Memoir Industry

This authoritative new history of place and people lays out the dramatic events that created the North—waves of migration, invasions and battles, and transformative changes wrought on European culture and the global economy. In a sweeping narrative that takes us from the earliest times to the present day, the book shows that the people of the North have shaped Britain and the world in unexpected ways.

Sonic Warrior is a collection of insane-but-true stories from the career of rock radio legend Lou Brutus. Each chapter is a separate tale that careens around his 40-plus years of covering concerts, interviewing music's biggest stars, and influencing generations of radio listeners. Starting with the first show he attended and continuing to the present day, stops along the way include Live Aid in Philadelphia, the Arctic, Live Earth in London, and the New Jersey Turnpike.

Dr. Lange graduated from medical school in 1981, right as a new plague swept across the globe. His story became intertwined with the story of HIV. At once a physician, scientist, AIDS activist, and medical diplomat, Lange studied ways to battle HIV and prevent its spread from mother to child. Fighting the injustices of poverty, Lange advocated for better access to health care for the poor and the vulnerable. The Impatient Dr. Lange is the story of one man's struggle against a global pandemic - and the tragic attack that may have slowed down the search for a cure.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

Wounded traces the journey made by a casualty from the battlefield to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him - stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, orderlies and nurses - from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty. We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home.

Miriam's doctor didn't believe she had breast cancer. She did. Sophie navigates being the only Black scientist in her lab while studying the very disease, HIV, that she hides from her coworkers. For Victoria, coming out as a transgender woman was less difficult than coming out as bipolar. Michele Lent Hirsch knew she couldn't be the only woman who's faced serious health issues at a young age, as well as the resulting effects on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self. What she found was a surprisingly large population with important stories to tell.

Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country—and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city hospital and a unique amalgam of history, insanity, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters these 250-year-old doors as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, life-and-death decisions, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, and overworked interns.

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned wartime hospital and setting for the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded.

All seems tranquil as newly qualified health visitor Sarah motors into a small Kentish hilltop village in her new green mini. She's barely out of the car when she's called to assist the midwife with a bride who's gone into labour in the middle of her own wedding reception. And so her adventures begin.... As a health visitor, Nurse Sarah is as green as grass, but she puts her best foot into wellies and braves the mad dogs, killer ganders and muddy tracks of the farming community.

He has been called the greatest surgeon of the 20th century. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Michael DeBakey rose from humble beginnings in a backwater Louisiana town to dominate the landscape of modern medicine. His contributions to our understanding and treatment of cardiovascular disease, in particular, were innumerable and epoch-making. DeBakey led a life of high drama, from the streets of Jazz Age New Orleans and the operating theaters of pre-war Europe, to the battlefields of World War II and the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Born in 1966 with a congenital heart defect known as the tetralogy of Fallot, Gabriel Brownstein entered the world just as doctors were learning to operate on conditions like his. He received a life-saving surgery at five years old, and since then has ridden wave after wave of medical innovation, a series of interventions that have kept his heart beating. The Open Heart Club is both a memoir of a life on the edge of medicine's reach and a history of the remarkable people who have made such a life possible.

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing a “vampiric real-life story of modern-day greed” (Leah Sottile, host of Bundyville).

Rather - who has won every prestigious journalism award in his distinguished career - discusses all the big stories from his decades of reporting. This very personal accounting includes (but is certainly not limited to) his dismissal from CBS, the Abu Ghraib story, the George W. Bush Air National Guard controversy, his coverage of the JFK assassination, the origin of "Hurricane Dan", as well as inside stories about all the top personalities Dan has either interviewed or worked with over his remarkable career.

In the first full biography of actor Sidney Poitier, Aram Goudsouzian analyzes the life and career of a Hollywood legend, from his childhood in the Bahamas to his 2002 Oscar for lifetime achievement. Poitier is a gifted actor, a great American success story, an intriguing personality, and a political symbol; his life and career illuminate America's racial history.

In 1946, Master Sergeant Donald Nichols was repairing jeeps on the sleepy island of Guam when he caught the eye of recruiters from the army's Counter Intelligence Corps. After just three months' training, he was sent to Korea, then a backwater beneath the radar of MacArthur's Pacific Command. Though he lacked the pedigree of most US spies - Nichols was a seventh-grade dropout - he quickly metamorphosed from army mechanic to black ops phenomenon.

In Deep Water Dream, Roedde recounts stories from her long career - from working with a Cree community in developing a medical dictionary in their own language, to training community-based health workers, to delivering Amish babies in her own home. Roedde redraws the boundaries between physician and community, strengthening the capacity to care for those close by, and offers a hopeful and powerful example to the rest of the world.

Dorothy Carvello knows all about the music biz. She was the first female A&R executive at Atlantic Records and one of the few in the room at RCA and Columbia. Featuring never-before-heard stories about artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Steven Tyler, Bon Jovi, INXS, Marc Anthony, Phil Collins, and many more, this audiobook is a must-hear for anyone who has ever wondered what it's really like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry.

We Took the Risk dives into the personal journeys of 25 executives who, through their own combination of traits, took on the challenges of an early US renewable energy industry. Far from being a self-improvement book or a glorified “who’s who” run down, this book provides a backdrop by which to juxtaposition your own career journey. Author Tom Weirich lets you view the beginnings of the industry as if you were there, lock in step with these entrepreneurial leaders, as they sift through decisions that would forever impact the trajectory of renewables in the US.

Adam Bierman wasn’t planning on selling weed—or developing a network of cannabis stores, or safeguarding his money in shoeboxes, or facing off with gangbangers in dark corners of parking lots, or taking on the public markets and justice system itself to bring the world America’s first public cannabis unicorn. But, of course, not everything goes according to plan.

As one of America’s most celebrated vascular surgeons, Dr. Frank Veith’s career was anything but conventional—from working undercover with the CIA to fighting to make vascular surgery an independent specialty to creating the largest vascular conference in the world.