Orem Library

From humble origins in the provinces, Mao Zedong rose to absolute power, unifying with an iron fist a vast country torn apart by years of weak leadership, colonialism, and war. This sharply drawn and insightful account brings to life this modern-day emperor and the tumultuous era that he did so much to shape.

Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills brings the same fresh scholarship, lively prose, and critical appreciation that characterize his well-known books on religion and American history to this outstanding biography of one of the most influential Christian philosophers. Saint Augustine follows its subject from his youth in fourth-century Africa to his conversion and subsequent development as a theologian. It challenges the widely held misconceptions about...

A passionate and sensuous portrait, O'Brien traces Joyce's early days as a rambunctious young Jesuit student; his falling in love with a tall, red-haired Galway girl named Nora Barnacle on Bloomsday; and his exile to Trieste where he found success, love and finally, despair. Joyce's raucous life as well as thoughtful commentary on his major writings is presented without the academic accoutrements that have made other Joyce biographies so difficult...

An eminent historian follows Rosa Parks from her childhood in Jim Crow Alabama through her early involvement in the NAACP to her epochal moment of courage and her afterlife as a beloved--and resented--icon of the civil rights movement.

This new biography of our 28th president is pithy and intelligent; it is also hurried. As with other titles in the Penguin Lives series, the match up of author and subject is inspired. Auchincloss, the highbrow novelist and biographer of such bluebloods as Edith Wharton and Henry James, is perfectly suited to chronicle the exploits of the most academic and idealistic man ever to have lived in the White House. In 18 breathless pages, Auchincloss covers...

"In Dante, Lewis traces the life and complex development--emotional, artistic, philosophical--of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later." --container.

Patricia Bosworth is an acclaimed biographer whose classic work on the life of Montgomery Clift was praised by Newsweek as "the best film star biography in years." Her firsthand knowledge of the entertainment industry infuses her writing with an intimacy and vividness The Washington Post Book World calls "extraordinary." In Marlon Brando, she evokes the magnetic sexuality, passion, and vulnerability of the icon and the man.

"This rich, timely and highly original portrait of the Buddha explores both the archetypal religious icon and Buddha the man." --container.

This self-made man from a log cabin-the great orator, the Emancipator, the savior of the Union, the martyr-was arguably our greatest president; but it takes a master storyteller like Thomas Keneally, author of the award-winning novel that inspired the film Schindler's List, to bring alive the history behind the myth. Acclaimed for his recent Civil War biography, American Scoundrel, Keneally delves with relish-and a keen, fresh eye-into Lincoln's complicated...