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Biography / Autobiography

Vicious: Too Fast to Live: The Definitive Biography (New Revised)

Vicious: Too Fast to Live: The Definitive Biography (New Revised)

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This work explodes the public image of punk legend Sid Vicious. Written with the full co-operation of his late mother, it charts Sid's story from his childhood to his final fix in New York. It details his life before, during and after the Sex Pistols.
Victoria

Victoria

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PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography (2015 LONGLIST)
-[A] shimmering and rather wonderful biography.---The Guardian (UK)

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, she had ruled for nearly sixty-four years. She was a mother of nine and grandmother of forty-two and the matriarch of royal Europe through her children's marriages. To many, Queen Victoria is a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique, an aging, stiff widow paraded as the figurehead to an all-male imperial enterprise. But in truth, Britain's longest-reigning monarch was one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous and unconventional women who ever lived, and the story of her life continues to fascinate.
A. N. Wilson's exhaustively researched and definitive biography includes a wealth of new material from previously unseen sources to show us Queen Victoria as she's never been seen before. Wilson explores the curious set of circumstances that led to Victoria's coronation, her strange and isolated childhood, her passionate marriage to Prince Albert and his pivotal influence even after death and her widowhood and subsequent intimate friendship with her Highland servant John Brown, all set against the backdrop of this momentous epoch in Britain's history--and the world's.
Born at the very moment of the expansion of British political and commercial power across the globe, Victoria went on to chart a unique course for her country even as she became the matriarch of nearly every great dynasty of Europe. Her destiny was thus interwoven with those of millions of people--not just in Europe but in the ever-expanding empire that Britain was becoming throughout the nineteenth century. The famed queen had a face that adorned postage stamps, banners, statues and busts all over the known world.
Wilson's Victoria is a towering achievement, a masterpiece of biography by a writer at the height of his powers.
*VICTORIA, an eight part miniseries about Queen Victoria is coming to PBS in the Downton Abbey slot, premieringJanuary 8th (trailer). The series stars Jenna Coleman (DR. WHO) as Queen Victoria, Rufus Sewell (PILLARS OF THE EARTH), and Tom Hughes (ABOUT TIME).*
Financial Times
-What to call [A. N. Wilson] now? -Eminent Victorianist- seems appropriate. Lytton Strachey, the acerbic author of Eminent Victorians as well as a biography of Victoria far less good than this, is never far away when Wilson writes about a period that, in several books, he has made very much his own... Wilson is an excellent history teacher. He orders and narrates the hugely complex socio-political events and party infighting of the 19th century with a rare clarity... Wilson sums up his feelings about Victoria in a single word: -Awe-. His own achievement, sustained by a lifetime's scholarly fascination with the Victorian era, is also, in its way, awesome.-
The Spectator (UK):
-Superb...The book that [Wilson] was born to write...Wilson clearly loves and admires his subject, but this is a critical biography--funny, insightful, original, and authoritative. At last Victoria has been rescued from her widow's weeds.-
Kirkus Reviews (starred):
-A shimmering portrait of a tempestuous monarch...[Wilson] lends a lively expertise to his portrayal of the forthright, formidable, still-enigmatic sovereign...During her long reign, Victoria had come to embody the experience of an entire age, overseeing great reform and the strengthening of ties between India and the British Empire. A robust, immensely entertaining portrait from a master biographer.-
Victoria & Abdul Movie Tie-in

Victoria & Abdul Movie Tie-in

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Now a Major Motion Picture starring Dame Judi Dench from director Stephen Frears.

History's most unlikely friendship--this is the astonishing story of Queen Victoria and her dearest companion, the young Indian Munshi Abdul Karim.

In the twilight years of her reign, after the devastating deaths of her two great loves--Prince Albert and John Brown--Queen Victoria meets tall and handsome Abdul Karim, a humble servant from Agra waiting tables at her Golden Jubilee. The two form an unlikely bond and within a year Abdul becomes a powerful figure at court, the Queen's teacher, her counsel on Urdu and Indian affairs, and a friend close to her heart. This marked the beginning of the most scandalous decade in Queen Victoria's long reign. As the royal household roiled with resentment, Victoria and Abdul's devotion grew in defiance. Drawn from secrets closely guarded for more than a century, Victoria & Abdul is an extraordinary and intimate history of the last years of the nineteenth-century English court and an unforgettable view onto the passions of an aging Queen.

Victoria The Queen

Victoria The Queen

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The true story for fans of the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria, this page-turning biography reveals the real woman behind the myth: a bold, glamorous, unbreakable queen--a Victoria for our times. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, this stunning portrait is a story of love and heartbreak, of devotion and grief, of strength and resilience.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
THE NEW YORK TIMES - ESQUIRE - THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

"Victoria the Queen, Julia Baird's exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch."--The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

When Victoria was born, in 1819, the world was a very different place. Revolution would threaten many of Europe's monarchies in the coming decades. In Britain, a generation of royals had indulged their whims at the public's expense, and republican sentiment was growing. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the landscape, and the British Empire was commanding ever larger tracts of the globe. In a world where women were often powerless, during a century roiling with change, Victoria went on to rule the most powerful country on earth with a decisive hand.

Fifth in line to the throne at the time of her birth, Victoria was an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary role. As a girl, she defied her mother's meddling and an adviser's bullying, forging an iron will of her own. As a teenage queen, she eagerly grasped the crown and relished the freedom it brought her. At twenty, she fell passionately in love with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, eventually giving birth to nine children. She loved sex and delighted in power. She was outspoken with her ministers, overstepping conventional boundaries and asserting her opinions. After the death of her adored Albert, she began a controversial, intimate relationship with her servant John Brown. She survived eight assassination attempts over the course of her lifetime. And as science, technology, and democracy were dramatically reshaping the world, Victoria was a symbol of steadfastness and security--queen of a quarter of the world's population at the height of the British Empire's reach.

Drawing on sources that include fresh revelations about Victoria's relationship with John Brown, Julia Baird brings vividly to life the fascinating story of a woman who struggled with so many of the things we do today: balancing work and family, raising children, navigating marital strife, losing parents, combating anxiety and self-doubt, finding an identity, searching for meaning.

Video Slut

Video Slut

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When video killed the radio star, Sharon Oreck was calling the shots.

Video Slut takes an irreverent look behind the scenes of the music-video industry during its eighties heyday. Oreck, one of the top producers of all time, bluffed her way into the business with no experience whatsoever and went on to produce more than six hundred video shoots with Madonna, Sting, Mick Jagger, Prince, and several members of the increasingly unstable Jackson family--not to mention a cadre of delinquent caterers, deranged interns, self-absorbed record executives, and malfeasant animal trainers.

Oreck also shares the at turns hilarious, biting, and poignant story of her origins as a single teen mother, disowned by her middle-class parents, and of her journey from welfare to kung fu movie sets to film school. She approaches her own delinquency and that of the superstars she encountered with humor and candor. The result is an acerbic but sympathetic account of the outrageous effects of fame, power, and money on people in the entertainment business. No one is spared, especially herself.

Vietnamerica

Vietnamerica

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A superb new graphic memoir in which an inspired artist/storyteller reveals the road that brought his family to where they are today: Vietnamerica

GB Tran is a young Vietnamese American artist who grew up distant from (and largely indifferent to) his family's history. Born and raised in South Carolina as a son of immigrants, he knew that his parents had fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. But even as they struggled to adapt to life in America, they preferred to forget the past--and to focus on their children's future. It was only in his late twenties that GB began to learn their extraordinary story. When his last surviving grandparents die within months of each other, GB visits Vietnam for the first time and begins to learn the tragic history of his family, and of the homeland they left behind.

In this family saga played out in the shadow of history, GB uncovers the root of his father's remoteness and why his mother had remained in an often fractious marriage; why his grandfather had abandoned his own family to fight for the Viet Cong; why his grandmother had had an affair with a French soldier. GB learns that his parents had taken harrowing flight from Saigon during the final hours of the war not because they thought America was better but because they were afraid of what would happen if they stayed. They entered America--a foreign land they couldn't even imagine--where family connections dissolved and shared history was lost within a span of a single generation.

In telling his family's story, GB finds his own place in this saga of hardship and heroism. Vietnamerica is a visually stunning portrait of survival, escape, and reinvention--and of the gift of the American immigrants' dream, passed on to their children. Vietnamerica is an unforgettable story of family revelation and reconnection--and a new graphic-memoir classic.

