Dance While you Can

The best-selling author, actress, and all-around celebrity shares personal stories about her own family--her parents, brother Warren Beatty, and her only daughter--and discusses her life in the movies over a period of four decades.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World - A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention

If all measures of human advancement in the last hundred centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost perfectly flat line--until the eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolutionwould cause the line to shoot straight up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress. In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, William Rosentells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it--the steam engine. In the process he tackles the question that has obsessed historians ever since: What madeeighteenth-century Britain such fertile soil for inventors?

The Middle Sea

The Middle Sea, In his latest sweeping history, the author of "Byzantium" considers the "political fortunes" of the lands of the Mediterranean from the age of ancient Greece to the First World War. Taking as a starting point the region’s unique geography, which seems to have been "deliberately designed" as a "cradle of cultures," he focusses on the rise and fall of civilizations through battles and their heroes, paying particular attention to the Christian and Muslim struggle for dominance. At times, the geographical framework feels arbitrary.

Free Air

Free Air is a novel written by Sinclair Lewis.

This cheerful little road novel, published in 1919, is about Claire Boltwood, who, in the early days of the 20th century, travels by automobile from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, where she falls in love with a nice, down-to-earth young man and gives up her snobbish Estate.
From a critical perspective, Free Air is consistent with Sinclair Lewis's lean towards Leftist politics, which he displays in his other works (most notably in It Can't Happen Here). Examples of his politics in Free Air are found in Lewis's emphasis on the heroic role played by the book's protagonist, Milt Dagget, a working class everyman type.

The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life

We travel with The Hawk, or Carl Ericson, son of Norwegian immigrants, born at the end of the 19th century through the first three adventurous periods of the young man’s life. We see him as an adventurous boy, running away with Gertie Cowels, the girl that lives in the big house in the better part of town, only to be rescued by Bone Stillman, a backwoods philosopher and influence on Carl.