New Biographies Memoirs

With a great deal of humour and honesty, Polly Gillespie walks the listener through some of the ups and downs of life, with advice, warnings and stories simply involving the awkwardness of being Polly. (She says that at the very least these will make you feel normal.) She has been on radio and in magazines continuously since 1991, and is a much-loved personality whose escapades and down-to-earth advice to others have fascinated and entertained listeners for many years.

Angel of the Ghetto tells the remarkable story of Sam Solasz, a boy born into a warm and loving Jewish family in Poland in 1928. Sam inhabited a protected world until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, which tore his world apart. Ripped from his family, young Sam lived a nomadic and dangerous life. He had to learn to depend on his resourcefulness and the keen ability. He had to size up people and events around him.

Can drugs, sex, and revolution lead to lasting fulfillment and love? This memoir by Eli Jaxon-Bear, framed as a teaching story, using Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero journey, answers this question in an exciting, funny, and deeply personal memoir.

Since 1975, a privately circulated document has been the subject of much discussion and debate among researchers into the dark realms of political conspiracy. Its tentacles go deep, reaching into the heart of the energy industry and the intelligence community. Here you will find assassination teams, rampant and destructive "defense industry" corruption, and the covert manipulation of millions of people.

He was quite possibly the most charismatic figure of the 20th century, a heroic figure that stood for the aspirations of the downtrodden, a true symbol of the triumph of the proletariat over dictatorships and imperialistic forces.

The Rise of a New American Left is the first book to look closely at this new politics. Propelled by interviews with AOC and the other key figures and organizations that have shaken up American politics, the book includes portraits of groups like Democratic Socialists of America, the Sunrise Movement, and Justice Democrats, explaining who they are, where they come from, and what they want.

What does it mean to construct a self? What does it mean to turn your life into a narrative? What’s gained? What’s lost? What lies inevitably get told? What deeper truths are reached or at least reached for? Enough About You has no answers to these questions, but it frames and asks these questions in a much more overt, honest, precise, and provocative way than any book has attempted yet, and tries to do so while also delivering the pleasures of narrative, of memoir, of search-for-self.

He was just a kid from Lubbock, Texas, sporting black horn-rimmed glasses, blue jeans, a white T-shirt, white socks, and loafers. And he changed the course of music history. Today, more than five decades after his tragic death, Buddy Holly still affects lives around the world.

Self-proclaimed liberals, Ellen and her “old man”, struggle to fit in with their fellow (mostly right-wing) "Trailer Dogs", as they recover from devastating personal and financial losses. Often profane, often caustic, and frequently satirical, Revenge of the Trailer Dogs takes up where Garrison’s first audiobook left off, at “The Resort”, a trailer park populated by wackos, racists, Evangelicals, hippies, NRA enthusiasts, transsexuals, homosexuals, and lesbians, each with their own views and prejudices.

These are true stories of winners and losers in the quest for superior service. Who wins? Who loses? It's up to you! Benchmark the best service innovations (Chapter 5: Generating New Ideas). Discover how to keep your customers happy, loyal, and buying more (Chapter 10: Building Up Your Business). Find out who makes the biggest mistakes in service and what you must avoid (Chapter 13: The Infinite Absurdity Awards).

This dramatic account of the War of 1812 fills a surprising gap in the popular literature of the nation's formative years. It is this war, followed closely on the War of Independence, that established the young nation as a permanent power and proved its claim to Manifest Destiny.

Navigating the Spanish Lake examines Spain's long presence in the Pacific Ocean (1521-1898) in the context of its global empire. Building on a growing body of literature on the Atlantic world and indigenous peoples in the Pacific, this pioneering book investigates the historiographical "Spanish Lake" as an artifact that unites the Pacific Rim (the Americas and Asia) and Basin (Oceania) with the Iberian Atlantic.

Maybe the youngest son of a violent criminal named Hoggy Thompson was born a beast. Maybe rage was beaten into him. One thing was certain, by the time he reached manhood, Jerry Thompson was a savage killer. He had no conscience about rape, child molestation, or thrashing a dozen men in a prison fight. Once he got his hands on a gun, any target would do. He didn't leave witnesses. When he terrorized an entire courtroom and offered to rip deputy prosecutor Larry Sells apart, people wondered if there would ever be a way to stop his viciousness.

Lester R. Brown, whom the Washington Post praised as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” built his understanding of global environmental issues from the ground up. Brown spent his childhood working on the family’s small farm. His entrepreneurial skills surfaced early. Even while excelling in school, he launched with his younger brother a tomato-growing operation that by 1958 was producing 1.5 million pounds of tomatoes.

Journalist Sarah Dingle was 27 when she learned that her identity was a lie. Over dinner one night, her mother casually mentioned Sarah had been conceived using a sperm donor. The man who’d raised her wasn’t her father; in fact, she had no idea who her father was. Or who she really was. As the shock receded, Sarah began to investigate her own existence. Thus began a 10-year journey - digging through hospital files, chasing leads and taking a DNA test - that finally led to her biological origins.

Old New Worlds intertwines the immigrant stories of the author and her great-great grandmother. Sarah Barker and her new husband sail from England in 1815 to minister to the indigenous Khoihoi in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. In the midst of conflict, illness, and natural disasters, Sarah bears 16 children. Two hundred years later, Judith leaves post-apartheid South Africa with her new American husband to immigrate to the United States. She is drawn to Sarah’s immigrant story in the context of her own experience, and she sets out to try and trace her.

John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age follows the spiritual sojourn of John E. Fetzer, a Michigan business tycoon. Fetzer parlayed his first radio station into extensive holdings in broadcasting and other enterprises.... By the time he died in 1991, Fetzer had been listed in Forbes magazine as one of the 400 wealthiest people in America. And yet, business success was never enough for Fetzer - his deep spiritual yearnings led him from the Christianity of his youth to a restless exploration of metaphysical religions and movements.

George Washington had Alexander Hamilton. Thomas Jefferson had Albert Gallatin. From internationally known tax expert and former Supreme Court law clerk Gregory May comes this long overdue biography of the remarkable immigrant who launched the fiscal policies that shaped the early republic and the future of American politics. Not Alexander Hamilton - Albert Gallatin. To this day, the fight over fiscal policy lies at the center of American politics.

Arthur Herzog's account is no mere chronicle, and his vivid writing captures all the color and spirit which imbued the "Children's Crusade" from its first startling success in New Hampshire to the chaos and agony of the Chicago anticlimax. Much of what seemed destined to remain unknown about this unprecedented and erratic campaign is brought to life in McCarthy for President, the first authoritative account of a movement that began, in McCarthy's own words, "to give the system a test".

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.