Survivor Biography

Sharon Osbourne's life has always been full of drama, heartbreak and passion. When she completed her best-selling first book, Extreme, she had hoped to find some peace and stability after her rollercoaster years. It was not to be. In Survivor, her brand-new memoir, she reveals what really happened next. From famous celebrity feuds, to her eventful experiences on The X Factor, to her turbulent relationship with her father and the tragic impact of his death, Sharon remains as frank and insightful as ever.

No one expected the Nazis to arrive with such speed, and without a shot being fired. But when they entered Kraków in 1939, Josef Lewkowicz’s life was obliterated as he and his family were sent to concentration camps across the continent. Josef—after surviving the horrors of six separate concentration camps during World War II—became a relentless Nazi hunter in the aftermath of the war. The Survivor is a captivating record of one man’s survival against all odds—but it is also an optimistic chronicle of such a pivotal moment in history, offering wisdom and hope despite the crushing darkness.

As a young girl growing up in Jamaica, Jozanne Marie's greatest desire was to restore a missing ancestral link and satisfy a longing for the one person she believed could affirm her identity: Her father. He had left for America when she was just an infant. After five years living on the island with an emotionally unavailable mother and a young grandmother (hiding a pocket full of secrets), her father made his triumphant return. He drove up in a white 1980s Volkswagen Beetle, enchanting as a dream. Tragically, her supposed redeemer became her greatest adversary.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

In January 1978, I slept in my bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University as Ted Bundy stalked nearby. He grabbed an oak log from a stack of firewood, slipped through a back door with a broken padlock, and headed upstairs.He began twisting doorknobs. Room 9 was open, and he quietly and quickly killed one of my sleeping sorority sisters. Across the hall, he found another unlocked door and murdered again. Then, he turned the knob to my bedroom and found it was open. I remember the attack vividly. But Bundy wasn’t my first brush with death, and he wasn’t my last.

Set against a backdrop of East End London, Georgia experienced a childhood few of us could imagine. Though brought up in a loving family, she watched her family break apart through deceit and her mother descend into heroin addiction. Escaping into what she felt was a loving sanctuary, Georgia ended up trapped in a violent relationship with a man who would beat and abuse her. After having her three children by him, she knew she had to escape to finally find safety. Now Georgia is sharing her story of survival to help others and prove there is hope even after trauma and heartache.

In 2015, Maggie Nichols’s gymnastics career was on fire. Having spent most of her young life training as an elite-level gymnast, Maggie carried the team all-around at the 2015 World Championships, helping to cinch the team gold medal. Next in her sights was the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. She was eagerly looking forward to training for the 2016 Olympic Games along with teammates such as Aly Raisman, Simone Biles, and Laurie Hernandez. But on the verge of achieving her lifelong Olympic dream, her world came crashing down.

Mark Wales thought his life would end in a cornfield in Afghanistan. Mark and his SAS troops emerged from that scorched battlefield 12 hours later, his mentor gunned down, his dream career now a nightmare. Over four deployments of intense warfighting, Mark watched the line between right and wrong become blurred. When he left the SAS he was adrift, crippled by guilt. On a mission to rebuild himself, Mark turned his life around. He fought his way into the gates of a US Ivy League business school and into the boardrooms of top-tier international corporations.

Elida Friedman was not supposed to have been born. In the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania, Nazi law forbade Jewish women from giving birth. Yet, despite the fear of death, Dr. Jonah Friedman and his wife Tzila choose to bring a daughter into the world, a little girl they name Elida—meaning non-birth in Hebrew.

Eric Davidson was a beautiful, fair-haired toddler when the Halifax Explosion struck, killing almost 2,000 people and seriously injuring thousands of others. Eric lost both eyes - a tragedy that his mother never fully recovered from. Eric, however, was positive and energetic. He also developed a fascination with cars and how they worked, and he later decided, against all likelihood, to become a mechanic. Assisted by his brothers, who read to him from manuals, he worked hard, passed examinations, and carved out a decades-long career.

Told by a former high-level member of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown survivor, Seductive Poison is the "truly unforgettable" (Kirkus Reviews) story of how one woman was seduced by one of the most notorious cults in recent memory and how she found her way back to sanity.

Erika Krouse has one of those faces. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” people say, spilling confessions. In fall 2002, Erika accepts a new contract job investigating lawsuits as a private investigator. The role seems perfect for her, but she quickly realizes she has no idea what she’s doing. Then a lawyer named Grayson assigns her to investigate a sexual assault, a college student who was attacked by football players and recruits at a party a year earlier. Erika knows she should turn the assignment down.

On May 2, 1963, Robert Killins, a former United Church minister, slaughtered every woman in his family but one. She (and her brother) lived to tell the story of what motivated a talented man who had been widely admired, a scholar and graduate from Queen's University, to stalk and terrorize the women in his family for almost twenty years and then murder them. Through extensive oral histories, Cook and Carson painstakingly trace the causes of a femicide in which four women and two unborn babies were murdered over the course of one bloody evening.

The story begins as Colleen and Newell Cerak first learn the doubtful, then shocking news that their daughter, buried five weeks earlier, is still alive. Forming a backdrop to the reunion are the faces of the Van Ryn family, strangers to the Ceraks, who are just coming to terms with the harsh reality that the girl whose bedside they have been posted at for five weeks is not their daughter after all - and that their own daughter, Laura, has already been buried under the name of Whitney Cerak.

Stolen is the true story of one survivor who escaped - more than once. First recruited while staying with her family at a hotel in Miami Beach, Katariina Rosenblatt was already a lonely and abused young girl who was yearning to be loved. She fell into the hands of a confident young woman who pretended friendship but slowly lured her into a child prostitution ring. For years afterward, a cycle of false friendship, threats, drugs, and violence kept her trapped.

For 27 hours, Genelle remained below the surface of Tower One’s rubble. During this time, she couldn’t help but reflect on the life she’d lived and how she’d drifted from the faith she once knew. One of her most painful regrets was that she’d left her daughter behind in Trinidad while she pursued her dream of singing and dancing in America. She begged God to forgive her - accepting that she may soon die, but praying for the miracle of life and a chance to live that life with a new purpose and direction.

This book details Alice’s struggles in navigating life and climbing up the ladder of success. It is about taking a step ahead from the fear of failure and conquering all the challenges that life lays in front of you with persistence. Remember, when struggling in life, you have a choice; you can either dwell on your miseries or you can use them as a stepping stone to be stronger.

In 1942, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish baby girl was smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto in a backpack. That baby, Joasia, knew nothing about this extraordinary event until she was thirty-two, when a letter arrived from a stranger. She also learned that the parents who raised her were actually her aunt and uncle. Joasia kept this knowledge hidden from her own daughter, Karen—until an innocent question unexpectedly revealed the truth.

From the nationwide satanic panic in the 1980s to local political cover-ups, shocking kidnappings, unsolved child murders, and scandalous pedophile rings, this book takes you behind the deceptive headlines and, finally, reveals what was going on in Omaha when all hell broke loose. Rich and well-connected members of Omaha's elite carried out unspeakable acts of abuse and even murder on innocent children.

Alexander Rosenberg was a smart and curious teenager who spoke many languages, and lived a pampered life with his parents in a tranquil Czechoslovakian town. The rise of fascism and Nazi Germany causes his protected existence to collapse, alongside the illusion of secular Jewish assimilation in 1930s Europe. Using their last reserves of wealth and influence to escape extermination, the Rosenbergs go underground to avoid the Gestapo. Eventually exposed, captured, and taken to Buchenwald, the largest concentration camp in Germany, Alexander and his father collaborate to survive one day at a time