Böcker av Susan Goodman

On This Spot...See buildings soar and traffic zoom, a kaleidoscope of color and movement. Now turn the page and time-travel back 175 years, where on the same spot carriages bumped and pigs raced across cobblestones. Turn again and go back 400 years to when a Lenape Indian trail crossed the spot. Now travel farther still, to when glaciers crept . . . dinosaurs preyed . . . a tropical sea teemed with ancient creatures . . . back 540 million years, when rock was all you could see.What happened on this spot?What will happen next?Look out your window. What happened on that spot?

Talks about Gertrude Bell, who is remembered as a friend and colleague of T E Lawrence. She was an intrepid traveller, journeying alone through the deserts of the Middle East or scaling peaks in the Swiss Alps. Later, as a British political officer in Baghdad, she was able to play a considerable role in determining the future of Mesopotamia.

Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, Susan Goodman here presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored.

From Simon & Schuster and Thomas Goodman and Stephanie Young's, Smart Face is a dermatologist's guide to saving your money and saving your skin.As reviewed by Publishers Weekly, "Goodman (The Skin Doctor's Skin Doctoring Book) and freelance writer Young offer a comprehensive consumer reference guide to cosmetics and facial skin care with medical sections that are refreshingly clear and jargon-free."

Mary Austin (1868-1934)-eccentric, independent, and unstoppable-was twenty years old when her mother moved the family west. Austin's first look at her new home, glimpsed from California's Tejon Pass, reset the course of her life, "e;changed her horizons and marked the beginning of her understanding, not only about who she was, but where she needed to be."e; At a time when Frederick Jackson Turner had announced the closing of the frontier, Mary Austin became the voice of the American West. In 1903, she published her first book, The Land of Little Rain, a wholly original look at the West's desert and its ethnically diverse peoples. Defined in a sense by the places she lived, Austin also defined the places themselves, whether Bishop, in the Sierra Nevada, Carmel, with its itinerant community of western writers, or Santa Fe, where she lived the last ten years of her life. By the time of her death in 1934, Austin had published over thirty books and counted as friends the leading literary and artistic lights of her day. In this rich new biography, Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson explore Austin's life and achievement with unprecedented resonance, depth, and understanding. By focusing on one extraordinary woman's life, Mary Austin and the American West tells the larger story of the emerging importance of California and the Southwest to the American consciousness.

Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "e;the boss"e; of literary critics-his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities-Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others-William Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.