New Biographies Memoirs

For the larger-than-life personalities now staking their fortunes on the development of rocket ships, the new race to explore space could be a dead end, a lucrative opportunity - or the key to humanity's salvation. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos take center stage in this fast-paced narrative as they attempt to disrupt the space economy, feed their own egos, and maybe even save the world.

On the night of March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, right up the street from the chocolate factory, Wilt Chamberlain, a young and striking athlete celebrated as the Big Dipper, scored 100 points in a game against the New York Knickerbockers.

This story of a real-life Indiana Jones of the 1950s named John Keel contains everything but a trip to Venus in a flying saucer - a subject our newsman/explorer would become famous for a decade later. In Egypt, the fearless Keel was cursed by a mummy and befriended members of a strange snake-charming cult. In Iraq, he played Russian roulette with a notorious desert bandit and lived among the Yezidi devil-worshippers. Later, in India, he was buried alive and discovered the secret of the Indian rope trick, which he then performed for incredulous reporters in New Delhi.

When Norbert Elliot graduated from his New Orleans Catholic grammar school in 1966, he was determined to claw himself free from his family and the place they called home. Interlacing the history of one of America’s iconic cities with his childhood memories, Elliot explores two hundred and fifty years of intentional cruelty and promised charity. With a focus on disposable lives, his memoir calls into question traditional views of family and home and asks us to imagine the freedom of lives lived on the delicate line between what can, and cannot, be.

The Kremlin intrigues, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class, Radzinsky thrillingly brings them to life. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might, and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history, is solved.

As Alexis Ohanian learned when he helped to co-found the immensely popular reddit.com, the internet is the most powerful and democratic tool for disseminating information in human history. And when that power is harnessed to create new communities, technologies, businesses or charities, the results can be absolutely stunning. In this audiobook, Alexis will share his ideas, tips and even his own doodles about harnessing the power of the web for good, and along the way, he will share his philosophy with young entrepreneurs all over the globe.

The next best thing to having a room key to the Chelsea Hotel during each of its famous - and infamous - decades The Chelsea Hotel, since its founding by a visionary French architect in 1884, has been an icon of American invention: a cultural dynamo and haven for the counterculture, all in one astonishing building. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a masterful and endlessly entertaining history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there.

Parley P. Pratt’s autobiography is one of the great personal stories of early Latter-day Saint church history. It is an eventful and thrilling story of a man’s complete faith in and total commitment to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as the price he paid and the blessings he received for pursuing such a course.

By 2050, $50 trillion will change hands in North America in the largest generational wealth transfer ever. It will remake the world and be the biggest money-making opportunity in history. "Business as usual", founded on exploitation and environmental ruin, is over. Climate catastrophe, reactionary politics, and widening inequity have put the world on edge. Meanwhile innovations are shifting the economic ground, and an entire generation is pounding the table for real change.

For fans of Anne Lamott, Abigail Thomas, and Ayelet Waldman, a postdivorce memoir, one woman's story of starting over at 60-in youth-obsessed, beauty-obsessed Hollywood. After the death of her best friend, the loss of her life's savings, and the collapse of her once-happy marriage, Meredith Maran - whom Anne Lamott calls "insightful, funny, and human" - leaves her San Francisco freelance writer's life for a 9-to-5 job in Los Angeles.

Dr. Temple Grandin gets to the real issues of autism, the ones parents, teachers, and individuals on the spectrum face every day. Temple offers helpful dos and don'ts, practical strategies, and try-it-now tips, all based on her insider perspective and a great deal of research.

Have you ever wanted to live a truly awesome life? In this compelling guide to fearless, creative living, Tae Yun Kim, a martial arts great grandmaster, shows that no matter what your age or background, culture, or career, you don't have to settle for anything less than awesome in your life. Dr. Tae Yun Kim began her training at the age of seven, defying 5,000 years of tradition prohibiting girls from learning the martial arts in South Korea. Against all odds, she became the first female martial artist in South Korea and one of the highest-ranking martial artists in the world.

When Rachel Bertsche first moves to Chicago, she’s thrilled to finally share a zip code, let alone an apartment, with her boyfriend. But shortly after getting married, Bertsche realizes that her new life is missing one thing: friends. Sure, she has plenty of BFFs—in New York and San Francisco and Boston and Washington, D.C. Still, in her adopted hometown, there’s no one to call at the last minute for girl talk over brunch or a reality-TV marathon over a bottle of wine. Taking matters into her own hands, Bertsche develops a plan....

This book reveals, for the first time, the story behind the writing of ‘Desiderata’. Beloved by millions, the poem was first published in 1927, but its true origins, along with the life of its author, have largely been lost to literary history. This account by actor and author Tim Dalgleish includes not only the story of ‘Desiderata’ but two additional, previously unpublished, chapters from a forthcoming biography of Max Ehrmann. This new material helps bring Max Ehrmann, the author of 'Desiderata', out of the shadows.

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.

To anyone interested in small-boat cruising and voyaging, the names Lin and Larry Pardey need no introduction. As world-girdling sailors who roamed the planet on a pair of small, engineless boats that they built themselves, the Pardeys established their hard-earned reputations by eloquently (and sometimes controversially) telling their stories through a series of best-selling books and manuals, and countless seminars and boat shows.

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.

1916: Norma Wallace, age 15, arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she tape-recorded her memories. With those tapes and original research, Christine Wiltz chronicles Norma's rise and fall with the social history of New Orleans.

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.

The instant New York Times best-selling memoir from the outspoken former governor - an "explosive" (Guardian) "must read" (Hugh Hewitt) account of Chris Christie's life in politics including his "not to miss" (Entertainment Weekly) insights into Donald Trump. In Let Me Finish, Christie sets the record straight about his tenure as a corruption-fighting prosecutor and a Republican running a Democratic state, as well as what really happened on the 2016 campaign trail and inside Trump Tower.