Great Lives
Biographies, Autobiographies,
Memoirs, and Diaries
Science, Technology, & Medicine
Oliver Sacks
The distinguished neurologist who wrote Awakenings has a life as fascinating as his celebrated case histories of his patients.
Stephen Hawking
This Cambridge theoretical physicist labors with incurable ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease), cannot speak (except by computer-controlled voice), and is confined to a wheel chair. However, his intellect is unaffected and he has gained recognition as one of the world’s most brilliant and original thinkers.
Rachel Carson
She loved the woods, built a summer cottage in Maine, wrote about the ocean, and finally published her landmark book about the poisonous pesticides killing wildlife.
James Herriot
Take an unforgettable journey through the English countryside and into the homes of its inhabitants--four-legged and otherwise--with the world's best-loved animal doctor.
Richard Feynman
To students of physics all over the world, Richard Feynman was living proof that to lead a life in science one does not need ice for blood and the mind of a computer.
Mae Jemison
Dr. Mae Jemison-- engineer, scientist, teacher-- was the first African-American woman to go into space. Trace her life from her childhood determination to fly into space to when she made history as she blasted into orbit aboard the space shuttle Endeavor.
Linus Pauling
In 1954, Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Horrified by the destructive uses of science in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he vowed to mention the need for world peace in every lecture he gave. Because of these efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.
The Arts
Marion Anderson
Born in Philadelphia in 1897, Marian Anderson revealed her talent at an early age. In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution tried to prevent her from singing at Constitution Hall because of racial bigotry, Eleanor Roosevelt's resignation from the D.A.R. catapulted Anderson into national prominence as a symbol of the struggle for racial equality. This led to Anderson's historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial before 75,000 people-- a defining moment in American history.
Harry Houdini
Houdini's career really took off when he began his famous acts as an escape artist. As his fame grew, so did the seemingly impossible challenges he imposed upon himself. Diving underwater in shackles, being buried alive, the Water Torture Cell, walking through brick walls, and making an elephant disappear are just a few of the stunts that he presented to the world.
Agnes de Mille
``Agnes is a very demanding person; she eats up the air,'' said a friend of choreographer, writer, and innovator Agnes de Mille, the American cultural giant who changed popular theater and dance forever with her choreography for Oklahoma and Carousel.
Gordon Parks
After learning to use his first camera, Parks stifled his fury at the racism he suffered and turned that rage into a creative force that broke racial barriers as he photographed for Vogue and Life magazines and directed the award-winning film Shaft.
Langston Hughes
The Harlem poet whose works gave voice to the joy and pain of the black experience in America. His works articulated the despair of blacks over social and economic conditions.
Heroes-Ordinary & Extraordinary
Chuck Yeager
Yeager both lived and made aviation history. His coolness under pressure, his knowledge of how everything on his plane worked, and his extraordinary luck saved his life in many instances. He was part of the original Mercury astronaut team and was the first person to break the sound barrier.
Jaime Escalante
He overcame economic and political obstacles to become a high-school instructor in La Paz, but started all over again when he immigrated to the U.S. The film Stand and Deliver brought Escalante's methods and accomplishments with inner-city youth from Los Angeles into the national spotlight.
The Dalai Lama
As a boy, he was both mischievous and mysterious, with ordinary childlike traits as well as deep spirituality. His accession to temporal power coincided with Chinese Communist control over Tibet, and at the age of 24, the Dalai Lama went into permanent exile. His teachings stress his universal message of peace and his compassion.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Roosevelt's ability to confront and successfully overcome long-standing social hurdles made her one of the greatest leaders of the last century. She was the first wife of a president to have a public life and career of her own, devoted to helping others and working for peace.
Jackie Robinson
The grandson of a slave, Robinson overcame his fatherless, destitute childhood and his volatile temper, relying on his moral strength, unassailable determination, and exceptional athletic skills to face the insults and attacks he endured when he dared to cross baseball's color line.
Steven Biko
Steve Biko, orator, writer, and political prisoner, challenged the South African government and its system of apartheid, becoming a symbol of hope for the future for blacks.
