New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. First edition - A clearly written and well-researched account of the life of the Norwegian scientist At 31, he "set out on a lifelong, increasingly compulsive quest to discover the origins of the aurora borealis.. from the ice mountains of Norway to the deserts of Africa, against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. Along the way, Birkeland made some remarkable discoveries and inventions, such as the idea of hearing aids for deaf patients; of making caviar from cod roe; and of using the force of cathode rays to propel rockets.. . Ultimately, [his] obsession with the workings of the cosmos cost him his health, his happiness, and his sanity - perhaps even his life. He spent his final days in exile in Egypt, and died in 1917 in Japan, under suspicious circumstances, his groundbreaking theories unheralded; he was cheated of the Nobel Prize by a rival. But now Birkeland?s ideas are considered to have been prophetic, and they have furthered our understanding not only of the Northern Lights but also of electromagnetism, comets, and the sun." Illustrated. Select bibliography. xii, 289 pp.

New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991. dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - "The life of the mythic, wealthy journalist/short-story writer of the Broadway classic 'Guys and Dolls', told by the legendary, wealthy journalist/novel writer of 'Table Money', etc. . .This Runyon with all his invented dialogue must be a fiction - but so what when the page is drugged with such high humor? Runyon at eight cut his teeth as his father's printer's devil in the western states, at 15 was on his own as a wandering reporter. He was a shy, quiet poet with a withering view of mankind - and also a man of warm fellowship with murderers, gamblers, and criminals who fed him the life in his copy and later became his fictional characters. Breslin excels at creating the mirror-reversed moral world of criminals - people who later become Runyonesques by choice. Breslin's best - and more impressive in its sustained cynicism than Runyon's own writing. Could live forever." (Kirkus Reviews) INSCRIBED on the title page. 410 pp. ISBN: 0-899199844.

Scappoose, OR: RBA Publishing, 2006. First edition - A memoir of the 1950s and the Beat era, the pivotal decade of the 20th Century in which a Beat Generation revised the awareness of consciousness at the same time as a deceptive military-industrial complex was corporatizing the Cold War. Poet David Meltzer commented that this "is the book within the book, the history within the mystery, the mythology of the '50s, the so-called Beat Generation. Briggs reveals the real deal as a participant in that confounding history. His work is a remarkable embodiment of the personal as the political; a brave demonstration of tough insight, survival and triumph. Briggs brings it all into play - as the ongoing and complex struggle all dissident spirits had to contend with in dark yet illuminated days." Illustrated with photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Large format. 326 pp. ISBN: 0-931191213.

New York: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, (2022) dj. SIGNED (on a bookplate) hardcover first edition - More than just an account of how Bruni, an award-winning journalist and columnist, woke up one day to discover that a mini-stroke had caused him to lose his vision in one eye -and to be at risk of losing the other - this also "curates an extraordinary collection of miniature profiles in courage and perseverance - a college friend with ParkinsonÕs, a blind Rhodes scholar turned lieutenant governor and many more. As Bruni walks alongside those who have heard the unwanted news, suffered the terrifying and somehow found intimacy, purpose and joy, he metabolizes his own loss into a muscular wisdom." (NY Times) As we age, changes to our body are inevitable - some more severely than others, so this is a book worth reading by everyone! SIGNED by Frank Bruni on a bookplate affixed to the half title page. 306 pp. ISBN: 978-1982108571.

Pasadena, California: Clara Vista Press, (1951). Hardcover first edition - Autobiography of a woman defined as "a clubwoman and a philanthropist," born in New York, but who moved to California in the 1880s and made it her home for the rest of her life. While women's clubs are no longer as important in American life as they were during the Progressive Era, her contributions were wide-ranging and significant and far more extensive than this brief list: she was the first president of the California Federation of Women's Clubs, active in politics, a founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Ebell Club (originally called the International Academy for the Advancement of Women) and erected their clubhouse at her expense, director of the Southwest Museum and the Pasadena Humane Society, first woman trustee of Syracuse University (where she had been one of the founders of the Alpha Phi sorority while she was a student there), and after suffrage was gained (she was quoted as saying she was a believer in suffrage politically, socially and morally), she was an organizer of the national League of Women Voters. This book - published when she was turning 96 - depicts her life from her youngest years through the early 1900s (ending with a trip with her family to Europe and the Middle East in 1900-1901, her funding the construction of the maternity wing of the Pasadena Hospital, and some discussion of her contributions towards the building of the Temple Baptist Auditorium, later known as the Philharmonic Auditorium), with only brief excerpts of her writings and short letters for the second half of her life. Illustrated with photographs. 246 pp.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1948). Hardcover first edition - Autobiography of this American activist and author. "For two years Chaplin worked in the strike committee with Mother Jones for the bloody Kanawha County, West Virginia strike of coal miners in 1912-13. These influences led him to write a number of labor oriented poems, one of which became the words for the union anthem, 'Solidarity Forever'. In 1917 Chaplin and some 100 other Wobblies were rounded up, convicted, and jailed under the Espionage Act of 1917 for conspiring to hinder the draft and encourage desertion. He wrote 'Bars And Shadows: The Prison Poems' while serving four years of a 20-year sentence. Chaplin was very disillusioned by the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the evolution of the Soviet state and international communism but he maintained his involvement with the IWW, serving in Chicago as editor of its newspaper, the Industrial Worker, from 1932 to 1936." (Wikipedia) vi, 435 pp plus 10 pp of photographs.

