Michael Korda Books In Order

Novels

  1. Worldly Goods (1982)
  2. Queenie (1985)
  3. The Immortals (1988)
  4. The Fortune (1989)
  5. Curtain (1991)

Non fiction

  1. Male Chauvinism! (1973)
  2. Power (1975)
  3. Power in the Office (1976)
  4. Success! (1977)
  5. Charmed Lives (1979)
  6. Man to Man (1996)
  7. Another Life (1999)
  8. Country Matters (2001)
  9. Making the List (2001)
  10. Horse People (2003)
  11. Ulysses S. Grant (2004)
  12. Cat People (2005)
  13. Horse Housekeeping (2005)
  14. Journey to a Revolution (2006)
  15. Ike (2007)
  16. With Wings Like Eagles (2009)
  17. Hero (2010)
  18. Clouds of Glory (2014)
  19. Alone (2017)
  20. Catnip (2018)
  21. Passing (2019)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Michael Korda Books Overview

The Fortune

Twenty four year old Alexa Walden secretly married 64 year old millionaire Arthur Bannerman. And after his death, Alexa finds herself tainted with scandal and pitted against the powerful and privileged world of the New York rich, where she must fight the entire Bannerman dynasty for control of The Fortune.

Curtain

Felicia Lisle and Robert Vane she the Oscar winning star of the world’s greatest epic motion picture, he the greatest English actor are the perfect couple, until Vane’s moody genius and Felicia’s private demons begin to tear them apart. PW. K.

Male Chauvinism!

Michael Korda writes brilliantly and irreverently about what male chauvinism means, why men act the way they do toward women in business, marriage and sex ways men are finally being asked to, forced to, abandon. He includes discussions with successful women such as Barbara Walters and Helen Gurley Brown. ‘Here, with unflinching candor, rapier wit, factual case histories, Michael Korda strips bare the means by which American men put down, illuse, dominate American women.’ Irving Wallace

Power

Do you need some Power to change your life, then read this book and get rid of the strife.

Success!

We have here a hands on guide to executive success. The author examines all the strategies known to man and weighs them up. In Korda’s game plan, style counts for everything. He advises men and women how to walk, sit and dress, how to communicate effectively, how to get a promotion even how to look successful when you’re on the bottom rung!

Charmed Lives

A Rolls Royce Silver Cloud drove him to airports; the British film industry kowtowed to his power; the great Hollywood studios fawned at his feet. Sir Alexander Korda, one of the world’s most flamboyant movie tycoons, rose from obscurity in rural Hungary to become a legendary filmmaker. With him were his brothers, Zoltan and Vincent, all living Charmed Lives in circles that included H. G. Wells, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Marlena Dietrich, Vivien Leigh, and Merle Oberon, who was soon to be Alex’s wife. But along with Alex’s flair for success was an equally powerful impulse for destruction. Now, Vincent’s son, Michael Korda, in the first book of his memoirs, recalls the enchanted figures of his childhood…
the glory days of the Korda brothers’ great films…
and then their heartbreaking, tragic end.

Man to Man

Although prostate cancer is a disease that strikes nearly 200,000 men every year, it is a disease that has been shrouded in silence, in part because it strikes at the very core of masculine identity. But in Man to Man, bestselling author Michael Korda breaks that silence, turning the story of his illness and recovery into a candid and instructive book that speaks not only to every man and woman whose life has been touched by prostate cancer but to everyone who lives in fear of it. With unsparing frankness, Korda describes how he survived the ordeal of prostate surgery and its painful and humiliating aftereffects. He tells us how tumors are graded, evaluates different treatments, and makes sense of prostate cancer’s mystifying ‘numbers.’ Practical, immensely readable, filled with information, and, above all, hopeful, Man to Man is literally a life saver.

