Bøger af Michael Korda

Originally published in hardcover in 2014.

Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Hero and Alone, tells the story of the First World War not in any conventional way but through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets who came to describe it best, and indeed to symbolize the war's tragic arc and lethal fury.His epic narrative begins with Rupert Brooke, "the handsomest young man in England" and perhaps its most famous young poet in the halcyon days of the Edwardian Age, and ends five years later with Wilfred Owen, killed in action at twenty-five, only one week before the armistice. With bitter irony, Owen's mother received the telegram informing her of his death on November 11, just as church bells tolled to celebrate the war's end.Korda's dramatic account, which includes anecdotes from his own family history, not only brings to life the soldier poets but paints an unforgettable picture of life and death in the trenches, and the sacrifice of an entire generation. His cast of characters includes the young American poet Alan Seeger, who was killed in action as a private in the French Foreign Legion; Isaac Rosenberg, whose parents had fled czarist anti-Semitic persecution and who was killed in action at the age of twenty-eight before his fame as a poet and a painter was recognised; Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whose friendship and friendly rivalry endured through long, complicated private lives; and, finally, Owen, whose fame came only posthumously and whose poetry remains some of the most savage and heartbreaking to emerge from the cataclysmic war.As Korda demonstrates, the poets of the First World War were soldiers, heroes, martyrs, victims, their lives and loves endlessly fascinating-that of Rupert Brooke alone reads like a novel, with his journey to Polynesia in pursuit of a life like Gauguin's and some of his finest poetry written only a year before his tragic death. Muse of Fire is at once a portrait of their lives and a narrative of a civilisation destroying itself, among the rubble, shadows, and the unresolved problems of which we still live, from the revival of brutal trench warfare in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

The award-winning author of Charmed Lives brings readers into the seductive and beguiling story of how being wrongfully accused of a crime led to a life of stardom in London for Dawn Avalon.Facing accusations for a crime she did not commit, Dawn Avalon abandons the life she knows and returns to her homeland in London to escape the charges. Against her expectations, she ends up leaving her entire identity behind as she becomes a star of the stage and the screen known as “Queenie.” Using her beauty to attract and marry the Hollywood producer that changes her life as he leads her into stardom, Dawn realizes too late that the price you must pay for success and fame is higher than she ever expected.

Fictionalizing the affairs of John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy with Marilyn Monroe, Michael Korda gives readers the satisfaction of a gripping and dramatic tale centered around the affairs that took the world by storm.Through the eyes of their close friends, this fictional story based on fact takes a look at Marilyn Monroe and her obsessive love for John and Bobby Kennedy and the damage their affairs caused for everyone involved. Seasoned author Michael Korda brings a story that has only been alive in imaginations to life in this stunningly passionate and tragic romance that is lived out against a background of deadly intrigue and threatening drama. “Once again, Korda glibly but engagingly dramatizes historical events.” — Publishers Weekly

?[A] beguiling biography. . . . Korda is at his best describing, after the heroics in the desert, the touching antiheroics of Lawrence's later life.? ? New York Times Book ReviewA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Editor's Choice--the definitive biography of the legendary British soldier, scholar and adventurer who became a myth even in his lifetime, T. E. Lawrence, ?Lawrence of Arabia."From Michael Korda, author of the New York Times bestselling Eisenhower biography Ike and the captivating Battle of Britain book With Wings Like Eagles, comes the critically-acclaimed definitive biography of T. E. Lawrence?the legendary British soldier, strategist, scholar, and adventurer whose exploits as ?Lawrence of Arabia? created a legacy of mythic proportions in his own lifetime. Many know T.E. Lawrence from David Lean's Oscar-winning 1962 biopic?based, itself, upon Lawrence's autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom?but in the tradition of modern biographers like John Meacham, David McCullough, and Barbara Leaming, Michael Korda's penetrating new examination reveals new depth and character in the twentieth century's quintessential English hero.