New York: David McKay Company, (1968) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - An account of a storybook Cold War romance - just weeks after the Russians brutally suppressed the Hungarian Revolution with tanks, Olga Fikotova was at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, where she won Czechoslovakia's only gold medal as a discus thrower in track and field. While there she met US hammer thrower Harold Connolly and watched him win a gold the next day. Just 4 months later, in March 1957, they were married despite all the obstacles thrown up by their countries, in what was intended to be a small ceremony in Prague, but wound up with tens of thousands celebrating with them in the old town square. Olga competed in four more Olympics for the USA, and held several American records; Harold competed in three more. INSCRIBED by Connolly on the front endpaper "with fond personal regards to Vern Davis" and dated in 1969, Illustrated with photographs. 311 pp.

New York: Oxford University Press, (1988) dj. Hardcover first edition - A book which is a combination of biography, sports history and social history, this focuses on two women who were the most responsible for the radical changes in women's tennis in the period between the two world wars, from a genteel sport to one more like that played by men. "Better known and more admired in the 1920s and '30s than any politician, movie star, or royal family member, Suzanne Lenglen, lionized by Frenchmen as 'The Goddess,' and Helen Wills, called 'The American Girl,' revolutionized tennis with their power and grace and beauty, and in the process virtually invented the concept of celebrity athlete. This dual biography - the first of either player to appear in English - follows their careers from the time they first set foot on a tennis court through their ascent and descent on the international circuit. . Lenglen became the first non-English-speaking woman to win the Wimbledon singles championship - . . Helen Wills beat Lenglen's Wimbledon record although she lost the only match in which they came face to face. In 1938, Wills set a record of eight Wimbledon wins." Photographs, sources, index. xiv, 464 pp. ISBN: 0-195043634.

Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, (2015). First edition - A moving memoir by this acclaimed novelist - "Grimsley was eleven years old in 1966 when federally mandated integration of schools went into effect in the state and the school in his small eastern North Carolina town was first integrated. Until then, blacks and whites didnt sit next to one another in a public space or eat in the same restaurants, and they certainly didnt go to school together.. . What he did not realize until he began to meet these new students was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any black people. Now, more than forty years later, he looks back at that school and those times - remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture." Booklist called this "a beautifully written coming-of-age recollection from the era of racial desegregation." 275 pp.

New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, (2003) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - Hartley, a journalist who worked in Africa in the 1990s describes his childhood as the son of a British colonial officer, a legacy that stretched back over 150 years - four generations of one family. As a journalist he witnessed genocidal activities in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Congo; the death of his friends, and heard stories of terrible attrocities. Burnt out by a decade of horrors he retreated to his family's home in Kenya where he found the Zanzibar chest his father had left him and inside the diaries of his father's best friend who had died in mysterious circmstances more than 50 years earlier- and so he set out on a journey to Southern Arabia to unlock Davey's story and that of his family. SIGNED on the title page. Dust jacket praise from Jim Harrison who called this a stunning piece of writing. Photographs. 415 pp. ISBN: 978-0871138712.

Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, (1975) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - Autobiography of this prominent attorney, author and who was also an innovator in urban development. "In Kansas City, base for his early career, he participated in initial attempts to bring down the Pendergast machine. At age 44 he moved to Pittsburgh and for the next 20 years served as general counsel, vice president and director of Pittsburgh Plate Class Company. He was active in the planning and implementing of the famed 'Renaissance,' helped initiated the city's (and nation's) first educational TV station, and in his retirement years, taught humanities to businessmen. These corporate and civic accomplishments are retold straight-forwardly with quiet (and justifiable) pride." (Library Journal) INSCRIBED on the front endpaper. Illustrated with photographs, index. xix, 314 pp. ISBN: 0-231038984.

New York: Delacorte, (1998) dj. SIGNED hardcover - Memoir of a boy growing up in Appalachia who became an engineer at NASA. "In a town where the only things that mattered were coal-mining and high-school football, a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik race across the West Virginia sky - and found his future in the stars. In 1957, Homer H. 'Sonny' Hickam, Jr., and a handful of his friends were inspired to start designing and launching the home-made rockets that would change their lives and their town forever. Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams." Basis for the award-winning film 'October Sky' featuring Jake Gyllenhaal. INSCRIBED on the title page. xii, 368 pp. ISBN: 0-38533320X.

London: Scribner, (1991) dj. Hardcover first edition - Publishers Weekly called this a "moving and astonishing biography [which] tells the improbable story of India-born Srinavasa Ramanujan Iyengar, self-taught mathematical prodigy. In 1913 Ramanujan, a 25-year-old clerk who had flunked out of two colleges, wrote a letter filled with startlingly original theorems to eminent English mathematician G. H. Hardy. . Over the next five years, the vegetarian Brahmin who claimed his discoveries were revealed to him by a Hindu goddess turned out influential mathematical propositions. Cut off from his young Indian wife left at home, Ramanujan returned to India in 1919, depressed, sullen and quarrelsome; he died one year later of tuberculosis, but his mathematical ideas are used today in cosmology and computer science." Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Illustrated with photographs. Extensive notes, selected bibliography, notes. ix, 439 pp. ISBN: 0-356203501.