Since his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama has captured attention as reporters, politicos, and ordinary citizens have wondered if he might be the nation's first black president. Chicago Tribune reporter Mendell argues that although Obama's rise to the national stage might seem unplanned, it is the outcome of a carefully calculated strategy by an ambitious man. Mendell...

Nadezhda Akinfova was enthusiastically loved by the Russian minister of foreign affairs, Prince A. M. Gorchakov. Moreover, Fedor Tiutchev devoted his verses to her; and then there's the story of her love for N. M. Leikhtenbersky, which was reflected in Tolstoy's novels 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina.' Now, unpublished confidential archival material has allowed the author to reconstruct the...

Vasilii Chapaev was one of the most active participants in Russia's Civil War; in our time, he is known as the hero of many jokes. The real story of his life is interwoven with fabrications from the well-known movie about his life. Before the fall of the USSR, the name Chapaev was surrounded by an aura of heroism and whole-hearted devotion to the Revolution. This book is based on archival...

A serious research of the last year of Dostoevsky's life. It sheds light on the drama of his life, death and the mystery of his departure.

Vlas Doroshevish. The Fate of The Feuilletonist. A full biography.

A biography of the famous Russian writer and a politician, Eduard Limonov.

This book is dedicated to the study of the work of the artist and poet Mikhail Grobman. One of the most important representatives of the Moscow artistic and literary avant-garde of the 1960s, he emigrated to Israel in 1971, where he became famous for his performances in the Judean Desert, carried out by the group ‘Leviathan,’ which he founded. Grobman's art occupies a special place between...

Richard P. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. In this lively work that 'can shatter the stereotype of the stuffy scientist' (Detroit Free Press), Feynman recounts his experiences trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets?and much more of an eyebrow-raising nature....

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How Christopher Johnson McCandless...

Wolfgang Leonhard was a 13-year-old boy when he had to leave Nazi Germany with his mother and emigrated to the Soviet Union. There he grew up after the arrest of his mother in a home for German and Austrian emigrants, studied at the Moscow Pedagogical College of Foreign Languages and joined the Komsomol. He experienced the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in Moscow and was forcibly resettled...