New Biographies Memoirs

George Washington may be the most famous American who ever lived and certainly is one of the most admired. But although he has been heavily mythologized, it is no myth that the man who led America's fight for independence and whose two terms in office largely defined the presidency was the most highly respected individual among a generation of formidable personalities. In First and Always, celebrated historian Peter Henriques illuminates Washington's life, more fully explicating his character and his achievements.

The apostle Barnabas may be one of the most overlooked and yet most influential leaders of the New Testament. His impact on the church began with a simple gift to feed hungry believers, then grew into much more. Barnabas was trusted by the original apostles to lead the first organized church outside of Jerusalem, Antioch. He mentored Paul and later Mark, and pioneered the first missionary outreach of the early church. The Barnabas Way follows the journey of this amazing leader across acts, gleaning the important leadership principles that Barnabas leaves along the way.

Parley P. Pratt’s autobiography is one of the great personal stories of early Latter-day Saint church history. It is an eventful and thrilling story of a man’s complete faith in and total commitment to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as the price he paid and the blessings he received for pursuing such a course.

If you care about social change but hate feel-good platitudes, Do It Anyway is the book for you. Courtney Martin's rich profiles of the new generation of activists dig deep, to ask the questions that really matter: How do you create a meaningful life? Can one person even begin to make a difference in our hugely complex, globalized world?

In August 2009, Colin Hagendorf set out to review every regular slice of pizza in Manhattan, and his blog, Slice Harvester, was born. Two years and nearly 400 slices later, he'd been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Daily News (New York), and on radio shows all over the country. Suddenly, this self-proclaimed punk who was barely making a living doing burrito delivery and selling handmade zines had a following.

No one had ever tried a caper like this before. The goods were kept in a secure room under constant scrutiny, deep inside a crowded building with guards at the exits. The team picked for the job included two old hands known only as Paul and Swede, but all depended on a fresh face, a kid from North Carolina. In the Depression, some fellows were willing to try anything - even a heist in the rare book room of the New York Public Library. In Thieves of Book Row, Travis McDade tells the gripping tale of the worst book-theft ring in American history, and the intrepid detective who brought it down.

A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction that redefines the genre, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the meaning of life - all told with a dark pulse of existential horror. What emerges is an unforgettable study of mortality and the artist’s journey.

On the 14th of August 1941, a Polish monk named Maximilian Maria Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz. Kolbe's life had been remarkable. Fiercely intelligent and driven, he founded a movement of Catholicism and spent several years in Nagasaki, ministering to the 'hidden Christians' who had emerged after centuries of oppression. A Polish nationalist as well as a monk, he gave sanctuary to fleeing refugees and his death was no less remarkable: he volunteered to die, saving the life of a fellow prisoner. It was an act that profoundly transformed the lives of two Japanese men.

Am 20. Mai 1999 wurde die südaustralische Polizei gerufen, um eine stillgelegte Bank in der bescheidenen Stadt Snowtown im Zusammenhang mit dem Verschwinden mehrerer vermisster Personen zu untersuchen. Die Beamten waren nicht auf die schreckliche Szene vorbereitet, die sie erwartete.

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.

Almost half a century ago, a young reporter from Germany arrived in still-glamorous Saigon to cover the Vietnam War over a period of five years. In this memoir he now tells the story of how he fell in love with the Vietnamese people. He praises the beauty, elegance and feistiness of their women. He describes blood-curdling Communist atrocities and fierce combat scenes he had witnessed. He introduces a striking array of characters: heroes, villains, statesmen and spooks, hilarious eccentrics, street urchins and orphans herding water buffalos.

Tiyo Attallah Salah-El died in 2018 on “Slow Death Row” while serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. He was a man with a dizzying array of talents and vocations: author, scholar, teacher, musician, and activist: he was the founder of the Coalition for the Abolition of Prisons. He was also, as is apparent from the letters written over a decade and half to his friend Paul Alan Smith that make up this book, an extraordinarily eloquent correspondent.

Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled. Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence.

Once there was a wilderness: Australia's frontier, a dangerous and unforgiving place where outlaws ruled the roads and killers were hailed as heroes. It was here, in 1838, that one man's uncompromising sense of justice changed history and shocked the world. Denny Day was a vicar's son from Ireland. A member of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, as a young man Day joined the British army before resigning to seek his fortune in New South Wales. There he accepted the most challenging role in the young colony: keeping the peace on the frontier.

As a teenage orphan in England in 1791, Mary Reibey was sentenced to death for stealing a horse. When police cornered her, she was dressed as a boy, and she maintained that disguise until she was unmasked at her trial. Due to her 'tender age', Reibey was spared the hangman's noose and sentenced to seven years' transportation to the colony of New South Wales. With the odds stacked against her, Reibey went on to become Australia's first female business tycoon and the richest woman in the colony, founding the Bank of New South Wales, now one of the nation's biggest financial institutions.

Rowena’s community is called the Silversmiths and is settled in Romania. Although the ones who stayed behind were made slaves in the 19th century and were deported during World War II, they never gave up on their country. Listen carefully to hear the great-great-grandmother’s song, enslaved in her youth. Close your eyes, and see the caravan where Rowena’s grandmother was born. See the slum of Alexandria, where her mother grew up. Bathe yourself in the enticing smells of a Gypsy dinner of what is allowed or forbidden for these Romani women.

'We can give you a start. You will need a six foot by four foot piece of canvas and blanket. If you stay for three months we will refund your fare. You will need to fly TAA out of Cloncurry and advise me your date of arrival.' And so began the adventures and misadventures of young Roland Breckwoldt. It was 1960. He was not yet sixteen, and the unworldly Roland was leaving his home on the semi-agricultural fringes of Sydney to work as a stockman on the vast cattle stations of the Gulf Country of North Queensland.

Picture a man, he’s tall, not excessively so, yet as wide as he is high. This man is a spitting and growling street brawler; a tank full of ready-to-blow, muscle-fuelled aggression. Imagine, if you will, the comic-book style Bulldog of Great British stamp. Well, there you have him! The prototypical face taken from the terraces of an ’80s football fan’s rolled-up newspaper cosh; a poster-boy of malevolence left over from Thatcher’s post-punk Britain.

Jemima Atar first experienced the unfolding of her complex narrative when she began exploring her life with the help of her therapist. Throughout the turmoil that characterized facing up to the truth of painful childhood trauma, Jemima’s therapist was her steadfast anchor, providing safety and support. But when he suddenly had to terminate the sessions after almost two years, Jemima found herself thrown into the depths of unfamiliar, isolating, misunderstood grief.

In December 1832 a farmer found the body of a pregnant young woman hanging near a haystack outside a New England mill town. When news spread that Methodist preacher Ephraim Avery was accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a factory worker, the case gave the public everything they found irresistible: sexually charged violence, adultery, the hypocrisy of a church leader, secrecy and mystery, and suspicions of insanity. Murder in a Mill Town tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America's first "trial of the century."