New Biographies Memoirs

Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015, and overnight, the political became personal, as the world awoke to the reality of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima Kurdi first saw the shocking photo of her nephew in her home in Vancouver, Canada. But Tima did not need a photo to understand the truth - she and her family had already been living it.

Betsy LaQuanda Ross is a self-proclaimed “Peculiar Patriot”, who makes regular visits to penitentiaries in order to boost the morale of her loved ones. When she is not sharing neighborhood updates and gossip, Betsy illuminates our country’s cruel and unjust criminal justice system and its impact not only on the 2.3 million people behind bars, but also their family and friends.

“When I become mayor, we become mayor.” Ras Baraka’s famous words speak to exactly who he is as a leader - a fiercely loyal member of his community. In this innovative and ground-breaking Audible Original, hear how Baraka - the mayor of Newark, New Jersey - grew from spoken-word artist to school principal to successful politician.

An Epidemic of Absence asks what will happen in developing countries, which, as they become more affluent, have already seen an uptick in allergic disease: Will India end up more allergic than Europe? Velasquez-Manoff also details a controversial underground movement that has coalesced around the treatment of immune-mediated disorders with parasites. Against much of his better judgment, he joins these do-it-yourselfers and reports his surprising results.

From acclaimed actor and producer Wendell Pierce, an insightful and poignant portrait of family, New Orleans and the transforming power of art. On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina barreled into New Orleans, devastating many of the city's neighborhoods, including Pontchartrain Park, the home of Wendell Pierce's family and the first African American middle-class subdivision in New Orleans. The hurricane breached many of the city's levees, and the resulting flooding submerged Pontchartrain Park under as much as 20 feet of water.

For 20 years Daniel Paquette's murder in New Hampshire went unsolved. It remained a secret between two high school friends until Eric Windhurst's arrest in 2005. What was revealed was a crime born of adolescent passion between Eric and Daniel's stepdaughter, Melanie - redefining the meaning of loyalty, justice, and revenge.

The first comprehensive collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the Black liberation era, The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, and FBI infiltration of civil rights groups with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton’s private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, Cuba, and more.

On 20 May 1999, the South Australian Police were called to investigate a disused bank in the unassuming town of Snowtown, in connection to the disappearance of multiple missing people. The police were not prepared for the chilling scene that awaited them. The officers found six barrels within the abandoned bank vault, each filled with acid and the remains of eight individuals. The smell from inside the vault was so stifling that the police required breathing equipment.

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.

Jesus' life is a song that still resonates down through the ages. His deeds and words speak with beauty and mystery, both comforting and confounding us. Who is this man? Over the course of his career, singer-songwriter Michael Card has explored the depths of Scripture by bringing together biblical study and the power of the imagination. Now he sheds light on the life of Jesus through lyrical reflections on the four Gospels. These 40 meditations lead us to a place where Jesus becomes real and we can hear him with both hearts and minds.

Wearing the colour red and having the patch with the emblem of the mighty bulldog on your back was what ex-Mongrel Mob leader Tuhoe 'Bruno' Isaac called being True Red. "Because all levels of society hated us we created a new society of hatred symbolised by the bulldog. Its ferocious habits were engraved on our hearts", Tuhoe says, "If you weren't a mobster you weren't worth knowing." He lived this way for 17 years. However, constantly living for the bash, beer, prison and the possibility of dying in a pool of blood eventually saw Tuhoe search for another way of doing life.

The Best Life Stories by Reader's Digest are 150 of the best hand-picked real-life tales of resilience, joy, and hope - all in 150 words or less! My first year working as a nurse, I picked up extra hours doing home visits for a hospice.

Eleven women went missing over the spring and summer of 1988 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an old fishing port known as the Whaling City, where Moby Dick, Frederick Douglass, textile mills, and heroin-dealing represent just a few of the many threads in the community's diverse fabric. In Shallow Graves, investigative reporter Maureen Boyle tells the story of a case that has haunted New England for 30 years.

Colditz Castle was Nazi Germany’s infamous "escape-proof" wartime prison, where hundreds of the most determined and resourceful Allied prisoners were sent. Despite having more guards than inmates, Australian Lieutenant Jack Champ and other prisoners tirelessly carried out their campaign to escape from the massive floodlit stronghold, by any means necessary.

12 is the propulsive story of this gritty comeback. It's a drama that unfolds in the locker room, the court room, and under the brightest lights in all of sports - the Super Bowl. Now for the first time, listeners will have an exclusive look into Tom Brady's experience and the NFL's shocking strangle-hold on their players. With unprecedented access to Brady himself, his teammates, and his lawyers, we will see just how a football legend went up against one of the largest corporations in the world to stage the greatest comeback in NFL history and emerge a god of the gridiron.

Philip II is not only the most famous king in Spanish history, but one of the most famous monarchs in English history: the man who married Mary Tudor and later launched the Spanish Armada against her sister Elizabeth I. This compelling biography of the most powerful European monarch of his day begins with his conception (1526) and ends with his ascent to Paradise (1603), two occurrences surprisingly well documented by contemporaries. Eminent historian Geoffrey Parker draws on four decades of research on Philip as well as a recent, extraordinary archival discovery - a trove of 3,000 documents in vaults in New York City....

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker magazine has met this challenge more often and more successfully than any other modern American journal. Starting with its light fantastic evocations of the glamorous and the idiosyncratic in the '20s and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Marlon Brando and Richard Pryor, The New Yorker's Profiles have presented readers with a vast and brilliant portrait gallery.

Lin and Larry Pardey's first book, Cruising in Seraffyn, is credited with launching 50,000 dreams. This third book in the critically-acclaimed Seraffyn series chronicles their three years spent exploring Ulysses' wine-colored sea.

Easter Sunday, 1902, deep in the Carnarvon Ranges a police constable and station manager are slain then later incinerated, their remains stuffed into saddlebags. Accused of the ghoulish crime are two members of the bushranging Kenniff gang, fast gaining notoriety as Queensland's equivalent of the Kelly gang. Yet the murders are a bold escalation from the petty fraud, horse stealing and cattle duffing the gang is known for. Starving and exhausted after three long months on the run, the brothers are finally captured, and so the wheels of justice start to turn.

Whether in Truman Capote’s detailed murder of the Clutter family or Ted Bundy’s small-town charm, criminals have always roamed rural America and towns worldwide. Featuring murder stories, criminal case studies, and more, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns contains all-new accounts from writers of true crime, crime journalism, and crime fiction. And these entries are not based on a true story - they are true stories. Edited by acclaimed author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto, the stories in this volume span the globe.