Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Biographies & Memoirs

From the front lines in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and other conflict zones to the base of the burning Twin Towers on 9/11 to the eye of countless hurricanes, Rick Leventhal chronicles some of the most amazing stories he’s covered in his thirty-five years as a news reporter, anchor, and Senior Correspondent—with some life lessons thrown in along the way.

Recounts the author's experiences as a black man and aviator, detailing his efforts at building his own experimental aircraft, the loss of both his legs in the crash of a prototype, his later career as an aerospace research engineer, and more.

Major Megan McClung is the first female United States Naval Academy graduate to be killed in action since the school’s 1845 founding and the highest-ranking female U.S. Marine Corps officer to die during the Iraq war. Be Bold is Megan’s inspirational story of defying steep odds, making the ultimate sacrifice and paving the way for a new era of women at war.

And the Rest Is History takes listeners on a traveling circus from Paris to Beirut, Baghdad, and beyond, introducing them to spies and terrorists, arms dealers and crooks, and along the way reveals a few surprises about the secret underbelly of recent history you won’t find in WikiLeaks. This book pinpoints precisely when the era of “fake news” actually began in America, and will change the way you think about journalism and journalists.

In Nothing Like a Dame, theater journalist Eddie Shapiro opens a jewelry box full of glittering surprises, through in-depth conversations with twenty leading women of Broadway. He carefully selected Tony Award-winning stars who have spent the majority of their careers in theater, leaving aside those who have moved on or occasionally drop back in. The women he interviewed spent endless hours with him, discussing their careers, offering insights into the iconic shows, changes on Broadway over the last century, and the art (and thrill) of taking the stage night after night.

Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, The Déjà Vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir. As Civil considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals, race at the movies, black feminist legacies, and more, she reflects on her personal losses and desires, speculates on black time, and dreams into expansive black life.

In life, everyone starts from somewhere. Some may start at the starting line while others begin in the parking lot. Her journey began on the south side of the tracks and took her up on Rodeo Drive in the winter and 5th Ave in the spring. Attending a different school every forces you to be independent. It turns all the attention—good or bad—on you. You learn to read the room, feeling for temperatures both cold and hot. You accept there will be fights, bullying, and a small chance of seeing them again. It’s both liberating while simultaneously scary. So you adapt.

Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds.

The second of a two-volume biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter by historian E. Stanly Godbold, Jr., this book offers a comprehensive account of the professional and personal lives of the powerful couple who have worked together as reformers in Georgia, President and First Lady of the United States, and founders of the Carter Center to promote international health, conflict resolution, and democracy.

Within the stoned soul picnic of Black music icons in the ’60s and ’70s, only one could bill himself without a blush as Moses, demanding liberation for Black men with his notions of life and self—Isaac Lee Hayes Jr., the beautifully sheen, shaded, and chain-spangled acolyte of cool, whose high-toned “lounge music” and proto-rap was soul’s highest order—heard on twenty-two albums and selling millions of records.

Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For twenty years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. Diamonds and Deadlines reveals the unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “empress of journalism”.

Suppose one day, your son or husband, while serving in the military or working as a journalist, is taken hostage by a terrorist group - and you have no idea whether your loved one is dead or alive. It’s a nightmare scenario. Here for the first time is the story of Ory Slonim, the one man in Israel who, for more than two decades, was known as the “door knocker.” He had been a private Israeli lawyer when he was asked to undertake, on behalf of the Israeli government, secret negotiations to find out the whereabouts of Israeli soldiers who were taken alive.

Like all great dreamers and planners, Marcus Garvey dreamed and planned ahead of his time and his peoples' ability to understand the significance of his life's work. A set of circumstances, mostly created by the world colonial powers, crushed this dreamer, but not his dreams. Due to persistence and years of sacrifice of Mrs. Amy Jacques Garvey, widow of Marcus Garvey, a large body of work by and about this great nationalist leader has been preserved and can be made available to a new generation of Black people who have the power to turn his dreams into realities.

The urgent need to honor the 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence came to Douglas MacKinnon, fittingly enough, on the Fourth of July. While doing research for a column meant to remind the American people of that date’s critical importance, he came across example after example of those from the left and the far left—be they in the mainstream media, activists, or anarchists—calling for not only the “canceling” of the Fourth of July, but the continued smearing, censorship, and canceling of our Founding Fathers.

I would talk to the president before the chief of staff even saw the president in the morning. I walked into work, and I was already in the Oval Office talking to President Trump. It was rarely medical, to be honest with you; it was whatever was going on in the news. I’d be the first person he’d see in the morning. The president was completing tasks two to three hours before anybody else showed up in the West Wing to work. He’d get up at five o’clock in the morning and would be watching TV, tweeting, making phone calls, and doing all types of other tasks.

There was no reason to bet on Bruce Johnson, given where he started out. Poor, Black, and raised by a single mother who had a secret. He was the child she hid in plain view from the rest of her family. As an adult, he set out to just make a living - to do better than Black folks who tried their best before, while making his Momma and Grandmomma proud. His journey to becoming a successful TV journalist nearly killed him, but he refused to treat himself as a victim. His role was to use his voice and example to pull others out of deep waters.

When civil rights leader Hosea Lorenzo Williams died in 2000, US Congressman John Lewis said of him, "Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America. Through his actions, he helped liberate all of us."

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America—the right to cast a ballot—in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population. And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice.

In 2016, Lawrence Jackson accepted a new job in Baltimore, searched for schools for his sons, and bought a house. It would all be unremarkable but for the fact that he had grown up in West Baltimore and now found himself teaching at Johns Hopkins, whose vexed relationship to its neighborhood, to the city and its history, provides fodder for this captivating memoir in essays.

Brainstorm is an amazing five-year probe into the mysterious death of beloved movie star Natalie Wood by a real-life criminal law authority who determinedly pursued the truth in the face of Los Angeles County officials hell-bent on keeping it buried forever. Brainstorm: An Investigation of the Mysterious Death of Film Star Natalie Wood is the first-person account of Sam Perroni’s probing investigation of the actress’s death.