Classic Biography

Christina Rice offers the first biography of the actress and activist perhaps most well-known for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Despite the fact that her movie career was stalled for nearly a decade, Jane Russell's filmography is respectable. She worked with some of Hollywood's most talented directors—including Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Josef von Sternberg—and held her own alongside costars such as Marilyn Monroe, Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Vincent Price, and Bob Hope.

What elevates teaching my mother how to give birth, what gives the poems their disturbing brilliance, is Warsan Shire's ability to give simple, beautiful eloquence to the veiled world where sensuality lives in the dominant narrative of Islam; reclaiming the more nuanced truths of earlier times -...

Hector Berlioz was one of the most significant artistic figures of the 19th century. Intended for medicine, he turned instead to music and became one of its most original composers. His first major work, the semi-autobiographical Symphonie Fantastique, revolutionised the sound of the orchestra and its use in storytelling. Unhappy with the quality of performance of his works, he took up the baton himself and became a great conductor, celebrated across Europe and in Russia.

Maureen O'Hara is the first book-length biography of the screen legend hailed as the "Queen of Technicolor". Following the star from her childhood in Dublin to the height of fame in Hollywood, film critic Aubrey Malone draws on new information from the Irish Film Institute, production notes from films, and details from historical film journals, newspapers, and fan magazines.

In Ted W. Lawson’s classic Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Lawson gives a vivid eyewitness account of the unorthodox assignment that 85 intrepid volunteer airmen - the “Tokyo Raiders” - under the command of celebrated flier James H. Doolittle executed in April 1942. The plan called for 16 B-25 twin-engine medium bombers of the Army Air Corps to take off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, bomb industrial targets in Japan, and land at airfields in China.

A father kills his three young children and his wife and impersonates a disgraced journalist. Oregon's most famous murderer explains how her jail breaks show she's ready for parole.

Around 2500 years ago a thirty-five-year-old man named Siddhartha had a mystical insight under a peepul tree in north-eastern India, in a place now revered as Bodhgaya. Today, more than 300 million people across the globe consider themselves beneficiaries of Gautama Buddha’s insight, and...

Following Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Bondage and My Freedom, this third memoir by the iconic abolitionist expands on Douglass’s time in bondage, his escape, and his reinvention as an influential statesman—providing many details that, in earlier years, would have endangered himself and others. It also offers a fascinating window into Douglass’s political activism and his connections to major American figures of the mid-nineteenth century, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and three different US presidents.

Whenever the subject of Lincoln is brought up, it usually produces a mixed response ranging from adoration to excoriation. Back in 1931 when Lincoln the Man appeared, there were few willing to publicly judge Lincoln on the basis of anything less than hagiographic platitudes. That all changed when the famous poet and writer Edgar Lee Masters published Lincoln the Man. This book is less a biography and more of an analysis of Lincoln’s thinking process and political evolution from backwoods lawyer to president of the United States.

Jeff Corey (1914-2002) made a name for himself in the 1940s as a character actor in films like The Killers (1946). Everything changed in 1951, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Corey refused to name names and was promptly blacklisted, which forced him to walk away from a vibrant livelihood as an actor and embark on a career as one of the industry's most revered acting instructors. In Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act, Corey recounts his extraordinary story.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world...

Much like The Stories Behind The Best-Loved Songs Of Christmas, The Stories Behind The Great Traditions of Christmas and More Stories Behind The Best Loved Songs of Christmas this new Collins Christmas book will fill a void in the book world. With a look at these secular classics, people who...

In August 1982, a 30-year-old woman, Jane Goodwin, was found murdered in her Newark, New Jersey apartment. Her killer had strangled Jane until she passed out. Then, reportedly, he ripped open her blouse, posed her with her breasts exposed, and repeatedly stabbed Jane in the chest. He left no fingerprints or DNA-just a shattered, grieving family. Over the next 19 years, three other women were attacked in a similar fashion. Police eventually caught their assailant, Edwin “Ned” Snelgrove, a promising college grad with an uncontrollable desire to hurt women.

Welcome to New York, Notorious USA! The Empire State has witnessed many unique and perverse crimes. Quite a few triggered international headlines. This is where the phrase "serial killer" was born - for good reason! From genius killers to violent child molesters, New York has it all. We also find the demented assassinations of Stanford White and John Lennon, the strange case that inspired Edgar Allen Poe, murders that enthralled filmmakers, scandalous crimes that altered journalism, and even a murderous writer.

This fascinating account was written as the events of Lincoln's assassination unfolded, and contains insight into the chaos that surrounded it. Included are interesting details of Booth and his motives, the manhunt, as well as the speedy trial and execution of the conspirators, including the first ever woman executed by the federal government, Mary Surratt.

The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author - a woman very much ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos. Nancy Spain was one of the most celebrated - and notorious - writers and broadcasters of the '40s, '50s and '60s. Hilarious, controversial and brilliant, she lived openly as a lesbian (sharing a household with her two lovers and their various children) and was frequently litigated against for her newspaper columns - Evelyn Waugh successfully sued her for libel...twice.

A heartwarming Christian Christmas picture book for kids to celebrate unity, kindness, and the miracle of the Nativity. On a peaceful night in Bethlehem, a stable full of animals is about to witness a miracle. But can they put aside their differences in time to welcome a very special guest? The...

Bishop Jordan has produced a stellar work that is guaranteed to free the mentally enslaved, acquit the wrongfully charged, and bring healing to the sick. The Laws of Thinking is not a work for the shallow-minded person. It is demanding and challenging. It is neither intended to be used as the...

A boy with a rifle walks into a middle school, intent on carrying out Western-style vigilante justice. A wife and mother of four kisses her twelve-year-old student and forever changes our definition of student-teacher conferences. The world's most famous serial killers put Washington on the map. A bathtub, a handgun, a meat grinder, and a burn barrel play a role in the murder of the captain of a freighter.

Told in the unmistakable voice of America’s immortal storyteller, this chronicle of a vanishing past is a tale of two journeys. The first is that of Samuel Clemens, young antebellum-era steamboat pilot who navigates wide-eyed passengers on the Mississippi. And the second tells of a reflective Mark Twain. He’d return, years later, to observe the inevitable and dismaying post-Civil War developments along the currents of the ever-changing Great River.