New Release Books in Biographies & Memoirs

Jeffrey Frank, author of the bestselling Ike and Dick, returns with the first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly thirty years, recounting how so ordinary a man met the extraordinary challenge of leading America through the pivotal years of the mid-20th century. The nearly eight years of Harry Truman’s presidency—among the most turbulent in American history—were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan; the first use of an atomic weapon; the beginning of the Cold War; creation of the NATO alliance; the founding of the United Nations; the Marshall Plan to rebuild the wreckage of postwar Europe; the Red Scare; and the fateful decision to commit troops to fight in Korea. Historians have tended to portray Truman as stolid and decisive, with a homespun manner, but the man who emerges in The Trials of Harry S. Truman is complex and surprising. He believed that the point of public service was to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens, and was disturbed by the brutal treatment of African Americans. Yet while he supported stronger civil rights laws, he never quite relinquished the deep-rooted outlook of someone with Confederate ancestry reared in rural Missouri. He was often carried along by the rush of events and guided by men who succeeded in refining his fixed and facile view of the postwar world. And while he prided himself on his Midwestern rationality, he could act out of emotion, as when, in the aftermath of World War II, moved by the plight of refugees, he pushed to recognize the new state of Israel. The Truman who emerges in these pages is a man with generous impulses, loyal to friends and family, and blessed with keen political instincts, but insecure, quick to anger, and prone to hasty decisions. Archival discoveries, and research that led from Missouri to Washington, Berlin and Korea, have contributed to an indelible, and deeply human, portrait of an ordinary man suddenly forced to shoulder extraordinary responsibilities, who never lost a schoolboy’s romantic love for his country, and its Constitution.

A collection of personal stories and reflections based on the memoirs of Junko Tabei, the first woman to climb Mount Everest and the Seven Summits. Honouring High Places is a compelling collection of highlights from Junko Tabei''s stirring life that she considered important, inspiring and interesting to mountaineering culture. Until now, her works have been available only in Japanese, and RMB is honoured to be sharing these profound and moving stories with the English-speaking world for the first time. The collection opens on Mount Everest, where the first all-women''s expedition is met with disaster but pushes on against all odds. The story then shifts to the early years of Tabei''s life and reflects on her countryside childhood as a frail girl with no talent for sport, and cultural expectations that ignored her passion for mountains. With reminiscences of the early days of female climbers on Everest, the deaths of fellow mountaineers, Tabei''s pursuit of Mount Tomur, a cancer diagnosis, and efforts to restore a love for nature in the surviving youth of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, this beautifully curated collection of essays captures the essence of a notable time and the strength of character of one of the 20th and 21st centuries'' female mountaineering pioneers.

The first English-language biography of one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, written by his award-winning translator"Bernofsky takes us into the heart of an artist''s life/work struggles, brilliantly illuminating Walser''s exquisite sensibility and uncompromising radical innovations, while deftly tracking how his life gradually came apart at the seams. A tragic and intimate portrait."--Amy Sillman "Robert Walser is the perfect pathetic poet: pithy, awkward, drinks too much, sibling rivalrous, ambitious, broke, and mentally ill. Was he proto queer or trans, this red headed writer who next to Gertrude Stein might be the most influential writer of our moment? Riveting and heart-breaking, this biography kept me drunk for days."--Eileen Myles The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of society, shocking his Berlin friends by enrolling in butler school and later developing an urban-nomad lifestyle in the Swiss capital, Bern, before checking himself into a psychiatric clinic. A connoisseur of power differentials, his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest--social outcasts and artists as well as the impoverished, marginalized, and forgotten--prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him "a clairvoyant of the small." His revolutionary use of short prose forms won him the admiration of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others. He was long believed an outsider by conviction, but Susan Bernofsky presents a more nuanced view in this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography. Setting Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, she provides illuminating analysis of his extraordinary life and work, bearing witness to his "extreme artistic delight."

The life of Franklin Roosevelt''s most trusted and powerful advisor, Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief "Fascinating... greatly enriches our understanding of Washington wartime power."--Madeleine Albright Aside from FDR, no American did more to shape World War II than Admiral William D. Leahy--not Douglas MacArthur, not Dwight Eisenhower, and not even the legendary George Marshall. No man, including Harry Hopkins, was closer to Roosevelt, nor had earned his blind faith, like Leahy. Through the course of the war, constantly at the president''s side and advising him on daily decisions, Leahy became the second most powerful man in the world. In a time of titanic personalities, Leahy regularly downplayed his influence, preferring the substance of power to the style. A stern-faced, salty sailor, his U.S. Navy career had begun as a cadet aboard a sailing ship. Four decades later, Admiral Leahy was a trusted friend and advisor to the president and his ambassador to Vichy France until the attack on Pearl Harbor. Needing one person who could help him grapple with the enormous strategic consequences of the war both at home and abroad, Roosevelt made Leahy the first presidential chief of staff--though Leahy''s role embodied far more power than the position of today. Leahy''s profound power was recognized by figures like Stalin and Churchill, yet historians have largely overlooked his role. In this important biography, historian Phillips Payson O''Brien illuminates the admiral''s influence on the most crucial and transformative decisions of WWII and the early Cold War. From the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and France, to the allocation of resources to fight Japan, O''Brien contends that America''s war largely unfolded according to Leahy''s vision. Among the author''s surprising revelations is that while FDR''s health failed, Leahy became almost a de facto president, making decisions while FDR was too ill to work, and that much of his influence carried over to Truman''s White House.

In ''The Brothers'', the long-awaited follow-up to the 2001 bestseller ''Diana''s Boys'', Christopher Andersen picks up where ''Diana''s Boys'' left off and shows William and Harry navigating their relationship as adults, with one brother the designated heir, and the other doomed to life as the spare.

"The memoir of a young man from a long line of enlisted men and women, raised on military bases and shaped from a young age to idolize and glorify war and the people who fight it. After he joins the Marines and serves in Iraq, he must begin to reckon with the troubled and complicated truths of the American war machine"--

Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon; his work has defined our childhoods, and even more than twenty-five years after his death his books continue to find new readers. Theodor Geisel, however, led a life that goes much deeper than the prolific and beloved children''s book author. He had a successful career as a political cartoonist, and his political leanings can be felt throughout his books. Jones introduces us to this complicated man, who introduced generations to the wonders of reading while teaching young people about empathy and how to treat others well. -- adapted from jacket

Based on private diaries, correspondence, and unpublished writings, George Rochberg, American Composer, reveals the impact of personal trauma on the creative and intellectual work of a leading postmodern composer.

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau''s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau''s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.--Dust jacket.

This Companion provides a chronological survey of Latin American poetry, analysis of modern trends and six succinct essays on the major figures.

A family memoir--as written by her granddaughter--of this prominent Catholic, writer, social activist, and co-founder of a movement dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor, offering a intimate portrait of this complicated woman and exploring the effects of her legacy on her daughter and grandchildren. --Adapted from publisher description.

Includes a partial Heming''s family tree.