Author results for "NSA"

Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz

Agustina Espansandín

Aziz Ansari

Boualem Sansal

Heinz G. Konsalik

Laura Kinsale

Laura Kinsale grew up in a small country town, surrounded by the influence of her family's women: her mother, her grandmother and some maiden aunts. During her childhood she dreamed to be a painter, own a twenty-thousand acre ranch in Arizona or the first woman president. But, she became interested into geology because near her grandmother's house, there was a road-cut, that it showed the layers of limestone clearly, and there were fossils in it. Laura obtained a Master of Science in Geology from the University of Texas at Austin. She worked as petroleum geologist, a career which consisted of getting out of bed in the middle of the night and driving hundreds of miles alone across west Texas to sit at drilling rigs, wear a hard hat, and attempt to boss around oil-covered males considerably larger than herself. While working, also spending a great deal of time sitting rigs and living in horrid little motel courts in small towns, and she started reading a lot. It was pure escapism for her. She didn't really consider writing as a serious career until she figured out her first plot, at thirty-five years after six years as a geologist. Laura Kinsale became a winner and multiple nominee for the Best Book of the Year award given by the Romance Writers of America. Her heroes are full of flaws or with physical problems, and her heroines also are imperfect. She says: "It's well known that I think making the heroine too perfect is a great way to create a character readers will hate!". She spend long periods of time, attempting to figure out What-Happens-Next, and she confesses that her husband, David, greatly assists her in figuring out how to end a scene. She says: "Really, his name should go also on the cover too, but he refuses. I wonder why?". From 1985 to 1994, she wrote one book a year, but she decided she needed more time to write her books. Laura divides her time between Santa Fe and Dallas.

Lord Dunsany

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett was born in Ireland, the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany and Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax. He spent his childhood at several family properties, including Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, Dunsany Castle in County Meath, as wells as other family homes such as in London. His schooling was at Cheam, Eton and finally Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896. He became the 18th Baron of Dunsany when his father died in 1899, and he returned to Dunsany Castle in 1901 after war duty. He married Lady Beatrice Child Villiers in 1904. Their child, Randal, was born in 1906. Edward Plunkett was a writer and dramatist, notable for his work, mostly in fantasy, which he published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than eighty books of his work were published, and his oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as successful plays, novels and essays.

Mustansar Hussain Tarar

Nicholas Monsarrat

Paramahansa Yogananda

Scott Weidensaul

Stephen Bonsal

Tamim Ansary

Tamim Ansary was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and came to the United States as a junior in high school. Culture and cultural perspective have been among his lifelong preoccupations. His new book, The Invention of Yesterday, looks at world history as the story of ever-increasing human interconnectedness: history from the perspective of the emerging global "we". Ansary has also written a history of the world through Islamic eyes, a history of Afghanistan from an insider's point of view, a literary memoir about straddling a cultural fault line in the world (Islam and the West), a historical novel set against the background of the First Anglo-Afghan war, and some 30 nonfiction books for children. In Road Trips, he tells the story of morphing from an Afghan into an American just as the sixties were giving way to the seventies. His Destiny Disrupted won the Northern California Book Award for nonfiction in 2009, and his first memoir West of Kabul, East of New York was selected as a One City One Book pick by both San Francisco and Waco, Texas. In 2001, an email he sent to 20 friends reputedly became the first viral phenomenon of the Internet Age, reaching tens of millions around the world within days.

Tina McElroy Ansa