Benita Eisler

"Drawing on many revealing and sometimes colorful court cases of the past two centuries, Private Lives offers a lively short history of the complexities of family law and family life - including the tensions between the laws on the books and contemporary arrangements for marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing."--Jacket.

"At twenty-one, Chopin fled Russian-occupied Poland for exile in France. He would never see his native country again. With only two public concerts in as many years, he became a star of Parisian society and a legendary performer at its salons, revered by his great contemporaries Schumann, Liszt, and the painter Eugene Delacroix. Blessed with genius, success, and the love of Europe's most famous - and infamous - woman novelist, George Sand, Chopin's years of triumph ended with his expulsion from paradise: less than two decades after his conquest of Paris, the composer lay destitute and dying in the arms of Sand's estranged daughter, Solange. Chopin's Funeral is the story of this fatal fall from grace, of an Oedipal tragedy unfolding, and of illness and loss redeemed by the radical breakthrough of the composer's last style."--BOOK JACKET.

A biography of Lord Byron, the 19th century poet, concentrating on his romantic life. The book describes his amours with both men and women, including incest with his half-sister. The author analyzes the extent to which the love affairs influenced his writing.

Provides a look at the artistic collaboration and romance between artist-painter Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer, art patron, and mentor Alfred Stieglitz.

Brian O'Bunion, hated or ignored at home and school, feels like disappearing until his classmates actually do, and Brian uncovers the trail of a strange thug bent on revenge.

George Catlin has been called the "first artist of the West," as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a "vanishing race" before their "extermination"--his word. In the first six years of the 1830s, he created over six hundred portraits--unforgettable likenesses of individual chiefs, warriors, braves, squaws, and children belonging to more than thirty tribes living along the upper Missouri River. Political forces thwarted Catlin's ambition to sell what he called his "Indian Gallery" as a national collection, and in 1840 the artist began three decades of self-imposed exile abroad. For a time, he was the most celebrated American expatriate in London and Paris. But when he started to tour "live" troupes of Ojibwa and Iowa, his fortunes declined: he changed from artist to showman, and from advocate to exploiter. Tragedy and loss engulfed them. This humane portrait brings Catlin and his Indian subjects to life for our own time.--From publisher description.