Collection: Biography & Memoir

The national bestseller celebrated as "the ultimate Johnny Cash biography . . . Rock writer great Robert Hilburn goes deep." -- Rolling Stone

In this, the definitive biography of an American legend, Robert Hilburn conveys the unvarnished truth about a musical superstar. Johnny Cash's extraordinary career stretched from his days at Sun Records with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to the remarkable creative last hurrah, at age 69, that resulted in the brave, moving "Hurt" video.

As music critic for the Los Angeles Times, Hilburn knew Cash throughout his life: he was the only music journalist at the legendary Folsom Prison concert in 1968, and he interviewed both Cash and his wife June Carter just months before their deaths. Drawing upon a trove of never-before-seen material from the singer's inner circle, Hilburn creates an utterly compelling, deeply human portrait of a towering figure in country music, a seminal influence in rock, and an icon of American popular culture. Hilburn's reporting shows the astonishing highs and deep lows that marked the journey of a man of great faith and humbling addiction who throughout his life strove to use his music to lift people's spirits.

The true story behind Crispus Attucks High School and the all-Black basketball team loosely depicted as the championship opponent in the beloved classic sports movie Hoosiers.

For far too long the mythology of Indiana basketball has been dominated by Hoosiers. Framed as the ultimate underdog, feel-good story, there has also long been a cultural debate surrounding the film. The Real Hoosiers sets out to illuminate the narrative that the film omits, the story of the unheralded Crispus Attucks Tigers, playing the game at the highest level in the 1950s in a racially divided Indiana.

After a crushing loss to Milan High School in the 1954 semifinal, which was the game that the final scenes in Hoosiers are based on, Attucks went on to win back-to-back Indiana state championships. That team was led by a young Oscar Robertson and coached by Ray Crowe, who fully recognized the seemingly insurmountable challenges of playing basketball in a state that was a bastion for not only the game but also the Ku Klux Klan.

Veteran sportswriter and the bestselling author of Dream Team, Jack McCallum, pulls back the curtain on that history, which is rich, far beyond the basketball court. The Real Hoosiers replaces a lacuna in the history of Indiana while dissecting the myths and lore of Hoosier hoops; placing the game in the context of migration, segregation, and integration; and enhancing our understanding of this country's struggle for civil rights.

Filled with broken hearts and black ravens, Edgar Allan Poe's ghastly tales have delighted readers for centuries. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age two. He was soon adopted by a Virginia family who worked as tombstone merchants. In 1827 he enlisted in the Army and subsequently failed out of West Point. His first published story, The Raven, was a huge success, but his joy was overshadowed by the death of his wife. Poe devoted his life to writing and his tragic life often inspired his work. He is considered to be the inventor of detective fiction and the father of American mystery writers. His work continues to influence popular culture through films, music, literature, and television.

Dead Weight chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society to earn a PhD in creative writing and become the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions. Horton's visceral essays highlight the difficulties of trying to change one's life for the better, how the weight of felony convictions never dissipates.

The memoir begins with a conversation between Horton and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man statue in New York City. Their imagined dialogue examines the psychological impact of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton's separation from his mother, immediately after his birth, in a segregated Alabama hospital. From his current life as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his experiences as a drug smuggler and trafficker during the 1980s-1990s as well as the many obstacles he faced after his release. He also examines the lasting impact of his drug activity on those around him, reflecting on the allure of economic freedom and the mental escapism that cocaine provided, an allure so strong that both sellers and users were willing to risk prison. Horton shares historical context and vivid details about people caught in the war on drugs who became unsuspecting protagonists in somebody else's melodrama.

Lyrical and gripping, Dead Weight reveals the lifelong effects of one man's incarceration on his psyche, his memories, and his daily experience of American society.

