Family Biography

The Shahanis came to Queens - from India, by way of Casablanca - in the 1980s. They were undocumented for a few unsteady years, and then, with the arrival of their green cards, they thought they'd made it. This is the story of how they did, and didn't; the unforeseen obstacles that propelled them into years of disillusionment and heartbreak; and the strength of a family determined to stay together.

Brian Johnson is a man who went looking for gold and found so much more-a soulmate for life, the child he had always dreamed of, and the joy of working alongside people who loved him. Brian Johnson lived his life in unexpected ways, choosing adventure over the predictable day-to-day. Working side-by-side with his brother, Loren, he struck gold repeatedly in the wilderness of Alaska and the Yukon as a modern-day goldminer for more than forty years.

One woman's journey through unbearable loss. A true story.

A poetic portrait of faith, futility, and the joy of this mortal life. In this astoundingly unique audiobook, best-selling author N. D. Wilson reminds each of us that to truly live, we must recognize that we are dying. Every second we create more of our past. Then, we must see the future. We stand in the now. God says create. Live. Choose. Shape the past. Etch your life in stone, and what you make will be forever.

A wide range of women—actors, athletes, academics, CEOs, writers, small-business owners, birth workers, physicians, and activists—share their experiences of becoming mothers in this multifaceted, moving, and revealing collection.

A Very Fine House is an intimate memoir of a mother's Norman Rockwell family turned upside down by her daughter's descent into meth addiction and crime. Bright and beautiful, Annie is an unlikely candidate for meth. Living fast and hard on the streets of Bend, Oregon, she commits crimes against herself, the community, and her own family.

Karen Gravano is the daughter of Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, once one of the mafia's most feared hit men. With 19 confessed murders, the former Gambino Crime Family underboss - and John Gotti’s right-hand man - is the highest ranking gangster ever to turn State’s evidence and testify against members of his high-profile crime family. But to Karen, Sammy Gravano was a sometimes elusive but always loving father figure. He was ever-present at the head of the dinner table.

This is the true story of a six-year-old girl named Elena and her battle against brain cancer. In her last days she showed a community how to love and how to live. Written through the eyes of her parents, Brooke and Keith Desserich, as a remembrance to Elena's younger sister, Elena's story is one of humility and inspiration as she lives each day, one day at a time.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.

Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015, and overnight, the political became personal, as the world awoke to the reality of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima Kurdi first saw the shocking photo of her nephew in her home in Vancouver, Canada. But Tima did not need a photo to understand the truth - she and her family had already been living it.

This is the story of a Canadian woman who was in the Advanced Training Institute, run by Bill Gothard, for fourteen years. The amazing thing is that she never knew she was in a cult until several years after she was out. That's what happened to Christine in 2014. She has spent the past nine years trying to deprogram and change the way she sees the world. Join her as she navigates the cult, goes through a divorce, finds out she was in a cult and subsequently has to unlearn all she believed to be true.

One of America's most influential Hispanics - Maria on Sesame Street - delivers a beautifully wrought coming-of-age memoir. Set in the 1970s in the Bronx, this is the story of a girl with a dream. When listeners meet young Sonia, she is a child living amid the squalor of a boisterous home that is filled with noisy relatives and nosy neighbors. Each day she is glued to the TV screen that blots out the painful realities of her existence and also illuminates the possibilities that lie ahead.

In 1979 Liz Pryor is a 17-year-old girl from a good family in the wealthy Chicago suburbs. Halfway through her senior year of high school, she discovers that she is pregnant - a fact her parents are determined to keep a secret from her friends, siblings, and community forever. One snowy January day, after driving across three states, her mother drops her off at what Liz thinks is a Catholic home for unwed mothers - but which is, in truth, a locked government-run facility for delinquent and impoverished pregnant teenage girls.

¡Hola Papi! columnist John Paul Brammer’s Authentically Mexican is the hilarious and heartfelt story of his Mexican American family in diaspora, exploring his heritage and identity through six meaningful meals.

David and Tamela Mann have been married for 30 years, but the singers, actors, and entrepreneurs are just as, if not more than, happily in love as they were in the early days of their relationship. In their new audiobook, the couple will relate the story of their first encounters as teenagers, the importance of communication, and how they’ve been able to keep that spark burning through all these years.

Mothering under normal circumstances takes all you have to give. But what happens when your child is disabled, and sacrificing all you've got and more is the only hope for a decent future? Full of rage and resilience, duty and love, Ashley Bristowe delivers a mother's voice like no other we've heard.

In Force of Beauty, Mikki Taylor, editor-at-large of Essence magazine and longtime activist, introduces us to her gifted grandmother, Bessie, her glamorous mother, Modina, and how Modina’s friendship with the legendary Sarah Vaughan shaped Mikki’s childhood. Taylor’s mini-memoir is a tribute to Newark in the '50s and '60s, of cool jazz clubs and close-knit neighborhoods, a handsome house on Avon Avenue, and one family’s tale of perseverance and ingenuity in a city they all loved.

Between them, the three men in the fearsome Pierrepoint dynasty executed over 800 people during a career spanning more than half a century. Henry, his brother Thomas, and his son Albert, dispatched some of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century, and in the process earned a public notoriety that followed them throughout their eventful lives.

Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was. What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and abandonments.

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.