Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Art & Literature

A stirring true story of the journalists who dared to oppose Hitler - and the campaign waged against them. After serving in the First World War, Adolf Hitler encountered a serious obstacle to his plotting for power when the Munich Post, drawing on sources within the Nazi Party, began tracking the corruption and dark dreams of his inner circle. With leaked documents from Hitler's political rivals, who were shocked by his violent rhetoric and fearing the worst, the Post battled Hitler for ownership of the truth.

Ludwig Bemelmans's charming intergenerational friendship with the late-in-life "First Lady of Interior Decoration" provides an enormously enjoyable nostalgia trip to the sun-soaked glamour of Los Angeles, where de Wolfe surrounded herself with classic movie stars and a luminous parade of life's oddities.

One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan's Brooklyn apartment. Calling themselves "The Sisterhood," the group would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.

Thomas More is an enduringly fascinating and profoundly controversial figure. A brilliant scholar, his Utopia of 1516 dared to imagine how society might be completely reordered. At the same time, his hatred of the Reformation caused him to advocate, and seek to implement, the death penalty for heretics. A friend and advisor to Henry VIII, More's refusal to support Henry's break with Rome led to his execution in 1535, and the start of a long argument about his legacy.

Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cultural life in the 19th century, as well as someone who confronted with unusual determination and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany.

Jane Edberg's creative muse vanished when a switch flipped from child alive to child dead. How was she supposed to process her loss? This lyrical, original, beautifully written story is about how, after the tragic death of her adored nineteen-year-old son, she rediscovers the power of art to create an unconventional pathway through grief.

Best known as the author of Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville is one of America's greatest writers. His achievements range from popular novels and experimental fiction to powerful poetry. His works are tragic and funny, impassioned and ironic, obsessed with philosophical seeking and attuned to the details of everyday life.

In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb.

Who built the Empire State Building? Astonishingly, no list of workmen on this historic landmark was ever compiled. While the names of the owners, architects, and contractors are well known, and Lewis Hine's legendary portraits left us indelible images of the workers, their identities—the last generation of workmen still practicing these time-honored trades, have not been identified until author Glenn Kurtz unearthed their individual stories for this book.

Henry David Thoreau was a leading figure in the American Transcendentalist movement and the era of US literary emergence, an intellectual with worldwide influence as essayist, social thinker, naturalist-environmentalist, and sage. Thoreau's Walden, an autobiographical narrative of his two-year sojourn in a self-built lakeside cabin, is one of the most widely studied works of American literature. It has generated scores of literary imitations and experiments in back-to-basics living.

In this unusual biography Krystal gives us not only the peripatetic and turbulent life of a cultural icon but also the intellectual sweep of a period in history that created our modern America. Some Unfinished Chaos delivers a nuanced portrait of a man whose various sides embodied the trends, passions, and pursuits of the imperfect society that both glorified and dismissed him.

In this memoir of a lost America, Hal Borland tells the story of his family's migration to eastern Colorado as homesteaders at the turn of the twentieth century. On an unsettled and unwelcoming prairie landscape, the Borlands build a house, plant crops, and eke out a meager existence. While life is difficult—and self-reliance is necessary with no neighbors for miles—the experience brings the family close and binds them closer to the terrible and beautiful natural patterns that govern their lives.

After a nearly fatal bout of appendicitis, Hal Borland decided to leave the city behind and move with his wife to a farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Their new home on one hundred acres inspired Borland to return to nature. In this masterpiece of American nature writing, he describes such wonders as the peace of a sky full of stars, the breathless beauty of blossoming plants, the way rain swishes as it hits a river, and the invigorating renewal brought by the changing seasons. The delights of nature as Borland observes them seem boundless, and his sense of awe is contagious.

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories turned Norman Maclean into a late-in-life literary phenomenon and then a household name after the success of the Hollywood film based on the title story. Yet fewer know of Maclean's lifelong struggles to reconcile very different parts of himself: the revered teacher and writer in the intellectual hub of Chicago and the Montana man compelled by the wildness and traumas of his home state and family, including the tragic Mann Gulch fire and the murder of his brother.

War Is Not Just for Heroes rescues the incredible true stories of United States Marine Corps. Written by one marine, Claude R. "Red" Canup, a combat correspondent in the Pacific during World War II, these dispatches and private letters provide insight into the grind of war and ordinary men and women who carried out their duty. Thoughtfully edited and contextualized by a preface and prologue by his daughter, Linda M. Canup Keaton-Lima, War Is Not Just for Heroes combines documentary and biography to provide the human dimensions of those in combat and those who reported out.

A cultural storm swept through the 1960s—Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies—and at its center sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens) and everybody knew Andy.

Follow Ernest Hemingway's exploits on the Bahamian island of Bimini from 1935 to 1937, the very moment in time when the International Game Fish Association (under the author's co-leadership) was emerging. Covers Hemingway's role in the formation of the IGFA, his underappreciated seminal writing about competitive saltwater angling when the sport was still in its infancy, the amazing fishing he enjoyed on the island, and the way all of these experiences translated into the composition of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream.

In sports, not all the long shots who succeed are athletes. In 1984, Tom Hammond, a forty-year-old sportscaster who had primarily worked in Kentucky and the Southeast, got an unlikely opportunity to appear on the NBC Sports telecast of the inaugural Breeders' Cup. Assigned to report from the stall area on what was supposed to be a single broadcast, Hammond performed so well that an NBC executive offered him a chance to call NFL games on the spot.

Jack Kerouac was one of America's great writers of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet he endured a life characterized by persistent hardship and disillusion. Leading Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. targets the writer's embattled insight of self as central to his life and work. He reveals how Kerouac's troubled interactions with alcohol, drugs, and spirituality stamped its importance on his autobiographical prose and poetry and created a singular language that united thoughts on the human condition and spiritual liberation.

What happens when magazine editors behave worse than the celebrities they feature? Shock, comedy, and farce, expertly chronicled in Jeremy Murphy's Too Good to Fact Check, a firsthand account of his ten years traveling with stars as the editor of a glossy magazine. In between taking Julianna Marguiles to the Côte d'Azur, Neil Patrick Harris aboard the Orient Express, and LL Cool J to Paris among other locales, the author lived a wild, decadent life that rivaled anyone he was covering, and recounts the most outrageous moments in colorful, candid detail.