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The Romance of American Communism
by Vivian GornickWriter and critic Vivian Gornick&’s long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life&“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.&” So begins Vivian Gornick&’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin&’s crimes became public.
Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton
by Vivian GornickA champion of the women's movement of the 1970s, Gornick reviews the life of one of the 19th-century founders of the movement for women's rights. For more than 50 years Elizabeth Cady Stanton battled for equal rights for women, educating, inspiring, and organizing women across the country. Gornick looks at parallels between the movements and draws upon her own life and evolution as a feminist.
Taking A Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time
by Vivian GornickOne of our most vital and incisive writers on literature, feminism, and knowing one's selfFor nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, Taking a Long Look illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what binds us to the larger world.In these essays, Gornick explores the lives and literature of Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Herman Melville; the cultural impact of Silent Spring and Uncle Tom's Cabin; and the characters you might only find in a New York barber shop or midtown bus terminal. Even more, Taking a Long Look brings back into print her incendiary essays, first published in the Village Voice, championing the emergence of the women's liberation movement of the 1970s.Alternately crackling with urgency or lucid with insight, the essays in Taking a Long Look demonstrate one of America's most beloved critics at her best.
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
by Vivian GornickA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceOne of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her lifeI sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me.Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”
The Maisky Diaries
by Gabriel Gorodetsky Ivan MaiskyThe terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary, never before published in English, grippingly documentsBritain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Churchill's rise to power, the German invasion of Russia, and the intense debate over the opening of the second front. Maisky was distinguished by his great sociability and access to the key players in British public life. Among his range of regular contacts were politicians (including Churchill, Chamberlain, Eden, and Halifax), press barons (Beaverbrook), ambassadors (Joseph Kennedy), intellectuals (Keynes, Sidney and Beatrice Webb), writers (George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells), and indeed royalty. His diary further reveals the role personal rivalries within the Kremlin played in the formulation of Soviet policy at the time. Scrupulously edited and checked against a vast range of Russian and Western archival evidence, this extraordinary narrative diary offers a fascinating revision of the events surrounding the Second World War. "
A Mountain of Crumbs
by Elena GorokhovaElena Gorokhova grows up in 1960's Leningrad where she discovers that beauty and passion can be found in unexpected places in Soviet Russia.
Russian Tattoo: A Memoir
by Elena GorokhovaAn exquisite portrait of mothers and daughters that reaches from Cold War Russia to modern-day New Jersey, from the author of A Mountain of Crumbs--the memoir that "leaves you wanting more" (The Daily Telegraph, UK).In A Mountain of Crumbs Elena Gorokhova describes coming of age behind the Iron Curtain and leaving her mother and her Motherland for a new life in the United States. Now, in Russian Tattoo, Elena learns that the journey of an immigrant is filled with everyday mistakes, small humiliations, and a loss of dignity. Cultural disorientation comes in the form of not knowing how to eat a hamburger, buy a pair of shoes, or catch a bus. But through perseverance and resilience, Elena gradually adapts to her new country. With the simultaneous birth of her daughter and the arrival of her Soviet mother, who comes to the US to help care for her granddaughter and stays for twenty-four years, it becomes the story of a unique balancing act and a family struggle. Russian Tattoo is a poignant memoir of three generations of strong women with very different cultural values, all living under the same roof and battling for control. Themes of separation and loss, grief and struggle, and power and powerlessness run throughout this story of growing understanding and, finally, redemption. "Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist's gift," says The New York Times, and her latest offering is filled with empathy, insight, and humor.
