Memoir Project

Starting with a traumatic event that changed her forever, two-time award-winning entrepreneur and certified life coach, Hanneke Antonelli, takes listeners on a journey to hone their entrepreneurial skills and scale more profitable businesses without sacrificing their freedom.

Everyone's journey to their promised land starts differently. My journey started when I 15, pregnant, and living in the projects. I realized my mission in life became my ministry. The pain became my plan. God's plan took me from the projects to my promised land to use me for the kingdom to help other women. 

The house was built when I was nine years old at the place where our old house was torn down, because it was too old to live in. That old house was built about 100 years ago. My ancestors lived at exactly the same spot generation after generation for over 1000 years since my family used to be a landlord of the area. We are here for around 63 generations.

For 20 years, Lisa Murphy, Jeff Murphy, and a group of volunteers traveled the world with the Mobility Project, delivering mobility to the poorest people on the planet. They helped tens of thousands of disabled poor to gain mobility and hope. The disabled received wheelchairs, walkers, and crutches from the United States, items they never would have been able to afford. Like Simon of Cyrene, we helped people carry their cross of disability. From the hot tropical jungles of Costa Rica, Thailand, and São Tomé to the deserts of Afghanistan, the disabled poor got a new chance at life.

On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life, seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government's Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich.

This book chronicles a time in the '60s and the '70s. The story is centered on a young man who never took anything in life for granted and savored every moment as if it were his last. From sneaking into concerts to evading the police, he did it all. Gary has lived through it all, from childhood poverty to a successful business career.

After the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a white police officer, Chicagoans demanded change. Can a new state’s attorney, the first black woman to hold the position, bring real reform to a broken system? With a brick on her desk from the Cabrini-Green housing project where she spent her childhood, Kim Foxx must adapt her hard-won ideals to the realities of criminal justice in Chicago. In this intimate narrative by award-winning author Steve Bogira, Foxx reveals: “My mother taught me how to be a hustler. Hustle in the sense of work hard, grind - find a way out of no way.”

In April 2014, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter died after a long battle with cancer. David McCallum was exonerated and freed two months later, after serving 29 years in prison. This is the story of how Carter and his friend and coauthor Ken Klonsky worked for 10 years to help free the wrongfully convicted McCallum, along with a group of committed friends and professionals.

In Girls of Tender Age, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith fully articulates with great humor and tenderness the wild jubilance of an extended French-Italian family struggling to survive in a post-World War II housing project in Hartford, Connecticut.

Digging into one's family history can reveal unusual surprises. In my case, I recently discovered my great grandfather, Jesse C. Davisson's first-hand account of his 25-year military experience during an epic period in American history. Jesse was no angel when he first joined the Army in 1893, as an ordinary young man in Philadelphia. His diary follows his subsequent adventures - from learning to ride a horse with the 7th Cavalry, and befriending Indian Scouts, to surviving ambushes, and water-boarding prisoners - all while serving in the American Indian Wars.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American innovator, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who helped establish the contemporary rotating present (AC) electrical energy delivery system.

The remarkable story of a T-shirt company that sparked a global movement to aid people living in poverty. All his life, Derek Evans felt a spiritual pull to be a part of something greater than himself, but it wasn’t until he and a friend embarked on a transformational trip to LA’s infamous skid row that he found his true calling. They returned home with a plan to build a mission-minded business that would change the world - one T-shirt at a time.

Get smarter in just 60 minutes with in60Learning. Concise and elegantly written nonfiction books and audiobooks help you learn the core subject matter in 20% of the time that it takes to read a typical book. Life is short, so explore a multitude of fascinating historical, biographical, scientific, political, and financial topics in only an hour each.

Teresa Newton-Terres never knew her dad. Losing him when she was only two, she lived with unresolved grief for almost 50 years. But when a dusty scrapbook hidden by her grandmother lands on her doorstep, she plunges into an abyss to uncover the story. In 1960, an eminent physicist and six other men including Newton-Terres' father left on a covert Raytheon-related underwater communications experiment.

It has been the public's perception that Madoff investors were all extremely wealthy and all belonged to exclusive clubs. This perception has been reinforced by the media and the powers that be. The truth is, with very few exceptions, such as Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Picower and Stanley Chais, most were average, small time investors. This is their story.

Every photograph is a frozen moment, a story waiting to be told. A wedding photograph of a secret marriage. A dapper man who may be a lost relative. Three women covered in funeral shrouds. A brother. A father. A sonogram. These are six of the seventeen that comprise an album of photographs and their stories—nonfiction short stories found and told by a group of Columbia Journalism students. Perhaps in discovering these stories you may set off to find your own photographs, and with them, the stories they tell.

The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious - and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of broke writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a rich and beguiling series of guidebooks to the 48 states. All this fell within the singular purview of the Federal Writers' Project - a division of the Works Progress Administration founded to employ jobless writers, from best-selling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified.

The Soul of a Child places brilliant educator and reformer Maria Montessori in the context of her time. It examines the relationships, inner struggles, and inspirations of Montessori, a woman with heart, empathy, and resilience. As a strong woman who lived through two world wars, the rise of fascism in Spain and Italy and the dawn of the nuclear age, she remained undeterred in her faith in the possibility of positive change through education. Her life spanned both the joys of innovation and the horrors of destruction of the 20th century.

"War Diary: The Diary of Mike Rogers" is a poignant historical record that chronicles the experiences of a young boy, Mike Rogers, during World War II. The diary begins in 1939, capturing the tense atmosphere as Britain enters the war. It provides detailed daily entries that cover the significant and mundane aspects of wartime life, from the fear of air raids and the impact of rationing to personal reflections and observations of everyday occurrences.

A long time ago, when Japan had the feudal system, my family was a landlord of the area. It has come to a complete downfall over the years, but my family still clings to its past glory. For them, to succeed the family is critical. I’m firstborn and have no brother which meant that I was a successor and destined to spend the whole life in my hometown. But, music changed everything. To pursue a career in music, my hometown was too rural, and I had to move out. Back then, I was a college student, and moving to a city meant dropping out of school.