Education Biography

"Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt," writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

Known for decades as one of the NFL’s most iconic and spectacular playmakers, Deion Sanders remains college football's most intriguing newsmaker. In just three years, he has become the most talked about coach by recruiting elite players to moribund programs and reviving the spirit and pride of forgotten fanbases by winning. Along the way, he’s changing how we think about college sports while rejuvenating whole communities with the national attention that follows him and the fresh commerce a winning culture ignites.

As President Clinton's senior adviser, George Stephanopoulos saw it all: the endless arguments, the back-hall scheming, the protracted decisions, and the last minute flip-flops that somehow produced real accomplishments but also set in motion an almost tragic series of events that placed the fate of the president in the hands of the Senate. Now, with the natural ease of a born storyteller and the sensitive eye for detail of a novelist, Stephanopoulos tells his extraordinarily gripping story.

Noted Mexican American journalist Alfredo Corchado refuses to shrink from reporting on government corruption, murders in Juarez, or the ruthless drug cartels of Mexico. One night, Corchado received a tip that he could be the next target of the Zetas, a violent paramilitary group - and that he had 24 hours to find out if the threat was true. Midnight in Mexico is the story of one man's quest to report the truth of his country - as he races to save his own life.

Amid the constant rain of German bombs and the escalating violence of World War II, British parents by the thousands chose to send their children out of the country: the wealthy, independently; the poor, through a government relocation program called CORB. In September 1940, passenger liner SS City of Benares set out in a convoy of 19 ships sailing for Canada. On board were 90 CORB children, chaperones, and crew, along with paying passengers. When the war ships escorting the Benares to safe waters peeled off, a German submarine attacked and torpedoed the Benares.

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.

The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O'Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work - equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky - has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.

Tactical Reload offers a road map for police professionals eager to succeed as America transitions from unrest to a new age of social enlightenment. Through honest personal stories and interviews with top police chiefs and thought leaders, Wilson thoroughly explores the present crisis of law enforcement and foreshadows a safer future.

More than three decades after his death, John Steinbeck remains one of the nation's most beloved authors. Yet few know of his career as a journalist who covered world events from the Great Depression to Vietnam. Now, this original collection offers a portrait of the artist as citizen, deeply engaged in the world around him. In addition to the complete text of Steinbeck's last published book, America and Americans, this volume brings together for the first time more than 50 of Steinbeck's finest essays and journalistic pieces.

This House of Grief is a heartbreaking audiobook by one of Australia's most admired authors. Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain.

Driven by his single mother's dreams for his survival and success, Kevin Powell became the first in his family to attend a university, where he became a student leader keenly aware of widespread social injustice. But the struggle to define himself and break out of poverty continued into adulthood, with traumatic periods of homelessness and despair. As a young star journalist with Vibe magazine, Powell interviewed luminaries such as Tupac Shakur, writing influential chronicles of the evolution of hip-hop from his eyewitness view.

The Critique of Pure Reason is a work that examines the faculty of reason and the qualities inherent in human thought. Before this time the influence of the knower on that which was sought to be known was not considered in a thorough and developed manner. Kant attempted with this critique to establish a limit to the knowable based on the nature of human cognition. His work was an attempt to address the failings in philosophy and metaphysics and provide a solid foundation for the proper use of reason to expand knowledge.

The best-selling memoir by Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. I Am Malala. This is my story. Malala Yousafzai was only 10 years old when the Taliban took control of her region. They said music was a crime. They said women weren't allowed to go to the market. They said girls couldn't go to school. Raised in a once-peaceful area of Pakistan transformed by terrorism, Malala was taught to stand up for what she believes. So she fought for her right to be educated.

In 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaïre, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible "professor of boxing." The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble. Observing them was Norman Mailer, a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.

American Libraries editor in chief Leonard Kniffel offers a compelling collection of interviews with prominent figures--all of whom have special connections to libraries. From President Barack Obama to actress Julie Andrews; from basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to former First Lady and librarian Laura Bush and many others, stars of literature, politics, entertainment, and the public arena speak with Kniffel about the ways libraries have been critical in their lives.

Author Bruce Jarett has put together a must-have entertaining guide for people who love to cook and want to know the inside scoop when it comes to professional cooking tips. His humorous advice on shopping methods, food preparation, serving guests, understanding recipes, and dealing with common kitchen mishaps, is enjoyably spot on - fun to listen to, and will prove to be an invaluable go-to manual for the home cook and for professional chefs.

A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere: this is the goal of the Khan Academy, a passion project that grew from an ex-engineer and hedge funder's online tutoring sessions with his niece, who was struggling with algebra, into a worldwide phenomenon. Today millions of students, parents, and teachers use the Khan Academy's free videos and software, which have expanded to encompass nearly every conceivable subject; and Academy techniques are being employed with exciting results....

Long before he starred on some of television’s most beloved and long-running series such as Taxi and Who’s the Boss? and went on to distinguish himself in a variety of film and stage roles, Tony Danza was a walking contradiction: an indifferent student who dreamed of being a teacher. Inspiring a classroom of students was an aspiration he put aside for decades until one day it seemed that the most meaningful thing he could do was give his dream a shot. What followed was a year spent teaching 10th-grade English at Northeast High - Philadelphia’s largest high school with 3,600 students....