5 Biographies eBooks

Road Dog: Life and Reflections from the Road as a Stand-up Comic by Dov Davidoff
Jonathan Cott, "Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews"
The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President by Noah Feldman
Stephen Kotkin, "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941"
The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi by Ronald Kessler

*Road Dog: Life and Reflections from the Road as a Stand-up Comic by Dov Davidoff

English | October 31st, 2017 | ASIN: B06Y5W7YVX, ISBN: 1250038073 | 208 Pages | EPUB | 9.98 MB
Road Dog is comedian, actor, and writer, Dov Davidoff's unflinching memoir told through reflections of twelve months on the road. Davidoff travels across the country from college campuses to local theaters doing stand-up comedy and telling it like it is. He's been known to wax poetic about everything from encounters with large fake breasts, to people who have too many kids, to magnum condoms the size of CD cases. He is hilarious and relatable and will have you laughing at yourself in no time.
But there's more to the road dog life than TV features and sold out comedy shows, there's a dark underbelly and Dov knows it well. His memoir chronicles the highs and often very low lows of performance life with honesty, clarity, and humility. Dov takes readers from his fractured childhood days spent in a New Jersey junkyard with a gruff Jewish father and commune-loving hippie Protestant mother to the intense hyperactive persona that his fans know and expect discussing the relationships, drugs, and demons that he has fought along the way. With an eye for self-reflection, and a penchant for hilarious irony, Dov pulls back the curtain on a life hard-made on the road.

*Jonathan Cott, "Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews"

ISBN: 1501173197 | 2017 | EPUB | 544 pages | 3 MB
“A historical compilation to savor” (Los Angeles Times) that is “invaluable…irresistible” (The New York Times)—the ultimate collection of interviews and encounters with Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, spanning his entire career from 1962 to today.
Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews features over two dozen of the most significant and revealing conversations with the singer, gathered in one definitive collection that spans his career from street poet to Nobel Laureate. First published in 2006, this acclaimed collection brought together the best interviews and encounters with Bob Dylan to create a multi-faceted, cultural, and journalistic portrait of the artist and his legacy. This edition includes three additional pieces from Rolling Stone that update the volume to the present day.
Among the highlights are the seminal Rolling Stone interviews—anthologized here for the first time—by Jann Wenner, Jonathan Cott, Kurt Loder, Mikal Gilmore, Douglas Brinkley, and Jonathan Lethem—as well as Nat Hentoff’s legendary 1966 Playboy interview. Surprises include Studs Terkel’s radio interview in 1963 on WFMT in Chicago, the interview Dylan gave to screenwriter Jay Cocks when he was a student at Kenyon College in 1964, a 1965 interview with director Nora Ephron, and an interview Sam Shepard turned into a one-act play for Esquire in 1987.
Introduced by Rolling Stone editor Jonathan Cott, these intimate conversations from America’s most celebrated street poet is a “priceless collection with honest, open, and thoughtful musings…a fascinating window into his one-of-a-kind mind” (Publishers Weekly).

*The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President by Noah Feldman

English | October 31st, 2017 | ASIN: B01N5X6B6S, ISBN: 081299275X | 777 Pages | EPUB | 30.13 MB
A sweeping reexamination of the Founding Father who transformed the United States in each of his political “lives”—as a revolutionary thinker, as a partisan political strategist, and as a president
“In order to understand America and its Constitution, it is necessary to understand James Madison.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician he co-founded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning.
In The Three Lives of James Madison, Noah Feldman offers an intriguing portrait of this elusive genius and the constitutional republic he created—and how both evolved to meet unforeseen challenges. Madison hoped to eradicate partisanship yet found himself giving voice to, and institutionalizing, the political divide. Madison’s lifelong loyalty to Thomas Jefferson led to an irrevocable break with George Washington, hero of the American Revolution. Madison closely collaborated with Alexander Hamilton on the Federalist papers—yet their different visions for the United States left them enemies.
Alliances defined Madison, too. The vivacious Dolley Madison used her social and political talents to win her husband new supporters in Washington—and define the diplomatic customs of the capital’s society. Madison’s relationship with James Monroe, a mixture of friendship and rivalry, shaped his presidency and the outcome of the War of 1812.
We may be more familiar with other Founding Fathers, but the United States today is in many ways Madisonian in nature. Madison predicted that foreign threats would justify the curtailment of civil liberties. He feared economic inequality and the power of financial markets over politics, believing that government by the people demanded resistance to wealth. Madison was the first Founding Father to recognize the importance of public opinion, and the first to understand that the media could function as a safeguard to liberty.
The Three Lives of James Madison is an illuminating biography of the man whose creativity and tenacity gave us America’s distinctive form of government. His collaborations, struggles, and contradictions define the United States to this day.

*Stephen Kotkin, "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941"

ISBN: 1594203806 | 2017 | EPUB | 1184 pages | 9 MB
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin has written the definitive biography of Joseph Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror to the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history
In 1929, Joseph Stalin, having already achieved dictatorial power over the vast Soviet Empire, formally ordered the systematic conversion of the world’s largest peasant economy into “socialist modernity,” otherwise known as collectivization, regardless of the cost.
What it cost, and what Stalin ruthlessly enacted, transformed the country and its ruler in profound and enduring ways. Building and running a dictatorship, with life and death power over hundreds of millions, made Stalin into the uncanny figure he became. Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is the story of how a political system forged an unparalleled personality and vice versa.
The wholesale collectivization of some 120 million peasants necessitated levels of coercion that were extreme even for Russia, and the resulting mass starvation elicited criticism inside the party even from those Communists committed to the eradication of capitalism. But Stalin did not flinch. By 1934, when the Soviet Union had stabilized and socialism had been implanted in the countryside, praise for his stunning anti-capitalist success came from all quarters. Stalin, however, never forgave and never forgot, with shocking consequences as he strove to consolidate the state with a brand new elite of young strivers like himself. Stalin’s obsessions drove him to execute nearly a million people, including the military leadership, diplomatic and intelligence officials, and innumerable leading lights in culture.
While Stalin revived a great power, building a formidable industrialized military, the Soviet Union was effectively alone and surrounded by perceived enemies. The quest for security would bring Soviet Communism to a shocking and improbable pact with Nazi Germany. But that bargain would not unfold as envisioned. The lives of Stalin and Hitler, and the fates of their respective dictatorships, drew ever closer to collision, as the world hung in the balance.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 is a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power. It is a landmark achievement in the annals of historical scholarship, and in the art of biography.

*The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi by Ronald Kessler

English | October 31st, 2017 | ASIN: B075RB39K8, ISBN: 0446513393, 0446352292 | 282 Pages | EPUB | 23.24 MB
New York Times bestselling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler goes inside the infamously lavish life of billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, once the richest man in the world.
He made more money - and more quickly - than anyone in history. And he spent it at a dizzying clip of $330,000 a day, every day of the year. He was Adnan Mohamed Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian middleman who started out with nothing and in twenty-five years parlayed his connections to the Saudi royal family and genius at dealing with people into a fortune of colossal proportions.
Khashoggi's American Express bill often exceeded $1 million. When he felt like having spaghetti, he flew to Venice for dinner on one of his three commercial-size airplanes. One of his luxury yachts, the 282-foot Nabila, was considered the most opulent modern yacht afloat and was borrowed for a James Bond movie.
This remarkable book is a rare glimpse into a life of opulence beyond most people's wildest imaginings - a compelling closeup of a complex and driven man who has explored the outer reaches of success, power, and all that money can buy.