Alejandro Malaspina was an eighteenth-century officer in the Spanish Navy, whose sailing exploits rival those of his near-contemporary, Captain James Cook, and whose visionary political notions were ahead of their time. He is little... Read More

Movie stars hire publicity agents and managers, but surely geniuses don’t. Yet Albert Einstein had one, in function if not in title. Helen Dukas helped shape Einstein’s image as the saintly old man we remember today. This massive... Read More

Woody Allen will not win any popularity poll with American moviegoers. Many of his movies saunter into obscurity within weeks after their release to theaters. With the publication of this book, the author, a movie film critic, hopes to... Read More

Like all great novels, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time stands alone, creating its own world and its own independent reality. Yet far more than most, it is a work intimately and inextricably intertwined with its author’s own... Read More

In 1930, Paramount Pictures’ marketing department mistakenly spelled Carol Lombard’s first name with an “e” in promoting the film Fast and Loose, then decided that it would be too costly to change the posters. Lombard, ever the... Read More

This book will have Twain scholars and fans vigorously discussing its merits for years to come. The author takes as his subject the relationship between Mark Twain and his older brother, Orion, traditionally presented as a bit of a... Read More

“ … I traveled through the Caucasus like a perfect vagabond,“ wrote Kennan, noting he one day journeyed with a prince, the next with a pauper … one day dined in state, the next subsisted on raw turnips. At twelve Kennan was a... Read More

After a lifetime in the limelight, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to climb Mount Everest, has kept the publicity machine rolling lately by appearing in a television commercial promoting an all-terrain vehicle. But never fully... Read More