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

Alexandra Fuller won worldwide attention, popular acclaim, and critical accolades for her memoir of her childhood in Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. This engaging follow-up explores Fuller’s parents’ childhoods and charts the trajectories of their lives through all the British couple’s experiences in war-torn Africa. With the same sharply etched narrative that has earned the author such immense praise, Fuller expands on and offers new insights into her family’s remarkable trials and successes.

Everyone has a story, and helping people tell their stories has been Nancy Slonim Aronie’s life mission. Building on her acclaimed Memoir as Medicine, this new guide tackles the short personal essay. With warmth and humor, Nancy provides prompts, inspiration, and hard-won wisdom to empower you to write an unforgettable narrative. You’ll learn to begin with an irresistible hook (“kill ’em with the first line”) and employ compelling direct quotes, drama, vulnerability, universal themes, and self-reflection to get readers into your corner.

In this compelling biography, McPherson follows Abraham Lincoln from his early frontier days to his turbulent years in the White House. This concise yet comprehensive account reveals why Lincoln still remains a quintessential American icon.

A chronicle of the divergent journeys of a father, who fled post-war Vietnam on a small boat to find refuge in the United States, and his American-born daughter, who ventures to Vietnam as an adult, capturing the stark contrast between their perspectives on their shared homeland, as they search for common ground and a path toward mutual healing.

When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "Lewis Carroll", Ayelet Waldman is at a low point. Her mood storms have become intolerably severe; she has tried nearly every medication possible; her husband and children are suffering with her. So she opens the vial, places two drops on her tongue, and joins the ranks of an underground but increasingly vocal group of scientists and civilians successfully using therapeutic microdoses of LSD.

Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein presents a concise and nuanced account of Einstein's life and work embedded in his intellectual and social contexts. His life is interconnected with so many of the important political and intellectual movements of his era—Zionism, pacifism, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, civil rights, McCarthyism, the League of Nations, and substantial discoveries in epochal theories of special relativity and quantum theory.

Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenona mind-changer. Widely consumed by the general public as well as by educators, this influential book laid out Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. In his new book, A Synthesizing Mind, Gardner reflects on his intellectual development and his groundbreaking work, tracing his evolution from bookish child to eager college student to disengaged graduate student to Harvard professor.

The best-selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters tells the story of a wild encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig, and a British warship in the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812. Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard abandoned in the Falklands for eighteen months.

Raised in Miami and the daughter of Cuban refugees, Crucet examines the political and personal contours of American identity and the physical places where those contours find themselves smashed: be it a rodeo town in Nebraska, a university campus in upstate New York, or Disney World in Florida. Crucet illuminates how she came to see her exclusion from aspects of the theoretical American Dream, despite her family's attempts to fit in with white American culture - beginning with their ill-fated plan to name her after the winner of the Miss America pageant.

"If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch, it must be the sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person," wrote Mark Twain, and now you can share in that experience. The beloved American humorist spent seven years on a "pleasure trip" through the untamed wilderness of Nevada. Twain intended to spend three months touring silver mines, but the lure of rough terrain and comfortable clothes proved irresistible - as will this vibrant travelogue.

Powerful, haunting, and unforgettable, this remarkable gathering of original documents, including never-before-published letters and papers, creates a day-by-day eyewitness account of the monumental collision at Gettysburg, in the words of the commanders, soldiers, politicians, and civilians from both the North and the South who experienced firsthand the changing course of the Civil War. New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian and author Allen C. Guelzo delivers an invaluable and sobering firsthand perspective of the Civil War’s turning point.

In The Paper Garden, celebrated poet Molly Peacock explores the remarkable life of 18th-century British gentlewoman-turned-artist Mary Delany. In the 1770s, at the age of 72, the twice-widowed and nearly broke Delany turned her interest in botany into beautiful paper “mosaick” flowers still revered today.

The Making of Martin Luther takes a provocative look at the intellectual emergence of one of the most original and influential minds of the 16th century. Richard Rex traces how, in a concentrated burst of creative energy in the few years surrounding his excommunication by Pope Leo X in 1521, this lecturer at an obscure German university developed a startling new interpretation of the Christian faith that brought to an end the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe.

Dave Eggers scored a worldwide phenomenon with this memoir that topped national best-seller lists and has since become a staple for summer reading and book clubs. A compelling voice for Generation X, Eggers hererecounts his early 20s, caring for his younger brother after their parents’ unexpected deaths and his endeavors in a variety of media.

Melissa Stockwell has been a restless force of nature from the time she was a little girl speeding around her neighborhood on her bike, to her tumbles and spills as a high-level gymnast and Olympic hopeful, to joining the ROTC in college as an outlet for her patriotism and love of America.

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.

Derek Black was raised to take over the White nationalist movement in the United States. Derek’s father, Don Black, was a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and started Stormfront, the internet’s first White supremacist website—Derek built the kids’ page—and David Duke was a mentor. Racist hatred, though often wrapped up in respectability and American history, was all Derek knew. It was their inheritance, their community, their identity. Then, while in college in 2013, Derek publicly renounced White nationalism and apologized for their actions and the suffering that they had caused.

He pulled off what some deem the crime of the century: skyjacking a commercial jetliner, collecting a ransom of $200,000, parachuting off the aft stairs of the Boeing 727 into the night, and simply disappearing. Since November 1971, “D. B. Cooper”—no one knows his real name or identity—has become a figure of enduring fascination and obsession. The FBI pursued him for over forty years, before closing the case and leaving it unsolved. Unsolved, perhaps, but much admired. D. B. Cooper’s exploit over the skies of the American Northwest has inspired books, films, and endless speculation.

From the outside, Hollywood starlet Lana Turner seemed to have it all—a thriving film career, a beautiful daughter, and the kind of fame and fortune that most people could only dream of. But when the famous femme fatale began dating mobster Johnny Stompanato, thug for the infamous west coast mob boss Mickey Cohen, her personal life became violent and unpredictable. Lana's teenage daughter, Cheryl, watched her beloved mother's life deteriorate as Stompanato's intense jealousy took over.

When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war.