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Book Edison

Download or read book Edison written by Edmund Morris and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Morris comes a revelatory new biography ofThomas Alva Edison, the most prolific genius in American history.

Book Colonel Roosevelt

Download or read book Colonel Roosevelt written by Edmund Morris and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “Colonel Roosevelt is compelling reading, and [Edmund] Morris is a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level. . . . A moving, beautifully rendered account.”—Fred Kaplan, The Washington Post This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, marks the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine? Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, this masterwork recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. “Hair-raising . . . awe-inspiring . . . a worthy close to a trilogy sure to be regarded as one of the best studies not just of any president, but of any American.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Download or read book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt written by Edmund Morris and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of Modern Library’s 100 best nonfiction books of all time • One of Esquire’s 50 best biographies of all time “A towering biography . . . a brilliant chronicle.”—Time This classic biography is the story of seven men—a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician—who merged at age forty-two to become the youngest President in history. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook 8,150 hands. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk—and then you go home to wring the personality out of your clothes.” The rest of this book tells the story of TR’s irresistible rise to power. During the years 1858–1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail, asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. Fresh out of Harvard, he simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New York State Assembly. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police commissioner in New York City. As assistant secretary of the navy, he almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. After leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the governorship of New York. In what he called his “spare hours” he fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. Seven months later, an assassin’s bullet gave TR the national leadership he had always craved. His is a story so prodigal in its variety, so surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated it as a series of haphazard episodes. This book, the only full study of TR’s pre-presidential years, shows that he was an inevitable chief executive. “It was as if he were subconsciously aware that he was a man of many selves,” the author writes, “and set about developing each one in turn, knowing that one day he would be President of all the people.”

Book Dutch

    Book Details:
  • Author : Edmund Morris
  • Publisher : Modern Library
  • Release : 2011-10-19
  • ISBN : 0307791424
  • Pages : 909 pages

Download or read book Dutch written by Edmund Morris and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 909 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the only biography ever authorized by a sitting President--yet written with complete interpretive freedom--is as revolutionary in method as it is formidable in scholarship. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first literary guests was Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris developed a fascination for the genial yet inscrutable President and, after Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, put aside the second volume of his life of Roosevelt to become an observing eye and ear at the White House. During thirteen years of obsessive archival research and interviews with Reagan and his family, friends, admirers and enemies (the book's enormous dramatis personae includes such varied characters as Mikhail Gorbachev, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elie Wiesel, Mario Savio, François Mitterrand, Grant Wood, and Zippy the Pinhead), Morris lived what amounted to a doppelgänger life, studying the young "Dutch," the middle-aged "Ronnie," and the septuagenarian Chief Executive with a closeness and dispassion, not to mention alternations of amusement, horror,and amazed respect, unmatched by any other presidential biographer. This almost Boswellian closeness led to a unique literary method whereby, in the earlier chapters of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Morris's biographical mind becomes in effect another character in the narrative, recording long-ago events with the same eyewitness vividness (and absolute documentary fidelity) with which the author later describes the great dramas of Reagan's presidency, and the tragedy of a noble life now darkened by dementia. "I quite understand," the author has remarked, "that readers will have to adjust, at first, to what amounts to a new biographical style. But the revelations of this style, which derive directly from Ronald Reagan's own way of looking at his life, are I think rewarding enough to convince them that one of the most interesting characters in recent American history looms here like a colossus."

Book Theodore Rex

Download or read book Theodore Rex written by Edmund Morris and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A shining portrait of a presciently modern political genius maneuvering in a gilded age of wealth, optimism, excess and American global ascension.”—San Francisco Chronicle WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY • “[Theodore Rex] is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison.”—Times Literary Supplement Theodore Rex is the story—never fully told before—of Theodore Roosevelt’s two world-changing terms as President of the United States. A hundred years before the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, “TR” succeeded to power in the aftermath of an act of terrorism. Youngest of all our chief executives, he rallied a stricken nation with his superhuman energy, charm, and political skills. He proceeded to combat the problems of race and labor relations and trust control while making the Panama Canal possible and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But his most historic achievement remains his creation of a national conservation policy, and his monument millions of acres of protected parks and forest. Theodore Rex ends with TR leaving office, still only fifty years old, his future reputation secure as one of our greatest presidents.

