Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle’s talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now. For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined.

I’ve been in this life for 50 years, been trying to work out its riddle for 42, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last 35. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.  

True North Heists tells the tales of some of the most outlandish capers ever committed on Canadian soil.

Most success starts with failure, but we rarely hear those stories.

A down-to-earth global pop star. A deeply spiritual, cerebral powerhouse. A famously outspoken introvert. For her millions of fans, and the few unacquainted, defining rock luminary Alanis Morissette is an exercise in dichotomies and nuance. And though her most formidable traits are seemingly at odds with one another, they are, oddly enough, completely emblematic of all of us: complex, conflicting, and, most importantly, ever evolving. With her striking command of language and profound emotional fluency, the 46-year-old covers an enormous amount of personal ground with listeners.

Montréal, 1978. Alors que survient l'assassinat du parrain calabrais Paolo Violi, nul ne devine l'ampleur de la «machine» mafieuse qui se cache derrière ce meurtre. Pour le clan adverse des Siciliens, c'est le début d'une épopée qui va durer plus de 30 ans. Après avoir échappé à la justice pendant des décennies, les chefs mafieux Nicolò et Vito Rizzuto sont arrêtés et condamnés au milieu des années 2000, l'un à Montréal et l'autre aux États-Unis. Or, dans le cœur du clan sicilien, frappé d'une série de meurtres stratégiques, la débandade continue.

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both a memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It offers a piercing, electrifying examination of the restrictive expectations women are issued from birth; shows how hustling to meet those expectations leaves women feeling dissatisfied and lost; and reveals that when we quit abandoning ourselves and instead abandon the world’s expectations of us, we become women who can finally look at ourselves and recognize: There she is.

Sir Michael Caine - perhaps best known as gang leader Charlie Croker in 60s crime caper The Italian Job - tells the stories of remarkable heists and extraordinary robberies from around the world, as remembered by the masterminds, detectives, victims, journalists and witnesses that lived through them. For more than 60 years, Caine has played thieves, criminals, gangsters and the detectives trying to catch them. But there’s Hollywood and then there’s real life... and that’s when things get really interesting.

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency - a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare - poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a US Armed Forces icon and one of the world's top endurance athletes. The only man in history to complete elite training as a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller, he went on to set records in numerous endurance events.

Digging deep into her strengths, her failures, and her losses, Jann Arden brings us an inspiring account of how she has surprised herself, in her 50s, by at last becoming completely her own person. Like many women, it took Jann a long time to realize that trying to be pleasing and likeable and beautiful in the eyes of others was a loser's game. Letting it rip, and damning the consequences, is not only liberating, it's a hell of a lot of fun: "Being the age I am - that so many women are - is just the best time of my life."

Carolyn Pickles retraces the true story of how 11 people came to be brutally cut with a deadly sharp implement, in a spate of attacks that left a town in a state of fear and police mystified about the identity of the attacker. Halifax, West Yorkshire, 1938 and the hunt is on for a razor-wielding attacker, possibly a murderer. The papers name him 'The Halifax Slasher'. A huge reward is offered for leads to his arrest. Vigilante groups form, and innocent men are set upon. Baffled, police argue with each other about how to catch the suspect.

In this award-winning Audible Studios production, Trevor Noah tells his wild coming-of-age tale during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa. It’s a story that begins with his mother throwing him from a moving van to save him from a potentially fatal dispute with gangsters, then follows the budding comedian’s path to self-discovery through episodes both poignant and comical.  

Power is changing. Private corner offices and management by decree are out, as is unquestioned trust in the government and media. These former pillars of traditional power have been replaced by networks of informed citizens who collectively wield more power over their personal lives, employers, and worlds than ever before. So how do you navigate this new landscape and come out on top?  Adam Grant, Wharton organizational psychologist, went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the epicenter of power, and sat down with thought leaders from around the world, to find out.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms.

Since his first performance at the legendary New York nightclub "Catch a Rising Star" as a 21-year-old college student in fall of 1975, Jerry Seinfeld has written his own material and saved everything. "Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old school accordion folders," Seinfeld writes. "So I have everything I thought was worth saving from forty-five years of hacking away at this for all I was worth."

Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster, and racial unrest. Woodward, the number-one international best-selling author of Fear: Trump in the White House, has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency.

It took me a lifetime to have the courage and the clarity to write my memoir. I want to tell the story of the moments - the ups and downs, the triumphs and traumas, the debacles and the dreams - that contributed to the person I am today. This book is composed of my memories, my mishaps, my struggles, my survival, and my songs. Unfiltered. I went deep into my childhood and gave the scared little girl inside of me a big voice. I let the abandoned and ambitious adolescent have her say, and the betrayed and triumphant woman I became tell her side.

Brian Burke is one of the biggest hockey personalities - no, personalities full-stop - in the hockey media landscape. His brashness makes him a magnet for attention, and he does nothing to shy away from it. Most famous for advocating "pugnacity, truculence, testosterone, and belligerence" during his tenure at the helm of the Maple Leafs, Burke has lived and breathed hockey his whole life.

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge.