Rick Bass is an environmental activist and writer.
Rick was born on March 7, 1958 in south Texas and grew up there. His father was a geologist. His grandfather told him interesting stories during deerhunting trips.
In 1979, he received a degree in geology from Utah State University and then worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi. This experience informed one of his better-known nonfiction books, Oil Notes.
Bass has lived in Texas, Mississippi, Vermont, Utah, Arkansas, and Montana.
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Isabel Allende is a Latin American writer. Her many books, in Spanish, have been translated into several languages. The author has received international acclaim for her writing.
Isabel was born on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru. Her parents divorced three years later. In 1953, her mother married Ramon Huidobro, a Chilean diplomat. Allende graduated from a private high school in Santiago, Chile, and shortly after married Miguel Frias. They had two children.
Allende worked as a secretary for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Santiago and then began successful careers in the theatre and print and broadcast journalism.
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Edgar Allan Poe is the founder of the genre of the detective fiction. It was he who came up with the main component of a criminal story – the image of a brilliant detective. But he created at least two more genres of literature: fiction story and a horror novel. What we now call Gothic literature.
His life was hard – orphanhood, separation from his beloved sister, cruel guardian, jealousy and betrayal of friends, work for ridiculous fees, the death of his wife, alcoholism, drug addiction, madness… His death was even worse. But it gave special mystique to writer’s gothic. There is written “truthful testimony” that one of the admirers, three years after his death met him and had a long conversation. There are mediums who claim that the spirit of the writer “got in touch and told how he had been buried alive”.
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Dave Foreman is an American radical environmental activist, co-founder of Earth First! He wants to slow or stop strip mining, clear-cut logging of old-growth forests, the damming of wild rivers, and other environmentally destructive practices.
Dave was born in 1947 into a family of a United States Air Force employee and traveled widely while growing up.
In college he chaired the conservative Young Americans for Freedom. In the 1970s Foreman was a conservative Republican and moderate environmentalist. He worked for the Wilderness Society in Washington, DC.
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Alice Bailey became a real teacher for many people: her word was a law, and personality was an object for imitation. But Alice’s enemies questioned everything she said, wrote and did…
Much of her biography is surrounded by a veil of mystery, and today you cannot find out where the truth and the fiction are.
A certain fact: she was born in Manchester on June 16, 1880 in an old and noble family. When Alice LaTrobe Bateman (her full maiden name) was 6 years old, she was left without parents. At first the father died of tuberculosis, and soon the mother died. The girl was brought up by her grandparents. They were very strict. The girl was not allowed to communicate with other children. Her life was strictly regulated. Rhetoric, literature, music, dancing, riding, etiquette – the girl did not have a single free minute. If Alice did not cope with the task, she was punished. The girl tried to commit suicide three times. The first attempt was made at the age of 6 and the last when she was fifteen…
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Barry Commoner was an American biologist, environmental scientist, author, and social activist. In 1980 he was an US presidential candidate. He was one of the founders of the modern environmental movement who was referred to as the Paul Revere of Ecology.
Barry Commoner was born on May 28, 1917 in Brooklyn in a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. He was the nephew of a translator and researcher of classical Russian prose, dean of the Slavic department of the New York Public Library Abram Yarmolinsky (1890-1975). His father, Isidor Commoner, was a tailor from Chisinau. He became blind when his son was a child. Barry’s mother, Golda Yarmolinskaya was a housewife.
Barry graduated from the University of Columbia with a bachelor’s degree. In 1938 he received a master’s degree. And in 1941 Commoner earned a doctorate in biology from Harvard.
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Cleveland Amory was an American writer, who devoted his life to defending animal rights. He is best known as the author of books about his cat Polar Bear, whom Amory saved on Christmas 1977 in Manhattan.
Cleveland Amory was born on September 2, 1917 in Nahant, Massachusetts to an old Boston family.
Amory attended Harvard University, where he became editor of The Harvard Crimson. After graduation he became the youngest editor ever to join The Saturday Evening Post.
During the Second World from 1941 to 1943 Amory served in the US Army military intelligence. He was one of the founders of The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). In 1967 he founded the Fund for Animals. Also from 1987 until his death in 1998 he was a president of the New England Anti-vivisection Society (NEAVS).
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