New Memoirs

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.

Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock occupies a singular place in American life. As senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and now as a senator from Georgia, he is the rare voice who can call out the uncomfortable truths that shape contemporary American life and, at a time of division, summon us all to a higher moral ground.

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.

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.

Bob Schlegel grew up on a struggling family farm, and like his entrepreneurial father, he took charge of his destiny by starting his own businesses - often more than one at a time. He and his wife Myrna partnered together in their early endeavors and raised a family of entrepreneurs. Their diverse startups included a chain of 15 superior nursing and retirement centers, as well as the nation's leading manufacturer of paving stones and landscaping materials.

At 12.16 a.m. on Wednesday, June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded in the service pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. A 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, was found holding the smoking gun and convicted of murder. That is the official history - but Tim Tate and Brad Johnson have uncovered a different story.

Accidents happen, but they're usually the result of human carelessness. Charlie Morecraft found that out one August night years ago, when he literally blew himself up. A long time worker at an Exxon refinery in New Jersey, Morecraft was rushing to leave for vacation and too macho to bother following standard safety procedures when performing a late night repair job. The result? Burns covering 50 percent of his body, months upon months of hospitalization and rehab, dozens of surgeries, and emotional suffering.

La espléndida biografía de Alexander von Humboldt, el héroe perdido de la ciencia y padre de la ecología.

Sudhir Venkatesh, acclaimed sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day, returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York's divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the city's underground economy. Based on Venkatesh's interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city's true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity - revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York.

In this book, Prusiner tells the remarkable story of his discovery of prions - infectious proteins that replicate and cause disease but surprisingly contain no genetic material - and reveals how superb and meticulous science is actually practiced with talented teams of researchers who persevere. He recounts the frustrations and rewards of years of research and offers fascinating portraits of his peers as they raced to discover the causes of fatal brain diseases.

Two billion people worldwide watch YouTube. Yet its stars remain a mystery to much of the public and media. What is the secret of their appeal? How do they cope with being in front of the lens? And who is behind them? Wired journalist Chris Stokel-Walker reveals the answers in the first independent in-depth book on YouTube. For three years he has interviewed more than 100 figures connected with the world's biggest video-sharing website, including leading agents, managers and the YouTubers themselves.

In March 2011, a major police investigation was opened in the search for missing Swindon local, Sian O'Callaghan. When taxi driver Christopher Halliwell was arrested, Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher didn't expect what happened next. After the body of another missing girl, Becky Godden-Edwards, was uncovered, the police had two murders on their hands and one suspect, but how many more unsolved murders could Christopher Halliwell be responsible for?

No topic is too taboo or off limits, from the sexual assaults she suffered as a child to the exhibitionism displayed and multiple abortions she had as an adult. Garland weaves the seedy and secretive world of a sex addict with her words, removing the erotic and replacing it with the reality of what it means to live a double life: lying to and cheating on the ones you love.

In this new audiobook, broadcaster and music writer Alan Cross narrates the definitive history of New Order. Cross succeeds once again in revealing the fascinating history behind the music in the same compelling way we've come to expect from his long broadcasting career.

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.

The Pacific with Sam Neill is the companion audiobook to the Foxtel documentary series of the same name, in which actor and raconteur Sam Neill takes a deeply personal, present-day voyage to map his own understanding of James Cook, Europe's greatest navigator, and the immense Pacific Ocean itself. Voyaging on a wide variety on vessels, from container ships to fishing trawlers and sailing boats, Sam crosses the length and breadth of the largest ocean in the world to experience for himself a contemporary journey in Cook's footsteps.

In January 1889, Louisa Collins, a 41-year-old mother of 10 children, became the first woman hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol and the last woman hanged in New South Wales. Both of Louisa's husbands had died suddenly and the Crown, convinced that Louisa poisoned them with arsenic, put her on trial an extraordinary four times in order to get a conviction, to the horror of many in the legal community. Louisa protested her innocence until the end.

In this uniquely fascinating audiobook, internationally renowned psychic Sylvia Browne recounts her captivating life as a clairvoyant, telling of her earliest readings as a young child in Kansas City, and of her first contact with Francine, her spirit guide.

Displaced is Linda Schwab’s Holocaust memoir, a retelling of her experience surviving 18 months in a man-made cave, another year as an exile in Poland and Germany, and three years as a refugee in a displaced persons camp. Just six years old when a band of Nazi soldiers arrived in her tiny shtetl in Myadel, Poland, Linda observed atrocities no child ever needs to witness.

When Lanfranco ‘Frankie’ Dettori arrived on British shores in 1985, aged just 14, he couldn’t speak a word of English. Having left school just a year earlier, he was eager to become a stable boy and apprentice jockey, following in the footsteps of his father. This was his first, but certainly not his last, leap of faith. Despite his slight size, Frankie’s impact upon the British racing scene was immediate and significant.