An immigrant's memoir recounting the life of a young Pakistani man who came to the U.S. with only a driving ambition to make a difference in his chosen industry, aviation. Through challenges and successes, Michael Chowdry soared to the very heights of the airline business. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, he unleashed his passion, ultimately building a successful airline, Atlas Air Cargo.

Argues for a life based on humility, service, and sacrifice instead of the accepted worldview of a life valuing fame and recognition.

"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." —Guy Davenport, Harper's John D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist Henry Darger, who died in obscurity, Halls of Fame hovers on the brink between prose and poetry, deep seriousness and high comedy, the subject and the self.

When William Boyd published his biography of New York modern artist Nat Tate, a huge reception of critics and artists arrived for the launch party, hosted by David Bowie, to toast the late artist's life. Little did they know that the painter Nat Tate, a depressive genius who burned almost all his output before his suicide, never existed. The book was a hoax, and the art world had fallen for it. Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s. William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Praise for Nat Tate: "William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread-that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist-did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate."-David Bowie "A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time."-Gore Vidal

“Hearteningly strange . . . Collins exhumes little-known figures [and] recounts their perversely inspiring battles against the more logical ways of the world.” —The Onion Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck—or perhaps some combination of them all—leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as “The Three Mile Painting”) made him the richest and most famous artist of his day . . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed “William Shakespeare” to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard—until he pushed his luck too far. Collins’ love for what he calls the “forgotten ephemera of genius” give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard’s Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions—acts of excavation and reclamation—to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.

"In the Shadow of Obscurity: Toiling in a Reluctant Society" is of historical value in content not only for people of color, but also for society. This book not only tells the stories of many of our great sports figures in history, it addresses their pain on the road to greatness. It is a must read to understand why we must stay focused, and make this society understand that we must all commit to a just society and make things better for generations to come.