Life Biography

Who - or what - was the real love of Freddie Mercury's life? Millions of Queen and screen fans who watched the Oscar-winning film Bohemian Rhapsody believe that Mary Austin, the woman he could never quite let go of, was the love of Freddie Mercury's life. But the truth is infinitely more complicated. Best-selling biographer and music writer Lesley-Ann Jones explores the charismatic frontman's romantic encounters and reveals why none of his love interests ever perfected the art of being Freddie's life partner.

Anne Frank is the most well-known victim of the Holocaust. In 1945, at the age of 15, she died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, becoming one of the six million Jews who were murdered in Europe under the Nazi regime. But through her writing, her memory lives on. Jemma Saunders goes beyond Anne Frank's diary to fill in the gaps about her family history, her life before she went into hiding, and her final months at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A sobering tale, Anne Frank's story is one that will continue to inspire for decades to come.

When Michael Collins decided to become a surgeon, he was totally unprepared for the chaotic life of a resident at a major hospital. A natural overachiever, Collins' success in college and medical school led to a surgical residency at one of the most respected medical centers in the world, the famed Mayo Clinic. But compared to his fellow residents, Collins felt inadequate and unprepared.

In 2008 veteran journalist Evan Wright, acclaimed for his New York Times best-selling book Generation Kill and co-writer of the Emmy-winning HBO series it spawned, began a series of conversations with super-criminal Jon Roberts, star of the fabulously successful documentary Cocaine Cowboys. Those conversations would last three years, during which time Wright came to realize that Roberts was much more than the de-facto “transportation chief” of the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, much more than a facilitator of a national drug epidemic.

A 23-year veteran of emergency medical services, paramedic Matthew Sias took a detour in his career to pursue the death-care business and found a complementarity between two seemingly divergent careers. Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Life Saving Mortician is the record of some of the more memorable calls he has responded to through the years.

Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected - a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly 30-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack.

You may not recognize my name-or my face for that matter-but it's very likely you've seen me at work. I've managed to cram quite a bit into my thirty-year acting career. In fact I've helped put more bums on cinema seats than Will Smith or Tom Hanks. Who else can say that they've helped destroy a Death Star? Defeated an evil sorceress? Taught magic to Harry Potter? Become a Jedi Master? Reluctantly hitchhiked across the galaxy in search of the answer to the Ultimate Question?

Chuck Noll won four Super Bowls and presided over one of the greatest football dynasties in history, the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 70s. Later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his achievements as a competitor and a coach are the stuff of legend. But Noll always remained an intensely private and introspective man, never revealing much of himself as a person or as a coach, not even to the players and fans who revered him.

Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen letters from the sisters as well as from their grandmother Queen Victoria, The Princesses of Hesse takes us on a sweeping journey across the tumultuous landscape of the turn of the century - from the dramas of the Russian Court to the Russian Revolution, and through both World Wars in which they often found themselves on opposing sides.

In 2003, Carolyn Jessop, a lifelong member of the extremist Mormon sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), gathered up her eight children, including her profoundly disabled four-year-old son, and escaped in the middle of the night to freedom. After detailing the shocking conditions of FLDS and her harrowing flight in her memoir, Escape, Carolyn reveled in her newfound identity as a bestselling author, a devoted mom, and a loving companion to the wonderful man in her life. She thought she had put her past firmly behind her.

In the 27 years that Kurt Cobain walked this earth, he crafted the songs and the narrative that would become the anthem of a generation. Yet, it was never anything that Cobain set to do deliberately; if anything, he could be called an accidental genius. Cobain’s approach to art as well as life was one flowing stream of consciousness. He never set out to change a generation when he wrote songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Come as You Are".

As the brother in law to JFK and a member of the Rat Pack, Peter Lawford was one of America's most acclaimed movie stars. Lawford led an extraordinary life. His story, as told by the woman who knew him best, is the always candid, sometimes shocking unveiling of the most intriguing show business personalities and significant political events of our time.

This audiobook offers a vast look at the life of St. Teresa. Authored by her own hand, she details her life and experiences, along with her mystical encounters with God.

In August 2015, Limerick man Jason Corbett was murdered by his wife, Molly Martens, and her father, ex-FBI agent Tom Martens, in the bedroom of their luxury North Carolina home. He had been savagely beaten to death with a baseball bat and brick while his children slept nearby. For his sister, Tracey Corbett-Lynch, and the rest of his family in Ireland, it was just the beginning of the nightmare that would involve a custody battle, an online hate campaign, and, ultimately, the gripping trial that would lead to her conviction.

For Nipsey Hussle, “The Marathon” was more than a mixtape title or the name of a clothing store; it was a way of life, a metaphor for the relentless pursuit of excellence and the willpower required to overcome adversity day after day. Hussle was determined to win the race to success on his own terms, and he wanted to see his whole community in the winner’s circle with him.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation.

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. When his specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation.

Former Chicago police officer and Outfit associate Fred Pascente is the man who links Tony Spilotro, one of Chicago's most notorious mob figures, to William Hanhardt, chief of detectives in the Chicago Police Department. Pascente and Spilotro grew up together on Chicago's Near West Side, and as young toughs they were rousted and shaken down by Hanhardt.

Picking up where his previous memoir leaves off, Sledge, a young marine in the First Division, traces his company's movements and charts his own difficult passage to peace following his horrific experiences in the Pacific. He reflects on his duty in the ancient city of Peiping (now Beijing) and recounts the difficulty of returning to his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and resuming civilian life haunted by the shadows of close combat.

The life of Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), ruler of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued biographers. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world's first transatlantic empire, complicate the task.