Historical Memoirs

The true story of the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the famous Battle at the OK Corral, by the New York Times best-selling author of Dodge City and Wild Bill. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, nine men clashed in what would be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were exchanged in 30 seconds, killing three men and wounding three others. The fight sprang forth from a tense, hot summer.

This is the story of Prof. Shaul Harel, formerly Charlie Hilsberg, who lost his shadow in 1942 at only five years old, when he was separated from his family and surroundings and saved from the furnaces of Auschwitz by the Belgian resistance. This book reveals his story, from his time as a “hidden child” in France and Belgium during the Holocaust, through his experiences in orphanages, his immigration to Israel, the serious injury he sustained in his military service, and more.

Based on the source material for the Alec Guinness classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, Murder in the Title follows the exploits of Anton Gascoyne, a poor and distant heir to one of Britain’s great noble families, who decides to murder his way to the Gascoyne earldom. But the closer he gets to the coronet, the greater the suspicion he falls under. Will Anton get away with it? Murder in the Title will keep you guessing until the end!

Un document humain qui en aucun cas ne laissera le lecteur intact. Gary Gilmore est l'un des condamnés à mort les plus célèbres des États-Unis. Accusé de meurtre en juillet 1976, il réclama lui-même la peine de mort plutôt qu'une condamnation à perpétuité. Le 17 janvier 1977 au matin, il est exécuté. Deux ans plus tard, Norman Mailer lui consacre un des chefs-d'œuvre de la littérature américaine, "Le Chant du bourreau".

Nancy Wake, nicknamed 'the white mouse' for her ability to evade capture, tells her own story. As the Gestapo's most wanted person, and one of the most highly decorated servicewomen of the war, it's a story worth telling. After living and working in Paris in the 1930's, Nancy married a wealthy Frenchman and settled in Marseilles. Her idyllic new life was ended by World War II and the invasion of France. Her life shattered, Nancy joined the French Resistance and, later, began work with an escape-route network for Allied soldiers.

Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life - an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph.

This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize - and National Book Award - winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, marks the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written 40 books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to rarely seen personal letters and papers, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.

Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession is a quintessential American tale of a young man's unbridled escapades across the vastness of the Western Frontier. From humble beginnings in Boston, Chamberlain journeyed to Texas to fight in the Mexican-American War and eventually fell in with the notorious Glanton Gang, a brutal group of scalp-hunters immortalized in Cormac McCarthy's Western masterpiece Blood Meridian.

One of the most important stories of World War II, already optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture: a spectacular, searing history that brings to light the extraordinary accomplishments of brave Jewish women who became resistance fighters - a group of unknown heroes whose exploits have never been chronicled in full, until now.

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman, so she went underground.

The scandalous image of the Empress Messalina as a ruthless and sexually insatiable schemer, derived from the work of Roman historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius, has taken deep root in the Western imagination. The stories they told about her included nightly visits to a brothel and a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a prostitute. Tales like these have defined the empress's legacy, but her real story is much more complex. In her new life of Messalina, the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin reappraises one of the most slandered and underestimated female figures of ancient history.

Among the defining figures of the Age of Revolution, Toussaint Louverture is the most enigmatic. Though the Haitian revolutionary’s image has multiplied across the globe—appearing on banknotes and in bronze, on T-shirts and in film—the only definitive portrait executed in his lifetime has been lost. Well versed in the work of everyone from Machiavelli to Rousseau, he was nonetheless dismissed by Thomas Jefferson as a “cannibal.” A Caribbean acolyte of the European Enlightenment, Toussaint nurtured a class of black Catholic clergymen who became one of the pillars of his rule.

Stan McChrystal served for 34 years in the US Army, rising from a second lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division to a four-star general, in command of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. During those years he worked with countless leaders and pondered an ancient question: "What makes a leader great?" He came to realize that there is no simple answer. McChrystal profiles 13 famous leaders from a wide range of eras and fields - from corporate CEOs to politicians and revolutionaries. He uses their stories to explore how leadership works in practice.

La meilleure biographie de Churchill, abondée de documents inédits. De Churchill, croit-on, tout a été dit - en premier lieu par lui-même. Et pourtant, Andrew Roberts est parvenu à exhumer des articles de presse, des correspondances privées, des journaux intimes - le moindre n'étant pas celui du roi Georges VI, jusque-là sous clé - qui ne figurent dans aucune des mille biographies environ déjà consacrées à ce personnage essentiel de la Grande-Bretagne et du XXe siècle.

The six wives of Henry VIII have become defined in a popular sense not so much by their lives as by the way these lives ended. But, as Antonia Fraser conclusively proves, they were rich and feisty characters. They may have been victims of Henry's obsession with a male heir, but they displayed considerable strength and intelligence at a time when their sex supposedly possessed little of either. Inevitably there was great rivalry and jealously between them. The story Antonia Fraser tells is romantic and cruel, funny and sad, dramatic and enthralling.

Elizabeth of York would have ruled England, but for the fact that she was a woman. One of the key figures of the Wars of the Roses, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, she married Henry Tudor to bring peace to a war-torn England. In Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen, Alison Weir builds a portrait of this beloved queen, placing her in the context of the magnificent, ceremonious, often brutal world she inhabited.

The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the greatest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring.”

The startling truth behind one of the most notorious dynasties in history is revealed in a remarkable new account by the acclaimed author of The Tudors and A World Undone. Sweeping aside the gossip, slander, and distortion that have shrouded the Borgias for centuries, G. J. Meyer offers an unprecedented portrait of the infamous Renaissance family and their storied milieu.