True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
Author: Abraham Riesman
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593135733

The definitive, revelatory biography of Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, a writer and entrepreneur who reshaped global pop culture—at a steep personal cost HUGO AWARD FINALIST • EISNER AWARD NOMINEE • “A biography that reads like a thriller or a whodunit . . . scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking.”—Neil Gaiman Stan Lee was one of the most famous and beloved entertainers to emerge from the twentieth century. He served as head editor of Marvel Comics for three decades and, in that time, became known as the creator of more pieces of internationally recognizable intellectual property than nearly anyone: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk . . . the list goes on. His carnival-barker marketing prowess helped save the comic-book industry and superhero fiction. His cameos in Marvel movies have charmed billions. When he died in 2018, grief poured in from around the world, further cementing his legacy. But what if Stan Lee wasn’t who he said he was? To craft the definitive biography of Lee, Abraham Riesman conducted more than 150 interviews and investigated thousands of pages of private documents, turning up never-before-published revelations about Lee’s life and work. True Believer tackles tough questions: Did Lee actually create the characters he gained fame for creating? Was he complicit in millions of dollars’ worth of fraud in his post-Marvel life? Which members of the cavalcade of grifters who surrounded him were most responsible for the misery of his final days? And, above all, what drove this man to achieve so much yet always boast of more?

Stan Lee's Backchannel Volume 1

Stan Lee's Backchannel Volume 1
Author: Stan Lee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2024-03-12
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 195212624X

One of the final projects of the legendary Stan Lee and beautifully illustrated by Spider-man veteran Andie Tong, BACKCHANNEL centers on Tom Tanner and his father, Martin. On the surface, Tom Tanner is having an average high school life - struggling to stay on the lacrosse team, hiding his affections for his friend Sally, and trying to keep his head down and grades up. What his father, an LA police detective, and friends don’t know is that Tom is an engineering prodigy and is being recruited by BACKCHANNEL, a decentralized hactivist group causing havoc at prisons across the U.S. While developing a highly sophisticated AI algorithm, a power awakens within Tom that grants him the ability to mentally hack into any device (technopathy). While initially using this newfound power for personal gain and petty revenge, he learns of a dark secret from his father’s past that will change him forever. In need of a moment of escapism, Tom returns to his favorite digital comics. This time though, the comic is disturbingly on point with what Tom has been experiencing. As he continues to read, Tom realizes that there are encrypted messages in the comic from an unknown ally who clearly knows everything Tom has been up to. When he discovers that the hacktivist group BACKCHANNEL has been tracking him and is aware of his new abilities and reaching out to him for help, Tom is set on a very dangerous path.

Marvel Visionaries

Marvel Visionaries
Author: Stan Lee
Publisher: Marvel Entertainment
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2019-06-26
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1302514369

Collects Fantastic Four (1961) #11 and Annual #3; Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #96-98 and Annual #5; Daredevil (1964) #7 and #47; Silver Surfer (1968) #5; Thor (1966) #179-181; Marvel Premiere #3 and material from Captain America Comics #3 and #16, Suspense #28, Amazing Adult Fantasy #11, Amazing Fantasy (1962) #15 and Spectacular Spider-Man Super Special. Celebrate the career of a true Marvel Visionary! In the days before World War II, a teenager named Stanley Lieber ran errands in the Timely Comics offices. Soon, “Stan Lee” published his first story — and before long, he was running the show! In the 1960s, Lee and Jack Kirby transformed super hero comics with the Fantastic Four — whose success sparked a line of smash hits that created the Marvel Universe! Presented here are some of the greatest stories written by “The Man,” from rarely seen tales from Lee’s earliest days to unforgettable adventures starring his most iconic co-creations with Kirby, Steve Ditko and others — including the FF, Spider-Man, Thor, Silver Surfer, Doctor Strange and Daredevil!

Vatican Secret Diplomacy

Vatican Secret Diplomacy
Author: Charles R. Gallagher
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2008-06-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0300148216

In the corridors of the Vatican on the eve of World War II, American Catholic priest Joseph Patrick Hurley found himself in the midst of secret diplomatic dealings and intense debate. Hurley’s deeply felt American patriotism and fixed ideas about confronting Nazism directly led to a mighty clash with Pope Pius XII. It was 1939, the earliest days of Pius’s papacy, and controversy within the Vatican over policy toward Nazi Germany was already heated. This groundbreaking book is both a biography of Joseph Hurley, the first American to achieve the rank of nuncio, or Vatican ambassador, and an insider’s view of the alleged silence of the pope on the Holocaust and Nazism. Drawing on Hurley’s unpublished archives, the book documents critical debates in Pope Pius’s Vatican, secret U.S.-Vatican dealings, the influence of Detroit’s flamboyant anti-Semitic priest Charles E. Coughlin, and the controversial case of Croatia’s Cardinal Stepinac. The book also sheds light on the powerful connections between religion and politics in the twentieth century.

