Sociology Memoirs

Women of Privilege traces the decline of a once-privileged Hudson River Valley family where the neighbors were Vanderbilts, Delanos, and Roosevelts. Susan Gillotti provides insight into her ancestors' heretofore secret lives, culled from private diaries, letters, and journals of the three generations of women who inhabited Grasmere - one of the great houses of the Hudson River Valley. On the surface, their lives seem ideal, but beneath that facade, there was mental illness, alcoholism, yearning for divorce, and questions of sexual identity.

Stephen Heywood was 29 years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight, his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.

In 2016, Sandy Winterbottom embarked on an epic six-week tall-ship voyage from Uruguay to Antarctica. At the mid-way stop in South Georgia, her pristine image of the Antarctic was shattered when she discovered the dark legacy of twentieth century industrial-scale whaling. Enraged by what she found, she was quick to blame the men who undertook this whole scale slaughter, but then she stumbled upon the grave of an eighteen-year-old whaler from Edinburgh who she could not allow to bear the brunt of blame. There are two sides to every story.

Le bambine e i bambini, nati in Italia nel 2018 grazie alle tecniche di Procreazione medicalmente assistita (Pma), sono il 3,2%. Vuol dire che esistono oltre 14.000 figlie e figli di persone che hanno affrontato questi percorsi. Allargando la fotografia a tutte quelle donne che decidono di avere un figlio da sole o con un'altra donna in una coppia lesbica, ovvero alle soggettività che non rientrano nella visione normativa della legge 40 del 2004, i numeri crescono ancora.

In this fascinating historical adventure, broadcaster and author Selina Mills takes us on a journey through the history of blindness in Western Culture to discover that blindness is not so dark after all. Inspired by her own experience of losing her sight as she forged a successful journalistic career, Life Unseen takes us through a personal and unsentimental historical quest through the lives, stories and achievements of blind people—as well as those sighted people who sought to patronize, demonize and fix them.

Con el formidable éxito de ventas de Entre limones -el divertidísimo relato autobiográfico de un joven inglés que, con tal de no vestir traje y acudir a una oficina, se gasta todos sus ahorros en la compra de un ruinoso cortijo en la Alpujarra granadina- Chris Stewart dio comienzoa su célebre trilogía sobre el irresistible encanto de la vida alternativa, en la que los pequeños sucesos cotidianos y la tranquila observación del espectáculo que supone la actitud del hombre ante sus semejantes y ante la naturaleza compensan con creces los placeres materiales de una vida normal.

Von 2004 bis 2009 arbeitete Amaryllis Fox undercover als Antiterrorismus-Spezialistin der CIA. In diesem überwältigenden Memoir erzählt sie ihre Geschichte. "Ich trainierte mit der Glock, beherrschte das M4, wusste mich aus Plastikhandschellen zu befreien, während ich im Kofferraum eines Autos lag. Ich wurde gedrillt, Folter auszuhalten, lernte, welche Methoden des Suizids für den Fall einer Gefangenschaft anzuwenden wären. Am Ende aber brachte mir meine kleine Tochter bei, dass zwischenmenschliche Nähe die mächtigste Waffe von allen ist."

A transcendent memoir from an author of rare talent, Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground recounts Bell’s time living mostly alone in the hills of Wyoming, where she herded sheep and cattle and battled isolation. A journey to the heart of self, Bell’s work sparkles with shimmering prose and remarkable insight.

Dame Sue Black es una de las científicas forenses más reconocidas del mundo y se enfrenta a la muerte todos los días: analiza restos mortales humanos en su laboratorio, en lugares de entierro y en escenas de violencia, asesinatos y desmembramiento criminal. Sus aportaciones en el análisis de muertes en masa debido a guerras, desastres naturales o accidentes han sido fundamentales. La autora revela los muchos rostros de la muerte que ha llegado a conocer, utilizando distintos casos clave y experiencias de su vida personal para explorar cómo se ha desarrollado la ciencia forense.

On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Diaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order.

Becoming a young Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity. Every year, thousands of eager college graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money-- as well as how to dress...

Wieder ein Buch von Astrid Wagner, das die Leser durch packende Schilderung, Authentizität und Empathie mitreißt. Die in diesem Buch versammelten wahren Verbrechen zeigen die Abgründe der menschlichen Seele. Es sind unfassbare Geschichten von Liebe, die in Hass umschlägt, und Leidenschaft, die zu Mordlust wird.

Like Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’ Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage - an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf.

In this first biography of Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. in more than 30 years, Chuck McFadden explores the unique persona of one of the most idiosyncratic politicians in California history. The son of California political royalty who forged his own political style against the tumultuous backdrop of a huge, balkanized state - and shoved to and fro by complex currents - Jerry Brown pursued visionary impulses as well as his grandiose ambitions.

The world's preeminent environmental organization began with a layer of soot on the windowsill of a Greenwich Village apartment. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) founder John H. Adams, a pioneer of environmental action, was working as a lawyer for the U.S. Attorney's office when he and fellow lawyers teamed up to form a grassroots environmental advocacy group.

When Pauline Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives. What she didn't count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her training, as she struggles to reconcile a shared humanity with her patients and to separate ideals about healing from a fierce desire to cure. Chen's transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live.

The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement - whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens - speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully.

A massive audience in sitting rooms, parks and pubs watched England in the 2018 World Cup. Yet as Duncan Hamilton demonstrates with style, insight and wit in Going to the Match, watching on TV is no substitute for being there. Hamilton embarks on a richly entertaining, exquisitely crafted journey through football. Glory game or grass roots, England v Slovenia or Guiseley v Hartlepool, he delves beneath the action to illuminate the stories which make the sport endlessly compelling.

This is the extraordinary story of the South African boy whose bravery and fierce determination to make a difference despite being born with AIDS has made him the human symbol of the world's fight against the disease, told by the veteran American journalist whose life he changed.

As a columnist for Time magazine, among many other publications, Tom Callahan witnessed an extraordinary number of defining moments in American sport across four decades. He takes us from Roberto Clemente clinching his 3,000th, and final, regular-season hit in Pittsburgh; to ringside for the Muhammad Ali - George Foreman fight in Zaire; and to Arthur Ashe announcing, at a news conference, that he'd tested positive for HIV.