Life Biography

Lee Miller, 1927 - New York: A classically beautiful young woman, she is discovered by Condé Nast. Lee Miller, 1929 - Paris: Protégé and lover of Man Ray, she invents with him the solarization technique of photography, develops into a brilliant Surrealist photographer, and plays the statue in Cocteau's film Blood of a Poet. Lee Miller, 1939-45 - Europe: Living at times with her future husband, the painter Roland Penrose, she becomes a US war correspondent and covers the siege of St Malo and the liberation of Paris.

After Molly Wizenberg's father died, she traveled to Paris and - amidst its culinary delights - realized her heart was in the kitchen. So she began Orangette, a highly popular cooking and life blog that eventually led her to the love of her life.

In an audiobook that is The Big Sick meets Dad Is Fat, Jeannie Gaffigan, writer/director/producer/accused supermom and wife of best-selling author/comedian Jim Gaffigan, writes with humor and heart about the pear-sized brain tumor she had removed, the toll it took on her enormous family, and the priceless lessons she learned along the way.

Rockefeller was the quintessential industrialist. He created an industry out of nascent oil and gas start-ups during a time when none existed. His strategies and tactics may not have been approved by all, but he was certain he was doing God’s work. We live in a world today that is based on the actions of John D. Rockefeller. Everything we do and how we live are the result of oil and its power. This inherent structure is based on what one man did when the oil industry was just starting off.

In 1999 in the Los Rios region of southern Chile, orthopedic surgeon, devoted wife, and loving mother Dr. Mary Neal drowned in a kayak accident. While cascading down a waterfall, her kayak became pinned at the bottom and she was immediately and completely submerged. Despite the rescue efforts of her companions, Mary was underwater for too long, and as a result, died. To Heaven and Back is Mary’s remarkable story of her life’s spiritual journey and what happened as she moved from life to death to eternal life, and back again.

When Lou Henry married Herbert Hoover in February 1899, she looked forward to a partnership of equality and a life of adventure. She could fire a rifle and sit a horse as well as any man. The Quaker community of Whittier, California, where she lived as a teen, reinforced the egalitarian spirit of her upbringing. But history had other ideas for Lou Henry Hoover. Conveying Lou’s humor, personality, and intelligence, A Woman of Adventure takes a fresh look at the first lady who preceded Eleanor Roosevelt and her also-extraordinary accomplishments.

The full-length, in-depth and intimate autobiography from Jenson Button, one of the greatest racing drivers of his generation. His 17 years in Formula One have seen him experience everything the sport has to offer, from nursing duff cars round the track to winning world championships and everything in between. Here, Jenson tells his full story for the first time in his own honest, intelligent and eloquent style.

Katie Ledecky has won more individual Olympic races than any female swimmer in history. She is a three-time Olympian, a seven-time gold medalist, a twenty-one-time world champion, eight-time NCAA Champion, and a world record-holder in individual swimming events. Time and again, the question is posed to her family, her coaches, and to her—what makes her a champion? Now, for the first time, she shares what it takes to compete at an elite level.

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.

When author Jeff Hobbs arrived at Yale University, he became fast friends with the man who would be his college roommate for four years, Robert Peace. Robert's life was rough from the beginning in the crime-ridden streets of Newark in the 1980s, with his father in jail and his mother earning less than $15,000 a year. But Robert was a brilliant student, and it was supposed to get easier when he was accepted to Yale, where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.

In preparing the Life of Lee for Children, for use in the public schools, I beg leave to place before teachers good reasons for employing it as a supplementary reader.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone form Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure akin to Sarah Bakewell's book on Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but also to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind for our own age.

Through such hits as "The Sound of Silence", "Bridge Over Troubled Water", "Still Crazy After All These Years", and "Graceland", Paul Simon has spoken to us in songs for a half-century about alienation, doubt, resilience, and empathy in ways that have established him as one of the most honored and beloved songwriters in American pop music history. His music has gone beyond the sales charts into our cultural consciousness. He was the first songwriter awarded the Gershwin Prize by the Library of Congress and is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

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".

Navigating poverty, violence, and instability, a young James Plummer had two guiding stars - a genius IQ and a love of science. But a bookish nerd is a soft target, and James faced years of bullying and abuse. As he struggled to survive his childhood in some of the country’s toughest urban neighborhoods in New Orleans, Houston, and LA, and later in the equally poor backwoods of Mississippi, he adopted the persona of “gangsta nerd” - dealing weed in juke joints while winning state science fairs with computer programs that model Einstein’s theory of relativity.

I landed in this place six years ago in a welter of panic, pain and instinct. I'd been in fight-or-flight mode for twelve months, wanting only to keep on flying—or fleeing. I brought almost nothing of my previous life. Grief had made me ruthless; I threw and threw. (And yes, I knew how appalled you'd have been, Pete.) My father implored me to stay with the familiar. Constants, he said, would give me scaffolding. Decades ago, when his second wife, my stepmother, died suddenly, habits were his protection and rituals his comfort—along with a packet or two of cigarettes a day.

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.

Born just outside London in 1942, Glyn Johns was 16 years old at the dawn of rock and roll. His big break as a producer came on the Steve Miller Band's debut album, Children of the Future. He went on to engineer or produce iconic albums for the best in the business, including Abbey Road with the Beatles. Even more impressive, Johns was perhaps the only person on a given day in the studio who was entirely sober, and so he is one of the most reliable and clear-eyed insiders to tell these stories today.

Over five years in the making, John A. Farrell’s magnificent biography of Edward M. Kennedy is the first single-volume life of the great figure since his death. Farrell’s long acquaintance with the Kennedy universe and the acclaim of his previous books, including his New York Times-bestselling biography of Nixon, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, helped garner him access to a remarkable range of new sources, including Kennedy’s personal diary.

Fritjof Capra and the Systems View of Life (Great Minds, Book 3): 2017 Revised, Updated, and Reformatted Edition is a passionate study about the great contemporary physicist and a review of all of his published books, including extensive quotes. The author considers Fritjof Capra as one of the most important authors on new science and systems research and considers as genius Capra's unique gift to formulate and explain complex scientific and philosophical insights and interrelations in a way that the educated listener can understand.