Title: Willie Brown: a biography 
Author: Richardson, James 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive biography of Willie Brown, one of California's most enduring and controversial politicians. Audacious, driven, talented - Brown has dominated California politics longer and more completely than any other public figure. James Richardson, a senior writer for The Sacramento Bee , takes us from Brown's childhood, through his years as Speaker of the State Assembly, to his election as San Francisco's mayor. Along the way we get a riveting, behind-the-scenes account of three decades of California politics.   [brief]
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Title: May her likes be multiplied: biography and gender politics in Egypt 
Author: Booth, Marilyn
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Women's Studies | Literature | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: Marilyn Booth's elegantly conceived study reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male-authored, in the late nineteenth century short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. Booth uses over five hundred "famous women" biographies - which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu, and Lucy Stone - to demonstrate how these narratives prescribed complex role models for middle-class girls, in a context where nationalist programs and emerging feminisms made defining the ideal female citizen an urgent matter.Booth begins by asking how cultural traditions shaped women's biography, and to whom the Egyptian biographies were directed. The biographies were published at a time of great cultural awakening in Egypt, when social and political institutions were in upheaval. The stories suggested that Islam could be flexible on social practice and gender, holding out the possibility for women to make their own lives. Yet ultimately they indicate that women would find it extremely difficult to escape the nationalist ideal: the nuclear family with "woman" at its center. This conflict remains central to Egyptian politics today, and in her final chapter Booth examines Islamic biographies of women's lives that have been published in more recent years.   [brief]
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Title: Hollywood diva: a biography of Jeanette MacDonald
Author: Turk, Edward Baron
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | American Studies | Gender Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Jeanette MacDonald, the movie musical's first superstar, was an American original whose onscreen radiance mirrored a beguiling real-life personality. Based in large part on the author's exclusive access to MacDonald's private papers, including her unpublished memoir, this vivid, often touching biography transports us to a time when lavish musical films were major cultural events and a worldwide public eagerly awaited each new chance to fall under the singer's spell. Edward Baron Turk shows how MacDonald brilliantly earned her Hollywood nickname of "Iron Butterfly," and why she deserves a privileged position in the history of music and motion pictures.What made MacDonald a woman for our times, readers will discover, was her uncommon courage: Onscreen, the actress portrayed strong charcters in pursuit of deep emotional fulfillment, often in defiance of social orthodoxy, while offscreen she personified energy, discipline, and practical intellect. Drawing on interviews with individuals who knew her and on MacDonald's own words, Turk brings to life the intricate relations between the star and her legendary costars Maurice Chevalier, Clark Gable, and, above all, baritone Nelson Eddy. He reveals the deep crushes she inspired in movie giants Ernst Lubitsch and Louis B. Mayer and the extraordinary love story she shared with her husband of twenty-seven years, actor Gene Raymond.More than simply another star biography, however, this is a chronicle of American music from 1920s Broadway to 1960s television, in which Turk details MacDonald's fearless efforts to break down distinctions between High Art and mass-consumed entertainment. Hollywood Diva will attract fans of opera and concert music as much as enthusiasts of the great Hollywood musicals. It is first-rate cultural and film history.   [brief]
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Title: Henry Edwards Huntington: a biography
Author: Thorpe, James Ernest 1915-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | California and the West | Californian and Western History | United States History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: A legendary book collector, a connoisseur of fine art, a horticulturist, and a philanthropist, Henry Edwards Huntington is perhaps best known as the founder of the world-renowned Huntington Library, Art Gallery, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. James Thorpe's comprehensive biography of Huntington tells the richly human story of the man who became America's greatest book collector and was a leading figure in the development of southern California.Henry Edwards Huntington was born in New York State in 1850. He began working at the age of 17, eventually moved to California, and in later years was hailed for his vision in developing the street railway system that created the structure of the Los Angeles area. Always a lover of books, Huntington acquired many spectacular volumes - among them the complete Gutenberg Bible on vellum and the library of the Earl of Bridgewater. He also built a splendid art collection and established a grand botanical garden on the grounds of the buildings that would house his art and books. Then, in an act of philanthropy seldom equaled, he gave these great treasures to the public.The intimate side of Huntington's life appears in these pages, too. Thorpe has culled a vast trove of private letters, diaries, and other documents that reveal Huntington's exceptional personal qualities. The author's well-rounded biography of this unassuming yet gifted American is also richly evocative of the times in which Henry Edwards Huntington lived.   [brief]