Genius at Play

Genius at Play
Author: Siobhan Roberts
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2024-10-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691267510

A multifaceted biography of a brilliant mathematician and iconoclast A mathematician unlike any other, John Horton Conway (1937–2020) possessed a rock star’s charisma, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a sly sense of humor. Conway found fame as a barefoot professor at Cambridge, where he discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry and the aptly named surreal numbers. He also invented the cult classic Game of Life, a cellular automaton that demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity—and provides an analogy for mathematics and the entire universe. Moving to Princeton in 1987, Conway used ropes, dice, pennies, coat hangers, and the occasional Slinky to illustrate his winning imagination and share his nerdish delights. Genius at Play tells the story of this ambassador-at-large for the beauties and joys of mathematics, lays bare Conway’s personal and professional idiosyncrasies, and offers an intimate look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most endearing and original intellectuals.

Church of Spies

Church of Spies
Author: Mark Riebling
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465061559

The heart-pounding history of how Pope Pius XII -- often labeled "Hitler's Pope" -- was in fact an anti-Nazi spymaster, plotting against the Third Reich during World War II. The Vatican's silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him "Hitler's Pope." But a key part of the story has remained untold. Pope Pius in fact ran the world's largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he sent birthday cards to Hitler -- while secretly plotting to kill him. He skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazis. Under his leadership the Vatican spy ring actively plotted against the Third Reich. Told with heart-pounding suspense and drawing on secret transcripts and unsealed files by an acclaimed author, Church of Spies throws open the Vatican's doors to reveal some of the most astonishing events in the history of the papacy. Riebling reveals here how the world's greatest moral institution met the greatest moral crisis in history.

Stalin's Secret Agents

Stalin's Secret Agents
Author: M. Stanton Evans
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2012-11-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 143914768X

A primary source examination of the infiltration of Stalin's Soviet intelligence network by members of the American government during World War II reveals the dictator's dubious partnerships with such top-level figures as Vice President Henry Wallace andchief advisor Harry Hopkins.

New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics

New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics
Author: C-T James Huang
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9400916086

The past decade and a half has witnessed a great deal of renewed interest in the study of Chinese linguistics, not only in the traditional areas of philological studies and in theoretically oriented areas of syn chronic grammar and language change but also in the cultivation of new frontiers in related areas of the cognitive sciences. There is a significant increase in the number of students studying one area or another of the linguistic structure of Chinese in various linguistic programs in the United States, Europe, Australia and in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. Several new academic departments devoted to the study of linguistics have been established in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the past few years. The increasing research and study activities have also resulted in a number of national and international conferences, including the North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL), which has been held annually in the United States; the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL), which has had its fourth meeting since it was launched by Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1990; the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (lACL), created in Singapore in 1992 and now incorporated in Irvine, California, which has held its annual meetings at major institutions in Asia, Europe, and the US.

Black Panther

Black Panther
Author: Don McGregor
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 0143135813

The Penguin Classics Marvel Collection presents the origin stories, seminal tales, and characters of the Marvel Universe to explore Marvel’s transformative and timeless influence on an entire genre of fantasy. A Penguin Classics Marvel Collection Edition Collects Fantastic Four #52-53 (1966); Jungle Action #6-21 (1973-1976). It is impossible to imagine American popular culture without Marvel Comics. For decades, Marvel has published groundbreaking visual narratives that sustain attention on multiple levels: as metaphors for the experience of difference and otherness; as meditations on the fluid nature of identity; and as high-water marks in the artistic tradition of American cartooning, to name a few. The Black Panther is not just a super hero; as King T’Challa, he is also the monarch of the hidden African nation of Wakanda. Combining the strength and stealth of his namesake with a creative scientific intelligence, the Black Panther is an icon of Afro-futurist fantasy. This new anthology includes the Black Panther’s 1966 origin tale and the entirety of the critically acclaimed “Panther’s Rage” storyline from his 1970s solo series. A foreword by Nnedi Okorafor, a scholarly introduction and apparatus by Qiana J. Whitted, and a general series introduction by Ben Saunders offer further insight into the enduring significance of Black Panther and classic Marvel comics. The Penguin Classics black spine paperback features full-color art throughout.

Sandworm

Sandworm
Author: Andy Greenberg
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0525564632

"With the nuance of a reporter and the pace of a thriller writer, Andy Greenberg gives us a glimpse of the cyberwars of the future while at the same time placing his story in the long arc of Russian and Ukrainian history." —Anne Applebaum, bestselling author of Twilight of Democracy The true story of the most devastating act of cyberwarfare in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it: "[A] chilling account of a Kremlin-led cyberattack, a new front in global conflict" (Financial Times). In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world's largest businesses—from drug manufacturers to software developers to shipping companies. At the attack's epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damage—the largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen. The hackers behind these attacks are quickly gaining a reputation as the most dangerous team of cyberwarriors in history: a group known as Sandworm. Working in the service of Russia's military intelligence agency, they represent a persistent, highly skilled force, one whose talents are matched by their willingness to launch broad, unrestrained attacks on the most critical infrastructure of their adversaries. They target government and private sector, military and civilians alike. A chilling, globe-spanning detective story, Sandworm considers the danger this force poses to our national security and stability. As the Kremlin's role in foreign government manipulation comes into greater focus, Sandworm exposes the realities not just of Russia's global digital offensive, but of an era where warfare ceases to be waged on the battlefield. It reveals how the lines between digital and physical conflict, between wartime and peacetime, have begun to blur—with world-shaking implications.