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

This first complete biography of poet and writer Margaret Walker (1915-98) offers a comprehensive close reading of a pillar in American culture for a majority of the 20th century. Without defining herself as a radical or even a feminist, Walker followed the precepts of both. She was an artist of tradition and social change, a public intellectual and institution builder. Among the first to recognize the impact of black women in literature, Walker became a chief architect of what many have called the new Black South Renaissance.

In 1898, a group of schoolboys in Bridgeport, Connecticut, discovered gruesome packages under a bridge holding the dismembered remains of a young woman. Finding that the dead woman had just undergone an abortion, prosecutors raced to establish her identity and fix blame for her death. Suspicion fell on Nancy Guilford, half of a married pair of “doctors” well known to police throughout New England. A fascinated public followed the suspect’s flight from justice, as many rooted for the fugitive.

Killed in a car crash when Laura was twenty-five, Mick seemed lost forever. My Father’s List is the story of how one woman—with the help of family, friends, and even strangers—found the courage to go after her own dreams after realizing those of a beloved yet mysterious man. This is a story about secrets—and the freedom we feel when we learn to trust again: in life, in love, and in a father’s lessons on how to fully live.

Jane Smiley has long been acclaimed as one of America’s preeminent novelists. Less known is her nonfiction, her steady and penetrating essays on some of the aesthetic and cultural issues that mark any serious engagement with reading and writing. Her approach is both enthusiastic and meticulous, always quick to dive beneath surface-level interpretations of authors and their work. This volume of nonfiction begins with a personal introduction that traces Smiley’s migration from Missouri to California a quarter-century ago.

Mark H. Brezinski is a forty-five-year veteran of the dynamic restaurant industry. A graduate of the famed School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, Mark went on to create or co-create multiple nationally acclaimed restaurant companies. His experiences span the globe in search of culinary discoveries and inspirations with industry icons like the late Norman Brinker, Paul Fleming, Phil Romano, and chefs Michael Mina and Mark Miller. This book takes you to all of these places and more, while telling behind-the-scenes stories.

In 2015 and 2016, Baltimore was reeling after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the protests that followed. In the midst of this unrest, the Baltimore Police Department's Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) roamed the city, robbing people, selling drugs and guns back onto the same streets they were supposed to be policing, and dividing the loot and profit among themselves. Created to trace guns back to the criminals responsible for Baltimore's high crime rates, instead, on March 1, 2017, all members of the GTTF were arrested on federal racketeering charges.

August 1943. As World War II consumes much of the globe, Americans at home have no idea the extent of the horror their servicemen face. What they also don’t know is that Eleanor Roosevelt has boarded a military transport plane, heading to the Pacific theater on a mission to discover and report first hand accounts of the war. Anticipating familiar backlash from those who would prefer a prim and proper First Lady, as well as to help ensure her safety, Eleanor and the rest of the White House keep the journey a closely guarded secret.

Dr. Sartor wrote an inspiring first-person account of how he treated more than 1,000 patients—and by his reckoning, lost only five—which lay forgotten in a lockbox of family artifacts until it was discovered decades later by his granddaughter, Beth Obermeyer, a journalist and author of three previous books. Beth knew her grandfather through her teenage years and grew up absorbing family stories. Based upon Dr. Sartor’s memoir and her years of research, she vividly reconstructs his life from childhood in Luxembourg to medical school in Chicago, courtship and marriage.

A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the United Nations, he was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten. In The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Kal Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in history.

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.

I Always Knew is an intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud’s life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991. In candid detail, Chase-Riboud tells her mother about her life in Europe, her work as an artist, her romances, and her journeys around the world, from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia.

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.

Growing up on welfare, food stamps, and Greyhound buses, Holly Thompson Rehder quit school at fifteen to help take care of her mother and younger sister after a devastating car accident. Getting married and pregnant soon thereafter, Holly decided that the life she had been born into was not what she intended to give her child. Two decades later she was a successful businesswoman. And today, she is a rising political star who serves as an inspiration to young women across the state of Missouri—and indeed, the entire nation—all while never forgetting where she came from.

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.

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.