Ron Powers

"New York Times bestselling author Ron Powers offers a searching, richly researched narrative of the social history of mental illness in America paired with the deeply personal story of his two sons' battles with schizophrenia. From the centuries of torture of "lunatiks" at Bedlam Asylum to the infamous eugenics era to the follies of the anti-psychiatry movement to the current landscape in which too many families struggle alone to manage afflicted...

In Mark Twain, Ron Powers consummates years of research with a tour de force on the life of our culture's founding father. He offers Sam Clemens as he lived, breathed, and wrote. With the assistance of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, he has drawn on thousands of letters and notebook entries, many only recently discovered. Sam Clemens left his frontier boyhood in Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats. He skirted...

Edward M. ("Ted") Kennedy was first elected as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts in 1962, after playing a key role in his brother John's Presidential campaign. "In 2004 he began interviews at the Miller Center of the Univ. of Virginia for an oral history project about his life. Since then he has drawn from his fifty years of contemporaneous notes from personal diaries and worked closely on this book with ... Ron Powers." -- dust jacket. In his revealing...

The story of the five Marines and one Navy corpsman that were forever immortalized as a symbol of WWII by raising the American flag at the battle of Iwo Jima. When Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the event becomes a symbol of hope for the families at home, the three surviving men are pulled from combat and sent on a tour across America to raise desperately-needed bond money. It is a trip that brings out the truths of both that symbolic act, and of their...