English Biography

Rita Hayworth was the epitome of 1940s glamour. A legendary "Love Goddess", she was a huge box-office star, and her sultry beauty and sensational figure made her into one of Hollywood's greatest sex-symbols: a pin-up so incendiary that GIs pasted it on to the first atom bomb ever detonated.

Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most original painters America has ever produced, left behind a remarkable legacy when she died at the age of 98. Her vivid visual vocabulary, sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth, had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art in this century.

Eve Haas is the daughter of a German Jewish family that took refuge in London after Hitler came to power. Following a terrifying air raid in the blitz, her father revealed the family secret - that her great-great grandmother Emilie was married to a Prussian prince. He then showed her the treasured leather-bound notebook inscribed to Emilie by the prince.

England, late 1547. King Henry VIII is dead. His 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth is living with the king's widow, Catherine Parr, and her new husband, Thomas Seymour. Seymour is the brother of Henry VIII's third wife, the late Jane Seymour, who was the mother to the now-ailing boy king. Ambitious and dangerous, Seymour begins an overt flirtation with Elizabeth that ends with Catherine sending her away. When Catherine dies a year later and Seymour is arrested for treason soon after, a scandal explodes.

Throughout Zarna’s whole childhood in India, everyone called her “so American” just for reading the newspaper, having deep thoughts, and talking back to anyone over the age of thirty. When Zarna’s dad tried to marry her off at age fourteen, Zarna fled—first to the streets of Mumbai and ultimately to the glittering paradise of Akron, Ohio, where she got to become American for real.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, by Executive Order No. 11130 dated November 29, 1963, created this Commission to investigate the assassination on November 22, 1963, of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. The President directed the Commission to evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin and to report its findings and conclusions to him.

Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things—from strawberries and witch hazel to water lilies and lichen—provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass. Adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith, this new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth's oldest teachers: the plants around us.

It was a split-second operation as delicate and as deadly as a time bomb. It demanded the concentrated devotion and vigilance of more than six hundred men for every hour, every day, and every night for more than a year. With only their bare hands and crude homemade tools, they sank shafts, built underground railroads, forged passports, drew maps, faked weapons, and tailored German clothes.

A few days before Thanksgiving 1994, Jeffrey Eugenides’s father, Gus, was piloting a small plane when it crashed in Daytona Beach, Florida. The circumstances surrounding his death added to the mystery of a life that defied expectations, but left many questions unanswered. Now, more than 30 years later, Eugenides tells the story of how his father, a first-generation American, rose from Detroit’s east side to find financial success as a mortgage banker and real estate developer–only to lose it all.

In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued a landmark $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron for decades of oil pollution in the Amazon rainforest. The ruling was celebrated as a historic win for Indigenous communities—and for the New York-based lawyer who helped lead the case, Steven Donziger. But Chevron never paid. Instead, the company fought back, accusing Donziger of fraud and waging an aggressive legal campaign that would ultimately leave him disbarred and under house arrest.

As the Sixties came to a close, Paul McCartney was faced with the daunting prospect of being a solo artist for the first time. Wings’ ascension to the top of the charts with classic albums including Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, and At the Speed of Sound, along with the band’s stadium-filling live shows, would prove to critics and fans that not all great acts are impossible to follow. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is a rousing, stereophonic celebration of the songs, collaborations and performances that would shape the soundtrack of the late twentieth century.

Tina Brown has been observing and chronicling the British monarchy for three decades, and her sweeping account is full of powerful revelations, newly reported details, and searing insight gleaned from remarkable access to royal insiders. Stylish, witty, and erudite, The Palace Papers will irrevoca­bly change how the world perceives and under­stands the royal family.

The long-awaited memoir from the iconic Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Rush bassist, and bestselling author of Geddy Lee's Big Beautiful Book of Bass. Includes two new songs by Geddy Lee, available exclusively in the My Effin’ Life audiobook. Geddy Lee is one of rock and roll's most respected...

Whether in Kraftwerk or as an acclaimed solo artist, Karl Bartos has had an extraordinary impact on electronic music. In The Sound of the Machine, Bartos’ recollections include his childhood in postwar Germany, the early musical encounters that led him to Kraftwerk, and fascinating insights from his time with the group, such as the genesis of monumental songs like "The Robots," "The Model," and "Tour de France," and candid accounts of his relationships with the other bandmembers.

When Sandra Leigh was seven years old, she fell into the role of protector of her mother and three younger siblings. One winter night, she ushered her mother out of the house during one of her father’s tirades, and then snuck her back into the dark home through a window. Sandra was used to events like these; what she wasn’t used to were the mountains and nature surrounding her new home in West Virginia.

As lead singer and songwriter for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis has lived life on the razor's edge. Much has been written about him, but until now we've only had his songs as clues to his experience from the inside. In Scar Tissue, Kiedis proves himself to be as compelling a memoirist as he is a lyricist, giving us a searingly honest account of the life from which his music has evolved.

New York Times best-selling poet and multiplatinum singer-songwriter Jewel explores her unconventional upbringing and extraordinary life in an inspirational memoir that covers her childhood, rise to fame, marriage, and motherhood. She writes beautifully about growing up amid the natural wonders of Alaska, about pain and childhood trauma, and about discovering her own identity years after the entire world had discovered the beauty of her songs.

Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today’s clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice - in heaven and on earth.

The close knit community in San Miguel de Allende Mexico was plagued by a string of sophisticated kidnappings for nearly a decade. When the police finally made an arrest the townspeople were shocked by who was accused of masterminding the criminal enterprise. It's everyone's favorite neighbor and a pillar of the community, Ramon Guerra. Except Ramon isn't who he says he is.

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker The Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature...