John M. Letiche started life as Ianik Letichevsky, a citizen of the newly constituted Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The son of a brilliant but dictatorial father and a loving, cultivated mother, he went on to a remarkable career as an accomplished scholar, professor of economics, and adviser to governments.

Letiche, now in his nineties, provides an intriguing look at the changes that have occurred during his lifetime. Following his Kiev childhood and formative years in Depression-era Montreal, he completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago and took up a Rockefeller fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. As a technical adviser to the Economic Commission for Africa he conducted trade talks with both gifted and corrupt heads of state in sub-Saharan Africa, and later shared a working White House dinner with an infamous American president. His half-century-long teaching career at Berkeley included a front row seat for the Free Speech Movement and the most documented student revolt in popular history.

Told with humor, insight, and humility, Crises and Compassion moves nimbly among weighty events and meaningful personal history, showing how "civility in intellectual exchange" came to be the guiding principle of a life of monumental experiences.

Happy Days Revisited: Growing Up Jewish in Ike's America consists of autobiographies of three Jewish men who grew up in Milwaukee during the 1950s: Gerald S. Glazer, BS'63; Jack Nusan Porter, PhD; and Sanford L. Aronin.

The three stories describe how the authors met the challenges of maintaining a Jewish identity in a gentile society, then experiencing the rise of the new teen culture. Among the challenges encountered were anti-Semitism and the conflicts between traditional Judaism and modern worldviews.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print during the last two decades of her life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Based on archives and interviews with Jackie's authors, colleagues, and friends, Reading Jackie mines this significant period of her life to reveal both the serious and the mischievous woman underneath the glamorous public image.

Though Jackie had a reputation for avoiding publicity, she willingly courted controversy in her books. She was the first editor to commission a commercially successful book telling the story of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his female slave. Her publication of Gelsey Kirkland's attack on dance icon George Balanchine caused another storm. Jackie rarely spoke of her personal life, but many of her books ran parallel to, echoed, and emerged from her own experience. She was the editor behind bestsellers on the assassinations of Tsar Nicholas II and John Lennon, and in another book she paid tribute to the allure of Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas. Her other projects take us into territory she knew well: journeys to Egypt and India, explorations of the mysteries of female beauty and media exploitation, into the minds of photographers, art historians, and the designers at Tiffany & Co.

Many Americans regarded Jackie as the paragon of grace, but few knew her as the woman sitting on her office floor laying out illustrations, or flying to California to persuade Michael Jackson to write his autobiography. Reading Jackie provides a compelling behind-the-scenes look at Jackie at work: how she commissioned books and nurtured authors, as well as how she helped to shape stories that spoke to her strongly. Jackie is remembered today for her marriages to JFK and to Aristotle Onassis, but her real legacy is the books that reveal the tastes, recollections, and passions of an independent woman.

Few Western scholars of the Middle East have exerted such profound influence as Edward William Lane. Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), which has never gone out of print, remains as a highly authoritative study of Middle Eastern society. His annotated translation of the Arabian Nights (1839-41) retains a devoted readership. Lane's recently recovered and published Description of Egypt (2000) shows that he was a pioneering Egyptologist as well as orientalist. The capstone of his career, the definitive Arabic-English Lexicon (1863-93), is an indispensable reference tool. Yet, despite his extraordinary influence, little was known about Lane and virtually nothing about how he did his work. Now, in the first full-length biography, Lane's life and accomplishments are examined in full, including his crucial years of field work in Egypt, revealing the life of a great Victorian scholar and presenting a fascinating episode in East-West encounter, interaction, and representation.

Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art is the deeply moving, untold story of America's greatest 20th-century novelist and is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his life--his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and the childhood friend who became his wife, Estelle Oldham. In this new exploration of Faulkner's creative process, author Judith Sensibar discovers that these women's relationships with Faulkner were not simply close and lifelong: they inspired his imaginative vision. Sensibar brings to the foreground--as Faulkner did--this "female world," an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography. Through extensive research in hitherto unknown biographical sources--including archival materials of Faulkner's and his wife's and interviews with these women's families and other members of the black and white communities in which they lived--she reconnects Faulkner's biography to his work. She demonstrates of the themes of race, tormented loss, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his defining relationships with these three women. In doing so Sensibar alters and enriches our understanding not only of Faulkner, his art, and the complex world of the American South that came to life in his fiction, but also of the desires, fears, and unspokens that Faulkner revealed in the American psyche.

