'It seems certain that the apple in Eden grew on the tree of knowledge of elsewhere. Up until that point Adam and Eve were happy where they were. Then they ate the apple and it was slightly disappointing to them and they started to wonder if maybe...
When he arrived in Moscow in 1851, a young Leo Tolstoy set himself three immediate aims: to gamble, to marry, and to obtain a post. At that time he managed only the first. The writer's momentous life would be full of forced breaks and abrupt...
Within days of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the far-reaching arm of American airpower sprang into action. Cockrell writes lyrically about flying, and about the emotional and intellectual satisfaction enjoyed by those who fly. His...
t would be too easy to say Vidal's second memoir picks up where Palimpsest left off; as in that earlier book, he essentially lets his memories flow at will, often revisiting yet again the stories of his Washington childhood. The general focus,...
The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton is a confused place. His father, a brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic at home whilst his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who escaped Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war,...
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has...
Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk...
When he was just six years old, Zachary Lazar's father, Edward, was shot dead by hit men in a Phoenix, Arizona parking garage. The year was 1975, a time when, according to the Arizona Republic, "land-fraud artists roamed the state in sharp suits,...
The African is a short autobiographical account of a pivotal moment in Nobel-Prize-winning author J. M. G. Le Cl zio's childhood. In 1948, young Le Clezio, with his mother and brother, left behind a still-devastated Europe to join his father, a...