New Biographies Memoirs

Dave Newman’s fierce and jittery memoir reveals, in unsanitized detail and naked, smart reflection, the story of a working class casualty--or near casualty--that a less honest, less inquisitive writer might avoid. In this exquisitely paced, wrenchingly beautiful tale of addictions, of needing help, of helping and not helping, of fighting and surviving, of the will and wonder and work of loving hard, of brokenness and the precarious impulse to apply the glue and clamp ourselves back together, Newman proves that he is beyond truth-seeker. He is a truth be-er.

"Landstuhl is a regional military hospital located in Kaiserslautern, a town in the German state of Rheinland-Pfalz. It is the largest military hospital in Europe, also called “The German front in the Iraq War”. Every day, planes land at Ramstein Airbase with severely injured US soldiers from Iraq where lives are saved, limbs amputated, and gunshot wounds patched up from the Iraqi war front.

That Monday afternoon, in high-school gyms across America, kids were battling for the only glory American culture seems to want to dispense to the young these days: sports glory. But at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California, in a gear-cluttered classroom, a different type of “cool” was brewing. A physics teacher with a dream - the first public high-school teacher ever to win a MacArthur Genius Award - had rounded up a band of high-I.Q. students who wanted to put their technical know-how to work.

Through the rising action of his life in literature, Lennon’s remembrances track the influence not only of his literary pater familias, Norman Mailer, but his actual father, a booze-bitten blue-collar bibliophile with his own reputation for genius, and how together these mentors forged and focused the 20/20 literary vision Lennon takes to the work of some of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century, from Baldwin and Bishop to Didion and DeLillo and, not least, Mailer himself.

An army medic who went beyond the call of duty amid a frenzy of treacherous bloodletting in Ladakh’s Galwan while his fellow soldiers fought the Chinese to death; the crew of an Indian Navy destroyer that put everything on the line to rescue hundreds from Cyclone Tauktae in the Arabian Sea; an Indian Air Force pilot who ejected from his doomed fighter less than two seconds before it hit the ground, only to find he was missing a leg.

In this startling and original work, best-selling author Charles Higham (Howard Hughes: The Secret Life) addresses one of the greatest historical mysteries: Did John Wilkes Booth act alone on the night of Good Friday, 1865, or was he part of a wide conspiracy? Drawing from letters, diaries, previously unstudied records of official hearings, railway timetables, and obscure shipping manifests, Higham weaves a spellbinding account of intrigue.

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.

March 1942: The world is at war. Too old to fight and with jobs scarce at home, Tom Phelps found work as a carpenter in the goldfields of the New Guinea Highlands. No one expected the Japanese to attack in the Pacific. But they did. Tom and his mates weren't going to hang around and wait to be killed. With escape routes bombed by the Japanese, their only option was to try to reach safety by foot, through some of the most rugged terrain on Earth - the Bulldog Track. Back home in Sydney, Rose Phelps, their son, George, and three daughters, Joy, Shirley and Ann, waited for news of Tom's fate.

In Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, veteran technology journalist Ashlee Vance provides the first inside look into the extraordinary life and times of Silicon Valley's most audacious entrepreneur. Written with exclusive access to Musk, his family, and his friends, the book traces the entrepreneur's journey from a rough upbringing in South Africa to the pinnacle of the global business world.

This riveting biography of a Massachusetts slave boy who fought in the Revolutionary War illuminates race relations in the Northern colonies, early battles of the revolution, and the experiences of Black soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

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.

Grant Muller was nearly killing himself – quite literally. A desperate quest to get rich had made him a millionaire before the age of 30 but then taken him to the brink: homeless, living on drugs and hustle. If his lifestyle didn’t end him, one of the thugs he owed money to would surely do the job. So when he finally got off the streets and got clean, he knew everything had to change. He reinvented himself, and along the way came to understand that real success in sales isn’t just about the hustle, or about being top of mind. It’s about the human connections you create.

Franklin D. Roosevelt led the American people through the two major crises of modern times. The first volume of an epic two-part biography, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Road to the New Deal, 1882-1939 presents FDR from a privileged Hyde Park childhood through his leadership in the Great Depression to the ominous buildup to global war. Roger Daniels revisits the sources and closely examines Roosevelt's own words and deeds to create a 21st century analysis of how Roosevelt forged the modern presidency.

You cannot undo this, one of the surgeons told me, you have to be sure. I was sure. My choices were frightening, grim, and daunting. I possess the rare breast cancer genetic mutation BRCA2 and I saw it as a death sentence. My choices were drastic, my actions were immediate. Complete hysterectomy followed by prophylactic double mastectomy with 2. I will never be the same. In so many ways. It was, and is, such a journey.

Mark Wayne Nelson details the efforts of one of America’s most underappreciated public servants. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Marriner S. Eccles, a Mormon from Utah, to join his administration. As a Republican businessman, Eccles seemed an unlikely candidate for the role of leading crusader for a fairer and more economically sound distribution of the nation’s wealth. From his first position in the Treasury Department, though, he emerged as the central mover in revolutionizing the mortgage structure of the private home market in the United States.

'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.

Join author and adventurer Jim Pasmore on a fascinating and exciting journey that began with a three-and-a-half second near death "flash" - during which time he re-experienced his entire life, revealing insights and lessons that took him the next 40 years to fully understand...including 22 other near-misses. The author takes us on a journey of exploration, discovery, excitement and adventure leading to the tantalizing grand prize of existence: discovery of Self as Spirit.

Comedian and actor Jay Mohr's humorous memoir about the lunacy that ensues when we reach the blessed stage of parenthood. Riotously acerbic and refreshingly honest, No Wonder My Parents Drank casts the very funny Jay Mohr with an even funnier mini-me sidekick as a supporting character in a little comedic love story that every person who either is a parent or has a parent will find delightful.

وبينما يكافح العالم اليوم لمواجهة روسيا الأكثر جرأة، فإن أهمية فهم فلاديمير بوتين الهائلة والطموحة لم تكن أكبر من أي وقت مضى... فمن ناحية، ساعدت الإصلاحات المحلية الكثيرة التي قام بها بوتين - من التخفيضات الضريبية إلى توسيع حقوق الملكية - على إعادة تشكيل إمكانات الملايين من الروس الذين كانت تجربتهم الديمقراطية الوحيدة هي الجريمة والفقر وعدم الاستقرار بعد سقوط الاتحاد السوفييتي.