Robert Falcon Scott
"Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman." So reads Captain Robert Falcon Scott's message from the grave, found in a tent with his frozen corpse after his expedition had lost the race to the South Pole.
Dennis Byrd
Byrd, a defensive lineman for the New York Jets, was paralyzed from the neck down in a collision during a game. In months, Byrd defied all predictions and hopes and began walking again.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
As a youngster in Texas, Babe raced streetcars. Her amazing high school basketball career led to a position on the Golden Cyclones. The team manager also formed a track-and-field team that gave his star player the opportunity to become a national champion and win medals in the Olympics. Babe Didrikson broke records in golf, track and field, and other sports, at a time when there were few opportunities for female athletes.
Pele
Time magazine named Pele as one of the Top 20 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century. Pele started his soccer career at the age of 16, played in 1,363 games before retiring, and scored nearly 1300 goals. He brought national pride to the Brazil and, playing for the New York Cosmos, even brought joy to many Americans previously unaware of soccer.
LouAnne Johnson
A fiesty female ex-Marine, Johnson became an English teacher in a troubled inner-city high school. She taught her students about self-respect, courage and success. What had been called "the class from hell" went on to defy everyone's expectations, and proved that her unorthodox techniques worked.
Lech Walesa
Walesa is the union organizer who was instrumental in gaining government recognition for the movement Solidarity and in ending Soviet control of Poland. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and became Poland's first democratically elected president.
Anne Moody
Moody's autobiography is a classic work on growing up poor and Black in the rural South. Her searing account of life before the civil rights movement is "a history of our time [and] a reminder that we cannot now relax,” says Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Lauralee Summer
Summer is a Harvard grad who grew up sometimes homeless and often on welfare. Summer's experiences in shelters, of feeling utter panic and anxiety, were counterbalanced by the real love she shared with her mother, by her relationship with an excellent teacher, and by having joined the wrestling team. (She was the only female on her high school and Harvard teams.)
Frank McCourt
He was born in Brooklyn, but his family went back to Ireland where he grew up near starvation. In a brief stay in a clinic he discovered the beauty of Shakespeare. McCourt's father passed on to his son a gift for superb storytelling. He told him about the great Irish heroes, the people in their Limerick neighborhood, and the world beyond their shores.
John Irwin
Born in Norristown, PA, Irwin enlisted in the army at age 18. An eventful march through Germany, including a surprise capture of enemy soldiers, culminated when Irwin and his company arrived at a Nazi slave labor camp, where the rockets that destroyed much of London during the infamous Blitz were manufactured.
Gerda Klein
In the winter of 1945, Gerda Weissmann, with more than four thousand other young women, began a thousand-mile march from a labor camp in Germany to Czechoslovakia. A prisoner of the Nazis from the age of eighteen, Gerda was one of 120 who survived that march. The Nazis had taken all but her life. She was rescued by Lieutenant Kurt Klein, who then visited her during her long convalescence. They fell in love, and a year later, were married
Cedric Jennings
As an honor student walking the gauntlet of sneers and threats at his crime-infested high school in Washington, D.C., Jennings achieved the impossible: a 4.02 grade-point average and acceptance into Brown University.
Mark Pfetzer
At age 15, Pfetzer became the youngest climber ever to attempt the summit of Mount Everest. Luck provided him with mentors who trained and inspired him from a climbing gym to high-altitude expeditions on several continents.
Nancy Mace
Upon entering The Citadel's imposing gates as one of its first female students, Mace soon found out that she wasn't just fighting the tradition of the Corps, but the culture and city that surrounded it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Morrow, who dreamed of being a writer, met her future husband, Charles Lindbergh in 1927, soon after he became the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. Anne embarked on a life of adventure with Lindbergh, accompanying her husband as copilot, navigator and radio operator. The kidnapping and death of their son was “the crime of the century”.
Ben Carson
Carson was the worst student in his inner city fifth grade class until his mother turned off the TV and made him go to the library and turn in book reports to her every week. He went on to Yale and became the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins at age 33, the youngest person to have ever achieved this position.