Showing results for "friendship" in History

Frank Sinatra desperately wanted to be part of John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s gang. He had his own famed "Rat Pack", made up of hard drinking, womanizing individuals like himself - guys like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford - but the guy "Ol' Blue Eyes" really wanted to hang with was Lawford's brother-in-law, the real chairman of the board, John F. Kennedy. In Sinatra and the Jack Pack, Michael Sheridan delves deep into the acclaimed singer's relationship with the former president.

Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship of two towering Enlightenment thinkers that had great consequences for modern thought. David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime, he was attacked as "the Great Infidel" for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism.

After helping to murder Becket, King Henry II is haunted by memories of their passionate friendship. Appointing Becket as Archbishop was the King's greatest mistake, for Becket finds his allegiance shifting from king and country to God and Church.

Saving My Enemy is the touching true story of two soldiers on opposite sides of WWII whose unlikely friendship, forged in their 80s, dissolves six decades of guilt and shame that had pushed both men to despair.

Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were the greatest leaders of “the Greatest Generation.” In Franklin and Winston, Jon Meacham explores the fascinating relationship between the two men who piloted the free world to victory in World War II.

This book is about two unlikely friends. One brown, one white; one female, one male; one born in 1970s Britain to Indian immigrant parents, the other arrived from Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing persecution. This book is about common ground. It is a story of migration, anti-Semitism, racism, family, belonging, grief and resilience. This book is about the past and the present. It is about the mistakes of the 20th century and the uncertain hope of our present moment.

From Brandon Webb, Navy SEAL sniper and New York Times best-selling author, comes his account of the eight friends and fellow SEALs who made the ultimate sacrifice. As a Navy SEAL, Webb rose to the top of the world's most elite sniper corps, experiencing years of punishing training and combat missions from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. Along the way, Webb served beside, trained, and supported men he came to know not just as fellow warriors, but as friends and, eventually, as heroes.

When it first appeared, A Rumor of War brought home to American readers, with terrifying vividness and honesty, the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on the soldiers who fought there. And while it is a memoir of one young man's experiences and therefore deeply personal, it is also a book that speaks powerfully to today's students about the larger themes of human conscience, good and evil, and the desperate extremes men are forced to confront in any war.

Once a week, in late 18th-century London, writers of contrasting politics and personalities gathered around a dining table. The veal and boiled vegetables on offer at 72 St Pauls Churchyard may have been unappetising, but the company was convivial and the conversation was at once brilliant, unpredictable and profound. The host was Joseph Johnson, publisher and bookseller: a man at the heart of literary life.

In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.

When they first met at Harvard in 1946, young Kenny O’Donnell and Bobby Kennedy could not have imagined where their lives would take them. The friendship they built saw them through some of the most pivotal moments of the twentieth century - including Robert Kennedy’s tenure as attorney general and O’Donnell’s time spent as John F. Kennedy’s chief of staff - and only ended with RFK’s tragic death.

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties when he died aged ninety-seven - yet their epistolary friendship was her lifeline.

In Girl Talk, New York Times science reporter Jacqueline Mroz takes on the science of female friendship - a phenomenon that's as culturally powerful as it is individually mysterious. She examines friendship from a range of angles, from the historical to the experiential, with a scientific analysis that reveals new truths about what leads us to connect and build alliances, and then "break up" when a friendship no longer serves us.

With grey post-WWII skies hanging low over Britain, factories lining the streets and smoke stacks dotting the horizon, there was one way that ordinary families could escape: The ever-cheerful holiday camps of Butlin's. Rich in period detail and highly evocative, Wish You Were Here! follows the lives of seven of the camps' key figures through the highs and lows of the holiday season: From redcoats searching for stardom to young families who returned year after year, to pensioners who rediscovered an inner youth.

In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was fighting. Believing that Britain was locked in an existential battle, Winston Churchill had already created a secret agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshoot­ing. Their job, he declared, was to 'set Europe ablaze'. But with most men on the front lines, the SOE was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France.

A pair of silver Regency candlesticks. Pieces of well-worn family jewelry. More than a thousand documents, letters, and photographs. Lotte Meyerhoff's best friends risked their lives in Nazi Germany to safeguard these and other treasured heirlooms and mementos from her family and return them to her after the war. The Holocaust had left Lotte the lone survivor of her family, and these precious objects gave her back a crucial piece of her past. Four Girls from Berlin vividly recreates that past and tells the story of Lotte and her courageous non-Jewish friends.

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a 'frenemy' from his schooldays. With little food and no electricity, under ever-present threat of bombardment, Sergeyich's one remaining pleasure is his bees.

For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate’s flagship sugar refinery at Love Lane dominated the Liverpool skyline - and was the beating heart of the local community. More than 10,000 workers passed through the doors of the factory during its lifetime, with some families counting four or even five generations of service. Young women leaving school in the post-war years were drawn by the good wages and the unrivalled social life that Tate & Lyle offered.

In 1962, boxing writers and fans considered Cassius Clay an obnoxious self-promoter, and few believed that he would become the heavyweight champion of the world. But Malcolm X, the most famous minister in the Nation of Islam, saw the potential in Clay, not just for boxing greatness, but as a means of spreading the Nation’s message. The two became fast friends, keeping their interactions secret from the press for fear of jeopardizing Clay’s career.

When three colleagues die violently during a single wartime election day in Central America, two female journalists, best friends, are hurled into a torrent of change in their personal and professional lives and in their relationship with each other. The author, bedeviled by stress and feelings of abandonment, hangs on by her fingernails to reporting while her dear friend "just can't take another picture of a dead body" and throws herself into teaching photography to children who live in a garbage dump.