Best Biographies

Richard Holmes, highly acclaimed military historian and broadcaster, tells the exhilarating story of Britain's greatest-ever soldier, the man who posed the most serious threat to Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington's remarkable life and extraordinary campaigns are recreated with Holmes' superb skill in this compelling book.

Richard Holmes charts Wellington's stellar military career from India to Europe, and in the process, rediscovers the reasons Queen Victoria called him the greatest man the nineteenth century had produced. Combining his astute historical analysis with a semi-biographical examination of Wellington, Holmes artfully illustrates the rapid evolution in military and political thinking of the time.

Wellington is a brilliant figure, idealistic in politics, cynical in love, a wit, a beau, a man of enormous courage often sickened by war. As Richard Holmes charts his progress from a shy, indolent boy to commander-in-chief of the allied forces, he also exposes the Iron Duke as a philanderer, and a man who sometimes despised the men that he led, and was not always in control of his soldiers. Particularly infamous is the bestial rampage of his men after the capture of Cuidad Rodgrigo and Badajoz.

THE IRON DUKE is a beautifully produced book, complete with stunning illustrations and colour plates. Richard Holmes' TV series to accompany THE IRON DUKE will be lavishly constructed in four parts, and filmed on location in Britain, India, Spain, Portugal, France and Belgium.

This is the candid, mesmerizing, and often intimate account of how four young people--Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina--gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s.

Even before they became lovers in 1963, Dylan and Joan Baez were seen as the reigning king and queen of folk music. But their songs and their public images grew out of their association with Joan's younger sister, Mimi, a musician in her own right, and Richard Farina, the roguish novelist Mimi married when she was seventeen. Their rise from scruffy coffeehouse folksingers to pop stars comes about through their complex interpersonal relationships, as the young Dylan courts the famous Joan to further his career, Farina woos Mimi while looking longingly on her older sister, and Farina's friend Thomas Pynchon keeps an eye on their amours from afar.

Listed as one of the essential 50 books of all time in The Guardian

It's only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades―all before his suicide at age forty-one. This classic biography of the founder of computer science, reissued on the centenary of his birth with a substantial new preface by the author, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life.

A gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution, Andrew Hodges's acclaimed audiobook captures both the inner and outer drama of Turing's life. Hodges tells how Turing's revolutionary idea of 1936―the concept of a universal machine―laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. The audiobook also tells how this work was directly related to Turing's leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic story of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program―all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. Here is the perfect joining of subject and writer: Johnson, the man of awesome complexity, energy, ambition, and power―obsessed with secrecy, obscuring (often “rewriting”) the facts of his personal and political life; Caro, his biographer, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his life of Robert Moses, The Power Broker―and everywhere acclaimed for the brilliance, tenacity, and integrity of his research, for his grasp of character and of the workings of power. The conjunction has produced a monumental and galvanizing book that is a landmark in American biography. No president―no era of American politics―has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facts of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak.

The Path to Power―the first book of The Years of Lyndon Johnson―reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and urge to power that set LBJ apart. Chronicling the startling early emergence of Johnson's political genius, it follows him from his Texas boyhood through the years of the Depression in the Texas Hill Country to the triumph of his congressional debut in New Deal Washington, to his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, of the national power for which he hungered.

We see in him, from earliest childhood, a fierce, unquenchable necessity to be first, to win, to dominate―coupled with a limitless capacity for hard, unceasing labor in the service of his own ambition. Caro shows us the big, gangling, awkward young Lyndon―raised in one of the country's most desperately poor and isolated areas, his education mediocre at best, his pride stung by his father's slide into failure and financial ruin―lunging for success, moving inexorably toward that ultimate “impossible” goal that he sets for himself years before any friend or enemy suspects what it may be.

We watch him, while still at college, instinctively (and ruthlessly) creating the beginnings of the political machine that was to serve him for three decades. We see him employing his extraordinary ability to mesmerize and manipulate powerful older men, to mesmerize (and sometimes almost enslave) useful subordinates. We follow, close up, the radical fluctuations of his relationships with the formidable “Mr. Sam” Rayburn (who loved him like a son and whom he betrayed) and with FDR himself. And we follow the dramas of his emotional life―the intensities and complications of his relationships with his family, his contemporaries, his girls; his wooing and winning of the shy Lady Bird; his secret love affair, over many years, with the mistress of one of his most ardent and generous supporters....

