Survivor Biography

Former high school teacher and New York-based comedian Mimi Hayes is a brain injury survivor. She wrote her first humorous memoir while recovering from a traumatic head injury at the age of 22. Her honest take on trauma and love followed her to the stage as a stand-up comedian, where she has performed on stages such as Denver Comedy Works, Broadway Comedy Club, Stand Up NY, Dangerfield's, and The Upright Citizen's Brigade.

Born into a century of conflict, Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of the Duke of Somerset and a descendant of Edward III, was married at the age of twelve. She was a mother, orphan, and widow by thirteen. She survived the vicissitudes of the Wars of the Roses and two further marriages to see her only son, Henry, ascend the throne of England as the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty. During Henry's reign, she exerted considerable influence at court, and played a part in the upbringing of her grandson, the future Henry VIII. She was a lifelong artistic patron and supporter of academia.

In this brave and beautiful memoir, written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liar’s Club, a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuse—examining the tenderness and violence entwined in the relationship...

Alexander Rosenberg was a smart and curious teenager who spoke many languages, and lived a pampered life with his parents in a tranquil Czechoslovakian town. The rise of fascism and Nazi Germany causes his protected existence to collapse, alongside the illusion of secular Jewish assimilation in 1930s Europe. Using their last reserves of wealth and influence to escape extermination, the Rosenbergs go underground to avoid the Gestapo. Eventually exposed, captured, and taken to Buchenwald, the largest concentration camp in Germany, Alexander and his father collaborate to survive one day at a time

A story ultimately without a time and ultimately without a place. It's a memoir of families across generations of peace and of war, of homes that become lost and hopes that are kept, and a belief in a future that's better than the present. In each family, a fundamental life event spawns ripples that sweep across time and generations that would fade forever without exploration and would otherwise shed all meaning. The key event in many lives is making the decision to leave home forever and to strike out, not knowing if it leads to disaster or to a future and a better place.

I want to share my experience from being diagnosed, the journey of treatment, and how I handle every day I am breathing. My desire is to give hope, inspire, educate, and give strength to anyone out there wanting to be cancer-free or have someone in their life wanting to be cancer-free.

This book details Alice’s struggles in navigating life and climbing up the ladder of success. It is about taking a step ahead from the fear of failure and conquering all the challenges that life lays in front of you with persistence. Remember, when struggling in life, you have a choice; you can either dwell on your miseries or you can use them as a stepping stone to be stronger.

The West Wing meets The Office in this “funny, moving story about working in the White House that is a must read for anyone who misses having Barack Obama as President” (Dan Pfeiffer, cohost of Pod Save America), directly from his senior writer and former Deputy Director of Messaging. West...

A memoir of family, the Holocaust, trauma, and identity, in which Adam Frankel, a former Obama speechwriter, must come to terms with the legacy of his family’s painful past and discover who he is in the wake of a life-changing revelation about his own origins. “The Survivors is an...

The lone survivor trembled as she pleaded with investigators.... For over 40 years, the events of what happened at Gitchie Manitou the night of November 17, 1973, remained a mystery to all but a few. Then the lone survivor broke her silence. Five teenage friends had driven to the park to spend a few hours around a campfire. By morning, four had been murdered, and only she was still alive. Gitchie Girl Uncovered is a chilling account of the strange twists and bizarre details discovered by an elite team of investigators under intense pressure to catch the killers.

This striking work of narrative nonfiction tells the true story of six-year-old Sachiko Yasui's survival of the Nagasaki atomic bomb on August 9, 1945 and the heartbreaking and lifelong aftermath. Having conducted extensive interviews with Sachiko Yasui, Caren Stelson shares the true story of a young girl who survived the atomic bomb and chronicles her long journey to find peace. This special book offers listeners a remarkable new perspective on the final moments of World War II and their aftermath.

A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE FINALIST This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way to freedom from the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in the ways we...

I glanced behind me and saw my husband being detained. The guards interrogated him and took his photo as the flashbulbs illuminated his face. The moment felt like an eternity as they searched Pe's body from head to toe. And then, he was forced to sign yet another confession. Looking on, I held my breath in anticipation as my 5-year-old son asked, "Are they going to let us go?" Nita Tin, born in Rangoon, Burma, and descended from nobility was raised in an opulent lifestyle. But as her country came under the control of a ruthless military dictator, her whole life changed.

In these compelling, award-winning, Holocaust memoirs, Nanette Blitz Konig relates her amazing story of survival during the Second World War when she, together with her family and millions of other Jews, was imprisoned by the Nazis with a minimum chance of survival. Nanette (b. 1929) was a class mate of Anne Frank in the Jewish Lyceum of Amsterdam. They met again in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before Anne died.

This is the memoir written by Bella Kuligowska Zucker, the only person in her family to survive the Holocaust. In September 1939, Bella was a carefree teenager living in Poland when the German army struck. She was rounded up with her friends and family and sent to a series of grim Jewish ghettos. After loved ones were separated and lost through the war years, Bella survived by changing her identity. After finding the birth certificate of a Catholic girl five years her senior, she became Sabina Mazurek. Then she went into the eye of the storm, Germany.

As a therapist, author, and former radio talk show host and hospital director, C.K. has nearly forty years of sobriety from mind and mood-altering substances. Miraculously, he survived years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse which led to alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, sexual addiction, nicotine, and other debilitating addictions to escape his pain.

In early 2022, life in the port city of Mariupol, Ukraine was safe and predictable for Adoriana Marik. The thirty-one-year-old tattoo artist loved walking her dog by the seaside and meeting friends at cafés and public gardens. But all that changed on February 24, 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation.”

The diary of a young Jewish housewife who, together with her husband and five-month-old baby, fled the Warsaw ghetto at the last possible moment, and survived the Holocaust hidden on the "Aryan" side of town in the loft of a run-down tinsmith's shed. Rescued from the Ashes documents the incredible life story of Leokadia Schmidt and her small family and their daily struggle to survive the Warsaw Ghetto.

Some people have a knack for survival, for getting out of jams. 12-year-old David Karmi found himself face to face with the ultimate test. With his homeland consumed by fear, David entered a world of human slaughter. Whole towns were vaporized. Cities obliterated in firestorms. More than 50 million people died - 12 million either gassed, shot, hanged, worked to death, or subjected to biological experiments. David survived.

Leia Hughey courageously peels through layers of vulnerabilities and fears to bare herself to her listeners. A victim of rape as a child, the author suffered from its psychological effects... low self-esteem and self-hatred throughout her life, even though all recollection of the trauma was repressed from her conscious memory. It wasn't until she was in college that the memories began to slowly and heartbreakingly work their way to the surface through dreams and flashbacks.