With characteristic wit, self-effacing charm and sheer, exuberant love of a good cat story, New York Times bestselling author Michael Korda and his wife Margaret Korda recount their lives as "cat people," beginning with Margaret's passion for cats (and Michael's reluctant mid-life transformation into a cat person), and introducing readers to a hilarious assortment of people whose life revolves--often to an extraordinary degree--around their cat, or cats, from Cleopatra a transatlantic traveler who found happiness in Paris to Wally, the epitome of feline dignity. Here are people who just can't say no to another cat, who "world-travel" with their cat, who build their social life around their cats--and of course the cats themselves, for the Kordas celebrate the beguiling power of cats, including many of their own, who have complemented, complicated and changed their lives together over the years. Here are charming, often hilarious and sometimes sad portraits of such cats as Margaret's beloved Irving, whose favorite abode was the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and Mumsie, who arrived unexpectedly at the door with her two kittens, and special cats like Jake and the gentle Chutney, as well as "difficult" cats like Chui and poor Mrs. Bumble, and Mr. McT., the bully who found love late in life. Here are graceful cats and cats like Kit-Kat that never look before they jump, in short, countless cats the reader will never forget, even those with many cats of their own.

"Dreaming of moving to the country? First, read Michael Korda's engaging memoir. City types will find laughter, profit, and fair warning in Country Matters." --Washington PostWith his inimitable sense of humor and storytelling talent, New York Times bestselling author Michael Korda brings us this charming, hilarious, self-deprecating memoir of a city couple's new life in the country.At once entertaining, canny, and moving, Country Matters does for Dutchess County, New York, what Under the Tuscan Sun did for Tuscany. This witty memoir, replete with Korda's own line drawings, reads like a novel, as it chronicles the author's transformation from city slicker to full-time country gentleman, complete with tractors, horses, and a leaking roof.When he decides to take up residence in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Dutchess County, ninety miles north of New York City, Korda discovers what country life is really like: Owning pigs, more than owning horses, even more than owning the actual house, firmly anchored the Kordas as residents in the eyes of their Pleasant Valley neighbors.You may own your land, but without concertina barbed wire, or the 82nd Airborne on patrol, it's impossible to keep people off it!It's possible to line up major household repairs over a tuna melt sandwich.The locals are not particularly quick to accept these outsiders, and the couple's earliest interactions with their new neighbors provide constant entertainment, particularly when the Kordas discover that hunting season is a year-round event--right on their own land! From their closest neighbors, mostly dairy farmers, to their unforgettable caretaker Harold Roe--whose motto regarding the local flora is "Whack it all back! "--the residents of Pleasant Valley eventually come to realize that the Kordas are more than mere weekenders.Sure to have readers in stitches, this is a book that has universal appeal for all who have ever dreamed of owning that perfect little place to escape to up in the country, or, more boldly, have done it.

A Rolls Royce Silver Cloud drove him to airports; the British film industry kowtowed to his power; the great Hollywood studios fawned at his feet.Sir Alexander Korda, one of the world's most flamboyant movie tycoons, rose from obscurity in rural Hungary to become a legendary filmmaker. With him were his brothers, Zoltan and Vincent, all living charmed lives in circles that included H. G. Wells, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Marlena Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, and Merle Oberon, who was soon to be Alex's wife. But along with Alex's flair for success was an equally powerful impulse for destruction. Now, Vincent's son, Michael Korda, in the first book of his memoirs, recalls the enchanted figures of his childhood...the glory days of the Korda brothers' great films...and then their heartbreaking, tragic end.

From world leaders to Mafia dons, from Hollywood stars to the literary world's most eccentric writers, the notable and notorious alike have entrusted their life's work to Simon & Schuster's preeminent editor, Michael Korda. In this masterful memoir, Korda reveals the unforgettable cast of characters and outrageous anecdotes behind four decades of blockbuster publishing, bringing us face-to-face with dozens of larger-than-life figures: Richard Nixon, who maintained his "presidential" persona long after his public life was over; Joan Crawford, whose autobiography reflected a life she would have liked to have lived but did not; Joseph Bonanno, the retired Mafia don who'd do anything to keep from being killed by the reviewers. And in a revelatory account that reads as compulsively as fiction, Another Life paints a vivid picture of publishing's glitterati, including Jacqueline Susann, who liberated women's fiction--and terrorized a publishing house, and Tennessee Williams, who nourished his genius on four-course vodka lunches. A veritable Who's Who of stage, screen, and letters, Another Life is the deft interweaving of publishing at it most fascinating--and storytelling at its finest.

