Böcker av Nicholas A. Basbanes

In his national bestseller, A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes explored the sweet obsession people feel to possess books. Now, Basbanes continues his adventures among the "gently mad" on an irresistible journey to the great libraries of the past -- from Alexandria to Glastonbury -- and to contemporary collections at the Vatican, Wolfenbüttel, and erudite universities. Along the way, he drops in on eccentric book dealers and regales us with stories about unforgettable collectors, such as the gentleman who bought a rare book in 1939 "by selling bottles of his own blood."Taking the book's grand title from the marble lions guarding the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, Basbanes both entertains and delights. And once again, as Scott Turow aptly noted, "Basbanes makes you love books, the collections he writes about, and the volume in your hand."

A major literary biography of America''s best-loved nineteenth-century poet, the first in more than fifty years, and a much-needed re-assessment for the twenty-first century of a writer whose stature and celebrity were unparalleled in his time, whose work helped to explain America''s new world not only to Americans but to Europe and beyond. From the author of On Paper ("Buoyant" --The New Yorker; "Essential" --Publishers Weekly), Patience and Fortitude ("A wonderful hymn" --Simon Winchester), and A Gentle Madness ("A jewel" --David McCullough).In Cross of Snow, the result of more than twelve years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work--the soul--of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching, his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde.    Basbanes writes of the shaping of Longfellow''s character, his huge body of work that included translations of numerous foreign works, among them, the first rendering into a complete edition by an American of Dante''s Divine Comedy. We see Longfellow''s two marriages, both happy and contented, each cut short by tragedy. His first to Mary Storer Potter that ended in the aftermath of a miscarriage leaving Longfellow devastated. His second marriage to the brilliant Boston socialite--Fanny Appleton, after a three-year-long pursuit by Longfellow (his "fiery crucible" he called it), and his emergence as a literary force and a man of letters.    A portrait of a bold artist, experimenter of poetic form and an innovative translator--the human being that he was, the times in which he lived, the people whose lives he touched, his monumental work and its place in his America and ours.