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Alexandra: The Last Tsarina

Just as Edvard Radzinsky wrote the ultimate account of Nicholas II in The Last Tsar and Robert Massie memorably described the imperial marriage in Nicholas and Alexandra, Carolly Erickson has created an indelible portrait of Alexandra, the woman blamed by her contemporaries for the downfall of the Romanovs.
Under Carolly Erickson's scrutiny the full dimensions of the empress's singular psychology are laid bare: her childhood bereavement, her long struggle to marry the deeply flawed man she loved, Nicholas, the anguish of her pathological shyness, her painful, bruising conflicts with her in-laws, her increasing eccentricities and loss of self as she became more and more preoccupied with matters of faith, and her growing dependence on a series of occult mentors, the most notorious of whom was Rasputin.
Alexandra's thorny personal story unfolds against the backdrop of Russian history in the last decades before the Revolution of 1917, a time of opulent palaces, bejeweled aristocrats, and lavish wealth - and also of anarchist bombs and pervasive violence and fear.
While the rich of St. Petersburg were carried away in a frenzy of fin-de-siecle merrymaking, the empress, feeling the burden of having to be her husband's emotional mainstay, sought answers to Russia's overwhelming problems through mediums and charlatans - and attempted to find healing for her hemophiliac son through the mysterious wonder-working powers of Rasputin.
Alexandra: The Last Tsarina by Carolly Erickson
ISBN: 031230238X

Lucrezia Borgia

The very name Lucrezia Borgia conjures up everything that was sinister and corrupt about the Renaissance - incest, political assassination, papal sexual abuse, poisonous intrigue, unscrupulous power grabs. Yet as best-selling biographer Sarah Bradford reveals in this breathtaking new portrait, the truth is far more fascinating than the myth. Neither a vicious monster nor a seductive pawn, Lucrezia Borgia was a shrewd, determined woman who used her beauty and intelligence to secure a key role in the political struggles of her day.
Born the illegitimate daughter of Rodrigo Cardinal Borgia and his scheming mistress, Vannozza Cattanei, Lucrezia Borgia was twelve when her father became Pope Alexander VI and thirteen when she was forced into her first marriage. She would marry twice more, gaining increasing power with each match, until she came into her own as duchess of the city-state of Ferrara.
Sarah Bradford argues that in her maturity Lucrezia Borgia was an enlightened ruler, kind and decisive in time of war, generous to the poets and artists of her court, passionate in love, and utterly indifferent to sexual morality.
Drawing from a trove of contemporary documents and fascinating firsthand accounts, Bradford brings to life the art, the pageantry, and the dangerous politics of the Renaissance world Lucrezia Borgia helped to create. Sarah Bradford is an expert on the Borgia family and in Lucrezia Borgia she has found a subject ideally suited to her gift for narrative and psychological insight. Sex, gossip, murder, astonishing beauty, and ambition - this is the Renaissance at its most irresistible.
Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love, and Death in Renaissance Italy by Sarah Bradford
ISBN: 0670033537

Jane Kenyon: Best Day the Worst Day

Jane Kenyon was nineteen years younger than Donald Hall and a student poet at the University of Michigan when they met. Donald Hall was her teacher. The Best Day the Worst Day is an intimate account of their twenty-three-year marriage, nearly all of it spent in New Hampshire at Eagle Pond Farm - of their shared rituals of writing, close attention to pets and gardening, and love in the afternoon. Hall joyfully records Jane's growing power as a poet and the couple's careful accommodations toward each other as writers. This portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, is laid against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months.
The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon by Donald Hall
ISBN: 0618478019

Mary Childers: Welfare Brat

From an early age, Mary Childers loves her family fiercely but refuses to repeat her mother's or older sisters' mistakes. She doesn't believe that school is optional and that men are the source of all happiness and all despair.
The child of an absent carny father and a single mother who schemes and struggles to house and feed her brood, Mary Childers is the third of her mother's surviving seven children, who were fathered by four different men. If her mother's romantic charisma can occasionally brighten their dim, roach-infested two-bedroom apartment, her alcohol-inspired moodiness and irresponsibility can leave her children hungry and desperate. Determined to live differently, Mary finds refuge first in books and then in work. Self-sufficiency, Mary Childers realizes by the age of twelve, is her only reliable ticket out of Bronx neighborhoods increasingly characterized by arson, rampant crime, and racial conflict.
In a culture where fatherless children are the norm and academic achievement and hard work are often scorned, Mary Childers seems to alienate her family and friends at every turn. Yet she blazes her own bumpy path out of the tight circle of poverty.
Welfare Brat: A Memoir by Mary Childers
ISBN: 1582345864