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Six more weeks of biographies on ice

It’s Groundhog Day here, there and everywhere. Unfortunately for those who dislike the cold, hard squint of winter, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning. We did a full-text Advanced Search for “punxsutawney” in Biography Resource Center and found a few goodies to celebrate the day.

  • Author Esther Jane Carrier, who was born in Punxsutawney, PA, in 1925 and continues to reside there
  • Susanna Leonard Hill, who wrote the feminist screed Punxsutawney Phyllis
  • Bert States, an English professor who was once program director at radio station WPXY in Punxsutawney
  • Teacher Dolores P. Sullivan, who was born in Punxsutawney
  • Author Robert Denny, who was born in Punxsutawney
  • Poet David McKain, who was born in Punxsutawney
  • Ted Ward, who was born in Punxsutawney
  • George “Rube” Waddell, a baseball player who spent an unfortunate month (the townspeople ran him out of town) playing for Punxsutawney’s team before signing with the Milwaukee Brewers in 1900
  • Harold Ramis and Bill Murray, for the film Groundhog Day
  • Renowned basketball coach Chuck Daly, who before leading the Detroit Pistons to back-to-back championships began his coaching career at Punxsutawney High School in 1955
  • Barbara Birenbaum, honored centennial author at the Punxsutawney Phil Groundhog Day centennial celebration, 1987

Posted on: February 2, 2010, 5:51 pm Category: Factoids Tagged with: , ,

By: Erin Walker

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New content added to Biography Resource Center: 2/2/2010

Happy African American History Month! We hope to have an exciting related content announcement later in the month, but for the moment we are pleased to announce the release of the following content to Biography Resource Center:

  • Carroll’s Directories annual update
  • Debrett’s People of Today annual update
  • Contemporary Authors, vol. 288
  • Contemporary Authors New Revision, vol. 195 and 196
  • Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 76 and 77
  • Contemporary Theatere, Film and Television, vol. 97
  • Newsmakers 2010, Issues 2 and 3
  • 87 original, contemporary biographies written specifically for Biography Resource Center by our team of subject experts

Volume 288 of Contemporary Authors brings such authors as Edward Alden, Gustavo Arellano, Brunonia Barry, Mike Chinoy, Rose George, Fred Haynes, Joni Sensel, Marilee Strong, Mark Tungate and Lisa Zunshine to the database.

The newest volumes of Contemporary Authors New Revision include fresh biographies on Pat Barker, Eric Clark, Patricia Cornwell, Nancy Farmer, Douglas Frantz, Sue Grafton, Merry Jones, Steve Martin, Kate Morgenroth, Sidney Offit, Noelle Oxenhandler, Sharon Shinn, Neal Stephenson, Studs Terkel, Ben Wynne, Tariq Ali, Bonnie Buxton, Katie Fforde, Atul Gawande, Donald Hall, Michael Lieb, Norman Mailer, Jude Morgan, Barack Obama, Lional Shriver and Rick Walton.

New biographies added from the latest volumes of Contemporary Black Biography include Law & Order’s Anthony Anderson; Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir; saxophonist Hank Crawford; Black Enterprise published Butch Graves; reparations activist Ray Jenkins; former Tanzanian president Ali Hassan Mwinyi; Love and Basketball writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood; businesswoman Suzanne Shank; Charles Young, the third African-American to graduate from West Point; opera singer Anne Brown; women’s health pioneer Lena Frances Edwards; composer Erroll Garner; U.S. attorney general Eric Holder; and writer Denene Miller.

Coming to us from the most recent issues of Newsmakers include biographies of Man Booker Prize-winning author Aravind Adiga; musician Bob Bogle; basketball coach Chuck Daly; Israeli writer Amos Elan; The Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell; Bengali musician Ali Akbar Khan; Grammy-winning band Kings of Leon; Ed McMahon; U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice; crime novelist Karin Slaughter; Tavis Smiley; basketball player and jazz musician Wayman Tisdale; NBA player Chris “Birdman” Andersen; author Maeve Binchy; actress Edie Falco; Roomba inventor Helen Greiner; MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow; and Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe.

Finally, new biographies written by our subject experts that cannot be found in any of our print or electronic book series include Captain Lou Albano; U.S. senator Scott Brown; Big Ten conference commissioner Jim Delany; Russian activist Natalya Estemirova; actress Clementine Ford; Japanese first lady Miyuki Hatoyama; so-called socialite Kourtney Kardashian; Canadian activist Wilton Littlechild; American congressman and Iraq War veteran Patrick Murphy; baseball player Hanley Ramirez; surfer Kelly Slater; and New York MTA chair Jay Walder.

Whew! You can find them in Biography Resource Center as of today. Enjoy!