Viktor Frankl Recollections: An Autobiography (Revised)

Viktor Frankl Recollections: An Autobiography (Revised)

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Born in 1905 in the center of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, Viktor Frankl was a witness to the great political, philosophical, and scientific upheavals of the twentieth century. In these stirring recollections, Frankl describes how as a young doctor of neurology in prewar Vienna his disagreements with Freud and Adler led to the development of the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, known as logotherapy; recounts his harrowing trials in four concentration camps during the War; and reflects on the celebrity brought by the publication of Man's Search for Meaning in 1945.
Village of the Small Houses

Village of the Small Houses

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In 1959, just one step ahead of the law, Ian Ferguson's parents left the sophisticated big-city life of Edmonton for Fort Vermilion - once a fur-trapping frontier town, now a remote aboriginal settlement in northernmost Alberta. There, Ian and his six brothers and sisters grew up without indoor plumbing, electricity, central heating, or even a radio. Beginning with the dramatic events surrounding his birth (including a paddlewheel ferry heading for destruction, a legendary rowboat trip, and a life-and-death race against time), the richly recalled events of Ferguson's life and a vivid array of characters make for a taut and appealingly idiosyncratic tale.
Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography

Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography

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"Price emerges as one of his most complex characters in this entertaining and touching biography," observed The New York Times of Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography. In this candid and heartfelt biography, Victoria Price traces her father's 65-year career from his radio days to his movie, Broadway, and television performances. A thorough and uniquely intimate look at the life of a legendary actor, the book also recaptures Price's many other roles, which included art historian, gourmet chef, and loving father.
Since his death in 1993, Price's stature as a Hollywood icon has grown. Famed for his participation in such unforgettable horror films as House of Wax and The Fly, he also appeared in classic movies such as Laura and The Song of Bernadette as well as a variety of TV shows, from Batman and The Muppet Show to Mystery! His passion for art and enthusiasm for sharing his collections helped popularize the visual arts in the United States, and his zest for good food shines through in his bestselling cookbooks. This fascinating biography portrays a true Renaissance man whose larger-than-life presence filled his child's life with wonder. Bonus features include a never-before-published essay by Price, a Foreword by director Roger Corman, and 32 pages of black-and-white photographs.
Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography

Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography

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Originally published by St. Martin's Press in 1999.
Vincents Books

Vincents Books

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"Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me."

One of the most famous artists in history, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was also a man with another powerful passion--for books. An insatiable reader, Van Gogh spent his life hungrily consuming as many books as he could. He read, reread, and copied out books in Dutch, English, and French. He knew many passages by heart from works by Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, and Maupassant, among many others. As he wrote to his brother, Theo, in one of their hundreds of letters: "I have a more or less irresistible passion for books."

In Vincent's Books, Mariella Guzzoni explores Van Gogh's life as a voracious bookworm, noting what he read, what he wrote about, and how his love of reading influenced his art. She walks us through his life, chapter by chapter: from the religious aspirations of his early adulthood, to his decision to be a painter, to the end of his tragically short life. He moved from Holland to Paris to Provence; at each moment, ideas he encountered in books defined and guided his thoughts and his worldview. Van Gogh wrote with eloquence and insight about what he was reading in his letters to Theo, referring to at least two hundred authors. Books and readers are frequent subjects of his paintings, and Guzzoni highlights over one hundred of these works, such as Still Life with Bible in the Van Gogh Museum and his vivid paintings of l'Arlesienne.

A gorgeously illustrated biography that will appeal to any booklover, Vincent's Books takes us on a fresh, fascinating journey through the pages of a beloved artist's life.

Explore Van Gogh's musings on his favorite writers, including
Thomas à Kempis, Charles Blanc, Honoré de Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Erckmann-Chatrian, Homer, Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, Jules Michelet, William Shakespeare, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Émile Zola

Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor

Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor

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She was able, through clever maneuvering and dogged determination, to achieve a commission from the Congress for a life-sized statue of the assassinated president--this despite the very real animus against women artists at that time, which is apparent in the heated arguments against granting her the Lincoln commission--arguments spearheaded in the Senate by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.

Steeped in the history of her time, Vinnie Ream was involved with dozens of senators and congressmen and other powerful men--not least of all Generals Sherman and Custer--and her studio on Capitol Hill became a legendary stopping place for many admirers and tourists. Her statue of Lincoln stands in the rotunda of the capitol building; her statue of Admiral Farragut stands in a Washington, D.C. park; other works are in Statuary Hall and various museums. This is an engaging biography of a spirited female artist, and an effective portrait of Washington, D.C. in the Civil War era.

Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor

Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor

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This is the remarkable story of a fascinating, talented, nineteenth-century American woman who was able, despite a lack of formal training, to build a successful, if controversial, career as a sculptor. When she was only seventeen years old, she succeeded in prevailing upon her friends in Congress to convince President Lincoln to sit for her and, after his assassination, these friends managed to have a bill passed granting her a contract for the completion of a statue of the late president. Vinnie Ream was not a feminist, but her story is the story of a woman's remarkable achievement in a world controlled by men, who used money to influence Congress. Vinnie Ream did not have money, but she did have talent, intelligence, beauty and great charm, and she used these qualities in every way she could. and events. She was in the midst of the controversy over Andrew Johnson's impeachment, and was accused of causing Senator Edmund Ross to cast the deciding vote for Johnson's acquittal. In this little-known slice of Americana, we learn about a woman who was ahead of her time in at least one respect: her tenacity in the pursuit of artistic achievement. It is a story which needs to be told.
Violet Hour

Violet Hour

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From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter--an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality.

In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of six great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called "the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea."

Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas's fatal collapse at the Chelsea Hotel. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak's beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look.

The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, "If it's nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?" By bringing these great writers' final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid.

Praise for The Violet Hour

"A beautiful book . . . The intensity of these passages--the depth of research, the acute sensitivity for declarative moments--is deeply beguiling."--The New York Times Book Review

"Profound, poetic and--yes--comforting."--People

"Unconventional, engaging . . . [The Violet Hour] is at once scholarly, literary, juicy--and unabashedly personal."--Los Angeles Times

"Enveloping . . . I read it in bed, at the kitchen table, while walking down the street. . . . 'What normal person wants to blunder into this hushed and sacred space?' she asks. But the answer is all of us, and Ms. Roiphe does it with grace."--Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

"A beautiful and provocative meditation on mortality."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A tender yet penetrating look at the final days . . . Roiphe has always seemed to me a writer to envy. No matter what the occasion, she can be counted on to marry ferocity and erudition in ways that nearly always make her interesting."--The Wall Street Journal

"Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant vigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper. . . . She knows that true criticism does not bother with the mollification of delicate sensibilities, only with the intellect as it roils and rollicks through language."--William Giraldi, The New Republic

Viper Pilot

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Action-packed and breathtakingly authentic, Viper Pilot is the electrifying memoir of one of the most decorated F-16 pilots in American history: U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hampton, who served for twenty years, flying missions in the Iraq War, the Kosovo conflict, and the first Gulf War.

Both a rare look into the elite world of fighter pilots and a thrilling first-person account of contemporary air combat, Viper Pilot soars--a true story of courage, skill, and commitment that will thrill U.S. Special Forces buffs, aviation and military history aficionados, and fans of the novels of Tom Clancy and Dale Brown.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

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An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her.

How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies--of strength, style, and creativity--shaped Woolf's path to the radical writing that inspires so many today.

Gill casts back to Woolf's French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L'Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf's aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer. Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf. Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in. Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group. This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men--united in their love for one another and their disregard for women--into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

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A biography wholly worthy of the brilliant woman it chronicles. . . . It rediscovers Virginia Woolf afresh. --The Philadelphia Inquirer

While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives, producing a richly layered portrait of the writer and the woman that leaves all of her complexities and contradictions intact. Such issues as sexual abuse, mental illness, and suicide are brought into balance with the immensity of her literary achievement, her heroic commitment to her work, her generosity and wit, and her sanity and strength.

It is not often that biography offers the satisfactions of great fiction--but this is clearly what Hermione Lee has achieved. Accessible, intelligent, and deeply pleasurable to read, her Virginia Woolf will undoubtedly take its place as the standard biography for years to come.

One of the most impressive biographies of the decade: moving, eloquent, powerful as both literary and social history.
--Financial Times

The most distinguished study of Woolf yet. --The New Republic

Virginia Woolf in Richmond

Virginia Woolf in Richmond

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NEW EDITION IN PAPERBACK to coincide with a new project to unveil a statue of the author in Richmond on Thames in 2022

"I ought to be grateful to Richmond & Hogarth, and indeed, whether it's my invincible optimism or not, I am grateful." - Virginia Woolf

Although more commonly associated with Bloomsbury, Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf lived in Richmond-upon-Thames for ten years from the time of the First World War (1914-1924). Refuting the common misconception that she disliked the town, this book explores her daily habits as well as her intimate thoughts while living at the pretty house she came to love - Hogarth House.

Drawing on information from her many letters and diaries, as well as Leonard's autobiography, the editor reveals how Richmond's relaxed way of life came to influence the writer, from her experimentation as a novelist to her work with her husband and the Hogarth Press, from her relationships with her servants to her many famous visitors.