Nonfiction Memoir

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history, including Alessandro Volta, inventor of the battery; Michael Faraday, inventor of the electric motor; Marie Curie, famous for her work on radioactivity; Albert Einstein, creator of the theory of relativity; Alexander Fleming, discoverer of the first antibiotic; and Linus Pauling, chemist and peace activist.

Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning 50 and the storm caused by The First Stone. Her story on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio wins her a Walkley Award.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Where Have All the Bullets Gone?, written and read by Spike Milligan. Back to those haunting days in Italy in 1944, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, with lava running in great red rivulets down the slope towards us, and Jock taking a drag on his cigarette and saying, "I think we've got grounds for a rent rebate."

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Tuohy follows Richard O'Kane, America's undersea ace of aces, and a few fearless submariners, during the U.S. submarine war in the Pacific. This grueling battle saw 10 million tons of Japanese shipping sunk by U.S. submarines, but the cost to the U.S. Navy was one in five of its boats, the highest casualty rate of the U.S. armed services.

Follow Paul Oakenfold—world-renowned DJ and dance music pioneer—as he tells his incredible story of a phenomenal career at the beating heart of dance. Paul's journey takes him from a musical baptism in 1980s New York and underground club nights in London to running a seminal dance record label and a legendary trip to Ibiza that introduced him to trance and changed the face of dance music forever.

Two families assemble for a wedding at a family mansion on the beach in East Hampton. But as the festivities are readied, the father of the bride suffers a massive stroke from alcohol withdrawal and lies in a coma in the hospital. So begins Jeanne McCulloch’s vivid memoir of her wedding weekend in 1983 and its aftereffects on her family and the family of the groom. As McCulloch reveals, the repercussions from that weekend will ripple throughout her own family and that of her in-law as they grapple with questions of loyalty, tradition, marital honor, hope, and loss.

The stories in I Thought He Would Be in Jail are the true-life adventures of a mischievous hyperactive boy who became a prank-playing jet-age pilot instead. Growing up in the 1940s and '50s, Steve Taylor created trouble everywhere he went. He skipped school for weeks at a time but never took a day off from walking on the edge. Some tales tug at your heart, some make you laugh, and some will show the upside of benign neglect.

In the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Pope Pius VII shared a common goal: to reconcile the church with the state. But while they were able to work together initially, formalizing an agreement in 1801, relations between them rapidly deteriorated. In 1809, Napoleon ordered the Pope's arrest. Ambrogio Caiani provides a pioneering account of the tempestuous relationship between the emperor and his most unyielding opponent.

With compelling realism mixed with equal doses of self-deprecating wit, youthful bravado, and hard-earned humility, Symptoms of Withdrawal chronicles Lawford's deep and long descent into near-fatal drug and alcohol addiction, and his subsequent formidable path back to the sobriety he has preserved for the past 20 years.

One of the world's most influential religious leaders shares his legacy message and spiritual memoir for the first time. Tracing his faith journey from humble beginnings on the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to sharing the good news with millions and counseling world leaders, Luis' life is filled with adventure, risk, and faith. A very personal audiobook with never-before-told stories and a 16-page photo insert, Luis recounts losing his father at an early age and caring for his five siblings and his mother.

From the creator of the "How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book" workshop comes the ultimate guide to crafting a book in any genre. Mary Carroll Moore is the author of 13 books in three genres, and she has taken thousands of new book authors from idea to print! Your Book Starts Here offers sound, easy-to-follow advice on the ins and outs of book writing: everything from writing practice to pacing your prose.

While on patrol as part of a peacekeeping mission, eleven British soldiers are kidnapped. The captors are a dangerous rebel group known as the West Side Boys. Fuelled by alcohol and drugs, the behaviour of the rebels is notoriously unpredictable. How long the soldiers have, no one knows. Rescuing them becomes the British military's highest priority, and so they bring in the SAS for Operation Barras, a mission that will go down in special forces history.

For more than 200 years, the wreck of the Whydah (and the riches that went down with it) eluded treasure seekers, until the ship was finally found in 1984 by marine archaeologists. The artifacts brought up from the ocean floor are priceless, both in value and in the picture they reveal of life in that much-mythologized era, changing much of what we know about pirates.

I'm Just a Supply Sgt. is a compelling narrative of the Vietnam War with a very personal, psychological perspective that is difficult to find in most histories. Don Stout's ability to comprehend and record his feelings during the war, and his struggles after the war, provide not only a window into the suffering of many veterans but also a tool for catharsis for those afflicted with PTSD. Without a doubt, Don's story provides one of the most unique perspectives on the war and is not only a history of his service but a psychological epic.

Patton's Shadow by Nathan C. Jones, a leading authority on George S. Patton, offers a definitive account of the creation of the Patton legend and what it illuminates about American culture and the worship of heroes. Jones traces how the persona of Patton, a brash and brilliant general in the European theater of World War II, transcended the individual man and became a cultural icon and byword for triumphal American might.

The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author - a woman very much ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos. Nancy Spain was one of the most celebrated - and notorious - writers and broadcasters of the '40s, '50s and '60s. Hilarious, controversial and brilliant, she lived openly as a lesbian (sharing a household with her two lovers and their various children) and was frequently litigated against for her newspaper columns - Evelyn Waugh successfully sued her for libel...twice.

Heirs to the renowned German-American Bergdoll Beer fortune at a young age, the Bergdoll boys used their millions to become champion race car drivers and pioneer aviation heroes in the early 1900s. Grover, the most notorious, is celebrated for his daring record-setting flights in a Wright Brothers airplane. Erwin drives a powerful Benz to win a prestigious motor car race, the equivalent of the Daytona 500. Then they're snared by vengeful local military draft officials.

The mercurial, self-mythologizing novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the twentieth-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was the finest observer and chronicler of his age. Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia, and he died an alcoholic.

Before the consecutive two-term administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, there had only been one other trio of its type: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Kevin R. C. Gutzman's The Jeffersonians is a complete chronicle of the men who served as president from 1801 to 1825 and implemented the foreign policy, domestic, and constitutional agenda of the radical wing of the American Revolution, setting guideposts for later American liberals to follow.

Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things.