'I am not a man, I am dynamite.' Ecce Homo is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in 1888, a few weeks before his descent into madness, the book sub-titled 'How To Become What You Are' passes under review all Nietzsche's previous works so that we, his 'posthumous' readers, can finally understand him aright, on his own terms. He reaches final reckonings with his many enemies - Richard Wagner, German nationalism, 'modern men' in general - and above all Christianity, proclaiming himself the Antichrist. Ecce Homo is the summation of an extraordinary philosophical career, a last great testament to Nietzsche's will.

As a journalist, historian, and novelist born into a family that included two past Presidents, Henry Adams was forever focused on the experiences and expectations unique to America. A prompt bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and his
country's development from 1838--the year Adams was born--up to 1905, thus incorporating the Civil War, unprecedented capitalist expansion, and the growth of the United States as a world power. Adams considered the nation both a success and a failure, and this paradox was the very impetus that
compelled him to set down his Education--in the pages of which he also voiced a deep skepticism about mankind's ability to control the direction of history. Written with immense wit and irony, reassembling the past while glimpsing at the future, this book wholly expresses what Henry James declared
the "complex fate" of being an American. Adams's thoroughly documented vision remains one of the most absorbing American autobiographies ever written.