Land Memoir

Fun While It Lasted is the story of Bruce McNall's life as a player. McNall started in the ancient coin business. Soon, he branched out into horse racing, movies, and major league sports as owner of the L.A. Kings hockey team. Ultimately his empire collapsed amid charges of fraud and deception, and he was sent to prison for admittedly bilking banks out of more than $200 million. Here is the tale of how he played fast and loose in Hollywood.

British organised crime has changed beyond all recognition over the last five years. Youth violence, the drug trade and rising levels of gun crime are rarely out of the news. Beginning on the troubled streets of the inner cities, Gang Land takes its readers on a journey up through the underworld hierarchy until it finally reaches the very highest levels, occupied by shadowy ‘Mr Big’ characters.

A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the 90s, becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and Miller's personal and working relationship with David Foster Wallace.

I have always had an obsession with fatherhood, both as a poorly served recipient and a naive purveyor. Fatherhood is the greatest of gifts. Some long for it but are, sadly, never blessed. Some have it thrust upon them and do magnificently.

In the early 1900s, at the dawn of the “American Century,” few knew the intoxicating power of greed better than white men on the forefront of the black gold rush. When oil was discovered in Oklahoma’s Indian Country, these tycoons impersonated, defrauded, and murdered Native property owners to snatch up hundreds of acres of oil-rich land. Journalist and fourth-generation Oklahoman Russell Cobb sets the stage for one such oilman’s chicanery: Tulsa entrepreneur Charles Page’s campaign for a young Muscogee boy’s land in Creek County.

More than fifty expeditions across all seven continents – by land, sea and air – have led adventurer Neil Laughton to some of the most remote places in the world. Adventureholic tells the stories of Neil’s most unforgettable and daring adventures yet.

Mary Jane Seacole (1805­-1881) was a British Jamaican nurse, author, world traveler, and businesswoman renowned for her work with the soldiers of the Crimean War.

Michael E. Uslan, executive producer of the Batman movie franchise, offers an insider’s look at Hollywood and the process of how movies and television shows go from the drawing board to your screens. Continuing the delightful tale of his adventures begun in The Boy Who Loved Batman, Uslan draws on both his successful and less successful attempts to bring ideas to the screen, offering a helpful, honest, and breezily told guide to producing films.

In the winter of 1913, high in the Canadian Arctic, two Catholic priests set out on a dangerous mission to do what no white men had ever attempted: Reach a group of utterly isolated Eskimos and convert them. Farther and farther north the priests trudged, through a frigid and bleak country known as the Barren Lands, until they reached the place where the Coppermine River dumps into the Arctic Ocean.

Beth McRae’s 40 years as a midwife have been packed full of unforgettable moments, from the terrifying experience of witnessing her first birth as a naïve student nurse—in the days when the words birth plan were unheard of and what women wanted was a long way from being part of any plan—to working in one of the most isolated corners of Australia.

In Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, Kate Whouley strips away the romantic veneer of mother-daughter love to bare the toothed and tough reality of caring for a parent who is slowly losing her mind. Yet, this is not a dark or dour look at the demon of Alzheimer’s. Whouley shares the trying, the tender, and the sometimes hilarious moments in meeting the challenge also known as Mom.

Growing up Aquinnah Wampanoag, Joseph Lee grappled with what it means to be an Indigenous person in the world today, especially as tribal land, culture, and community face new threats. Starting with the story of his own tribe, which is from the iconic Martha’s Vineyard, Lee tackles key questions around Indigenous identity and the stubborn legacy of colonialism. Lee weaves his own story—and that of his family—with conversations with Indigenous leaders, artists, and scholars from around the world about everything from culture and language to climate change and the politics of belonging.

Real rock stars do truly insane thing and invite truly insane things to happen to them: murder, drug trafficking, rape, cannibalism and the occult. We allow this behavior. We are complicit because a rock star behaving badly is what's expected. It's baked into the cake. Deep down, way down, past all of our self-righteous notions of justice and right and wrong, when it comes down to it, we want our rock stars to be bad. We know the music industry is full of demons, ones that drove Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, and Sid Vicious and that consumed the Norwegian black metal scene.

After Andy is Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni's insider's account of working in Andy Warhol's studio and Interview magazine and explores Warhol's impact on the art world, pop culture, society, and fashion - and how his iconic status gave rise to some of our most influential tastemakers today.

The Jack Nicholson film The Departed didn't tell half of their story. A poor kid from the slums, Robert Fitzpatrick grew up to become a stellar FBI agent and challenge the country's deadliest gangsters. Relentless in his desire to catch, prosecute, and convict Whitey Bulger, Fitzpatrick fought the nation's most determined cop-gangster battle since Melvin Purvis hunted, confronted, and killed John Dillinger. In his crusade to bring Bulger to justice, Fitzpatrick faced not only Whitey but also corrupt FBI agents, along with political cronies and enablers from Boston to Washington....

The "absorbing and powerful" (Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I. In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.

There are many reasons why it might seem unwise to walk, mostly alone, through the Middle East. That, in part, is exactly why Leon McCarron did it. From Jerusalem, McCarron followed a series of wild hiking trails that trace ancient trading and pilgrimage routes and traverse some of the most contested landscapes in the world. In the West Bank, he met families struggling to lead normal lives amidst political turmoil and had a surreal encounter with the world's oldest and smallest religious sect.

At turns shockingly fierce and surprisingly tender, Goat is a shattering memoir that graphically portrays the scarred emotional landscape of young men. Brad is driving two strangers home from a party when he realizes they are leading him to the middle of nowhere. Viciously beaten and left in the middle of the road, Brad survives. But as his physical injuries heal, his psychological wounds worsen. Desperate to belong, he pledges his brother's fraternity.

This riveting biography from the American Bar Association visits the spectacular life of Edwin Land, breakthrough inventor. At the time of his death, he stood third on the list of our most prolific inventors, behind only Thomas Edison and one of Edison's colleagues. Land's most famous achievement was the creation of a revolutionary film-and-camera system that could produce a photographic print moments after the picture was taken.

On the morning of November 4, 2019, a caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen on a desolate stretch of road in northern Mexico controlled by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Firing semi-automatic weapons, the attackers killed nine people and gravely injured five more. The victims were members of the LeBaron and La Mora communities-fundamentalist Mormons whose forebears broke from the LDS Church and settled in Mexico when their religion outlawed polygamy in the late nineteenth century.