Book Guest Historian

A dinner party in an ornate mansion on the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan provides the scene for this witty and incisive play. Set in two eras--the early 1900s and our own Gilded Age--the characters move effortlessly from one period to the other. The host, a contemporary master of high-risk arbitrage, steps in and out of character as a robber baron of an earlier time. His guests of today include a Hollywood director, a not-so-cutting-edge sculptor, an online lingerie designer, an aggressive publicist, and an aging historian. Their counterparts from the past are the great man's rebellious son, a grand dame of New York society, the architect who built the mansion originally, and the maids and servants who maintain it. In this dance of rich storytelling and social commentary, it becomes strikingly clear that while old money has become new, little else has changed over the years. Children still rebel against their controlling parents, women still hope for love, and greed, snobbery, and angst persist.

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight--and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896); and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity--now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety--has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person. For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was "as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, has discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing." In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams." For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out intothe world at large--a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles.

George Dyson (science historian) - George Dyson (born 1953) is a scientific historian, the son of Freeman Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of Sir George Dyson. He is the author of Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965, and is the subject of Kenneth Brower's book The Starship and the Canoe.

Barbara Guest - Barbara Guest (born 1920) is an American poet and critic who is frequently associated with the New York School. She is also well-known for her book on the poet H.

Brute Force (book) - Brute Force is a controversial book by historian John Ellis which proposes that the Allied Forces won World War II not by the skill of their leaders but by brute force. Ellis claims that the Allied High Command made poor use of their overwhelming advantage in manpower.

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Book Guest Million - Book Guest Million The Wedding Countdown Book and Clock Here`s the witty book-plus gift for anyone planning a wedding. From the day the couple becomes engaged until the last guest leaves the reception, there are a million details to be attended to. With a welcome dose of humor, the clever, fully illustrated 64-page book outlines all that needs to be done-registering for gifts, hiring the photographer, drawing up the guest list book guest million and seating plan- ...

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Ever of offering (He funny at the time a frequent marijuana user, experimented with LSD, taking the drug with such impunity that he was eventually hospitalized. In the 1990s, Sim became an outspoken advocate of creators' rights in comics, and used the editorial pages of Cerebus to promote self-publishing and greater artist activism. Not long after, Sim became known for traveling to conventions and store signings in limousines (he spent $25,000 in limo service during his 1992 signing tour), and renting lavish suites at conventions at which he'd throw huge parties. Now complete, it marks the longest-running comic book in almost every conceivable way. (He was also, around this time, reportedly diagnosed with borderline schizophrenia.) Inspired in some ways by the Steve Gerber character Howard the Duck, the earliest issues of Cerebus took the form of a parody of Conan the Barbarian and its genre. History of the High Society segued the narrative into a complex political satire and drama. When Sim published the first Cerebus "phone book", a paperback collection of the fictional city-state of Iest, Pope (in the mammoth Church and State saga), and renegade. It was this incident that Sim claims led to the inspiration to produce Cerebus for 300 issues and 6,000 pages, through March 2004. He is an extremely morally ambiguous character, at times sympathetic, at others almost unpalatably callous. In 1979, Sim, who was at the time a frequent marijuana user, experimented with LSD, taking the drug with such impunity that he was eventually hospitalized. In the 1990s, book guest historian.