Birth Memoirs

Discovered at last, the legendary lost manuscript of Grateful Dead co-founder and primary lyricist Robert Hunter, written in the early 1960s—a wry, richly observed, and enlightening remembrance of “the scene” in Palo Alto that gave rise to an incredible partnership of Hunter and Jerry...

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well. This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth.

From late 1872 to 1876, H.M.S. Challenger explored the world's oceans. Conducting deep sea soundings, dredging the ocean floor, recording temperatures, observing weather, and collecting biological samples, the expedition laid the foundations for modern oceanography. Following the ship's naturalists and their discoveries, earth scientist Doug Macdougall engagingly tells a story of Victorian-era adventure and ties these early explorations to the growth of modern scientific fields.

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.

Each time she knelt to "catch" another wriggling baby - nearly 3,000 times during her remarkable career - California midwife Peggy Vincent paid homage to the moment when pain bows to joy and the world makes way for one more. With every birth, she encounters another woman-turned-goddess: Catherine rides out her labor in a car careening down a mountain road. Sofia spends hers trying to keep her hyper doctor-father from burning down the house. Susannah gives birth so quietly that neither husband nor midwife notice until there's a baby in the room.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration became one of the most celebrated women in America when she prevented a deadly sedative from entering the U.S. market. A Canadian-born pharmacologist and physician, Kelsey saved countless Americans from the devastating side effects of thalidomide, routinely given to pregnant women to prevent morning sickness. As the FDA medical officer charged with reviewing Merrell Pharmaceutical’s application for approval, Kelsey was unconvinced that there was sufficient evidence of the drug’s efficacy and safety.

Henry Avery of Devon pillaged a fortune from a Mughal ship off the coast of India and then vanished into thin air—and into legend. More ballads, plays, biographies and books were written about Avery’s adventures than any other pirate. His contemporaries crowned him "the pirate king" for pulling off the richest heist in pirate history and escaping with his head intact (unlike Blackbeard and his infamous Flying Gang). Avery was now the most wanted criminal on earth. To the authorities, Avery was the enemy of all mankind. To the people he was a hero.

Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands to his military career against both the French and the British to his presidency.

October, 1997. Late one night in Fairbanks, Alaska, a passerby finds a teenager unconscious, collapsed on the edge of the road, beaten nearly beyond recognition. Two days later, he dies in the hospital. His name is John Gilbert Hartman and he's just turned 15 years old. The police quickly arrest four suspects, all under the age of 21 and of Alaska Native and American Indian descent. Police lineup witnesses, trials follow, and all four men receive lengthy prison terms. Case closed. But journalist Brian Patrick O'Donoghue can't put the story out of his mind.

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....

The Icon and the Idealist has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher...

Joseph Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor was many things to many people: a kind and caring husband, father and stepfather, a reliable son and brother, a generous and considerate neighbour and patron. He was also a criminal willing to consider any type of crime, provided it supported his lifestyle and his ego. Squizzy graduated from teenage pickpocket to adult murderer, from organizing smash-and-grab raids on jewellers to corrupting juries and suborning witnesses.

Revealed for the first time in Racing for the Bomb, Groves played a crucial and decisive role in the planning, timing, and targeting of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Norris offers new insights into the complex and controversial questions surrounding the decision to drop the bomb in Japan and Groves' actions during World War II, which had a lasting imprint on the nuclear age and the Cold War that followed.

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 1948, Stan Andrews left a comfortable postwar life in Los Angeles to travel to the war-torn Middle East, where a four-front Arab invasion threatened to destroy the newly-declared State of Israel. There he joined the Israeli Air Force and became one of its first fighter pilots. Andrews was an unexpected volunteer for the fight for a Jewish state. He had previously been aloof from the struggle for Jewish independence but found himself so roused by the anti-Semitism of 1940s America that he decided to go to Israel and risk everything.

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.

New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s moving meditation on the experience of motherhood—the first nonfiction work by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. Louise Erdrich’s first major work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay’s Dance, brilliantly and...

Finding Margaret is the moving story of journalist and broadcaster Andrew Pierce's search for his birth mother. As he was approaching fifty, Pierce decided that it was finally time to track down his biological mother. He knew that he had lived in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Cheltenham for more than two years and was adopted at the age of three by a family who loved and nurtured him.

Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world's physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called "the Pope" by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics.

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.