Biography English Language

Starting on the evening before he begins work as a doctor, this audiobook charts Max Pemberton's touching and funny journey through his first year in the NHS. Progressing from youthful idealism to frank bewilderment, Max realises how little his job is about 'saving people' and how much of his time is taken up by signing forms and trying to figure out all the important things no one has explained yet - for example, the crucial question of how to tell whether someone is dead or not.

Following up her international best seller The Zookeeper's Wife, Diane Ackerman tells the breathtaking story of the stroke that deprived her husband, Paul West - a distinguished novelist and poet - of every scrap of language beyond the syllable "mem". In her characteristically glorious prose, Ackerman weaves together the latest science on stroke and the brain’s ability to store and process language, with her intensely personal journey as caregiver in helping Paul to an extraordinary recovery.

Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in spare, luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear.

Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio — even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars.

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history, including Alessandro Volta, inventor of the battery; Michael Faraday, inventor of the electric motor; Marie Curie, famous for her work on radioactivity; Albert Einstein, creator of the theory of relativity; Alexander Fleming, discoverer of the first antibiotic; and Linus Pauling, chemist and peace activist.

Bill Gates, whose vision of the personal computer propelled Microsoft into one of the world's leading companies, astonished the business community in 1996 by abruptly reinventing his entire company around the Internet. He explains why the Internet has revolutionized not just Microsoft but everything else too - and at a faster pace than even he had anticipated.

My Life in Propaganda is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She compares the beliefs of her family with what she was taught at school, learning early on about double interpretations and ambiguities through language. Through her chosen field of linguistics, she analyzes ways in which propagandistic language, such as ‘doubletalk,’ Orwellian ‘Newspeak,’ ‘weasel words,’ and, more colloquially, ‘bullshit,’ is used to distort reality. The book demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted.

For the last 150 years, both popular and academic views have asserted that Jesus spoke Aramaic as his primary language of communication since supposedly Hebrew died out after the children of Israel were taken into Babylonian captivity. This view, however, is not based on the testimony of the Old Testament, the New Testament, historical sources, or Jesus' actual words. Just which language did Jesus and his disciples speak?

Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams. Apart from mathematics, he transformed every field of knowledge that he touched. Above all, Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic. When he first divided human knowledge into separate categories, he enabled our understanding of the world to develop in a systematic fashion.

Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation. But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press.

We all know that the best way to study a foreign language is to go to a country where it's spoken, but can the same immersion method be applied to history? How do interactions with antique objects influence perceptions of the modern world?

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being." In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even "the pretenses of psychology." Nonetheless, it was the source of all these subjects. The branch of philosophy to which Kierkegaard gave birth has come to be known as existentialism.

On the edge of mortality, a profound transformation occurred within Matthew Johns. They came to a realization: events they once believed simply occurred to them were, in reality, orchestrated milestones leading them toward a greater purpose. The introduction of a soulmate in their life acted as a beacon, illuminating their newfound spiritual path. Delving into this spiritual realm, Matthew Johns cultivated a deep and intuitive bond with The Divine. Their blossoming psychic understanding opened a sacred dialogue with Spirit, unveiling profound truths.

The Language of Mothers is a hybrid memoir grounded in the power of prose and poetry. It is an imaginative tapestry of women's storytelling that punctures narrative craft to illuminate the inheritance of domestic trauma and the voicing of familial stories that are healing spaces that carry through time.

This is a story meant to be a beacon of hope and inspiration for the minority women in speech-language pathology who find themselves struggling with a sense of belonging in their field. It follows the autobiographical account of Barbara Fernandes, an adult immigrant to the US, as she embarks on her journey as a CSD student learning both English and Spanish. It tells of her struggles facing isolation, microaggressions, and her own internal battles to eventually become one of the most successful entrepreneurs within the SLP field.

Speaking My Soul is the honest story of linguist John R. Rickford's life from his early years as the youngest of ten children in Guyana to his status as Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Stanford, of the transformation of his identity from colored or mixed race in Guyana to black in the USA, and of his work championing Black Talk and its speakers. In this engaging memoir, Rickford recalls landmark events for his racial identity.

Shakespearean is a rich, brilliant and superbly drawn portrait of an extraordinary artist, one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Through an enthralling narrative, ranging widely in time and space, McCrum seeks to understand Shakespeare within his historical context while also exploring the secrets of literary inspiration and examining the nature of creativity itself.

Follow this family of six on their passage - extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreakingly poignant-from Bright Lights (of New York City) to the Northern Lights (of Norway) to the City of Light (Paris) to the speed-of-light of the Autobahn (in Munich). Continue deep into the tropics of Southeast Asia (Singapore) and end your voyage in the heights of the Swiss Alps (Geneva).

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history, including Pablo Casals, the Catalan cello player; Louis Armstrong, the American trumpet player and singer; Frank Sinatra, the Italian American singer and actor; Édith Piaf, France's famous singing star; Maria Callas, the Greek opera singer; and Elvis Presley, the man who changed pop music.

These are my stories losing language in a stroke, then brain trauma. I'm a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, baby observer, bird watcher. My sense of self survived using these skills to reflect on walking through a wilderness without read signs. I found languages outside of verbal language that took me to whole new worlds... To speak at all was to locate the fewest words to express anything. I wanted to keep this spare language to convey the unimaginable.