Biographies Power

Meggie was a weird teenager. We’re talkin’ so weird that her parents worried about her being too religious. After a divine nudge to preach at the age of 13, she answered the call to full-time ministry as a 16-year-old. She became a paid church staff member a year later, and from 18 to 32, served in the same church. While creating sacred space for others, Meggie forgot to nurture her own. In the rush of ministerial leadership, she allowed many limiting beliefs to hold her back. She searched for validation from others but failed to look within and find that she was already enough.

Larry Krasner spent thirty years learning about America’s carceral system as a civil rights and criminal defense lawyer in Philadelphia, working to get some kind of justice for his clients in a broken system, before deciding that the way to truly transform the system was to get inside of it. So he launched an unlikely campaign to become the district attorney of Philadelphia, a city known for its long line of notorious “tough on crime” DAs who had turned Philly into a city with one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country.

Never has society focused on a mother’s life after her child has been incarcerated until now. In this heart-wrenching memoir, Tosha shares a highly detailed journey of how she propelled through the physical and mental exhaustion of dealing with a dying mother and a prodigal son. She spent endless hours fighting to keep her oldest son, BJ, out of the realm of juvenile delinquency. However, his continued disobedience and criminal conduct resulted in a harsh prison sentencing.

In this engaging and highly accessible compendium for young listeners and aspiring power brokers, Virginia Senator Janet Howell and her daughter-in-law Theresa Howell spotlight the careers of fifty American women in politics - and inspire listeners to make a difference.

David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint.

From the author of the New York Times best sellers First Women and The Residence, an intimate, news-making look at the men who are next in line to the most powerful office in the world - the vice presidents of the modern era - from Richard Nixon to Joe Biden to Mike Pence. In interviews with more than 200 people, Kate Andersen Brower pulls back the curtain and reveals the sometimes cold, sometimes close, and always complicated relationship between our modern presidents and their vice presidents.

Bill Shorten is the man who would be our next prime minister. David Marr is the nation's leading writer of political biography. Marr's Quarterly Essay profiles of Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott ignited firestorms of media coverage and were national best sellers. In Quarterly Essay 59, he turns his enquiring mind toward Bill Shorten. This controversial and brilliant new essay looks at the making of Shorten.

Texas Titans is a story of George Herbert Walker Bush and James Addison Baker, III, two of America's most consequential statesmen of the past 50 years. Two men from opposite areas of the country who found friendship on the tennis courts at the Houston Country Club. Two men who helped transform a world during an era of immense challenges and change. Two men who became - and still are - Texas titans.

Shaking up New York and national politics by becoming the first African American congresswoman and, later, the first Black major-party presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm left an indelible mark as an "unbought and unbossed" firebrand and a leader in politics for meaningful change. Chisholm spent her formative years moving between Barbados and Brooklyn, and the development of her political orientation did not follow the standard narratives of the civil rights or feminist establishments.

Exploring the use of privilege and power by people who identify as White or Black to address the perennial challenge of our time, this book challenges listeners to do the deep introspective work to examine privilege and harness power to fight back against white supremacy. As people from different backgrounds seek to discover ways to eradicate racism while understanding their own biases, When White Supremacy Knocks, Fight Back provides practical guidance that everyone can use to make their voices and actions create the change that they want to see.

From the time their daughter was born, Ketanji Brown’s parents taught her that if she worked hard and believed in herself, she could do anything. As a child, Ketanji focused on her studies and excelled, eventually graduating from Harvard Law School. Years later, in 2016, when she was a federal judge, a seat opened on the United States Supreme Court. Although the timing didn’t work out then, it did in 2022, when President Joe Biden nominated her. At her confirmation, Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black female Supreme Court justice in the United States.

Rosalind Franklin loved science, but when she was young, there weren’t many woman scientists. Still, she persisted in pursuing her dreams, becoming a scientist and playing a key role in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA (what we’re all made up of). Though her male colleagues took credit for her work at the time, we now know just how important her discoveries were to figuring out what our DNA looks like and how it works!

Brave women from diverse backgrounds make the world a better place through their businesses in this inspiring companion to the best-selling Girls Think of Everything by Sibert-winner Catherine Thimmesh and Caldecott Honor winner Melissa Sweet. For fans of Women Who Dared and Women in Science.

The only book-length account of the life of Wendell Scott, the one-time moonshine runner who broke the color barrier in stock-car racing in 1952 and, against all odds, competed for more than 20 years in a sport dominated by Southern Whites.

¿Estás sobreviviendo o vives plenamente? No hay nada excitante en las historias llenas de dolor, incomprensión e injusticia. Pero cuando una persona se puede levantar, contra todo pronóstico, después de haber sufrido eventos traumatizantes, que incluso han comprometido su identidad y su propósito en la vida, la historia triste se convierte en una poderosa herramienta de inspiración y transformación.

In 1964, as a 22-year-old Ohio State graduate with working-class Cleveland roots and a family to support, Len Downie landed an internship with the Washington Post. He would become a pioneering investigative reporter, news editor, foreign correspondent, and managing editor, before succeeding the legendary Ben Bradlee as executive editor.

Ron Archer’s story will inspire you to trust God with the impediments facing you, whether big or small. Born to a biracial teenage mother forced by poverty to become a call girl, he survived an abortion his mother’s pimp forced her to have. Abused by some, bullied by others, and rejected by a stepfather, Ron was a stutterer and a bed-wetter. At age 10, he decided to take his own life. The gun did not fire. Afterward, a schoolteacher and a widowed neighbor stepped in and shared the love of God with him - forever changing his life.

In most lives, there is a moment when we need to rise through our pain, self-doubt, fear, and mistrust and reconnect with who we are meant to be. Fight Song recounts one acclaimed educator’s journey through chaos into meaning and shows listeners how to reawaken connection with themselves and humanity. Kim Bearden is an award-winning educator whose career has spanned three decades.

In this beautifully crafted memoir, best-selling author and business leader Joe Sweeney weaves a remarkable tale of friendship, spirituality, and even some of the mischief that characterizes the unlikely 32-year relationship he enjoyed with a modern-day saint. She had a way about her, he said, and it was unlike anything he had encountered as a lifelong Catholic with honest questions about his faith, spirituality, and the meaning of life. A Light Shines Through Us guides listeners of all faiths, and those claiming no faith, on a journey of spiritual exploration and discovery.

Leonardo da Vinci was a revolutionary thinker, artist, and inventor who has been written about and celebrated for centuries. Lesser known, however, is his revolutionary and empowering portrayal of the modern female centuries before the first women's liberation movements. Before da Vinci, portraits of women in Italy were still, impersonal, and mostly shown in profile. Leonardo pushed the boundaries of female depiction having several of his female subjects, including his Mona Lisa, gaze at the viewer, giving them an authority which was withheld from women at the time.