It has been nearly three decades since Shirley MacLaine commenced her brave and public commitment to chronicling her personal quest for spiritual understanding. In testament to the endurance and vitality of her message, each of her eight legendary bestsellers -- from Don't Fall Off the Mountain to My Lucky Stars -- continues today to attract, dazzle, and transform countless new readers. Now Shirley is back -- with her most breathtakingly powerful and unique book yet.
This is the story of a journey. It is the eagerly anticipated and altogether startling culmination of Shirley MacLaine's extraordinary -- and ultimately rewarding -- road through life. The riveting odyssey began with a pair of anonymous handwritten letters imploring Shirley to make a difficult pilgrimage along the Santiago de Compostela Camino in Spain. Throughout history, countless illustrious pilgrims from all over Europe have taken up the trail. It is an ancient -- and allegedly enchanted -- pilgrimage. People from St. Francis of Assisi and Charlemagne to Ferdinand and Isabella to Dante and Chaucer have taken the journey, which comprises a nearly 500-mile trek across highways, mountains and valleys, cities and towns, and fields. Now it would be Shirley's turn.
For Shirley, the Camino was both an intense spiritual and physical challenge. A woman in her sixth decade completing such a grueling trip on foot in thirty days at twenty miles per day was nothing short of remarkable. But even more astounding was the route she took spiritually: back thousands of years, through past lives to the very origin of the universe. Immensely gifted with intelligence, curiosity, warmth, and a profound openness to people and places outside her own experience, Shirley MacLaine is truly an American treasure. And once again, she brings her inimitable qualities of mind and heart to her writing. Balancing and negotiating the revelations inspired by the mysterious energy of the Camino, she endured her exhausting journey to Compostela until it gradually gave way to a far more universal voyage: that of the soul. Through a range of astonishing and liberating visions and revelations, Shirley saw into the meaning of the cosmos, including the secrets of the ancient civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, insights into human genesis, the essence of gender and sexuality, and the true path to higher love.
With rich insight, humility, and her trademark grace, Shirley MacLaine gently leads us on a sacred adventure toward an inexpressibly transcendent climax. The Camino promises readers the journey of a thousand lifetimes.

George Washington's place in the foundations of the Republic remains unrivalled. His life story--from his beginnings as a surveyor and farmer, to colonial soldier in the Virginia Regiment, leader of the Patriot cause, commander of the Continental Army, and finally first president of the United States--reflects the narrative of the nation he guided into existence. There is, rightfully, no more chronicled figure.

Yet American history has largely forgotten what Washington himself knew clearly: that the new Republic's fate depended less on grand rhetoric of independence and self-governance and more on land--Indian land. Colin G. Calloway's biography of the greatest founding father reveals in full the relationship between Washington and the Native leaders he dealt with intimately across the decades: Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Guyasuta, Attakullakulla, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, among many others. Using the prism of Washington's life to bring focus to these figures and the tribes they represented--the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware--Calloway reveals how central their role truly was in Washington's, and therefore the nation's, foundational narrative.

Calloway gives the First Americans their due, revealing the full extent and complexity of the relationships between the man who rose to become the nation's most powerful figure and those whose power and dominion declined in almost equal degree during his lifetime. His book invites us to look at America's origins in a new light. The Indian World of George Washington is a brilliant portrait of both the most revered man in American history and those whose story during the tumultuous century in which the country was formed has, until now, been only partially told.

This is the remarkable true story of a family during one of the bleakest periods in history, a story that "radiates optimism and the resilience of the human spirit" (Washington Post).

In June 1941, the Rudomin family is arrested by the Russians. They are accused of being capitalists, "enemies of the people." Forced from their home and friends in Vilna, Poland, they are herded into crowded cattle cars. Their destination: the endless steppe of Siberia.

For five years, Esther and her family live in exile, weeding potato fields, working in the mines, and struggling to stay alive. But in the middle of hardship and oppression, the strength of their small family sustains them and gives them hope for the future.

The first winner of the Sydney Taylor Awards was Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia, and 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of this powerful classic.

From Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, the author of the New York Times bestseller The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, comes the story of a unique team of warriors -- women who could not be Army Rangers and Navy SEALS in their own right, but who answered the call to get as close to the fight as the Army had ever allowed women to be -- including Ashley White, a beloved soldier who was killed serving her country's cause

In 2010, the Army created Cultural Support Teams, a secret pilot program to insert women alongside Special Operations soldiers battling in Afghanistan. The Army reasoned that women could play a unique role on Special Ops teams: accompanying their male colleagues on raids and, while those soldiers were searching for insurgents, questioning the women living at the compound. Their presence had a calming effect on enemy households, but more importantly, the CSTs were able to search adult women for weapons and gather crucial intelligence. They could build relationships in ways that male soldiers in an Islamic country never could.

In Ashley's War, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon uses on-the-ground reporting and a finely tuned understanding of the complexities of war to tell the story of CST-2, a unit of women hand-picked from the Army to serve in this highly specialized and challenging role. The pioneers of CST-2 proved for the first time, at least to some grizzled Special Operations soldiers, that women are physically and mentally tough enough to become one of them.

The price of this professional acceptance came in personal loss and social isolation: the only people who really understand the women of CST-2 are each other. At the center of this story is a friendship cemented by "Glee," video games, and the shared perils and seductive powers of up-close combat. At the heart of the team is the tale of a beloved and effective soldier, Ashley White.

Much as she did in her bestselling The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, Lemmon transports readers to a world they previously had no idea existed: a community of women called to fulfill the military's mission to "win hearts and minds" and bound together by danger, valor, and determination. Ashley's War is a gripping combat narrative and a moving story of friendship--a book that will change the way readers think about war and the meaning of service.