Ike is acclaimed author Michael Korda's sweeping and enthralling biography of Dwight David Eisenhower, arguably America's greatest general and one of her best presidentsa remarkable man in an extraordinary time, the hero who won the war and thereafter kept the peace.

In the summer of 1940, fewer than three thousand young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed almost within his grasp.In this superb history of three epic months that saved the world, Michael Korda brilliantly re-creates the intensity of combat in "the long, delirious, burning blue" of the sky above southern England?while tracing, perhaps for the first time, the entire complex web of political, diplomatic, scientific, industrial, and human decisions during the 1930s that inexorably led to the world's first, greatest, and most decisive air battle. With Wings Like Eagles brings to vivid life the extraordinary men and women on both sides of the conflict?from Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to the ground crews, the German pilots, the American volunteers, and the courageous airmen and airwomen of the RAF.

One of the first two volumes in Harper's Eminent Lives series, Korda brings his acclaimed storytelling talents to the life of Ulysses S. Grant a man who managed to end the Civil War on a note of grace, serve two terms as president, write one of the most successful military memoirs in American literature, and is today remembered as a brilliant general but a failed president. Ulysses S. Grant was the first officer since George Washington to become a fourstar general in the United States Army, and the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve eight consecutive years in the White House. In this succinct and vivid biography, Michael Korda considers Grant's character and reconciles the conflicting evaluations of his leadership abilities. Grant's life played out as a true Horatio Alger story. Despite his humble background as the son of a tanner in Ohio, his lack of early success in the army, and assorted failed business ventures, his unwavering determination propelled him through the ranks of military leadership and into the presidency. But while the general's tenacity and steadfastness contributed to his success on the battlefield, it both aided and crippled his effectiveness in the White House. Assessing Grant both within the context of his time and in contrast to more recent American leaders, Korda casts a benevolent eye on Grant's presidency while at the same time conceding his weaknesses. He suggests that though the general's second term ended in financial and political scandals, the fact remains that for eight years Grant exerted a calming influence on a country that had only just emerged from a horrendous civil war. Ulysses S. Grant is an evenhanded and stirring portrait of a man who guided America through a pivotal juncture in its history.

In the tradition of The Year of Magical Thinking comes a legendary editor's unflinching love song about his radiant wife, Margaret, and her battle with cancer.

Bestselling author Michael Korda's Horse People is the story -- sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes sad and moving, always shrewdly observed -- of a lifetime love affair with horses, and of the bonds that have linked humans with horses for more than ten thousand years. It is filled with intimate portraits of the kind of people, rich or poor, Eastern or Western, famous or humble, whose lives continue to revolve around the horse.Korda is a terrific storyteller, and his book is intensely personal and seductive, a joy for everyone who loves horses. Even those who have never ridden will be happy to saddle up and follow him through the world of horses, horse people, and the riding life.

From silly to sweet, 365 cat sketches by Michael Korda, drawn with love for his wife.

Combining epic history with rich family stories, Michael Korda chronicles the outbreak of the Second World War and the great events that led to Dunkirk.

Presents the story of four twenty-four year old Oxford undergraduates who took off for Budapest in a beat-up old Volkswagon convertible in October 1956, to bring badly needed medicine to the Budapest hospitals and to participate, at street level, in one of the great, heroic battes of post-war history.

Michael Kordas Hero is an epic biography of the mysterious,Englishman whose daring exploits made him an object of intense fascination, known the world over as Lawrence of Arabia. An Oxford Scholar and archaeologist, T.E. Lawrence was sent to Cairo as an intelligence officer in 1916 and vanished into the desert in 1917. He united and led the Arab tribes to defeat the Turks and eventually capture Damascus, an adventure he recorded in the classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A born leader, utterly fearless and seemingly impervious to pain and danger, he remained modest, and retiring.,Farsighted diplomat, brilliant military strategist, the first media celebrity, and acclaimed writer, Lawrence was a visionary whose achievements transcended his time: had his vision for the modern Middle East been carried through, the hatred and bloodshed that have since plagued the region might have prevented. The democratic reforms he would have implemented as British High Commissioner of Egypt, are those the Egyptians are now demanding, 91 years later. Ultimately, as this magisterial work demonstrates, Lawrence remains the paradigm of the hero in modern times.