Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Entertainment & Celebrities

"Questions are posed," writes Norman Mailer, "in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions." In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years.

Throughout his life, three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Unser has approached his racing career and personal life the same way - with a relentless drive to succeed. Talk to him today and he'll tell you, "I never really retired from racing, I just retired from what I was racing." This philosophy has allowed him to achieve success in business and in life, and it can help you do the same.

Come one, come all to this larger-than-life biography of P. T. Barnum, showman and founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Visit Barnum's American Museum, established in only four weeks! Meet Madame Josephine Clofulia, the Swiss Bearded Lady. Get to know Tom Thumb, a miniature man (only twenty-five inches tall), and his tiny bride (32 inches). Watch as the circus parade goes by, elephants tail to trunk, costumed performers waving, lions yawning. Then, under the big top, as Barnum steps into the spotlight, cast your eyes on the center ring and prepare to be amazed.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds - part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

When a mysterious woman summons Nancy Balbirer to a Russian restaurant in New York City, the near stranger’s shocking purple hair and even more shocking news send Balbirer simultaneously reeling back to her past and hurtling toward a future that, at almost fifty years old, she never dreamed possible. This romantic-comedy memoir tells the true story of how a pack of Hollywood television writers and the denizens of a fabled but cursed Manhattan apartment building helped the author and one of her best friends turn a thirty-two-year almost romance into a real one.

Lola Montez was one of the most celebrated and notorious women of the nineteenth century. A raven-haired Andalusian who performed her scandalous “Spider Dance” in the greatest performance halls across Europe, she dazzled and beguiled all who met her with her astonishing beauty, sexuality, and shocking disregard for propriety. But Lola was an impostor, a self-invention. Born Eliza Gilbert, the beautiful Irish wild child escaped a stifling marriage and reimagined herself as Lola the Sevillian flamenco dancer and noblewoman.

In the tradition of Geoffrey Wolf’s The Duke of Deception and Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, John-Ivan Palmer’s Master of Deception takes listeners on the road with his magician father and his mother, the lovely assistant, as they travel from Elks Lodges to County Fairs, performing alongside contortionists, ventriloquists, and every manner of screwball act that passed for variety entertainment before television drove us all indoors and away from one another.

Thanks to one reporter's skill, we can fix the exact moment on November 22, 1963 when the world stopped and held its breath: At 12:34 p.m. Central Time, UPI White House reporter Merriman Smith broke the news that shots had been fired at President Kennedy's motorcade. Most people think Walter Cronkite was the first to tell America about the assassination. But when Cronkite broke the news on TV, he read from one of Smith's dispatches.

The Art of Youth is a moving inquiry into the nature of artistic prodigies who did their major work at an early age. Renowned novelist Nicholas Delbanco gives us a triptych of indelible portraits: the American writer Stephen Crane, British artist Dora Carrington and the legendary composer George Gershwin. All three lived colorful, productive lives before dying early, at an average age of thirty-five. In this audiobook, Delbanco discovers what it is we mourn in authors who pass away so young, and muses on his own life - one marked by both early success and longevity.

A 1959 encounter brought reporter Valerie Danby-Smith face-to-face with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was brief, but before it ended something had clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie was devoted to Hemingway and his wife, traveling with them through Spain and France and finally Cuba. Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway when she married the writer's son Gregory. Now, she tells the story of the years she spent with this talented and doomed family.

He was the most famous and best ballplayer of his generation. She was America's blonde. They were intense, impassioned lovers, and, long after that, gentle and loving friends. The only thing that didn't work between Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe was their marriage. Joe & Marilyn is a portrait of DiMaggio, as godlike as his legend on the field, but vulnerable and intensely human off and of a stormy Marilyn of whom it was said, "She doesn't need a husband. She needs salvation."

Over the course of a nearly sixty-year career, Norman Mailer wrote more than 30 novels, essay collections, and nonfiction books. Yet nowhere was he more prolific - or more exposed - than in his letters. All told, Mailer crafted more than 45,000 pieces of correspondence (approximately 20 million words), many of them deeply personal, keeping a copy of almost every one. Now the best of these are published - most for the first time - in one remarkable volume that spans seven decades and several lifetimes.

The Sweet Potato Queens are back and bawdier than ever in Southern belle extraordinaire Jill Conner Browne’s ninth edition of the hysterical series. Having experienced pretty much ALL of the crappy parts of life, Browne feels it is her duty to render whatever assistance she can to her fellow sufferers - and she does so in her own inimitable fashion.

Her father taught her there are very few situations in life that we really and truly cannot change, and it is up to us to figure out how to either make fun OUT of them - or make fun OF them.

Originally published in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Mailer at his brilliant, provocative, outrageous best. Emerging at the height of "hip", Advertisements is at once a chronicle of a crucial era in the formation of modern American culture and an important contribution to the great autobiographical tradition in American letters.

August Busch IV had everything - or seemed to. In 2006, Busch became the chief executive of Anheuser-Busch, the sixth member of his family to control the legendary brewery. At age 42, Busch was handsome, wealthy, married to a beautiful woman, and running one of the biggest companies in America. Two years later, Busch lost control of Anheuser-Busch. Soon he was jobless, divorced, and struggling with alcohol and drugs. Then he woke to find his girlfriend, a waitress named Adrienne Martin, dead in his bed.

Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul documents the beloved singing star’s rocky personal life and internationally acclaimed show business career. An in-depth and frank examination of Aretha, this definitive biography traces her career from her beginnings as a 12-year-old member of a church choir in the early 1950s, recording her first album at the age of 14, a major recording contract at 18, and stardom in her 20s, right up through her headline-grabbing 2010 health scare, to her triumphant return: singing to her cheering Detroit hometown fans in summer 2011.