The composer and music critic portrays his life and describes his friendships with figures such as D.H. Lawrence, Augustus John, and Dylan Thomas

Dit boek vertelt het verhaal van de arbeidersjongen Herman van Veen (1945) die uitgroeide tot een van de meest veelzijdige artiesten van Nederland en tot op de dag van vandaag grote internationale waardering oogst. In 1965 beklom Van Veen voor het eerst het podium en sindsdien reist hij met zijn voorstellingen de wereld over. Hij verrijkte de Nederlandse muziek met prachtige liedjes. Herman van Veen speelt viool, zingt, componeert, schrijft, acteert en regisseert, schildert en is de geestelijk vader van de wereldberoemde stripfiguur-eend Alfred Jodocus Kwak. Van Veen zet zich al veertig jaar actief in voor de rechten van het kind, is jarenlang ambassadeur voor Unicef en mag zich naast de vele internationale onderscheidingen die hem ten deel vielen Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw noemen.

The extraordinary 1950s London childhood of one of Britain's best-loved politicians. Alan Johnson's childhood was not so much difficult as unusual, particularly for a man who was destined to become Home Secretary. Not in respect of the poverty, which was shared with many of those living in the slums of post-war Britain, but in its transition from two-parent family to single mother and then to no parents at all. This is essentially the story of two incredible women: Alan's mother, Lily, who battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and loneliness to try to ensure a better life for her children; and his sister, Linda, who had to assume an enormous amount of responsibility at a very young age and who fought to keep the family together and out of care when she herself was still only a child. Played out against the background of a vanishing community living in condemned housing, the story moves from post-war austerity in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, through the race riots, school on the Kings Road, Chelsea in the Swinging 60s, to the rock-and-roll years, making a record in Denmark Street and becoming a husband and father whilst still in his teens. This Boy is one man's story, but it is also a story of England and the West London slums which are so hard to imagine in the capital today. No matter how harsh the details, Alan Johnson writes with a spirit of generous acceptance, of humour and openness which makes his book anything but a grim catalogue of miseries.

Paul Johnson, the celebrated historian, grew up in Tunstall, one of the six towns around Stoke-on-Trent that made up the Potteries'. From an early age he was fascinated by the strange beauty of its volcanic landscape of fiery furnaces belching out heat and smoke. As a child he often accompanied his father - headmaster of the local art school and desperate to find jobs for his students, for this was the Hungry Thirties - to the individual pottery firms and their coal-fired ovens. His adored mother and father are at the heart of this story and his older sisters who, as much as his parents, brought him up. life was extraordinarily free and unsupervised. No door was locked - Poverty was everywhere but so were the Ten Commandments.' The book ends in 1938 as the 11-year-old author queues at the town-hall for a gas mask.

A woman of intellect and ambition describes growing up on an Australian ranch, coping with her father's death and her mother's depression, her intellectual awakening at the university, and her path to becoming Smith College's first woman president

The first volume of distinguished New Zealand novelist Janet Frame's autobiography. She tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to publish poetry.

In her no-holds-barred family memoir, controversial scholar-critic Louise DeSalvo breaks the traditional silence around life for an Italian American girl coming of age in working-class Hoboken, New Jersey. Upon first publication, DeSalvo's memoir???which sifts through painful memories of childhood incest, a sister's suicide, a mother's psychotic depression, and a father's violent rage???enjoyed wide acclaim as an instant classic of the genre, written in "one of the most refreshing feminist voices around."-"San Francisco Chronicle" Marketing Plans: East Coast readings Extensively promoted with new anthology "Taste This: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Identity" Louise DeSalvo is professor of English at Hunter College. She has published thirteen books, including the acclaimed "Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work,"

Today, Philip Henry Gosse is remembered, if at all, as the patriarch and tyrannical religious maniac in his son Edmund's memoir, Father and Son. This is a vivid reassessment of the life of Philip Henry Gosse, the renowned Victorian naturalist, author, illustrator and Christian fundamentalist, who as both friend and antagonist of Charles Darwin, was at the very heart of the Victorian conflict between science and religion. Thwaite shows that Gosse believed that "the gratification of scientific curiosity is worse than useless if we ignore God."--Publisher.