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Ambassador Book Award
The Ambassador Book Award (1986–2011) was presented annually by the English-Speaking Union. It recognized important literary and non-fiction works that contributed to the understanding and interpretation of American life and culture. Winners of the award were considered literary ambassadors who provide, in the best contemporary English, an important window on America to the rest of the world. A panel of judges selected books out of new works in the fields of fiction, biography, autobiography, current affairs, American studies and poetry. The award was established in 1986. Winners included books by such notable authors as Tom Wolfe (1988), Joan Didion (1988), Raymond Carver (1989), Gore Vidal (1989), John Cheever (1992), John Updike (1997), Don Delillo (1998), Philip Roth (1999), and Annie Proulx (2000). Recipients 2011 *American Studies - ''The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks'', by Rebecca Skloot *Biography and Autobiography - ''The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Centu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Mann (writer)
James Mann is a Washington-based journalist and author. He has written a series of non-fiction books, including three about America's relationship with China and four more about American foreign policy. His group biography about George W. Bush's war cabinet, ''Rise of The Vulcans'', was a ''New York Times'' best-seller. As a newspaper journalist, he worked for more than two decades for the ''Los Angeles Times'', where he served as Supreme Court correspondent, Beijing bureau chief, and foreign-policy columnist. Earlier in his career, he worked at ''The Washington Post'', where he took part in the newspaper's Watergate coverage. Life Mann was born and raised in Albany, New York, where both his father Jay D. Mann and his grandfather Abraham Mann were local physicians. His mother, Peggy Lebair Mann, was the coach of women's tennis at the State University of New York at Albany, as well as a longtime tennis umpire who officiated at both the U.S. Open and at Wimbledon. Mann graduated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art. Early life and education Solnit was born in 1961 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother. In 1966, her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated," she has said of her childhood. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the General Educational Development tests. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17, she went to study in Paris. She returned to California to finish her college education at San Francisco State University. She then received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, ''The Bluest Eye'', was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed '' Song of Solomon'' (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for ''Beloved'' (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her work ''Beloved'' was made into a film in 1998. Mor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Shapiro
Alan Richard Shapiro (born February 18, 1952 in Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ..., Massachusetts) is an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Shapiro's poetry books include ''Tantalus in Love'', ''Song and Dance'', and ''Dead Alive and Busy''. In addition to poetry, Shapiro has published two personal memoirs, ''Vigil'' and ''The Last Happy Occasion''. Bibliography Poetry collections *''The Courtesy'' *''Happy Hour'' *''Covenant'' *''Mixed Company'' *''The Last Happy Occasion'' *''Vigil'' *''After the Digging'' *''The Dead Alive and Busy'' *''Song and Dance'' *''Tantalus in Love'' *''Old War'' *''Night of the Republic'' *''Reel to Reel'' List of poems Essays * Awards and hono ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser (born August 3, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel '' Martin Dressler''. Life and career Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of '' Edwin Mullhouse'' and ''From the Realm of Morpheus'' in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote ''Portrait of a Romantic'' at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" (in ''The Barnum Museum'') features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life. Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, ''Edwin Mullhouse''. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jane Mayer
Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the United States Predator drone program; Donald Trump's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz; and Trump's financial backer, Robert Mercer. In 2016, Mayer's book ''Dark Money'' — in which she investigated the history of the conservative fundraising Koch brothers — was published to critical acclaim. Early life and education Mayer was born in New York City. Her mother, Meredith (née Nevins), is a painter, print-maker and former president of the Manhattan Graphics Center. Her father, William Mayer, was a composer. Her paternal great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers. Her maternal grandparents were Mary Fleming (Richardson) and Allan Nevins, a historian and John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s authorized biographer. Maye ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Worster
Donald Worster (born 1941) is an American environmental historian who was, until his retirement, the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history. In 2009, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After retirement from University of Kansas, he became Distinguished Foreign Expert and senior professor in the School of History of Renmin University of China. Early life Donald Worster was born in 1941 and grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas, graduating from Hutchinson High School. He received a Bachelor of Arts in 1963 and a Master of Arts in 1964 from the University of Kansas. He continued his education at Yale University, earning an M.Phil. in 1970 and a PhD. in history in 1971 working with Howard R. Lamar. Professional career He came to the University of Kansas in 1989 to occupy the Hall Chair in American History, thus returning to his undergraduat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Benfey
Christopher Benfey (born October 28, 1954) is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Early life and education Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania, but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana. and attended The Putney School. His father was a German immigrant and his mother was from North Carolina. He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father, Otto Theodor Benfey, was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his B.A. at Guilford College. Benfey holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Career Benfey is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature. He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in ''The Atlantic'', ''The New York Times Sunday Book Review'', ''The New Republic'', ''The New York Review of Books'', and ''The Times Literary Supplement''. He was an art critic for ''Slate''. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robin Kelley
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley (born March 14, 1962) is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC), and from 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994 to 2003, he was a professor of history and Africana Studies at New York University (NYU) as well the chair of NYU's history department from 2002 to 2003. Kelley has also served as a Hess Scholar-in-Residence at Brooklyn College. In the summer of 2000, he was honored as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught and mentored a class of sophomores, as well as wrote the majority of the book ''Freedom Dreams''. During the academic year 2009–10, Kelley served as Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University, the first African-American historian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colum McCann
Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York. He is a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York. McCann's work has been published in over 40 languages, and has appeared in ''The New York Times'', ''New Yorker'', '' Esquire'', ''Paris Review'', ''The Atlantic Monthly'', ''Granta'', as well as other international publications. McCann is the author of seven novels, including ''TransAtlantic'' (2013) and the National Book Award-winning '' Let the Great World Spin'' (2009). He has also written three collections of short stories, including ''Thirteen Ways of Looking'', released in October 2015. Early life McCann was born in 1965 in Dublin and studied journalism in the former College of Commerce in Rathmines, which became part of the Dublin Institute of Technology and which became the Technological University Dublin in 2019. He became a reporter for ''The Irish Press'' Group, and had his own column ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Let The Great World Spin
''Let the Great World Spin'' is a novel by Colum McCann set mainly in New York City in the United States. The book won the 2009 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, one of the most lucrative literary prizes in the world. Its title comes from the poem "Locksley Hall" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Plot The events of the story are told in a largely non-linear fashion, with several different narrators telling the story from different perspectives. The story is interspersed with fictionalized accounts of Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk across the World Trade Center (1973–2001), Twin Towers, the date on which the two main events of the novel occur: a fatal car crash and a trial. In 1974, an Irishman named Ciaran travels to New York City to see his younger brother, Corrigan, a devout Jesuit monk who has moved to the projects of the Bronx. Corrigan works at a nursing home and has befriended several of the prostitutes working around his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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