by Sonia Taitz (2012)
The Watchmaker's Daughter tells the story of a child of two refugees: a watchmaker who saved lives within Dachau prison, and his wife, a gifted concert pianist about to make her debut when the Nazis seized power. In this memoir, Sonia Taitz is born into a world in which the Holocaust is discussed constantly by her insular concentration camp-surviving parents. This legacy, combined with Sonia's passion and intelligence, leads the author to forge an adventurous life in which she seeks to heal both her parents and herself through travel, achievement, and a daring love affair. Ironically, it is her marriage to a non-Jew that brings her parents the peace and fulfillment they would never have imagined possible. Sonia manages to combine her own independence with a tender dutifulness, honoring her parents' legacy while forging a new family of her own.
Jackie Woolley
This book is dedicated to the millions of writers out there who have heard the call but never had the thrill of a twenty-city publicity tour, a review in Publisher's Weekly or an appearance on the Today show. This personal experience book is for beginners as well as advanced writers and goes beyond mere self-help in the craft of writing.
Daniel Schreiber
Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was one of America's first celebrity intellectuals. In the first biography to be published since her death, Daniel Schreiber portrays a glamorous woman full of contradictions and inner conflicts, whose life mirrored the cultural upheavals of her time. While known primarily as a cultural critic and novelist, Sontag was also a filmmaker, stage director, and dramatist. It was her status as a pop icon that was unusual for an American intellectual: she was filmed by Andy Warhol and Woody Allen, photographed by Annie Leibovitz and Diane Arbus, and her likeness adorned advertisements for Absolut vodka. Drawing on newly available sources, including interviews with Nadine Gordimer, Robert Wilson, and Sontag's son, David Rieff, as well as on myriad interviews given by Sontag and her extensive correspondence with her friend and publisher Roger Straus, Schreiber explores the roles that Sontag played in influencing American public cultural and political conversations.
Catherine Ross-Stroud
"Much has been written about the state of black adolescence - often from a sociological point of view situating black teens in an at-risk category. However, through her characters, young adult author Janet McDonald (1954-2007) presents the wide range of adolescent life. McDonald presents the multifarious views of society in relation to the self efficacious drive of urban teens to rise above their circumstances by any means necessary." "This book is a biocritical study of McDonald and her work as it relates to the contribution she has made to teen fiction. It explains McDonald's profoundly realistic fiction, which holds wide appeal for teens in search of answers to the coming of age mystery."--BOOK JACKET.
edited and annotated by Mary A. Hill
Historian Mary A. Hill, who earlier chronicled the life and work of feminist theorist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, turns to the private side of Gilman in this annotated collection of love letters the activist wrote to her second husband, Houghton Gilman, from 1897 to their marriage in 1900. She wrote these twenty- to thirty-page letters on an almost daily basis, revealing a private and passionate side very different from the public career that had won her justifiable national and international acclaim. Although Gilman's published writings have understandably received considerable scholarly attention, her private letters have not yet received the attention they deserve. Hill puts the letters into biographical and historical context in an introductory essay that also explains their theoretical and historical importance. The edited and annotated letters then follow in chapters, each preceded by an introductory essay. The book concludes with a biographical sketch of the remaining thirty-five years of Gilman's life, together with an assessment of the letters' historical and biographical significance.