Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Biographies & Memoirs

Placed on a ventilator for lung failure in 1999, M.K. McDaniel fought for her life in a drug-induced coma for three weeks. Misfit in Hell to Heaven Expat is based on a story of M.K.’s experiences before, during, and after a dark near-death experience. Her family waited and prayed, totally unaware of the horrors M.K. was bravely facing and miserably enduring in a seemingly eternal hell, culminating in her eventual glimpse of heaven and chat with her deceased fiancé.

Written in 1860 in the language of the day by William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom tells the story of a husband and wife's plight to escape slavery in 1848 Georgia. Unlike many slaves who escaped in the dead of night chased by slave hunters and bloodhounds, the Crafts traveled in first-class trains, dined with a steamboat captain, and stayed in the best hotels during their escape to Philadelphia and freedom. Ellen, who was nearly white, disguised herself as a young male cotton planter traveling with his slave, William.

At the end of summer 1839, the light changing and autumn in the air, Henry David Thoreau and his brother John clambered into their 15-foot-long homemade boat on an adventure north. They traveled the rivers from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire. Henry was two years out of Harvard, and his brother John was a few years older. They wound their way up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by day and camped along the shores at night.

Only two people were in a position to experience all the events leading up to the first flight of a viable airplane, and here in three short essays they report how it came about.The idea of powered flight was so new that there were not even accepted methods of measuring the forces at play on a machine in-flight.

US president from 1901 to 1909, an American politician, statesman, soldier, conservationist, naturalist, acclaimed historian … and a lover of books. This is an insight into Roosevelt’s reading interests and ideas about selecting reading material.

Sarah Merriman is just like any other urbane young woman in her twenties... She has a job in a Central London hotel, a boyfriend, commutes to work on the Tube, eats out, goes to films and theatre... This is all the more remarkable (though not to her) because Sarah was born with Down's Syndrome. Her parents having no prior inkling, it came as a huge shock to them that they now had a daughter with a disability. In 1999 her father Andy wrote a frank and moving book, A Minor Adjustment, about the challenge of her early years. Now he continues with this inspirational story.

Frederick Jackson Turner, American historian during the early twentieth century, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until 1910, and then at Harvard University. He was known primarily for his frontier thesis. He trained many PhDs who went on to become well-known historians. He promoted interdisciplinary and quantitative methods, often with an emphasis on the Midwestern United States.

(Richard Henry Stoddard) began long enough ago to have had his early poetry refused by Poe because it was too good to be the work of an obscure stripling. From 1870 to 1873, he was a confidential clerk to George B. McClellan in the New York dock department, and from 1874 to 1875 city librarian of New York. He was a literary reviewer for the New York World (1860–1870); one of the editors of Vanity Fair; editor of The Aldine (1869–1879), and literary editor of the Mail and the Mail and Express (1880–1903).

Mary Wollstonecraft is the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. She has been called Britain’s first feminist. Her daughter Mary Shelley is the author of the novel Frankenstein (1818). This biography was written by Elizabeth Robin Pennell. It was her first book, written before she was thirty. She was married that year to illustrator and artist Joseph Pennell.

Cathy Waterhouse is a farmer and praise be to DNA, a woman. In 2005, aged 38 and in dire financial straits, she spent a year as the world's most disastrously qualified escort, in order to buy a new Hereford bull and reduce the enormous overdraft which her sheep were, in the main, responsible for. It was a terrifying decision for a country girl whose raunchiest moment was giving the local farmer's son a hand job in his milking parlour.

Evil doers and thieves beware! The Pinkerton Detective Agency is on your tail. From the archives of the world's most successful agency come tales of daring heists and stories of the brave men who tracked down the bad guys. Train robbers, safe crackers, grifters, and murderers—all brought to justice by Pinkerton Detectives.

In his book, published in 1906, Harry Houdini informs and amuses his audiences with stories and interviews "exposing" the life of criminals. Always the showman, his intentions are to amuse, while safeguarding the public and possibly deterring those who may be tempted into a life of crime.

Despite attempts to suppress its publication and the advertising ban placed on it, The President’s Daughter enjoyed bestseller rankings after its eventual publication in 1927. Written so that Britton could raise enough funds to support her (and Harding’s) daughter and thus argue for the true legitimacy of children born out of wedlock, this tell-all about the affair between a starry-eyed girl and the man who would eventually become the twenty-ninth president of the United States is still a fascinating and relevant story in the context of the Me Too era.

Originally published in 1905, Daughters of the Puritans captures the lives of seven extraordinary American women from the New England area, whose influential writings and work in the nineteenth century transformed the nation.

In 1971, Elizabeth Garber’s domineering father announced he was sending his “problem children”—seventeen-year-old bookish Elizabeth and her fourteen-year-old brother Woodie—to a school on a sailing ship, in order to “shape up and learn to work.” Sailing at the Edge of Disaster chronicles Garber’s adventures, along with the fifty teen misfits and their teacher chaperones aboard the sailing school housed on a once-magnificent yacht formerly owned by General Post heiress, socialite, and philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Upton Sinclair, the greatest of the muckraking journalists, author of "The Jungle" and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, decided to run for Governor of California in 1934. It was the depths of the Great Depression in America and around the world. He changed his party registration to Democratic, ran for, and won the nomination. In this book, Sinclair lays out step by step what he proposes to do to lift the working men and women of California out of the poverty and unemployment which had gripped the state, the nation, and the world.

In a gathering of stories, Many Have Pictures Like This chronicles a family’s history and passing, from Armenian villages before WWI to the Armenian Genocide, to Romania, and finally to the United States. Much is fictionalized, all is based on truth, and the author asks throughout: What is owed to one’s dead? Sometimes serious, sometimes playful, and with lessons learned from salmon and ravens in the author’s attempt to flee his family’s story, this collection is a mythology of people with experiences not entirely unique in the history of the world, though they were.

Despite living a short life, and having a relatively small output, John Keats (1795-1821) has become one of the most celebrated English poets. This brief biography covers the important events of his life and provides a charming portrait of one of the most appealing and tragic figures of English literature.

Asoka, who reigned from 268 to 232 BC, was the most famous emperor of the Maurya Dynasty, which was the ruling clan of the Indian subcontinent from 321 BC to 185 BC. He was one of the most famous early converts to Buddhism and became one of its greatest evangelists. Today Asoka has a twofold interest for us: political and religious. The illustrious member of the great dynasty, of which he was the most celebrated representative, has left indelible traces of its achievements in Indian history. Moreover, he was the leader of a spiritual movement that spread rapidly throughout the East.

Thomas Love Peacock is today remembered as the author of seven satirical novels which many regard merely as literary curiosities. However, he was also a man of considerable learning, a skilled poet, and an astute literary critic. This collection includes Recollections of Thomas Love Peacock, an affectionate reminiscence by Sir Edward Strachey; Some Recollections of Childhood, a window into Peacock's early youth; "Four Ages of Poetry", in which he pokes fun at his contemporaries; and "The Last Day of Windsor Forest", an old man's recollection of a memorable episode.