A reference book that lists celebrated women and their discoveries and achievements including the true inventor of the cotton gin, General Grant's most brilliant spy, and history's ten most romantic women

This work by the award-winning biographer on the controversial ruler who ushered in England's Golden Age is "quite simply, one of the best".--Library Journal.

A study of the iconographic significance of the Ziegfeld girl in twentieth-century American conceptions of sexuality, race, class, and consumerism.

This book traces the dance career and artistic development of one of the founders of American modern dance. In this biography of dance pioneer Doris Humphrey, Marcia B. Siegel follows Humphrey's career from her days with the Denishawn Company (among fellos students like Martha Graham) to her creative partnership with Charles Weidman to her tenure as artistic director of protégé José Limon's dance company. Siegel's reconsideration and description of Humphrey's dances, including many that are no longer performed, sheds important light on this pathbreaking dancer/choreographer.

Time and the Town was the last of Mary Heaton Vorse's books. It is about many things--a town and its people, the author, a certain kind of idyllic life. As much as anything else, it is the biography of the house Vorse bought in 1907 and lived in, off and on, for the next thirty-six years. The moods of the house mirrored her own. "Our houses," she wrote, "are our biographies, the stories of our defeats and victories." Tinged with nostalgia and disenchantment, the book describes a Provincetown that has changed, a place on the verge of modernity. It is no longer a major fishing port. It has become a place whose business is tourism. Contrasting the old and the new, Vorse celebrates the enduring character of the town itself. She tells stories that are engaging and charming, droll and fabulous. The wrinkled Mrs. Mary Mooncusser who, though drunk and stark naked, conducts herself with great decorum when Vorse pays her a call, might have stepped out of the pages of Sherwood Anderson or Eudora Welty. In another anecdote, the townspeople scour the beaches for cases of booze dumped into the sea by rumrunners and are briefly inflated with the spirit of ancestral smugglers and buccaneers. Vorse herself remained something of an outsider in Provincetown, despite her evident affection for the place and its inhabitants. They surely regarded her as simply another of those artist-intellectuals--many of whom appear in the pages of this book. The "off-Cape" outsiders put the town in the national limelight but took no interest in local matters. Vorse here ponders local matters exclusively, almost, one suspects, as a way of forgetting the more complex matters that occupied her--her agonies of parental guilt, her resentment of domestic obligations, her third marriage, her depressions and breakdowns. The town is in that sense beyond time.

Rosa Raisa (1893-1963) was legendary for her imposing, powerful, and wide-ranging voice as well as for her highly dramatic and emotionally stirring stage presence. A renowned star of the Chicago Opera, Raisa sang over 1,000 opera performances and concerts around the world. Held in high esteem by composers, conductors, and colleagues, she was Puccini's choice to create the lead roles in La rondine and Turandot. In this first biography of Raisa, Charles Mintzer provides a captivating and revealing portrait of a warm-hearted, generous artist whose career and complex personality were shaped by a life that crossed Jewish, Italian, and American cultural boundaries. Mintzer masterfully blends together his narrative with selections from Raisa's unpublished memoir and excerpts from contemporary critical reviews to present a well-rounded picture of this extraordinary woman and to trace her incredible journey to operatic fame. Born Raitza Burchstein in the Polish ghetto of Bialystok, she fled the 1906 pogroms and settled in Italy, where she studied under Barbara Marchisio at the Conservatory of Naples. After her operatic debut in 1913 as Leonora in Oberto during the Verdi centenary celebrations at Parma, she immediately joined Cleofonte Campanini's Chicago Opera and, renamed Rosa Raisa, achieved instant acclaim. Mintzer recounts her great successes in Chicago and on the company's national tours, as well as several seasons in South America, Mexico, and Italy. He discusses Raisa's most famous roles, describes the La Scala premiere of Turandot with Arturo Toscanini conducting, and offers fresh insights into her controversial Berlin engagement in a Tosca performance with Adolf Hitler in the audience. Mintzer also chronicles her marriage to baritone Giacomo Rimini, her illnesses and miscarriages, her financial collapse, her lifelong commitment to Jewish organizations and causes, and her puzzling burial in a Catholic cemetery. Lavishly illustrated with over fifty photographs, many of them previously unpublished, the book includes an authoritative chronology of all of Raisa's performances, her concert repertoire, and an annotated discography.

Predenville discusses the historical, artistic, and critical contexts in which painting has taken a realist turn. Color illustrations.

A cultural history of the perceptions, exploitations, and celebrations of the human body discusses such topics as Achilles' heel, dreadlocks, fingerprints, breast-feeding, navel rings, and back pain. Reprint.

An international economic advisor shares a wide-spectrum theory about how to enable economic success throughout the world, posing solutions to top political, environmental, and social problems that contribute to poverty.

In the winter of 2002, Stupid White Men took America - and the world - by storm. Tired and skeptical of George W. Bush's high approval ating, frightened by the implications of the Enron scandal - and generally just looking for a voice of honest dissent in the thick atmosphere of jingoism that followed 9/11 - book buyers from coast to coast swiftly embraced Michael Moore's in-your-face anti-Bush-era manifesto, making it one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the year. With an unerring eye for greed, hypocrisy, and corruption, Michael Moore takes on the whole ugly mess of America at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Whether he's demanding U.N. action to overthrow the Bush Family Junta or calling on African Americans to place whites only signs over the entrances of unfriendly businesses, Stupid White Men is a pitch-perfect skewering of our culture of Malfeasance and Mediocrity.