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Title: Stravinsky and the Russian traditions: a biography of the works through Mavra
Author: Taruskin, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music.During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music.Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity - Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces . Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism" - the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art - and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music.Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed.Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.   [brief]
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Title: Fulk Nerra, the neo-Roman consul, 987-1040: a political biography of the Angevin count
Author: Bachrach, Bernard S 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Medieval Studies | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive biography of Fulk Nerra, an important medieval ruler, who came to power in his teens and rose to be master in the west of the French Kingdom. Descendant of warriors and administrators who served the French kings, Fulk in turn built the state that provided a foundation for the vast Angevin empire later constructed by his descendants.Bernard Bachrach finds the terms "constructed" and "built" more than metaphorical in relation to Fulk's career. He shows how Fulk and the Angevin counts who followed him based their long-term state building policy on Roman strategies and fortifications described by Vegetius. This creative adaptation of Roman ideas and tactics, according to Bachrach, was the key to Fulk's successful consolidation of political power. Students of medieval and military history will find here a colorful, impressively researched biography.   [brief]
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Title: Venus on wheels: two decades of dialogue on disability, biography, and being female in America
Author: Frank, Gelya 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Gender Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In 1976 Gelya Frank began writing about the life of Diane DeVries, a woman born with all the physical and mental equipment she would need to live in our society--except arms and legs. Frank was 28 years old, DeVries 26. This remarkable book--by turns moving, funny, and revelatory--records the relationship that developed between the women over the next twenty years. An empathic listener and participant in DeVries's life, and a scholar of the feminist and disability rights movements, Frank argues that Diane DeVries is a perfect example of an American woman coming of age in the second half of the twentieth century. By addressing the dynamics of power in ethnographic representation, Frank--anthropology's leading expert on life history and life story methods--lays the critical groundwork for a new genre, "cultural biography." Challenged to examine the cultural sources of her initial image of DeVries as limited and flawed, Frank discovers that DeVries is gutsy, buoyant, sexy--and definitely not a victim. While she analyzes the portrayal of women with disabilities in popular culture--from limbless circus performers to suicidal heroines on the TV news--Frank's encounters with DeVries lead her to come to terms with her own "invisible disabilities" motivating the study. Drawing on anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, narrative theory, law, and the history of medicine, Venus on Wheels is an intellectual tour de force.   [brief]
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Title: Sensory biographies: lives and deaths among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists
Author: Desjarlais, Robert R
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Buddhism | Aging
Publisher's Description: Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal. It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.   [brief]
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Title: Best friends and marriage: exchange among women 
Author: Oliker, Stacey J
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Gender Studies | Popular Culture | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this fascinating book, Stacey Oliker delves into the intimate realm of women's friendships and explores the complex relation between friendship and family life. Based on a series of interviews with women from the middle and working classes, this work reveals the distinctive values of best friendship and marriage, how husbands and their wives' friends feel about each other, and how women friends talk about marriage problems. Best Friends and Marriage suggests that close friendships provide women with unique sources of intimacy, affection, identity, and community. Contradicting a widespread view of families as isolated and self-contained private worlds, Oliker suggests that "companionate marriage" did not replace the friendship and intimacy that pervaded communities of past times, but rather, that intimate friendship and companionate marriage evolved intertwined. Examining the cultures and dynamics of friendship, Oliker shows how women's position in society constrains the choices they make at home and in friendship, and shapes how best friends perceive each other's best interests. Best Friends and Marriage breaks ground in linking together the institutions of family and friendship, and in explaining intimacy in sociological and historical as well as psychological terms. In this way, a richly descriptive book also extends theory in the areas of family, community, and gender inequality.   [brief]
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Title: Almost chosen people: oblique biographies in the American grain
