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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From Jane Leavy, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth?the man Roger Angell dubbed "the model for modern celebrity."A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:The Boston Globe | Publishers Weekly | Kirkus | Newsweek | The Philadelphia Inquirer | The ProgressiveWinner of the 2019 SABR Seymour Medal | Finalist for the PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award | Longlisted for Spitball Magazine's Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year | Finalist for the NBCC Award for Biography?Leavy's newest masterpiece.... A major work of American history by an author with a flair for mesmerizing story-telling.? ?ForbesHe lived in the present tense?in the camera's lens. There was no frame he couldn't or wouldn't fill. He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the biggest fines. Like all the new-fangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace?radios, automatic clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones and loudspeakers?Babe Ruth "made impossible events happen." Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh?business manager, spin doctor, damage control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one tightly buttoned double-breasted suit?Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom.His was a life of journeys and itineraries?from uncouth to couth, spartan to spendthrift, abandoned to abandon; from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston at the end of his career for a finale with the only team that would have him. There were road trips and hunting trips; grand tours of foreign capitals and post-season promotional tours, not to mention those 714 trips around the bases.After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927?a total that would not be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris did it with the aid of the extended modern season?he embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. Walsh called the tour a "Symphony of Swat." The Omaha World Herald called it "the biggest show since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses offered their entire performance under one tent." In The Big Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and in so doing captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth's life and times.Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man.

1928. Matilda Simpkin is a woman with a thrilling past and an infuriatingly dull present. As a militant suffragette, she marched, smashed windows, heckled Winston Churchill, and was jailed five times. Now in middle age, the closest she gets to the excitement of her old life is the occasional lecture on the history of the movement, given to a lukewarm audience.But after being shocked to discover that an old comrade has embraced Fascism, Mattie realizes that there is a new cause and a fresh generation to fight for. Thus, the Amazons are formed, a club that gives girls a place to exercise their bodies and minds, igniting a much-needed interest in the world around them. It's a wild success until a new recruit sends Mattie's past crashing into her present, and every principle she has ever stood for is threatened.Old Baggage is a funny and bittersweet portrait of a woman who has never given up the fight and the young women who are just discovering it.

Charles Darwin: The man who discovered evolution? The man who killed off God? Or a flawed man of his age, part genius, part ruthless careerist, who would not acknowledge his debts to other thinkers?In this first single-volume biography of Charles Darwin in twenty-five years, A. N. Wilson, the acclaimed author of The Victorians and God's Funeral, goes in search of this celebrated but contradictory figure.Darwin was described by his friend and champion Thomas Huxley as a symbol. But what did he symbolize? In Wilson's portrait, both sympathetic and critical, Darwin was two men. On the one hand, a brilliant naturalist, a patient and precise collector and curator who greatly expanded the possibilities of taxonomy and geology. On the other hand, a seemingly diffident man who appeared gentle and even lazy but hid a burning ambition to be a universal genius: he longed to have a theory that explained everything.But was Darwin's 1859 masterwork, On the Origin of Species, really what it seemed, a work about natural history? Or was it in fact a consolation myth for the Victorian middle classes, reassuring them that selfishness and indifference to the poor were part of nature's grand plan?Charles Darwin is a radical reappraisal of one of the great Victorians, a book that isn't afraid to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy while bringing us closer to the man, his revolutionary ideas, and the wider Victorian age.

In the America of the near future, California has become a desolate wasteland controlled by violent separatist militias and marked by a lack of water and fuel. In a village outside Reno, Nevada, a middle-aged man visits an undertaker and gathers the ashes of his dead wife to bring to Alaska, where their children await. To reach them, the man must go north by bike across a treacherous, violent landscape, his dog his only companion.Thirty years earlier, we meet Roy Bingham. After a rough-and-tumble childhood, Roy numbs himself with skateboarding, drugs, and sex. Then he meets Karen Oronski. Sassy, soulful, and arresting, Karen pulls Roy into her orbit until she decides to give up their nomadic lifestyle and put down roots in her hometown of Loyalton, California. Roy buckles under the commitment, and after a boozy night in Reno, he leaves Karen for the road and skateboarding.Flashing back and forth in time across four decades in the life of a man who is lost even when he's found, Trouble No Man delivers a resonant story of survival and family, set against the tumult of an America on the precipice of becoming an unfree nation.

?Reading Wright is a steep, stinging pleasure.??Dwight Garner, New York TimesIn this incisive, satirical collection of three classic American novels by Charles Wright?hailed by the New York Times as ?malevolent, bitter, glittering??a young, black intellectual from the South struggles to make it in New York City. This special compilation includes a foreword by acclaimed poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, who calls Wright, ?Richard Pryor on paper.?As fresh and poignant as when originally published in the sixties and seventies, The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to get Alarmed About form Charles Wright's remarkable New York City trilogy. By turns brutally funny and starkly real, these three autobiographical novels create a memorable portrait of a young, working-class, black intellectual?a man caught between the bohemian elite of Greenwich Village and the dregs of male prostitution and drug abuse. Wright's fiction is searingly original in bringing to life a special time, a special place, and the remarkable story of a man living in two worlds. This updated edition shines a spotlight once again on this important writer?a writer whose work is so crucial to our times.