Book Edmund Morris s Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy Bundle

Download or read book Edmund Morris s Theodore Roosevelt Trilogy Bundle written by Edmund Morris and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive trilogy of biographies chronicling the storied life of the United States’ youngest President, Theodore Roosevelt—a consummate writer, soldier, naturalist, and politician—and his two world-changing terms in office. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “One of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment.”—The New York Times Book Review “A towering biography.”—Time Theodore Rex Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography “A masterpiece . . . A great president has finally found a great biographer.”—The Washington Post “As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison.”—Times Literary Supplement Colonel Roosevelt “Hair-raising . . . awe-inspiring . . . a worthy close to a trilogy sure to be regarded as one of the best studies not just of any president, but of any American.”—San Francisco Chronicle “[A] splendid and indispensable study of America’s twenty-sixth president . . . Morris is a superb chronicler of Roosevelt’s busy, peripatetic life. . . . Abraham Lincoln may embody America’s soul, but Theodore Roosevelt has America’s heart.”—Chicago Tribune

Book Ten Acres Enough

    Book Details:
  • Author : Edmund Morris
  • Publisher : University of Michigan Library
  • Release : 1866
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 256 pages

Download or read book Ten Acres Enough written by Edmund Morris and published by University of Michigan Library. This book was released on 1866 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Ten Acres Enough

Download or read book Ten Acres Enough written by Edmund Morris and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The New World

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard B. Morris
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1963
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 180 pages

Download or read book The New World written by Richard B. Morris and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Last of the Southern Girls

Download or read book The Last of the Southern Girls written by Willie Morris and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1994-08-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carol Hollywell is beautiful, smart, elegant, and charming. A debutante from De Soto Point, Arkansas, and a recent graduate of Ole Miss, she is heir to a good southern name and a small southern fortune. She knows what she wants and, more important, knows how to get it. She is, in other words, the prototypical southern belle, a Scarlett O’Hara for the 1950s, and when she moves to Washington, D.C., in 1957, she sets the town on its ear. Willie Morris’ cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed novel (loosely based on a real-life figure) follows this headstrong woman from her arrival at the Capital and traces the ups and downs of her life in the political and social whirl of the city over the next decade and a half. Eventually, she becomes romantically involved with a prominent congressman—an idealist, a reformer, a man perhaps headed for the very pinnacle of political life. It is at first a dazzling alliance, yet the genuine satisfactions they find in their relationship cannot long withstand the pressures of the ambitions both of them harbor. The very drives that initially brought them together in the end propel their love affair into jeopardy. Morris paints a devastatingly accurate portrait not only of a power-hungry woman but also of the society that feeds such hunger. His descriptions of Washington and its denizens—the politicos, the journalists, the socialites, and the hangers-on—are nothing short of breathtaking.

Book Doctor Always On Call

Download or read book Doctor Always On Call written by Robert Morris and published by . This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Morris II recorded eight hours of interviews with his father, Robert Morris, MD (1904-1990), from which he drafted an autobiography and presented it to his dad on his 85th birthday. Until Dr. Morris' death 15 months later, they collaborated to correct and add to the original memories. Dr. Morris' career was unique in several ways: He dropped out of medical school twice, returning to farming, then vowed that he'd become a doctor or die. The third time in medical school, he led his class most quarters. Married a nurse and settling in the village of Medina (pop. 400) in 1935, his practice and reputation -- especially as a diagnostician--grew until his death. He made home visits extending to five counties, the last doctor to do so in this area, delivering some 2000 babies in the home, while also serving in four hospitals. He was a devout Christian and lay leader in his church. Two of his daughters married doctors, two others became ending as a writer. Dr. Morris tells both painful and humorous stories about his life.

Book The Conservative Revolution

Download or read book The Conservative Revolution written by Lee Edwards and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999-07-23 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The triumph of the conservative movement in reshaping American politics is one of the great untold stories of the past fifty years. At the end of World War II, hardly anyone in public life would admit to being a conservative, but as Lee Edwards shows in this magisterial work, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a small group of committed men and women began to chip away at the liberal colossus, and their descendants would scale the ramparts of power in the 1980s and 1990s. Not even the fall of Newt Gingrich has changed the indisputable fact that the movement has truly rewritten the rules of American political life, and the republic will never be the same. Edwards tells the stories of how conservatives built a movement from the ground up by starting magazines, by building grass-roots organizations, and by seizing control of the Republican party from those who espoused collaboration with the liberals and promised only to manage the welfare state more efficiently and not to dismantle it. But most of all he tells the story of four men, four leaders who put their personal stamp on this movement and helped to turn it into the most important political force in our country today: * Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," the beacon of conservative principle during the lean Roosevelt and Truman years * Barry Goldwater, "Mr. Conservative," the flinty Westerner who inspired a new generation * Ronald Reagan, "Mr. President," the optimist whose core beliefs were sturdy enough to subdue an evil empire * Newt Gingrich, "Mr. Speaker," the fiery visionary who won a Congress but lost control of it By their example and vision, these men brought intellectual and ideological stability to an often fractions conservative movement and held the high ground against the pragmatists who would compromise conservative principles for transitory political advantage. And through their efforts and those of their supporters, they transformed the American political landscape so thoroughly that a Democratic president would one day proclaim, "The era of big government is over." Political history in the grand style, The Conservative Revolution is the definitive book on a conservative movement that not only has left its mark on our century but is poised to shape the century about to dawn.

