Meryle Secrest's Books

Stephen Sondheim

A Life

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The first and only full-scale and definitive biography of one of the the most important composer-lyricists in musical theater. A remarkable portrait of the man, the music, and the genius of Stephen Sondheim: star of his own fascinating life. Drawing on personal conversations with Sondheim himself, as well as interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers, Secrest offers new insight into the enigmatic and very private Stephen Sondheim. Here, we learn about his childhood on New York’s Upper West Side, his parents’ devastating divorce, and his ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical. Secrest vividly recreates the energy, passion, and despair that went into each beloved show, from Sondheim’s fabled collaboration with Hal Prince on Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music, to his disagreements with co-lyricist Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

482

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307946843

ISBN 13

9780307946843

Frank Lloyd Wright

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Frank Lloyd Wright

By: Meryle Secrest

The widely admired biographer of Bernard Berenson (“A triumph”—Washington Post; “A perfect riot”—Michael Holroyd; “Astonishing”—London Sunday Times) and of Kenneth Clark (“Splendid, enthralling”—The Wall Street Journal) gives us now a complete and complex portrait of an American titan, Frank Lloyd Wright. Meryle Secrest shows us Frank Lloyd Wright in full scale—the brilliant, outrageous, fascinating man; the giant who changed modern architecture; the standard-bearer for the new, quintessentially American vision, the artist who never, during a seventy-year career, abandoned his principles of design; the radical, the Bohemian—the visionary who was one of the central figures of the twentieth-century American culture, society and politics. Meryle Secrest is the first biographer to have full access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Her life of the architect, more than five years’ work and illustrated with 121 photographs, is a stunning feat of biographical narrative, sustained analysis and compassionate insight. With her extraordinary grasp of the man and his art, she gives us Frank Lloyd Wright close up—a creature of boundless energy and indomitable appetite for experience, a man whose limitless belief in his own rightness carried him through bankruptcy, arrest, fire, divorce, and years of social ostracism. A riveting portrait of a genius.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

899

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804153388

ISBN 13

9780804153386

Frank Lloyd Wright

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Frank Lloyd Wright

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

Wright's family history, personal adventures, and colorful friends are explored in this evocative biography. Secrest had unprecedented access to an extensive archive of Wright's letters, photographs, drawings and books. "Secrest's achievement is to etch Wright's character in sharp relief. . . . (She) presents Wright in his every guise".--Blair Kamin, "Chicago Tribune". 121 photos.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

660

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226744140

ISBN 13

9780226744148

Princess Margaret and the Curse

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Princess Margaret and the Curse

By: Meryle Secrest

A Groundbreaking New Perspective of Princess Margaret by Renowned Biographer Meryle Secrest Meryle Secrest, distinguished biographer in the arts and humanities, and recipient of a White House Medal, has turned her focus to royalty. In Princess Margaret and the Curse, she has put the conventional view of a much-reviled Princess on its head. Her latest study, which she considers more of an investigation than a biography as such, proposes that nobody knows the truth about the fabled, doomed Princess. She is the first person to have looked at Princess Margaret in a particular family context. That is to say with reference to her mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the daughter of a famous, hard-drinking Scottish family that had inhabited an ancient dwelling, Gamis Castle, for centuries. Her older brothers were already renowned for their prowess in alcohol consumption. Decades later, once she became Queen Mother, this Elizabeth would begin to imbibe by eleven in the morning. She was already lamenting the loss of her "drinking powers" when, because of severe bouts of morning sickness during her first pregnancy with the future Queen Elizabeth in 1926, she could not drink. Four years later, while pregnant with Princess Margaret in 1930, she was not so handicapped. Doctors believed it was perfectly safe for a mother-to-be to drink, so she drank. The doctors were wrong. But it took another forty-three years, until 1973, before new studies established that alcohol in any amount was poisonous to the developing human being. The effect is lifelong. We now know that victims’ growth is stunted (Margaret stopped growing at five feet), and their skeletal structures are fragile. They get sick sooner and age faster. There are characteristic emotional differences, too. They never develop maturity of mind. They remain subject to sudden tantrums, rages, are poor judges of character, and particularly prone to run and hide, as Princess Margaret tried to do all her life. They may be as intelligent and gifted as she was, but mulish and fly into a rage. They are, it turns out, exactly like the person she became. None of this has ever been recognized, let alone understood. With this study, the author places Margaret's life in its proper perspective. It seems particularly sad that someone expected to be perfection itself in her manners and behavior should have been born in the one situation where perfection was, in fact, impossible. It is time we looked at this public figure from a new and more forgiving frame of mind, and with a new understanding.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

