In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

This is a biography of a man named Jules Massenet, a French composer of the Romantic era who was best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty. The two most frequently staged are 'Manon' and 'Werther'. He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs, and other music.

In this collection of informal reminiscences, first published in 1975, Max Born has written an extraordinarily vivid account of his life and work, originally intended for his family. Ranging from his time at the University of Göttingen, where Born had his first real motivation for a professional career in science, to the period in Berlin as professor extraordinary, when he and his wife became close friends of Einstein, these anecdotes and memories chart the "heroic age of physics" from the perspective of one of its leading characters. In 1954 Born was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his fundamental contributions to the great discovery of that cadre of superlative scientific minds – quantum theory. But his scientific research provides only one strand of this story. Born’s varied interests outside science led to many interesting experiences – some of historical importance insofar as they offer a glimpse into German society before and between the wars.