A Life Of Triumph: How A Girl With Cerebral Palsy Beat The Odds To Achieve Success
by Karen A. Gorr Duane HicklerA Life of Inspiration and Hope Karen A. Gorr was born in 1937 and developed debilitating physical challenges shortly thereafter due to a prolonged illness. Her mother was a single parent with another disabled child and no familial support. When her mother became ill, she placed her children in an institution for the "feeble-minded" since no other facilities stepped up to help. Karen spent 10 years of her childhood there, and she constantly longed to escape the abuse, isolation, hunger, and neglect. A Life of Triumph is Ms. Gorr's story of how her own determination, grit, stubbornness, and a sense of humor - and the help of friends and professionals - enabled her to find a life beyond an institution. She shares her transformation from a "limp rag doll" into a scholarship student, teacher, public speaker, board member, and advocate for those with mental and physical disabilities. Along the way, Ms. Gorr learns to forgive those who caused her so much suffering, and she's blessed with what she calls the "ultimate gift" - her own perfect daughter who has made the whole journey worthwhile.
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
by Michael GorraA revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843-1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel--the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer--came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James's family, the European literary circles--George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev--in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand's The Metaphysical Club and McCullough's The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.
The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War
by Michael GorraHow do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese
by Michael Gorra Patrick Leigh FermorThe Mani, at the tip of Greece's--and Europe's--southernmost promontory, is one of the most isolated regions of the world. Cut off from the rest of the country by the towering range of the Taygetus and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, it is a land where the past is still very much a part of its people's daily lives. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has been described as "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene," bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal an ancient world living alongside the twentieth century. Here, in the book that confirmed his reputation as one of the English language's finest writers of prose, Patrick Leigh Fermor carries the reader with him on his journeys among the Greeks of the mountains, exploring their history and time-honored lore. Mani is a companion volume to Patrick Leigh Fermor's celebrated Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece.
The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found
by Angela Williams Gorrell&“My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals.&” Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew, only twenty-two years old, to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching at Yale suddenly felt shallow and distant—completely unattainable in the fog of grief she now found herself in. But joy was closer at hand than it seemed. As she began volunteering at a women&’s maximum-security prison, she met people who suffered extensively yet still showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: &“Joy doesn&’t obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering.&” This is the story of Angela&’s discovery of an authentic, grounded Christian joy. But even more, it is an invitation for others to seize upon this more resilient joy as a counteragent to the twenty-first-century epidemics of despair, addiction, and suicide—a call to action for communities that yearn to find joy and are willing to &“walk together through the shadows&” to find it.
Heart and Soul: The Story of Florence Nightingale
by Gena K. GorrellIn Florence Nightingale's day, if a person was sick - and lucky - he or she was nursed at home with caring family members tending the bedside. Hospitals were horrible places from which few emerged alive. The nurses were often drunks and prostitutes. Doctors had rudimentary skills. Thus the privileged Nightingale family was appalled when Florence, who had done her share of household nursing, announced that she wanted to train to work in a hospital. After all, her role was cut out for her: she was to be a decorative, witty lady. A career, much less nursing, was out of the question. It took many years, but Florence found her calling in Crimea. More English soldiers died of sickness there than died in battle. If they were wounded they were almost sure to suffer in misery, lying on pallets caked with old blood, hungry and thirsty, without anyone to offer them so much as a sip of water. Florence caused a revolution in her insistence for cleanliness, wholesome food, and kind treatment of men, who were considered to be nothing more than cannon fodder. Florence's campaign resulted in reforms to health care for millions of people. Although she was in frail health for much of her life, her sense of outrage and her extraordinary stamina in the face of prejudice and almost criminal ignorance make her story one of the most inspiring in history. Dozens of photographs, posters, and cartoons bring the past to life in this memorable biography.
The Wives: A Memoir
by Simone Gorrindo&“A haunting, beautifully written celebration of found sisterhood.&” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) &“A fearless, engaging, and important memoir.&” —Library Journal (starred review) &“[A] gorgeously rendered peek behind the curtain of military life.&” —Booklist (starred review) A captivating memoir that tells the story of one woman&’s experience of joining a community of army wives after leaving her New York City job—a profoundly intimate look at marriage, friendship, and the power of human connection.When her new husband joins an elite Army unit, Simone Gorrindo is uprooted from New York City and dropped into Columbus, Georgia. With her husband frequently deployed, Simone is left to find her place in this new world, alone—until she meets the wives. Gorrindo gives us an intimate look into the inner lives of a remarkable group of women and a tender, unflinching portrait of a marriage. A love story, an unforgettable coming-of-age tale, and a bracing tour of the intractable divisions that plague our country today, The Wives offers a rare and powerful gift: a hopeful stitch in the fabric of a torn America.
