Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?browse=true&Ne=7107&N=3+7515 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1510995 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1645220 In this book the author transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. In this work he has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1054725 In this tough, tender memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith transports readers to what seemed like halcyon days for art and artists in New York as she shares tales of the denizens of Maxs Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribners, Brentanos and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplthorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=986047 A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1037092 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=804471 Historian and legal scholar Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family, and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=713036 Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world--when it did not succeed, it set out to change the world instead. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=606394 The dust storms that terrorized Americas High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived - those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave - Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=651950 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=690819 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=594888 Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Years Eve - the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This book is Didions attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=533242 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=443522 In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing up in a privileged Havana household - and of being exiled from his own childhood by the Cuban revolution. That childhood, until his world changes, is as joyous and troubled as any other - but with exotic differences. Lizards roam the house and grounds. Fights arent waged with snowballs but with breadfruit. The rich are outlandishly rich, like the eight-year-old son of a sugar baron who has a real miniature race car, or the neighbor with a private animal garden, complete with tiger. All this is bathed in sunlight and shades of turquoise and tangerine: the island of Cuba, says one of the stern monks at Carloss school, might have been the original Paradise - and it is tempting to believe. His father is a municipal judge and an obsessive collector of art and antiques, convinced that in a past life he was Louis XVI and that his wife was Marie Antoinette. His mother looks to the future; conceived on a transatlantic liner bound for Cuba from Spain, she wants her children to be modern, which means embracing all things American. His older brother electrocutes lizards. Surrounded by eccentrics, in a home crammed with portraits of Jesus that speak to him in dreams and nightmares, Carlos searches for secret proofs of the existence of God. Then, in January 1959, President Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Castro has taken his place, and Christmas is canceled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. At the Aquarium of the Revolution, sharks multiply in a swimming pool. And one by one, the authors schoolmates begin to disappear - spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, alone, never to see his father again.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=402553 At the heart of this work is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works. Interweaving his narrative with a brilliantly astute and concise history of the Senate, Caro shows readers how political initiatives triumph or fail and how political genius functions. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=359237 The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policymakers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has had on various demographic populations around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. The depth of human experience Solomon chronicles, the range of his intelligence, and his boundless curiosity and compassion will change the readers view of the world.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1047324 This book is an account of the history, ecology, and mystique of the arctic region. The author offers a thorough examination of this obscure world, its terrain, its wildlife, its history of Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on their icy shores. But what turns this marvelous work of natural history into a breathtaking study of profound originality is his unique meditation on how the landscape can shape our imagination, desires, and dreams. Its prose as hauntingly pure as the land it describes, and is nothing less than an indelible classic of modern literature. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=312743 The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the Titanic disaster was in the twentieth. Nathaniel Philbrick now restores this story - which inspired the climactic scene in Herman Melvilles Moby Dick - to its rightful place in American history. In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, the unthinkable happened: in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, decided instead to sail their three tiny boats for the distant South American coast. They would eventually travel over 4,500 miles. The next three months tested just how far humans could go in their battle against the sea as, one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. Nathaniel Philbrick brings an incredible story to life, from the intricacies of Nantuckets whaling economy and the mechanics of sailing a square-rigger to the often mysterious behavior of whales. But it is his portrayal of the crew of the Essex that makes this a heartrending book. These were not romantic adventurers, but young working men, some teenagers, just trying to earn a living in the only way they knew how. They were a varied lot; the ambitious first mate, Owen Chase, whose impulsive nature failed at a crucial moment, then drew him to a more dangerous course; the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, whose long-lost account of the ordeal, written at age seventy-one, provides new insights into the story; and Captain George Pollard, who was forced to take the most horrifying step if any of his men were to survive.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=33550 In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today hover(s) over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams. For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large - a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles. We watch him exhibiting both great depth and great shallowness, combining massive learning with extraordinary naivete, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale. We understand why we should neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though we are by no means required to stop loving him. He is Thomas Jefferson, after all - our very own sphinx.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=223839 This outstanding book treating the three most beloved composers of the Vienna School is considered basic to any study of classical-era music. Drawing on his rich experience and intimate familiarity with the works of these giants, Charles Rosen presents his keen insights in clear and persuasive language. For this expanded edition of The Classical Style, Rosen provides an entirely new, 64-page chapter on the later years of Beethoven and the musical conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. Rosen has also written an extensive new preface in which he responds to other writers who have commented on his ideas. Finally, readers are treated to a compact disc, recorded by Rosen in 1996 and produced especially to accompany this new edition of the book. The CD offers complete performances of two late sonatas of Beethoven that are discussed extensively in the text: the Opus 106 in B[flat] major (the Hammerklavier) and the Opus 110 in A[flat] major.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=218141 Already a classic, Monettes critically acclaimed coming of age/coming out story traces the first quarter-century of a remarkable life. One of the most most complex, moral, personal, and political books to have been written about gay life.--LA Weekly. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=233933 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=174998 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=177749 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=172495 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=198844 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=234526 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=229236 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=9611 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=192061 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=220881 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=163338 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=336681 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=41006