Biography & autobiography

Swing Low: A Life

by Miriam Toews

One morning, Mel Toews put on his coat and hat, walked out of town, and took his own life. A loving husband and father, a faithful member of the Mennonite church, and an immensely popular schoolteacher, Mel...

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

Born in A.D. 76, Hadrian lived through and ruled during a tempestuous era, a time when the Colosseum was opened to the public and Pompeii was buried under a mountain of lava and ash. Acclaimed author Anthony...

Memoirs Of A Booklegger

by Jack Kahane

Kahane, father of Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias, recalls his life and his incredible publishing run in Paris from '31-39.

President Lincoln

by William Lee Miller

In his acclaimed book Lincoln's Virtues, William Lee Miller explored Abraham Lincoln's intellectual and moral development. Now he completes his "ethical biography," showing how the amiable and inexperienced...

Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile

by Julia Fox

The history books have cast Katherine of Aragon, the first queen of King Henry VIII of England, as the ultimate symbol of the Betrayed Woman, cruelly tossed aside in favor of her husband’s seductive mistress,...

The Facts of Life: and Other Dirty Jokes

by Willie Nelson & Larry Mcmurtry

If you had to give America a voice, it’s been said more than once, that voice would be Willie Nelson’s. For more than fifty years, he’s taken the stuff of his life-the good and the bad-and made from it...

This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood

by Jack Valenti

With the nation at war in the 1940s, twenty-two-year-old Jack Valenti flew fifty-one combat missions as the pilot of a B-25 attack bomber with the 12th Air Force based in Italy. In the 1960s, with the nation...

Don't Trade the Baby for a Horse: And Other Ways to Make Your Life a Little More Laura Ingalls Wilder

by Wendy McClure

A compendium of ways to capture the pioneer spirit of the classic American author from a Little House on the Prairie expert.

In her spirited memoir The Wilder Life, Wendy McClure strapped on her sunbonnet and...

You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (and Each Other)

by Vanessa Williams & Helen Williams

A candid and inspirational mother-daughter memoir of family, fame, trials, and triumphs by superstar Vanessa Williams her mother Helen Williams.

Since she was a little girl, Vanessa Williams wanted to be on...

God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

by Victoria Sweet

A medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle).

San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the...

Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

by Neil Strauss

Featuring all new material not included in the print edition, including: two deleted chapters, the contents of Neil’s Bugout Bag, a disaster survival cheat sheet on how to survive 35 catastrophic events, and...

Mother Teresa's Lessons of Love and Secrets of Sanctity

by Susan Conroy

An inspiring, first-hand account from someone who worked by her side. With loving directness and never-before-seen photographs, this is an unforgettable witness to Mother Teresa's work.

The Adventurist: My Life in Dangerous Places

by Robert Young Pelton

The Adventurist is one man's story, a story that will change the way you think about travel, survival, where you have been, and where you are going.

Enter the world of Robert Young Pelton (if you dare), adventurer...

Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, and God

by Russell Simmons

Russell Simmons, the original and eternal hip-hop mogul, is one of the most innovative and influential figures in modern American business and culture. When no one outside of inner-city New York had even heard...

The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball

by Nicholas Dawidoff

Growing up in a doomed hometown with a missing father and a single mother, Nicholas Dawidoff listened to baseball every night on his bedside radio, the professional ballplayers gradually becoming the men in...

Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue

by Spalding Gray

As the first decade of the new century was getting underway, Spalding Gray worried that the joy he’d finally found with his wife, stepdaughter, and two sons would fail to fuel his work as a theatrical monologist...

You Could Lose an Eye

by David Reich

“You Could Lose an Eye” is the expression David Reich’s mother often used for those she loved. It is the story of a family’s transition from the wretched oppression they left behind when they arrived...

We Heard the Heavens Then: A Memoir of Iran

by Aria Minu-Sepehr

ARIA MINU-SEPEHR was raised in a sheltered world of extraordinary privilege as the son of a major general in the Shah’s Imperial Iranian Air Force. It seemed his father could do anything—lead the Golden...

Birth Of The Cool

by Lewis MacAdams

Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.

What do all these people have in common? Fame, of course, and undeniable talent. But most...

Alexander: The Ambiguity of Greatness

by Guy Maclean Rogers

For nearly two and a half millennia, Alexander the Great has loomed over history as a legend–and an enigma. Wounded repeatedly but always triumphant in battle, he conquered most of the known world, only to...