Biography

Hardcover. San Francisco, Encounter Books, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 222 pages. Clean, unmarked copy. Black and white pictures in center. Goodyear was an entrepreneur who actually made good on the ever-popular claim that his company would change the world. Korman, senior editor of Engineering News-Record, dryly traces the life of the rubber pioneer and American industrial legend in this part scientific history lesson and part American business story. Goodyear (1800-1860) became an inventor not out of any great scientific thirst; he was self-taught and wanted to make money. He earned success, but endured continual patent monopoly battles and numerous trips to debtors' prison as he steadfastly and compulsively held onto his dream of using rubber to change just about every aspect of life. (According to Korman, Goodyear frequently wore a coat made of rubber in his early inventing days to underscore the versatility of his product.) Korman waxes scientific at times, offering in-depth descriptions of how Goodyear cooked rubber and sulfur compounds, yet his technical discourses are not so esoteric that they will turn away amateurs. His book is also valuable for its accurate portrayal of factory life in the 1830s and '40s; his accounts of the aproned men who chopped rubber with axes and knives and the machines that ground it are lively examples of industrial age America. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Hill & Wang, 3rd pr., 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 358 pages, b&w illustrations. From modest beginnings as a tea shop, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company became the largest retailer in the world. It was a juggernaut, with nearly sixteen thousand stores. But its explosive growth made it a mortal threat to mom-and-pop grocery stores across the nation. Main Street fought back tooth and nail, leading the Hoover, Roosevelt, and Truman administrations to investigate the Great A&P. In a remarkable court case, the government pressed criminal charges against the company for selling food too cheaply-and won. The acclaimed historian Marc Levinson tells the story of a struggle between small business and big business that tore America apart. George and John Hartford took over their father's business and reshaped it again and again, turning it into a vertically integrated behemoth that paved the way for every big-box retailer to come. George demanded a rock-solid balance sheet; John was the marketer-entrepreneur who led A&P through seven decades of rapid changes. Together, they set the stage for the modern consumer economy by turning an archaic retail industry into a highly efficient system for distributing food at low cost. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Hawthorn Books, 2nd pr., 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 243 pages, in a bright , price-clipped dust jacket. Clean copy.

NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 609 pages, b&w illustrations. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan's words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John's father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation's prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan's dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan's Plessy dissent his "Bible"--and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan's words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.

Hardcover. London, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two hardcover volumes, light tan cloth with silver lettering on spines, 379 +438 pages, b&w illustrations. The first biography of Burney to be published after his daughter's 3-volume memoirs appeared in the 19th century. Endpaper maps. Clean copies.

NY, Crown, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY MOSHER on the title page. Documents the author's road trip across twenty-first-century America, where he shared personal encounters with homeless people, country performers, and readers and writers from all walks of life. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton & Company, 1st US, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Advance Reading Copy, 408 pages. The seven-foot Dirk Nowitzki is one of the greatest players in basketball history. The Dallas Maverick's legend revolutionized the sport, redefining the role of the big man in the modern game. Dirk moved differently: flexible and fast, confident and in control. He thought differently, too. On the court, his shots were masterful-none more venerated than his signature one-legged flamingo fadeaway, a move that lives on in the repertoire of today's most skilled NBA players. How did this lanky kid from the German suburbs become an all-time top ten scorer and NBA champion? How can a superstar stay so humble? Award-winning novelist and sportswriter Thomas Pletzinger spent over seven years traveling with Nowitzki. He witnessed Dirk's summer workouts, involving fingertip pushups and the study of the physics, and spent days discussing literature and philosophy with Holger Geschwindner, Dirk's enigmatic mentor and coach. Watching Nowitzki in empty gyms and in packed arenas with 30,000 fans, Pletzinger began to understand how Dirk and Holger's philosophical insights on performance, creativity, and freedom enabled his success and longevity. This proof edition lacks the photo section. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Alcove Press , 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket with foxing, tanning. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Company, 1st, 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket. 320 pages, b&w illustrations. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with fading to spine, 289 pages, b&w illustrations. Turner's work on the frontier and on sectional development helped transform the teaching and writing of American history. Here are 150+ letters excerpted or given in full (to Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Schlesinger, Carl Becker, Merle Curti and others.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 373 pages. Color and b&w photographs. Water stain on back cover. Dust jacket has some small tears. A pictorial record, with accompanying text, of German society, culture, and politics, from the Weimar Republic to Hitler's last public appearence, detailing the rise of Nazism and Hitler's public and private lives.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Since 1945 there have been more than one hundred biographies of Hitler, and countless other books on him and the Third Reich. What happens when so many people reinterpret the life of a single individual? Dangerously, the cumulative portrait that begins to emerge can suggest the face of a mythic antihero whose crimes and errors blur behind an aura of power and conquest. By reversing the process, by making Hitler's biographers--rather than Hitler himself--the subject of inquiry, Lukacs reveals the contradictions that take us back to the true Hitler of history. Like an attorney, Lukacs puts the biographies on trial. He gives a masterly account of all the major works and of the personalities, methods, and careers of the biographers (one cannot separate the historian from his history, particularly in this arena); he looks at what is still not known (and probably never will be) about Hitler; he considers various crucial aspects of the real Hitler; and he shows how different biographers have either advanced our understanding or gone off track. By singling out those who have been involved in, or co-opted into, an implicit "rehabilitation of Hitler," Lukacs draws powerful conclusions about Hitler's essential differences from other monsters of history, such as Napoleon, Mussolini, and Stalin, and--equally important--about Hitler's place in the history of this century and of the world.

