Birth Memoirs

“Second Life is not only a book for parents; it's for anyone intrigued (and concerned) by the ways in which our digital footprints impact the circle of life itself.” —Elle “Engrossing….With a reporter’s gimlet eye, Hess lenses out from her personal experience…[She] has a...

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk....

Discover the true story of a self-taught surgeon and trailblazing figure in medical history—Madame Restsell, a revolutionary surgeon who fought for women's rights and healthcare in Gilded Age New York.Madame Restell is a sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history which introduces us to an iconic...

This is a story about two boys who, at birth, were inexplicably switched, a switch that would dramatically change the author’s life in every aspect—religion, ethnicity, economics, and culture. Time and time again, the two boys’ paths cross with one another’s before ultimately discovering, decades later, that they aren’t who they spent their whole lives believing they were.

Long before the era of the news anchor, the pundit, and the mini-cam, one man blazed a trail that thousands would follow. Reporting live from the streets and rooftops of London as Nazi war planes rained terror from the skies during the Battle of Britain, Edward R. Murrow brought the stark horror of war and the shock of breaking news events directly into American living rooms for the first time, and that was just the beginning.

"In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin's French mission, the most exacting, and momentous, eight years of his life.

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A. C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature.

My life was flipped upside down on April 7, 2001, one day before my 43rd birthday. I received the DNA test results that had answered a lifetime of questions. Everything—and I mean everything—I knew about myself wasn’t true. I turned into my own private investigator, digging through records and interviewing nurses who worked at the hospital, where my life changed forever. It’s a devastating and bizarre story, so out of this world that my life even garnered worldwide attention. The research and wisdom I have gained regarding trauma have given me hope and understanding.

Before the Five Families who so notoriously dominated U.S. organized crime for a bloody half-century, there was the one-fingered, surpassingly cunning Giuseppe Morello and his murderous coterie of brothers. Born into a life of poverty in rural Sicily, Morello became an American nightmare, pioneering the bizarre initiation rituals, imaginative protection rackets, influential underworld reigns, and Mafia wars later popularized by countless books, television shows, and movies.

Here is an audiobook that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the 21st century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll hear about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to 10-pound babies.

As the founder of financial futures and initiator of Globex, the world’s first global electronic trading system, Leo Melamed revolutionized the finance industry. Man of the Futures, his definitive memoir, recounts Melamed’s journey from Holocaust survivor and accidental runner at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), to one of the most prominent leaders in the world of finance.

Handsome and charismatic, Albert Hicks had long been known in the dive bars and gin joints of the Five Points, the most dangerous neighborhood in maritime Manhattan. For years, he operated out of the public eye, rambling from crime to crime, working on the water in ships, sleeping in the nickel-a-night flops, drinking in barrooms where rat-baiting and bear-baiting were great entertainments. Rich Cohen tells the story of this notorious underworld figure, from his humble origins to the wild, globe-crossing, bacchanalian crime spree that forged his ruthlessness and his reputation.

A searing portrait of a mother’s body—a resurrection and reclamation of pleasure after abuse, a study of intergenerational trauma, and a love letter to the bodies of women: as alive and unbound as the teeming Mississippi wilds that bear witness Four months postpartum with her second child...

In No Woman Left Behind, Grant recounts her decision to abandon a promising advertising career, and the ups and downs of building Silicon Valley–based Fistula Foundation from a modest start-up into the global leader in fistula treatment. Through vivid firsthand accounts of surgeons toiling in remote corners of Africa and Asia, we see inside the fight to restore hope to some of the world’s most vulnerable women.

The acclaimed writer A. M. Homes was given up for adoption before she was born. Her biological mother was a twenty-two-year-old single woman who was having an affair with a much older married man with a family of his own. The Mistress's Daughter is the ruthlessly honest account of what happened when, thirty years later, her birth parents came looking for her.

Darlene Ortiz was with Ice T for 17 years, beginning with his early days hustlin' on the streets and his subsequent rise to fame. In Definition of Down: My Life with Ice T & the Birth of Hip Hop, she tells how hip hop started, with intimate glimpses into their daily life and stories about their climb to the top and all the rappers who got their start in those times.

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’ ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’ work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative Black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible.

Three countries, two religions, one story. Muslim by Birth, Christian by Choice is the powerful, true story of Karima Burdette, a woman who defies the odds, surviving abuse and overcoming obstacles throughout her life, giving all the credit to her Savior. From the markets of Morocco to the French countryside and all the way to the United States, her journey inspires hope that with God, all things are possible.

On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl took the stage at San Francisco's hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged - Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers, among others.

Inferno is the riveting memoir of a young mother who is separated from her newborn son and husband when she's involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward in New Jersey after a harrowing bout of postpartum psychosis. This program is read by the author. When Catherine Cho and her husband set off...