Education Biography

Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that would let her spend three months, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell chose Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she could finally rid herself of distractions and write.

Award-winning author John Ferling is a leading authority on the American Revolution. His entertaining and enlightening histories have greatly improved our understanding of early America and the Founding Fathers. Now Ferling opens a window to the past and explores the contentious presidential election of 1800.

Kristie Macrakis combines a storyteller's sense of drama with a historian's respect for evidence in this pause-resisting history of intrigue and espionage, love and war, magic and secrecy. From the piazzas of ancient Rome to the spy capitals of the Cold War, Macrakis' global history reveals the drama and importance of invisible ink. From Ovid's advice to use milk for illicit love notes, to al-Qaeda's hidden instructions in pornographic movies, this book presents stories of secret messaging that chart its evolution in sophistication and its impact on history.

A peaceful summer night is shattered by gunfire as an unseen assailant tries to murder police officer John Busby. Though horribly wounded, Busby survives. But the perpetrator remains at large, meaning neither Busby, nor his wife, nor their three children are safe. In separate chapters John and his daughter, Cylin, who was nine at the time, recount the story of that year. John writes graphically, and movingly, of his wounds, his pain, his multiple surgeries, and his rage.

The colorful, sentimental, funny, affectionate, cantankerous memoir by the most colorful, funniest, most cantankerous-- and probably the most revered-- sportswriter of the last fifty years. Dan Jenkins is accepted as one of the greatest (if not the greatest) golf writer of all time, wrote beloved bestselling novels and abused more corporate expense accounts than anyone who ever lived. It's a touching, laugh-out-loud tribute to the romanticism of old-time sportswriting-- and the glory days of sports.

In 1951, Carlotta Walls Lanier was one of the nine African-American students to integrate Little Rock High School, and the first to earn a diploma. Here she provides a firsthand account of her experiences - including the bombing that rocked her home, the constant threats she and her classmates faced, and the pressure and bullying her parents endured.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank takes a fair and balanced look at the unsettling rise of the silly Fox News host Glenn Beck. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. In America in 2010, Glenn Beck provides the very refreshment Jefferson had in mind: Whether he's the patriot or the tyrant, he's definitely full of manure.

Reed joined the New York Times in 1965 and was quickly thrust into the chaos of the Selma, Alabama protest movement and the historical interracial march to Montgomery. His story then moves from days of racial violence to the political combat of Washington. Reed covered the Johnson White House and the early days of the Nixon administration as it wrestled with the competing demands of Black voters and southern resistance to a new world.

Christine Montross was a nervous first-year medical student, standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class, preparing herself for what was to come. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags is shocking, no matter how long you've prepared yourself, but a strange thing happened when Montross met her cadaver.

Roger Mudd joined CBS in 1961 and rose to fame as the congressional correspondent, covering the historic Senate filibuster debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Mudd was there to see Dan Rather going toe-to-toe with the Nixon White House, Marvin Kalb deciphering the State Department, Daniel Schorr bird-dogging Watergate, Lesley Stahl and Connie Chung staking out all the president's men, George Herman presiding over Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer covering the Pentagon like a police reporter.

You might not know Terry McDonell, but you certainly know his work. Among the magazines he has top-edited: Outside, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. In this revealing memoir, McDonell talks about what really happens when editors and writers work with deadlines ticking (or drinks on the bar). His stories about the people and personalities he's known are both heartbreaking and bitingly funny.

This dramatic story of two men's efforts to save a small Wisconsin daily from obliteration at the hands of the nation's largest newspaper chain brings together startling case histories of the dubious tactics practiced by Gannett and unsparing insights into the newspaper industry.

An essential document of the first American war of the new century. During this journey into war, Rodgers and his crew embraced the dangers, the numbing fatigue, and the moments of stark fear of the young armored cavalrymen they lived with twenty-four hours each day, an experience that created for them the lifelong bond that only soldiers serving together under fire share.

On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life, seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government's Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich.

Newspaperman tells the story of how an immigrant's shy son from Queens, New York, rose to the top of his industry, powered by little more than passion, brains, and hard work. Phillips began his career working as a copyboy for the New York Herald Tribune for 16 dollars a week... and ended it as publisher of The Wall Street Journal and CEO of its parent corporation, Dow Jones & Company. The life story of Warren Phillips is the story of the American newspaper business.

Thanks to a successful interview with the painfully shy E.B. White, a beautiful, 19-year-old, blue-eyed blonde from the cornfields of Iowa lands a job as a receptionist at The New Yorker magazine. There she stays two decades, becoming general all-around factotum - watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the 18th floor. Though she dreamed of becoming a writer, she never advanced at the magazine.

How Lincoln Learned to Read tells the American story from a fresh and unique perspective: how do we learn what we need to know? Beginning with Benjamin Franklin and ending with Elvis Presley, author Daniel Wolff creates a series of intimate, interlocking profiles of notable Americans that track the nations developing notion of what it means to get a good education.

A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, journalist Megan K. Stack, a 25-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen and prodding warlords for information. From there, she traveled to war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon and other countries scarred by violence, witnessing the changes that swept the Muslim world and laboring to tell its stories.

The year was 1961, a year marking the start of the racial unrest that would last throughout the decade. Living in a trailer camp in Maryland with his wife and children, Fred Engh’s future seemed bleak - that is, until he heard a college football coach being interviewed on a local radio show talking about becoming a physical education teacher. The coach’s words would inspire him enough to register at Maryland State College, a then all-black college.

Unexpected Joy is a book about an inspirational young man who makes friends everywhere he goes. He is not like everyone else. He has special needs. He has taken his father and others on a journey they did not choose. His father learned to embrace the journey over many years. This is a story of struggle, depression, deliverance, redemption, acceptance, and eventually joy wrapped in an adventure of a lifetime of challenges.