Pierce Brendan Brosnan, OBE (born 16 May 1953) is an Irish actor, film producer and environmentalist. After leaving school at 16, Brosnan began training in commercial illustration, but trained at the Drama Centre in London for three years. Following a stage acting career he rose to popularity in the television series Remington Steele (1982–87).
Gary Shteyngart (born Igor Shteyngart in 1972) is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR. Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times.
...
Shteyngart's work has received numerous awards. Absurdistan was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine, as well as a book of the year by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications. The Russian Debutante's Handbook won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian. In 2002, he was named one of the five best new writers by Shout NY Magazine. In June 2010, Shteyngart was named as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers.
Katherine Esau (3 April 1898 – 4 June 1997) was a German-American botanist.
She was born in Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) to a family of Mennonites of German descent. After the Revolution her family moved to Germany, and then to California, where she achieved her doctorate in 1931. She moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1963, and worked there until 1992. She was the sixth woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1957, and in 1989, President George Bush awarded Dr. Esau the National Medal of Science.
Esau was a pioneering plant anatomist--perhaps the greatest plant anatomist of the 20th century. Her books Plant Anatomy and Anatomy of Seed Plants have been key plant structural biology texts for the last four decades.
Orlando Patterson (born 1940) is a Jamaica-born American historical and cultural sociologist known for his work regarding issues of race in the America, as well as the sociology of development, currently holding the John Cowles chair in Sociology at Harvard University. Patterson took his B.Sc in Economics from the University of London and his Ph.D. in Sociology at the London School of Economics in 1965.
Earlier in his career, Patterson was concerned with the economic and political development of his home country, Jamaica. He served as Special advisor to Michael Manley, the then Prime Minister of Jamaica, from 1972 to 1979.
Patterson has appeared on PBS and has been a guest columnist in The New York Times.
Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz; March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts. He was also a skeptic who set out to expose frauds purporting to be supernatural phenomena.
At 17, Ricardo Sr. paid a smuggler to drive him and a few friends into El Paso before catching a bus to California.
“It was crazy, with my dad crossing illegally,’’ Romero says. “My dad’s goal was to come to the United States for a better life. So when he got that chance, he wasn’t going to let go of it.”
...
Reformed federal immigration laws under the Reagan administration would eventually allow “undocumented” people in the U.S. to become legal residents, with a path to citizenship — and the right to vote — if they choose. The senior Romero is now a legal resident.
Robert L. "Bob" Cardenas (born March 10, 1920) is a retired Brigadier General of the United States Air Force.
He was born in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. When he was five, his family moved to San Diego, California. He excelled in Mathematics and Physics in high school. When General Cardenas was a teenager, building models and learning about gliders first sparked his interest in airplanes.
Due to his excellent grades, San Diego State University invited him to study there.
In 1939, while attending San Diego State, he decided to enlist as a private in the California National Guard, thus began his distinguished military career. In 1940, Cardenas became an aviation cadet. He graduated, received his pilot wings and was commission a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps in July 1941.
