Biographies & Memoirs

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...

At the Movies
A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance
by Jane Juska
'Round-heeled' is an old-fashioned label for a woman who is promiscuous - someone who nowadays might be called 'easy.' It's a surprising way for a cultured English teacher with a passion for the novels of Anthony Trollope to describe herself

Strange Meeting
Diana: The Secret Years
by Simone Simmons
Though many have written about Diana, Princess of Wales, few have known her as intimately as Simone Simmons, the woman who became Diana's close friend and confidante following her painful separation and divorce.

The Boy Who Snipped the Lock
Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved
by Russell Martin
It was not until 1871 that Kapellmeister Ferdinand Hiller, the corpulent dean of music in the Rhine-side city of Cologne, first described for fascinated German readers what it had been like to meet Ludwig van Beethoven and what, in fact, the circumstances

Prelude
Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved
by Russell Martin
Ludwig van Beethoven lay dying in 1827, a young musician named Ferdinand Hiller came to pay his respects to the great composer. In those days, it was customary to snip a lock of hair as a keepsake, and this Hiller did a day after Beethoven's death.

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.

Inside eBay
The Perfect Store
by Adam Cohen
In this brisk, engaging chronicle of one of the most stunning success stories in American business history, Adam Cohen takes us inside eBay the corporation as well as into the community of eBay's passionate users.

Part 3
Robert E. Lee
by Roy Blount
Sometimes eleven Oneida warriors, on their own horses, joined his cavalry troop for the sport of the thing. Harry learned their language and sat them down to dine in the field with him and the other officers, from chinaware and sterling cups.

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.

Part 1
Robert E. Lee
by Roy Blount
In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime, he may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursor-cross between England's Cary Grant and Virginia's Randolph Scott.

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?

The Hunger for Certainty, Part 2
Martin Luther
by Martin E. Marty, Ph.D.
Luther's professors, adapting what some called the modern way and others referred to as the nominalism of Ockham and Biel, stressed a commonsense counsel: Test theory by experience.

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

The Story of Martin Luther
Martin Luther
by Martin E. Marty, Ph.D.
Martin Luther is the story of Martin Luther, not a history of the Protestant Reformation, though its subject was the most prominent figure in the combined religious and political stirrings of sixteenth-century Europe.

Part 5
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
As a child John longed to escape alone into the natural green world introduced to him by his uncle and probably by his mother. Reading by this time had become an escape as well.

Part 4
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
The other three-quarters of Robert Fowles's intellectual reading was in philosophy, with which he was fascinated.33 He favored the seventeenth-century Continental Rationalists, like Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnit (1646-1716).

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.

Part 2
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
Twenty-six when he enlisted as an officer in the Honourable Artillery Company, Robert saw three years of action in the trenches of Flanders. Memories of comrades dying beside him in battle tormented him throughout his life.

Voices in the Garden
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
It was not a show garden, although its owner loved to show it to visitors. It was the secret place of a solitary, turned in upon itself, not facing the outside world at all. The single acre of the Belmont House garden spread over a steep slope, dense

Introduction
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
By the early 1970s John Fowles, still in the midst of his active career as a writer, was already the subject of academic scrutiny. He was beginning, at this point, to critique the critics, wondering why they devoted far too much