Collection: Biography & Memoir

Succeed in business with practical career strategies and communication skills from the world's greatest leaders in 10 Skills for Effective Business Communication.

Effective business communication is a skill that anyone can develop. From interview strategies to high-stakes negotiation tactics, 10 Skills for Effective Business Communication offers practical strategies to improve communication skills and help you succeed in your career.

Equal parts research and actionable advice, this book applies effective strategies from the world's most successful professionals to common workplace scenarios. With step-by-step guidance and simple exercises, you'll learn why, how, and when to use fundamental communication skills to successfully navigate any situation.

Learn how to listen from a Microsoft CEO, or gain the confidence to network your way into any room with advice from a renowned venture capitalist--10 Skills for Effective Business Communication teaches you these skills and more, with:

• 10 essential communication skills that empower you to masterfully handle pivotal moments in your career
• Actionable exercises to practice and improve your communication skills right away
• Clear explanations of the social psychology behind communication skills
• Inspirational success stories that highlight communication skills from some of the world's greatest business leaders including Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Tony Robbins, and more

Advance your career and set yourself up for success with effective communications skills from 10 Skills for Effective Business Communication.

The uproarious true adventures of a dog who doesn't understand that he's a dog -- and the boy who loved him. Funny, heartwarming, and true, this is a classic story of a very imaginative kid and one very unusual dog.

Funny and poignant, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be is a lively portrait of an unorthodox childhood and an unforgettable friendship. Growing up in on the frontier of Saskatoon, Canada, the legendary adventurer and naturalist, Farley Mowat, received a gift from his mom: a dog she bought for four cents. Farley quickly named him "Mutt."

Mutt displayed skills at hunting and retrieving that were either pure genius or just plain crazy -- once going so far as to retrieve a plucked and trussed ruffed grouse from the grocer. Mutt also loved riding passenger in an open car wearing goggles and climbing both trees and ladders -- the perfect companion for a child with a love for animals and misadventures.

Originally published for young people, this is a memoir by the author Never Cry Wolf that will delight dog lovers of all ages.

Discovering that your teen "cuts" is every parent's nightmare. Your most urgent question is: "How can I make it stop?" Tens of thousands of worried parents have turned to this authoritative guide for information and practical guidance about the growing problem of teen self-injury. Dr. Michael Hollander is a leading expert on dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), the most effective treatment approach for cutting. Vivid stories illustrate how out-of-control emotions lead some teens to hurt themselves, how DBT can help, and what other approaches can be beneficial. You'll learn practical strategies for talking to teens about self-injury without making it worse, teaching them skills to cope with extreme emotions in a healthier way, finding the right therapist, and helping reduce stress for your whole family. Incorporating the latest research, the second edition offers a deeper understanding of the causes of self-injury and includes new DBT skills.

Part inspirational story of Bea Johnson (the "Priestess of Waste-Free Living") and how she transformed her family's life for the better by reducing their waste to an astonishing one liter per year; part practical, step-by-step guide that gives readers

In the follow-up to her #1 bestselling memoir, A Stolen Life, Jaycee Dugard tells the story of her first experiences after years in captivity: the joys that accompanied her newfound freedom and the challenges of adjusting to life on her own.When Jaycee Dugard was eleven years old, she was abducted from a school bus stop within sight of her home in South Lake Tahoe, California. She was missing for more than eighteen years, held captive by Philip and Nancy Garrido, and gave birth to two daughters during her imprisonment. In A Stolen Life Jaycee told the story of her life from her abduction in 1991 through her reappearance in 2009. Freedom: My Book of Firsts is about everything that happened next. "How do you rebuild a life?" Jaycee asks. In these pages, she describes the life she never thought she would live to see: from her first sight of her mother to her first time meeting her grownup sister, her first trip to the dentist to her daughters' first day of school, her first taste of champagne to her first hangover, her first time behind the wheel to her first speeding ticket, and her first dance at a friend's wedding to her first thoughts about the possibility of a future relationship. This raw and inspiring book will remind you that there is, as Jaycee writes, "life after something tragic happens...Somehow, I still believe that we each hold the key to our own happiness and you have to grab it where you can in whatever form it might take." Freedom is an awe-inspiring memoir about the power we all hold within ourselves.

