English Biography

You may think you know Jerry Springer—the iconic TV host who presided over America's most controversial daytime talk show for 27 years. In that time, Springer’s name became synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious on-stage fights. But before The Jerry Springer Show made him infamous all over the world, Springer was something else entirely: a respected Midwestern politician whom many saw as a future leader in the Democratic Party. So how did this serious-minded idealist with lofty political aspirations take such a turn in such a radically different direction?

Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife... but as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. A man who bled quietly to death in his living room. Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead - and the book she has written is equally extraordinary.

Dear Cousin: The Stalking of Susan Fensten is the gripping true story of one woman's quest for long lost family. After the deaths of her sister and estranged father, Susan searches for relatives on an early online genealogy forum. When she meets cousins from her grandfather's other family, they're everything she'd hoped for—until it all goes to hell.

The first edition of Greentown helped reopen one of America's most shameful unsolved murder cases, the savage slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in an exclusive enclave of Greenwich, Connecticut, the night before Halloween 1975. Soon after Martha's body was discovered, attention focused on members of the Skakel family, who lived across the street from the Moxleys. Ethel Skakel and Robert Kennedy had married in Greenwich, and the two families were close.

He's baseball's biggest heartbreaker. I'm a recovering romantic...and his new trainer. Parker Knight is a smooth-talking pitcher with a smile for days and a roster of broken hearts behind him. Those are only a few reasons why a guy like him is never getting near my heart. After making a move to prove I deserve a place within my dad's baseball empire, the last thing on my mind is a playboy pitcher. I didn't know who he was when we randomly met off the field, and Parker certainly had no idea I'm the team owner's daughter. He thought I was going to be his next conquest.

In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. During the four extraordinary years that Michelangelo spent laboring over the ceiling, power politics and personal rivalries swirled around him. He battled ill health, financial and family difficulties, inadequate knowledge of the art of fresco, and the Pope's impatience - a history that is more compelling than most novels.

A misfit kid at the best of times, Mishka Shubaly had his world shattered when, in a 24-hour span in 1992, he survived a mass shooting on his school's campus then learned that his parents were getting divorced. His father, a prominent rocket scientist, abandoned the family, and their home was lost to foreclosure. Shubaly swore to avenge the wrongs against his mother but instead plunged into a magnificently toxic love affair with alcohol.

A shy, bookish college graduate from a solid middle-class home, Kate Holden was uncertain of her way in life. When she decided to try her first hit of heroin, she did not anticipate that the drug would take over. Desperation drove her first to offer her body on the streets and then in high-class brothels, where she discovered hidden strengths as well as parts of herself that frightened her. With the acceptance and unyielding love of a family that never abandoned her, Kate Holden ultimately defeated the drug and left her netherworld behind.

2012 Audie Award Finalist for Audiobook of the Year Walter Isaacson’s “enthralling” (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family...

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Carl Van Doren incorporates materials from Franklin's letters, manuscripts, journals, and published works to give the most accurate and comprehensive portrait ever written of this great American.

In May of 1963, Seattle mountaineer Jim Whittaker stepped into world history by becoming the first American to summit Mount Everest. More than 50 years later, he is still regarded as a seminal figure in North American mountaineering, as well as an astute businessman who helped create the outdoor recreation industry. A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond is Jim's courageous, no-punches-pulled autobiography and a look at a peripatetic, sometimes difficult life.

The true story for fans of the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria, this page-turning biography reveals the real woman behind the myth: a bold, glamorous, unbreakable queen—a Victoria for our times. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, this stunning portrait is a story of love and heartbreak...

With 30 years of backcountry patrol experience in Florida, Bob Lee has lived through incidents of legend, including one of the biggest environmental busts in Florida history. His fascinating memoir reveals the danger and the humor in the unsung exploits of game wardens.

In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than 50 years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America's famous frontier hero while illuminating the American hero-making process itself. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone's own hand, and a treasure trove of reminiscences gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape.

Saving My Enemy is the touching true story of two soldiers on opposite sides of WWII whose unlikely friendship, forged in their 80s, dissolves six decades of guilt and shame that had pushed both men to despair.

When Bill Payne and Billie Jean Hayworth began their romance, they unknowingly set in motion a diabolical plot that would end with them murdered in their own home, Hayworth holding their mercifully unharmed infant. Chris was a CIA agent who was concerned about Jenelle. Seeing the cyberbullying she had endured, and worried for her safety, Chris got in touch with Jenelle's protective parents and her devoted boyfriend, warning them that Payne and Hayworth were a danger to Jenelle.

Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a classic film noir and also a damning dissection of the Hollywood dream factory, evokes the glamour and ruin of the stars who subsist on that dream. It’s also one long in-joke about the movie industry and those who made it great - and who were, in turn, destroyed by it. One of the most critically admired films of the 20th century, Sunset Boulevard is also famous as silent-star Gloria Swanson’s comeback picture.

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.

In the 1960s Ram Dass was a Harvard professor who turned to Eastern religion to answer the questions troubling his generation. He shared his story in the landmark classic, Be Here Now, which instantly captured the spiritual longings of his contemporaries. In Still Here, Ram Dass once again brings understanding, common sense, and reassurance for those of us facing the final season of life.

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.