Author: Zuckerman, Michael 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | United States History | American Literature | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Few historians are bold enough to go after America's sacred cows in their very own pastures. But Michael Zuckerman is no ordinary historian, and this collection of his essays is no ordinary book.In his effort to remake the meaning of the American tradition, Zuckerman takes the entire sweep of American history for his province. The essays in this collection, including two never before published and a new autobiographical introduction, range from early New England settlements to the hallowed corridors of modern Washington. Among his subjects are Puritans and Southern gentry, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Spock, P. T. Barnum and Ronald Reagan. Collecting scammers and scoundrels, racists and rebels, as well as the purest genius, he writes to capture the unadorned American character.Recognized for his energy, eloquence, and iconoclasm, Zuckerman is known for provoking - and sometimes almost seducing - historians into rethinking their most cherished assumptions about the American past. Now his many fans, and readers of every persuasion, can newly appreciate the distinctive talents of one of America's most powerful social critics.   [brief]
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Title: Douglas Hyde: a maker of modern Ireland 
Author: Dunleavy, Janet Egleson
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | European History
Publisher's Description: In 1938, at an age when most men are long retired, Douglas Hyde (1860-1949) was elected first president of modern Ireland. The unanimous choice of delegates from all political factions, he was no stranger to public life or to fame. Until now, however, there has been no full-scale biography of this important historical and literary figure.Known as a tireless nationalist, Hyde attracted attention on both sides of the Atlantic from a very early age. He was hailed by Yeats as a source of the Irish Literary Renaissance; earned international recognition for his contributions to the theory and methodology of folklore; joined Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, George Moore, and Edward Martyn in shaping an Irish theater; and as president of the Gaelic League worked for twenty-two years on behalf of Irish Ireland.Yet in spite of these and other accomplishments Hyde remained an enigmatic figure throughout his life. Why did he become an Irish nationalist? Why were his two terms as Irish Free State senator so curiously passive? Why, when he had threatened it earlier, did he oppose the use of physical force in 1916? How did he nevertheless retain the support of his countrymen and the trust and friendship of such a man as Eamon de Valera? Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland dispels for the first time the myths and misinformation that have obscured the private life of this extraordinary scholar and statesman.   [brief]
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Title: Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the politics of the New Age
Author: Musto, Ronald G
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | European Studies | Medieval History | Medieval Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | Classical Politics | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: On May 20, 1347, Cola di Rienzo overthrew without violence the turbulent rule of Rome's barons and the absentee popes. A young visionary and the best political speaker of his time, Cola promised Rome a return to its former greatness. Ronald G. Musto's vivid biography of this charismatic leader - whose exploits have enlivened the work of poets, composers, and dramatists, as well as historians - peels away centuries of interpretation to reveal the realities of fourteenth-century Italy and to offer a comprehensive account of Cola's rise and fall. A man of modest origins, Cola gained a reputation as a talented professional with an unparalleled knowledge of Rome's classical remains. After earning the respect and friendship of Petrarch and the sponsorship of Pope Clement VI, Cola won the affections and loyalties of all classes of Romans. His buono stato established the reputation of Rome as the heralded New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse and quickly made the city a potent diplomatic and religious center that challenged the authority - and power - of both pope and emperor. At the height of Cola's rule, a conspiracy of pope and barons forced him to flee the city and live for years as a fugitive until he was betrayed and taken to Avignon to stand trial as a heretic. Musto relates the dramatic story of Cola's subsequent exoneration and return to central Italy as an agent of the new pope. But only weeks after he reestablished his government, he was slain by the Romans atop the Capitoline hill. In his exploration, Musto examines every known document pertaining to Cola's life, including papal, private, and diplomatic correspondence rarely used by earlier historians. With his intimate knowledge of historical Rome - its streets and ruins, its churches and palaces, from the busy Tiber riverfront to the lost splendor of the Capitoline - he brings a cinematic flair to this fascinating historical narrative.   [brief]
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Title: Surviving freedom: after the Gulag
Author: Bardach, Janusz
