Nobody was closer to the source of Howard Hughes's vast influence than Robert Maheu, and nobody witnessed his catastrophic descent more closely. Maheu made all Hughes's business deals and represented him and his holdings to the outside world for 13 years. Now he tells the shocking true story behind the life and death of this powerful man. Photographs.

A spare and deeply-felt narrative about feeling like an outsider

Portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese movie The Aviator, Howard Hughes is legendary as a playboy and pilot—but he is notorious for what he became: the ultimate mystery man. Citizen Hughes is the New York Times bestselling exposé of Hughes’s hidden life, and a stunning revelation of his “megalomaniac empire in the emperor’s own words” (Newsweek). At the height of his wealth, power, and invisibility, the world’s richest and most secretive man kept what amounted to a diary. The billionaire commanded his empire by correspondence, scrawling thousands of handwritten memos to unseen henchmen. It was the only time Howard Hughes risked writing down his orders, plans, thoughts, fears, and desires. Hughes claimed the papers were so sensitive—“the very most confidential, almost sacred information as to my innermost activities”—that not even his most trusted aides or executives were allowed to keep the messages he sent them. But in the early-morning hours of June 5, 1974, unknown burglars staged a daring break-in at Hughes’s supposedly impregnable headquarters and escaped with all the confidential files. Despite a top-secret FBI investigation and a million-dollar CIA buyback bid, none of the stolen secret papers were ever found—until investigative reporter Michael Drosnin cracked the case. In Citizen Hughes, Drosnin reveals the true story of the great Hughes heist—and of the real Howard Hughes. Based on nearly ten thousand never-before-published documents, more than three thousand in Hughes’s own handwriting, Citizen Hughes is far more than a biography, or even an unwilling autobiography. It is a startling record of the secret history of our times.

Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects, from the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia. Now he turns that eye inward, onto himself and the world that formed him. Hughes analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a Picasso. From his relationship with his stern and distant father to his Catholic upbringing and school years; and from his development as an artist, writer, and critic to his growing appreciation of art and his exhilaration at leaving Australia to discover a new life, Hughes’ memoir is an extraordinary feat of exploration and celebration.

Collaboration between the public and private sectors helped the U.S. economy recover from its last period of economic malaise, and similar collaboration is needed today, according to a key participant in the 1980s–1990s competitiveness movement. In Building the Next American Century, Kent H. Hughes describes that movement, beginning with the conditions that stimulated it: stagflation in the early 1970s, declines in manufactured exports, and challenges from German and Japanese manufacturers. The United States responded with monetary and fiscal reform, technological innovation, and formation of a culture of lifelong learning. Although a great deal of leadership came from government, a new sense of partnership with the private sector and its leaders was crucial. Hughes attributes much of the national prosperity of the late 1990s to contributions from the private sectors. Hughes argues that a twenty-first-century competitiveness strategy with a system-wide approach to innovation, learning, and global engagement can meet today's challenges, even in the demanding environment shaped by national security concerns after 9/11.

A monumentally informed and irresistibly opinionated guide to the most un-Spanish city in Spain, from the bestselling author of The Fatal Shore. In these pages, Robert Hughes scrolls through Barcelona's often violent history; tells the stories of its kings, poets, magnates, and revolutionaries; and ushers readers through municipal landmarks that range from Antoni Gaudi's sublimely surreal cathedral to a postmodern restaurant with a glass-walled urinal. The result is a work filled with the attributes of Barcelona itself: proportion, humor, and seny—the Catalan word for triumphant common sense.

Set amid descriptions of the unimaginable changes that affected America between Hughes's birth in 1905 and his death in 1976, this book gives an insider's perspective about what money can buy, and what it can't.

Annotation A deeply personal account of raising a child with low functioning autismBeautifully written by a respected journalist and teacherOffers hands-on advice to parents in an entertaining and easy-to-read manner.

Anecdotal and immensely charming, Ted and I is a unique portrait of a shared childhood between Gerald Hughes and his younger brother Ted, one of the finest and best-loved poets of modern times. Ted's love for Gerald was probably one of the most enduring and sustaining forces in his life. Hughes brings alive a period when the two brothers would roam the countryside, camping, making fires, pitching tents, hunting rabbits, rats, wood pigeon and stoats. Ted's fascination with all wildlife subsequently fed directly into his sublime poetry. Gerald describes watching his brother evolving into a great poet and describes them continuing their relationship, even when many miles apart. Containing a great many unique and never-before seen family photographs of Ted Hughes, as well as unpublished material, this extraordinary memoir is an achingly poignant tale of childhood and youth and togetherness; the tenderness of brotherly love and the development of a poetic mind as Hughes went into the air force, on to Cambridge where he published his first poems and met Sylvia Plath, before settling in Devon with Sylvia, where their children were born. Ted and I also features a foreword by Gerald's niece Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and herself a well-known painter and poet.