Collection: Biography & Memoir

In 2003, nine-year-old presidential enthusiast Kurt Deion presented his father with an audacious request: would he help him follow in the footsteps of historian Richard Norton Smith and C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb by taking him to visit the final resting place of each dead U.S. president? He got all he asked for, and more.

Deion's journey to these tombs, and from elementary school neophyte to college history major, was unorthodox. With his zany, boundary-pushing father at the wheel, the straight-laced youngster found himself sneaking a camera past Secret Service agents, purposely locked in a cemetery enclosed with barbed wire, and handcuffed to the former Dallas homicide detective who was tethered to alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. Most daringly, he (reluctantly) gained entry to a vice president's private family burial ground in order to possibly become the lone person to have visited each presidential and vice presidential grave, collectively.

In this history-driven memoir, Deion reconstructs his decade-long, cross-country quest and analyzes the evolution of his perspective on the commanders-in-chief and what it means to visit a cemetery.

2 EISNER AWARD NOMINATIONS / Best Graphic Memoir and Best
Writer/Artist Craig Thompson

Set of twelve comic books. Includes Hello Chunky Root
mini-comic and a sticker.

From ages 10 to 20, Craig Thompson (author of Blankets,
Goodbye Chunky Rice, Habibi, Carnet De Voyage, Space Dumplins) and his little
brother Phil toiled in Wisconsin farms weeding and harvesting ginseng. The
medicinal herb fetched considerable profits in China and funded Craig's youthful
obsession with comic books. Comics, in turn, allowed him to escape his rural,
working-class trappings.For the first time in his career, Thompson is serializing
his story. Part memoir, part travelogue, part essay-- all comic book--Ginseng
Roots is a sweeping narrative that unearths surprising connections between
class divide, agriculture, holistic healing, the 300-year-long trade
relationship between China and North America, childhood labor, and the bond
between two brothers.

The Little Book of the Beatles is a superb book of quotations by, and about, the band that revolutionised popular music the world over.

A perfect companion for Beatles fans everywhere, this collection of bite-sized quips helps capture exactly what made the Fab Four so special. From insightful quotes by fellow artists, collaborators and friends, to words of wit and wisdom from John, Paul, George and Ringo themselves, you'll find more than 170 amusing and inspiring soundbites inside.

'I'd like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.'

John Lennon, 1970.

In 1978 animation director Yoshiyuki Tomino set forth to change the Japanese animation industry. For decades prior, Japanese science fiction had churned out numerous tales of semi-autonomous robots that would often come to the aide of humanity, but as someone who worked on a number of those works, Tomino came to the realization that he wanted to see a more realistic robot narrative. His vision was one where the robot while just slightly more human in appearance, was utilized more as a tool manipulated by man. With renowned artist Yoshikazu Yasuhiko by his side, and occasionally as his artistic rival, Tomino would change the way the whole world came to see Japanese animation and the broader toy and comics industries built around it. This evolution would be a war in its own right! Battles were fought in the offices of the animation studio! Conflicts were equally as heated in the recording booth!

Imam Taymullah Abdur-Rahman's incredible life story weaves the contemporary Black American experience with the Black Muslim American experience and emphasizes the role of interreligious dialogue in the fight for abolition and justice.

By the time he was twelve, Taymullah Abdur-Rahman (born Tyrone Sutton) was a rising pop star, recruited as part of the R&B group Perfect Gentlemen, with a top-ten hit, national teen magazine covers, and an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. However, after his music career peaked, Abdur-Rahman found himself back home, with little to show for his success. He became a teen father struggling to survive in Roxbury, MA. Seeing Islam as a way to discipline himself in an unrelenting environment, he converted. He went on to work in a maximum-security prison as a Muslim chaplain, where he became zealously focused on saving souls instead of understanding the outside forces that lead men to prison.

Later, in his work as the first paid Muslim chaplain at Harvard, Abdur-Rahman began to seek counsel outside of Islam, engaging with Jewish and Christian mentors who opened his eyes to the gifts of interreligious dialogue and helped lead him to what he was truly seeking: enlightenment. With this new framework, he returned to working with prisoners and clearly saw the cyclical effects of systemic racism that keep Black and brown people locked up and without support in America today. A sweeping narrative, American Imam voices the contemporary concerns of Black Muslim Americans in the shadow of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, in the aftermath of 9/11, and in light of the fights for social justice and prison abolition. Abdur-Rahman's story sounds an indelible rallying cry for understanding across race, religion, and cultural divides.