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | European Studies | Sociology | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: In 1941, as a Red Army soldier fighting the Nazis on the Belarussian front, Janusz Bardach was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Twenty-two years old, he had committed no crime. He was one of millions swept up in the reign of terror that Stalin perpetrated on his own people. In the critically acclaimed Man Is Wolf to Man, Bardach recounted his horrific experiences in the Kolyma labor camps in northeastern Siberia, the deadliest camps in Stalin's gulag system. In this sequel Bardach picks up the narrative in March 1946, when he was released. He traces his thousand-mile journey from the northeastern Siberian gold mines to Moscow in the period after the war, when the country was still in turmoil. He chronicles his reunion with his brother, a high-ranking diplomat in the Polish embassy in Moscow; his experiences as a medical student in the Stalinist Soviet Union; and his trip back to his hometown, where he confronts the shattering realization of the toll the war has taken, including the deaths of his wife, parents, and sister. In a trenchant exploration of loss, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and existential loneliness, Bardach plumbs his ordeal with honesty and compassion, affording a literary window into the soul of a Stalinist gulag survivor. Surviving Freedom is his moving account of how he rebuilt his life after tremendous hardship and personal loss. It is also a unique portrait of postwar Stalinist Moscow as seen through the eyes of a person who is both an insider and outsider. Bardach's journey from prisoner back to citizen and from labor camp to freedom is an inspiring tale of the universal human story of suffering and recovery.   [brief]
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Title: The maiden of Ludmir: a Jewish holy woman and her world
Author: Deutsch, Nathaniel
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Women's Studies | European History | Judaism | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Hannah Rochel Verbermacher, a Hasidic holy woman known as the Maiden of Ludmir, was born in early-nineteenth-century Russia and became famous as the only woman in the three-hundred-year history of Hasidism to function as a rebbe - or charismatic leader - in her own right. Nathaniel Deutsch follows the traces left by the Maiden in both history and legend to fully explore her fascinating story for the first time. The Maiden of Ludmir offers powerful insights into the Jewish mystical tradition, into the Maiden's place within it, and into the remarkable Jewish community of Ludmir. Her biography ultimately becomes a provocative meditation on the complex relationships between history and memory, Judaism and modernity. History first finds the Maiden in the eastern European town of Ludmir, venerated by her followers as a master of the Kabbalah, teacher, and visionary, and accused by her detractors of being possessed by a dybbuk, or evil spirit. Deutsch traces the Maiden's steps from Ludmir to Ottoman Palestine, where she eventually immigrated and re-established herself as a holy woman. While the Maiden's story - including her adamant refusal to marry - recalls the lives of holy women in other traditions, it also brings to light the largely unwritten history of early-modern Jewish women. To this day, her transgressive behavior, a challenge to traditional Jewish views of gender and sexuality, continues to inspire debate and, sometimes, censorship within the Jewish community.   [brief]
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Title: Season of high adventure: Edgar Snow in China 
Author: Thomas, S. Bernard 1921-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | China | Autobiographies and Biographies | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1928, Edgar Snow (1905-1972) set out to see the world, hoping to make his mark as a travel-adventure writer. Shanghai was to be a mere stopover, but Snow stayed on in China for thirteen more years. The idealistic young Midwesterner became a journalist and ultimately developed close friendships with China's emerging revolutionary leaders. His 1938 classic, Red Star over China , strongly influenced American views of the Chinese Communists and is still in print nearly sixty years later.This biography breaks fresh ground with its unique and extensive use of Snow's diaries of over forty years. These writings convey Snow's private hopes and fears, his moods and motivations. Thomas skillfully links them with Snow's public writings and deeds. By recreating the milieu in which Snow worked in China, Thomas provides a clearer understanding of both the man and his times.Snow came to China devoid of any political agenda or sinological background. He returned home a politically astute China hand and famed journalist-author. His writing had taken on the nature of political action, which resulted in troubled soul-searching that Snow usually confined to his diary. Thomas's portrait of Ed Snow reveals a man caught up in an important historical moment, a man who profoundly influenced, and was influenced by, the events that swirled around him.   [brief]
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Title: Friends, brothers, and informants: fieldwork memoirs of Banaras 
Author: Kumar, Nita 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: "Why was Banaras such a mystery to me when I arrived in 1981? Was it ironically because I was an Indian and expected to have a privileged insight into it?"In this unusually personal, evocative account of her fieldwork experiences, Kumar tackles the dilemma of how a Western-trained Indian intellectual adapts to the field and builds deeply affecting relationships with strangers. She discloses what it is like to be a native researching her own culture, offering her fieldwork memoirs in all their spontaneity and candor.We see Banaras through her eyes when she first arrives: throngs of people, cramped and dark lodgings, unappetizing food, mischievous monkeys, and almost overwhelming filth. But as she establishes friendships, we are treated to her discoveries not only about the city and its people, but also about her place in this society.The familiar problems that face most anthropologists conducting fieldwork - of Self versus Other, objectivity versus bias, familiar circumstances versus new and dismaying ones - are given a surprising and complex dimension. Through a narration of her own experiences, the author demonstrates how personal locations - habits, preferences, expectations deriving from childhood memories, and areas of ignorance - impose themselves on the process of selection, observation, and interpretation in research.   [brief]
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Title: For the hell of it: the life and times of Abbie Hoffman
