Recommendations based on "Living My Life, Vol. 1"

Killing Thatcher is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet – an extraordinary assassination attempt linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot.In this fascinating and compelling book, veteran journalist Rory Carroll retraces the road to the infamous Brighton bombing in 1984 – an incident that shaped the political landscape in the UK for decades to come. He begins with the infamous execution of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 – for which the IRA took full responsibility – before tracing the rise of Margaret Thatcher, her response to the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland and the chain of events that culminated in the hunger strikes of 1981 and the death of 10 republican prisoners, including Bobby Sands. From that moment on Thatcher became an enemy of the IRA – and the organisation swore revenge.Opening with a brilliantly-paced prologue that introduces bomber Patrick Magee in the build up to the incident, Carroll sets out to deftly explore the intrigue before and after the assassination attempt – with the story spanning three continents, from pubs and palaces, safe houses and interrogation rooms, hotels and barracks. On one side, an elite IRA team aided by a renegade priest, US-raised funds and Libya’s Qaddafi and on the other, intelligence officers, police detectives, informers and bomb disposal officers. An exciting narrative that blends true crime with political history, this is the first major book to investigate the Brighton attack.

A riveting look inside a life of poverty, success, and the inner circles of political influence--from the foothills of Appalachia all the way to the White House.New York Times bestselling ghostwriter Nancy French is coming out of the shadows to tell her own incredible story.Nancy's family hails from the foothills of the Appalachians, where life was dominated by coal mining, violence, abuse, and poverty. Longing for an adventure, she married a stranger, moved to New York, and dropped out of college. In spite of her lack of education, she found success as a ghostwriter for conservative political leaders. However, when she was unwilling to endorse an unsuitable president, her allies turned on her and she found herself spiritually adrift, politically confused, and occupationally unemployable.Republicans mocked her, white nationalists targeted her, and her church community alienated her. But in spite of death threats, sexual humiliation, and political ostracization, she learned the importance of finding her own voice--and that the people she thought were her enemies could be her closest friends.A poignant and engrossing memoir filled with humor and personal insights, Ghosted is a deeply American story of change, loss, and ultimately love.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: O Magazine, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Seattle Times The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.  Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.

A highly anticipated biography of the enigmatic and popular Swedish painter.   The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe.    But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the institution.   Despite her enormous popularity, there has not yet been a biography of af Klint—until now. Inspired by her first encounter with the artist’s work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research af Klint’s life—not only who the artist was but what drove and inspired her. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic.

In the context of nineteenth-century Victorinoir and close readings of original-cycle film noir, Julie Grossman argues that the presence of the "femme fatale" figure, as she is understood in film criticism and popular culture, is drastically over-emphasized and has helped to sustain cultural obsessions with "bad" women.

USA TODAY BESTSELLER "Utterly gripping. . . a transformative and immersive story so powerful and captivating that I could not put it down. . . . Truly one of the best books I've read."--Liv Constantine, bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish "Lisa Barr's new historical fiction, The Goddess of Warsaw, gifts the reader with jaw-dropping moments worthy of a Tarantino film, a story that could not be more timely, and a heroine whose ferocity and valor knows no bounds."--Natalie Jenner, author of the instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society The Goddess of Warsaw is an enthralling tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and those she loves, then and now. Los Angeles, 2005. Sienna Hayes, Hollywood's latest It Girl, has ambitions to work behind the camera. When she meets Lena Browning, the enormously mysterious and famous Golden Age movie star, Sienna sees her big break. She wants to direct a picture about Lena's life--but the legendary actor's murky past turns out to be even darker than Sienna dreamed. Before she was a Living Legend, Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a Polish Jew whose life and family were destroyed by the Nazis. Warsaw, 1943. A member of the city's Jewish elite, Bina Blonski and her husband, Jakub, are imprisoned in the ghastly, cramped ghetto along with the rest of Warsaw's surviving Jews. Determined to fight back against the brutal Nazis, the beautiful, blonde Aryan-looking Bina becomes a spy, gaining information and stealing weapons outside the ghetto to protect her fellow Jews. But her dangerous circumstances grow complicated when she falls in love with Aleksander, an ally in resistance--and Jakub's brother. While Lena accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, she sacrifices much in the process. Over a decade after escaping the horrors of the ghetto, Bina, now known as Lena, rises to fame in Hollywood. Yet she cannot help but be reminded of her old life and hungers for revenge against the Nazis who escaped justice after the war. Her power and fame as a movie star offer Lena the chance to right the past's wrongs . . . and perhaps even find the happy ending she never had. A gripping page-turner of one of history's most heroic uprisings and an actress whose personal war never ends, The Goddess Of Warsaw is filled with secrets, lies, twists and turns, and a burning pursuit of justice no matter the cost.

