eBooks Planet

Salmon P. Chase: A Biography
1995 | 576 | ISBN: 0195046536 | PDF | 38 Mb
Salmon P. Chase was one of the preeminent men of 19th-century America. A majestic figure, tall and stately, Chase was a leader in the fight to end slavery, a brilliant administrator who as Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury provided crucial funding for a vastly expensive war, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the turmoil of Reconstruction, and the presiding officer of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. Yet he was also a complex figure. As John Niven reveals in this magisterial biography, Chase was a paradoxical blend of idealism and ambition. If he stood for the highest moral purposes--the freedom and equality of all mankind--these lofty ideas failed to mask a thirst for power so deeply ingrained in his character that it drove away many who shared his principles, but mistrusted his motives....

Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order
2007 | 688 | ISBN: 0809327856 | PDF | 28 Mb
This comprehensively researched, ably written biography depicts Wiliam Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) as unable to accept disorder and uncertainty because of an unstable childhood, reinforced by economic failure in post-Jacksonian America. The Civil War offered the general both an ultimate challenge and an ultimate opportunity. He was, however, anything but a prophet of total war for its own sake, shows Marszalek, a history professor at Mississippi State University. Sherman's objective was not to destroy the South, but to convince southerners to abandon the struggle. Attacking Confederate pride and property, as in the March to the Sea, was a step towards restoration of national harmony and integrity. Marszalek exaggerates the uniqueness and the intensity of Sherman's "passion for order," for few professional soldiers accept disorder as a desirable social norm. Sherman's approach to fighting the Civil War can be alternatively interpreted as a common-sense response to an evolving reality. Nevertheless, this provocative volume stands as an outstanding modern study of one of this country's great public figures. ...

Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
2007 | 432 | ISBN: 140004345X | EPUB + PDF | 6 MB + 5 Mb
Even in his own day, the famed 13th-century travel writer Marco Polo was mocked as a purveyor of tall tales—gem-encrusted clothes, nude temple dancing girls, screaming tarantulas—in his narrative of his journey to the Chinese court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. In this engrossing biography, Bergreen (James Agee: A Life), while allowing that mere facts... were never enough for Marco, finds him a roughly accurate and perceptive witness (aside from the romantic embellishments and outright fabrications concocted with his collaborator Rustichello of Pisa) who painted an influential and unusually sympathetic portrait of the much-feared Mongols. Bergreen follows Polo's disjointed commentary on everything from Chinese tax policy to asbestos manufacturing, crocodile hunting and Asian sexual mores—Polo was especially taken with the practice of sharing one's wife with passing travelers—while deftly glossing it with scholarship. Less convincing is Bergreen's attempt to add depth to Polo's lurid taste and over-heated imagination by portraying him as both a prophet of globalization and a pilgrim and explorer of the spirit. Polo's spiritual trek didn't take him very far, since he ended his days back in Venice as a greedy, litigious merchant. Still, the result is a long, strange, illuminating trip. ...

Squint: My Journey with Leprosy (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
2009 | 240 | ISBN: 1604731192 | PDF | 1 Mb
Lying in a hospital bed, Jose P. Ramirez, Jr. (b. 1948) almost lost everything because of a misunderstood disease. When the health department doctor gave him the Handbook for Persons with Leprosy, Ramirez learned his fate. Such a diagnosis in 1968 meant exile and hospitalization in the only leprosarium in the continental United States--Carville, Louisiana, 750 miles from his home in Laredo, Texas. In Squint: My Journey with Leprosy, Ramirez recalls being taken from his family in a hearse and thrown into a world filled with fear. He and his loved ones struggled against the stigma associated with the term "leper" and against beliefs that the disease was a punishment from God, that his illness was highly communicable, and that persons with Hansen's disease had to be banished from their communities. ...

Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage - by Gyles Brandreth Unabridged (2011)
Audiobook | English | ISBN-10: 0393061132 | 48 kHz | MP3 | ~48 kbps | Run time: 13.5 hours | 306 MB
History, Biography

This is the first biography of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh - both royal, both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, but, in temperament and upbringing, two very different people. The Queens childhood was loving and secure, the Dukes was turbulent: his grandfather assassinated, his father arrested, his family exiled, his parents separated when he was only ten. Elizabeth and Philip met as cousins in the 1930s. They married in 1947, aged twenty-one and twenty-six.

Robert Altman - visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend - comes roaring to life in this rollicking cinematic biography, told in a chorus of voices that can only be called Altmanesque.

Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica
2011 | 480 | ISBN: 0312649894 | EPUB + PDF | 1 MB + 2 Mb
Their roots lie in the heavy rock of 70s groups like Deep Purple. The music they played—heavy metal mixed with punk attitude—became its own genre: thrash. Their bassist died and they survived to became the biggest-selling band in the world. As grunge threatened to overtake them, they reinvented themselves. Then their singer went into rehab and they almost fell apart. They are Metallica, the most influential heavy metal band of the last thirty years.As Led Zeppelin was for hard rock and the Sex Pistols were for punk, Metallica became the band that defined the look and sound of 1980s heavy metal. Inventors of thrash metal—Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth followed—it was always Metallica who led the way, who pushed to another level, who became the last of the superstar rockers....