Holding Court
by Chris GorringeWimbledon is a paradox. While outwardly appearing the quintessential English lawn tennis club, as much a part of being British as strawberries and cream or picnics in the park, it is in fact the largest annual outside broadcast operation in the world and a multi-million pound commercial enterprise. Remarkably, an enterprise that generates its profit in just two weeks of the year. It is also something we do rather well. Which other tennis tournament in the world can describe itself as simply, "The Championships"?Chris Gorringe is the man who, for twenty-six years, made it all happen. The former chief executive, fondly referred to as "Clockwork Gorringe," has dealt with everything from the 1973 players' boycott, the McEnroe tantrums, and Middle Sunday, to the demands for equal prize money and the Olympic bid. He has witnessed some of the greatest names in the sport producing some of their most dazzling performances - from Navratilova to the Williams sisters, from Borg to Federer - while assisting with the requirements of and demands on today's high-profile professional tennis players. During his tenure, revenue increased from £58,000 in his first year, to £27m in his last. In Holding Court, he charts the unique journey of one of the country's most venerable establishments, where decisions are still made through a committee system dating back to 1868, into the modern era. For anyone who has ever been captivated by McEnroe v Borg, soaked up the atmosphere in Aorangi Park, or been intrigued by what goes on behind the scenes at SW19, Holding Court is a must-read. Wimbledon is a national institution. When play starts on the first Monday, millions of followers tune in. This book is for them.
The Pioneers
by Marie Gorsline Douglas W. GorslineDepicts the hardships of the pioneers as they made their way westward from Missouri across the prairie and over the mountains to the Pacific coast.
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
by Neil GorsuchJustice Neil Gorsuch reflects on his journey to the Supreme Court, the role of the judge under our Constitution, and the vital responsibility of each American to keep our republic strong. <P><P>As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, he was reportedly asked what kind of government the founders would propose. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” <P><P>In this book, Justice Neil Gorsuch shares personal reflections, speeches, and essays that focus on the remarkable gift the framers left us in the Constitution. Justice Gorsuch draws on his thirty-year career as a lawyer, teacher, judge, and justice to explore essential aspects our Constitution, its separation of powers, and the liberties it is designed to protect. <P><P>He discusses the role of the judge in our constitutional order, and why he believes that originalism and textualism are the surest guides to interpreting our nation’s founding documents and protecting our freedoms. He explains, too, the importance of affordable access to the courts in realizing the promise of equal justice under law—while highlighting some of the challenges we face on this front today. <P><P>Along the way, Justice Gorsuch reveals some of the events that have shaped his life and outlook, from his upbringing in Colorado to his Supreme Court confirmation process. And he emphasizes the pivotal roles of civic education, civil discourse, and mutual respect in maintaining a healthy republic. <P><P>A Republic, If You Can Keep It offers compelling insights into Justice Gorsuch’s faith in America and its founding documents, his thoughts on our Constitution’s design and the judge’s place within it, and his beliefs about the responsibility each of us shares to sustain our distinctive republic of, by, and for “We the People.” <P><P><b>A New York Times Bestseller</b>
A Bridge to Justice: The Life of Franklin H. Williams
