The Cigarette Century

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Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0786721901
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cigarette Century by : Allan Brandt

Download or read book The Cigarette Century written by Allan Brandt and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From agriculture to big business, from medicine to politics, The Cigarette Century is the definitive account of how smoking came to be so deeply implicated in our culture, science, policy, and law. No product has been so heavily promoted or has become so deeply entrenched in American consciousness. The Cigarette Century shows in striking detail how one ephemeral (and largely useless) product came to play such a dominant role in so many aspects of our lives—and deaths.

Our Man

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 030794817X
Total Pages : 626 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis Our Man by : George Packer

Download or read book Our Man written by George Packer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography* *Winner of the Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography* *Winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize* "Portrays Holbrooke in all of his endearing and exasperating self-willed glory...Both a sweeping diplomatic history and a Shakespearean tragicomedy... If you could read one book to comprehend American's foreign policy and its quixotic forays into quicksands over the past 50 years, this would be it."--Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review "By the end of the second page, maybe the third, you will be hooked...There never was a diplomat-activist quite like [Holbrooke], and there seldom has been a book quite like this -- sweeping and sentimental, beguiling and brutal, catty and critical, much like the man himself."--David M. Shribman, The Boston Globe Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. His story is thus the story of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke's diaries and papers, we are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

The Overstory: A Novel

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Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393635538
Total Pages : 512 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (936 download)

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Book Synopsis The Overstory: A Novel by : Richard Powers

Download or read book The Overstory: A Novel written by Richard Powers and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018 "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The Prize

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1471104753
Total Pages : 928 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis The Prize by : Daniel Yergin

Download or read book The Prize written by Daniel Yergin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Prize recounts the panoramic history of oil -- and the struggle for wealth power that has always surrounded oil. This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations. The Prize is as much a history of the twentieth century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of this history is enormous -- from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm. The cast extends from wildcatters and rogues to oil tycoons, and from Winston Churchill and Ibn Saud to George Bush and Saddam Hussein. The definitive work on the subject of oil and a major contribution to understanding our century, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement -- and great importance.

Picture Coverage of the World

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Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN 13 : 3643108443
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (431 download)

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Book Synopsis Picture Coverage of the World by : Heinz Dietrich Fischer

Download or read book Picture Coverage of the World written by Heinz Dietrich Fischer and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2011 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prizes for Press Photography are latecomers within the prestigious award system. Established in 1942 during World War II, they started with a general category called "Photography," covering all kinds of photographs. After about a quarter-century, in 1968, this award category was divided into two separate prize groups, entitled "Spot News Photography" and "Feature Photography." This book presents the decision-making processes that lead to the annual Pulitzer Prize winners. Additionally, in each decision-making case, one award-earning photo is reproduced to give an idea about the broad spectrum of aspects and themes declared prize-worthy by the jurors. (Series: Pulitzer Prize Panorama - Vol. 2)

Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories

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Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN 13 : 9780813825458
Total Pages : 809 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (254 download)

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Book Synopsis Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories by : David Garlock

Download or read book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories written by David Garlock and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 809 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Garlock relates in the preface, “The quality of the research, reporting and writing of these unique features is stunning. No two are written exactly the same way. But they all hold to one constant: strong emotions and content—powerful, touching, frightening, harrowing journalism.” The rules for winning a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing are simple, yet demanding: the prize is awarded for “a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality.” For over two decades, the Pulitzer has been given annually to journalists whose work best exemplifies those high ideals. The second edition of Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America’s Best Writing is an unabridged collection of this award-winning work, now covering 25 years. Editor David Garlock analyzes each story, and readers are given a glimpse at the circumstances surrounding the narrative. Each feature is followed by an insightful analysis by Garlock that probes the tactics the feature writer used in both writing and reporting the work. Journalism students and experienced professional writers will find Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories an essential compendium of the best feature writing of the last quarter century.

The Promise of the New South

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199724555
Total Pages : 592 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis The Promise of the New South by : Edward L. Ayers

Download or read book The Promise of the New South written by Edward L. Ayers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-07 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593492617
Total Pages : 897 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (934 download)

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Book Synopsis G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by : Beverly Gage

Download or read book G-Man (Pulitzer Prize Winner) written by Beverly Gage and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 897 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Biography Winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography | Finalist for the 2023 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022 “Masterful…This book is an enduring, formidable accomplishment, a monument to the power of biography [that] now becomes the definitive work”—The Washington Post “A nuanced portrait in a league with the best of Ron Chernow and David McCullough.”—The Wall Street Journal A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape. We remember him as a bulldog--squat frame, bulging wide-set eyes, fearsome jowls--but in 1924, when he became director of the FBI, he had been the trim, dazzling wunderkind of the administrative state, buzzing with energy and big ideas for reform. He transformed a failing law-enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal, into a modern machine. He believed in the power of the federal government to do great things for the nation and its citizens. He also believed that certain people--many of them communists or racial minorities or both-- did not deserve to be included in that American project. Hoover rose to power and then stayed there, decade after decade, using the tools of state to create a personal fiefdom unrivaled in U.S. history. Beverly Gage’s monumental work explores the full sweep of Hoover’s life and career, from his birth in 1895 to a modest Washington civil-service family through his death in 1972. In her nuanced and definitive portrait, Gage shows how Hoover was more than a one-dimensional tyrant and schemer who strong-armed the rest of the country into submission. As FBI director from 1924 through his death in 1972, he was a confidant, counselor, and adversary to eight U.S. presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats. Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did the most to empower him, yet his closest friend among the eight was fellow anticommunist warrior Richard Nixon. Hoover was not above blackmail and intimidation, but he also embodied conservative values ranging from anticommunism to white supremacy to a crusading and politicized interpretation of Christianity. This garnered him the admiration of millions of Americans. He stayed in office for so long because many people, from the highest reaches of government down to the grassroots, wanted him there and supported what he was doing, thus creating the template that the political right has followed to transform its party. G-Man places Hoover back where he once stood in American political history--not at the fringes, but at the center--and uses his story to explain the trajectories of governance, policing, race, ideology, political culture, and federal power as they evolved over the course of the 20th century.

