Albert schweitzer, General George S. She was a daring and fearless woman whose adventures included being the first American woman in uniform held as a POW by the Germans during World War II. Patton, lilly Pulitzer, and Bing Crosby. Read all about her gilded age girlhood, work for the oss - the original American spy agency - during World War II, explorations on three continents, hijinks on the French Riviera with the Lost Generation, and her imprisonment by the Nazis.
In 1902 and ending at her plantation outside Charleston in 2000 She also partied on the riviera with the murphys, undertook numerous challenging expeditions for natural history museums and lead four and befriended some of the greatest personalities of the 20th century, the Fitzgeralds and Harpo Marx in the 1920s, including Dr.
And that's less than half the story! Gertrude Sanford Legendre was a woman whose adventurous life spanned the twentieth century, beginning in Aiken, S. C. Gertie lived a 20th century life full of fun, adventure, derring-do and drama.
A Guest of the Reich: The Story of American Heiress Gertrude Legendre's Dramatic Captivity and Escape from Nazi Germany
. In a guest of the reich, peter finn tells the gripping story of how in 1944, while on leave in liberated Paris, Legendre was captured by the Germans after accidentally crossing the front lines. A washington post best book of the yearthe dramatic story of a South Carolina heiress who joined the OSS and became the first American woman in uniform taken prisoner on the Western front—until her escape from Nazi Germany.
A guest of the reich is a propulsive account of a little-known chapter in the history of World War II, as well as a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary woman. Gertrude “gertie” legendre was a big-game hunter from a wealthy industrial family who lived a charmed life in Jazz Age America. Subjected to repeated interrogations, including by the Gestapo, Legendre entered a daring game of lies with her captors.
After six months in captivity, Legendre escaped into Switzerland. Her adventurous spirit made her the inspiration for the Broadway play Holiday, which became a film starring Katharine Hepburn. First in washington and then in London, some of the most closely-held United States government secrets passed through her hands.
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The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency
Widely considered the first—and only—female presidential chief of staff, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand was the right-hand woman to Franklin Delano Roosevelt—both personally and professionally—for more than twenty years. Although her official title as personal secretary was relatively humble, her power and influence were unparalleled.
She was one of his most trusted advisors, affording her a unique perspective on the president that no one else could claim, and she was deeply admired and respected by Eleanor Roosevelt. The gatekeeper is a thoughtful, revealing unsung-hero story about a woman ahead of her time, the true weight of her responsibility, and the tumultuous era in which she lived—and a long overdue tribute to one of the most important female figures in American history.
Everyone in the white house knew one truth: If you wanted access to Franklin, you had to get through Missy. With unprecedented access to missy’s family and original source materials, journalist Kathryn Smith tells the “fascinating” Publishers Weekly and forgotten story of the intelligent, loyal, and clever woman who had a front-row seat to history in the making.
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Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford; The Biography
Her highly autobiographical early work, gaston palewski, to friends such as Evelyn Waugh, and to the great love of her life, the biographies and novels of her more mature French period, and the vast body of letters to her family, her journalism, all tell an intriguing story. Drawing from these, and colleagues, acquaintances, as well as conversations with Mitford’s two surviving sisters, prizewinning author Laura Thompson has fashioned a portrait of a contradictory and courageous woman.
. Life in a cold climate is full of the sound of Mitfordian laughter; but also tells the often paradoxical and complex story beneath the smiling and ever-elegant façade.
Sunset Lodge in Georgetown: The Story of a Madam Landmarks
Weisse was also aware of the community around her business. She approved their choices of clothes to wear to Front Street, warned them not to look at men on the sidewalk and forbade soliciting. Despite being illegal, the business remained open for thirty-three years until Weisse's retirement in 1969. She sent her "sporting ladies" to town for their weekly doctor visits, banking deposits and shopping trips.
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The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
The splendid and the vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when, courage, in the face of unrelenting horror, and a family, Churchill’s eloquence, and perseverance bound a country, together. It was up to churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—and willing to fight to the end.
Poland and czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. In the splendid and the vile, erik larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless. It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London.
The #1 new york times bestselling author of the devil in the white city and dead wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of winston churchill and london during the BlitzNAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2020 BY The Washington Post • HuffPost • The Seattle Times • Lit Hub • The Week • PopSugarOn Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium.
For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45, 000 Britons.
Dawson's Fall: A Novel
He later became the editor of the charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. In the end, dawson—a man in many ways representative of the country at this time—was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.
Set in 1889, robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, in Charleston, and spans the life of her tragic hero, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, South Carolina, Frank Dawson, social, and moral landscape. Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights.
As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, justice, equality, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Nor could dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor, which threatened to stain his family’s reputation.
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Tell Me a Story: My Life with Pat Conroy
Their friendship bloomed into a tentative, long-distance relationship. Pat and cassandra ultimately married, ending Pat's long commutes from coastal South Carolina to her native Alabama. Bestselling author cassandra king conroy considers her life and the man she shared it with, Pat Conroy, paying tribute to her husband, the legendary figure of modern Southern literature.
Tell me a story is breathtakingly tender, heartbreakingly true. The best memoir I’ve read. Mary alice monroe, divorced “sunday wife” of a preacher, New York Times bestselling author of The Beach House Reunion Cassandra King was leading a quiet life as a professor, and debut novelist when she met Pat Conroy.
As she reflects on their relationship and the eighteen years they spent together, cut short by Pat’s passing at seventy, Cassandra reveals how the marshlands of the South Carolina Lowcountry ultimately cast their spell on her, funny, generous, too, and how she came to understand the convivial, and wounded flesh-and-blood man beneath the legend—her husband, the original Prince of Tides.
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The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture
. It was also the first age of cultural globalization—an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming the barriers of nationalism and facilitating the development of a truly European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, theater manager, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, and republican activist.
By 1900, the same paintings reproduced, the same books were being read across the continent, the same music played in homes and heard in concert halls, the same operas performed in all the major theatres. Drawing from a wealth of documents, and other archival materials, letters, acclaimed historian Orlando Figes examines the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible.
Together, flaubert, brahms, the schumanns, dickens, turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange—they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, and Dostoyevsky, Liszt, Hugo, Chopin, Berlioz, among many other towering figures. As figes observes, ideas, nearly all of civilization’s great advances have come during periods of heightened cosmopolitanism—when people, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations.
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Baroness of Hobcaw: The Life of Belle W. Baruch Non Series
Miller describes belle's final success in saving Hobcaw from development as the overarching triumph of a tempestuous life. In 1905 he bought hobcaw barony, a sprawling seaside retreat where he entertained the likes of Churchill and FDR. Belle's story also reveals her efforts to win her mother's approval and her father's attention, family, employees, as well as her unraveling relationships with friends, and lovers—both male and female.
Belle W. Belle's daily life at hobcaw reflects the world of wealthy northerners, including the Vanderbilts and Luces, who bought tracts of southern acreage. Presidents. In baroness of Hobcaw, Mary E. Miller provides a provocative portrait of this unorthodox woman who gave a gift of monumental importance to the scientific community.
Belle's father, Bernard M. Baruch 1899–1964 could outride, outhunt, outshoot, and outsail most of the young men of her elite social circle—abilities that distanced her from other debutantes of 1917.
The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete
It reveals that, in one way or another, we can trace our fanaticism for fitness and sports directly back to the twenty-sixth president and his relentless pursuit of “The Strenuous Life. Essential reading for anyone who cares about the history of sports in America. Michael kazin, author of war against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918.
As president of the united states, practiced Ju-Jitsu, Roosevelt boxed, played tennis nearly every day, and frequently invited athletes and teams to the White House. In adulthood, he was diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition and was told never to exert himself again. It was during his administration that America saw baseball’s first ever World Series; interscholastic sports began; and schools began to place an emphasis on physical education.
It seemed as if theodore Roosevelt’s biographers had closed the book on his life story. Crippling asthma, a frail build, and grossly myopic eyesight: these were the ailments that plagued Teddy Roosevelt as a child. But ryan swanson has uncovered an untold chapter” Johnny Smith, coauthor of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.