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

Magician and escape artist Harry Houdini profiles his onetime hero, French magician Robert-Houdin, whose name he used as inspiration for his own, and discovers that his former idol's claims and professional accomplishments conceal disturbing realities. Houdini's effort becomes an investigation through England and Europe that also serves as a general history of magic.

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.

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.

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.