N/A

Publisher

Skyhorse

Published Date

ISBN 10

1510782567

ISBN 13

9781510782563

Elsa Schiaparelli

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Elsa Schiaparelli

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

The first biography of the grand couturier, surrealist, and embattled figure (her medium was apparel), whose extraordinary work has stood the test of time. Her style was a social revolution through clothing-luxurious, eccentric, ironic, sexy; synonymous with fashion innovation and chicesse. She was audacious; her fashions were inspired from the whimsical to the most practical-from a Venetian cape of the commedia dell'arte to a Soviet parachute. She collaborated on her designs with some of the greatest artists of the twentieth-century: on jewelry with Jean Schlumberger; on clothes with Salvador Dalí; with Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti; with photographers Man Ray, Horst, Cecil Beaton, and the young Richard Avedon. Her name: Elsa Schiaparelli. She was known as the Queen of Fashion; a headline attraction in the international glitter-glamour show of the late twenties and thirties; she gave fabulous parties-and went to those given by others; she lived and worked seriously and hard in much-photographed residences and was a guest at others; she knew the "everybodies" who were always "there" and inevitably became one of them herself, feted in Rome (where she was born), Paris, New York, London, Moscow, Dallas, Hollywood, Dublin. Now, Meryle Secrest, acclaimed biographer-whose work has been called "enthralling" (WSJ); "captivating" (WP Book World); "Rich in detail, scrupulously researched, sympathetically written" (NYRB), and who has captured the lives of many of the twentieth-century's most iconic, cultural figures, among them: Frank Lloyd Wright, Bernard Berenson, Leonard Bernstein, Duveen; Richard Rodgers; Modigliani; Stephen Sondheim-gives us the never-before-told story of this most extraordinary fashion designer, perhaps the most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth-century, who in her time was more famous than Chanel.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

425

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0385353278

ISBN 13

9780385353274

Frank Lloyd Wright

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Frank Lloyd Wright

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

660

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226744140

ISBN 13

9780226744148

Duveen

A Life in Art

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Duveen

A Life in Art

By: Meryle Secrest

Anyone who has admired Gainsborough's Blue Boy of the Huntington Collection in California, or Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owes much of his or her pleasure to art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). Regarded as the most influential—or, in some circles, notorious—dealer of the twentieth century, Duveen established himself selling the European masterpieces of Titian, Botticelli, Giotto, and Vermeer to newly and lavishly wealthy American businessmen—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, to name just a few. It is no exaggeration to say that Duveen was the driving force behind every important private art collection in the United States. The first major biography of Duveen in more than fifty years and the first to make use of his enormous archive—only recently opened to the public—Meryle Secrest's Duveen traces the rapid ascent of the tirelessly enterprising dealer, from his humble beginnings running his father's business to knighthood and eventually apeerage. The eldest of eight sons of Jewish-Dutch immigrants, Duveen inherited an uncanny ability to spot a hidden treasure from his father, proprietor of a prosperous antiques business. After his father's death, Duveen moved the company into the riskier but lucrative market of paintings and quickly became one of the world's leading art dealers. The key to Duveen's success was his simple observation that while Europe had the art, America had the money; Duveen made his fortune by buying art from declining European aristocrats and selling them to the "squillionaires" in the United States. "By far the best account of Joseph Duveen's life in a biography that is rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written. [Secrest's] inquiries into early-twentieth-century collecting whet our appetite for a more general history of the art market in the first half of the twentieth century."—John Brewer, New York Review of Books

