Family Biography

In the winter of 1967-68, Robert F. Kennedy, then a US Senator from New York, ventured deep into the heart of Appalachia. As acting chairman of a Senate subcommittee on poverty, RFK went to eastern Kentucky to gauge the progress of the War on Poverty. He was deeply disillusioned by what he found. Kennedy learned that job training programs were useless, welfare programs proved insufficient, and jobs were scarce and getting scarcer. Before he'd even left the state, Kennedy had determined the War on Poverty was a failure - and he blamed Lyndon Johnson.

Raised for vastly different futures, one burdened with the responsibility of becoming the future king and the other destined to live in his shadow, Charles and Andrew have spent their lives on different sides of the same coin. War of the Windsors tells, for the first time, the complete story of Charles and Andrew from their diverging childhoods to their current struggles.

In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, NY newspaper. Burned once, she's eager for love, but as the only "girl" in the newsroom, she's more concerned about finding allies and making friends. When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions.

A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Charles Spencer attended in his youth and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, he reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt at aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the appalling inescapability of it all.

Since the publication of their successful book Real Life, Real Love, DJ Envy and Gia, collectively known as the Caseys, have constantly been inundated with questions from people all around the world wondering how they create and maintain the patience, focus, and time to raise happy and successful children after all these years. In Real Life, Real Family, they dive deeper into how they’ve created a family unit that’s filled with unwavering love and share with listeners the ways they manage to raise low-stress children while nurturing a solid and thriving partnership together.

The Gambino family is a prime example of organized crime families and how their in-house fighting and varying styles of leadership have defined the age of the mob. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the family went through a series of names and leaders, but they always remained at the top of the New York mob regime and retained their Sicilian ties.

The world's most famous demonologists, Ed and Lorraine Warren, were called in to help an average American family who were assaulted by forces too awesome, too powerful, and too dark to be stopped. It's a true story, supported by dozens of eyewitnesses - neighbors, priests, police, journalists, and researchers.

Whether she’s playing an “age-defying” book editor on television or dazzling audiences on the Broadway stage, Sutton Foster manages to make it all look easy. How? Crafting. From the moment she picked up a cross stitch needle to escape the bullying chorus girls in her early performing days, she was hooked. Cross stitching led to crocheting, crocheting led to collages, which led to drawing, and so much more. Channeling her emotions into her creations centered Sutton as she navigated the significant moments in her life and gave her tangible reminders of her experiences.

On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade, however, was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored.

In the 70s and 80s, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to the United States, all in search of a new place to call home. Decades later, their experiences remain largely unknown. Kao Kalia Yang was driven to tell her own family's story after her grandmother’s death. The Latehomecomer is a tribute to that grandmother, a remarkable woman whose spirit held her family together.

In April 1992, a young man named Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness, where he survived for more than 100 days before perishing in an abandoned bus. For over twenty years his story has captivated millions, and yet only one person knew the truth behind his remarkable journey - until now.

Brooke Shields never had what anyone would consider an ordinary life. She was raised by her Newark-tough single mom, Teri, a woman who loved the world of show business and was often a media sensation all by herself. Brooke's iconic modeling career began by chance when she was only 11 months old, and Teri's skills as both Brooke's mother and her manager were formidable. But in private she was troubled and drank heavily.

Ashley is a young single mum raising her daughter, Eden, and working hard to do the very best job she can - until one night she can't find a babysitter and makes the decision to leave Eden home alone for a couple of hours, asleep inside a wardrobe. It is an action that begins a terrible downward spiral for both of them. When Eden arrives at experienced foster carer Louise Allen's home, she has entered the care system because her mother is in prison. Eden is five years old and will not speak to any human.

Damian is just seven when he is taken in by foster carer Cathy Glass. His mother, Rachel, loves her three young children dearly, but she is vulnerable, naïve and unable to cope on her own. Cathy sets about helping Damian overcome his eating issues, with the hope that he will eventually return home. But when Rachel’s new boyfriend, Troy, arrives on the scene, Cathy becomes deeply concerned. She soon realises that Damian and his siblings are in great danger.

It’s a freezing winter’s night in 1954. A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside. After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.

Kelly Thompson and her older sister, Meghan, are proof that sisterhood doesn’t always equate to friendship. Growing up within a military family, the girls were close despite being temperamental opposites—Kelly, anxious and studious, looked to her big sister for comfort, and Meghan, who battled kidney cancer as a toddler, was gregarious and protective. But as she approached adulthood, Meghan spi­ralled into a cocaine and opioid addiction, and Kelly’s relationship with her sister was torn apart.

That terrible belief spurs author Jeff Blackstock to investigate the circumstances of his mother Carol's death when he was a child. Carol Blackstock died at age 24 in 1959 - poisoned by arsenic - but the cause of her death remained shrouded in mystery for decades. Jeff's father George Blackstock was a career diplomat in Canada's foreign service, posted to glamorous Buenos Aires with his wife Carol and their three children.

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.

In Dad is Fat, stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan, who’s best known for his legendary riffs on Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, and McDonald's, expresses all the joys and horrors of life with five young children - everything from cousins ("celebrities for little kids") to toddlers’ communication skills ("they always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours to deliver important news"), to the eating habits of four-year-olds ("there is no difference between a four-year-old eating a taco and throwing a taco on the floor").

In Raising Trump, Ivana Trump reflects on her extraordinary life and the raising of her three children - Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka - and recounts the lessons she taught her children as they were growing up.