Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Biographies & Memoirs

Van Gogh is a vivid portrait of the great Impressionist painter that traces his life from the Netherlands, where he was born into a family of art dealers, through his years in England, the Hague, and Paris, to his final home in Arles, where he discovered the luminous style of his late paintings before his suicide at the age of thirty-seven.

The Gilded Razor is the true story of a double life. By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out.

Everyone loves a good love story. And we all love stories about how the love started and blossomed. This fun new book about dating, romance, love, and marriage, will make you laugh and make you cry, and is guaranteed to inspire you to renew that search for your soul mate or open your heart a little more. Read about how couples met, when “they knew”, good and bad dates, proposals, maintaining the relationship, second chances, and all the other ups and downs of love, romance, and marriage.

It's the foundation of any enduring relationship between friends, lovers, spouses, and families. But when trust is placed in those who are not what they seem, the results can be deadly. Ann Rule, who famously chronicled her own shocking experience of unknowingly befriending a sociopath in The Stranger Beside Me, offers a riveting, all-new collection from her true-crime files, with the lethally shattered bonds of trust at the core of each blood-soaked account.

Real-life murder. Real-life mystery. In some murder cases, the truth behind the most tragic of crimes crystallizes with relative ease. Not so with these fascinating accounts drawn from the personal files of Ann Rule, America's #1 bestselling true-crime writer. What happens when the case itself becomes an intractable puzzle, when clues are shrouded in smoke and mirrors, and when criminals skillfully evade law enforcement in a maddening cat-and-mouse chase?

Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration offers an unusual and irresistible look at her life and her myriad interests and accomplishments. Created by the people who know her best - her longtime friends Marcia Ann Gillespie and Richard A. Long, and her niece, Rosa Johnson Butler - it captures Angelou at home, at work, and in the public eye.

The Behind the scenes Story of the network that Shaped a generation. SLIMED! is the first oral history to chronicle the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of Nickelodeon, the first kids’ network. Beginning as a DIY start-up in the late seventies, the network forged ahead through the early eighties with a tiny band of young artists and filmmakers, transforming itself into a cultural force in the late eighties and nineties that would change everything about cable television, television in general, animation, and children’s entertainment.

When Sergeant Charlie McCabe returns from fighting in Afghanistan, she hopes to leave the war behind. Instead, she comes home to a father whose gambling has put him in deep trouble with a violent loan shark. She finds work as a professional bodyguard, but to save her father, she needs to get serious cash together fast. However, her father isn’t the only one who needs saving. When Charlie’s first client - a wealthy executive with a shady past - narrowly escapes a bomb plot, Charlie’s investigation leads her into the heart of Boston’s criminal underworld.

Do you know me?, the email began, sparking tremors of fear that turned into a full quake of panic when William Dameron discovered that his selfie had been stolen by strangers. On social networks and dating sites, his image and identity - a forty-year-old straight white male - had been used to hook countless women into believing in lies of love and romance.

Everyone wants to escape their boring, stagnant lives full of inertia and regret. But so few people actually have the bravery to run - run away from everything and selflessly seek out personal fulfillment on the other side of the world where they don’t understand anything and won’t be expected to. The world is full of cowards. Tim Anderson was pushing 30 and working a string of dead-end jobs when he made the spontaneous decision to pack his bags and move to Japan.

Unwanted and neglected from birth, Barbara Graham had to overcome the odds just to survive. Her beauty was both a blessing and a curse—offering her too many options of all the wrong kind. Her innate sensitivity left her vulnerable to the harsh realities of the street, where she was left to fend for herself before she reached double digits. Her record of petty crimes spoke to a life that constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. But in 1953, a catastrophic twist of fate would catapult her out of obscurity and into the headlines.

Evelyn Chang and her husband were vacationing in the Philippines when they were ambushed by terrorists. Evelyn’s husband was killed. She was kidnapped and disappeared into the lawless netherworld of the Sulu Archipelago. There was no hope of a rescue. Former Green Beret Gene Yu was five years out of the military, unemployed, and struggling with his transition back to the real world when Evelyn’s family asked for help. His improbable mission: infiltrate one of the most dangerous corners of the world and get her back. Alone.

Born and raised in Hawai‘i by a father whose ancestors are indigenous to the land and a mother from the American South, Jessica Machado wrestles with what it means to be “local.” Feeling separate from the history and tenets of Hawaiian culture that have been buried under the continental imports of malls and MTV, Jessica often sees her homeland reflected back to her from the tourist perspective—as an uncomplicated paradise. Her existence, however, feels far from that ideal. Balancing her parents’ divorce, an ailing mother, and growing anxiety, Jessica rebels.

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds.

Brilliantly wresting meaning from the historical, social and religious strands of his story, Carroll illuminates the Church's transformation from reactionary monolith to an institution in which the deepest aspects of faith are being called into question. Carroll reveals his own story--as a Catholic boy in the 1940s and '50s, as a seminarian and priest in the crucible of the 1960s and early '70s, and as a committed but questioning Catholic today--with an emotional impact reminiscent of his An American Requiem.

As America's foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life - on the airwaves and in print - for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics.

In 1981, Elizabeth Glaser received blood transfusions following the birth of her daughter Ariel. Then, in 1986, two years after her second child, Jake, was born, tests showed that Ariel had AIDS, contracted through breast-feeding.

This engaging memoir reveals the true story of the Search for ExtraterrestrialIntelligence (SETI), and discloses what we may very soon discover. Chronicling the program’s history with insight and humor, SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak assures us that if there is sentient life in the universe, we are within decades of picking up its signal.

Published in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising on June 28, 1969, Indecent Advances investigates how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them and displayed little compassion for the violence they endured. Polchin shows, with masterful insight, how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall.

In this candid oral history of a presidential tenure, author Brian Abrams reveals the behind-the-scenes stories that illuminate the eight years of the Obama White House through more than one hundred exclusive interviews. Among those given a voice in this extraordinary account are Obama’s cabinet secretaries; his teams of speechwriters, legal advisers, and campaign strategists; as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who fought for or against his agenda. They recall the early struggles of an idealistic outsider candidate and speak openly about the exacting work that led to cornerstone legislation.