Provocative insights into Beauvoir's philosophical and personal development during wartime Written from September 1939 to January 1941, Simone de Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary gives English readers unabridged access to a scandalous text that threatened to overturn traditional views of Beauvoir’s life and work. Beauvoir's clandestine affair with Jacques Bost and sexual relationships with various young women challenge the conventional picture of Beauvoir as the devoted companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. At the same time, her account of completing her novel She Came to Stay at a time when Sartre had just begun Being and Nothingness questions the traditional view of Beauvoir’s novel as merely illustrating Sartre’s philosophy. Wartime Diary also traces Beauvoir's philosophical transformation as she broke from the prewar solipsism of She Came to Stay in favor of the postwar political engagement of The Second Sex. Beauvoir's emerging existentialist ethics reflect the dramatic collective experiences of refugees fleeing German invasion and life under Nazi occupation. The evolution of her thought also reveals the courageous reaffirmation of her individuality in constructing a humanist ethics of freedom and solidarity. This edition also features previously unpublished material, including her musings about consciousness and order, recommended reading lists, and notes on labor unions. In providing new insights into Beauvoir’s philosophical development, the Wartime Diary promises to rewrite a crucial chapter of Western philosophy and intellectual history.

WINNER OF THE 2013 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHYGeneral Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar--because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. But, hidden behind General Dumas's swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: he was the son of a black slave--who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas made his way to Paris, where he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution--until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat. The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world's first multi-racial society. TIME magazine called The Black Count "one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moment that made it possible." But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

"Niki's heart was thrumming as the taxi stopped with a jerk in front of the gray, stone building behind tall, black iron gates. On a metal plaque was engraved Les Soeurs de Merci. Niki thrust several franc notes staring through the rungs of the gate. Years ago another young woman-perhaps her mother- had stood in the same place, a baby in her arms, the child she was going to give up. What emotions had run through her heart?" Niki had come to France to seek her true identity and to experience the richness of her French heritage. But what begins as a romantic, carefree summer holiday for Niki, her stepbrother Luc Montrose, and their friend Paul Duval, ends with the outbreak of war, changing their lives forever. As World War II ravages Europe, Niki wants desperately to serve her native country in its time of need. She finds herself making dangerous decisions and facing dramatic challenges, aware of- but unable to do anything about- the impact the war is having on her loved ones back at Montclair. Caught up in the firestorm of world conflict, this courageous young woman with an unknown past faces an uncertain future, with only her newfound faith to sustain her.

Margaret Thatcher is the towering political figure of late-twentieth-century Great Britain. No other prime minister in modern times sought to change the British nation and its place in the world as radically as she did.Published in a single volume for the first time, Margaret Thatcher is the story of her remarkable life told in her own words--the definitive account of an extraordinary woman and consummate politician, bringing together her bestselling memoirs The Downing Street Years and The Path to Power. Writing candidly about her upbringing and early years and the formation of her character and values, she details the experiences that propelled her to the very top in a man's world. She offers a riveting firsthand history of the major events, the crises and triumphs, during her eleven years as prime minister, including the Falklands War, the Brighton hotel bombing, the Westland affair, the final years of the Cold War, and her unprecedented three election victories. Thatcher's judgments of the men and women she encountered during her time in power-from statesmen, premiers, and presidents to Cabinet colleagues-are astonishingly frank, and she recalls her dramatic final days in office with a gripping, hour-by-hour description from inside 10 Downing Street. Powerful, candid, and compelling, Margaret Thatcher stands as a testament to a great leader's significant legacy.