Another Life

In his remarkable new memoir, at once frank, audacious, canny, and revealing, Michael Korda, the author of Charmed Lives and Queenie, does for the world of books what Moss Hart did for the theater in Act One, and succeeds triumphantly in making publishing seem as exciting and as full of great characters as the stage. Here is a memoir that reads like a novel, sweeping the reader into Another Life on a tide of energy, wit, and a seemingly inexhaustible flow of marvelous anecdotes. Another Life is not just an adventure the engaging and often hilarious story of a young man making his career but the insider’s story of how a cottage industry metamorphosed into a big business, with sometimes alarming results for all concerned. Korda writes with grace, humor, and a shrewd eye, not only about himself and his rise from a lowly but not humble assistant editor reading the ‘slush pile’ of manuscripts to a famous editor in chief of a major publishing house, but also about the celebrities and writers with whom he worked over four decades. Here are portraits rare, intimate, always keenly observed of such larger than life figures as Ronald Reagan, affable and good natured but the most reluctant of authors, struggling with his ‘ghosted’ presidential autobiography; Richard Nixon, seen here as a genial, if bizarrely detached, host; superagent Irving Lazar, pursuing his endless deals and dreams of ‘class’; retired Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, the last of the old time dons, laboring over his own version of his life in his desert retreat; Joan Crawford, giving Korda her rules for successful living; and countless other greats, near greats, and would be greats. Here too are famous writers, sometimes eccentric, sometimes infuriating, sometimes lost souls, captured memorably by someone who was close to them for years: Graham Greene, in pursuit of his FBI file and a Nobel Prize; Tennessee Williams, wrestling unsuccessfully with his demons; Jacqueline Susann, facing and conquering the dreaded ‘second novel syndrome’ after the stunning success of Valley of the Dolls; Harold Robbins who had to be guarded under lock and key and made to finish his novels, struggling to keep the IRS at bay from the deck of his yacht; Carlos Castaneda, at his most sorcerously charming, described at last in detail, as he really was, by one of the few people who knew him well; not to mention Richard Adams, Will and Ariel Durant, Susan Howatch, S. J. Perelman, Fannie Hurst, Larry McMurtry, and many, many more. And here as well is a rich cast of major publishing figures, beginning with the marvelously peculiar M. Lincoln Schuster and his partner, Richard L. Simon father of Carly and including just about everybody who is or was anybody in the world of book publishing: For Another Life is also a business story, tracing the rise and fall of great names and explaining just what happened when ‘Publishers’ Row’ collided with Wall Street, transforming modest if world famous businesses into multibillion dollar book conglomerates. Parts of this book that have appeared in The New Yorker over the years have brought Korda great acclaim the chapter about Jacqueline Susann has been made into a major motion picture. Here at last, entertaining and provocative and always hugely readable, is the whole story a book as engaging and full of life as Korda’s highly acclaimed memoir of his family, Charmed Lives, about which Irwin Shaw wrote: ‘I don’t know when I have enjoyed a book more.’

Country Matters

With his inimitable sense of humor and storytelling talent, New York Times bestselling author Michael Korda brings us this charming, hilarious, self deprecating memoir of a city couple’s new life in the country. At once entertaining, canny, and moving, Country Matters does for Dutchess County, New York, what Under the Tuscan Sun did for Tuscany. This witty memoir, replete with Korda’s own line drawings, reads like a novel, as it chronicles the author’s transformation from city slicker to full time country gentleman, complete with tractors, horses, and a leaking roof. When he decides to take up residence in an eighteenth century farmhouse in Dutchess County, ninety miles north of New York City, Korda discovers what country life is really like:Owning pigs, more than owning horses, even more than owning the actual house, firmly anchored the Kordas as residents in the eyes of their Pleasant Valley neighbors. You may own your land, but without concertina barbed wire, or the 82nd Airborne on patrol, it’s impossible to keep people off it! It’s possible to line up major household repairs over a tuna melt sandwich. And everyone in the area is fully aware that Michael ‘don’t know sh*it about septics.’The locals are not particularly quick to accept these outsiders, and the couple’s earliest interactions with their new neighbors provide constant entertainment, particularly when the Kordas discover that hunting season is a year round event right on their own land! From their closest neighbors, mostly dairy farmers, to their unforgettable caretaker Harold Roe whose motto regarding the local flora is ‘Whack it all back! ‘ the residents of Pleasant Valley eventually come to realize that the Kordas are more than mere weekenders. Sure to have readers in stitches, this is a book that has universal appeal for all who have ever dreamed of owning that perfect little place to escape to up in the country, or, more boldly, have done it.

Horse People

Michael Korda’s Horse People is the story sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes sad and moving, always shrewdly observed of a lifetime love affair with horses, and about the bonds that have linked humans with horses for more than ten thousand years. It is filled with intimate portraits of the kind of people, rich or poor, Eastern or Western, famous or humble, whose lives continue to revolve around the horse. How is it that the horse, neither a pet nor, strictly speaking, a working animal, has managed to survive and even thrive in the modern world, and whence comes our fascination for this creature, which is at once fragile and immensely strong, docile yet amazingly swift, friendly but still at heart wild?Korda has spent his entire life around people who love horses in fact he met his wife, Margaret, while they were both riding in New York’s Central Park. His book is a loving tribute to a shared obsession that takes the reader far afield, whether it’s foxhunting in Virginia, the rodeo in Madison Square Garden, the world of competitive riding, or the simple enjoyment of a daily, early morning ride in the country. Indeed, many of the ‘characters’ in his book which, like the works of the great nineteenth century British sporting novelistSurtees, whom Korda so admires, is as much about horsesas ‘Horse People‘ are the horses he and Margaret have owned,loved, ridden, and sometimes lost, to old age or disease, over the years. Readers who love horses will appreciate the often touching portraits of such animals as Tabasco, Margaret’s elderly Thoroughbred, whom she rescued from life as a hack in Central Park; True Grit, the strong minded mare who hated joggers and dogs; Hustle, the kindly gentleman of a quarterhorse who never put a foot wrong, even when he lost one eye to cancer; and Margaret’s favorite, Nebraska, an Appaloosa mare nicknamed ‘Miss Braveheart’ who went on to win innumerable medals, ribbons, and awards, and whose untimely death is told in one of the most poignant scenes in the book. It is also about many people, from prisoners who rehabilitate broken down racehorses to famous riders such as William Steinkraus, who rode in five Olympics and won four medals, including the individual gold in Mexico City in 1968, farriers, vets, horse dealers of all kinds, and little girls with their ponies. Horses have a way of taking over one’s life, and Horse People is the story of that obsession of people who love horses, or know horses, or make their living from horses, or who just plain can’t imagine what life would be like without horses. Korda is an unparalleled storyteller, and his book is intensely personal and seductive, a joy for everyone who loves horses though even those who have never ridden will be happy to saddle up and follow him through the world of horses, Horse People, and the riding life.

Ulysses S. Grant

One of the first two volumes in Harper’s Eminent Lives series, Korda brings his acclaimed storytelling talents to the life of Ulysses S. Grant a man who managed to end the Civil War on a note of grace, serve two terms as president, write one of the most successful military memoirs in American literature, and is today remembered as a brilliant general but a failed president. Ulysses S. Grant was the first officer since George Washington to become a four star general in the United States Army, and the only president between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson to serve eight consecutive years in the White House. In this succinct and vivid biography, Michael Korda considers Grant’s character and reconciles the conflicting evaluations of his leadership abilities. Grant’s life played out as a true Horatio Alger story. Despite his humble background as the son of a tanner in Ohio, his lack of early success in the army, and assorted failed business ventures, his unwavering determination propelled him through the ranks of military leadership and into the presidency. But while the general’s tenacity and steadfastness contributed to his success on the battlefield, it both aided and crippled his effectiveness in the White House. Assessing Grant both within the context of his time and in contrast to more recent American leaders, Korda casts a benevolent eye on Grant’s presidency while at the same time conceding his weaknesses. He suggests that though the general’s second term ended in financial and political scandals, the fact remains that for eight years Grant exerted a calming influence on a country that had only just emerged from a horrendous civil war. Ulysses S. Grant is an even handed and stirring portrait of a man who guided America through a pivotal juncture in its history.

Cat People

In Cat People, Michael Korda, the ‘New York Times’ bestselling author of Horse People, and his wife, Margaret, provide a wildly entertaining look at the world of cat lovers and their devotion to their pets. With characteristic wit, self effacing charm, and sheer, exuberant love of a good cat story, they recount their lives as ‘Cat People,’ beginning with Margaret’s passion for cats and Michael’s reluctant midlife transformation into a cat person, and introduce readers to a hilarious assortment of people whose lives revolve often to an extraordinary degree around their cats, from Cleopatra, a transatlantic traveler who found happiness in Paris, to Wally, the epitome of feline dignity. Here are people who just can’t say no to acquiring another cat, who travel the world with their cats, who build their social lives around their cats and, of course, here are the cats themselves. The Kordas celebrate the beguiling power of cats, including many of their own who have complemented, complicated, and changed their lives together over the years. Charming, often funny, and sometimes sad portraits populate the book such as Margaret’s beloved cat Irving, whose favorite abode was the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and Mumsie, who arrived unexpectedly at the door with her two kittens, and special cats like Jake and the gentle Chutney, as well as ‘difficult’ cats like Chui and poor Mrs. Bumble, and Mr. McT., the bully who found love late in life. There are graceful cats and cats like Kit Kat that never look before they jump; in short, countless cats the reader will never forget, even those with many cats of their own. The human characters include such unabashed Cat People as onecouple who keeps twenty three cats and orders litter by the truckload; a glamorous New York agent who regularly shares lunch with her cat, Tulip, courtesy of New York’s finest French restaurants; and many others, ranging from the eccentric to the bizarre. From city cats to country cats, Margaret and Michael celebrate the challenges, the joys, and the occasional heartbreak of living with and sometimes ‘for’ one’s cat. Here is the perfect gift for any cat lover to give or get, illustrated with whimsical line drawings by Michael Korda.

