Other books that might interest you

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  American Ghost - A Family's...

  Hannah Nordhaus

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  The dark-eyed woman in the long black gown was first seen in the 1970s standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events: blankets ripped off while they slept, the room temperature plummeting, disembodied breathing, and dancing balls of light. 
   
  La Posada—"place of rest"—had been a grand Santa Fe home before it was converted to a hotel. The room with the canopy bed had belonged to Julia Schuster Staab, the wife of the home's original owner. She died in 1896, nearly a century before the hauntings were first reported. In American Ghost, Hannah Nordhaus traces the life, death, and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother, Julia, from her childhood in Germany to her years in the American West with her Jewish merchant husband. As she traces the strands of Julia's life, Nordhaus uncovers a larger tale of how a true-life story becomes a ghost story and how difficult it can sometimes be to separate history and myth.

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  The Secret Life of John le Carre

  Adam Sisman

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  The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive.  
   
  Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. 
  Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. 
  In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. 
  The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. “Now that he is dead,” Sisman writes, “we can know him better.”

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  Lyndon - An Oral Biography

  Merle Miller

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  The bestselling author of Plain Speaking crafts a candid portrait of one of the most complex, fascinating, difficult, and colorful American presidents.   From his birth in 1908 to his death in 1973, the story of Lyndon B. Johnson is told without sparing his personal excesses and contentious public image—while also highlighting the strength of his greatest accomplishments in Washington. Interlaced with interviews from Lady Bird Johnson, John Kenneth Galbraith, J. William Fulbright, Larry O’Brien, Hubert H. Humphrey, and hundreds of others, Miller provides an extensive and objective image of the life of LBJ.   “No secret remains. This is Lyndon Johnson true, lunging through life, pouring ‘every ounce of his energy’ into whatever he did, ranting, raving, shouting, ‘screaming at the universe,’ flogging system, staff and self to achieve what others pronounced unachievable . . . Miller allows his posse of turncoats—336 in all, myself among them—to lead him to the Johnson few ever knew: at his best, magnificent; at his worst, outrageous.” —Horace Busby, The Washington Post   “The domestic triumphs and the Johnson style come across like the Fourth of July . . . page-by-page, this is the low-down up to the Presidency—and one long book that never flags.” —Kirkus Reviews

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  Maybe You Will Survive - A...

  Graham Diamond, Aron Goldfarb

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  In Graham Diamond"s collaboration with Aron Goldfarb, the reader feels the struggles of people trying to survive during the Holocaust. The author recounts his experiences in Poland during the Holocaust, when he escaped from a forced labor camp and, with his brother, hid in underground holes on the grounds of an estate controlled by the Gestapo.

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  Soldier of Christ - The Life of...

  Robert A. Ventresca

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  “This well-crafted biography” presents “a balanced, but not uncritical, examination of the life of a controversial pope” (Library Journal). Debates over the legacy of Pope Pius XII are so heated they are known as the “Pius wars.” Soldier of Christ focuses instead on Eugenio Pacelli, the flawed yet gifted man himself. While offering insight into the pope’s response to Nazism, Robert A. Ventresca argues that it was the Cold War and Pius XII’s manner of engaging with the modern world that defined his pontificate. Ventresca begins with the story of Pacelli’s Roman upbringing, his intellectual formation in Rome’s seminaries, and his interwar experience as papal diplomat and Vatican secretary of state. Accused of moral equivocation during the Holocaust, Pius XII later fought the spread of Communism, spoke against the persecution of Catholics, and tackled a range of social and political issues. By appointing the first indigenous cardinals from China and India and expanding missions in Africa, he internationalized the church’s membership and moved Catholicism beyond the colonial mentality of previous eras. Drawing from a diversity of international sources, including unexplored documentation from the Vatican, Ventresca reveals a paradoxical figure: a prophetic reformer of limited vision whose leadership both stimulated the emergence of a global Catholicism and sowed doubt and dissension among some of the church’s most faithful servants.

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  The Work Is Innocent

  Rafael Yglesias

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  A funny, candid look at the beginning of a promising literary career launched remarkably earlyBeing a teenage literary prodigy is hard. Richard Goodman may have a book contract at seventeen, but his parents don’t respect his opinions, he can’t lose his virginity, and his ego inflates and deflates with every breath. Even when Richard receives the attention he craves, he finds that fame and fortune can’t deliver him from his own flaws. The Work Is Innocent is Yglesias’s fictional take on his own freakishly precocious literary coming-out as a teen. Written with startlingly self-assured prose and unflinching self-awareness, this novel explores the hilarious and harrowing complications of youthful success. This ebook features a new illustrated biography of Rafael Yglesias, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

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