New Memoirs

We could all write a book about our life's adventures, growing up and experiencing life on the planet Earth. It's like I've been living two different lives; a programmed one and a liberated one. I have had adventures, experienced romance, and started my life over at least a half dozen times. I have experienced a broken heart four different times by four different wives, but I have been single now for fourteen years!

In Future Perfect, Victoria Loustalot draws on her own personal experience to launch a broader inquiry into the phenomena of psychics, shamans, astrologers, and their fans. Through historical documents and interviews with clairvoyants, seers, and their believers, Victoria opens herself up to the modern mystical complex in cultures and cities around the globe. She pays close attention to what they have to tell us about how we choose to live, what we might be missing out on in the process, and what in the world we’re supposed to do with all that information.

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.

In this shocking and groundbreaking new book, economic historian Burton Folsom, Jr., exposes the idyllic legend of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a myth of epic proportions. With questionable moral character and a vendetta against the business elite, Roosevelt created New Deal programs marked by inconsistent planning, wasteful spending, and opportunity for political gain---ultimately elevating public opinion of his administration but falling flat in achieving the economic revitalization that America needed.

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.

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path.

Herbert George "H. G." Wells (1866 - 1946) was an English writer.

He was prolific in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a "father of science fiction"

BOOK THE FIRST: THE MAKING OF A MAN: Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books.

Thomas Keneally has been observing, reflecting on and writing about Australia and the human condition for well over 50 years. In this deeply personal, passionately drawn and richly tuned collection, he now turns inwards to reflect on what has been important to him, drawing on a lifetime of engagement with the great issues of our recent history and his own moments of discovery and understanding.

Sex workers in 19th-century Melbourne were judged morally corrupt by the respectable world around them. But theirs was a thriving trade, with links to the police and political leaders of the day, and the leading brothels were usually managed by women. While today a popular bar and a city lane are famously named after Madame Brussels, the identities of the other ‘flash madams’, the ‘dressed girls’ who worked for them and the hundreds of women who solicited on the streets of the Little Lon district of Melbourne are not remembered.

On 7 February 2009, Roger Wood was the police officer in charge of Kinglake, at the epicentre of the worst ever bushfire disaster in Australia's history, Black Saturday. As the firestorm engulfed the community, he risked his life again and again to try to save people. When he phoned home to warn his wife what was coming, she screamed that the fire had already hit their property. Then the line went dead.

The oft-told exploits of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly survive vividly in the public imaginations of their respective countries, the United States and Australia. But the outlaws' reputations are so weighted with legend and myth that the truth of their lives has become obscure. In this adventure-filled double biography, Robert M. Utley reveals the true stories and parallel courses of the two notorious contemporaries who lived by the gun.

There was a place far worse than Changi - Singapore's Outram Road Gaol. Deprivation here was so extreme that there really was a fate worse than death. Stubborn Buggers is the story of 12 Australian POWs who fought and survived the battle for Malaya, then captivity and slave labour, followed by the unimaginable hardships of Outram Road Gaol.

It is a story of how they dealt with the brutality of the Japanese military police, the feared Kempeitai.

Actors, musicians, TV personalities, and other public figures in the spotlight aren’t always who they appear to be. You might be surprised by just how many have led nefarious, double lives, and have become infamous criminals! Power, status, and a rich lifestyle aren’t barriers to criminal behavior. Yes, people from all walks of life commit crimes. But the people featured here are not your typical neighbors or subway passengers—they are household names and Hollywood stars.

On August 25, 1895, Ernest Alfred Hall was born into a pioneering Australian family that lived on a 313-acre property called "Cloverdale" near the hamlet of Beech Forest, south of the Otway Ranges, some 200 kilometres south west of Melbourne, Victoria. As a child, it seemed he would be destined for the life of a farmer in a country that was just realising its independence through Federation, yet his path was to be diverted by the cataclysmic events that befell Europe and the British Empire.

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.

There are countless paths to follow when seeking spiritual guidance, but thousands of years of theology and religion cannot replace the premier example that Jesus himself set for us. In A Portrait of Jesus, best-selling writer Joseph Girzone recaptures the truth of Jesus that is presented to us in the Gospels and gives a compelling vision of the person Jesus' contemporaries must have known.

In the late 1970s, criminal mastermind John Milligan and his associates conspired to import heroin into Far North Queensland via a remote mountaintop airdrop. In a story that is stranger than fiction, it took them three trips through dense jungle to locate the heroin, but they only recovered one of the two packages. When narcotics Agent John Shobbrook took on the investigation of this audacious crime, codenamed 'Operation Jungle', his career was on the rise within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

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.

In A New America, Tommy Mottola explores the societal and cultural impact the Latino community and its music has had on America by sharing behind-the-scenes stories from his own life and his connection to the Latin sound throughout the decades - from his initial fascination with Latin music which started with Puente, to the mainstream success of Ritchie Valens, to the groove-laden guitar wizardry of Carlos Santana. >But A New America is more than a story about music and musicians. It is the story of a culture that continues to grow and influence America.

"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.