Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.

Recounts the accomplishments of President Obama during his eight years in office, considering his major successes and how he was able to govern while facing both racial hostility and unrealistic expectations. Barack Obama was once an unlikely candidate, but his successful campaign for the White House made him a worldwide sensation and a transformative figure even before he was inaugurated. Elected as the Iraq War and the Great Recession had discouraged...

"In 1965 Thomas Merton fulfilled a twenty-four-year-old dream and went to live as a hermit beyond the walls of his Trappist monastery. Seven months later, after a secret romance with a woman half his age, he was in danger of losing it all. Yet on the very day that his abbot uncovered the affair, Merton found solace in an unlikely place--the songs of Bob Dylan, who, as fate would have it, was experiencing his own personal and creative crises during...

Ackroyd takes readers from William of Orange's accession following the Glorious Revolution to the Regency, when the flamboyant Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of his mad father, George III. Late Stuart and Georgian England marked the creation of the great pillars of the English state, and was also a revolutionary era in English letters. It was also a time of extraordinary and unprecedented technological innovation, which saw England utterly and...

A group portrait of America's first President and the men who served with him to create the office shares insights into their personalities and the consequences of Washington's decision to heed or disregard specific advice.

Presents a portrait of five extraordinary figures--Ernest Shackleton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rachel Carson--to illuminate how great leaders are made in times of adversity and the diverse skills they summon in order to prevail.

Profiles Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of the most prominent and influential family in American politics. It is the first time in a major documentary television series that their individual stories have been interwoven into a single narrative. This seven-part, 14 hour film follows the Roosevelts for more than a century, from Theodore's birth in 1858 to Eleanor's death in 1962. Over the course of these years, Theodore would...

"Drawing on new research, including the diaries, memoirs, and personal letters of both Lenin and his friends, Victor Sebestyen's biography--the first in English in nearly two decades--is not only a political examination of one of the most important historical figures of the twentieth century, but a portrait of Lenin the man."-- "Victor Sebestyen's riveting biography of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin--the first major biography in English in nearly two decades--is...