by Enid Gort John CaherDocuments the life of a gifted African American leader whose contributions were pivotal to the movement for social justice and racial equalityFranklin Hall Williams was a visionary and trailblazer who devoted his life to the pursuit of civil rights—not through acrimony and violence and hatred but through reason and example. A Bridge to Justice sheds new light on this practical, pragmatic bridge-builder and brilliant, complex individual whose life reflected the opportunities and constraints of an intellectually elite Black man in the twentieth century.Franklin H. Williams was considered a “bridge” figure, someone whose position outside the limelight allowed him to navigate both Black and white circles, span the more turbulent racial waters below, and persuade people to see the world in a new way. During his prolific lifetime, he was a civil rights leader, lawyer, diplomat, organizer of the Peace Corps, United Nations representative, foundation president, and associate of Thurgood Marshall on some of the seminal civil liberties cases of the past hundred years, though their relationship was so fraught with tension that Marshall had Williams sent to California. He worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, served as a diplomat, and became an exceptionally persuasive advocate for civil rights. Even after enduring the segregated Army, suffering cruel discrimination, and barely escaping a murderous lynch mob eager to make him pay for zealously representing three innocent Black men falsely accused of rape, Franklin was not a hater. He believed that Americans, in general, were good people who were open to reason and, in their hearts, sympathetic to fairness and justice.Dr. Enid Gort, an anthropologist and Africanist who conducted hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with Williams, his family, friends, colleagues, and compatriots, and John M. Caher, a professional writer and legal journalist, have co-written an exhaustively researched and scrupulously documented account of this civil rights champion’s life and impact. His story is an object lesson to help this nation heal and advance through unity rather than tribalism.
Eva Braun: Una vida con Hitler
by Heike B. GörtemakerLa biografía definitiva de la amante de Hitler que ofrece un retrato íntimo y paralelo de la vida del dictador nazi y del ascenso y caída del régimen que creó. Él era el Führer solitario, el hombre comprometido con una nación: Alemania. Así lo presentaba la propaganda nacionalsocialista, que no dejaba espacio posible para una relación sentimental en la vida de Hitler. Sin embargo, una mujer lo acompañó durante cerca de quince años, en las reuniones decisivas, en los peores momentos, en el Berlín asediado por los soviéticos, en la hora de su muerte. Adolf Hitler tenía una amante cuya existencia permaneció oculta hasta el final del Tercer Reich: Eva Braun. ¿Quién era la mujer con la que se casó Hitler poco antes de su caída? ¿Qué significó para ella vivir con uno de los mayores criminales de la historia? Heike B. Görtemaker ha buscado las respuestas y ha permitido a Eva Braun salir de las sombras para desvelar la intimidad de un dictador durante la época más catastrófica de la historia de Alemania. Reseñas:«Esta biografía de Frau Hitler, la más rigurosa y documentada, cambiará la idea de la rubia tonta impasible ante los asesinatos en masa.»Klaus Wiegrefe «No es posible estar más cerca de Eva Braun.»Die Welt
Hitler's Court: The Inner Circle of The Third Reich and After
by Heike B. GörtemakerThis revelatory history examines the loyal inner circle that followed—and enabled—Hitler’s rise to power and continued on after WWII.Hitler was not a lonely, aloof dictator. Throughout his rise in the NSDAP, he gathered a loyal circle around him, and was surrounded by people who celebrated, flattered and intrigued him. Who belonged to this inner circle around Hitler? What function did this court fulfill? And how did it influence the perception of history after 1945? Using previously unknown sources, Heike Görtemaker explores Hitler’s private environment and shows how this inner circle made him who he was. Hitler’s inner circle, the Berghof Society, was his private retreat. But the court was more than that. It provided him with the support he needed to take on the role of “Führer” at all, while at the same time allowing him to use its members as political front men. Most of all, it represented a conspiratorial community whose lowest common denominator was anti-Semitism. In this book, Heike Görtemaker asks new questions about the truth behind Hitler’s inner circle and, for the first time, also examines the “circle without leaders”; the networking of the inner circle after 1945.