A lavishly illustrated history of America's game from the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress, with a foreword by George F. Will and a new preface by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress?One of the most seductively designed books about the sport to come our way. . . . A book like this, so rich and deep in material. . . . brings baseball history to multifaceted life and reminds us that baseball is the sport that celebrates its history more than any other. . . . This book itself is a form of time-traveling?a pleasurable, often surprising and aesthetic trip.? ?San Diego Union-Tribune Baseball, the sport that helped reunify the country in the years after the Civil War, remains the National Pastime. The Library of Congress houses the world's largest baseball collection, documenting the history of the game and providing a unique look at America since the late 1700s. Baseball Americana presents the best of the best from that treasure trove. From baseball's biggest stars to street urchins, from its most newsworthy stories to sandlot and Little League games, the book examines baseball's hardscrabble origins, rich cultural heritage, and uniquely American character.The more than 350 fabulous illustrations?many never before published?feature first-generation, vintage photographic and chromolithographic baseball cards; photographs of famous players and ballparks; and newspaper clippings, cartoons, New Deal photographs, and baseball advertisements. Packed with images that will surprise and thrill even the most expert collector, Baseball Americana is a gift for every baseball fan.

In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet's now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unites to dismantle his iron rule?galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one?not the rebels, Jean de Men, nor even Joan herself?can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.

During the long, hot summer of 1888, an extraordinary friendship blossoms between Anton Chekhov and a young doctor, Zinaida Lintvaryova. Struggling with her health, Zinaida has retreated to her family's quiet country estate, but this secluded existence is transformed when the Chekhov family arrives to spend the summer there. What begins as a journal Zinaida keeps simply to pass the time becomes an intimate story of her relationship with the middle Chekhov son, Anton Pavlovich, in the early days of his literary career.More than a century later, the discovery of Zinaida's diary represents Katya Kendall's last chance to save her publishing house. It also raises a tantalizing question: Did Chekhov, known only as a short-story writer and dramatist, write a novel that has since disappeared? The answer could change history, and finding the manuscript proves an irresistible challenge for Ana Harding, the translator Katya hires. Increasingly drawn into Zinaida and Chekhov's world, Ana is consumed by her desire to find the ?lost? book as she soon suspects that the manuscript is not the only mystery contained within the diary's pages.

Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother, accused of killing a white man, flees their home in Chattanooga. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town's leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved and a rare peace in a hostile world. Yet tragedy visits them nearly daily, and after a series of devastating events?a lynching, a church burning?Delvin fears being accused of murdering a local white boy and leaves town.Haunted by his mother's disappearance, Delvin rides the rails, meets fellow travellers, falls in love, and sees an America sliding into the Great Depression. Before his hopes for life and love can be realized, he and a group of other young men are falsely charged with the rape of two white women and shackled to a system of enslavement masquerading as justice. As he is pushed deeper into the darkness of imprisonment, his resolve to escape burns only more brightly, until, in a last spasm of flight, he is called to choose his fate.

Sarah never admits that she's his mother, but the beautiful boy has watched her survive as a ?lot lizard?: a prostitute working the West Virginia truck stops. Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever. With his own leather mini-skirt and a makeup bag that closes with Velcro, the young ?Cherry Vanilla? embarks on a journey through the Appalachian wilds, dining on transcendental cuisine, supplicating to the mystical Jackalope, encountering the most terrifying of pimps, walking on water, being venerated as an innocent girl saint?and then being denounced as the devil. By turns exhilarating and shocking, magical and realistic, Sarah brings urgency, wit, and imagination to an unknown and unforgettable world.

Armistead Maupin's uproarious, moving Tales of the City novels?the first three of which are collected in this omnibus volume?have earned a unique niche in American literature as indelible documents of cultural change from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium.Originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City (1980), and Further Tales of the City (1982) afforded a mainstream audience of millions its first exposure to straight and gay characters experiencing on equal terms the follies of urban life.Among the cast of this classic saga are the lovelorn residents of 28 Barbary Lane: the bewildered but aspiring Mary Ann Singleton; the libidinous Brian Hawkins; Mona Ramsey, still in a sixties trance; Michael ?Mouse? Tolliver, forever in bright-eyed pursuit of Mr. Right; and their marijuana-growing landlady, the indefatigable Mrs. Madrigal.Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads them through heartbreak and triumph, through nail-biting terrors and gleeful coincidences. The result is an addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.