Book They Marched Into Sunlight

Download or read book They Marched Into Sunlight written by David Maraniss and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-10-14 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Maraniss tells the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967. With meticulous and captivating detail, They Marched Into Sunlight brings that catastrophic time back to life while examining questions about the meaning of dissent and the official manipulation of truth—issues that are as relevant today as they were decades ago. In a seamless narrative, Maraniss weaves together the stories of three very different worlds: the death and heroism of soldiers in Vietnam, the anger and anxiety of antiwar students back home, and the confusion and obfuscating behavior of officials in Washington. To understand what happens to the people in these interconnected stories is to understand America's anguish. Based on thousands of primary documents and 180 on-the-record interviews, the book describes the battles that evoked cultural and political conflicts that still reverberate.

Book This Living Hand

Download or read book This Living Hand written by Edmund Morris and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the multitalented biographer Edmund Morris (who writes with equal virtuosity about Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) was a schoolboy in colonial Kenya, one of his teachers told him, “You have the most precious gift of all—originality.” That quality is abundantly evident in this selection of essays. They cover forty years in the life of a maverick intellectual who can be, at whim, astonishingly provocative, self-mockingly funny, and richly anecdotal. (The title essay, a tribute to Reagan in cognitive decline, is poignant in the extreme.) Whether Morris is analyzing images of Barack Obama or the prose style of President Clinton, or exploring the riches of the New York Public Library Dance Collection, or interviewing the novelist Nadine Gordimer, or proposing a hilarious “Diet for the Musically Obese,” a continuous cross-fertilization is going on in his mind. It mixes the cultural pollens of Africa, Britain, and the United States, and propogates hybrid flowers—some fragrant, some strange, some a shock to conventional sensibilities. Repeatedly in This Living Hand, Morris celebrates the physicality of artistic labor, and laments the glass screen that today’s e-devices interpose between inspiration and execution. No presidential biographer has ever had so literary a “take” on his subjects: he discerns powers of poetic perception even in the obsessively scientific Edison. Nor do most writers on music have the verbal facility to articulate, as Morris does, what it is about certain sounds that soothe the savage breast. His essay on the pathology of Beethoven’s deafness breaks new ground in suggesting that tinnitus may explain some of the weird aural effects in that composer’s works. Masterly monographs on the art of biography, South Africa in the last days of apartheid, the romance of the piano, and the role of imagination in nonfiction are juxtaposed with enchanting, almost unclassifiable pieces such as “The Bumstitch: Lament for a Forgotten Fruit” (Morris suspects it may have grown in the Garden of Eden); “The Anticapitalist Conspiracy: A Warning” (an assault on The Chicago Manual of Style); “Nuages Gris: Colors in Music, Literature, and Art”; and the uproarious “Which Way Does Sir Dress?”, about ordering a suit from the most expensive tailor in London. Uniquely illustrated with images that the author describes as indispensable to his creative process, This Living Hand is packed with biographical insights into such famous personalities as Daniel Defoe, Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Glenn Gould, Jasper Johns, W. G. Sebald, and Winnie the Pooh—not to mention a gallery of forgotten figures whom Morris lovingly restores to “life.” Among these are the pianist Ferruccio Busoni, the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the novelist James Gould Cozzens, and sixteen so-called “Undistinguished Americans,” contributors to an anthology of anonymous memoirs published in 1902. Reviewing that book for The New Yorker, Morris notes that even the most unlettered persons have, on occasion, “power to send forth surprise flashes, illuminating not only the dark around them but also more sophisticated shadows—for example, those cast by public figures who will not admit to private failings, or by philosophers too cerebral to state a plain truth.” The author of This Living Hand is not an ordinary person, but he too sends forth surprise flashes, never more dazzlingly than in his final essay, “The Ivo Pogorelich of Presidential Biography.”

