A chronicle of the life of the acclaimed Broadway actress traverses five decades in show business and reveals her personal challenges involving her heritage and her father's alcoholism.

A personal collection of true stories, essays and sketches. Paying homage to the rugged land and seascapes in Southeastern Alaska and the equally rugged people--loggers, commercial fishermen, hunters, trappers and pilots--who carved out lives there.

Tom Stern has always been something of a Renaissance man. Living his life moment to moment, reluctant to limit himself, broadening his horizons and enjoying life. Stern's new memoir, Just Lucky I Guess, is a series of short story adventures put into a timeline thereby creating a fascinating and enjoyable book. Stern spent his early childhood on the Jersey Shore, where he got into his share of mischief but also learned important lessons about adulthood. The country went through the Great Depression, but Stern's parents were determined to give their children a decent life. Stern remembers the start of World War II and his father's work as a "spotter" of suspicious planes and ships in the Atlantic. At twenty-two, Stern was invited down to Vero Beach by the Brooklyn Dodgers, got hurt, and was immediately drafted into the Army. Luckily, he was sent to Germany rather than to Korea. While in Germany he decided to pursue a career in showbiz as an actor, which lead to writing, producing, and directing in Hollywood. In a short story format, Stern's book paints a fascinating picture of a life well lived.

Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck-novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics-and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of probability and exploring how luck relates to theology, sports, ethics, gambling, knowledge, and present-day psychology. As we travel across traditions, times and cultures, we come to realize that it's not that as soon as we solve one philosophical problem with luck that two more appear, like heads on a hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is nothing to defeat: luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. By introducing us to compelling arguments and convincing reasons that explain why there is no such thing as luck, we finally see why in a very real sense we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way.