Classic Biography

The following audio is from a television interview from the early 1970s.

"Talk to the hand, ’cause the face ain’t listening," the saying goes. When did the world stop wanting to hear? When did society become so thoughtless? It’s a topic that has been simmering for years, and Lynne Truss says it’s now reached the boiling point. Taking on the boorish behavior...

A hilarious, poignant, and big-hearted memoir about the challenges of coming of age—within the strictures of the Mormon church. Growing up in 1980s Edmonton, Greg Hudson loved pop music, comic books, and hanging out at the mall. But unlike most of his friends, Greg and his family were devout...

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship, to his often stormy...

Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840. While at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles that affected his vision. Thinking it might help his sight, Dana, rather than going on a Grand Tour as most of his fellow classmates traditionally did (and unable to afford it anyway), and being something of a nonconformist, left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor.

After a notorious lawyer, at the behest of a famed composer, meticulously conceals a child's origins, his adoptive mother spares no effort to bury the truth. Pulling strings and enlisting influential allies—including a television icon—she constructs an elaborate facade to ensure he never uncovers his past.

Was wird als Rechtfertigung, Entschuldigung und Erklärung missbraucht, um Menschen zu misshandeln, zu vertreiben, zu ermorden? Die Wahrheit! Faschisten, Kommunisten, Diktatoren und Religionen bedienen sich ihrer gewissenlos, um ihre gehirntoten Horden hinter sich zu bringen. Unser Protagonist "Karl Duschek" weiß dies genau, denn er erlebt den Fanatismus verifizierter Staats- und Glaubensfacetten am eigenen Leib und Verstand.

Die 1792 fertig gestellten "Erinnerungen" von Giacomo Casanova lassen uns an einem, auch für heutige Verhältnisse unglaublich aufregenden Leben teilhaben. Sie bestechen durch ihre flüssige Sprache und lebendigen Dialoge und sind von hohem kulturhistorischem Wert. Sie erregten jedoch schon immer vor allem wegen der beschriebenen frivolen erotischen Abenteuer Aufsehen und machten Casanova weltweit zum Synonym für die hohe Kunst der Verführung.

«Este es un libro acerca de la virtud más admirable de todas las virtudes humanas: el valor. Ernest Hemingway la definió como “gracia bajo presión”. Y estos son los relatos sobre las presiones que experimentaron ocho Senadores de Estados Unidos y la gracia con la cual las enfrentaron»...

"A great story--how modernism brought down the regime of censorship--told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."--Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club For...

A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer. When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth...

Richard Brookhiser has won a wide and loyal following for his stylish, pointed, and elegant biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. In America's First Dynasty, Brookhiser tells the story of America's longest and still greatest dynasty -- the Adamses, the only family in our...

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem...

The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob. Sweeping in its scope and relentless in its argument, Demonic explains the peculiarities of liberals as standard groupthink behavior. To...

As author of the bestselling Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe, and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer has emerged as the nation's number one scourge of superstition and bad science. Now, in The Borderlands of Science, he takes us to the place where real...

Four works in one collection: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Also The Life of Lovecraft: An Original Biography by CSA Publishing. Howard Lovecraft, well-known for his style of weird fiction and horror stories, is attributed as the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos and one of the most significant authors of supernatural horror fiction of the 20th-century.

Originally published in 1856, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed is the personal memoir of Peter Still, who was born a slave. He was yoked to servitude for more than four decades in Alabama and Kentucky. Still was finally freed with the help of two Jewish brothers.

Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada is an engrossing blend of scientific exploration and personal adventure. Clarence King describes the ascent of Mounts Tyndall, Shasta, and Whitney with a scientific poet’s eye, and makes the grandeur of the cliffs, the peaks, the glaciers, and the meadows of Yosemite Valley come alive through his remarkable gifts of portrayal. King describes nature like a master painter while his portrait of the people of California 20 years after the Gold Rush finds engaging expression in a subtle shift of style.

Walden is a work by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and to some degree a manual for self-reliance. First published in 1854, Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amid woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.

In Volume Four, Dumas relates the 1819 murder of German dramatist August von Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand, the campaign to destroy Father Urbain Grandier in 1634, who was successfully convicted of witchcraft and put to a brutal death, and the consequences of the amorous relationship between the prince of Brancaleone and Nisida.