Part cultural history, part literary criticism, and part memoir, A Body Made of Glass is a definitive biography of hypochondria.

Caroline Crampton's life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of the cancer didn't mean she felt well. Instead, the fear lingered, and she found herself always on the alert, braced for signs that the illness had reemerged.

Now, in A Body Made of Glass, Crampton has drawn from her own experiences with health anxiety to write a revelatory exploration of hypochondria--a condition that, though often suffered silently, is widespread and rising. She deftly weaves together history, memoir, and literary criticism to make sense of this invisible and underexplored sickness. From the earliest medical case of Hippocrates to the literary accounts of sufferers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust to the modern perils of internet self-diagnosis, Crampton unspools this topic to reveal the far-reaching impact of health anxiety on our physical, mental, and emotional health.

At its heart, Crampton explains, hypochondria is a yearning for knowledge. It is a never-ending attempt to replace the edgeless terror of uncertainty with the comforting solidity of a definitive explanation. Through intimate personal stories and compelling cultural perspectives, A Body Made of Glass brings this uniquely ephemeral condition into much-needed focus for the first time.

In this "thought-provoking blend of history, biography, women's studies, and travelogue" (Library Journal) Mia Kankimäki recounts her enchanting travels in Japan, Kenya, and Italy while retracing the steps of ten remarkable female pioneers from history.What can a forty-something childless woman do? Bored with her life and feeling stuck, Mia Kankimäki leaves her job, sells her apartment, and decides to travel the world, following the paths of the female explorers and artists from history who have long inspired her. She flies to Tanzania and then to Kenya to see where Karen Blixen--of Out of Africa fame--lived in the 1920s. In Japan, Mia attempts to cure her depression while researching Yayoi Kusama, the contemporary artist who has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades. In Italy, Mia spends her days looking for the works of forgotten Renaissance women painters of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and finally finds her heroines in the portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Atremisia Gentileschi. If these women could make it in the world hundreds of years ago, why can't Mia? The Women I Think About at Night is "an astute, entertaining...[and] insightful" (Publishers Weekly) exploration of the lost women adventurers of history who defied expectations in order to see--and change--the world.

From the critically acclaimed author of Shizuko's Daughter (a New York Times Notable Book) and Yarn, comes a fascinating new memoir about animals, loss, and finding a home in the world.

Cat and Bird, a "memoir in animals," is anchored around Kyoko Mori's relationship with the six house cats who defined the major eras of her life as a writer: Dorian, Oscar, Ernest, Algernon, Miles, and Jackson. As she details the rhythms and routines of their days together, she weaves a narrative tapestry out of her past: the deep family tragedy and resilience that marked her childhood in Japan, her move to the American Midwest as a young adult, her experiences as a bird rehabilitator and cat trainer, her marriage and divorce, and the joys and profound heartbreaks that come with pet ownership. Full of razor-sharp observations and generous prose, Cat and Bird whirls into a moving meditation about grief, writing, the imagination, the solitary life, and the wonders of companionship with creatures both domestic and wild.

A colossal expedition into the mind of Tim Burton through over 200 pieces of rare and unpublished behind-the-scenes materials

From Beetlejuice to Batman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Alice in Wonderland and beyond, Tim Burton has made an indelible mark on cinema across horror, drama and fantasy films with his uncanny, whimsical style. Since his youth, he has created a thematic repository of popular culture, comics, fairy tales, Old Hollywood films and more, the elements of which he intersperses into his movies.
The major, immersive exhibition at the Museo del Cinema in Turin, and its corresponding catalog, honors Burton's unique vision and artistic output. Divided into nine thematic sections, the catalog features over 200 examples of rarely or never-before-seen original artworks spanning Burton's entire lifetime: including early sketches from his childhood, paintings, drawings, photographs, concept art, storyboards, costumes, moving-image works, maquettes, puppets and life-size sculptural installations. This archival material honors Burton's signature style but also reveals his appreciation of the work of previous generations, including the drawings of Edward Gorey and Charles Addams, the horror films of Vincent Price and Japanese monster movies. The World of Tim Burton creates an autobiography told through his creative process, tracing the singular visual imagination of a multidimensional postmodern artist.
Tim Burton (born 1958) grew up in Burbank, California and studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts. Fired from Disney after making Frankenweenie, Burton was approached by Paul Reubens to direct Pee-wee's Big Adventure, which became his first major hit. Since then he has directed dozens of blockbuster movies and has become recognizable for his signature style. Recently he directed and produced the TV series Wednesday, the second-most watched show on Netflix.

