Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Art & Literature

While still a young boy, Robb White built his first boat, hewn from the tin roof of an abandoned chicken coop in the backyard. Today, without any formal training, White constructs some of the most sought-after wooden boats around. In How to Build a Tin Canoe, this Southern raconteur and self-taught expert wooden-boat builder recounts tall tales of a life lived on the water, from his childhood exploring the Gulf of Mexico to growing up - or not really growing up - to share his accrued wisdom with others.

Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane - the credited artist of the weepy waifs - for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992, he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a conman than an artist and that he forced his wife, Margaret, to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

For 15 years, Eleanor Roosevelt and her handsome doctor, David Gurewitsch, were friends, traveling, entertaining, and eventually buying a townhouse together in Manhattan. Their friendship has always intrigued historians, but not much is known about it. David kept detailed journals and took thousands of photos, but he never publicly discussed their time together.

James Orlebar Cloyster, in order to marry his true love, embarks on a scheme of such clever deception that he very nearly manages to ruin both his romance and his career. Told from multiple viewpoints - that of James, his fiancée, and friends - Not George Washington lampoons London society, literary pretension, the West End stage, playwrights, playgoers, bohemian life, and the newspapers of the day.

As a longtime leader of the Democratic Party and key member of Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, Josephus Daniels was one of the most influential progressive politicians in the country, and as secretary of the navy during the First World War, he became one of the most important men in the world. Before that, Daniels revolutionized the newspaper industry in the South, forever changing the relationship between politics and the news media. Lee Craig, an expert on economic history, delves into Daniels’ extensive archive to inform this nuanced and eminently readable biography, following Daniels’ rise to power in North Carolina and chronicling his influence on 20th-century politics.

A Son of the Middle Border is an epic story of the quest for new frontiers during the last half of the nineteenth century, and of the gradual, heartbreaking failure of America's pioneer ideal.

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage - learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio - and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska.

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole."

What One Man Said to Another is, on one level, a series of extended conversations between friends. On another, it is a spoken autobiography of Richard Selzer, respected surgeon and writer, as recorded by New York artist and writer Peter Josyph.

Generoso Pope, Sr., an Italian immigrant, arrived in New York in 1906 with only pennies in his pocket. He got a job shoveling sand, but through his intelligence, he worked his way up to become the biggest provider of cement, just as it was becoming the key material for building. Gene Pope, Jr., was his father’s choice to inherit and run the business, but Gene’s mother and two brothers forced him out, and he found himself penniless and on his own. With a loan from his godfather, mobster Frank Costello, Gene bought the New York Enquirer. He renamed it the National Enquirer.

Twenty of the world's greatest novelists live again! The authors take you on a magic carpet to the homes of these titans of literature, and you not only become their intimate friend but you acquire an even greater appreciation of their masterpieces.

Al Silverman, a noted figure in American publishing, has written a wonderful chronicle of book publishing for all who cherish books. The Time of Their Lives is not only a love song to the industry's golden age, an era that began after World War II and lasted for three-plus decades, but it is also a reflection of the tastes and cultural appetites of the American public.

Priscilla Buckley is probably known for her long and admired tenure as managing editor of the conservative political journal National Review, founded in the 1950s by her brother, William F. Buckley, Jr. But in String of Pearls we meet a different Priscilla, young Pitts Buckley, just out of Smith, eager for the next step up from the college paper to "real" journalism.

Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were united not only as man and wife, but also as writers who shared and debated ideas, values, and literary craft.

Lessons at the Halfway Point is a deeply thought-provoking look at one man’s courageous journey to understand life from the perspective of having just turned 40. It is both a wry reflection on the past as well as an optimistic look to a challenging future. Nothing escapes Michael Levine’s critical eye, insightful mind, and often humorous spin on our world and ourselves.

From an acclaimed classicist comes a witty, unusual, and fascinating "biography" of Homer's fictional Bronze Age hero, Odysseus. In this entertaining book, Charles Beye fills out the story of this extraordinary figure while at the same time portraying Odysseus' evolution through the course of a strange and adventuresome life, at times so remote, at times so immediate in the contemporary perspective.

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.

Mark Twain's complete, uncensored Autobiography was an instant best seller when the first volume was published in 2010, on the centennial of the author's death, as he requested. Published to rave reviews, the Autobiography was hailed as the capstone of Twain's career. It captures his authentic and unsuppressed voice, speaking clearly from the grave and brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions. The eagerly awaited second volume delves deeper into Twain's life, uncovering the many roles he played in his private and public worlds.

What are you going to do for the rest of your life? For David Lawrence, Jr., a brilliant newspaper editor and publisher with a distinguished, three-decade-long journalism career who retired in 1999 at the age of 56, the answer in his words was to dedicate his life to a "[N]ewly energized purposefulness: that every child have a real chance to succeed."