Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second to Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden. For centuries, WASPs like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Friend noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics....

"Lusitania: She was a ship of dreams, carrying millionaires and aristocrats, actresses and impresarios, writers and suffragettes - a microcosm of the last years of the waning Edwardian Era and the coming influences of the Twentieth Century. When she left New York on her final voyage, she sailed from the New World to the Old; yet an encounter with the machinery of the New World, in the form of a primitive German U-Boat, sent her - and her gilded passengers...

A portrait of the Standard Oil heiress and legendary American trendsetter Millicent Rogers. Nobody knew how to live the high life like Millicent Rogers. Born into luxury, she lived in a whirl of beautiful homes, European vacations, exquisite clothing and handsome men. Here, Cherie Burns chronicles Rogers's glittering life from her days as a young girl afflicted with rheumatic fever to her Taos finale. A rebellious icon of the age, she eloped with...

"Is the father I wanted the father my children want me to be, too? Or is the father I got the father I've inevitably become? Almost everyone yearns to know their parents more thoroughly before they die, to solve some of those lifelong mysteries. Maybe, just maybe, those answers will help you live your own life. But life doesn't stop to wait. In his fifties, writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and father and trying to grasp who he is...