Art Biography

You don't have to be a hunter or camper to enjoy this collection of hilarious stories by a writer who is often compared to Mark Twain and Garrison Keillor. In fact, the charm of Patrick F. McManus' work is that it provides plenty of reasons for staying indoors, surrounded by friendly appliances. You'll laugh aloud as McManus and his friends, including Rancid and Crazy Eddie, venture into the great outdoors to face formidable foes.

On March 17, 2005, Spamalot debuted on Broadway to rapturous reviews for its star-studded creative team, including creators Eric Idle and John Du Prez, director Mike Nichols, and stars Hank Azaria, David Hyde Pierce, Sara Ramirez, Tim Curry, and more. But long before the show was the toast of Broadway and the winner of three Tony Awards, it was an idea threatening to fizzle before it could find its way into existence. Now, Eric Idle shares original journal entries and raw email exchanges, revealing the sometimes bumpy, always entertaining, path to the show’s unforgettable run.

In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon.

Finding Grace is the powerful, often humorous, and deeply moving story of one woman's journey of broken dreams. It is the story of how a painful legacy of the past is confronted and met with peace. This book is for anyone who has struggled to understand why our desires---even the simplest ones---are sometimes denied or who has questioned where God is when we need Him most. This story is about one woman's unlikely road to motherhood. Finally, it's a book about the "undeserved gift which is life itself."

The legend behind such songs as "Suzanne," "Bird on the Wire," and "Hallelujah" and the poet and novelist behind such groundbreaking literary works as Beautiful Losers and Book of Mercy, Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and influential artists of our era, a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life - sex, religion, power, meaning, love. I'm Your Man is the definitive account of Cohen's extraordinary life.

On August 5, 1949, a crew of 15 of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for 40 years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

In Catch Me if You Can, Frank W. Abagnale recounted his youthful career as a master imposter and forger. In The Art of the Steal, Abagnale tells the remarkable story of how he parlayed his knowledge of cons and scams into a successful career as a consultant on preventing financial foul play—while showing you how to identify and outsmart perpetrators of fraud.

I've been in this life for 50 years, been trying to work out its riddle for 42 and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last 35. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.

Scouting for Grant and Meade is comprised of the popular recollections of Judson Knight, former chief scout of the Army of the Potomac from August 1864 to June 1865. Originally beginning as a serialized column in the armed forces service paper National Tribune, Knight’s column "Fighting Them Over Again" offers a rare glimpse into the comings and goings of scouts behind enemy lines during the American Civil War.

Mix tapes: We all have our favorites. Stick one into a deck, press play, and you’re instantly transported to another time in your life. For Rob Sheffield, that time was one of miraculous love and unbearable grief. A time that spanned seven years, it started when he met the girl of his dreams, and ended when he watched her die in his arms.

In the late 1960s, riding the crest of the counterculture movement, Cea's family left a comfortable existence in California to live off the land in the Canadian wilderness. But unlike most commune dwellers of the time, the Persons weren't trying to build a new society - they wanted to escape civilization altogether. Led by Cea's grandfather Dick, they lived a pot-smoking, free-loving, clothing-optional life under a canvas tipi without running water, electricity, or heat for the bitter winters.

An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.

Connie Chung is a pioneer. In 1969 at the age of 23, this once-shy daughter of Chinese parents took her first job at a local TV station in her hometown of Washington, D.C. and soon thereafter began working at CBS news as a correspondent. Profoundly influenced by her family’s cultural traditions, yet growing up completely Americanized in the United States, Chung describes her career as an Asian woman in a white male-centered world.

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter - for whom this book was written - from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers.

A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. In The Grand Affair, scholar Paul Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siecle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

Growing up poor in Mountain Pine, Arkansas, with a young, addicted mom, Bobby Estell fell in love with country music. Abandoned by his father at the age of five, Bobby saw the radio as his way out - a dream that came true in college when he went on air at the Henderson State University campus station broadcasting as Bobby Bones while simultaneously starting The Bobby Bones Show at 105.9 KLAZ.

When twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones began working as a secretary at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, she spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile and passing on projects—until one day, a book caught her eye. She read it in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture-defining career in publishing. Legendary editor Judith Jones finally gets her due in this intimate biography.

The most successful director in movie history, Steven Spielberg has been responsible for such box-office blockbusters as Jurassic Park, Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Indiana Jones trilogy. And yet throughout much of his career, Spielberg's work has been undervalued by critics who have questioned his emotional maturity and intellectual seriousness. It was not until he made Schindler's List in 1993 that he was widely recognized as a serious filmmaker.

Long before Wikileaks and social media, the journalist Drew Pearson exposed to public view information that public officials tried to keep hidden. Pearson devoted himself to revealing what politicians were doing behind closed doors. From 1932 to 1969, his daily "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column and weekly radio and TV commentary broke secrets, revealed classified information, and passed along rumors based on sources high and low in the federal government, while intelligence agents searched fruitlessly for his sources.

Rachel Maddow has beaten the odds in a way that's novel in today's America: She uses her brain. In a world of banal and opinionated soundbites, she regularly crushes Sean Hannity's ratings thanks to her deeply researched reports. And in our highly polarized world, Maddow amiably engages the staunchest conservatives, while never hesitating to expose their light-on-facts defenses.