Songs of ourselves

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Stuart Stirling

"Francisco Pizarro is possibly one of the best known but least understood figures of world history. In 1530, at the age of fifty-four, he set out on his successful and bloody conquest of Peru, thus changing the future of a continent and its peoples forever. It was a long way from his humble beginnings as an illiterate, illegitimate pig-herder. Within these pages Stuart Stirling tells the story of adversity and tragedy which was the life of Francisco Pizarro.". "By the standards of the time, Pizarro was an elderly man when he conquered Peru. He had served as a foot soldier in Spain's Italian wars and later earned a living as an Indian fighter and slaver. Audacious, ruthless and cruel, Pizarro had a surprising and almost fatalistic belief in the Indies as an escape from his illegitimacy. Luck also played a major part in his invasion of Peru - Pizarro's 200 men should not have been able to defeat the indigenous army of more than 30,000, but they did. However, the Spanish conquest saw few happy endings, even for Pizarro, who was now rich beyond his wildest dreams. Eleven years after the conquest, he was assassinated by his one-time Spanish allies.". "Stuart Stirling's researches in the Archives of the Indies in Seville enable him to present an accurate portrait of Pizarro as a man of his time, and to place even his most infamous act - the killing of the Inca king Atahualpa - within context. This book brings the man to life against a turbulent background of exploration, discovery, empire building and a clash of cultures."--BOOK JACKET.

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Pat O'Brien

"Growing up, Pat O'Brien was the skinny Midwestern kid with the divorced parents and the alcoholic father. He drove himself to the University of South Dakota after finishing his last late-night shift and moved in while his roommate was asleep. His life was unceremonious--until he was picked up in the student center by a professor who envisioned his future as the household television name he would become. From that day forward, Pat's life became anything but ordinary: from afternoons in the late Bobby Kennedy's living room with Muhammad Ali, to Rangers games in President Bush's suite, to the drugs and drinking and party lifestyle of Los Angeles. Over the course of his career, Pat has met everyone: the Beatles, the Kennedys, Neil Young, and Magic Johnson. In I'll Be Back Right After This, Pat reveals the highs and lows of life spent sharing the mic with the world's most rich and famous"--

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B.B. King with David Ritz

Riley B. King grew up amidst the cotton farms of Mississippi, picking in the fields. At age 21 he wrecked a tractor and took it as a sign that a brighter future awaited him as a musician in Memphis. The rest is history. Recounting his days as a disk jockey and pioneering bluesman on the rhythm and blues circuit, B. B. dramatizes his whirlwind adventures, from the Memphis of the forties to the Moscow of the nineties, in a voice that is both raw and real. A deeply sensuous and sensitive soul, he discloses his complex relationship to women and sexuality, and chronicles his first-hand experience with racism, the Civil Rights movement, and the shifting politics of show business.

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Joyce Milton

Joyce Milton examines this formidable, fascinating woman, giving probing insight into the First Lady's character, her values and her career. In The First Partner, Milton goes behind the scenes at the Clinton White House and explores the First Lady's involvement in Travelgate, Filegate, the Health Care Task Force fiasco and fund-raising for the 1996 presidential campaign, showing how these controversies grew out of the tensions in her political partnership with Bill Clinton. Milton also describes how Mrs. Clinton's defensive reactions to her husband's chronic infidelities have often misfired and have sometimes enabled his bad behavior. Milton also investigates Hillary Rodham's Mid-western childhood and Methodist upbringing, when she developed her strong belief that social and political activism can be an expression of religious faith. This authoritative book follows the future First Lady through her years as a student activist at Wellesley and as a children's rights advocate at Yale Law School, where she met her future husband, Bill Clinton. It takes a close look at Mrs. Clinton's first Washington experience, as a legal staffer for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation; shows how she juggled her positions as an activist, a corporate attorney and the first lady of the state of Arkansas; and probes her handling of the Whitewater investments that eventually led to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of the President. Milton also examines Mrs. Clinton's attempts to reconcile a host of contradictions - feminist convictions in painful collision with family commitment; philosophical beliefs in conflict with harsh political reality; and the precarious balance of professional ambition, public image and private life.