Biographies & Memoirs
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Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Michael Streissguth
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: It Books (2013, Jun 4th).
Pages: 304
Outlaw by acclaimed author Michael Streissguth follows the stories of three legends as they redefined country music: Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.Streissguth delves into the country music scene in the late '60s and early '70s, when these rebels found themselves in Music City writing songs and vying for record deals. Channeling the unrest of the times, all three Country Music Hall of Famers resisted the music industry’s unwritten rules and emerged as leaders of the outlaw movement that ultimately changed the recording industry.Outlaw offers a broad portrait of the outlaw movement in Nashville that includes a diverse secondary cast of characters, such as Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell, Kinky Friedman, and Billy Joe Shaver, among others. more
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Conversations with Myself
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Nelson Mandela
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (2011, Sep 27th).
Pages: 480
Foreword by President Barack ObamaNelson Mandela is one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of recording thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has opened his personal archive, which offers unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.From letters written in the darkest hours of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment to the draft of an unfinished sequel to Long Walk to Freedom, Conversations with Myself gives readers access to the private man behind the public figure. Here he is making notes and even doodling during meetings, or transcribing troubled dreams on the desk calendar in his cell on Robben Island; writing journals while on the run during the antiapartheid struggle in the early 1960s, and conversing with friends in almost seventy hours of recorded conversations. more
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Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--and My Own
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Mika Brzezinski
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Weinstein Books (2013, May 7th).
Pages: 256
Mika Brzezinski is at war against obesity. On Morning Joe, she is often so adamant about improving America’s eating habits that some people have dubbed her “the food Nazi.” What they don’t know is that Mika wages a personal fight against unhealthy eating habits every day, and in this book she describes her history of food obsession and distorted body image, and her lifelong struggle to be thin. She believes it’s time we all learned to stop blaming ourselves, and each other, and look at the real culprits—the food we eat and our addiction to it. Mika feels the only way to do this is to break through the walls of silence and shame we’ve built around obesity and food obsessions. She believes we need to talk openly about how our country became overweight, and what we can do to turn the corner and step firmly onto the path of health. more
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Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Charles Moore
Format: Deckle Edge]
Publisher: Knopf; 1st US Edition edition (2013, May 21st).
Pages:
With unequaled authority and dramatic detail, the first volume of Charles Moore’s authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher reveals as never before the early life, rise to power, and first years as prime minister of the woman who transformed Britain and the world in the late twentieth century. Moore has had unique access to all of Thatcher’s private and governmental papers, and interviewed her and her family extensively for this book. Many of her former colleagues and intimates have also shared previously unseen papers, diaries, and letters, and spoken frankly to him, knowing that what they revealed would not be published until after her death. The book immediately supersedes all other biographies and sheds much new light on the whole spectrum of British political life from Thatcher’s entry into Parliament in 1959 to what was arguably the zenith of her power—victory in the Falklands in 1982. more
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The Other Side of the Tiber: Reflections on Time in Italy
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013, Apr 23rd).
Pages: 384
A moving and illuminating memoir about a singular woman’s relationship with a fascinating and complex countryA fresh, nuanced perspective on a profoundly perplexing country: this is what Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s unique, captivating narrative promises—and delivers. The Other Side of the Tiber brings Italy to life in an entirely new way, treating the peninsula as a series of distinct places, subjects, histories, and geographies bound together by a shared sense of life. A multifaceted image of Italy emerges—in beautiful black-and-white photographs, many taken by Wilde-Menozzi herself—as does a portrait of the author. Wilde-Menozzi, who has written about Italy for nearly forty years, offers unexpected conclusions about one of the most complex and best-loved countries in the world. more
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Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Judy Pasternak
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Free Press; Reprint edition (2011, Jul 5th).
Pages: 336
Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Yellow Dirt, “will break your heart. An enormous achievement—literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism—illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we’ve become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become” ( The Christian Science Monitor ).From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. more
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That's That: A Memoir
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Colin Broderick
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Broadway (2013, May 7th).
Pages: 368
How can we know who we are if we do not understand where we came from? Colin Broderick grew up in Northern Ireland during the period of heightened tension and violence known as the Troubles. Broderick's Catholic family lived in County Tyrone --the heart of rebel country. In That’s That, he brings us into this world and delivers a deeply personal account of what it was like to come of age in the midst of a war that dragged on for over two decades. We watch as he and his brothers play ball with the neighbor children over a fence for years, but are never allowed to play together because it is forbidden. We see him struggle to understand why young men from his community often just disappear. And we feel his frustration when he is held at gunpoint at various military checkpoints in the North. more
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Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Olympia Snowe
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Weinstein Books (2013, May 14th).
Pages: 328
An outspoken centrist, Senator Snowe stunned Washington in February 2012 when she announced she would not seek a fourth term and offered a sharp rebuke to the Senate, citing the dispiriting gridlock and polarization. After serving in the legislative branch at the state and federal levels for 40 years, including 18 years in the U.S. Senate, she explained that Washington wasn’t solving the big problems anymore.In this timely call to action, she explores the roots of her belief in principled policy-making and bipartisan compromise. A leading moderate with a reputation for crossing the aisle, Senator Snowe will propose solutions for bridging the partisan divide in Washington, most notably through a citizens’ movement to hold elected officials accountable. more
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Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Peter Carlson
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: PublicAffairs (2013, May 28th).
Pages: 288
Junius Browne and Albert Richardson covered the Civil War for the New York Tribune until Confederates captured them as they tried to sneak past Vicksburg on a hay barge. Shuffled from one Rebel prison to another, they escaped and trekked across the snow-covered Appalachians with the help of slaves and pro-Union bushwhackers. Their amazing, long-forgotten odyssey is one of the great escape stories in American history, packed with drama, courage, horrors and heroics, plus moments of antic comedy.On their long, strange adventure, Junius and Albert encountered an astonishing variety of American characters—Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, Rebel con men and Union spies, a Confederate pirate-turned-playwright, a sadistic hangman nicknamed “the Anti-Christ,” a secret society called the Heroes of America, a Union guerrilla convinced that God protected him from Confederate bullets, and a mysterious teenage girl who rode to their rescue at just the right moment. more
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The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Richard Rubin
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2013, May 21st).
Pages: 528
In 2003, 85 years after the armistice, it took Richard Rubin months to find just one living American veteran of World War I. But then, he found another. And another. Eventually he managed to find dozens, aged 101 to 113, and interview them. All are gone now. A decade-long odyssey to recover the story of a forgotten generation and their Great War led Rubin across the United States and France, through archives, private collections, and battlefields, literature, propaganda, and even music. But at the center of it all were the last of the last, the men and women he met: a new immigrant, drafted and sent to France, whose life was saved by a horse; a Connecticut Yankee who volunteered and fought in every major American battle; a Cajun artilleryman nearly killed by a German aeroplane; an 18-year-old Bronx girl “drafted” to work for the War Department; a machine-gunner from Montana; a Marine wounded at Belleau Wood; the 16-year-old who became America’s last WWI veteran; and many, many more. more
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