by Edward Jay Epstein (1996)
Edward Jay Epstein's investigation into the life of Armand Hammer exposes a tale of fraud, corruption, and personal betrayal that was carried out on such a grand scale and over such a long period of time that it is surely unique. Hammer was ninety-two when he died in 1990. A lengthy front-page obituary in The New York Times lauded him as a successful businessman "who long sought peace between the United States and the Soviet Union and financed research for a cancer cure." His philanthropy was noted, along with his vast art collection and his elevated social connections. But the official version of Hammer's life, which incorporated many of the major figures and key events of the twentieth century, was in fact a myth, carefully nurtured and embellished for nearly seventy years. Aided by newly available sources, Epstein has put together a gripping portrait of a ruthless, audaciously manipulative opportunist whose self-inventions have until now been widely accepted. Epstein gained unprecedented access to FBI files, SEC documents, and files on the Hammer family kept by Soviet intelligence agencies since the 1920's. He interviewed Hammer's mistresses, family, and close friends as well as the shadowy figures who assisted him in business deals. During his investigation, Epstein discovered that for many years Hammer had, like Richard Nixon, secretly taped conversations, many of them dealing with illegal activity. These tapes give an intimate view of a master con man at work.
Daniel Mark Epstein
Sister Aimee rose to God's challenge, but also found herself a celebrity and personality in the 1920's and 1930's. Epstein traces her history from its roots in her ministry work to her mission and stardom in Hollywood as a revivalist.
Anatole Dolgoff
Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990) was a house painter by trade and member of the IWW from the early 1920s until his death. Sam, along with his wife Esther, was at the center of American anarchism for seventy years, bridging the movement's generations, providing continuity between past and present, and creating some of the most vital books and journals from the Great Depression through WWII, the Civil Rights era, and into the last decade of the century. This instant classic of radical history, written with passion and humor by his son, conjures images of a lost New York City, the faded power of immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, and the blurred lines dividing proletarian and intellectual culture.
James Lincoln Collier
Louis Armstrong. "Satchmo." To millions of fans, he was just a great entertainer. But to jazz aficionados, he was one of the most important musicians of our times--not only a key figure in the history of jazz but a formative influence on all of 20th-century popular music. Set against thebackdrop of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York during the "jazz age", Collier re-creates the saga of an old-fashioned black man making it in a white world. He chronicles Armstrong's rise as a musician, his scrapes with the law, his relationships with four wives, and his frequent feuds with fellowmusicians Earl Hines and Zutty Singleton. He also sheds new light on Armstrong's endless need for approval, his streak of jealousy, and perhaps most important, what some consider his betrayal of his gift as he opted for commercial success and stardom...
Lois Gould
Compelling and multilayered, Mommy Dressing recounts the author's bittersweet girlhood as the daughter of one of America's first star designers. Lois Gould now offers a memoir that is at once a personal history of her family and a fascinating portrayal of New York's emergence as the world's fashion and glamour capital. Both stories revolve around the central figure of Jo Copeland, a brilliant artist and working mother whose career spanned four decades, from the birth of New York fashion in the 1920s to the close of her own design studio in the 1960s. The story of Jo Copeland's rise to success - in the company of other such early designers as Hattie Carnegie, Claire McCardell, and Vera Maxwell - is also the story of the headstrong, difficult rise of American fashion. And through the lens of Lois Gould's childhood, an interior world as remote and complex as the mother she strove to understand, readers are given a glimpse of the distant landscape of beautiful exteriors that her mother both created and inspired.