A landmark biography by historian Geoffrey C. Ward, drawing on thousands of original documents—many never before published—to trace Franklin Roosevelt's formative years. From his cloistered upbringing as a patrician youth to his emergence as a serious contender for the presidency, Ward chronicles FDR's early political career, his complicated marriage to Eleanor, and his extraordinary comeback from the paralysis of polio that would have ended a lesser man's public life.

A classic of American biography that explores the origins of FDR's indomitable will and extraordinary political charisma.

A wide-ranging collection of intellectual essays exploring the transformation of culture and technology in the twentieth century. Crossing five domains — nature, history, language, art, and human evolution — the book examines how technology has fundamentally altered human values and ways of thinking. Drawing on the new science of chaos, computer art, and Baconian empiricism, it traces how modern people have, like figures disappearing through a skylight, drifted ever further from traditional conceptions of nature and culture. Written by a former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, this stimulating work of cultural criticism blends literary scholarship with a deep engagement with science.

Humanity is now disappearing through the skylight — slipping outside the culture it has nurtured — and almost no one has noticed.

A collection of twelve stories set in Irish villages and cities, tracing the lives of women shaped by loneliness, love, and loss. Like images cast by a magic lantern, memories and desires surface through O'Brien's passionate and exacting prose. Family tensions, village gossip, romantic longing, and nostalgia for the Irish landscape run through each story. Between an opening sequence of eccentric village portraits and the title story's Dublin party, every tale quietly illuminates lives held together by little more than endurance.

Stories that hum with secrets -- the lantern's beam falls on the hidden longings and quiet solitude of Irish lives.

A painstaking biographical inquiry into the life of Rodrigo Diaz, the legendary eleventh-century Castilian warrior known as El Cid, disentangling historical fact from myth. Drawing on primary sources, Fletcher scrutinizes the conventional image of the devout Christian hero and reveals instead a more complex figure who served as a mercenary under Muslim rulers. The book illuminates how the heroic legend was constructed against the turbulent backdrop of medieval Spain's political, religious, and cultural conflicts.

A vivid portrait of a man who lived through the Reconquista, cutting through layers of myth and legend to reveal the historical reality beneath.

A collection of poems and prose poems rooted in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota. Through recurring symbolic figures—the Giant, the child, and the boy—Caddy transforms the everyday relationship between father and son into something approaching myth. Vivid memories of growing up in a mining town, close observations of nature, and intimate family scenes accumulate into a meditation on what it means to belong to a place.

Mining-town memories and natural detail converge in a collection that renders the bond between father and son with mythic depth.

A detailed nonfiction account of how Dr. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine and successfully completed the largest clinical trial in history in 1954. Smith traces the polio epidemics that terrified America in the first half of the twentieth century, the organized support of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes), and the broader question of public ownership of scientific knowledge—as captured in Salk's famous refusal to patent the vaccine. The book is also the story of the countless people who worked alongside him.

When asked who owned the patent on the vaccine, Salk answered, 'The people, I would say.' Smith brings this defining moment of scientific generosity to life with vivid, engaging prose.