Ebook: Life stories: profiles from the New Yorker

Mr. Hunter's grave (George F. Hunter) / Joseph Mitchell -- Secrets of the magus (Ricky Jay) / Mark Singer -- Isadora (Isadora Duncan) / Janet Flanner -- Soloist (Mikhail Baryshnikov) / Joan Acocella -- Time, fortune, life, Luce (Henry Robinson Luce) / Wolcott Gibbs -- Nobody better, better than nobody (Heloise) / Ian Frazier -- Mountains of pi (Chudnovsky brothers) / Richard Preston -- Covering the cops (Edna Buchanan) / Calvin Trillin -- Travels in Georgia (Carol Ruckdeschel) / John McPhee -- Man who walks on air (Philippe Petit) / Calvin Tomkins -- House on Gramercy Park (Benjamin Sonnenberg) / Geoffrey Hellman -- How do you like it now, gentlemen? (Ernest Hemingway) / Lillian Ross -- Education of a prince (Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff) / Alva Johnston -- White like me (Anatole Broyard) / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- Wunderkind (Floyd Patterson) / A.J. Liebling -- Fifteen years of the salto mortale (Johnny Carson) / Kenneth Tynan -- Duke in his domain (Marlon Brando) / Truman Capote -- Pryor love (Richard Pryor) / Hilton Als -- Gone for good (Steve Blass) / Roger Angell -- Lady with a pencil (Katharine White) / Nancy Franklin -- Dealing with Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) / John Lahr -- Coolhunt (Baysie Wightman and DeeDee Gordon) / Malcolm Gladwell -- Man goes to see a doctor (Max Grosskurth) / Adam Gopnik -- Show dog (Biff Truesdale) / Susan Orlean -- Forty-one false starts (David Salle) / Janet Malcolm -- Redemption (George W. Bush) / Nicholas Lemann -- Gore without a script (Al Gore) -- Nicholas Lemann -- Delta nights (Lucinda Williams) / Bill Buford.;One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. These Profiles are literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, and are unrivalled in their range, their variety of style, and their embrace of humanity. From the Trade Paperback edition.