first biography of critically acclaimed then critically derided filmmaker Michael Cimino--and a reevaluation of the infamous film that destroyed his career. The director Michael Cimino (1939-2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven's Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. Originally budgeted at $11 million, Cimino's sprawling western went off the rails in Montana. The picture grew longer and longer, and the budget ballooned to over $40 million. When it was finally released, Heaven's Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven's Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton's Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker.

Softcover. Torino, Societa Editrice Internazionale, 1st Italian, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages, illustrated wrappers. An Italian journalist's memoir of a half century living in London. With a SiGNED letter laid in to the previous owner Cecil Roberts from the author. ITALIAN TEXT.

Hardcover. New York , Norton , 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 190 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Cipe Pineles was art director for leading fashion magazines between 1930 and 1960. Tracing Pineles's career from young immigrant to "ranking" female in the design world, Martha Scotford chronicles a time when few women were involved in design and assesses Cipe's brilliant contributions to graphic design and magazine design in particular.

Softcover. Rootstock Publishing, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 316 pages, b&w illustrations. Circle of Sawdust is a uniquely personal story of the wild characters, fascinating personalities, remarkable histories, and behind-the-scenes world of traditional traveling circuses. Here is a true-life tale about a boy's impulse to run off and join the circus and then-through doubt, failure, loss, and tragedy-pursue the implausible vision of starting his own circus! With humor and passion, founder of Circus Smirkus Rob Mermin writes about the precarious life of a creative artist, the ups and downs of taking risks, and the idealistic struggle to hold onto a dream. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, pages. Citizen Coors is the riveting saga of an American dynasty. From the moment the destitute Prussian Adolph Coors stows away on a Baltimore-bound ship in 1868 to the worldwide expansion of the billion-dollar Coors Brewing Company, Citizen Coors is a headlong American tale of triumph over bare-knuckle competition. The Coors family does it the old-fashioned way, through fearsome devotion to product, rejection of modern marketing, and refusing to borrow so much as a nickel.But the family almost rides its principles into the ground. "Nobody will ever choose a beer on the basis of a thirty-second ad," Bill Coors is fond of saying at a time when his two main competitors, Anheuser-Busch and Miller, are spending upward of a billion dollars a year on ads. He won't even allow a ring-pull can. The brewery's decline and recovery are dizzying. But Citizen Coors is more than a business story. Here is Adolph, the founder,in 1929, distraught over Prohibition, hurling himself to his death from a hotel balcony. Here is Bill,ten years later, yearning for the wider world but forced back to the brewery by a single glance from his father. Here is Joe, Jr., raised to rule yet suddenly banished for marrying without permission. Here is Peter, prevented from rescuing the company precisely because he has been trained to do so. Here is kidnapping and murder. Here are generations of Coors men broken against the iron will of their fathers. Here is a second suicide, eerily similar to the first.

Hardcover. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1st US, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 423 pages, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy. With "humanism, generosity, and a passionate, beating heart" (The Times, London), Janice Galloway's Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann. In her lifetime, Clara was a celebrated concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms -- as well as mother of the eight Schumann children and caretaker of her husband through a series of crippling mental illnesses. In its luminous integrity the novel brings Clara Schumann to life as a woman of genius. Galloway is at once a meticulous researcher of her subjects' remarkable and highly dramatic artistic careers and a virtuoso storyteller whose imagination and empathy lead her to that place off limits to history and biography -- inside the human mind. Distilling the memories, poetry, and musical notes therein, she examines the ways artists divine patterns out of life's chaos. "Passion," writes Galloway of Clara's performance philosophy, "one might take for granted -- its control is the mechanism through which all else flows." Though music may have bent to Clara's will, love served her far more tragically. Dismissing the cliches of Great Art and rejecting the romantic conflation of Madness and Creativity, Clara boldly ventures that in a life marred by alienation and isolation, "Work alone endures."

Hardcover. Lexington KY, University Press of Kentucky, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 448 pages. Greta Garbo proclaimed him as her favorite director. Actors, actresses, and even child stars were so at ease under his direction that they were able to deliver inspired and powerful performances. Academy-Award-nominated director Clarence Brown (1890-1987) worked with some of Hollywood's greatest stars, such as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy. Known as the "star maker," he helped guide the acting career of child sensation Elizabeth Taylor (of whom he once said, "she has a face that is an act of God") and discovered Academy-Award-winning child star Claude Jarman Jr. for The Yearling (1946). He directed more than fifty films, including Possessed (1931), Anna Karenina (1935), National Velvet (1944), and Intruder in the Dust (1949), winning his audiences over with glamorous star vehicles, tales of families, communities, and slices of Americana, as well as hard-hitting dramas. Although Brown was admired by peers like Jean Renoir, Frank Capra, and John Ford, his illuminating work and contributions to classic cinema are rarely mentioned in the same breath as those of Hollywood's great directors. In this first full-length account of the life and career of the pioneering filmmaker, Gwenda Young discusses Brown's background to show how his hardworking parents and resilient grandparents inspired his entrepreneurial spirit. She reveals how the one-time engineer and World War I aviator established a thriving car dealership, the Brown Motor Car Company, in Alabama-only to give it all up to follow his dream of making movies. He would not only become a brilliant director but also a craftsman who was known for his innovative use of lighting and composition.

