Biographies & Memoirs

A Perfect Frenchman
The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal
by Martine Orange
On the sweltering summer night of July 3, 2001, the limousines of the cream of the French banking, business, and political worlds drew up outside the Centre Pompidou, the modern art complex in the heart of Paris.

A Tehran Girlhood
Iran Awakening
by Shirin Ebadi, Azadeh Moaveni
My indulgent grandmother, who never spoke to us children in anything but honeyed tones of endearment, snapped at us for the first time on August 19, 1953.

Childhood, Part 2
'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson
In the winter of 1552-53, King Edward VI fell ill with what doctors now think was a virulent strain of pneumonia. On July 6, 1553, the prophecies of a long and illustrious Edwardian Age did not come to pass. The sixteen-year-old monarch had died.

The Factory of Genius
Simone Weil
by Francine du Plessix Gray
Growing up in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century were two contented children from whose household all toys and dolls had been categorically banned. It had been their mother's intent to nurture their intellectual skills.

Part 2
Marlon Brando
by Patricia Bosworth
He was starting to date. One of his first girlfriends, Carmelita Pope, remembers inviting him over for pasta; after they'd eaten, he would go out on the sunporch with her father, who was a lawyer, and ask him all sorts of questions.

The Sword and the Dagger
Borges: A Life
by Edwin Williamson
The ancestors of Jorge Luis Borges were among the first Europeans to arrive in America. Explorers, conquistadors, founders of cities, and rulers of provinces, they were builders of the vast empire that Spain was to establish in the New World.

The Remembrance of Our Misdoings
The Black Veil
by Rick Moody
While still in his twenties, Rick Moody found that a decade of alcohol, drugs, and other indulgences had left him stranded in a depression so severe that he feared for his life.

Runthood
The Good Good Pig
by Sy Montgomery
Christopher Hogwood came home on my lap in a shoe box. On a rain-drenched April evening, so cold the frogs were silent, so gray we could hardly see our barn, my husband drove our rusting Subaru over mud roads sodden with melted snow.

Chapter 1
Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
by Tracy Kidder
Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that 'the only real nation is humanity' - a philosophy that is embodied in the small public

The extraordinary rise and fall of Jean-Marie Messier
The Man Who Tried to Buy the World: Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal
by Martine Orange
The first raids came at dawn in the weeks leading up to Christmas. On Thursday, December 12, 2002, fifteen police officers from the fraud squad swooped down on the headquarters of Vivendi Universal to seize computer files, documents, and e-mails.

I'm No Saint
Memoir of a Wayward Wife
by Elizabeth Hayt
More voyeuristic than Sex and the City and more desperate than Desperate Housewives, here is an eye-opening memoir of marital disappointment, maternal struggles, and outrageous sexual behavior...

A Memoir of My Years in the White House
Ronald Reagan in Private
by Jim Kuhn
No one said much as we stood behind the glass front doors in the atrium of Chateau Fleur d'Eau, an imposing lakeside chateau in Geneva, Switzerland, on that overcast, chilly November morning in 1985. The president seemed calm, but preoccupied.

Metropolis
Leni; The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
by Steven Bach
The definitive biography of Leni Riefenstahl, the woman best known as 'Hitler's filmmaker,' one of the most fascinating and controversial personalities of the twentieth century. It is the story of huge talent and huger ambition

Part 2
Robert E. Lee
by Roy Blount
Can we recast Lee in terms more edifying in this century? One problem is that Lee's life didn't fit him. He appears to have been too fine for his childhood, for his education, for his profession, for his marriage, and for the Confederacy.

The Geisha and the Farm Boy
Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West
by Lesley Downer
One fine autumn evening in 1885 a young man was strolling along the banks of the River Sumida in Tokyo. It was a beautiful place thick with grasses and wildflowers, lined with cherry and willow trees.

The Hunger for Certainty
Martin Luther
by Martin E. Marty, Ph.D.
Shortly before midnight one November 10, probably in 1483, in the Saxon town of Eisleben, Margarethe Lindemann Luder gave birth to a son. When he was grown and had made enemies, some of them charged that this 'beloved mother' had been a whore

Part 3
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
Both his children recalled Robert Fowles as a thin man of very nervous disposition who constantly worried about his business and the people dependent on him. In the mid-1930s he developed a debilitating duodenal ulcer.

One Woman's Search for Everything
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Gilbert
I wish Giovanni would kiss me. Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and like most Italian guys in their twenties he still lives with his mother.

Part 2
Picasso, My Grandfather
by Marina Picasso
Inside the titan's den-Ali Baba's treasure cave-clutter reigns supreme. There are piles of paintings on paint-spattered easels, sculptures lying everywhere, crates overflowing with African masks, cardboard packing boxes, old newspapers

The Hunger for Certainty, Part 3
Martin Luther
by Martin E. Marty, Ph.D.
Though filled with dread, he survived the ordeal. At a celebration after Mass Hans Luther chose the moment to interrogate his cornered son: What if that thunderstorm at Stotternheim and your call to the monastery came from the devil?