Until she finally got sober, Maeve's life was mired in depression and unconscious struggle.She felt unconnected and full of self-loathing. Not herself. It took a lifetime in and out of AA and rehab and a trail of failed relationships and escalating trouble, before she began to understand the source of her lifelong despair and took the bold step to become the woman she is now.In this intimate and unflinchingly honest memoir, Maeve tells the story of being herself in all aspects of her life, including work, the last threshold. She faced the special challenge of working as a manager of public relations for Goldman Sachs and therefore was a public face of the company. She knew she couldn't transition quietly.Initially she keeps her identity a secret with wardrobe changes in the lobby bathroom after work. When she finally declares herself, Goldman Sachs - to her surprise - embraces her. A New York Times story follows, leading Maeve to a new life as a role model for other transgender people and giving her a sense of purpose that had been lacking her entire life.

For readers of Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us comes a fiercely feminist, heartwarming story of friendship and music about The Liverbirds, Britain's first all-female rock group.

The idea for Britain's first female rock band, The Liverbirds, started one evening in 1962, when Mary McGlory, then age 16, saw The Beatles play live at The Cavern Club in Liverpool, the nightclub famously known as the "cradle of British pop music." Then and there, she decided she was going to be just like them--and be the first girl to do it.

Joining ranks in 1963 with three other working-class girls from Liverpool--drummer Sylvia Saunders and guitarists Valerie Gell and Pamela Birch, also self-taught musicians determined to "break the male monopoly of the beat world"--The Liverbirds went on to tour alongside the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and Chuck Berry, and were on track to hit international stardom--until life intervened, and the group was forced to disband just five years after forming in 1968.

Now, Mary and Sylvia, the band's two surviving members, are ready to tell their stories. From that fateful night in 1962, when Mary, who once aspired to become a nun, decided to provide for her family by becoming a rich-and-famous rocker, to the circumstances that led to the band splitting up--Sylvia's dangerously complicated pregnancy, and the tragic accident that paralyzed Valerie's beau--The Liverbirds tackles family, friendship, addiction, aging, and the forces--even destiny--that initially brought the four women together.

Discover the life of Katherine Johnson--a story about reaching for the stars, for kids ages 6 to 9

Katherine Johnson was one of the best mathematicians in the history of the United States. Before her math skills helped send the first American astronauts safely into space, she was a smart and curious girl who loved to learn new things about the world around her. She studied hard in school and became one of the first Black women hired by NASA to figure out difficult math problems. This book helps kids explore how Katherine went from being a young girl growing up in West Virginia to one of the most important people in American space history.

This Katherine Johnson book for kids includes:

• Core curriculum--Kids will learn the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of Katherine's life, and take a quick quiz to test their knowledge.
• Her lasting legacy--This book explains how Katherine's talents and contributions made the world a better place for future generations.

• Short chapters--Brief chapters divide this Katherine Johnson biography into smaller sections that inspire new readers to keep reading.

How will Katherine's out-of-this-world achievements inspire the child in your life?

To escape the tough streets of Southeast Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s, young Rodney Stotts would ride the metro to the Smithsonian National Zoo. There, the bald eagles and other birds of prey captured his imagination for the first time. In Bird Brother, Rodney shares his unlikely journey to becoming a conservationist and one of America's few Black master falconers.

Rodney grew up during the crack epidemic, with guns, drugs, and the threat of incarceration an accepted part of daily life for nearly everyone he knew. To rent his own apartment, he needed a paycheck--something the money from dealing drugs didn't provide. For that, he took a position in 1992 with a new nonprofit, the Earth Conservation Corps. Gradually, Rodney fell in love with the work to restore and conserve the polluted Anacostia River that flows through D.C. As conditions along the river improved, he helped to reintroduce bald eagles to the region and befriended an injured Eurasian Eagle Owl named Mr. Hoots, the first of many birds whose respect he would work hard to earn.

Bird Brother is a story about pursuing dreams against all odds, and the importance of second chances. Rodney's life was nearly upended when he was arrested on drug charges in 2002. The jail sentence sharpened his resolve to get out of the hustling life. With the fierceness of the raptors he had admired for so long, he began to train to become a master falconer and to develop his own raptor education program and sanctuary. Rodney's son Mike, a D.C. firefighter, has also begun his journey to being a master falconer, with his own kids cheering him along the way.

Eye-opening, witty, and moving, Bird Brother is a love letter to the raptors and humans who transformed what Rodney thought his life could be. It is an unflinching look at the uphill battle Black children face in pursuing stable, fulfilling lives, a testament to the healing power of nature, and a reminder that no matter how much heartbreak we've endured, we still have the capacity to give back to our communities and follow our wildest dreams.