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A hilarious memoir chronicles the adventures and misadventures of a woman whose perfect life, perfect job, and perfect man vanish when she goes from a six-figures career to unemployment. Original.

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A fascinating tour of the underside of pop culture chronicles the murder of porn star John Holmes, the assassination of Irish reporter Veronica Guerin, the life of "notorious" rapper Easy E. Winner, the white slave dalliances of Rick James, and much, much more. Original.

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Thomas Walz tells the story of Bill Sackter, a man who spent nearly half a century in a Minnesota mental institution and emerged to blossom into a most unlikely celebrity. Bill Sackter was committed to the Faribault State Hospital at the age of seven, there to remain until he was in his fifties. At the time of his commitment, Bill's father had recently died; thus his sole contact with his family came through rare letters from his mother. Some years after his discharge from Faribault as a result of the movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill in the 1960s, Bill enjoyed a serendipitous encounter with a young college student and part-time musician, Barry Morrow. Bill became part of the Morrow family and a regular in Morrow's music group. When Morrow accepted a job at the School of Social Work at the University of Iowa, Bill followed him to Iowa City and was put in charge of a small coffee service. Bill became an important part of the University of Iowa community, and Wild Bill's Coffeeshop developed into an institution. A cheerful man of great good will who was a harmonica virtuoso, Bill began to inspire affectionate legends, and his life as a celebrity began in earnest. He was named Iowa's Handicapped Person of the Year in 1977, and two television movies were made about his life -- Bill, which earned Emmy awards for cowriter Barry Morrow and Mickey Rooney (as Bill) in 1981, and Bill on His Own in 1983. Years later, Morrow would earn an Oscar for his script of Rain Man. Through vignettes ranging from hilarious to near tragic, Walz reveals a remarkable human being. An account of Bill's life in an institution is necessarily part of the story, but there is much more: Bill's rolein helping a young child recover from a coma, his menagerie of friends, his love for a pet parakeet, his late-life Bar Mitzvah, his failure as a woodworker, his success as Santa, and his dignified death at the age of seventy.

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<P><B> Get under the surface of the most powerful and feared leader of the French Revolution </B></P> <UL><LI> Offers brilliantly original analysis. </LI> <LI> Explains how Robespieree came by his extraordinary power. </LI> <LI> Explores the power and development of a police state. </LI></UL><P>A provincial lawyer from Arras, Robespierre (1758-94) dominated France at the height of the Revolution, the event which more than any other, shaped modern history. Robespierre had an enigmatic and contradictory personality, reclusive, cerebral and austere, yet at the same time both neurotic and theatrical with a solitary lifestyle, hidden away even at the height of his fame in modest lodgings with a family he trusted. Others have written extensively by concentrating on analyzing Robespierre's set-piece speeches to parliament and the Jacobian club, but John Hardman gets behind the polished but chilly surface of the public persona by examining Robespierre at his desk rather that at the rostrum. Concentrating on Robespierre's administration rather than his rhetoric, <I>Robespierre</I> offers not only a brilliant original analysis of its formidable protagonist, but also a dramatic vantage point from which to survey the main phase of the Revolution itself, from the fall of the ancien regeime to the end of the Terror. As a title in the very popular <I>Profiles in Power</I> series, this is not a biography, though inevitably it contains much biographical material, it instead analyzes the major features, achievements and failures of Robespierre's career. </P><P> <B>John Hardman</B> formerely of the University of Edinburgh has written <I> Louis XVI</I> (Yale 1993) and <I> French Politics</I> (Longman 1995).

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The personal story of the civil rights leader's work and life, published to coincide with the fifth anniversary of his death, discusses his witness to and experiences with the prison farms and lynch mobs of Mississippi, the firefights and political activism of the African liberation wars, and the efforts of Black Power and Pan-Africanism.

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Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power, the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.

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Thomas Hardy once said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The most famous poet of the Jazz Age, Millay captivated the nation: She smoked in public, took many lovers (men and women, single and married), flouted convention sensationally, and became the embodiment of the New Woman.<br><br>Thirty years after her landmark biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Nancy Milford returns with an iconic portrait of this passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself. Chosen by USA Today as one of the top ten books of the year, Savage Beauty is a triumph in the art of biography. Millay was an American original&#8212;one of those rare characters, like Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway, whose lives were even more dramatic than their art.

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Shocking, grim, frightening, Curt Gentry's masterful portrait of America's top policeman is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 pages of previously classified documents, Gentry reveals exactly how a paranoid director created the fraudulent myth of an invincible, incorruptible FBI. For almost fifty years, Hoover held virtually unchecked public power, manipulating every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. He kept extensive blackmail files and used illegal wiretaps and hidden microphones to destroy anyone who opposed him. The book reveals how Hoover helped create McCarthyism, blackmailed the Kennedy brothers, and influenced the Supreme Court; how he retarded the civil rights movement and forged connections with mobsters; and what part he played in the investigations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. A New York Times bestseller. 32 pages of photographs.

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<B>An up-close look at the democratic race for the White House &#151;it isn't pretty.</B><BR><I>Spanking the Donkey</I> is a campaign diary like no other. Celebrated reporter Matt Taibbi turns a withering eye on the kissing contest of puffed-up martinets and egomaniacal fantasists more generally known as the 2004 Democratic primaries.<BR>Taibbi's contempt for the whole charade, and for most of those involved (including a generous helping of his fellow journalists), makes for a searing and highly entertaining account. His refusal to take the proceedings seriously leads him to volunteer for Wesley Clark's New Hampshire campaign in the guise of an adult-film director, while his take on a John Edwards press conference in New York City is filtered through the haze of hallucinogenic drugs. Taking up residence in slums and halfway houses as he follows the circus around the country, Taibbi juxtaposes an idiotic dog-and-pony show in which clashes of plainly identical candidates are presented as real controversies, with the quite separate concerns of the ordinary Americans whose lodgings he shares. The gap between the antiseptic exercise in faint patriotic optimism that is mainstream politics and the harsh realities of life for the millions of Americans that the electoral parade simply passes by has never been more sharply, or hilariously, sketched.

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A transsexual takes readers on a fascinating tour of his gender reassignment surgery and its aftermath, beginning with his life as a straight woman, exploring all aspects of this difficult physical and social passage from one gender to another.

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The remarkable Civil War letters of a Georgia plantation family, now available in a compact, illustrated volume for new readers and for all those who so greatly admired the original monumental edition. The letters vividly recreate a period of American history unparalleled for its drama and poignancy.

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A balanced portrait of the popular Democratic Speaker of the House chronicles Nancy Pelosi's rise to political power and to the highest political office ever held by an American woman, her role as a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, the legislative efforts she has spearheaded successfully, and her future in American politics. 60,000 first printing.

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A portrait of the Massachusetts Puritan who became the New World's first best-selling poet discusses the impact of her imperious Protestant father on her life, her ties to the fledgling nation's founding leaders, and her experiences with period politics and disease.

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