New Biographies Memoirs

Over the course of seven months in 1988, eleven women disappeared off the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gloomy, drug-addled coastal town that was once the whaling capital of the world. Nine turned up dead. Two were never found. And the perpetrator remains unknown to this day. In Killing Season, Smith takes listeners into a close-knit community of working-class men and women, an underworld of prostitution and drug abuse, and the halls of New England law enforcement to tell the story of an epic failure of justice.

This expanded edition of A Book features additions from Desi Arnaz’s uncompleted, never published second memoir, a new closing chapter picking up his life story where A Book leaves off following his divorce from Lucille Ball, a new Epilogue by Lucie Arnaz, and new photos throughout. Desi’s original work and the additions come together to paint a comprehensive portrait of a man beloved and admired by family and people he worked with despite admitted personal failings, and to whom Lucy herself gave credit for the success of I Love Lucy and pioneering television production in its infancy.

What does retirement mean to you? Do you feel you’ve seen enough of the world? As you approach this later stage in life, the thought of travel can feel beyond intimidating—especially for those of us handling chronic medical conditions. In What If . . . ?, author Roberta Sawatzky highlights the importance of seizing the day when it comes to seeing the world, even and especially as one approaches retirement age.

The Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author of Let’s Take the Long Way Home now gives us a stunning, exquisitely written memoir about a dramatic turning point in her life, which unexpectedly opened up a world of understanding, possibility, and connection. New Life, No Instructions is about the surprising way life can begin again, at any age.

When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s 35-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter - one that raises the possibility of new materials with never-before-seen properties but that violates laws set in stone for centuries.

An anthology of 20 stories, Killer Case Files delivers riveting accounts of deviant and horrifying murders. These killers can range from seemingly normal people to psychopaths and serial killers who commit years of murder and mayhem. Every volume delves into the forensic science and detective work used to identify and apprehend these violent predators.

Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon’s remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.

A unique collection of 41 groundbreaking essays, poems, and artwork by migrants, refugees and Dreamers—including award-winning writers, artists, and activists—that illuminate what it is like living undocumented today.

Steven Adams overcame extreme odds to become a first-round prospect in the 2013 NBA draft. From there he signed a major contract with the Oklahoma City Thunder - making him New Zealand's highest-paid athlete ever - and went on to forge a reputation for his intense, physical style of basketball. Adams takes you inside the draft process from the fascinating whirlwind tour of pre-draft workouts with dozens of teams to the draft itself where dreams are made or dashed and the Gatorade bottles on every table are glued shut.

There have been dozens of Chinese dynasties and hundreds of emperors. Different parts of the country have different customs and dialects, but they all share the same history, learning from the great men and women who shaped China and its 5,000 years of civilization. Presented in three volumes are stories of characters who shaped the history of the Chinese from past to present. By knowing them, you will begin to understand today's China.

From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.

Forty, chronically single, and up an extra 20 pounds, TV news producer Stephanie Krikorian fell victim to the Great Recession, finding herself suddenly unemployed. One unwanted pregnancy away from being a Lifetime Original Movie, Stephanie had to reinvent herself...and fast. So, to keep her head above water, she started ghostwriting self-help and diet books for a variety of well-known experts. However, she didn't just write each book she took on, she lived it - chanting, journaling, reflecting, reframing - whatever it took to get deep into the heart of each project.

Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas, and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets to automatic weapons and even bombs. Welcome to New York City's Chinatown in 1925.

While free markets have brought positive change, traditional capitalism cannot solve problems of inequality and poverty because of its view of people as solely profit-driven. In fact, humans have other drives and passions, including spiritual, social, and altruistic.

From award-winning New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, the story of the world’s most exceptional city, told through 31 little-known yet pivotal inhabitants who helped define it. In Sam Roberts’s pulsating history of the world’s most exceptional metropolis, greet the city anew through thirty-one unique New Yorkers you’ve probably never heard of—just in time for the city’s 400th birthday.

In 1982, Sally Morgan travelled back to her grandmother's birthplace. What started as a tentative search for information about her family, turned into an overwhelming emotional and spiritual pilgrimage. My Place is a moving account of a search for truth into which a whole family is gradually drawn, finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous "escape-proof" wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold, by any means necessary.

Reflecting the yearnings and anxieties of a generation that came of age after World War II, this is the iconic journey of a restless man who leaves the hometown he loves to discover the world, and in so doing, to find himself. My New Orleans offers a penetrating and memorable account of a fading period of America’s evolution, turbulence and possibilities, as unique as the city of Wolf’s memory.

El 29 de febrero del año 2000, John Price pidió una orden de alejamiento contra su novia, Katherine Knight. Más tarde, ese mismo día, dijo a sus compañeros de trabajo que ella le había apuñalado y que si alguna vez desaparecía, era porque Knight le había matado. Come hombres, es el relato dramático y apasionante de la primera mujer en Australia condenada a cadena perpetua sin libertad condicional, con la adición especial de "nunca ser liberada". La fascinante narración de Ryan Green introduce al oyente en el horror real experimentado por la víctima.

In this delightful memoir, Jared Gulian describes the first four years of their new life in the country, its disasters, small triumphs, surprises, and pleasures. But most of all, he describes the warmth of the local community that welcomed them, saved them from certain peril, taught them how to cook, how to care for animals, and how to understand and love the land.