New Release Books in Biographies & Memoirs

The story of the career, music, and life of the man who made drums a solo instrument, symbolized the swing era, and is still internationally recognized as “the world''s greatest drummer.”

Traces the life of Benjamin, the first Jewish U.S. Senator, and the Confederate Secretary of State, and describes his exile in England

A biography of the self-educated electronics genius who invented virtually every technique of modern sound recording discusses his sixty-year career, his invention of the solid-body electric guitar, and his legacy. 30,000 first printing.

An historian of the Mormon Church draws on diaries and letters not available to previous biographers to profile the highly gifted and controversial church leader

The artist, writer, and director of such films as "Johnny Belinda" and "How to Marry a Millionaire" recalls his artist''s life in the Paris of the twenties, his Hollywood years and the celebrities he encountered, and his long, productive life in the arts

Traces the life of the jazz saxophonist, shares the comments of musicians who worked with or were influenced by him, and describes his contributions to the development of modern jazz

A biography of film star, Peter Finch, covers his childhood in Australia, his discovery by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, his development as an actor, and his personal life

This volume provides lively and clearly written expositions of those figures who have done most to shape our views in the period since 1914. Music, cinema, drama, art, fiction, poetry and philosophy are just some of the fields covered

This book argues that Gertrude Stein shifted the thrust of the genre of autobiography away from involvement in the past and the creation of the self as an artifact and towards a consciousness, on the part of both writer and reader, of knowing and writing as ongoing process.

The editor of twelve volumes of Walter Scott''s letters has written a new life, founded upon extensive research. The book is based upon the author''s lectures at Toronto University & throws new light on Scott''s financial affairs.

Written by one of the world''s outstanding music historians and critics, the late Alfred Einstein, this classic study of Mozart''s character and works brings to light many new facts about his relationship with his family, his susceptibility to ambitious women, and his associations with musicalcontemporaries, as well as offering a penetrating analysis of his operas, piano music, chamber music, and symphonies.

This satire of imaginary memoirs purports to be by Eginhardus, Abbot of Seligenstadt, but is in fact a contemporary satire by Mrs Mary de la Rivière Manley, written as a continuation of her ''Secret memoirs and manners of several persons...''.