Book Reagan

Download or read book Reagan written by Bob Spitz and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling biographer Bob Spitz, a full and rich biography of an epic American life, capturing what made Ronald Reagan both so beloved and so transformational. More than five years in the making, based on hundreds of interviews and access to previously unavailable documents, and infused with irresistible storytelling charm, Bob Spitz's REAGAN stands fair to be the first truly post-partisan biography of our 40th President, and thus a balm for our own bitterly divided times. It is the quintessential American triumph, brought to life with cinematic vividness: a young man is born into poverty and raised in a series of flyspeck towns in the Midwest by a pious mother and a reckless, alcoholic, largely absent father. Severely near-sighted, the boy lives in his own world, a world of the popular books of the day, and finds his first brush with popularity, even fame, as a young lifeguard. Thanks to his first great love, he imagines a way out, and makes the extraordinary leap to go to college, a modest school by national standards, but an audacious presumption in the context of his family's station. From there, the path is only very dimly lit, but it leads him, thanks to his great charm and greater luck, to a solid career as a radio sportscaster, and then, astonishingly, fatefully, to Hollywood. And the rest, as they say, is history. Bob Spitz's REAGAN is an absorbing, richly detailed, even revelatory chronicle of the full arc of Ronald Reagan's epic life - giving full weight to the Hollywood years, his transition to politics and rocky but ultimately successful run as California governor, and ultimately, of course, his iconic presidency, filled with storm and stress but climaxing with his peace talks with the Soviet Union that would serve as his greatest legacy. It is filled with fresh assessments and shrewd judgments, and doesn't flinch from a full reckoning with the man's strengths and limitations. This is no hagiography: Reagan was never a brilliant student, of anything, and his disinterest in hard-nosed political scheming, while admirable, meant that this side of things was left to the other people in his orbit, not least his wife Nancy; sometimes this delegation could lead to chaos, and worse. But what emerges as a powerful signal through all the noise is an honest inherent sweetness, a gentleness of nature and willingness to see the good in people and in this country, that proved to be a tonic for America in his time, and still is in ours. It was famously said that FDR had a first-rate disposition and a second-rate intellect. Perhaps it is no accident that only FDR had as high a public approval rating leaving office as Reagan did, or that in the years since Reagan has been closing in on FDR on rankings of Presidential greatness. Written with love and irony, which in a great biography is arguably the same thing, Bob Spitz's masterpiece will give no comfort to partisans at either extreme; for the rest of us, it is cause for celebration.

Book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Download or read book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt written by Edmund Morris and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 961 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE AND THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of Modern Library’s 100 best nonfiction books of all time • One of Esquire’s 50 best biographies of all time “A towering biography . . . a brilliant chronicle.”—Time This classic biography is the story of seven men—a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician—who merged at age forty-two to become the youngest President in history. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New Year’s Day, 1907, when TR, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook 8,150 hands. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk—and then you go home to wring the personality out of your clothes.” The rest of this book tells the story of TR’s irresistible rise to power. During the years 1858–1901, Theodore Roosevelt transformed himself from a frail, asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. Fresh out of Harvard, he simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New York State Assembly. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police commissioner in New York City. As assistant secretary of the navy, he almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. After leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the governorship of New York. In what he called his “spare hours” he fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. Seven months later, an assassin’s bullet gave TR the national leadership he had always craved. His is a story so prodigal in its variety, so surprising in its turns of fate, that previous biographers have treated it as a series of haphazard episodes. This book, the only full study of TR’s pre-presidential years, shows that he was an inevitable chief executive. “It was as if he were subconsciously aware that he was a man of many selves,” the author writes, “and set about developing each one in turn, knowing that one day he would be President of all the people.”

Book Rage for Fame

Download or read book Rage for Fame written by Sylvia Jukes Morris and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-02-06 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “Her technique was simple: aim for the top,” an envious colleague wrote of Clare Boothe Luce. No American woman of the twentieth century aimed so accurately, or rose so far, as this legendary playwright, politician, and social seductress. Born in New York’s Spanish Harlem, with nothing to recommend her but beauty, ferocious intelligence, and dry wit, she transformed herself into the youthful managing editor of Vanity Fair. She married two millionaires and wrote three Broadway hits, including the biting satire, The Women. Her second husband, Henry Luce—the publisher of Time, Fortune, and later at her suggestion Life—was only one of the dozens of men she entranced. Adding politics and power to journalism and drama, Clare used sex, street smarts, acid humor, and money to plot a career more improbable than anything in her own fiction. Not content with mere wealth and the acclaim of transatlantic café society, Clare Boothe Luce confessed to a “rage for fame.” This extraordinary book—the result of more than fifteen years of research by Sylvia Jukes Morris, her chosen biographer—tells how she achieved it. Praise for Rage for Fame “A model biography . . . the sort that only real writers can write.”—Gore Vidal, The New Yorker “[The] riveting first part of a two-volume biography . . . Relentlessly candid, meticulously documented, Morris’s book traces [Clare Boothe] Luce’s rocketing rise from illegitimacy and poverty to wealth, power and fame.”—Hartford Courant “Powerful and resonant, admiring at times, always critical, at times searing, but ultimately fair.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “Crammed with enough drama for several mini-series.”—The New York Times “An important book about an important figure . . . a stunning feat of biography.”—Forbes “A dishy biography that is also a formidable work of research.”—Slate “One of those rare books where the reader dreads the final page.”—Newport News Daily Press