New English Memoires

Today's extremist violence surges into our lives from what seems like every direction - vehicles hurtling down city sidewalks; cyber-threats levied against political leaders and backed up with violence; automatic weapons unleashed on mall shoppers, students, and the faithful in houses of worship. As varied as the violent acts are the attackers themselves - neo-Nazis, white nationalists, the alt-right, InCels, and Islamist jihadists, to name just a few.

From the survivor of 10 Nazi concentration camps who went on to create the New England Holocaust Memorial, an inspiring memoir about finding strength in the face of despair. On August 14, 2017, two days after a white-supremacist activist rammed his car into a group of anti-Fascist protestors, killing one and injuring 19, the New England Holocaust Memorial was vandalized for the second time in as many months. At the base of one of its fifty-four-foot glass towers lay a pile of shards. For Steve Ross, the image called to mind Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

Human exploration of Mars is the most ambitious and exciting scientific goal of the 21st century. Few people know as much about this fascinating planet as Dr. Larry Crumpler. As one of the long-term planning leads for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, he helped control the daily communications between NASA and the rovers.

Truman Capote’s best-selling book In Cold Blood has captivated worldwide audiences for over 50 years. It is a gripping story about the consequences of a trivial robbery gone terribly wrong in a remote village of western Kansas. But what if robbery was not the motive at all but something more sinister? And why would the Kansas Bureau of Investigation press the attorney general to launch a ruthless four-year legal battle to prevent fresh details of the state’s most famous crime from being made public, so many years after the case had been solved?

And so begins Doug Avery's story of emotional resilience in the face of what at times seemed a hopeless situation. The South Island farmer suffered terribly during eight years of drought. His farm was depleted and so was he, to the point of severe depression. The Resilient Farmer is Doug's powerful example of how to get life back on track. With candour and wisdom, he tells his story of turning desperation into determination, embracing risk, navigating change and, on top of everything, enduring monumental earthquakes.

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

This long-awaited translation of Confessions, which Stephen Greenblatt describes as central to the legacy of Adam and Eve, enlivens the beguiling world of late antiquity. No modern, well-versed literature lover can call her education complete without having listened to Augustine’s Confessions. One of the most original works of world literature, it is the first autobiography ever written, influencing writers from Montaigne to Rousseau, Virginia Woolf to Gertrude Stein.

Ray Walker had a secure career in finance until a wine-tasting vacation ignited a passion that he couldn't stifle. Ray neglected his work, spending hours poring over ancient French winemaking texts, learning the techniques and the language, and daydreaming about vineyards. After Ray experienced his first taste of wine from Burgundy, he could wait no longer. He quit his job and went to France to start a winery - with little money, a limited command of French, and virtually no winemaking experience.

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity - by chewing, brewing, and snorting - some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze Age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the great American literary icons of the 20th century, a protégé of Langston Hughes and mentor to a generation of poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Elizabeth Alexander. Her poetry took inspiration from the complex portraits of Black American life she observed growing up on Chicago's South Side - a world of kitchenette apartments and vibrant streets.

When businessman Thomas Peterson is killed outside a football ground in the Highlands, there are several witnesses. Yet the hunt for the killer is proving as futile as the search for a motive. Possible connections to Russian money and an eerie retirement home are soon thrown into the mix. To further complicate things, DI Westphall's MI6 past is coming back to haunt him. Guilt stalks his dreams, but could there be a message in these nightmares? Westphall is in danger of losing his head just when he needs it the most. He must find answers, and fast, before the murderer strikes again.

Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens all life on Earth. Desert Storm fighter pilot and NASA astronaut Ron Garan addresses this head-on in Floating in Darkness: A Journey of Evolution. Ron takes us on an extraordinary journey through outer space and inner space. He explores the dancing, intersecting orbits of religion, spirituality, and science while grappling with his own role in the violence of combat and the effects of war on all aspects of human life.

When it comes to divorce, forewarned is forearmed. This book delivers both in a story you won't be able to pause. Equal parts suspense thriller and how-to manual, Tim’s memoir is a must read for anyone who’s facing a divorce with children, or loves somebody who is. While most intuitively understand that divorce brings out the worst in people, and many have heard that separating can be extremely costly and frustrating, few approach the process aware of its greatest pitfalls, how truly terrible they are, and just how prevalent they’ve become.

Lawrence Weschler sets Oliver Sacks' brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks' capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul.

Grace Metalious, born and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, came from humble beginnings. A former mill worker, mother of three, and school principal’s wife, she would shock the nation in 1956 with the publication of Peyton Place, her first novel about a murder in a small town. Quickly becoming the best-selling book of its time, the sexually charged book spawned sequels, two Hollywood movies, and a long-running television series on ABC starring Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal.

With equal parts wit and wisdom, New York Times best-selling author Donald Miller invites you to reconnect with your faith. Miller shares what he's learned firsthand - that our relationship with God is designed to teach us about redemption, grace, healing, and so much more. Searching for God Knows What weaves together timeless stories and fresh perspectives on the Bible to capture one man's journey to discover an authentic faith that's worth believing.

The long agony of the “sick man of Europe”, an expression used by the tsar of Russia to depict the falling Ottoman Empire, could almost blind people to its incredible power and history. Preserving its mixed heritage - coming from both its geographic position, rising above the ashes of the Byzantine Empire, and the tradition inherited from the Muslim conquests - the Ottoman Empire lasted more than six centuries.

In iLeadership, Jay Elliot gives the listener the opportunity of seeing Steve Jobs as only his closest associates have ever seen him, and to learn what has made him - and the mystique of his management style - capable of creating tools so extraordinary that they have remade three industries and have transformed the way we create, consume, and communicate with each other.

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “life master” and king of the credit-default swap.

Starting with her childhood days in East Berlin (“I start with my life as a schoolgirl.... My own conscious life begins at the same time as the socialist life of Leipziger Strasse”), Not a Novel provides a glimpse of growing up in the GDR and of what it was like to be 22 when the wall collapsed; it takes us through Erpenbeck’s early adult years, working in a bakery after immersing herself in the worlds of music, theater, and opera, and ultimately discovering her path as a writer.