Waite "Schoolboy" Hoyt's improbable baseball journey began when the 1915 New York Giants signed him as a high school junior, for no pay and a five-dollar bonus. After nearly having both his hands amputated and cavorting with men twice his age in the hardscrabble Minor Leagues, he somehow ended up the best pitcher for the New York Yankees in the 1920s.

Based on a trove of Hoyt's writings and interview transcripts, Tim Manners has reanimated the baseball legend's untold story, entirely in Hoyt's own words. Schoolboy dives straight into early twentieth-century America and the birth of modern-day baseball, as well as Hoyt's defining conflict: Should he have pursued something more respectable than being the best pitcher on the 1927 New York Yankees, arguably the greatest baseball team of all time?

Over his twenty-three-year professional baseball career, Hoyt won 237 big league games across 3,845 ⅔ innings--and one locker room brawl with Babe Ruth. He also became a vaudeville star who swapped dirty jokes with Mae West and drank champagne with Al Capone, a philosophizer who bonded with Lou Gehrig over the meaning of life, and a funeral director who left a body chilling in his trunk while pitching an afternoon game at Yankee Stadium.

Hoyt shares his thoughts on famous moments in the golden age of baseball history; assesses baseball legends, including Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, and Pete Rose; and describes the strategies of baseball managers John McGraw, Miller Huggins, and Connie Mack. He writes at length about the art of pitching and how the game and its players changed--and didn't--over his lifetime. After retiring from baseball at thirty-eight and coming to terms with his alcoholism, Hoyt found some happiness as a family man and a beloved, pioneering Cincinnati Reds radio sportscaster with a Websterian vocabulary spiked with a Brooklyn accent.

When Hoyt died in 1984 his foremost legacy may have been as a raconteur who punctuated his life story with awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping anecdotes. In Schoolboy he never flinches from an unsparing account of his remarkable and paradoxical eighty-four-year odyssey.

Texas Bound
Hazelle has been living in the Grace Home, an orphanage in New York City, for almost a year. Now she and several other children have been put on a train headed for Texas, where they will be placed with families that want children. But Hazelle isn't an orphan, and her new home isn't what she expected.
Will Hazelle find a place where she belongs?
Hazelle Boxberg was a real eleven-year-old girl who traveled to Texas on an orphan train in 1918. Her story is as exciting as any novel.

A stirring and magnificently illustrated picture-book memoir of the author's childhood during the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Ying Chang Compestine was a young girl in 1966 when Mao launched his Cultural Revolution to reclaim power and eliminate non-communist values in the country. His army began punishing and arresting people who didn't agree with him, foreign reading material was banned, and children were all required to dress in uniform and carry the Little Red Book of Mao's teachings. It was a time of fear, mayhem, and scarcity that lasted until Mao's death ten years later, when Ying was thirteen. Through those ten harrowing years, Ying's parents found ways to secretly educate her and allow her dreams of visiting America to stay vibrant. Now she brings her childhood story and China's history to life in this absorbing and beautiful picture book.

This collection of one girl's real, unflinching diary entries about slowly dying of a terminal illness is an unparalleled exploration of the human spirit and what it means to truly live.

Many of the feelings I write about are too difficult to share while I'm alive, so I'm keeping everything in my journal password-protected until the end.

Mallory Smith was no ordinary girl, and this is no ordinary story. At age three, Mallory was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis--a disease that attacks the internal organs and would eventually kill her.
Despite living on borrowed time, Mallory pursued her passions: volleyball; writing; the environment; her boyfriend, family, and friends. Most importantly, every day she chose to embody the mantra "live happy."
Mallory also had her struggles--everything from love and sex to living with illness and just being a human on this planet. And she chronicled every bit of it, writing thousands of diary entries before her death in her twenties.
This is the poignant, true story of a young woman who refused to be defined by chronic illness. Her light and her life are shared here in her own words to encourage everyone to live life to the fullest, as she did, even as she was dying.

