She was there

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Israel Getzler

"Sukhanov stood at the centre of the Russian revolution as an active participant, keen observer and lively chronicler. He recorded the revolution's most stirring events in a vivid and remarkably honest seven-volume memoir where he took the measure of such leading figures as Lenin, Trotsky, Martov, Chernov, Tsereteli, Miliukov and many others. He played a major role in the early days of the Petrograd Soviet as founding member and ideologist; and, as editor and political columnist of the leading opposition newspaper, he was a pivotal figure in the political-intellectual ferment of the revolution. During the crucial agrarian debates of the 1920s, Sukhanov fearlessly championed the Russian village commune, the obshchina, against those Communist economists who prepared the party for Stalin's brutal collectivization policy. A defendant at the farcical Menshevik show-trial of March 1931, and subsequently the victim of a trumped-up charge of spying for Germany, Sukhanov was shot in June 1940 and only rehabilitated in 1992. His fate epitomizes the tragedy of those members of Russia's radical intelligentsia who sought a place for themselves in the Soviet system and were destroyed by it."--BOOK JACKET.

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Joan Bakewell

Inspired by her Guardian newspaper column 'Just 70', Joan Bakewell describes what her life is like at seventy, as well as returning to issues that have always been close to her. She writes with characteristic honesty and humanity about the consequences of ageing.

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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...

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Pamela Allara

In this generously illustrated chronicle of the life and work of prolific painter and bohemian eccentric Alice Neel, Pamela Allara shows how portraits from a career that spanned the 1920s to the 1970s constitute a virtual gallery of American cultural history. While some of Neel's portraits graced the covers of publications like Ms. and Time, most of her subjects were unknowns - the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the oppressed.