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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • The definitive portrait of the Gilded Age icon J. Pierpont Morgan, presenting his tumultuous life both in and out of the public eye, from the award-winning author of Alice James and Family Romance “Magnificent . . . the fullest and most revealing look at this remarkable, complex man that we are likely to get.”—The Wall Street Journal “It is hard to imagine a biographer coming any closer to perfection.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch History has remembered him as a complex and contradictory figure, part robber baron and part patron saint. J. Pierpont Morgan earned his reputation as “the Napoleon of Wall Street...
A century ago, J. Pierpont Morgan bestrode the financial world like a colossus. The organizing force behind General Electric, U.S. Steel, and vast railroad empires, he served for decades as America's unofficial central banker: a few months after he died in 1913, the Federal Reserve replaced the private system he had devised. An early supporter of Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, the confidant (and rival) of Theodore Roosevelt, England's Edward VII, and Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, and the companion of several fascinating women, Morgan shaped his world and ours in countless ways. Yet since his death he has remained a mysterious figure, celebrated as a hero of industrial progress and vilified a...
The Jameses are perhaps the most extraordinary and distinguished family in American intellectual life. Henry’s novels, celebrated as among the finest in the language, and William’s groundbreaking philosophical and psychological works, have won these brothers a permanent place at the center of the nation’s cultural firmament. Less well known is their enigmatic younger sister, Alice. As Jean Stouse’s generous, probing, and deeply imaginative biography shows, however, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right. Tortured throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention from achieving the worldly success she so desired...
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A glittering account of John Singer Sargent's relationship with an eminent Edwardian family. In Family Romance, Jean Strouse tells the story of John Singer Sargent and his relationship with the Wertheimer family, structured around the twelve portraits he painted of them between 1898 and 1908. Asher Wertheimer was a London art dealer of German-Jewish descent. A prominent figure of the Edwardian age, he was at ease among Rothschilds, royals, journalists and aristocrats. In commissioning Sargent to paint a series of portraits of his family, he became the American expatriate artist's most important patron, as well as a close personal friend.Recreating the world of turn-of-the-century London, Strouse gives a dramatic account of these extraordinary lives, a tale that encompasses intrigue, tragedy and resounding success. At the same time she traces the decline of the British aristocracy and the rise of new power and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic, a transformation that Sargent captured brilliantly in his art.
"As the first agent to publicly betray the CIA, Philip Agee was on the run for over forty years--a pariah akin to Edward Snowden. Agee revealed in spectacular detail what many had feared about the CIA's actions, but he also outed and endangered hundreds of agents. Agee relentlessly opposed the CIA and the regimes it backed, whether in America or around the world. In Jonathan Stevenson's words, Agee became "one of history's successful viruses: undeniably effective and impossible to kill." In this first biography of Agee, Stevenson will reveal what made Agee tick, and what made him run"--
The old masters' new masters -- Was modernism Jewish? -- In the middle -- To have and have not.
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the...
A Nobel Prize–winning cancer biologist, leader of major scientific institutions, and scientific adviser to President Obama reflects on his remarkable career. A PhD candidate in English literature at Harvard University, Harold Varmus discovered he was drawn instead to medicine and eventually found himself at the forefront of cancer research at the University of California, San Francisco. In this “timely memoir of a remarkable career” (American Scientist), Varmus considers a life’s work that thus far includes not only the groundbreaking research that won him a Nobel Prize but also six years as the director of the National Institutes of Health; his current position as the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; and his important, continuing work as scientific adviser to President Obama. From this truly unique perspective, Varmus shares his experiences from the trenches of politicized battlegrounds ranging from budget fights to stem cell research, global health to science publishing.
"Music journalist Moss debuts with [a] ... deep-dive into the careers of ... country music stars who 'opened up a window to a musical world where women are in charge.' Offering a ... cultural history of country music over the last 25 years, Moss traces how it went from being a space where singers like LeAnn Rimes and the (formerly Dixie Chicks) reigned supreme in the late '90s, to becoming a rigged system hell-bent on silencing its women"--Provided by publisher.