Family Biography

Sarah’s story is one for any parent; it is not just about the highs and lows of having a child with additional needs, but also simply as a mum of three. She talks candidly about coming to terms with the decision to move Oscar to a SEN (Special Educational Needs) school, another big milestone in Oscar’s young life. Whilst Sarah may have found herself on a different path to the one she’d imagined for herself, it has not been a bad one. There is sadness, certainly; and there have been struggles along the way; but there has been so much laughter and happiness, too.

The star of the hit show Glee shares her experiences and insider tips on beauty, fashion, inner strength, and more in an illustrated book that’s part memoir, part how-to, and part style guide. Lea Michele is one of the hardest working performers in show business. Whether she’s starring...

The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children. When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two...

In a world run amuck with seemingly irreparable differences and conflicts, Gail Straub’s memoir offers an antidote. As a seeker on pilgrimage across the Sahara with indigenous Tuaregs, trekking off the beaten trail high in the Himalayas, the intrepid Straub seeks out all that is different so that she can become whole.

In 1989, as US news outlets declared an end to Operation Just Cause, Craig Morgan was part of an elite group of military operatives jumping into the jungle along the Panamanian border on a covert operation. Fans know the country music star from his hit songs and acclaimed albums, but there’s a lot more to him—a soldier who worked with the CIA in Panama, an undercover agent who fought sex traffickers in Thailand, and a dedicated family man who lives the values he sings.

A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had...

Dionne Brand, author of the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Ossuaries, returns with a startlingly original work about the act of writing itself. On a lonely wharf a clerk in an ink blue coat inspects bales and bales of paper that hold a poet's accumulated left-hand pages—the unwritten...

""I fell in love with Maupin’s effervescent Tales of the City decades ago, and his genius turn at memoir is no less compelling. Logical Family is a must read.""—Mary Karr In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from...

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From the bestselling author of The Taking of Jemima Boone, the unbelievable true story of a real-life Swiss Family Robinson (and their dog) who faced sharks, shipwreck, and betrayal. On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were...

Step inside the world of America’s most powerful Mafia dynasty—the Gambino crime family. From the silent cunning of Carlo Gambino to the flamboyant reign of John Gotti, this gripping true account traces the family’s rise, dominance, and decline. Uncover the bloody power struggles, the unions and rackets that fueled their empire, the betrayals that shattered omertà, and the relentless FBI pursuit that brought them down. Blending history, crime, and culture, this book reveals the brutal reality behind the myth of the Mafia.

An engrossing and revolutionary biography of Isabella of Castile, the controversial Queen of Spain who sponsored Christopher Columbus's journey to the New World, established the Spanish Inquisition, and became one of the most influential female rulers in history Born at a time when Christianity...

From a historian and senior editor at Atlas Obscura, a fascinating account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one...

From the New York Times contributing opinion writer and award-winning author of Reading While Black, a riveting intergenerational account of his family’s search for home and hope “Powerful . . . McCaulley uses examples of his own family’s stories of survival over time to remind readers...

Between them, the three men in the fearsome Pierrepoint dynasty executed over 800 people during a career spanning more than half a century. Henry, his brother Thomas, and his son Albert, dispatched some of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century, and in the process earned a public notoriety that followed them throughout their eventful lives.

The story of the indomitable American POWs who endured "Alcatraz," the Hanoi prison camp where North Vietnam locked up its most dangerous and subversive prisoners, and the wives who fought to bring them home. As these men suffered in Hanoi, their wives launched an extraordinary campaign that would ultimately spark the POW/MIA movement. When the survivors finally returned, one would receive the Medal of Honor, another became a U.S. Senator, and a third still serves in Congress.

A riveting true-life thriller and revealing memoir from the daughter of an American intelligence officer—the astonishing true story of two spies and their families on opposite sides of the Cold War. In the summer of 1975, seventeen-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her...

Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at age 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighborhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pajamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario - especially to his wife and three children.

I started making a list in my diary entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” Under it I wrote: “Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran.” I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and...

“What are you reading?” That’s the question Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was...

Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her first and only child, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, and level-headed, but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education. But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three....