William J. Lederer

Total similar authors (25)

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  Stanley Karnow

  Stanley Karnow was a well-respected American journalist and historian whose book In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines won him the coveted Pulitzer Prize for History. Karnow was a World War II veteran who graduated from Harvard and began his journalism career in the early 1950s. He is probably best known for his coverage of the Vietnam War.
  
  Stanley Karnow died of congestive heart failure at the age of 87.

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  Eugene Burdick

  Eugene Burdick was an American Political Scientist and co-author of The Ugly American (1958), Fail-Safe (1962) and The 480 (1965).
  
  He was born in Sheldon, Iowa. His family moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was age 4. Burdick attended Stanford University and Oxford University where he earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology, and he worked at the department of Political Science at the University of California. In 1956, his critically acclaimed novel The Ninth Wave, a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship winner, was published. At the end of the 1950s, he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research. He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 46.

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  François Bizot

  François Bizot is the only Westerner to have survived imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge.
  
  Bizot arrived in Cambodia in 1965 to study Buddhism practiced in the countryside. He traveled extensively around Cambodia, researching the history and customs of its dominant religion. He speaks fluent Khmer, French and English and was married to a Cambodian with whom he had a daughter, Hélène, in 1968. When the Vietnam War spilled into Cambodia, Bizot was employed at the Angkor Conservation Office, restoring ceramics and bronzes.
  
  Bizot, at first, welcomed the American intervention in Cambodia, hoping that they might counter the rising influence of the Communists. "But their irresponsibility, the inexcusable naivete, even their cynicism, frequently aroused

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  Ronald Fry

  US Army Captain Ronald Fry was born in Diamond Bar, California. He attended Brigham Young University and served as a missionary in France and Switzerland for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Fry entered military service in 1996. Fry is a third-generation veteran who served in the 82nd Airborne Division and as a Special Forces team leader in Afghanistan. The mission to the Pech Valley of Afghanistan, the subject of "Hammerhead Six", would prove to be most unique and successful. The lessons learned on that mission would serve as a model for success in unconventional warfare. Fry currently lives in California with his wife and five children. Fry is an entrepreneur and public speaker.

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  Norman Lewis

  Norman Lewis was a British writer renowned for his richly detailed travel writing, though his literary output also included twelve novels and several volumes of autobiography. Born in Enfield, Middlesex in 1908 to a Welsh family, Lewis was raised in a household steeped in spiritualism, a belief system embraced by his grieving parents following the deaths of his elder brothers. Despite these early influences, Lewis grew into a skeptic with a deeply observant eye, fascinated by cultures on the margins of the modern world.
  His early adulthood was marked by various professions—including wedding photographer, umbrella wholesaler, and even motorcycle racer—before he served in the British Army during World War II. His wartime experiences in Algiers

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  Joan Didion

  Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
  Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United Stat

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  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
  Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre

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  Graham Greene

  Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
  Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded

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  Matt Ridley

  Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. He is known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics, and has been a regular contributor to The Times newspaper. Ridley was chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, during which period it experienced the first run on a British bank in 130 years. He resigned, and the bank was bailed out by the UK government; this led to its nationalisation.
  Ridley is a libertarian, and a staunch supporter of Brexit. He inherited the viscountcy in February 2012 and was a Conservative hereditary peer from February 2013, with an elected seat in the House of Lords, until his retirement in December 2021.

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  Rohinton Mistry

  Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012. Each of his first three novels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels to date have been set in India, told from the perspective of Parsis, and explore themes of family life, poverty, discrimination, and the corrupting influence of society.

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  Christopher Hitchens

  Christopher Hitchens was a British-American author, journalist, and literary critic known for his sharp wit, polemical writing, and outspoken views on religion, politics, and culture. He was a prolific essayist and columnist, contributing to publications such as The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, and The Nation.
  A staunch critic of totalitarianism and organized religion, Hitchens became one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his time. His book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) became a bestseller and solidified his place as a leading figure in the New Atheism movement. He was equally fearless in political criticism, taking on figures across the ideological spectrum, from Henry Kissinger (The Trial of Henry K

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  Sinclair Lewis

  Novelist Harry Sinclair Lewis satirized middle-class America in his 22 works, including Babbitt (1922) and Elmer Gantry (1927) and first received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1930.
  
  Middle-class values and materialism attach unthinking George F. Babbitt, the narrow-minded, self-satisfied main character person in the novel of Sinclair Lewis.
  
  People awarded "his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters."
  
  He knowingly, insightfully, and critically viewed capitalism and materialism between the wars. People respect his strong characterizations of modern women.
  
  Henry Louis Mencken wrote, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade...i

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  Carl Hiaasen

  Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. After graduating from the University of Florida, he joined the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the newspaper’s weekly magazine and prize-winning investigations team. As a journalist and author, Carl has spent most of his life advocating for the protection of the Florida Everglades. He and his family live in southern Florida.

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  Evelyn Waugh

  Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.”
  
