A Touchstone book

"Selection of the spoken words of Charles Darrow" includes lectures, a eulogy for Governor John Peter Altgeld, partial transcript of the Scopes "monkey trial," highlights of his summation in the Leopold and Loeb case, excerpts from other closing arguments.

"This landmark collection, brimming with his signature wit and incomparable sensibility, is Larry McMurtry's classic tribute to his home and his people. Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation's perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father's ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the "dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life." "The gold standard for understanding Houston's brash rootlessness and civic insecurities" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan."--Provided by publisher.

Expanded version of The Mansions of Philosophy

“Gypsies have always fascinated outsiders, but what has been written about them has usually been a mixture of romance and legend. For the Gypsies are a proud and secretive people, determined to live in their own way, deliberately turning away from the modern world - yet managing to live off it by their wits. Jan Yoors is the first person to write about them as an insider. His book is a sensitive and highly readable portrait of a mysterious people. He tells of their exultant celebrations, of their ancient customs and traditions - the Kris, when the elders sit in judgment on a member of tribe, the ritual curse, with its frightening power - of all the traditions that enshroud this fierce nomadic people which has taken our settled Western world as its hunting ground. He writes about the more practical side Gypsy life … the daring frontier crossings, the complex network of communications that binds one traveling kumpania to another across hundreds of miles, the yearly horse fairs, the in volved business deals in which Gypsy shrewdness is combined with all the apparatus of modern technology - the long-distance telephone, telegrams, post office boxes … The Gypsies is more than a book about a people; it is a loving tribute to the people Jan Yoors knew: to Pulika, the wise leader, to old Lyuba, the formidable matriarch, to Nanosh, who first befriended him, to Putzina, whose name he took, to Djidjo, whom he almost married.. . Mr. Yoors has succeeded in writing a vivid, personal and immensely beautiful book about this race of strangers in our midst.” BOOK JACKET

A collection of six television plays by this brilliant writer: Holiday Song, Printer's Measure, The Big Deal, Marty, The Mother, and The Bachelor Party. Includes an introduction and notes for each play by the author. [This is a hardback volume from Simon & Schuster; the identical content was later reprinted by Applause Books as The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Television Plays, a volume in its series The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky.]

Discusses the lives and work of Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keefe, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Sylvia Stone, and other American women artists.

Book Description: This classic history of Walt Disney's life and works takes us from his wandering youth through the desperate gamble of opening his own animation studio, his daring decision to crash Hollywood, the sudden and inspired invention of Mickey Mouse-and on to the creation of a multimillion-dollar international entertainment empire. Throughout Richard Schickel asks penetrating questions about Disney's achievements and shortcomings, and the enormous popularity of the "Disney version."

An instinctive and magnificent storyteller, Somerset Maugham was one of the most popular and successful writers of his time. He published seventy-eight books -- including the undisputed classics Of Human Bondage and The Razor's Edge -- which sold over 40 million copies in his lifetime. Born in Paris to sophisticated parents, Willie Maugham was orphaned at the age of ten and brought up in a small English coastal town by narrow-minded relatives. He was trained as a doctor, but never practiced medicine. His novel Ashenden, based on his own espionage for Britain in World War I, influenced writers from Eric Ambler to John le Carr?. After a failed affair with an actress, he married another man's mistress, but reserved his greatest love for a man who shared his life for nearly thirty years. He traveled the world and spoke several languages. Despite a debilitating stutter, and an acerbic and formal manner, he entertained literary celebrities and royalty at his villa in the south of France. He made a fortune from his writing--the short story "Rain" alone earned him a million dollars--yet true critical recognition, and the esteem of his literary peers, eluded him. The life of Somerset Maugham, as told by acclaimed biographer Jeffrey Meyers, is an intriguing, glamorous, complex, and extraordinary account of one of the twentieth century's most enduring writers.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A collection of biographies describing the lives and achievements of 29 mathematicians. Includes Zeno, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, and Leibniz.

"Seattle, 1933. Vera Ray kisses her three-year-old son, Daniel, good night and reluctantly leaves for work. She hates the night shift, but it's the only way she can earn enough to keep destitution at bay. In the morning--even though it's the second of May--a heavy snow is falling. Vera rushes to wake Daniel, but his bed is empty. His teddy bear lies outside in the snow. Seattle, present day. On the second of May, Seattle Herald reporter Claire Aldridge awakens to another late-season snowstorm. Assigned to cover this "blackberry winter" and its predecessor decades earlier, Claire learns of Daniel's unsolved abduction and vows to unearth the truth--only to discover that she and Vera are linked in unexpected ways"--

Stories and drawings by the longtime New Yorker humorist that celebrate man's best friend. Thurber's unpoetic dogs, with their expressive ears and baffled faces, surprise us with a vision of our sloppy selves.