The American Adventuress: A Novel
by C. W. Gortner"No one writes bright, bold, bad, and beautiful women of history like C.W. Gortner, and he outdoes himself with his latest heroine: Jennie Jerome, American heiress, royal mistress, and mother of Winston Churchill. The American Adventuress shines on every page with Jennie's irrepressible thirst for adventure, love, and everything else life has to offer!" -- Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose CodeThe story of Jennie Jerome Churchill, mother of Winston, a New York born heiress who always lived life on her own terms.Daughter of New York financier Leonard Jerome, Jennie was born into wealth—and scandal. Upon her parents’ separation, her mother took Jennie and her sisters to Paris, where Mrs. Jerome was determined to marry her daughters into the most elite families. The glamorous city became their tumultuous finishing school until it fell to revolt. Fleeing to Queen Victoria’s England, Jennie soon caught the eye of aristocrat Randolph Spencer-Churchill, son of the Duke of Marlborough, one of Britain’s loftiest peers. It was love at first sight, their unconventional marriage driven by mutual ambition and the birth of two sons. Undeterred by premature widowhood or society’s rigid expectations, Jennie brashly carried on a lifelong intimate friendship with Edward, Prince of Wales—a notorious bon vivant—and had two later marriages to younger men. When her son Winston launched his brilliant political career, Jennie guided him to success, his most vocal and valuable supporter.By turns scandalous, tragic, and exciting, Jennie Jerome lived an unconventional life full of defiance—one that enshrined her as an American adventuress.
C. W. Gortner: History's Great Queens 2-Book Bundle
by C. W. GortnerIn two stunning novels, C. W. Gortner brings to life two of history's most intriguing and courageous women: Catherine de Medici, the last legitimate descendant of the illustrious Medici family of Italy, and Juana of Castile, daughter of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand of Spain, who would be the last queen to inherit her country's throne. THE CONFESSIONS OF CATHERINE DE MEDICICatherine de Medici has been expelled from her native Florence and betrothed to Henri, son of François I of France. In an unfamiliar realm, she strives to create a role for herself through her patronage of the famous clairvoyant Nostradamus and her own innate gift as a seer. But in her fortieth year, Catherine is widowed, left alone with six young children in a kingdom torn apart by the ambitions of a treacherous nobility. Relying on her tenacity, wit, and uncanny gift for compromise, Catherine seizes power, intent on securing the throne for her sons, unaware that if she is to save France, she may have to sacrifice her ideals, her reputation, and the secret of her embattled heart.THE LAST QUEENBorn amid her parents' struggle to unify and strengthen their kingdom, Juana, at the age of sixteen, is sent to wed Philip, heir to the Habsburg Empire. There, she finds unexpected love and passion with her dashing young husband, and at first she is content with her children and her married life. But when tragedy strikes and she becomes heir to the Spanish throne, Juana finds herself plunged into a battle for power against her husband that grows to involve the major monarchs of Europe. Besieged by foes on all sides, Juana vows to secure her crown and save Spain from ruin, even if it costs her everything.Includes an excerpt from C. W. Gortner's much-anticipated new novel featuring Isabel of Castile, The Queen's Vow.
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici: A Novel
by C. W. GortnerBONUS: This edition contains a The Confessions of Catherine de Medici discussion guide and an excerpt from C.W. Gortner's The Queen's Vow.The truth is, not one of us is innocent. We all have sins to confess. So reveals Catherine de Medici, the last legitimate descendant of her family's illustrious line. Expelled from her native Florence, Catherine is betrothed to Henri, son of François I of France. In an unfamiliar realm, Catherine strives to create a role for herself through her patronage of the famous clairvoyant Nostradamus and her own innate gift as a seer. But in her fortieth year, Catherine is widowed, left alone with six young children in a kingdom torn apart by the ambitions of a treacherous nobility. Relying on her tenacity, wit, and uncanny gift for compromise, Catherine seizes power, intent on securing the throne for her sons, unaware that if she is to save France, she may have to sacrifice her ideals, her reputation, and the secret of her embattled heart. for herself through her patronage of the famous clairvoyant Nostradamus and her own innate gift as a seer. But in her fortieth year, Catherine is widowed, left alone with six young children as regent of a kingdom torn apart by religious discord and the ambitions of a treacherous nobility. Relying on her tenacity, wit, and uncanny gift for compromise, Catherine seizes power, intent on securing the throne for her sons. She allies herself with the enigmatic Protestant leader Coligny, with whom she shares an intimate secret, and implacably carves a path toward peace, unaware that her own dark fate looms before her--a fate that, if she is to save France, will demand the sacrifice of her ideals, her reputation, and the passion of her embattled heart. From the fairy-tale châteaux of the Loire Valley to the battlefields of the wars of religion to the mob-filled streets of Paris, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is the extraordinary untold journey of one of the most maligned and misunderstood women ever to be queen. From the Hardcover edition.
