JUVENILE · BIOGRAPHY
Mike Venezia
Christian Mate Pulisic (born September 18, 1998) is an American professional soccer player who plays as a winger, attacking midfielder and forward for Serie A club AC Milan and the United States national team. Regarded as one of the best North American players, he is nicknamed "Captain America." Pulisic is known for his dribbling, directness, and playmaking. Born and raised in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Pulisic began his professional career at Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund, where he progressed quickly through the team's youth academy, featuring in only 15 youth games. After being promoted to the senior team in January 2016 at age 17, he became the then-youngest player to score multiple goals in Bundesliga history. His involvement began increasing dramatically in the following 2016–17 season, where he was a mainstay in the Dortmund team that won the DFB-Pokal.
Edgar Degas was born in Paris, France, in 1834.
— from Edgar Degas (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists)
Most acclaimed
John Adams
In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second president of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as "out of his senses"; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the most moving love stories in American history. This is history on a grand scale -- a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived. - Publisher.
Paul Klee
Swiss-born artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) created some of the most innovative and best-loved works of the twentieth century. He combined the machine aesthetic of modernism with lyrical, organic elements, arriving at a visual language entirely his own. Although he moved freely between media and from figuration to abstraction, Klee's works remain instantly recognisable, often characterised by a playfulness and wit that can sharpen to biting satire on occasion. This book surveys Klee's entire career, particularly his role as recordkeeper of his work and the way this influenced the way his work was then exhibited. Featuring his best-known paintings reproduced in their full colourful complexity, the book focuses on Klee's major exhibitions during his lifetime. placing his output in the context of the period in which he lived, revealing an anxious artist who, despite his quirky lyricism, was troubled by the challenges of the modern world.
The Wright brothers
On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did? Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. The house they lived in had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but there were books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father, and they never stopped reading. When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education, little money and no contacts in high places, never stopped them in their mission to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off in one of their contrivances, they risked being killed. Historian David McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers' story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them.