Art Biography

Let the world's funniest sportsman tickle your funny bone with quirky homespun stories and whimsical perspectives on life. Patrick F. McManus gently pokes fun at the oddities of sacred institutions like friendship, marriage, and even hunting and fishing. Soon his crazy theories start making sense, and you know you've crossed the border into McManus country, where life is a little lighter - and much more amusing.

Michael Palin's diaries begin when he was newly married and struggling to make a name for himself in the world of television comedy. But Monty Python was just around the corner...Enjoying an unlikely cult status early on, the Pythons then proceeded to tour the USA and Canada. As their popularity grew, so Palin relates how the group went their separate ways, later to re-form for stage shows and the celebrated films The Holy Grail and Life of Brian.

Nora Ephron was one of the most popular, accomplished, and beloved writers in American journalism and film. Nora Ephron: A Biography is the first biography of the Manhattan-born girl who forged a path of her own, earning accolades and adoration from critics and fans alike. Author Kristin Marguerite Doidge explores the tremendous successes and disappointing failures Ephron sustained in her career and examines the private life she tried to keep in balance with her insatiable ambition.

Small acts of courage matter. Sometimes, they change the world. Our history books are filled with the stories of those who fought for democracy and freedom—for idealism itself—against all odds, from Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. These iconic struggles for social change illustrate the importance of engagement and activism, and offer a template for the battles we are fighting today. But using the right words is often easier than taking action; action can be hard, and costly.

Razzle Dazzle is a provocative, no-holds-barred narrative account of the people, money, and power that reinvented an iconic quarter of New York City, turning its gritty back alleys and sex shops into the glitzy, dazzling Great White Way - and bringing a crippled New York from the brink of bankruptcy to its glittering glory.

When 11-year-old James Renner fell in love with Amy Mihaljevic, the missing girl seen on posters all over his neighborhood, it was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with true crime. That obsession led James to a successful career as an investigative journalist. It also gave him PTSD. In 2011 James began researching the strange disappearance of Maura Murray, a UMass student who went missing after wrecking her car in rural New Hampshire in 2004.

In E. B. White on Dogs, his granddaughter and manager of his literary estate, Martha White, has compiled the best and funniest of her grandfather's essays, poems, and letters depicting over a dozen of his various canine companions. Included here are favorite essays such as "Two Letters, Both Open", "Bedfellows", and many others, as well as some of White's little-known notes and comment pieces covering dog shows, sled dog races, and the trials and tribulations of city canines.

In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.

Just what was it about the Grateful Dead that made them rock and roll's most beloved band? In Deadheads, those with the real story, who were there and are still listening to the music, explain it all. Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow talks about his lifelong friendship with Dead guitarist Bob Weir. Cajun chef Rick Begneaud shares his memories of feeding the Dead. John Popper of Blues Traveler recalls playing with the Dead at Bill Graham's memorial tribute .

A Recorded Books Audio Original production of songs and stories performed by Dolly herself, Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics goes beyond the glitz, glamour, and rhinestones to the warmth, heart, and soul of a treasured pop-culture icon.

Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft. With the help of the "muckraking" press, Roosevelt had wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses, and corrupting money brokers. Roosevelt led a revolution that he bequeathed to Taft only to see it compromised as Taft surrendered to money men and big business. The rupture led Roosevelt to run against Taft for president, an ultimately futile race that gave power away to the Democrats.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.

When Ann Woodward shot her husband, banking heir Billy Woodward, in the middle of the night in 1955, her life changed forever. Though she claimed she thought he was a prowler, few believed the woman who had risen from charismatic showgirl to popular socialite. Everyone had something to say about the scorching scandal afflicting one of the most rich and famous families of New York City, but no one was more obsessed with the tale than Truman Capote.

Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, recalls the golden age of prewar Europe - its seeming permanence, its promise and its devastating fall with the onset of two world wars. Zweig's passionate, evocative prose paints a stunning portrait of an era that danced brilliantly on the brink of extinction. It is an unusually humane account of Europe from the closing years of the 19th century through to World War II, seen through the eyes of one of the most famous writers of his era.

The famous journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich documents his front row seat at the pivotal events leading up to World War II. In the second of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer tells the story of his own eventful life, detailing the most notable moments of his career as a journalist stationed in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. Shirer was there while Hitler celebrated his new domination of Germany, unleashed the Blitzkrieg on Poland, and began the conflict that would come to be known as World War II.

Listen as Frank tells in his own inimitable voice his story of how at the age of 19 he traveled from Limerick to New York in pursuit of the American dream. Despite the abundance of unsolicited advice he gets to "join the cops" and "stick to his own kind", Frank knows that he should educate himself and somehow rise above his circumstances.

From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.

Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a sweeping critical analysis of Western colonialism, its foundational beliefs in militarism, patriarchy, Christianity, and white supremacy; and its destructive impact on the nations of Southeast Asia and, ultimately, America. Valentine focuses on the “dark arts” of empire: the black bag of CIA covert operations, including bribery, right-wing coups, assassinations, disinformation, and intimate relationships with drug, sex, and artifact traffickers.

Charlamagne Tha God - the self-proclaimed "Prince of Pissing People Off", co-host of Power 105.1's The Breakfast Club, and "hip-hop's Howard Stern" - shares his unlikely success story as well as how embracing one's truths is a fundamental key to success and happiness.

Without Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen’s hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen’s most important record—the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind it, but also the man himself.