Biographies & Memoirs

Benjamin Spock may have had a greater effect on the everyday lives of more people than any other living American. His
personal life, however, was shaken by failure and tragedy. Thomas Maier's extensive interviews with Spock, his family, and
others who knew him provide the first complete picture of this complicated man. Two photo inserts.

Angela's Ashes : A Memoir

Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes.
"Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Welcome, then, to the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

James Salter wings it in his long-awaited memoir, Burning the
Days.As more and more reminiscences spill down the literary chute, it's clear that the Age of the Memoir has not yet abated. The harvest has been a mixed one, of course. For every Frank McCourt or Mary Karr or Tobias Wolff, there seem to be a dozen score-settling memoirists on tap, many of them less interested in understanding the past than sinking a hatchet into it (Adele Mailer's recent plunge into pathography comes to mind). Now, however, another major contribution to the genre has appeared--James Salter's Burning the Days.

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He was born before the Civil War, but Linda Simon's lively biography Genuine Reality depicts William James (1842-1910) as a decidedly contemporary thinker. A pioneering psychologist and unorthodox philosopher, he rejected rigid systems in favor of a flexible, relativist approach that stressed the fluid nature of identity and physical reality. His students at Harvard (Gertrude Stein, for one) found this immensely liberating, as did James himself. One of the book's many virtues is Simon's sensitive
analysis of how his ideas rescued him from years of spiritual confusion and the smothering embrace of a neurotic family.

The Man Who Listens to Horses is a riveting and inspirational story, easy to read and hard to put down.... Monty Roberts will soften you up, get you chewing and listening to his insights into equine behavior and make you marvel at the success of his spiritual quest.

The 100 : A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History

A list of the one hundred most influential people in history features descriptions of the careers, contributions, and accomplishments of the political and religious leaders, inventors, writers, artists, and others who changed the course of history.