African American Lives offers up-to-date, authoritative biographies of some 600 noteworthy African Americans. Subjects include slaves and abolitionists, writers, politicians, and business people, musicians and dancers, artists and athletes, victims of injustice and the lawyers, journalists, and civil rights leaders who gave them a voice. Their experiences and accomplishments combine to expose the complexity of race as an overriding issue in America's past and present.

An illegitimate orphan from the Caribbean, Hamilton rose with stunning speed to become George Washington's aide-de-camp, a member of the Constitutional Convention, coauthor of The Federalist Papers, leader of the Federalist party, and the country's first Treasury secretary. With masterful storytelling skills, Chernow presents the whole sweep of Hamilton's turbulent life.

Here are solitary figures like Gwen John, Simone Weil, and Barbara Pym, muses and partners of dominant men like Clementine Churchill and Giuseppina Verdi, survivors such as Isak Dinesen, Doris Lessing, and Rebecca West, and other writers including Katherine Mansfield, Iris Murdoch, and Anita Brookner, as well as Dinnage's thoughts on the relationship among psychology, biography, and fiction.

Benjamin Franklin remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin is a landmark work, a magnificent fresh vision of Franklin's life and reputation, filled with profound insights into the Revolution and into the emergence of America's idea of itself.

Drawing on the pâtissier royal's rich memoirs, Ian Kelly traces Antonin Carème's meteoric rise from Paris orphan to international celebrity, and provides a dramatic below-stairs perspective on one of the most momentous, and sensuous, periods in European history-First Empire Paris, Georgian England, and the Russia of War and Peace. His recipes-now classics of French cuisine, created for, and named after, the gourmet-kings and queens for whom he worked-can bring the very taste and smell of the early 19th century alive.

A memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. "[A] self-portrait of the artist as a young girl, rendered in graceful black-and-white comics that apply a childlike sensibility to the bleak lowlights of recent Iranian history. . . . [Her] style is powerful; it persuasively communicates confusion and horror through the eyes of a precocious preteen." -Village Voice

With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Fuller describes her trip home to Zambia, where she meets men who have killed, mutilated, tortured and scrambled to survive during wartime, and who now live with their past.