Family Biography

On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

This is Emily Bloom’s journey towards and through motherhood, a path that has become, for the average woman, laden with data and medical technology. Emily faces decisions regarding genetic testing and diagnosis, technologies that offer the illusion of certainty but carry the weight of hard decisions. Her desire to know more thrusts her back into the history of science, as she traces the discoveries that impacted the modern state of pregnancy and motherhood.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.

In this personal story of becoming, belonging and being seen, a psychiatry resident pulls back the curtain on the journey to becoming a doctor. From childhood, Chika Oriuwa dreamed of being a doctor. She knew that she was destined to wear the white coat one day, no matter what it took. The high...

The perfect gift for music and car lovers, Special Deluxe is Neil Young's New York Times bestselling follow-up to Waging Heavy Peace that “reads like a great Neil Young song plays.” (The Buffalo News) In this acclaimed new memoir, New York Times bestselling author Neil Young has...

The most intimate and informative portrait yet of Prince Harry, from royal expert Katie Nicholl, author of the bestselling William and Harry and Kate. From his earliest public appearances as a mischievous redheaded toddler, Prince Harry has captured the hearts of royal enthusiasts around the...

For twenty years, Ken and Kristine Fitzhugh and their two sons had lived lives of comfortable middle-class normality. Then came the shocking news that Kristine Fitzhugh was dead, the victim of a terrible accident.... By the time the Palo Alto Police Department looked closer at the death of Kristine Fitzhugh, there could be only one conclusion. Someone had murdered Kristine in her own home, inflicting a series of horrific blows to the back of her head, and then cleaned up the mess to make it look like an accident.

A fiery, heartbreaking memoir that follows one New Hampshire family over the course of three years, unspooling a riveting story of gender identity, class, trans youth, and a child caught in the riptide of America’s culture wars Abi Maxwell grew up in rural New Hampshire, one of eight kids in a...

While much has been written about his father, Sam, a titan of industry, there is no public record of Charles Bronfman’s thoughts on his own life, family, career and his significant accomplishments in sport and philanthropy. Distilled does just that, chronicling key events in the life of the heir to one of Canada’s great fortunes. Born in 1931 to the fabulously wealthy Bronfmans, Charles grew up in a 20-room mansion with many staff. Via their control of the distilling giant Seagram, the Bronfman family dominated the liquor business.

A journalist pieces together the mysteries surrounding her ex-husband’s descent into drug addiction while trying to rebuild a life for her family, taking readers on an intimate journey into the world of white-collar drug abuse. “A rare combination of journalistic rigor, personal courage, and...

In 1920, in small-town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store". That's how Stella Suberman's father's store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee, was known locally. The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience From esteemed journalist Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in. Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively...

YOU DESERVE TO HAVE POWER. IT IS YOURS FOR THE TAKING. GENE SIMMONS IS HERE TO UNLOCK THE DOORS TO THE TEMPLE. Gene Simmons, KISS front-man, multi-hyphenate entrepreneur, and master of self-invention, shares his philosophy on power—how to attain it, how to keep it, and how to harness it as a...

In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.

Pakistani American Farah Naz Rishi’s first year of college was perfectly, thankfully, uneventful. After all, she was in college to learn and forge a path of self-sufficiency, especially after her last relationship fell apart—dashing her mother’s aspirations for an early marriage. What could Farah expect, anyway? For the ideal guy to just conveniently waltz into her life? Life isn’t a love story.

Is anyone ever truly lost in the internet age? A moving, original memoir of a young woman reckoning with her parents’ absence, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyperconnected world. “Brilliantly innovative . . . syncing a narrative of profoundly personal...

LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER An MIT astrophysicist reinvents herself in the wake of tragedy and discovers the power of connection on this planet, even as she searches our galaxy for another Earth, in this “bewitching” (Anthony Doerr, The New York Times Book Review) memoir...

A poetic portrait of faith, futility, and the joy of this mortal life. In this astoundingly unique audiobook, best-selling author N. D. Wilson reminds each of us that to truly live, we must recognize that we are dying. Every second we create more of our past. Then, we must see the future. We stand in the now. God says create. Live. Choose. Shape the past. Etch your life in stone, and what you make will be forever.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From one of Canada’s most beloved performing artists comes an audacious work of non-fiction that explores the stories that shape us and the reach that the past can have across generations "Thomson makes visible the ghosts of the Great War, untangling themes of loss...

The events of the Arab Spring have come to be overshadowed by the civil war in the Arabic-speaking nation of Syria, which has been ruled throughout the 21st century by Bashar al-Assad. Though he had not planned on ruling Syria, several events conspired to make Bashar the successor of his father, Hafez. Though the West frequently looked for signs that Bashar might be a reformer, due in part to his formerly popular Western wife, Assad remained part of a critical alliance with Iran and the sub-state groups Hamas and Hezbollah.