Horse Housekeeping

In Horse Housekeeping, Margaret and Michael Korda she is a successful novice and training level eventer and he is the author of Horse People provide everything you need to know to set up a barn of your own and care for your horse or horses at home. Authoritative, inspirational, highly accessible, full of common sense and down to earth advice, all of it based on twenty five years of experience, the Kordas’ book is a basic resource for anybody who wants to keep horses in a safe, content, healthy, and cost effective way at home, from detailed lists of things you need to have on hand to the basic and not so basic dos and don’ts of horse care. Divided into such useful chapters as ‘Fencing and Paddocks,’ ‘The Barn Routine,’ ‘The Care of the Horse,’ ‘People,’ ‘Feeding and Caring for the Horse,’ ‘Tack,’ ‘Horse Clothing,’ ‘Equipment,’ and ‘Care for the Aging Horse,’ it is helpfully illustrated and written in a voice that is at once informative, supportive, and full of funny and not so funny stories about Horse Housekeeping. The Kordas offer a unique and reliable guide to horse care that not only will be invaluable to beginner and experienced horse owners alike, but also is astonishingly readable. They take you through the steps of deciding if having a horse barn is practical for you, including helpful suggestions on space saving barn designs, creating pastures, building fences, sample exercise routines, the right feed, the basics of horse health care, and the equipment needed for both horse care and property maintenance. This detailed, user friendly compendium of down home wisdom, entertaining stories, and straightforward horse sense will help you to set up a barn the right way, so you will have time to actually ride your horse.

Journey to a Revolution

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was perhaps the most dramatic single event of the Cold War and a major turning point in history. Though it ended unsuccessfully, the spontaneous uprising of Hungarians against their country’s Communist party and the Soviet occupation forces in the wake of Stalin’s death demonstrated to the world at large the failure of Communism. In full view of the Western media and therefore the world the Russians were obliged to use force on a vast scale to subdue armed students, factory workers, and intellectuals in the streets of a major European capital. In October 1956, Michael Korda and three fellow Oxford undergraduates traveled to Budapest in a beat up Volkswagen to bring badly needed medicine to the hospitals and to participate, at street level, in one of the great battles of the postwar era. Journey to a Revolution is at once history and a compelling memoir the author’s riveting account of the course of the revolution, from its heroic beginnings to the sad martyrdom of its end.

Ike

A big, ambitious, and enthralling new biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower, full of fascinating details and anecdotes, which places particular emphasis on his brilliant generalship and leadership in World War Two, and provides, with the advantage of hindsight, a far more acute analysis of his character and personality than any that has previously been available, reaching the conclusion that he was perhaps America’s greatest general and one of America’s best presidents, a man who won the war and thereafter kept the peace.

IKE starts with the story of D Day, the most critical moment in America’s history. It was Hitler’s last chance to win the war he had the means to destroy the troops on the beaches, but he failed to react quickly enough. The one man who would have reacted quickly and decisively had he been on the spot, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was home on leave and didn’t arrive back at his headquarters until it was too late. It was Ike’s plan, Ike’s decision, Ike’s responsibility. He alone, among all the Allied generals, could win or lose the war in one day, and knew it.

But of course there is more to this book than military history. It is a full biography of a remarkable man, ambitious, a late starter, a brilliant leader of men and perhaps the only American general who could command such a difficult coalition, and win the respect of not only his own soldiers, but also those of Great Britain and France, and lead them to a triumphant victory.

It is also the story of a remarkable family. Ike grew up in Abilene, Kansas, and the Eisenhowers were Mennonites, who, like the Amish, were deeply committed pacifists, so it is ironic that he went to West Point and became a general, to his mother’s horror. It is as well the portrait of a tumultuous and often difficult marriage, for Mamie was every bit as stubborn and forceful as her husband, and it was by no means the sunny, happy marriage that Republican publicists presented to the public when Ike made his first moves towards the presidency.

Indeed, behind Ike’s big grin and the easy going, affable personality he liked to project was a very different man, fiercely ambitious, hot tempered, shrewd, and tightly wound. He was a perfectionist for whom duty always came first, and a man of immense ability. In 1941 he was a soldier who was still an unknown and recently promoted colonel, and just two years later he was a four star general who had commanded the biggest and most successful amphibious operation in history TORCH, the Anglo American invasion of North Africa. He commanded respect and was dealt as an equal with such world figures as President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Charles De Gaulle.

With Wings Like Eagles

Michael Korda’s brilliant work of history takes the reader back to the summer of 1940, when fewer than three thousand young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force often no more than nine hundred on any given day stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed almost within his grasp. Korda re creates the intensity of combat in ‘the long, delirious, burning blue’ of the sky above southern England, and at the same time perhaps for the first time traces the entire complex web of political, diplomatic, scientific, industrial, and human decisions during the 1930s that led inexorably to the world’s first, greatest, and most decisive air battle. Korda deftly interweaves the critical strands of the story the invention of radar the most important of Britain’s military secrets; the developments by such visionary aircraft designers as R. J. Mitchell, Sidney Camm, and Willy Messerschmitt of the revolutionary, all metal, high speed monoplane fighters the British Spitfire and Hurricane and the German Bf 109; the rise of the theory of air bombing as the decisive weapon of modern warfare and the prevailing belief that ‘the bomber will always get through’ in the words of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin. As Na*zi Germany rearmed swiftly after 1933, building up its bomber force, only one man, the central figure of Korda’s book, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the eccentric, infuriating, obstinate, difficult, and astonishingly foresighted creator and leader of RAF Fighter Command, did not believe that the bomber would always get through and was determined to provide Britain with a weapon few people wanted to believe was needed or even possible. Dowding persevered despite opposition, shortage of funding, and bureaucratic infighting to perfect the British fighter force just in time to meet and defeat the German onslaught. Korda brings to life the extraordinary men and women on both sides of the conflict, from such major historical figures as Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, and Reichsmarschall Herman G ring and his disputatious and bitterly feuding generals to the British and German pilots, the American airmen who joined the RAF just in time for the Battle of Britain, the young airwomen of the RAF, the ground crews who refueled and rearmed the fighters in the middle of heavy German raids, and such heroic figures as Douglas Bader, Josef Franti ek, and the Luftwaffe aces Adolf Galland and his archrival Werner M lders. Winston Churchill memorably said about the Battle of Britain, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ Here is the story of ‘the few,’ and how they prevailed against the odds, deprived Hitler of victory, and saved the world during three epic months in 1940.

Hero

Michael Korda’s Hero is the story of an epic life on a grand scale: a revealing, in depth, and gripping biography of the extraordinary, mysterious, and dynamic Englishman whose daring exploits and romantic profile including his blond, sun burnished good looks and flowing white robes made him an object of intense fascination, still famous the world over as ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ An Oxford scholar and archaeologist, one of five illegitimate sons of a British aristocrat who ran away with his daughters’ governess, Lawrence was sent to Cairo as a young intelligence officer in 1916. He vanished into the desert in 1917 only to emerge later as one of the greatest and certainly most colorful figures of World War One. Though a foreigner, he played a leading and courageous part in uniting the Arab tribes to defeat the Turks, and eventually capture Damascus, transforming himself into a world famous hero, hailed as ‘the Uncrowned King of Arabia.’ In illuminating Lawrence’s achievements, Korda digs further than anyone before him to expose the flesh and blood man and his contradictory nature. Here was a born leader who was utterly fearless and seemingly impervious to pain, thirst, fatigue, and danger, yet who remained shy, sensitive, mod est, and retiring; a hero who turned down every honor and decoration offered to him, and was racked by moral guilt and doubt; a scholar and an aesthete who was also a bold and ruthless warrior; a writer of genius the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of the greatest books ever written about war who was the virtual inventor of modern insurgency and guerrilla warfare; a man who at the same time sought and fled the limelight, and who found in friendships, with everyone from Winston Churchill to George Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, from Nancy Astor to No l Coward, a substitute for sexual feelings that he rigorously even brutally and systematically repressed in himself. As Korda shows in his brilliantly readable and formidably authoritative biography, Lawrence was not only a man of his times; he was a visionary whose accomplishments farsighted diplomat and kingmaker, military strategist of genius, perhaps the first modern ‘media celebrity’ and one of the first victims of it, and an acclaimed writer transcended his era. Korda examines Lawrence’s vision for the modern Middle East plans that, had they been carried through, might have prevented the hatred and bloodshed that have become ubiquitous in the region. Ultimately, as this magisterial work demonstrates, Lawrence remains one of the most unique and fascinating figures of modern times, the arch hero whose life is at once a triumph and a sacrifice and whose capacity to astonish still remains undimmed.

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