New Memoirs

Philip K. Dick was a visionary writer. From post-apocalyptic San Francisco to Nazi-occupied America, his strange alternative futures have transfixed the world. But his life was every bit as unusual as his fiction. A Life of Philip K Dick opens a window into PKD's unique mind. Written with close cooperation with two of his ex-wives and a number of his friends, we are taken through his five marriages, his periods living in squalor, and his souring literary success. We are also given unparalleled insight into his transcendental experiences.

If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. On February 20, 1962, when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the free world and renew America’s sense of self-belief. Mercury Rising recreates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to the moon.

Sexual assault, addiction, and other traumatic experiences can leave both physical and emotional scars. For Jennifer Storm, these scars serve as a reminder - both of the darkness and suffering she once experienced, and of how far she has come. Blackout Girl is the heartbreaking, enlightening, and inspiring story of Jennifer's narrow escape from her own self-destructive instincts when all of the odds, and systems, were stacked against her.

It was James Agee who christened Buster Keaton “The Great Stone Face.” Keaton’s face, Agee wrote, "ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was also irreducibly funny. Keaton was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work and . . . he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.”

On a warm spring evening in 1982, 37-year-old accountant Margaret Barbera left work in New York City and walked to the parking lot where she kept her BMW. Finding the lock on the driver’s side jammed, she went to the passenger’s side. A man leaned through the open window of a van parked in the next spot, pressed a silenced pistol to the back of Margaret’s head, and fired. She was dead before she hit the pavement. It was a professional hit, meticulously planned - but the killer didn’t expect three employees of the nearby CBS TV studios to stumble onto the scene of the crime.

A thrilling firsthand account by husband-and-wife ex-CIA operatives.

Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world, unsentimental critics, and meticulous stylists. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she said.

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.

Congressman John Lewis was a paragon of the civil rights movement and political leadership for decades. A hero we won’t soon forget, Lewis was a beacon of hope and a model of humility whose invocation to “good trouble” continues to inspire millions across our nation. In his last months on earth, even while battling cancer, he dedicated time to share his memories, beliefs, and advice—exclusively immortalized in these chapters—as a message to the generations to come.

They looked like a slightly mischievous version of the all-American couple: a handsome army veteran and his gorgeous artist girlfriend. Zackery Bowen, after completing his tour of Iraq, came home to New Orleans, and in two weeks before Hurricane Katrina, he met Addie Hall. Their improvised, hard-partying endurance during and after the storm inspired news outlets around the world to feature the couple as the personification of the indomitable spirit of New Orleans. But beneath the surface, trouble was brewing.

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.

From the former secretary of defense and author of the acclaimed number one best-selling memoir, Duty, a candid, sweeping examination of power, and how it has been exercised, for good and bad, by American presidents in the post-Cold War world.

Reimagining Blue is a passionate and personal analysis of a misunderstood profession from the vantage point of female Police Chief Kristen Ziman. Ziman credits her colorful childhood for the temperament that led her to gravitate toward policing, a profession where chaos is all in a day’s work. Many times, she learned life and leadership lessons through the revelation of what not to do. But nothing could have prepared Kristen for the turmoil that would unfold during her tenure.

From one of the country’s most recognizable journalists: How becoming a grandmother transforms a woman’s life. After four decades as a reporter, Lesley Stahl’s most vivid and transformative experience of her life was not covering the White House, interviewing heads of state, or researching stories at 60 Minutes. It was becoming a grandmother. She was hit with a jolt of joy so intense and unexpected, she wanted to “investigate” it - as though it were a news flash.

So rapid has this national transformation been that it has taken place within the lifetimes of these remarkable young sportsmen. Colombia Es Pasión! How a New Generation of Cyclists Changed a Nation explores the lives and dreams of each of Colombia's leading cyclists. Theirs are inspiring stories of overcoming poverty and violence, sickness and corruption - of the emergence of the indigenous to global sporting glory.

In 1975, seven-year-old Doina Cornell left England with her father Jimmy Cornell, mother and brother to spend the next six years sailing around the world on a small yacht. The author has drawn on her memories, diaries and stories, to re-create the perfect life led by a sailing child: swimming, diving and playing the days away in deserted anchorages; visiting some of the most beautiful islands in the world; falling in love with the sea in all its ever-changing moods, from balmy trade wind ocean passages to the treacherous breakers that crash onto tropical reefs.

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.

From Marine sniper Jake Wood comes a riveting memoir of leading over 100,000 veterans to a life of renewed service, volunteering to battle, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, pandemics, and civil wars, and inspiring onlookers as their unique military training saved lives and rebuilt our country.

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.

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.