Author: Raskin, Jonah 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: American Studies | United States History | Politics | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: As cultural revolutionary, media celebrity, Yippie, lost soul, and tragic suicide, Abbie Hoffman embodied the contradictions of his era. In this riveting new biography, Jonah Raskin draws on his own twenty-year relationship with Hoffman; hundreds of interviews with friends, family members, and former comrades; and careful scrutiny of FBI files, court records, and public documents. For the Hell of It is a must-read not only for those interested in this ultimate iconoclast, but also for all who seek a fuller understanding of Abbie Hoffman's America.   [brief]
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Title: Migrant daughter: coming of age as a Mexican American woman
Author: Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel 1931-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Women's Studies | Chicano Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: Taking us from the open spaces of rural New Mexico and the fields of California's Great Central Valley to the intellectual milieu of student life in Berkeley during the 1950s, this memoir, based on an oral history by Mario T. García, is the powerful and moving testimonio of a young Mexican American woman's struggle to rise out of poverty. Migrant Daughter is the coming-of-age story of Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, who was born in Spanish-speaking New Mexico, moved with her family to California during the Depression to attend school and work as a farm laborer, and subsequently won a university scholarship, becoming one of the few Mexican Americans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, at that time. Giving a personal perspective on the conflicts of living in and between cultures, this eloquent story provides a rare glimpse into the life of a young Mexican American woman who achieved her dreams of obtaining a university education. In addition to the many fascinating details of everyday life the narrative provides, Mario T. García's introduction contextualizes the place and importance of Tywoniak's life. Both introduction and narrative illustrate the process by which Tywoniak negotiated her relation to ethnic identity and cultural allegiances, the ways in which she came to find education as a channel for breaking with fieldwork patterns of life, and the effect of migration on family and culture. This deeply personal memoir portrays a courageous Mexican American woman moving between many cultural worlds, a life story that at times parallels, and at times diverges from, the real life experiences of thousands of other, unnamed women.   [brief]
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Title: Ahead of the curve: David Baltimore's life in science
Author: Crotty, Shane 1974-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Autobiographies and Biographies | History of Science | Science
Publisher's Description: Shane Crotty's biography of David Baltimore details the life and work of one of the most brilliant, powerful, and controversial scientists of our time. Although only in his early sixties, Baltimore has made major discoveries in molecular biology, established the prestigious Whitehead Institute at MIT, been president of Rockefeller University, won the Nobel Prize, and been vilified by detractors in one of the most scandalous and protracted investigations of scientific fraud ever. He is now president of Caltech and a leader in the search for an AIDS vaccine. Crotty not only tells the compelling story of this larger-than-life figure, he also treats the reader to a lucid account of the amazing revolution that has occurred in biology during the past forty years. Basing his narrative on many personal interviews, Crotty recounts the milestones of Baltimore's career: completing his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University in eighteen months, participating in the anti - Vietnam War movement, winning a Nobel Prize at age thirty-seven for the codiscovery of reverse transcriptase, and co-organizing the recombinant DNA/genetic engineering moratorium. Along the way, readers learn what viruses are and what they do, what cancer is and how it happens, the complexities of the AIDS problem, how genetic engineering works, and why making a vaccine is a complicated process. And, as Crotty considers Baltimore's public life, he retells the famous scientific fraud saga and Baltimore's vindication after a decade of character assassination. Crotty possesses the alchemical skill of converting technical scientific history into entertaining prose as he conveys Baltimore's huge ambitions, intensity, scientific genius, attitude toward science and politics, and Baltimore's own view about what happened in the "Baltimore Affair." Ahead of the Curve shows why with his complex personality, keen involvement in public issues, and wide-ranging interests David Baltimore has not only shaped the face of American science as we know it today, but has also become a presence in our culture.   [brief]
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Title: The tragedy of Mariam, the fair queen of Jewry
Author: Cary, Elizabeth, Lady 1585 or 6-1639
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is the first original play by a woman to be published in England, and its author is the first English woman writer to be memorialized in a biography, which is included with this edition of the play. Mariam is a distinctive example of Renaissance drama that serves the desire of today's readers and scholars to know not merely how women were represented in the early modern period but also how they themselves perceived their own condition.With this textually emended and fully annotated edition, the play will now be accessible to all readers. The accompanying biography of Cary further enriches our knowledge of both domestic and religious conflicts in the seventeenth century.   [brief]
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