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

545

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226744159

ISBN 13

9780226744155

Stephen Sondheim

A Life

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Stephen Sondheim

A Life

By: Meryle Secrest

In the first full-scale life of the most important composer-lyricist at work in musical theatre today, Meryle Secrest, the biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright and Leonard Bernstein, draws on her extended conversations with Stephen Sondheim as well as on her interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers to bring us not only the artist--as a master of modernist compositional style--but also the private man. Beginning with his early childhood on New York's prosperous Upper West Side, Secrest describes how Sondheim was taught to play the piano by his father, a successful dress manufacturer and amateur musician. She writes about Sondheim's early ambition to become a concert pianist, about the effect on him of his parents' divorce when he was ten, about his years in military and private schools. She writes about his feelings of loneliness and abandonment, about the refuge he found in the home of Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein, and his determination to become just like Oscar. Secrest describes the years when Sondheim was struggling to gain a foothold in the theatre, his attempts at scriptwriting (in his early twenties in Rome on the set of Beat the Devil with Bogart and Huston, and later in Hollywood as a co-writer with George Oppenheimer for the TV series Topper), living the Hollywood life. Here is Sondheim's ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical, from his chance meeting with play- wright Arthur Laurents, which led to his first success-- as co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story--to his collaboration with Laurents on Gypsy, to his first full Broadway score, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And Secrest writes about his first big success as composer, lyricist, writer in the 1960s with Company, an innovative and sophisticated musical that examined marriage à la mode. It was the start of an almost-twenty-year collaboration with producer and director Hal Prince that resulted in such shows as Follies, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and A Little Night Music. We see Sondheim at work with composers, producers, directors, co-writers, actors, the greats of his time and ours, among them Leonard Bernstein, Ethel Merman, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Robbins, Zero Mostel, Bernadette Peters, and Lee Remick (with whom it was said he was in love, and she with him), as Secrest vividly re-creates the energy, the passion, the despair, the excitement, the genius, that went into the making of show after Sondheim show. A biography that is sure to become the standard work on Sondheim's life and art.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

482

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307946851

ISBN 13

9780307946850

Modigliani

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Modigliani

By: Meryle Secrest

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

425

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307595471

ISBN 13

9780307595478

Elsa Schiaparelli

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Elsa Schiaparelli

A Biography

By: Meryle Secrest

The first biography of the grand couturier, surrealist, and embattled figure (her medium was apparel), whose extraordinary work has stood the test of time"--

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

425

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

030770159X

ISBN 13

9780307701596

Leonard Bernstein

A Life

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Leonard Bernstein

A Life

By: Meryle Secrest

The most insightful and engrossing work we have had from the widely admired biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright ("Captivating ... The reader comes away with an understanding of Wright as a man as well as an architect" -- Washington Post Book World ... "Spellbinding" -- Boston Globe), of Bernard Berenson ("Authoritative and fascinating" -- Philip Toynbee, The Observer ... "A memorable opus" -- Sir Harold Acton), and of Kenneth Clark ("Splendid, enthralling" -- Wall Street Journal). Here is Leonard Bernstein, full scale and fully alive -- the child prodigy, the man, the composer, the teacher, the hugely charismatic personality, the lover, the American folk hero. Everything is here: the child growing up in a Hasidic family in Massachusetts, his father a rabbi's son; his first piano at age nine ("I remember touching it ... It was my contact with life, with God"); his reluctant, brilliant, argumentative years at Harvard; the rocky but exhilarating start of his career (scant jobs, no money, but friendships with Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Judy Holliday, Comden and Green, et al.); his spectacular debut (understudy into a star!) as substitute conductor at the New York Philharmonic; the great career over the years as a composer in classical music (the Kaddish Symphony, Chichester Psalms, Songfest), and in musical theater (On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide, West Side Story, Mass, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). We see Bernstein: the good father to his three children, the man who adored his wife, Felicia Montealegre, the man who adored men, the brilliant and generous mentor, the temperamental artist, the hypochondriac, the politician, the businessman, the Pied Piper ... His life, hismusic, the great international cultural world in which he traveled, are richly and vividly portrayed in this magnificent biography, alive with music -- and with life. "From the Hardcover edition.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

500

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

067973757X

ISBN 13

9780679737575

Modigliani

a life

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Modigliani

a life

By: Meryle Secrest

Amedeo ('Beloved of God') Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh's. In Modigliani's time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani 'our aristocrat' and said, 'There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.' In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called 'enthralling' (The Wall Street Journal); 'rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written' (The New York Review of Books) — now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century's master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks ('How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful', said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . . and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche's theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani's long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest's book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

