The very name Lucrezia Borgia conjures up everything that was sinister and corrupt about the Renaissance—incest, political assassination, papal sexual abuse, poisonous intrigue, unscrupulous power grabs. Yet as bestselling biographer Sarah Bradford reveals in this breathtaking new portrait, the truth is far more fascinating than the myth. Neither a vicious monster nor a seductive pawn, Lucrezia Borgia was a shrewd, determined woman who used her beauty and intelligence to secure a key role in the political struggles of her day. <P> Born the illegitimate daughter of Rodrigo Cardinal Borgia and his scheming mistress, Vannozza Cattanei, Lucrezia was twelve when her father became Pope Alexander VI and thirteen when she was forced into her first marriage. She would marry twice more, gaining increasing power with each match, until she came into her own as duchess of the city-state of Ferrara. Bradford argues that in her maturity Lucrezia was an enlightened ruler, kind and decisive in time of war, generous to the poets and artists of her court, passionate in love, and utterly indifferent to sexual morality.<P> Drawing from a trove of contemporary documents and fascinating firsthand accounts, Bradford brings to life the art, the pageantry, and the dangerous politics of the Renaissance world Lucrezia Borgia helped to create. Bradford is an expert on the Borgia family and in Lucrezia she has found a subject ideally suited to her gift for narrative and psychological insight. Sex, gossip, murder, astonishing beauty, and ambition— this is the Renaissance at its most irresistible.

   Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>, <i>The Pianist </i>is now a major motion picture directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrien Brody (<i>Son of Sam</i>). <i>The Pianist</i> won the Cannes Film Festival’s most prestigious prize—the Palme d’Or.<br><br>On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn’t hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air.<br><br>Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, <i>The Pianist </i>is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.<br>

   <p>Here is an intimate glimpse of the greatest scientist of our day, the brilliant physicist confined to a wheelchair whose <i>A Brief History of Time</i> has become the first worldwide scientific bestseller of the century. The story of Stephen Hawking's relentless quest for the secret of the origins of the universe will change forever the way you look at the stars . . . and your place among them.</p>

   A journalist describes her twenty years as a functioning alcoholic, explaining how she used alcohol to escape the realities of life and personal relationships, until a series of personal crises forced her to confront her problem. Reprint. 90,000 first printing."

   Now in paperback, the #1 <I>San Francisco Chronicle</I> bestseller that is an enchanting and lyrical look at the life, the traditions, and the cuisine of Tuscany, in the spirit of Peter Mayle's <I>A Year in Provence.</I><P><P>Frances Mayes entered a wondrous new world when she began restoring an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. There were unexpected treasures at every turn: faded frescos beneath the whitewash in her dining room, a vineyard under wildly overgrown brambles in the garden, and, in the nearby hill towns, vibrant markets and delightful people. In <I>Under the Tuscan Sun,</I> she brings the lyrical voice of a poet, the eye of a seasoned traveler, and the discerning palate of a cook and food writer to invite readers to explore the pleasures of Italian life and to feast at her table.

   From a leading international authority on manic-depressive illness--and one of only a handful of women who are full professors of medicine--comes a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since childhood with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life.

   <b>“From the outside, no matter what the gradations of my mixed heritage, the shadow of Indian brown in my skin caused others to automatically perceive me as Hindu or Muslim. . . . Still, I trekked through life with the spirit of a Jew, fleshed out by the unique challenges and wonders of a combined brown and white tradition.”<br><br></b>In the politics of skin color, Carmit Delman is an ambassador from a world of which few are even aware. Her mother is a direct descendant of the Bene Israel, a tiny, ancient community of Jews thriving amidst the rich cultural tableau of Western India. Her father is American, a Jewish man of Eastern European descent. They met while working the land of a nascent Israeli state. Bound by love for each other and that newborn country, they hardly took notice of the interracial aspect of their union. But their daughter, Carmit, growing up in America, was well aware of her uncommon heritage.<br><br><i>Burnt Bread and Chutney</i> is a remarkable synthesis of the universal and the exotic. Carmit Delman’s memories of the sometimes painful, sometimes pleasurable, often awkward moments of her adolescence juxtapose strikingly with mythic tales of her female ancestors living in the Indian-Jewish community. As rites and traditions, smells and textures intertwine, Carmit’s unique cultural identity evolves. It is a youth spent dancing on the roofs of bomb shelters on a kibbutz in Israel—and the knowledge of a heritage marked by arranged marriages and archaic rules and roles. It is coming of age in Jewish summer camps and at KISS concerts—and the inevitable combination of old and new: ancient customs and modern attitudes, Jewish, Indian, and American.<br><br>Carmit Delman’s journey through religious traditions, family tensions, and social tribulations to a healthy sense of wholeness and self is rendered with grace and an acute sense of depth. <i>Burnt Bread and Chutney</i> is a rich and innovative book that opens wide a previously unseen world.

   Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. <i>Reading Lolita in Tehran</i> is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

   <DIV><DIV>In 1874, when Martha Summerhayes came as a bride to Fort Russell in Wyoming Territory, she "saw not much in those first few days besides bright buttons, blue uniforms, and shining swords," but soon enough the hard facts of army life began to intrude. Remonstrating with her husband, Jack, that she had only three rooms and a kitchen instead of "a whole house," she was informed that "women are not reckoned in at all in the War Department," which also failed to appreciate that "'lieutenants' wives needed quite as much as colonels’ wives." In fact, Martha had only a short time to enjoy her new quarters, for in June her husband’s regiment was ordered to Arizona, "that dreaded and then unknown land."<DIV> <DIV>Although Martha Summerhayes’s recollections span a quarter of a century and life at a dozen army posts, the heart of this book concerns her experiences during the 1870s in Arizona, where (as Dan L. Thrapp observes in his introduction) the harsh climate and "perennial natural inconveniences from rattlesnakes to cactus thorns and white desperadoes, all made [it] a less than desirable posting for the married man and his wife." First privately printed in 1908, Vanished Arizona was so well-received that in 1910 Mrs. Summerhayes prepared a new edition (reprinted here), which was published in 1911, the year of her death. Among "the essential primary records of the frontier-military West," the book "retains its place securely because of the narrative skill of the author, her delight in life—all life, including even, or perhaps principally, army life and people—and because it is such a joy to read.</DIV></div></div></div>

   A splendid combination of Zen wisdom and down-to-earth advice about writing.