The First Actress: A Novel of Sarah Bernhardt
by C. W. Gortner&“This novel about Sarah Bernhardt, the iconic French actress, is both a riveting portrait of the artist as a passionate young woman and a luscious historical novel full of period detail.&”—Melanie Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of Mistress of the Ritz and The Aviator&’s Wife From her beginnings as the daughter of a courtesan to her extraordinary transformation into the most celebrated actress of her era, Sarah Bernhardt is brought to life by an internationally bestselling author praised for his historical novels featuring famous women. Sarah&’s highly dramatic life starts when she returns to Paris after her convent schooling and is confronted by her mother&’s demand to follow in the family trade as a courtesan. To escape this fate, Sarah pursues a career onstage at the esteemed Comédie-Française, until her rebellious acting style leads to her scandalous dismissal. Only nineteen years old and unemployed, Sarah is forced to submit to her mother&’s wishes. But her seductive ease as a courtesan comes to an abrupt end when she discovers she is pregnant. Unwilling to give up her child, Sarah defies social condemnation and is cast adrift, penniless and alone. With her striking beauty and innovative performances in a bohemian theater, Sarah catapults to unexpected success; suddenly, audiences clamor to see this controversial young actress. But her world is torn asunder by the brutal 1870 siege of Paris. Sarah refuses to abandon the ravaged city, nursing wounded soldiers and risking her life. Her return to the Comédie and her tempestuous affair with her leading man plunge Sarah into a fierce quest for independence. Undeterred, she risks everything to become France&’s most acclaimed actress, enthralling audiences with her shocking portrayals of female and male characters. Sarah&’s daring talent and outrageous London engagement pave her path to worldwide celebrity, with sold-out tours in Europe and America. Told in her own voice, this is Sarah Bernhardt&’s incandescent story—a fascinating, intimate account of a woman whose unrivaled talent and indomitable spirit has enshrined her in history as the Divine Sarah.
Mademoiselle Chanel
by C. W. GortnerShe revolutionized fashion and built an international empire . . . all on her own termsBorn into rural poverty, Gabrielle Chanel and her sisters are sent to a convent orphanage after their mother's death. The nuns of the order nurture Gabrielle's exceptional sewing skills, a talent that would propel the willful young woman into a life far removed from the drudgery of her childhood.Burning with ambition, the petite brunette transforms herself into Coco, by day a hard-working seamstress and by night a singer in a nightclub, where her incandescence draws in a wealthy gentleman who becomes the love of her life. She immerses herself in his world of money and luxury, discovering a freedom that sparks her creativity. But it is only when her lover takes her to Paris that Coco discovers her destiny. Rejecting the frilly, corseted silhouette of the past, Coco's sleek, minimalist styles reflect the youthful ease and confidence of the 1920s modern woman. As her reputation spreads, her couture business explodes, taking her into rarefied circles of society and bohemian salons. But her fame and fortune cannot save her from heartbreak as the years pass. And when Paris falls to the Nazis, Coco is forced to make choices that will haunt her always. An enthralling novel about an entirely self-made woman, Mademoiselle Chanel tells the true story of Coco Chanel's extraordinary ambition, passion, and artistic vision.