Hardcover. Columbus OH, College Printers at The Champlin Press, 1st, 1916, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, First edition, hardcover in wood-grain paper, gilt lettering on cover, 22 pages, b&w frontis. Signed by Meeker and # 92 of 200 on a limitation page. Bottom corner of front cover worn otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday and Co., 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, beige cloth with titles in black and blue on spine, no dust jacket, 317 pages. These are the life and times of Col. John R. Stingo, fabulous figure of track and ring. The Colonel who Was a raconteur In The Grand Tradition; He shares his tales Oo rainmaking, horse racing, newspaper writing; and other exploits of his long and kaleidoscopic career. Paper tanning slightly but a clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Co., 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 180 pages. The author of the Travis McGee series relates his family's experiences with and high jinx of their pets, two tomcats and a goose. 4 leaves of b&w photo plates. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise tight and clean.

Hardcover. NY, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1st, 1907, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, illustrated frontispiece etching of Blenheim. Burgundy cloth with gilt titles and decoration, top edge gilt. The memoirs of the author of "Land of Hope and Glory." Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Indianapolis, Indiana Historical Society, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 209 pages. A revised edition of a book first published in 1966, profusely illustrated in color and b&w. Biography of Theodore Steele, a popular regional artist from Indiana who specialized in landscapes as well as portraits. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1st, 1928, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, tan cloth with dark blue lettering, 293 pages. Early book on Adolph Zuckor & the pioneer days of the motion picture industry. 15 photos. Zukor was a Hungarian-American who produced one of the first feature-length films (The Prisoner of Zenda, 1913) and was one of the three founders of Paramount Studios. The book covers his rise from nickelodeon arcades to the heights of Hollywood. No dust jacket. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Dial Press, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light gray boards with a red cloth spine, 431 pages. Clean copy. Book opens to half-title page, so assumed front fly leaf gone.

Hardcover. NY, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1st thus, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 288 pages. A special illustrated edition of this travel classic first published in the early 1940s. The author describes growing up in an Africa that no longer exists, training and breeding race horses, flying mail to Sudan, and being the first woman to fly the Atlantic from east to west. This edition with 75 duo tone photographs. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 3rd pr., 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 316 pages. David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as "the Great Infidel" for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy, and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism. Remarkably, the two were best friends for most of their adult lives, sharing what Dennis Rasmussen calls the greatest of all philosophical friendships. The Infidel and the Professor is the first book to tell the fascinating story of the friendship of these towering Enlightenment thinkers-and how it influenced their world-changing ideas. The book follows Hume and Smith's relationship from their first meeting in 1749 until Hume's death in 1776. It describes how they commented on each other's writings, supported each other's careers and literary ambitions, and advised each other on personal matters, most notably after Hume's quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton-Century, 1st, 1940, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 282 pages. The author (1870-1942) was born in Shelbyville, Kentucky at the home of her grandfather, but lived in Louisville all of her life. Her first novel "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch" was an overnight success, making her immediately famous. It had a remarkable publishing history, remaining on the best seller list for two years, going through more than a hundred printings, was made into a movie four times, and ran on Broadway for seven seasons. THE INKY WAY, her last book, published two years before her death, is her autobiography.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, Revised Ed., 1956, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. 253 pages, b&w photos. Expanded with new material for this 1956 editon. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Mason/Charter, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 181 pages, b&w photos. The life story of the 1930's Hollywood superstar, who is still popular today. Clean copy.