American novelist Joan Didion's first volume of nonfiction essays, first published in 1968, consisting of twenty works that reflect the atmosphere in America during the 1960s, especially in California.

At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 people. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.

255 p. 25 cm

In A Separate Reality, Castaneda resumes his apprenticeship, determined to go deeper still into Don Juan's world of mystical sensation and perception, to learn to see beyond the surface realities of life, partly with the aid of drugs but finally and essentially through a supremely difficult and demanding effort of will.

Vivian Gornick's brave and deeply moving memoir is a tour de force, a book that dissects one of life's most complex, maddening and closely entwined alliances - the relationship between mother and daughter. Heralded as a landmark in American autobiography, Fierce Attachments probes the intimate, sometimes destructive family passions that can shape a woman's childhood - and change her life forever.

Edited and re-released by Fuller's grandson, Jamie Snyder, this edition is true to the original manuscript but adds helpful footnotes providing a modern context to some of the figures and predictions throughout the book.

Twenty-four book sequel to the Homeric poem that continues the story of Odysseus from his return to Greece to his death. written in 33,333 17-syllable lines and divided into 24 books.

A captivating blend of personal biography and public drama, The Wise Men introduces six close friends who shaped the role their country would play in the dangerous years following World War II. They were the original best and brightest, whose towering intellects, outsize personalities, and dramatic actions would bring order to the postwar chaos and leave a legacy that dominates American policy to this day: Averell Harriman, the freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt’s special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation’s most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Shows how the problems of transition reach down into the very depths of African society, into the souls of individuals creating conflict and loneliness in all.

Essays on growing up within the confines of a huge Army arsenal in Ohio, to reflections on mountain hikes, limestone quarries, and fathers teaching their sons vital lessons.

In a letter to her unborn child, a Hollywood screenwriter attempts to analyze and justify a broken romance which left her pregnant. By the author of Surrender the Pink.

"Carlos Castaneda's extraordinary journey into the world of sorcery ... he takes the reader into a sorceric experience so intense, so terrifying, and so profoundly disturbing that it can only be described as a brilliant assault on every preconceived notion of life that is don Juan's remarkable legacy to his apprentice"--Cover.

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 is a novel by Richard Brautigan first published in 1971 by Simon & Schuster. In subsequent printings the title is often shortened to simply The Abortion. he Abortion is a genre novel parody concerning the librarian of a very unusual California library which accepts books in any form and from anyone who wishes to drop one off at the library—children submit tales told in crayon about their toys; teenagers tell tales of angst and old people drop by with their memoirs—described as "the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing" in the novel.Summoned by a silver bell at all hours, submissions are catalogued at the librarian's discretion; not by the Dewey Decimal system, but by placement on whichever magically dust-free shelf would, in the author's judgment, serve best as the book's home.

Includes information of Steffens' works as a muckraker journalist and his visits with Mexican and Russian revolutionaries.

Explains the nature of economic forces and defines economic terms.

Confronting and solving problems is a painful process which most of us attempt to avoid. Avoiding resolution results in greater pain and an inability to grow both mentally and spiritually. Drawing heavily on his own professional experience, Dr M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist, suggests ways in which facing our difficulties - and suffering through the changes - can enable us to reach a higher level of self-understanding. He discusses the nature of loving relationships: how to distinguish dependency from love; how to become one's own person and how to be a more sensitive parent. This is a book that can show you how to embrace reality and yet achieve serenity and a richer existence. Hugely influential, it has now sold over ten million copies - and has changed many people's lives round the globe.

"Since it's publication five decades ago, William L. Shirer?s monumental study of Hitler?s empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of the twentieth century?s blackest hours. A worldwide bestseller with millions of copies in print, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. Here, in a thoughtful new introduction for the fiftieth anniversary of its National Book Award win, Ron Rosenbaum, author of the much-admired Explaining Hitler, takes a fresh and penetrating look at this vital and enduring classic and the role it continues to play in today?s discussions of the history of Nazi Germany"--The publisher.

The founder of logotherapy explores the uniqueness of man's humanness, attacks the pseudo-humanism in current psychoanalysis, and presents a case for reinvesting psychoanalysis with humanism while preserving the traditions of Freudian analysis and behaviorism.

The Inadvertent Epic is based on a five part radio broadcast of the 1978 Massey Lectures which were aired in October of that year as part of CBC's IDEAS series. "I want to discuss the treatment of what seems to me now to be a kind of communal or co-operative prose epic, dealing with the war between the States, Reconstruction, and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as certain ethnic and sexual conflicts in America which helped motivate those political events and were in turn exacerbated by them."

Professor Tillich analyzes the development of Christian theology.