Posted on: February 2, 2010, 11:34 am Category: Announcements Tagged with:

By: Erin Walker

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I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it

A sad but not bad good-by to author J.D. Salinger, whose death yesterday was just made public by his family. The New Hampshire hermit was 91 and had lived a life of seclusion for more than a century after producing the 1951 literary classic The Catcher in the Rye. An excerpt from his entry in Encyclopedia of World Biography:

Salinger’s upbringing was not unlike that of Holden Caulfield, the Glass children, and many of his other characters. Raised in Manhattan, he was the second of two children of a prosperous Jewish importer and a Scots-Irish mother. He was expelled from several private preparatory schools before graduating from Valley Forge Military Academy in 1936. While attending a Columbia University writing course, he had his first piece of short fiction published in Story, an influential periodical founded by his instructor, Whit Burnett. Salinger’s short fiction soon began appearing in Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and other magazines catering to popular reading tastes.

Biography Resource Center has nine other narratives on Salinger, plus one in Lives and Perspectives Collection, two brief biographies in Biography Resource Center proper, and one brief biography in Marquis Who’s Who. Much more information on Salinger’s work — in addition to his life — can be found in Literature Resource Center, including more than 100 pieces of literary criticism.

Posted on: January 28, 2010, 4:04 pm Category: Factoids Tagged with:

By: Erin Walker

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Rhymes with stubble trap

It was to our great horror that we awoke this morning and discovered that never before, until this august date of January 25, had we been aware of Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. For this, and for the fact that we do not yet have biographies on the inventors of Bubble Wrap (turns out it should be capitalized as it is an actual brand that has been nounified, much like Kleenex and Xerox) – Michael Chavannes and Alfred Fielding — we are truly sorry. Then again, no time like the present than to begin righting packaging wrongs…right?

We do have a number of tangentially-related biographies.

  • Two biographies for individuals named Chavannes
  • 79 biographies for folks with the surname Fielding
  • Five biographies that include the phrase “bubble wrap”

We suggest you celebrate this special day as we are, which means squishing Bubble Wrap bubbles with gusto that results in our own satisfaction and our coworkers’ extreme irritation. When it comes down to it, unpopped Bubble Wrap bubbles are like that shy sneeze that just refuses to be unleashed from our nasal cavities.

POP! POP! POP! Ahhhhh. Much better, and no Kleenex necessary.

Posted on: January 25, 2010, 12:59 pm Category: Factoids Tagged with:

By: Erin Walker

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Biography means never having to say you’re sorry

Not created by Erich Segal

Not created by Erich Segal

The literary world lost two excellent writers this week: Erich Segal and Robert Parker. Segal was best known for writing Love Story, which jerked tears in movie theatres everywhere once it was adapted for the screen — indeed, the process really happened in reverse, as the novel was an adaptation of a screenplay Segal had written but had gotten stuck in turnaround. (Rumors that Segal worked for Mattel, invented the He-Man characters and wrote a television show around them, only to have it turned down and then made a giant success once he converted the story into action figures to be greedily sought after by children of the ’80s have been greatly exaggerated. He did, however, have a writing credit on Yellow Submarine, which is almost as cool as inventing He-Man.)

Parker, on the other hand, wrote hardboiled detective fiction, most notably about the P.I. Spenser, who appeared in upwards of thirty novels. In 2007, he won the Gumshoe Award for for Lifetime Achievement, an honor he shares with such sherlock authors as Donald Westlake and Ed McBain.

We have multiple biographies on each of these authors — check them out to get more in depth information about their lives.

Posted on: January 21, 2010, 2:02 pm Category: Factoids Tagged with: , ,

By: Erin Walker

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Toe pick!

Cool Runnings

Cool Runnings

We’re getting ready here at Biography Resource Center HQ for a marketing/programming push related to the soon-to-be-here (32 days and counting!) 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Oddly — or perhaps not so oddly — the Winter Games always bring to mind two of our favorite sports movies: Cool Runnings and The Cutting Edge.

We have lots of ice skaters available for your searching pleasure, but more interesting might be the bobsledders. Or is it bobsleighers?  Or even bobsledgers? We found the following results using Advanced Search on these terms.

  • bobsled — 36 narrative biographies
  • bobsleigh — 4 narrative biographies
  • bobsledge — 0 biographies

Individuals who came back from these searches include mostly athletes as well as a smattering of folks working in other careers. These include: Garret Hines and Randy Jones (United States); Vonetta Flowers (United States); Jim Shea, Jr. (United States); Alexandra Power Allred (United States); Pierre Lueders (Canada); Duff Gibson, who later switched to skeleton (Canada); Velvet Crush, who recorded an album for the label Bobsled Records (United States); Willie Gault (United States); Christopher Ondaatje (Canada); Lydia Skoblikova (Russia); Gerard Fairlie (Britain); Steve McKee, who wrote a book about sporting events including bobsledding (United States); Thomas McNab, who coached both Olympic track and field and bobsled teams (Britain); Dawn Steel, movie producer for Cool Runnings (United States); Kornelia Ender, whose husband was dropped from the East German bobsled team in the late 1980s (German); Laird Hamilton (United States); Cecil E. Heacox, who wrote the screenplay for Olympic Bobsled Run in 1960 (United States); John Candy, who starred in Cool Runnings (United States); Edwin Moses (United States); Herschel Walker (United States); Caroline Preston, an author who used bobsledding as a plot point once upon a time (United States); Lynn Swann, who provided commentary for the bobsled competition during the Calgary Games (United States); Willie Davenport (United States); Malik Yoba, who got his acting start in Cool Runnings with Candy (United States); Priscilla Lopez, who tried to imagine herself bobsledding in a Method acting class (United States); Claudette Colbert, who rode a bobsled in I Met Him in Paris (United States); Prince Albert of Monaco, who participated in five Winter Olympiads on the Monaco bobsled team (Monaco); and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, who photographed a toy invented as a child with his brothers that involved a bobsled on bicycle wheels (France).

