Biography & Autobiography

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a fresh, vivid look at Disraeli's life, achievements, and temperament that casts doubts on his much-touted commitment to Jewish rights Lauded as a "great Jew," excoriated by antisemites, and one of...

Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was first played in the city of its birth on 9 August, 1942. There has never been a first performance to match it. Pray God, there never will be again. Almost a year earlier, the Germans had begun their blockade of the...

"So richly detailed, you can almost smell the gunsmoke and the sweat of the saddles."-Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling authorFrom Spur Award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner, his classic dual biography of Billy the Kid and Sheriff Pat Garrett,...

Born in November 1916 to the Marquess and Marchioness of Granby, Lady Ursula was a sprightly and charming lady whose memoirs of her uniquely glamorous life make riveting reading. Describing herself as having been an observant child, she records life at...

Three centuries ago, Voltaire published his Dictionnaire philosophique, taking in such idiosyncratic topics as adultery, mountains, nakedness, and others besides. In 1957, another French philosopher of more recent vintage, Roland Barthes, mused in his...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781593764258Author Tim WiseFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Soft Skull PressPublisher Soft Skull Press

In 1995, high-flying British journalist Toby Young left London for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Other Brits had taken Manhattan - Alistair Cooke, Tina Brown, Anna Wintour - so why couldn't he? Surely, it would only be a matter...

This is the moving story of a nonviolent hero, illustrated with more than 70 photographs, and told by a highly respected author who grew up in Gandhi's India. Gandhi's life continues to inspire and baffle readers today. How did an unsuccessful young...

Auberon Waugh was a philosopher - savage, eccentric, but a philosopher nonetheless. More than any writer of his era, Auberon Waugh had a genius for dividing his readers, into the delighted and the infuriated, and he retains the ability to start a...

The long-awaited second volume of A. David Moody's critically acclaimed three-part biography of Ezra Pound weaves together the illuminating story of his life, his achievements as a poet and a composer, and his one-man crusade for economic justice. The...

In this powerful and evocative memoir, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter, Oliver Stone, takes us right to the heart of what it's like to make movies on the edge. In Chasing The Light he writes about his rarefied New York childhood, volunteering...

In this inspiring, soul-stirring memoir, Lawrence E. Carter Sr., founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel, shares his remarkable quest to experience King's "beloved community" and his surprising discovery in mid-life that King's...

Simon Yates is 'the one who cut the rope' in Joe Simpson's award-winning account of their epic struggle for survival in Touching the Void. Afterwards, Yates continued mountaineering on the hardest routes. Perhaps the most testing of all was one of the...

Finding self-acceptance both on and off the mat. In Sanskrit, yoga means to "yoke." To yoke mind and body, movement and breath, light and dark, the good and the bad. This larger idea of "yoke" is what Jessamyn Stanley calls the yoga of the everyday-a...

The road to Croke Park can be a long one, but for Leitrim hurler Zak Moradi it was longer than most. Born in a refugee camp in Ramadi, Iraq, at the height of the Gulf War, Zak spent his formative years living under the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein...

One puff adder, one antelope, one crocodile - This was the list of sick animals presented to Oliver Graham-Jones on his first day as a new vet at London Zoo in 1951. And his time at the zoo didn't get any less strange or entertaining...There's the time...

'Blisteringly honest . . . hilarious, traumatic, joyful and terrifying. One cannot help cheering from the side-lines for a man who has overcome so much. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy read!' LIZ NUGENT * * * I grew up in a psychiatric...

In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo details her journey to becoming a poet. Born in Oklahoma, the end place of the Trail of Tears, Harjo grew up learning to dodge an abusive stepfather by finding...

John Major's prime ministership was an eventful one. Between 1990 and 1997 he presided over Britain's participations in the Gulf War, the start of the Northern Ireland peace process, the Maastricht Treaty negotiations and, of course, Black Wednesday and...

Abby Chava Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, profoundly isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of an eighteenth-century Eastern European enclave, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143128021Author Herbie HancockFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 330g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781903854198Author Robin BarrattFormat PaperbackPage Count 250Imprint Milo BooksPublisher Milo BooksWeight(grams) 220g

Sangharakshita was a Buddhist monk, a writer, a poet, and the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order and Community - a pioneering worldwide Buddhist movement. He was also an audacious reformer, and for some a deeply controversial figure. In an absorbing...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781780910536Author Roy CalleyFormat PaperbackPage Count 204Imprint DB PublishingPublisher DB Publishing

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781910497364Author Brough ScottFormat HardbackPage Count 240Imprint Racing Post BooksPublisher Racing Post Books

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781984881922Author Luvvie Ajayi JonesFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Penguin LifePublisher Penguin LifeWeight(grams) 238gDimensions(mm) 203mm * 135mm...

Tom King's personal memoirs range across a life of exceptional activity and interest. Aged nineteen, he found himself commanding a military company against Mau Mau terrorists in Kenya; at thirty he became the youngest ever general manager in a major...

Big Snake Little Snake is a cascade of true stories by DBC Pierre, recorded while on his way to make a short film with a parrot in Trinidad, which not only examines the nature of gambling, the love affair between gambler and game and the mindset of...

Bursa prison, mid-winter 1940. Two prisoners meet, both writers, both serving long sentences for allegedly inciting Turkish soldiers to mutiny. One is Turkey's most famous poet and communist, Nazim Hikmet; the other a young, aspiring poet, Orhan Kemal,...

Born at a clifftop lighthouse in 1910, Archie's life was spent in the world of Scottish lighthouses - he was one of the third generation of his family in the service of the Northern Lighthouse Board. Archie's stories have gripped listeners of all ages...

A revelatory intellectual biography of Tocqueville, told through his wide-ranging travels-most of them, aside from his journey to America, barely known.It might be the most famous journey in the history of political thought: in 1831, Alexis de...

In this second edition of Arthur Keaveney's classic biography, a fresh generation of students, scholars and readers are introduced to one of the most pivotal figures in the outgoing Roman Empire.A definitive book in its field, this second edition is a...

Schrader on Schrader is an essential set of dialogues with one of the most genuinely fascinating and uncompromising writer-directors in American film.Raised as a Calvinist and hence forbidden to partake of 'worldly pleasures' such as movies, Paul...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780809015481Author Ernest JonesFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Farrar, Straus and GirouxPublisher Farrar, Straus and GirouxWeight(grams)...

Admiral John Benbow was an English naval hero, a fighting sailor of ruthless methods but indomitable courage. Benbow was a man to be reckoned with. In 1702, however, when Benbow engaged a French squadron off the Spanish main, other ships in his squadron...

'One of the most sought-after tenors with the stamina and heft for Wagner and the ardent warmth for Italian opera'New York TimesJonas Kaufmann is a phenomenon. With his musicality, his vocal technique and his expressive powers - to say nothing of his...

In an intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the...

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland's biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo - a thinker whose vision of the...

A spectacular and comprehensive authorized retrospective of Oscar-winning visual effects master Phil Tippett, founder and namesake of iconic Tippett Studio From Star Wars to Jurassic Park and RoboCop to Starship Troopers, special effects master Phil...

Known the world over for her unique musical style, distinctive look and a voice that propelled her into the charts time and time again, Dusty Springfield was undoubtedly one of the biggest and brightest musical stars of the twentieth century.Never one to...