Sir Alistair Horne has been a close observer of war and history for more than fifty years, and in this wise and masterly work, he revisits six battles of the past century and examines the strategies, leadership, preparation, and geopolitical goals of aggressors and defenders to reveal the one trait that links them all: hubris.In Greek tragedy, hubris is excessive human pride that challenges the gods and ultimately leads to total destruction of the offender. From the 1905 Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War to Hitler's 1941 bid to capture Moscow, to MacArthur's disastrous advance in Korea, to the French downfall at Dien Bien Phu, Horne shows how each of these battles was won or lost due to excessive hubris on one side or the other. In a sweeping narrative written with his trademark erudition and wit, Horne provides a meticulously detailed analysis of the ground maneuvers employed by the opposing armies in each battle. He also explores the strategic and psychological mind-set of the military leaders involved to demonstrate how devastating combinations of human ambition and arrogance led to overreach. Making clear the danger of hubris in warfare, his insights hold resonant lessons for civilian and military leaders navigating today's complex global landscape.A dramatic, colorful, stylishly written history, Hubris is a much-needed reflection on war from a master of his field.

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letterwriter since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.

In this dark and mesmerizing novel, a grieving couple seeks refuge in a country cottage. But the cottage has its own history of tragedy. Are the chilling memories trapped within its walls becoming their new reality?Suffolk, England: During a vicious storm, a redheaded stranger appears outside a farmer's cottage. The family takes him in?but he has no intention of leaving. One hundred and fifty years later, a devastating tragedy prompts Mary and her husband to start a new life in the countryside. They move into a small cottage, drawn to its beautiful, overgrown garden. The house has been empty for years, but it's remote, quiet, different?exactly what they need. Then it begins: children whispering, footsteps, a young man with red hair wandering through the orchard.As the stranger insinuates himself deeper into the farmer's family, and also into the affections of the eldest daughter, Mary's own sense of unease grows. She feels the past and present intertwining ever more tightly, but is grief twisting her mind? Or is the cottage, haunted by the horrific events of more than a century ago, not quite the rural sanctuary it seems?

In this fresh and illuminating biography, Fred Kaplan brings into focus the dramatic life of John Quincy Adams?the little-known and much-misunderstood sixth president of the United States and the first son of John and Abigail Adams?and reveals how Adams' inspiring, progressive vision guided his life and helped shape the course of America.Kaplan draws on a trove of unpublished archival material to trace Adams' evolution from his childhood during the Revolutionary War to his brilliant years as Secretary of State to his time in the White House and beyond. He examines Adams' myriad sides: the public and private man, the statesman and writer, the wise thinker and passionate advocate, the leading abolitionist and fervent federalist. In these ways, Adams was a predecessor of Lincoln and, later, FDR and Obama. This sweeping biography makes clear how Adams' forward-thinking values, his definition of leadership, and his vision for the nation's future is as much about twenty-first-century America as it is about Adams' own time.Meticulously researched and masterfully written, John Quincy Adams paints a rich portrait of this brilliant leader and his vision for a young nation.

Winner, Julia Ward Howe PrizeNew York Times Notable BookPublishers Weekly, "Ten Best" Books of 2013NPR, "Best of 2013"Los Angeles Times bestseller"Must Read" Book, Massachusetts Book AwardsNew York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: the story of a group of women collectively dubbed "Miss Anne."Sexualized and sensationalized in the mainstream press?portrayed as monstrous or insane?Miss Anne was sometimes derided within her chosen community of Harlem as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for "exotic" dancers and "hot" jazz, white women who were enthralled by life on West 125th Street took chances. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women?many from New York's wealthiest social echelons?who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. They include Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, British activist Nancy Cunard, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, educator Lillian E. Wood, and novelist Fannie Hurst?all women of accomplishment and renown in their day. Yet their contributions as hostesses, editors, activists, patrons, writers, friends, and lovers often went unacknowledged and have been lost to history until now.In a vibrant blend of social history and biography, award-winning writer Carla Kaplan offers a joint portrait of six iconoclastic women who risked ostracism to follow their inclinations?and raised hot-button issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the bargain. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan's formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, alters our perception of this historical moment, and brings Miss Anne to vivid life.

Founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann in 1914 to give voice to the growing progressive movement, The New Republic has charted?and shaped?the state of American liberalism, publishing many of the twentieth century's most important thinkers.Insurrections of the Mind is an intellectual biography of this great American political tradition. In more than fifty essays, organized chronologically by decade, a stunning collection of writers explores the pivotal issues of modern America. Weighing in on the New Deal; America's role in war; the rise and fall of communism; religion, race, and civil rights; the economy, terrorism, technology; and the women's movement and gay rights, the essays in this outstanding volume speak to The New Republic's breathtaking ambition and reach. Introducing each article, editor Franklin Foer provides colorful biographical sketches and amusing anecdotes from the magazine's history. Bold and brilliant, Insurrections of the Mind is a celebration of a cultural, political, and intellectual institution that has stood the test of time.Contributors include: Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Pauline Kael, Michael Lewis, Zadie Smith, and Margaret Talbot

"Achingly wise . . . Admirers of Marilynne Robinson will find themselves very much at home in this book." -Wall Street Journal Jessica Speight, an anthropologist in 1960s London, is at the beginning of a promising academic career when an affair leaves her a single mother. Anna is delightful-a pure gold baby. But as it becomes clear that Anna is not a normal child, the book circles questions of responsibility, potential, even age, with Margaret Drabble's characteristic intelligence and wit. Told from the point of view of Jess's fellow mothers, The Pure Gold Baby is a movingly intimate look at the unexpected transformations at the heart of motherhood.

From the acclaimed author of the National Book Award finalist So Much for That and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin comes an extraordinary novel about siblings, marriage, and obesity.When Pandora picks up her older brother Edison at the Iowa airport, she doesn't recognize him. In the four years since she last saw him, the once slim, hip New York jazz pianist has gained hundreds of pounds. What happened? And it's not just the weight. Edison breaks her husband Fletcher's handcrafted furniture, makes overkill breakfasts for the family, and entices her stepson not only to forgo college but to drop out of high school. After Edison has more than overstayed his welcome, Fletcher delivers his wife an ultimatum: it's him or me. But which loyalty is paramount, that of a wife or a sister? For without Pandora's support, surely Edison will eat himself into an early grave.Rich with Shriver's distinctive wit and ferocious energy, Big Brother is about fat?an issue both social and excruciatingly personal. It asks just how much we are obligated to help members of our families, and whether it's ever possible to save loved ones from themselves.

In this epic drama of love, death, and betrayal, Leonie Frieda charts the rise and fall of the Italian Renaissance through the lives of the princesses who helped shape it.

Jim Bishop's trademark suspenseful, hour-by-hour storytelling style drives this account of an unforgettable day in American history. Culled from interviews with more than three hundred individuals, his retelling tracks all the major and minor characters of that day?JFK, Oswald, Ruby, LBJ, Jackie, and others?illuminating a human drama that many readers believe they know well. At once moving and terrifying, and filled with vivid detail, it delivers the haunting feeling of being there as the day's events unfolded in both Dallas and Washington.As gripping as fiction but with a journalist's exacting detail, The Day Kennedy Was Shot captures the action, mystery, and drama that unfolded on November 22, 1963.

In this final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, the celebrated writer greets advancing age with poignant humor and an unquenchable appetite for the new. Isherwood deepens his study of Hinduism, writes his final books, and immerses himself in the vibrant creative scenes of the 1970s. With his long-term companion, Don Bachardy, Isherwood delves into the art worlds of Los Angeles, New York, and London, where he meets Rauschenberg, Ruscha, Warhol, and Hockney. Collaborating with Bachardy on scripts for Broadway and Hollywood, he encounters John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, David Bowie, Jon Voight, Armistead Maupin, Elton John, and Joan Didion. This volume is a densely populated human comedy, sketched with both ruthlessness and benevolence against the background of the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan White Houses. The final installment of Isherwood's masterwork reveals a man candidly fearful of his approaching death, and yet engaged in the vitality and energy of daily life.

One late spring evening in 1912, in the kitchens at Sterne, preparations begin for an elegant supper party in honor of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. But only a few miles away, a dreadful accident propels a crowd of mysterious and not altogether savory survivors to seek shelter at the ramshackle manor?and the household is thrown into confusion and mischief. Evening turns to stormy night, and a most unpleasant parlor game threatens to blow respectability to smithereens: Smudge Torrington, the wayward youngest daughter of the house, decides that this is the perfect moment for her Great Undertaking. The Uninvited Guests is the bewitching new novel from the critically acclaimed Sadie Jones. The prizewinning author triumphs in this frightening yet delicious drama of dark surprises?where social codes are uprooted and desire daringly trumps propriety?and all is alight with Edwardian wit and opulence.

HIV/AIDS has been reported as one of the most destructive diseases in recent memory, tearing apart communities and ostracizing the afflicted. But the emphasis placed on death and despair hardly captures the many and varied effects of the epidemic, or the stories of the extraordinary people who live and die under its watch. On a remarkable journey through his native Nigeria, Uzodinma Iweala opens our minds to these stories, speaking with people from all walks of life: the ill and the healthy, doctors, nurses, sex workers, students, parents, and children. Their testimonies are by turns uplifting, alarming, humorous, and always unflinchingly candid.At once a deeply personal exploration of life in the face of disease and an incisive critique of our ideas of health and happiness, Our Kind of People goes behind the headlines to illuminate the scope of the crisis and the real lives it affects.