Princeton University Art Museum, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 408 pages. Clarence H. White (1871-1925) was one of the most influential art photographers and teachers of the early 20th century and a founding member of the Photo-Secession. This beautiful publication offers a new appraisal of White's contributions, including his groundbreaking aesthetic experiments, his commitment to the ideals of American socialism, and his embrace of the expanding fields of photographic book and fashion illustration, celebrity portraiture, and advertising. Based on extensive archival research, the book challenges the idea of an abrupt rupture between prewar, soft-focus idealizing photography and postwar "modernism" to paint a more nuanced picture of American culture in the Progressive era. The illustrations are well reproduced and comprehensive.

Hardcover. NY, Praeger Publishers, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Foreword by Wilfrid Sheed. IIlustrated with photographs. Statistics. 274 pages. Biography of one of the greatest baseball player in the game. Roberto Clemente was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1973. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. On New Year's Eve 1972, following eighteen magnificent seasons in the major leagues, Roberto Clemente died a hero's death, killed in a plane crash as he attempted to deliver food and medical supplies to Nicaragua after a devastating earthquake. David Maraniss brings the great baseball player brilliantly back to life in "Clemente", a book destined to become a modern classic. 401 pages, clean copy.

Hardcover. Brooklyn NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Photographer Henry Horenstein presents his earliest photographs, made from 1970 to 1973: a collection of portraits of family and friends, landscapes, and period imagery. These photographs describe a time familiar to everyone, when one moves from adolescence to adulthood-remaining a part of a family while beginning to create a network of one's own.

Hardcover. Brooklyn NY, powerHouse Books, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 112 pages. Photographer Henry Horenstein presents his earliest photographs, made from 1970 to 1973: a collection of portraits of family and friends, landscapes, and period imagery. These photographs describe a time familiar to everyone, when one moves from adolescence to adulthood-remaining a part of a family while beginning to create a network of one's own.

Hardcover. NY, Mariner Books, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 374 pages, b&w photos. Mike Krzyzewski, known worldwide as "Coach K," is a five-time national champion at Duke, the NCAA's all-time leader in victories with nearly 1,200, and the first man to lead Team USA to three Olympic basketball gold medals. Through unprecedented access to Krzyzewski's best friends, closest advisers, fiercest adversaries, and generations of his players and assistants, three-time New York Times bestselling author Ian O'Connor takes you behind the Blue Devil curtain with a penetrating examination of the great but flawed leader as he closes out his iconic career. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, advanced reading copy, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 165 pages. Scholastique Mukasonga's Cockroaches is a compelling chronicle of the author's childhood in the years leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In a spare and penetrating tone, Mukasonga brings to life the scenes of her family's forced displacement from Rwanda to neighboring Burundi. With a view made lucid through time and pain, Mukasonga erodes the distance between her present and her past, resurrecting and paying homage to her family members who were massacred in the genocide, but also, in movingly simple language, the beauty present in quiet, daily moments with her loved ones. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dustjacket, 402 pages, b&w illustrations.The biography of a seminal figure in American public life, whose active career spanned the years from Theodore Roosevelt through the early Cold War. Stimson was an intimate friend of Theodore Roosevelt's, and was the crucial figure linking Roosevelt's imperialist expansionism to the world of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.

Softcover. Boston MA, Museum of Fine Arts, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 98 pages, softcover with illustrated wrappers, 98 pages with 126 b&w photos. Essay by Kathryn Buhler.

Hardcover. Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, reprint, 1910, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth, 434 pages. Minor cover corner and spine edge wear. Gilt top edge and titles on spine. Tissue guard on frontispiece portrait of Commodore Rodgers. Very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Appleton & Co., 1st, 1900, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light green cloth with gilt and b&w decoration, 480 pages. Top edge gilt. Front and rear hinges tender. Cloth covers rubbed at corners and along edges. Clean 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.

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations by Spiegelman. Maus is a holocaust survival story, a biography, and an autobiography. Written as a graphic novel (and winner of a Pulitzer Prize), Art Spiegelman captures the process of interviewing his father while simultaneously telling his father's story. In that sense, the text is very self-reflexive - there are parts in it showing Spiegelman working to create the very page you read, as previous parts of the his father's story are reintroduced from previous portions of the text. The story is complex. It not only details the horrors of the holocaust and the extreme lengths to which people went to survive, but it also captures the harrowing guilt survivors faced, and the lifelong aftereffects of the war. It also shows the struggle between father and son, both through the lens of a typical familial challenge, and of those unique between a survivor and child born afterwards.

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 296 pages, b&w illustrations by Spiegelman. Maus is a holocaust survival story, a biography, and an autobiography. Written as a graphic novel (and winner of a Pulitzer Prize), Art Spiegelman captures the process of interviewing his father while simultaneously telling his father's story. In that sense, the text is very self-reflexive - there are parts in it showing Spiegelman working to create the very page you read, as previous parts of the his father's story are reintroduced from previous portions of the text. The story is complex. It not only details the horrors of the holocaust and the extreme lengths to which people went to survive, but it also captures the harrowing guilt survivors faced, and the lifelong aftereffects of the war. It also shows the struggle between father and son, both through the lens of a typical familial challenge, and of those unique between a survivor and child born afterwards.

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.