A rollicking, colorfully illustrated history of burlesque as seen through the eyes of its first lady, Ann Corio.

Charlie Chaplin made an amazing seventy-one films by the time he was only thirty-three years old. He was known not only as the world's first international movie star, but as a comedian, a film director, and a man ripe with scandal, accused of plagiarism, communism, pacifism, liberalism, and anti-Americanism. He seduced young women, marrying four different times, each time to a woman younger than the last. In this animated biography of Chaplin, Joyce Milton reveals to us a life riddled with...

This "lively" study of female lawbreakers across centuries and cultures is "chock full of disquieting stories and truly twisted personalities" ( Booklist).Organized A-to-Z under six categories, this book offers insight into the lives and minds of women in different centuries and different countries, with diverse cultures and backgrounds from the poverty-stricken to royalty, who have defied law and order and social taboos. Read about mistresses, murderers, ...

The "endlessly fascinating" true story of a custody battle that threatened to expose the seedy secrets of Hollywood's Golden Age—illustrated with photos ( Entertainment Weekly).Most famous for playing opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Mary Astor was one of Hollywood's most beloved film stars. But her story wasn't a happy one. Widowed at twenty-four, she quickly entered a rocky marriage with Dr. Franklyn Thorpe in which both were unfa...

A look into the life of the so-called "Mad Monk" of Imperial Russia, his murder, and the effects of his death on a dynasty, a people, and a country.Written in three parts, Killing Rasputin begins with a biography that describes how a simple unkempt "holy man" from the wilds of Siberia became a friend of Emperor Nicholas II and his empress, Alexandra, at the most crucial moment in Russian history. Part Two examines the infamous murder of Rasputin through the...

The National Book Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories ( The New York Times).Though some moved on to ...

This "immensely stimulating story of true crime down the ages" tells the history of human violence, from Peking Man to the Mafia ( The Times, London).This landmark work offers a completely new approach to the history and psychology of human violence. Its sweep is broad, its research meticulous and detailed. Colin Wilson explores the bloodthirsty sadism of the ancient Assyrians and the mass slaughter by the armies led by Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ivan the Te...

A journalist with deep knowledge of the region provides "an enthralling and largely firsthand account of the war in Afghanistan" ( Financial Times).Few reporters know as much about Afghanistan as Carlotta Gall. She was there in the 1990s after the Russians were driven out. She witnessed the early flourishing of radical Islam, imported from abroad, which caused so much local suffering. She was there right after 9/11, when US special forces helped the Northe...

"An exceptional and compelling biography about one of the Tudor Age's most complex and controversial figures." —Alison WeirThomas Cromwell has long been reviled as a Machiavellian schemer who stopped at nothing in his quest for power. As King Henry VIII's right-hand man, Cromwell was the architect of the English Reformation; secured Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and plotted the downfall of his second wife, Anne Boleyn; and was fatally accused of trying t...

A medieval historian examines what we really know about the man who was "Merlin the Magician" and his impact on Britain.Merlin has remained an enthralling and curious individual since he was first introduced in the twelfth century in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. But although the Merlin of literature and Arthurian myth is well known, his "historical" figure and his relation to medieval magic are less familiar. In this book Anne Lawrence-...

From assassinations to student riots, this is "a splendidly evocative account of a historic year—a year of tumult, of trauma, and of tragedy" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.).In the United States, the 1960s were a period of unprecedented change and upheaval—but the year 1968 in particular stands out as a dramatic turning point. Americans witnessed the Tet offensive in Vietnam; the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; and the chaos at the De...

The shocking truth behind the death of an American icon—and the conspiracies that kept it secret for decades—in “the best autopsy of Marilyn Monroe” (Cyril H. Wecht, MD, JD)In her tragically short life, Marilyn Monroe embodied American womanhood, innocence, and lust—both as a Hollywood star and in the shadows of her tormented soul.But when she was found naked and dead on the morning of August 5, 1962, she became the subject of a mystery that has perplexed t...