We see Johnson at once unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted. And we see the country that bred him: the harshness and “nauseating loneliness” of the rural life; the tragic panorama of the Depression; the sudden glow of hope at the dawn of the Age of Roosevelt. And always, in the foreground, on the move, LBJ.

In preparation for this audiobook, Caro has―through some seven years―immersed himself in Johnson's life and world; has lived in Johnson's Hill Country, has crisscrossed the United States, finding and talking to hundreds of men and women―his boyhood friends and sweethearts, his college classmates and rivals, the men who politicked with him in congressional cloakrooms, the young New Deal aides (among them Corcoran, Cohen, Fortas, Rowe) who helped him rise and rose with him.

Here as never before is Lyndon Johnson―his Texas, his Washington, his America―in an audiobook that brings us as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process.

“Though we cannot learn leadership, we can learn from leaders, which is why this volume is so engaging and valuable.”―Boston Globe

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE, THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE, THE AMERICAN HISTORY BOOK PRIZE

NAMED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Economist * Time * Newsweek * Foreign Policy * Business Week * The Week * The Christian Science Monitor *Newsday

By the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker.

Book Four of Robert A. Caro's monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating insight that led the Times of London to acclaim it as “one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. A masterpiece.”
 
The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin's bullet to reach its mark.

By 1958, as Johnson began to maneuver for the presidency, he was known as one of the most brilliant politicians of his time, the greatest Senate Leader in our history. But the 1960 nomination would go to the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Caro gives us an unparalleled account of the machinations behind both the nomination and Kennedy's decision to offer Johnson the vice presidency, revealing the extent of Robert Kennedy's efforts to force Johnson off the ticket. With the consummate skill of a master storyteller, he exposes the savage animosity between Johnson and Kennedy's younger brother, portraying one of America's great political feuds. Yet Robert Kennedy's overt contempt for Johnson was only part of the burden of humiliation and isolation he bore as Vice President. With a singular understanding of Johnson's heart and mind, Caro describes what it was like for this mighty politician to find himself altogether powerless in a world in which power is the crucial commodity. 

For the first time, in Caro's breathtakingly vivid narrative, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson's eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how within weeks—grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery—he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of Kennedy's death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt Johnson's finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam.

In its exploration of this pivotal period in Johnson's life—and in the life of the nation—The Passage of Power is not only the story of how he surmounted unprecedented obstacles in order to fulfill the highest purpose of the presidency but is, as well, a revelation of both the pragmatic potential in the presidency and what can be accomplished when the chief executive has the vision and determination to move beyond the pragmatic and initiate programs designed to transform a nation. It is an epic story told with a depth of detail possible only through the peerless research that forms the foundation of Robert Caro's work, confirming Nicholas von Hoffman's verdict that “Caro has changed the art of political biography.”

• From Daredevil to Dracula, from Batman to Brother Voodoo, from Howard the Duck to Stewart the Rat, Secrets in the Shadows: The Art & Life of Gene Colan is the ultimate retrospective on one of comics' all-time unique artists. Featuring rare childhood drawings, photos, recently-discovered wartime illustrations, and original art and sketches from throughout his nearly 60-year career, this book offers new insight on the inspirations, challenges, and successes that shaped Gene 'the Dean' Colan.
• Among the highlights are: A comprehensive overview of Gene's glory days at Marvel Comics! Marv Wolfman, Don McGregor and other favorite writers share plot/script samples and anecotes of their Colan collaborations! Tom Palmer, Steve Leialoha, and other noted artists show how they approached the daunting task of inking Colan's famously nuanced penciled pages! Plus: a new portfolio of never-before-seen collaborations between Gene and such masters as John Byrne, Michael Kaluta, and George Perez, and all-new artwork created specifically for this book by Gene Colan, who is still inspired by the Secrets in the Shadows.