Fly on the wall reporting of one year at 20th Century Fox. Great discussion of the making and marketing of big movies in 1960s Hollywood. Dunne is a breezy writer, making sabre cuts with a light touch.

"Although this biography of Mark Twain begins when Twain is 31... the book is a full account of Twain, his life and his work related both to his early years and to the 'Gilded Age' of his mature life."

For the last two centuries "Vom Kriege" has been used to justify two different kinds of totalitarianisms: Marxism-Leninism and Nazism. However, during the 1950s liberal thinking also made use of that work. In line with liberal thinking, Raymond Aron's Penser la Guerre, Clausewitz presents Clausewitz's work as moderate and liberal and underplays its totalitarian connections.

In this classic book, the distinguished science writer Horace Freeland Judson tells the story of the birth and early development of molecular biology in the US, the UK, and France. The fascinating story of the golden period from the revelation of the double helix of DNA to the cracking of the genetic code and first glimpses of gene regulation is told largely in the words of the main players, all of whom Judson interviewed extensively. The result is a book widely regarded as the best history of recent biological science yet published.

A unique anthology of short prose fiction by distinguished poets of our time.

Freedom and Death is Kazantzakis's modern Iliad. The context is Crete in the late nineteenth century, the epic struggle between Greeks and Turks, between Chrisianity and Islam. A new uprising takes place to rival those of 1854, 1866 and 1878, and the island is thrown into confusion yet again. In the village of Megalokastro a Cretan resistance fighter, Captain Michales, is matched by the Turkish bey, his blood-brother. The life of the local community continues shakily, but is disrupted by explosions of violence.

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis was the perfect choice. He endured incredible hardships and saw incredible sights, including vast herds of buffalo and Indian tribes that had had no previous contact with white men. He and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a colorful and realistic backdrop for the expedition. Lewis saw the North American continent before any other white man; Ambrose describes in detail native peoples, weather, landscape, science, everything the expedition encountered along the way, through Lewis's eyes. Lewis is supported by a rich variety of colorful characters, first of all Jefferson himself, whose interest in exploring and acquiring the American West went back thirty years. Next comes Clark, a rugged frontiersman whose love for Lewis matched Jefferson's. There are numerous Indian chiefs, and Sacagawea, the Indian girl who accompanied the expedition, along with the French-Indian hunter Drouillard, the great naturalists of Philadelphia, the French and Spanish fur traders of St. Louis, John Quincy Adams, and many more leading political, scientific, and military figures of the turn of the century. This is a book about a hero. This is a book about national unity. But it is also a tragedy. When Lewis returned to Washington in the fall of 1806, he was a national hero. But for Lewis, the expedition was a failure. Jefferson had hoped to find an all-water route to the Pacific with a short hop over the Rockies - Lewis discovered there was no such passage. Jefferson hoped the Louisiana Purchase would provide endless land to support farming - but Lewis discovered that the Great Plains were too dry. Jefferson hoped there was a river flowing from Canada into the Missouri - but Lewis reported there was no such river, and thus no U.S. claim to the Canadian prairie. Lewis discovered the Plains Indians were hostile and would block settlement and trade up the Missouri. Lewis took to drink, engaged in land speculation, piled up debts he could not pay, made jealous political enemies, and suffered severe depression. . High adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy combine with high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel.

This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes is a 1980 collection of essays about logic, paradoxes, and philosophy. From at Wikipedia

Covering the crucial period of Gandhi's political activity from the Dandi Salt March in 1930 to the end of the second Round Table Conference in London in 1931, William L Shirer records his impressions, conversations and memoirs of MK Gandhi as a person and a shrewd politician in the showdown between British imperialism and Indian nationalism. He also highlights Gandhi's naivete in other aspects of international relations as well his flaws as a human being. Although not intended as a biography, it draws a picture of Gandhi's life from 1930 till his death in 1948. On the whole, a moving memoir, if at times slightly inclined to hero-worship.

Examines the current sad state of our national political life ; shows why the choices offered by both liberals and conservatives are false choices, choices that have no connection to most Americans' truest values and concerns.

Assembling the latest evidence from the fields of sociology, criminology, economics, medicine, biology, and psychology and exploring the effects of such factors as gender, age, race, and family, two eminent social scientists frame a groundbreaking theory of criminal behavior.

Danny Deck is on the verge of success as an author, when he flees Houston and hurtles unexpectedly into the hearts of three women: a girlfriend who makes him happy but who won't stay; a neighbour as generous as she is lusty; and his pal, Emma Horton. Ranging from Texas to California on a young writer's journey in a car he calls El Chevy, Danny embarks on a wild ride towards literary fame and an uncharted border country.

Discusses the many roles of women and the choices open to them. Includes detailed treatment of feminine hygiene.