Through this collection of essays, author and activist Reagan Jackson, chronicles her journey into the world of journalism. Art, cinema, social justice, feminism, Black reparations, health & reproductive rights, dance, education-while Jackson's subjects range far and wide, her writing brings an intimacy & immediacy to all.

Glamorous fashions, personalities, and places captured by iconic photographer Slim Aarons in this collection from curator Shawn Waldron and author Kate Betts.

Foreword by Jonathan Adler

Slim Aarons, at least according to the man himself, did not photograph fashion: "I didn't do fashion. I did the people in their clothes that became the fashion." But despite what he claimed, Aarons's work is indelibly tied to fashion. Aarons's incredibly influential photographs of high society and socialites being unambiguously themselves are still a source of inspiration for modern day style icons.

Slim Aarons: Style showcases the photographs that both recorded and influenced the luminaries of the fashion world. This volume features early black-and-white fashion photography, as well as portraits of the fashionable elite--like Jacqueline de Ribes, C.Z. Guest, Nan Kempner, and Marisa Berenson--and those that designed the clothes, such as Oscar de la Renta, Emilio Pucci, Mary McFadden, and Lilly Pulitzer. Featuring some never-before-seen images and detailed captions written by fashion historians, Slim Aarons: Style is a collection of the photographer's most stylish work.

From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.

After graduating from Mississippi State University in 1976, Di Rushing and her husband, Sam, found themselves back on their family farm near Merigold, Mississippi, with 350 acres and no real clue what to do. The couple decided to open the first winery in Mississippi, and with it, a successful business was born. Six years later, a small restaurant joined the Delta winery. Both businesses were thriving by 1990, with eight national award-winning wines, a beautiful vineyard, and a successful restaurant.

But in March of 1990, a series of unforeseen events rocked the operation. After the Rushings discovered one of the tour guides, Ray Russell, selling drugs in the winery parking lot, they fired him. He responded with a terrorizing vengeance that persisted over the next nine months. In the early morning hours, the former guide broke into the winery, crept into the wine cellar, and released the entire inventory--nearly a quarter of a million dollars' worth--down the drain. Fortunately, his incompetence thwarted his most destructive intention to blow up the restaurant. In his rampage, he broke all the windows, which allowed the gas from the kitchen oven to escape, sparing the premises. Though the Rushings rebuilt with the help of their community, Russell continued to stalk and threaten the young family. As his menacing behavior continued to escalate, the Rushings closed their business of fourteen years and moved to Ouray, Colorado, where they began rebuilding their lives. Culminating in the sudden, violent murders of Russell, his wife, and his father twenty-five years later, this book tells a story of both shock and resilience, charting Mississippi history in the process.

Intertwined with the true crime narrative, The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi's First Winery details author Di Rushing's life in and out of Mississippi, including growing up in 1960s Greenville, attending university, traveling overseas, and the relationships she cultivated along the way.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Drama Free and Set Boundaries, Find Peace, a hands-on resource for understanding and working through dysfunctional family dynamics--and recognizing when to walk away

Family can be a source of connection, and a source of conflict. In this exercise-filled workbook, licensed therapist and bestselling relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab offers powerful insights along with thought-provoking questions to help you unpack what's really going on--and express your needs and expectations going forward.
Whether you are coping with a long-term pattern of emotional neglect, addiction, or abuse, or trying to understand a new conflict that's come up with a parent, sibling, or in-law, you will find empowering information and tools to help you manage these complex relationships in a way that offers psychological safety and honors the person you truly are.

There is only one QUEEN OF SOUL! Discover why Aretha Franklin garners so much R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Aretha Franklin was a musical and cultural icon whose legacy spanned six decades! Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1942, Aretha got her start singing in front of her father's Baptist congregation and found minor success as a gospel singer. She then set her sights on becoming a pop music artist and used her powerful voice and impressive skills on the piano to get a record deal. Aretha released her first of many celebrated albums at the age of 18. In 1987, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, making her the first female artist to grace the prestigious list. With iconic hits such as "Respect" and "Think," and countless awards to her name including eighteen Grammys, Aretha Franklin was one of the bestselling artists of all time.

Amedeo Modigliani stands as one of Italy's best-known painters and sculptors of the 20^th century, posthumously renowned for his characteristic style and eccentric personality.

