Luce

Every winter, a young girl flies to Haiti to visit her Auntie Luce, a painter. The moment she steps off the plane, she feels a wall of heat, and familiar sights soon follow — the boys selling water ice by the pink cathedral, the tap tap buses in the busy streets, the fog and steep winding road to her aunt’s home in the mountains. The girl has always loved Auntie Luce’s paintings — the houses tucked into the hillside, colorful fishing boats by the water, heroes who fought for and won the country’s independence. Through Haiti’s colors, the girl comes to understand this place her family calls home. And when the moment finally comes to have her own portrait painted for the first time, she begins to see herself in a new way, tracing her own history and identity through her aunt’s brush. Includes an author’s note and a glossary.

How Henry R. Luce used his famous magazines to advance his interventionist agenda.

Clare Boothe Luce: American Renaissance Woman is a concise and highly readable political biography that examines the life of one of the most accomplished American women of the 20th century. Wife and mother, author, editor, playwright, political activist, war journalist, Congresswoman, ambassador, pundit, and feminist—Luce did it all. Carefully placing Luce in a series of shifting historical contexts, this book offers the reader an insight into mid-century American political, cultural, gender, and foreign relations history. Eleven primary sources follow the text, including excerpts from Luce’s diary, letters, speeches, and published works, as well as a TV talk-show appearance and a critic’s diary entry describing an evening with her, helping readers to understand her fascinating life. Together, the narrative and documents afford readers a brief yet in-depth look at Luce with all her complications: glamorous intellectual, acid-tongued diplomat, and feminist conservative, she was a deeply flawed high-achiever who repeatedly challenged the entrenched sexism of her age to become a significant actor in the rise of the “American Century.” Addressing the neglect suffered by women in foreign relations history, this will be of interest to students and scholars of US foreign relations, 20th-century US history, and US women’s history.

Considers nomination of Clare Boothe Luce to be Ambassador to Brazil and reviews her past performance as Ambassador to Italy and her political views.

"A solid account of Luce's life and legacy... A concise, readable volume." -- Journalism Quarterly

In Time, Life, and Fortune, Henry Luce invented three entirely new forms of journalism. They changed our country, largely for the better, and made Luce a very wealthy man. But his patriotic zeal and his obsessions with China, Communism, and Republican Party politics led him to ignore and distort inconvenient facts to make his case, irreparably tarnishing his legacy. His stunning successes, and his self-inflicted wounds, hold lessons for every leader. He invented the modern news magazine and named it Time, revolutionized the coverage of business with a publication he called Fortune, captured the world in pictures and christened it Life. His publications were read by fully a quarter of the U.S. population, and his ideas about journalism and the significance of American values left an indelible imprint on the history of the United States and the world. He was Henry Robinson Luce. Luce was America’s most powerful mass communicator for more than 40 years. Yet, he was an odd, contradictory man with few real friends and talents that were both more and less than they seemed. His private life was largely a failure, and his missionary zeal was never quite realized. New Word City, publishers of digital originals, contributes 10 percent of its profits to literacy causes.

When a teacher makes an alarming discovery about Luce, an all-star high school student, Luce's parents are forced to reckon with their idealized image of their son, adopted years ago from a war-torn African country. --Page 4 of cover.