The Warmth of Other Suns

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0679763880
Total Pages : 642 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (797 download)

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Book Synopsis The Warmth of Other Suns by : Isabel Wilkerson

Download or read book The Warmth of Other Suns written by Isabel Wilkerson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963

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Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0805025340
Total Pages : 736 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963 by : David L. Lewis

Download or read book W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963 written by David L. Lewis and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-10-17 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lewis charts the second half of Du Bois's career, from the end of World War I on.

The Swerve

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0099572443
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (995 download)

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Book Synopsis The Swerve by : Stephen Greenblatt

Download or read book The Swerve written by Stephen Greenblatt and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Captured By History

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Publisher : St. Martin's Press
ISBN 13 : 1250191882
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Captured By History by : John Toland

Download or read book Captured By History written by John Toland and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captured by History is an autobiography like none other in recent years, for few historians have interviewed as many men and women who helped shape the most momentous events of our century than John Toland. Here, for the first time, Toland reveals how he found these key players and how he persuaded them to talk to him. From disgraced Japanese generals to the German doctor who nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler, Toland's sources are remarkable for what they reveal about their subjects. It was Toland's ability to listen, more than anything else, that persuaded those he interviewed to divulge secrets and stories they would tell no one else. Toland's unorthodox approach to history came from his early desire to be a playwright. Even before graduating from Williams College during the depths of the Depression, Toland spent his summers hitchhiking and riding the rails as a hobo. He lived and worked with other bindle stiffs, learning their lingo and ways. He served five short jail sentences for riding freights and trespassing. His experiences and the characters he met encouraged Toland to write plays and early novels (unsuccessfully) until 1957, when he published his first book, Ships in the Sky. His work in the next four decades was nothing short of extraordinary, for Toland found that he saw history as a play, with narrative structure and drama, not as a dry series of dates and names. The result was a series of landmark works such as Infamy, the Rising Sun, which won him the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1970 and reflected his ability, with the help of his Japanese wife, to open doors normally closed to Westerners in Japan; In Mortal Combat; The Last 100 Days; and his best-selling biography of Adolf Hitler. Captured by History is not only the summation of a lifetime of groundbreaking works, but the story of a man who through his historical investigations became a witness to many of the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century. A self-effacing man in person, Toland nonetheless comes across as having had a life as fascinating as the lives of the many historical figures he has interviewed. Written by one of our last witnesses to the terrible and deracinating conflicts that split the world asunder at mid-century, Captured by History is an astonishing personal story of a hugely inquisitive man who became a historian not by accident or design, but by fate; a man who succeeded in chronicling the most tumultuous events of our century.

Inventing the Electronic Century

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674029399
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Inventing the Electronic Century by : Alfred Dupont CHANDLER

Download or read book Inventing the Electronic Century written by Alfred Dupont CHANDLER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumer electronics and computers redefined life and work in the twentieth century. In Inventing the Electronic Century, Pulitzer Prize-winning business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., traces their origins and worldwide development. This masterful analysis is essential reading for every manager and student of technology.

New and Collected Poems

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Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780156654913
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (549 download)

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Book Synopsis New and Collected Poems by : Richard Wilbur

Download or read book New and Collected Poems written by Richard Wilbur and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1989 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection including six earlier volumes of Wilbur's poetry, twenty-seven new poems, and a cantata.

A Distant Mirror

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Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0307793699
Total Pages : 738 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

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Book Synopsis A Distant Mirror by : Barbara W. Tuchman

Download or read book A Distant Mirror written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary NOTE: This edition does not include color images.

Trust

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Publisher : Riverhead Books
ISBN 13 : 9780593713099
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Trust by : Hernan Diaz

Download or read book Trust written by Hernan Diaz and published by Riverhead Books. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022 ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOKS OF 2022 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2022 KIRKUS PRIZE And named one of the BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The New Yorker, Vogue, Time, NPR, Oprah Daily, Esquire, BookPage, and more "Buzzy and enthralling ...A glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery...Fun as hell to read." --Oprah Daily "A genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City's elite in the roaring '20s and Great Depression."--Vanity Fair "A riveting story of class, capitalism, and greed." --Esquire "Captivating."--NPR "Exhilarating." --New York Times An unparalleled novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth--all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another--and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

Middlesex

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307401944
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Middlesex by : Jeffrey Eugenides

Download or read book Middlesex written by Jeffrey Eugenides and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy. But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set our narrator’s life in motion. Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world.