During this search we learned that, in a strange prophetic twist, former Pittsburgh Steelers star Swann was born in a town named Alcoa — in Tennessee, though, not Pennsylvania.  Biographies! Learn something new and potentially useful, if not downright intriguing, every day.

Posted on: January 6, 2010, 2:28 pm Category: Factoids Tagged with: ,

By: Erin Walker

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New content added to Biography Resource Center: 1/5/2010

We are pleased to announce the release of the following content to Biography Resource Center:

  • Animal Sciences
  • Encyclopedia of World Biography, vol. 29
  • Space Sciences

The latest volume of Encyclopedia of World Biography, one of Gale’s seminal biographical sources, includes 175 new biographies on such individuals as: Emile Augier; Lauren Bacall; Moe Berg; Janet Guthrie; Kon Ichikawa; Ahmed Orabi; Max Schmeling; Sunita Williams; and Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

The entire content sets for Animal Sciences and Space Sciences have been updated by our Science content team.

You can find them in Biography Resource Center as of today. Enjoy!

Posted on: January 5, 2010, 3:55 pm Category: Announcements Tagged with:

By: Erin Walker

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Do you have Prince Albert in a can?

No, we don’t — but we do have a lovely Spotlight on Prince Albert out of a can, consort to Queen Victoria, featured on the Biography Resource Center homepage this week. This particular Prince Albert had nothing to do with the chewing tobacco that inspired the horrible, horrible “let him out!” joke. Rather, he popularized the Christmas tree in the 19th century. We have nine results for a Name Search on Prince Albert in the database, including Prince Albert Best, Jr., who was a North Carolina public school administrator, and Prince Harry of Britain, who has a middle name of Albert.

Posted on: December 15, 2009, 5:57 pm Category: Factoids Tagged with:

By: Erin Walker

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New content added to Biography Resource Center: 12/10/2009

We are pleased to announce the release of the following content to Biography Resource Center:

New biographies added from the latest volume of Contemporary Authors include: Denise Affonco; Richard Bookstaber; David Carr; Dexter Filkins; Michelle Gonzalez; Nicholas Katzenbach; Marcia Kupfer; Kent Lightfoot; Elizabeth Neuffer; Keith Olbermann; Curtis Peebles; Michael Rosenberg; Katrina M. Sanders; Anna Shternshis; Sunera Thobani; and Paula Wilcox.

Contemporary Authors New Revisions vol. 194 includes new biographies on: David Aikman; Rick Bragg; Breena Clarke; Paulo Coelho; Herbert Gold; Sue Halpern; Don Higginbotham; Billie Letts; Amin Maalouf; Sara Pennypacker; Richard Russo; Sanyika Shakur; and Tim Winton.

The most recent volume of Contemporary Musicians includes new biographies on: Arctic Monkeys; Neko Case; Eric Clapton; Finger Eleven; Colin James; LL Cool J; Mates of State; Metallica; Seal; Britney Spears; TV on the Radio; and M. Ward.

Finally, new biographies from the latest volume of Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television include: Moises Arias; Peter Berg; Brandy; Fiona Dourif; Tovah Feldshuh; Hill Harper; Eric Lange; Neal Moritz; Monica Potter; Alex Proyas; Kelly Ripa; Jerry Springer; and Aimee Teegarden.

In all, 692 new biographies were added in this content load. You can find them in Biography Resource Center as of today. Enjoy!

Posted on: December 11, 2009, 1:55 pm Category: Announcements Tagged with:

By: Erin Walker

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World AIDS Day

We’ve been struck by a bit of absenteeism here at Facts of Lives — the holiday season will do that to you. Now that the turkey has been carved and consumed and the annual Black Friday/Cyber Monday consumer gluttony concluded, we’re back on track. (At least for a few weeks; there will be another hiatus the last two weeks of the year.)

Today we are observing World AIDS Day 2009, a holiday, for lack of a better word, that will hopefully someday no longer exist. You can find many biographies on individuals fighting against AIDS by doing an Advanced Search for keyword “AIDS,” which will result in such folks as microbiologist Souleymane Mboup, researcher Julio Montaner and epidemiologist Seth Berkley.

Posted on: December 1, 2009, 1:47 pm Category: Factoids Tagged with: ,

By: Erin Walker

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