Biography

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. 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.

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.

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. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 330 pages. This outrageous autobiography is the story of an adventurous man who lived and loved all over the world, courtesy of two million dollars in counterfeit money. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, John Day, 1st, 1949, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, edgeworn and chipped dust jacket. Explores the life and teachings of the ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius. The book delves into Confucius' background, upbringing, and the cultural and political context in which he lived. It also examines the various interpretations of Confucianism throughout history and how his teachings have influenced Chinese society and beyond. The author offers a critical analysis of Confucius' philosophy and challenges some of the popular myths and misconceptions that have surrounded him. Mild musty smell, clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 472 pages with index. The editor, Joanne Trautmann Banks, previously was co-editor of the six volume 'Letters of Virginia Woolf.' For this volume, Ms. Banks selected 'jewels' from the earlier compilation, and has provided explanatory footnotes throughout. Clean 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. Kent, OH, The Kent State University Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 348 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Very clean, unmarked copy still in publishers shrink-wrap. Conrad Wise Chapman (1842-1910) is unique among Civil War artists: he painted and sketched while on duty as a Confederate soldier who served in three theaters of the war. Chapman's first-hand knowledge is evident in his work. Ben Bassham has written both a critical study of Chapman's art and a biography, incorporating Chapman's correspondence and Civil War memoirs.

Hardcover. NY, Barnes & Noble Books, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 208 pages. Light edge wear, fading to dust jacket. Foxing to edges and end papers. Else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, The Overlook Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 358 pages, Illustrated with three sections of color plates. b&w maps, illustrations. Clean copy. A fascinating survey of the life and enduring legacy of perhaps the greatest and most unjustly ignored of the Roman emperors-written by a richly gifted historian.In 312 A.D., Constantine-one of four Roman emperors ruling a divided empire-marched on Rome to establish his control. On the eve of the battle, a cross appeared to him in the sky with an exhortation, "By this sign conquer." Inscribing the cross on the shields of his soldiers, Constantine drove his rivals into the Tiber and claimed the imperial capital for himself. Under Constantine, Christianity emerged from the shadows, its adherents no longer persecuted. Constantine united the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire. He founded a new capital city, Constantinople. Thereafter the Christian Roman Empire endured in the East, while Rome itself fell to the barbarian hordes.

Hardcover. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 528 pages, b&w and color photographs throughout. A very clean, tight copy in great condition. This book is the first comprehensive account of Gabo's life, career, and artistic theory and practice. Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder explore in detail the evolution of the artist's work and his aesthetic concerns, creative processes, assimilation of such new materials as plastic, and approach to public sculpture. Drawing on Gabo's extensive and largely unpublished archives of letters, diaries, notebooks, models, and sketchbooks, they discuss the sculptor's work in the context of his relations with other avant-garde artists, architects, and critics, including his brother Antoine Pevsner.

Hardcover. Jackson MS, University of Mississippi, 1st, 1987, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 178 pages. Gathers interviews with the Tennessee short story writer in which he discusses his career, writing, character development themes, settings, and growing older. Clean copy.