417

Publisher

Scribe Publications

Published Date

ISBN 10

1921844396

ISBN 13

9781921844393

Shoot the Widow

Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Shoot the Widow

Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject

By: Meryle Secrest

The first rule of biography, wrote Justin Kaplan: “Shoot the widow.” In her new book, Meryle Secrest, acclaimed biographer (“Knowing, sympathetic and entertainingly droll”—The New York Times), writes about her comic triumphs and misadventures as a biographer in search of her nine celebrated subjects, about how the hunt for a “life” is like working one’s way through a maze, full of fall starts, dead ends, and occasional clear passages leading to the next part of the puzzle. She writes about her first book, a life of Romaine Brooks, and how she was led to Nice and given invaluable letters by her subject’s heir that were slid across the table, one at a time; how she was led to the villa of Brooks’ lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio (poet, playwright, and aviator), a fantastic mausoleum left untouched since the moment of his death seventy years before; to a small English village, where she uncovered a lost Romaine Brooks painting; and finally, to 20, rue Jacob, Paris, where Romaine’s lover, Natalie Barney, had fifty years before entertained Cocteau, Gide, Proust, Colette, and others. Secrest describes how her next book—a life of Berenson—prompted Francis Steegmuller, fellow biographer, to comment that he wouldn’t touch the subject with a ten-foot pole. For her life of British art historian Kenneth Clark, Secrest was given permission to write the book by her subject, who surreptitiously financed it in the hopes of controlling its contents; we see how Clark’s plan was foiled by a jealous mistress and a stash of love letters that helped Secrest navigate Clark’s obstacle course. Among the other biographical (mis)adventures, Secrest reveals: how she tracked Salvador Dalí to a hospital room, found him recovering from serious burns sustained in a mysterious fire, and learned that he was knee-deep in a scandal involving fake drawings and prints and surrounded by dangerous characters out of Murder, Inc. . . . and how she went in search of a subject’s grave (Frank Lloyd Wright’s) only to find that his body had been dug up to satisfy the whim of his last wife. A fascinating account of a life spent in sometimes arduous, sometimes comical, always exciting pursuit of the truth about other lives.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

277

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307497860

ISBN 13

9780307497864

Somewhere for Me

A Biography of Richard Rogers

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Somewhere for Me

A Biography of Richard Rogers

By: Meryle Secrest

The life of composer Richard Rodgers encapsulates the very essence of New York high society during the first half of the 20th century.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

480

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

0747558256

ISBN 13

9780747558255

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer

By: Meryle Secrest

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer

By: Meryle Secrest

The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150. The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company came to be, how it survived two world wars and brought a ravaged Italy back to life, how after it mastered the typewriter business with the famous "Olivetti touch," it entered the new, fierce electronics race; how its first desktop compter, the P101, came to be; how, within eighteen months, it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that by then had become an arm of the American government, developing advanced weapon systems; Olivetti putting its own mainframe computer on the market with its desktop prototype, selling 40,000 units, including to NASA for its lunar landings. How Olivetti made inroads into the US market by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti's own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers; how a week after Olivetti purchased Underwood, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it; how Adriano Olivetti, the legendary idealist, socialist, visionary, heir to the company founded by his father, built the company into a fantastical dynasty--factories, offices, satellite buildings spread over more than fifty acres--while on a train headed for Switzerland in 1960 for supposed meetings and then to Hartford, never arrived, dying suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-eight . . . how eighteen months later, his brilliant young engineer, who had assembled Olivetti's superb team of electronic engineers, was killed, as well, in a suspicious car crash, and how the Olivetti company and the P101 came to its insidious and shocking end.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

321

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0451493664

ISBN 13

9780451493668

Book's by Meryle Secrest

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Princess Margaret and the Curse

Princess Margaret and the Curse

Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright

Duveen

Duveen

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim

Modigliani

Modigliani

Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

Modigliani

Modigliani

Shoot the Widow

Shoot the Widow

Somewhere for Me

Somewhere for Me

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email