Biographies & Memoirs

Introduction, Part 2
Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader
by Philip Stephens
There are echoes of an earlier age in Tony Blair's premiership. His approach to foreign policy has its roots in the interventionism of the nineteenth-century Liberal British prime minister William Gladstone.

Part 3
Frank Lloyd Wright
by Ada Louise Huxtable
After the family returned to Madison, Anna apparently decided that her son's carefully nurtured artistic sensibilities might have gone a bit overboard. Unlike the large, robust Lloyd Jones men, Frank was a small, solitary child content to read, draw

Recasting His Image
Microsoft Rebooted
by Robert Slater
In the early part of his career, Bill Gates had been in the media's eyes, the supernova of the technology world. He had been the boy genius of technology, creator of the company admiringly dubbed the smartest in the world.

Hotel Rwanda, Part 3
An Ordinary Man
by Paul Rusesabagina, Tom Zoellner
I was born on the side of a steep hill in the summer of 1954. My father was a farmer, my mother his helper. Our house was made of mud and sticks. We were about a mile away from the nearest village.

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.

Part 3
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes
Charles might also have heard, or thought he heard, or sensed, cries from the operating theatre in the hospital across the road. The surgeon, Robert Liston, had been a well-known figure at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh when Charles studied medicine

What Would Consumers Do?
Microsoft Rebooted
by Robert Slater
Judge Kollar-Kotelly's judgment of November 2002 had ended the legal cloud hanging over Microsoft, but her seal of approval on the settlement had by no means returned the company's once-lofty image to what it once had been.

Part 5
Talking Back: ...to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels
by Andrea Mitchell
By then a national correspondent in Washington for NBC, I was driving back from an assignment when we got the first word. The office asked me to confirm the loss. It was one of many times in my career when I found myself torn between personal emotion

Samuel Rosenberg's Daughters
Missing Men: A Memoir
by Joyce Johnson
I once had a husband who started obsessively painting squares - three squares in shifting relationships to each other on what appeared flat ground, colored emptiness. He explained to me that the negative space in his work was as important as the positive

Copyboy
Talking Back: ...to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels
by Andrea Mitchell
I'm not sure how I got to be so pushy. In the beginning, and even now, I wanted to emulate Miss Virginia Clair and be a lady and an ace reporter at the same time. It's a balancing act I'm still sorting out after nearly four decades in the business.

Part 2
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes
But he could joke about the difficulties she would have. After spending a morning with his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, he wrote to her: 'I was quite ashamed of myself today; for we talked for half an hour unsophisticated geology

Part 4
Talking Back: ...to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels
by Andrea Mitchell
In addition to the mayor's offices and city council chambers, City Hall housed the court of common pleas, the local criminal court. The corridors were lined with defendants awaiting trial, bail bondsmen, witnesses, lawyers, and other hustlers.

Part 5
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes
The Darwins and Wedgwoods all looked to Charles's father, Robert, a wealthy and successful physician in Shrewsbury, for medical judgements and prescriptions. Dr. Darwin gave Charles robust advice about his own ailments, and provided 'receipts' for Willy

Part 2
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
by Elizabeth Gilbert
And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment when this entire story began a moment which also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees

Part 4
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes
After the experience of her first pregnancy, Emma wanted to be prepared for the next delivery. There were four signs to watch for: missing a period, which was referred to in polite conversation as ceasing to be unwell, morning sickness

Kenosha
Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers
by Elizabeth Edwards
She charmed America with her smart, likable, down-to-earth personality as she campaigned for her husband, then vice-presidential candidate John Edwards. She inspired millions as she valiantly fought advanced breast cancer after being diagnosed only days

We Will Not Gloat
Microsoft Rebooted
by Robert Slater
Suddenly, it was only fifteen minutes before the announcement was due, 12:45 p.m. The Microsoft legal and public relations team began gathering in the company board room in Building 34.

Tug of War, Part 2
Ten Minutes from Normal
by Karen Hughes
I understood how torn he felt. My own feelings were mixed, and partly selfish. I thought George Bush would be a wonderful president - I also thought he was too decent a person to wish the presidency on him.

Ash Wednesday
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
by Karen Armstrong
In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford.

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