"Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin. 1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years...

"In this incisive series of intellectual portraits, Adam Shatz, one of the Anglophone world's foremost essayists, charts the role of the committed intellectual. Through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, he shows how writers bind themselves to the project embodied in their work In a moving portrait of Edward Said, Shatz uncovers the profound role the cause of Palestinian liberation had on his life and writing. And via thinkers as diverse as Fouad Ajami,...

"A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger. The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of...

"A history of the British thinkers who developed the Enlightenment-era ideas and ideals that drove the American Revolution"-- "The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy -- and contested...

"Gerald Vizenor counters the cultural notions of dominance, false representations, and simulations of absence, and, by documents, experience, and theories, secures a narrative presence of Native Americans."--Publisher description.