Hefner, the Playboy of the Western World, was a visionary publisher, an empire-builder, an avatar of pleasure, and a pajama-clad pipe-smoker with a pre-coital grin. In 1953, he published his first edition of Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover and her nude calendar inside. He obtained the rights for $500 with money borrowed from his ......
Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
Karen Pastorello's pathbreaking study is the first biography of Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the first scholarship to place this remarkable leader at the center of the founding of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Bridging the gap between progressive-era social feminists and labor feminists of the postwar era, Hillman worked to end ......
In every way, William Drew Washburn was larger than life. Although born one of ten children on a remote, hardscrabble farm in western Maine, fifty years later he was entertaining Presidents in his eighty-room mansion in Minneapolis, Minnesota. William Drew Washburn was at the center of some of the largest enterprises in mid-western history, but he ......
My Twisted Tale of Gangsters, Oligarchs, and Pop Stars in Russia
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia opened its borders, and Russian audiences were hungry for Western popular music and the values it espoused. David Junk was one of the first idealistic, young Americans to seize this opportunity. Rockin' the Kremlin is the thrilling true story of how David became the first CEO of Universal Music ......
Pauline Kramer-Saxon tells her story, as well as those of a wonderfully diverse cast of women (and some men) who pass through her lingerie store, Secret Women’s Business.
The story of Short Brothers at Rochester, a period of time when the company designed and manufactured their Stirling bomber and Sunderland flying boat. It was at Rochester that Shorts also specialised in the building of large passenger-carrying flying boats, these used by Imperial Airways to establish regular long-distance over water air routes.
Swindon-born William A. Stanier joined Great Western Railway as a fifteen-year-old trainee and began rising swiftly through the ranks. In 1904, he was appointed assistant to the divisional locomotive superintendent in London, and by 1931 he was chief mechanical engineer of the London Midland & Scottish Railway. The LMS locomotives were in a poor ......
For thirty-three years Robert Curley worked as a reporter and photographer for newspapers in Rome, Oneida, and Syracuse, New York. This memoir recounts the many remarkable events and personal encounters of his long career and rich family life.
‘A Carlton please!’ a name that’s still shouted across every bar and hotel in Australia. It was one of six breweries that united to form the company we know today as CUB (Foster’s), yet we still call it Carlton. But this is not a book of that great company – it’s a book of the people that made Carlton the greatest. They were all part of the long ......