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Biography

Ars Botanica: A Field Guide to Loss (USED)

Ars Botanica: A Field Guide to Loss (USED)

$42.00
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Written as letters to his unborn child, Tim Taranto's Ars Botanica describes the infinite pleasures of falling in love -- the small discoveries of each other's otherness, the crush of desire, the frightening closeness -- and the terrifying impossibility of losing someone. Through examinations of the ways in which various cultures and religions carry grief, Taranto discovers the emotional instincts that shape his own mourning. He seeks solace in the natural elements of our world, divining meaning from the Iowa fields that stretch around him, the stones he collects, the plants he discovers on walks through the woods. His letters, then, are the honest wanderings of someone earnestly seeking meaning and belonging, ultimately resulting in a field guide for love, grief, and celebrating life. At times astonishingly personal and even painful, Ars Botanica is also playfully funny, a rich hybrid of memoir, poetry, and illustration that delightfully defies categorization.

Ars Botanica is a gorgeous hybrid: a memoir in letters to a phantom addressee, an introduction to life on this planet, a primer for how to live, a meditation on family. It also winds up being a beautiful and highly personal field guide to the natural world. It's one of the most wrenching and honest accounts of falling in and out of love, of moving through a season of grief, that I've ever read.
--Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Tim Taranto is a writer, visual artist, and poet from New York. His work has been featured in Buzzfeed, FSG's Works in Progress, Harper's, The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and The Saint Ann's Review. Tim is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.


Artificial Paradises: Baudelair's Classic Work on Opium and Wine (USED)

Artificial Paradises: Baudelair's Classic Work on Opium and Wine (USED)

$6.99
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At the time of its release in 1860, Charles Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises (Les Paradis Artificiels) met with immediate praise. One of the most important French symbolists, Baudelaire led a debauched, violent, and ultimately tragic life, dying an opium addict in 1867. This book, a response to Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, serves as a memoir of Baudelaire's last years. In this beautifully wrought portrait of the effects of wine, opium, and hashish on the mind, Baudelaire captures the dreamlike visions he experienced during his narcotic trances. These hallucinations, sometimes exquisite, sometimes disturbing, and the delusions of grandeur that often accompanied them, constitute the Paradis Artificiels, the gorgeous yet false worlds of ecstasy that eventually led to his ruin. Contrasting the effects of hashish and opium with those of wine, Baudelaire concludes that "wine exalts the will, hashish destroys it" and makes idlers of all those who use it.
As Far As I Can See

As Far As I Can See

$15.00
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As Far as I Can See: A Memoir began as an attempt to write about a beloved husband's last year and his battle with dementia and illness. But it soon became the life story of two people from different backgrounds who married young but made it work. Writing it helped to mitigate the sadness of loss, and perhaps it can help others with similar experiences understand and learn.
Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

$19.99
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A NPR Best Book of the Year

The number one New York Times bestselling authors of Vanderbilt return with another riveting history of a legendary American family, the Astors, and how they built and lavished their fortune.

The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story--of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society.

The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic, one of many shocking and unexpected twists in the family's story.

In this unconventional, page-turning historical biography, featuring black-and-white and color photographs, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe chronicle the lives of the Astors and explore what the Astor name has come to mean in America--offering a window onto the making of America itself.

At the Hinge of Hisotry: A Reporter's Story (USED)

At the Hinge of Hisotry: A Reporter's Story (USED)

$20.00
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The autobiography of the journalist Joseph C. Harsch, who, over 60 years was a first-hand witness to many of the great events of the 20th century. He had a knack for being in the right place at the right time - the Great Depression, Hawaii when the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbour, and so on.
At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House

At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House

$32.50
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A revealing account of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster's turbulent and consequential thirteen months in the Trump White House.

At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive President drive necessary shifts in U.S. foreign policy at a critical moment in history. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the hyper partisanship of American politics. With the candor of a soldier and the perspective of a historian, McMaster rises above the fray to lay bare the good, the bad, and the ugly of Trump's presidency and give readers insight into what a second Trump term would look like.

While all administrations are subject to backstabbing and infighting, some of Trump's more unscrupulous political advisors were determined to undermine McMaster and others to advance their narrow agendas. McMaster writes candidly about Cabinet officials who, deeply disturbed by Trump's language and behavior, prioritized controlling the President over collaborating to provide the President with options.

McMaster offers a frank and fresh assessment of the achievements and failures of his tenure as National Security Advisor and the challenging task of maintaining one's bearings and focus on the mission in a hectic and malicious environment.

Determined to transcend the war within the administration and focus on national security priorities, McMaster forged coalitions in Washington and internationally to help Trump advance U.S. interests. Trump's character and personality helped him make tough decisions, but sometimes prevented him from sticking to them. McMaster adroitly assesses the record of Trump's presidency in comparison to the Obama and Biden administrations.

With the 2024 election on the horizon, At War with Ourselves highlights the crucial importance of competence in foreign policy, and makes plain the need for leaders who possess the character and intellect to guide the United States in a tumultuous world.

Augustine of Hippo (USED)

$4.99
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Autobiography and Other Writings (USED)

Autobiography and Other Writings (USED)

$2.99
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One of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin was a true Renaissance Man: writer, publisher, scientist, inventor, diplomat and politician. In his long life of eighty-four years, he offered advice on attaining wealth, organized public institutions, contributed to the birth of a nation, and negotiated with foreign powers to ensure its survival.

Through the words of the elder statesman himself, The Autobiography and Other Writings presents a remarkable insight into the man and his accomplishments and additional writings from Benjamin Franklin's wife and son provide a more intimate portrait of the husband and father who found himself a legend in his own time.

Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens: Volume Two (USED)

$10.00
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Autobiography of St. Ignatius (USED)

Autobiography of St. Ignatius (USED)

$11.00
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The life of St Ignatius of Loyola as told by him to Father Louis Gonzalez in the years preceding his death in 1556. This edition first published in 1900.