Edward Teller is perhaps best known for his belief in freedom through strong defense. But this extraordinary memoir at last reveals the man behind the headlines--passionate and humorous, devoted and loyal. Never before has Teller told his story as fully as he does here. We learn his true position on everything from the bombing of Japan to the pursuit of weapons research in the post-war years. In clear and compelling prose, Teller chronicles the people and events that shaped him as a scientist, beginning with his early love of music and math, and continuing with his study of quantum physics under Werner Heisenberg. He also describes his relationships with some of the century's greatest minds--Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Szilard, von Neumann--and offers an honest assessment of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the founding of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and his complicated relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer.Rich and humanizing, this candid memoir describes the events that led Edward Teller to be honored or abhorred, and provides a fascinating perspective on the ability of a single individual to affect the course of history.

The autobiography of Britain's greatest living composer is as idiosyncratic as the man himself, revealing his insatiable curiosity about people and places, ideas and sensations, and music of every kind. Vigorous, brave, funny, candid about his sexual and emotional life, Sir Michael has written a remarkable, memorable book.

In their literary autobiographies, modernists Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) challenge the scientific figures of the perverse lesbian, particularly those promulgated by Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. By multiplying their 'I's, manipulating subject and object divisions, undermining boundaries between writer and audience, and using repetition to code erotic moments, these writers queer the terms of autobiography. That queering requires understanding autobiography as more institutional than introspective, and the autobiographies themselves question the very theories that determine them: theories of lesbianism, female development, and memory.

A study of autobiography in twentieth-century African American culture.

One of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century details the events of his career and describes meetings with people who have shaped the philosophical and political character of recent history.

The prominent journalist, historian, and author—an eyewitness to some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century—tells the story of his final years. In the last book of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer recounts his return to Berlin after the Third Reich’s defeat, his shocking firing by CBS News, and his final visit to Paris sixty years after he first lived there as a cub reporter in the 1920s. It paints a bittersweet picture of his final decades, friends lost to old age, and a changing world. More personal than the first two volumes, this final installment takes an unflinching look at the author’s own struggles after World War II—and his vindication after the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, his most acclaimed work. It also provides intimate details of his often-troubled marriage. This book gives readers a surprising and moving account of the last years of a true historian—and an important witness to history.

China and the world entered a period of social, political, intellectual, and cultural crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, with China, being on the weak side of the China-world linkage, swept into calamitous turmoil. As this crisis intensified in the late 1920's, an innocent boy from rural China went to Beijing, where disruptive forces feeding the tumult converged, to attend pre-college classes at Peking University. In the ensuing thirty years, with wars torching the land around him, through personal suffering and struggles, he observed, learned, reflected, and lived to develop himself into a serious philosopher. This philosopher will later become arguably the most important Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century. This autobiography recounts the philosopher's development against the social and political events and intellectual currents of the turbulent time. It weaves social-political commentaries and philosophical contemplations in a narration of personal experiences. While movingly recalling the bright side of life-the worry-free childhood in a tranquil farm village, the unconditional friendship in difficult times, the uplifting inspiration from a teacher with authentic character, the soul-soaking awakening by a remote chant heard in a quiet night-it also honestly reveals the less bright side of living a life-the pull of the world of the senses, the self-righteous rancor harbored against those who wronged him, the anger and irreverence directed at certain well known figures, the dejection that overtook him when the world around him crumbled. But above all it shares with readers a genuine, unending existential quest. The philosopher's vigilance for "being" leads him to exclaim: "Just let the feeling of nothingness ... float without any lingering resistance! ... Have nothing, only this suffering, only this fear, only this sadness!" Vigilance for "being" is vigilance in solitude. The deepening of nothingness turns into absolute commiseration-the commiserative enlightenment that unifies the subjective and the objective sides of reality into one. With his own religiosity engaged by this deep existential enlightenment, the philosopher in the final chapter leaves the account of his factual life behind and turns to philosophizing "commiseration" by way of evaluating Christianity and Buddhism, infusing the autobiography with a distinct philosophical flavor. In this philosophical evaluation, what he finds lacking in Christianity and Buddhism in terms of commiserative enlightenment, he finds in Confucianism. This autobiography thus marks the launch of the philosopher into thirty more years of philosophizing about Confucianism, and underscores the importance of existential experience in motivating his very original Confucian moral metaphysics.