  In 1924 Waugh left Oxford without taking his degree. After inglorious stints as a school teacher (he was dismissed for trying to seduce a school matron and/or inebriation), an appren

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  Bernard Cornwell

  Cornwell was born in London in 1944. His father was a Canadian airman, and his mother, who was English, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. He was adopted and brought up in Essex by the Wiggins family, who were members of the Peculiar People, a strict Protestant sect who banned frivolity of all kinds and even medicine. After he left them, he changed his name to his birth mother's maiden name, Cornwell.
  
  Cornwell was sent away to Monkton Combe School, attended the University of London, and after graduating, worked as a teacher. He attempted to enlist in the British armed services at least three times but was rejected on the grounds of myopia.
  
  He then joined BBC's Nationwide and was promoted to become head of current affairs at BBC Nort

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  Chris Hedges

  Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.
  
  Hedges is known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
  
  Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.

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  Alistair MacLean

  Alistair Stuart MacLean (Scottish Gaelic: Alasdair MacGill-Eain), the son of a Scots Minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy; two and a half years spent aboard a cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. After the war he gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a schoolmaster. In 1983, he was awarded a D. Litt. from the same university.
  
  Maclean is the author of twenty-nine world bestsellers and recognised as an outstanding writer in his own genre. Many of his titles have been adapted for film - The Guns of the Navarone, The Satan Bug, Force Ten from Navarone, Wher

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  Bernard B. Fall

  Bernard B. Fall was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Austria, he moved with his family to France as a child after Germany's annexation, where he started fighting with the French Resistance at age 16, and later the French Army during World War II.
  
  In 1950 he first came to the United States for graduate studies at Syracuse University and Johns Hopkins University, returning and making his residence there. He taught at Howard University for most of his career and made regular trips to Southeast Asia to learn about changes and the societies. He predicted the failures of France and the United States in the wars in Vietnam because of their tactics and lack of

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  Neil Sheehan

  Cornelius Mahoney "Neil" Sheehan is an American journalist. As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. His series of articles revealed a secret U.S. Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a U.S. Supreme Court case when the United States government attempted to halt publication.
  He received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his 1989 book A Bright Shining Lie, about the life of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

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  John Stuart Mill

  John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's.

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  Nikolai Gogol

  People consider that Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (Николай Васильевич Гоголь) founded realism in Russian literature. His works include The Overcoat (1842) and Dead Souls (1842).
  
  Ukrainian birth, heritage, and upbringing of Gogol influenced many of his written works among the most beloved in the tradition of Russian-language literature. Most critics see Gogol as the first Russian realist. His biting satire, comic realism, and descriptions of Russian provincials and petty bureaucrats influenced later Russian masters Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and especially Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Gogol wittily said many later Russian maxims.
  
  Gogol first used the techniques of surrealism and the grotesque in his works The Nose , Viy ,

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  James N. Rowe

  Rowe graduated from West Point in 1960 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In 1963, First Lieutenant Rowe was sent to the Republic of Vietnam and assigned as Executive Officer of Detachment A-23, 5th Special Forces Group, a 12-man "A-team". Located at Tan Phu in An Xuyen Province, A-23 organized and advised a Civilian Irregular Defense Group camp in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. On October 29, 1963, after only three months in country, Rowe was captured by Viet Cong elements along with Captain Humberto "Rocky" R. Versace and Sergeant Daniel L. Pitzer. Separated from his comrades, Rowe spent 62 months in captivity with only brief encounters with fellow American POWs. Rowe was held in the U Minh Forest,

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  James Martin

  James Martin, SJ is a Jesuit priest, writer, editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America, and consultor to the Vatican's Secretariat for Communication.
  
  Fr. Martin grew up in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, United States, and attended Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1982 and worked in corporate finance at General Electric for six years. Dissatisfied with the corporate world, he entered the Society of Jesus (more commonly known as the Jesuits) in 1988, and after completing his Jesuit training (which included studies in philosophy and theology, as well as full time-ministry) was ordained a priest in 1999. He received his Master's in Divinity (M.Div.) and Master

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  Thomas More

  Sir Thomas More (1477-1535), venerated by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was a councillor to Henry VIII and also served as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to 16 May 1532.
  
  More opposed the Protestant Reformation, in particular the theology of Martin Luther and William Tyndale. He also wrote Utopia, published in 1516, about the political system of an imaginary ideal island nation. More opposed the King's separation from the Catholic Church, refusing to acknowledge Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England and the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, he was convicted

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  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Tomasi was born in Palermo to Giulio Maria Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, and Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangieri di Cutò. He became an only child after the death (from diphtheria) of his sister. He was very close to his mother, a strong personality who influenced him a great deal, especially because his father was rather cold and detached. As a child he studied in their grand house in Palermo with a tutor (including the subjects of literature and English), with his mother (who taught him French), and with a grandmother who read him the novels of Emilio Salgari. In the little theater of the house in Santa Margherita di Belice, where he spent long vacations, he first saw a performance of Shakespeare's Haml

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