Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Biographies & Memoirs

As a neurodivergent child in a hundred-year-old house, Zaji Cox collects grammar books, second-hand toys, and sightings of feral cats. She dances and cartwheels through self-discovery and doubt, guided by her big sister and their devoted single mother. Through short essays that evoke the abundant imagination of childhood, Plums for Months explores the challenges of growing up mixed race and low-income on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.

Stevie Salas was one of many boys coming of age in the 1980s—when the American dream was rock superstardom. As lead guitarist for a San Diego band, Salas played backyard parties and school dances and even scored the music for the cult classic Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. When he auditioned for Rod Stewart—where he was the youngest band member by a decade—Salas’s life truly hit a turning point.

Our Flag Was Still There details the improbable two-hundred-year journey of the original Star-Spangled Banner—from Fort McHenry in 1814, when Francis Scott Key first saw it, to the Smithsonian—and the enduring family who defended, kept, hid, and ultimately donated the most famous flag in American history. Tom McMillan tells a story as no one has before. Digging deep into the archives of Fort McHenry and the Smithsonian, McMillan follows the flag on an often-perilous journey through three centuries.

Seeing every challenge as an opportunity for growth, Dr. Ichak Adizes moved beyond a childhood marked by imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp and immigration to an unfamiliar country to discover the benefits of opening his heart. Rejecting isolation and fear, he became a renowned thought leader who advises companies and governments worldwide on structuring thriving organizations around a culture of trust and respect. Dr. Adizes’s personal story is more than a string of external events that propelled him through adversity after adversity to become the compassionate person he is today.

Beginning with his childhood growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood, Ramsey Lewis recounts his memories of the music in his parents’ church and his early piano lessons. As he learned classical technique, Lewis also absorbed countless jazz records and heard gospel music weekly, finally becoming a performer himself in his teenage years. With his coauthor and collaborator, Aaron Cohen, Lewis describes his early steps in jazz from joining the Clefs in the ’50s, to eventually establishing the Ramsey Lewis Trio. This memoir provides an evocative tour of Lewis’s life.

Seduced by the Light is the first and only biography of Mina Miller Edison, the wife of Thomas Edison, the woman who created and shaped the myth of one of the most seminal figures in America’s history. The Thomas Edison we think we know was essentially created by Mina Miller Edison. Exhaustively researched by author Alexandra Rimer, this account draws on unprecedented access to Edison family diaries, memoirs, and letters to look below the surface of the Edison family during the Gilded Age from the little-known perspective of this female protagonist.

John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness and vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching, and writing books, he found himself “crippled and dependent” and in search of care.

Told through many notes in four books and an epilogue, Sherwood Anderson’s memoir of Midwestern life and culture journeys through the author’s own imaginative world and through the world of facts. From Anderson’s childhood to his attempt to ingratiate himself with New York’s literary elite, A Story Teller’s Story is a unique look into the psyche of an American icon.

Martin Duberman, one of the LGBTQ+ community’s maverick thinkers and historians, looks back on ninety years of life, his history in the movement, and what he’s learned. In the early sixties, Martin Duberman published a path-breaking article defending the Abolitionists against the then-standard view of them as “misguided fanatics.” In 1964, his documentary play, In White America, which reread the history of racist oppression in this country, toured the country—most notably during Freedom Summer—and became an international hit.

In this thoughtful coming-of-age memoir, a young sociologist reflects on her Moroccan immigrant parents, their journey to France, and how growing up an outsider shaped her identity. Imbued with tenderness for her family and a critical view of the challenges facing French North African immigrants, Kaoutar Harchi’s probing account illustrates the deeply personal effects of political issues. Mixed with happy memories of her childhood home in eastern France are ever-present reminders of the dangers from which her parents sought to shield her.

The disappearance of a twenty-one-year-old woman from a Massachusetts suburb became one of the most discussed crimes of the twentieth century.

Anna May Wong remains one of Hollywood’s best-known Chinese American actors. Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro, and Warner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant’s difficult path through the prejudices of American culture. In a narrative that recalls the pathos of life in LA's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood’s pleasure palaces, Graham Russell Gao Hodges recovers the life of a Hollywood legend.

After author Jess Keefe ended things with her long-term boyfriend, she moved in with her brother in hopes that family could help her not only heal from the break-up but also evolve into a healthy adult. But that fantasy ended when Matt’s heroin addiction came roaring back after lying dormant for years, leading to a fatal overdose one October night. Thirty-Thousand Steps is a powerful and transformative memoir that interweaves the author’s obsessive training to becoming a distance runner, along with her focused research into the science of addiction in the shadow of grief.

Sara has invested years dutifully climbing the corporate ladder to become head of public relations at a major financial-services company, but she can’t shake the feeling that she’s not where she belongs. When her latest boss, a wine-guzzling, drama-loving diva, finally drives her to the brink, Sara seeks sanctuary in yoga-teacher training—only to encounter an entirely different assortment of craziness and calamity. Where in the OM Am I? chronicles one woman’s journey from the fast-paced, cutthroat corporate world to the slow-paced world of yoga.

As manic teens in the ’90s punk scene, Gogo Germaine and her girl gang of delinquents engage in a vivid spectrum of misbehavior—from truancy to tattoos to trespassing. Here, in the underbelly of adolescence, music is God and the rest is a rush of nihilism. Gogo and her friends stumble through sound and fury into questionable firsts at varying degrees of sobriety. Many of us blunder through that black hole. It is a point of universal convergence, manifested by divergent experiences. Gogo’s rebellion may look different from yours, but the visceral highs and lows will be familiar.

When Lt. Commander Bobby Thompson surfaced in Tampa in 1998, it was as if he had fallen from the sky, providing no hint of his past life. Eleven years later, St. Petersburg Times investigative reporter Jeff Testerman visited the rundown duplex Thompson used as his home and the epicenter of his sixty-thousand-member charity, the US Navy Veterans Association. But something was amiss. Thompson’s charity’s addresses were just maildrops, his members nonexistent, and his past a black hole.

Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, ideal American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first of the modern First Ladies. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours. Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. But the story of Jackie’s reinvention has been culturally erased. In Finding Jackie, author Oline Eaton pieces it back together.

Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are James Alan McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable. Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside contemporaries such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, as this collection amply proves.

Americans have lost faith in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution they once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency. Thomas Baker spent many years with the FBI and is deeply troubled by this loss of faith. Specific lapses have come to light and each is thoroughly discussed in this book: Why did they happen? What changed? The answer begins days after the 9/11 attacks when the FBI underwent a significant change in culture.

Jeremy Schreiber was on top of the world—athletic, newly married, successful. And then something went terribly wrong. In this moving memoir, he shares his journey after he received a terrifying diagnosis: ALS. As the devastating disease robbed him of movement and speech, he was abandoned by his wife and betrayed by a society that shuns people with disabilities. But it’s not all doom and gloom. He found love, support, and a powerful purpose. While fighting for his independence and then for his life, Jeremy gave his all to the ALS and disability communities.