Secondhand Biography & Memoir Bargain Book Box SP2919

Secondhand Biography & Memoir Bargain Book Box SP2919

A wide-ranging memoir and biography box — major literary lives of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Archibald MacLeish; Naipaul's India: A Million Mutinies Now; the history of the Navy SEALs; A.L. Rowse on Oxford; Lennard Bickel's polar survival account (endorsed by Edmund Hillary as the greatest story of its kind); and the biography of Alan Bond at the height of his fame.

1. Paul VI: The First Modern Pope — Peter Hebblethwaite — The biography of the pope who steered the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, introduced the vernacular mass, and issued Humanae Vitae — the encyclical on contraception that has divided the Church ever since.
2. Brave Men Dark Waters: The Untold Story of the Navy SEALs — Orr Kelly — The history of the US Navy SEALs from their founding in 1962 through Vietnam, Panama, and the Gulf: the training, the missions, and the culture of one of the most demanding military organisations in the world.
3. Freud and His Father — Marianne Krüll — Krüll argues that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory was shaped not solely by clinical evidence but by the need to protect his father from what the theory would have implied. One of the more provocative rereadings of psychoanalytic history.
4. Mind's Eye: An Autobiography 1927-1972 — Basil Dean — Dean was a founding figure of British cinema and theatre in the 1920s and 1930s; his memoir covers the productions, the personalities, and the organisations — including ENSA — that he built and ran.
5. Stanley: Sorcerer's Apprentice — Frank McLynn — McLynn's biography of the explorer Henry Morton Stanley focuses on the complexity later biographers have exposed: the brutal methods in Africa, the contradictions in his public and private personas, and the extraordinary circumstances that produced his fame.
6. Archibald MacLeish: An American Life — Scott Donaldson — The biography of the poet and public intellectual who won three Pulitzer Prizes, served as Librarian of Congress, and was a central figure of the American literary world from the 1920s to the 1970s.
7. Bond — Terence Maher — The biography of Alan Bond at the height of his fame: the America's Cup victory, the media empire, the business deals, and the collapse that would follow. Maher reported on Bond during the years of his ascendancy.
8. Blizzard: Race to the Pole — Jasper Rees — The story of the BBC expedition to retrace Scott's polar route, with diary entries from expedition member Bruce Parry and a foreword from Ranulph Fiennes. The race as a meditation on endurance and failure.
9. All Souls in My Time — A.L. Rowse — The Cornish historian and Shakespeare scholar recalls seven decades of Oxford life: the dons, the dinners, the long argument about Shakespeare's Dark Lady that made him famous, and the college that gave him everything.
10. India: A Million Mutinies Now — V.S. Naipaul — Naipaul's third book on India, written in 1990: long interviews with Indians across classes, regions, and generations, listening to the voices of a country remaking itself. His most generous and most human India book.
11. The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change — Rebecca McClanahan — McClanahan traces four generations of her Midwestern American family through the twentieth century, using letters, photographs, and records to recover what ordinary lives contain.
12. Screaming at the Sky: My Journey — Tony Griffin, foreword by Lance Armstrong — An Australian cyclist who set out to break the transcontinental cycling record, and the memoir of what the preparation, the attempt, and the aftermath actually cost.
13. Lance Armstrong's Comeback from Cancer — Samuel Abt — Published after Armstrong's first Tour de France victory following his cancer treatment, this scrapbook biography chronicles the illness, the comeback, and the early years of what would become the most contested story in cycling.
14. The Landy Era: From Nowhere to the Top of the World — Len Johnson — The story of John Landy — the second man to break four minutes for the mile, the 1954 Empire Games runner who stopped to help a fallen competitor and still won his heat — and the golden decade of Australian middle-distance running.
15. Eudora Welty: A Biography — Suzanne Marrs