In his memoir, Alvin Ziontz reflects on his more than 30 years representing Indian tribes, from a time when Indian law was little known through landmark battles that upheld tribal sovereignty. He discusses the growth and maturation of tribal government and the underlying tensions between Indian society and the non-Indian world. A Lawyer in Indian Country presents vignettes of reservation life and recounts some of the memorable legal cases that illustrate the challenges faced by individual Indians and tribes.

As the senior attorney arguing U.S. v. Washington, Ziontz was a party to the historic 1974 Boldt decision that affirmed the Pacific Northwest tribes' treaty fishing rights, with ramifications for tribal rights nationwide. His work took him to reservations in Montana, Wyoming, and Minnesota, as well as Washington and Alaska, and he describes not only the work of a tribal attorney but also his personal entry into the life of Indian country.

This is the first book to introduce young people, ages 10 to 100, to author and activist Jane Jacobs. Her now-classic 1961 book helped people value their cities, called for an end to the wrecking ball of "urban renewal," and ultimately changed the world. In words, vintage photos, and illustrations, Genius of Common Sense follows Jacobs from her childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania, through her groundbreaking work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and her involvement in battles to save the very New York City neighborhoods she wrote about.

This young-adult book serves as a valuable introduction for readers of all ages to the life and work of Jane Jacobs. Even those familiar with this remarkable woman will find information and images never published before.

Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet is the first major biography of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Born in 1889, Akhmatova came of age just as the Tsarist regime was collapsing. Famous for her haunting poetry and austere beauty, she was so lionized in communist Russia that Stalin feared to kill her, but attacked her family and closest friends. A poet of prophetic power who witnessed her beloved homeland suffer under oppression, Akhmatova wrote from her intensely personal experience as a woman, mother, lover, and artist. Her poems are among the most influential works of the 20th century. This biography has recently been revised and expanded, based on new material, interviews, and archival research. It includes revelations and new interpretations of Akhmatova's relationship to Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Isaiah Berlin, as well as an updated bibliography.

Written as he spoke it, Wilson tells of his early life in Louisiana and his adult years in Galveston and San Francisco in vivid colloquial language that gives the reader the feeling of sitting across the kitchen table, listening to him talk. His storytelling provides an illuminating and accessible historical account of the lives of blacks in the South and their migration north during World War II. Details about routine living skills add important details to his story, as does the importance of Negro League baseball. Life was not always simple or pleasant for Wilson, but hard lessons he learned at an early age molded him into a man able to overcome obstacles placed in his path by time, place and racism, without losing his innate decency.

To Be a Man: Johnnie Wilson Jr. is an inspiration to anyone who is looking for basic goodness in today´s world. The book grew from a chance encounter with Mr. Wilson´s grandson, Lorrel Anderson, who drove for a car service that took the author to the airport. The two got into a conversation about family and soon, with love and pride, he began telling her about his 93-year-old grandfather. As a result of that car ride, she began recording Mr. Wilson´s story for his family, believing it spoke to more people than just his family.

To Be a Man: Johnnie Wilson Jr. is the first book by Susan Gluck Rothenberg, a San Francisco-based oral historian. Susan's work has previously been published in the Oral History Review.

Go behind the scenes for a firsthand look at the corporate culture, values, management styles, challenges, and opportunities that cause organizations to succeed or fail. In this straight-talking account of his life and career as an international business executive, Maurice Marwood guides the reader through the corridors of corporate power and offers down-to-earth strategies for succeeding in a globalized economy. Throughout his 40-year career, Marwood fought to defend the virtues of capitalism and free enterprise against a constant onslaught of socialism and anti-business elements. Working in more than 85 countries, he was often on the cutting edge of international business developments. He first visited China, for example, shortly after the death of Chairman Mao--at the very beginning of the country's period of phenomenal growth. Later, while living in Taiwan, he devoted several years studying the history and culture of the ethnic Chinese, analyzing the complex, antagonistic relationship between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan--as well as the reluctant role played by the United States. Marwood's candid memoir of his on-the-job successes, failures, and frustrations intertwines with recollections of personal adventures alongside reflections on ethics, morality, spirituality, and the epidemic of mysticism that destroys the lives of so many. Professional Nomad is not only a reference for those aspiring to a successful career in international business, but it is also a blueprint for a flourishing life, one lived with passion, determination, and ultimate satisfaction.