Writing in the 1950s, Modigliani's daughter Jeanne was only a baby when her father died. Nevertheless, her interest in her father's short life resulted in this biography - the fruits of Jeanne's researches and conversations with those who remembered him are now considered valuable by art historians. We learn of the artist's early years in Italy, his journeys and work in France, his romances and excesses, and the challenges he faced selling his works. Though he had friends to lend him money when times were hard, Modigliani constantly grappled with poverty and illness.

The final years of Modigliani's life saw his greatest yet most tragic romance, to the young art student Jeanne Hébuterne. A gifted painter in her own right, Jeanne fell in love with Modigliani and doted on him as his health faltered. When Modigliani expired from tuberculosis, Jeanne was inconsolable, and committed suicide two days later. It was not until the year 2000 that her artworks were showcased alongside her husband's, with the permission of her heirs.

This biography includes more than 130 examples of the letters and artworks of Modigliani that the reader may appreciate and observe how his unique art progressed with the years.

THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY MEMOIR YOU WILL EVER READ ABOUT A MOTHER'S LOVE.

"I could not love this book more. Did I Ever Tell You? grabbed my heart from the very first pages and took me on a journey that has changed forever the way I think about the legacies we leave--on purpose and by accident--to those we love. In bracing, vivid, generous prose and with crystalline candor, Kingston shares a page-turning and wholly unexpected story about the extraordinary gifts her mother left her, including the most powerful one of all: the tools Kingston needed to carry on without her mom. This book is so full of hard-won wisdom and surprising insight into the challenges and joys of living every day that I want to press it into the hands of everyone I know and say, simply, 'You must, must read this.'" --Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club

"Did I Ever Tell You? is compelling and heartbreaking and reminded me how beautiful humans can be when life breaks them open. Gwen's mother executes an act of miraculous love for her children that has a scope and power that will take your breath away. Don't miss this gorgeous memoir." --Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward

"An extraordinary testament to the power of love over death, this book is healing, moving, and ultimately, instructive. The example of one mother's incredible unconditional love for her daughter, and this daughter's resilient search to live well in the face of devastating loss, will make readers cry, and also help them through their grief. Though I read this book quickly because I could not put it down, it will nurture me for a long time to come. What a beautiful gift from a mother to a daughter, and for a daughter to her readers." --Sarah Ruhl, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Smile

With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation--destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England--and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives. In a sweeping narrative that echoes The Guns of August, Korda recounts these four years of a civilization destroying itself and portrays the lives and anguished deaths of the young men who unforgettably illuminated it. As the success of Pat Barker's Regeneration, the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front and the images of brutal trench warfare in today's Ukraine demonstrate, contemporary interest in "the war to end war" remains high.

Vulture/NY Magazine's Best Comics of 2018

A surprisingly honest and touching account of a trans girl surviving through sex work in Seattle. With excerpts published in Eisner nominated anthology ISLAND, the full colour volume, drawn and painted by Remy Boydell is an unflinching debut graphic novel. Written by Michelle Perez

The New Yorker staff writer and Filterworld author Kyle Chayka examines the deep roots-and untapped possibilities-of our newfound, all-consuming drive to reduce.

"Less is more" Everywhere we hear the mantra. Marie Kondo and other decluttering gurus promise that shedding our stuff will solve our problems. We commit to cleanse diets and strive for inbox zero. Amid the frantic pace and distraction of everyday life, we covet silence-and airy, Instagrammable spaces in which to enjoy it. The popular term for this brand of upscale austerity, "minimalism," has mostly come to stand for things to buy and consume. But minimalism has richer, deeper, and altogether more valuable gifts to offer.

In The Longing for Less, one of our sharpest cultural critics delves beneath the glossy surface of minimalist trends, seeking better ways to claim the time and space we crave. Kyle Chayka's search leads him to the philosophical and spiritual origins of minimalism, and to the stories of artists such as Agnes Martin and Donald Judd; composers such as John Cage and Julius Eastman; architects and designers; visionaries and misfits. As Chayka looks anew at their extraordinary lives and explores the places where they worked-from Manhattan lofts to the Texas high desert and the back alleys of Kyoto-he reminds us that what we most require is presence, not absence. The result is an elegant synthesis of our minimalist desires and our profound emotional needs.

With a new afterword by the author.