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  Open Me Carefully - Emily...

  Emily Dickinson

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  The 19th–century American poet’s uncensored and breathtaking letters, poems, and letter-poems to her sister-in-law and childhood friend. For the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson’s thirty-six year correspondence with her childhood friend, neighbor, and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully invites a dramatic new understanding of Emily Dickinson’s life and work, overcoming a century of censorship and misinterpretation. For the millions of readers who love Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Open Me Carefully brings new light to the meaning of the poet’s life and work. Gone is Emily as lonely spinster; here is Dickinson in her own words, passionate and fully alive.  Praise for Open Me Carefully“With spare commentary, Smith  . . . and Hart  . . . let these letters speak for themselves. Most important, unlike previous editors who altered line breaks to fit their sense of what is poetry or prose, Hart and Smith offer faithful reproductions of the letters’ genre-defying form as the words unravel spectacularly down the original page.” —Renee Tursi, The New York Times Book Review

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  Being Elvis - A Lonely Life

  Ray Connolly

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  Elvis Presley is a giant figure in American popular culture, a man whose talent and fame were matched only by his later excesses and tragic end. A godlike entity in the history of rock and roll, this twentieth-century icon with a dazzling voice blended gospel and rhythm and blues with country to create a completely new kind of music and new way of expressing male sexuality, which blew the doors off a staid and repressed 1950s America.In Being Elvis, veteran rock journalist Ray Connolly takes a fresh look at the career of the world's most loved singer, placing him, forty years after his death, not exhaustively in the garish neon lights of Las Vegas but back in his mid-twentieth-century, distinctly southern world. For new and seasoned fans alike, Connolly, who interviewed Elvis in 1969, re-creates a man who sprang from poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, to unprecedented overnight fame, eclipsing Frank Sinatra and then inspiring the Beatles along the way. The creator of an American sound that resonates today, Elvis remains frozen in time, an enduring American icon who could capture an inner emotion, perhaps of eternal yearning, to which all of us can still relate.

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  Vinnie Ream - An American Sculptor

  Edward Cooper

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  An intriguing biography of the American woman sculptor and Civil War–era Washington, DC, fixture. One of America’s least known and most controversial women artists of the Civil War era was Vinnie Ream, who sculpted a bust of Abraham Lincoln from life when she was only sixteen years old and had almost no artistic training.  She was able, through clever maneuvering and dogged determination, to achieve a commission from the Congress for a life-sized statue of the assassinated president—this despite the very real animus against women artists at that time, which is apparent in the heated arguments against granting her the Lincoln commission—arguments spearheaded in the Senate by Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.  Steeped in the history of her time, Vinnie Ream was involved with dozens of senators and congressmen and other powerful men—not least of all Generals Sherman and Custer—and her studio on Capitol Hill became a legendary stopping place for many admirers and tourists. Her statue of Lincoln stands in the rotunda of the capitol building; her statue of Admiral Farragut stands in a Washington, DC, park; other works are in Statuary Hall and various museums. This is an engaging biography of a spirited female artist, and an effective portrait of Washington, DC, in the Civil War era. Praise for Vinnie Ream “Ream’s intellect, artistic talents, indomitable will, seductiveness, and grand ambitions were already evident when she was a teenager newly arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1861. . . . Endlessly intriguing. . . . Kudos to Cooper for resurrecting Ream and enriching so vividly the history of women in art.” —Booklist“A sharply focused biography, which skillfully exploits unpublished papers, journals and scrapbooks of Vinnie Ream.” —New York Review of Books

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  An Eagle's Odyssey - My Decade...

  Johannes Kaufmann

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  The first English translation of one German military pilot’s experience before, during, and after World War II flying for the Third Reich.   Johannes Kaufmann’s career was an exciting one. He may have been an ordinary Luftwaffe pilot but he served during an extraordinary time with distinction. Serving for a decade through both peacetime and wartime, his memoir sheds light on the immense pressures of the job.   In this never-before-seen translation of a rare account of life in the Luftwaffe, Kaufmann takes the reader through his time in service, from his involvement in the annexation of the Rhineland, the attack on Poland, fighting against American heavy bombers in the Defense of the Reich campaign. He also covers his role in the battles of Arnhem and the Ardennes, and the D-Day landings, detailing the intricacies of military tactics, flying fighter planes and the challenges of war.   His graphic descriptions of being hopelessly lost in thick cloud above the Alps, and of following a line of telegraph poles half-buried in deep snow while searching for a place to land on the Stalingrad front are proof that the enemy was not the only danger he had to face during his long flying career.   Kaufmann saw out the war from the early beginnings of German expansion right through to surrender to the British in 1945. An Eagle’s Odyssey is a compelling and enlightening read, Kaufmann’s account offers a rarely heard perspective on one of the core experiences of the Second World War.

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  Theresa May - The Enigmatic...

  Rosa Prince

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  Twenty days after Britain's dramatic vote to leave the European Union, with the government still reeling from the political aftershock, a new Prime Minister captured Downing Street. Few were more surprised by this unexpected turn of events than Theresa May herself.
  David Cameron's sudden resignation unleashed a leadership contest like no other – and saw the showier rivals for his crown fall one by one with dizzying speed. So how did the daughter of an Oxfordshire vicar rise to the top job with such ease? In this fascinating biography, Rosa Prince explores the self-styled unflashy politician whose commitment to public service was instilled in her from childhood.
  More than a decade after she warned stunned Conservatives of their 'nasty' image, May has become the champion of Middle England and, for the time being, united her riven party. Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister maps the rise of Britain's second female premier, a woman who had to fight against the odds to become an MP, who remained overlooked and undervalued during much of her time in Parliament, yet who went on to become a formidable Home Secretary and, now, the leader of her country as it faces its greatest challenge since the Second World War.

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  Lion Rampant - The Memoirs of an...

  Robert Woollcombe

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  'One of the most vivid personal memoirs of the Second World War. Few writers have bettered his description of the experiences of front line infantrymen under the stress of battle.' - Max HastingsLion Rampant is Robert Woollcombe's graphic account of his experiences as a front-line infantry officer with the King's Own Scottish Borderers during the desperate battle for Normandy and the Allied advance into Germany. Vividly evoking the confusion, horror and comradeship of war - from the killing fields of Normandy bocage, through house-to-house fighting in shattered Flemish towns, to the final Rhine crossing - Lion Rampant is a powerful, authentic and moving story, telling with extraordinary clarity how the author, his fellow officers and the men of his company lived through one of the most bitter campaigns in history.

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