A compact, profoundly inspiring book that captures the spirit of Nelson Mandela, distilling the South African leader's wisdom into 15 vital life lessons

We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013 at the age of ninety-five, is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint. He liber­ated a country from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite oppressor and oppressed in a way that had never been done before.

Now Richard Stengel, the editor of Time maga­zine, has distilled countless hours of intimate conver­sation with Mandela into fifteen essential life lessons. For nearly three years, including the critical period when Mandela moved South Africa toward the first democratic elections in its history, Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and traveled with him everywhere. Eating with him, watching him campaign, hearing him think out loud, Stengel came to know all the different sides of this complex man and became a cherished friend and colleague.

In Mandela's Way, Stengel recounts the moments in which "the grandfather of South Africa" was tested and shares the wisdom he learned: why courage is more than the absence of fear, why we should keep our rivals close, why the answer is not always either/or but often "both," how important it is for each of us to find something away from the world that gives us pleasure and satisfaction--our own garden. Woven into these life lessons are remarkable stories--of Mandela's child­hood as the protégé of a tribal king, of his early days as a freedom fighter, of the twenty-seven-year imprison­ment that could not break him, and of his fulfilling remarriage at the age of eighty.

This uplifting book captures the spirit of this extraordinary man--warrior, martyr, husband, statesman, and moral leader--and spurs us to look within ourselves, reconsider the things we take for granted, and contemplate the legacy we'll leave behind.

For African American women, the fight for the right to vote was only one battle.

This Coretta Scott King Author Honor book tells the important, overlooked story of black women as a force in the suffrage movement--when fellow suffragists did not accept them as equal partners in the struggle.

Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Alice Paul. The Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. The 1913 Women's March in D.C. When the epic story of the suffrage movement in the United States is told, the most familiar leaders, speakers at meetings, and participants in marches written about or pictured are generally white.

That's not the real story.

Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn't just about gender. African American women had to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity--and safety--in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks.

Lifting as We Climb is the empowering story of African American women who refused to accept all this. Women in black church groups, black female sororities, black women's improvement societies and social clubs. Women who formed their own black suffrage associations when white-dominated national suffrage groups rejected them. Women like Mary Church Terrell, a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and of the NAACP; or educator-activist Anna Julia Cooper who championed women getting the vote and a college education; or the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells, a leader in both the suffrage and anti-lynching movements.

Author Evette Dionne, a feminist culture writer and the editor-in-chief of Bitch Media, has uncovered an extraordinary and underrepresented history of black women. In her powerful book, she draws an important historical line from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to contemporary young activists--filling in the blanks of the American suffrage story.

"Dionne provides a detailed and comprehensive look at the overlooked roles African American women played in the efforts to end slavery and then to secure the right to vote for women." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist who fights for female education, and in 2014 became the youngest Nobel Prize laureate. Penguin Readers is a series of popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction written for learners of English as a foreign language. Beautifully illustrated and carefully adapted, the series introduces language learners around the world to the bestselling authors and most compelling content from Penguin Random House, and includes language activities that help readers to develop key skills.

How Alexander Hamilton embraced American oligarchy to jumpstart American prosperity.

"Forgotten founder" no more, Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name. Millions imagine knowing the man. But what did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight? It's ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the man's most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievements--as well as downplaying unsettling aspects of his legacy.

Thrilling to the romance of becoming the one-man inventor of a modern nation, our first Treasury secretary fostered growth by engineering an ingenious dynamo--banking, public debt, manufacturing--for concentrating national wealth in the hands of a government-connected elite. Seeking American prosperity, he built American oligarchy. Hence his animus and mutual sense of betrayal with Jefferson and Madison--and his career-long fight to suppress a rowdy egalitarian movement little remembered today: the eighteenth-century white working class.

Marshaling an idiosyncratic cast of insiders and outsiders, vividly dramatizing backroom intrigues and literal street fights--and sharply dissenting from recent biographies--William Hogeland's The Hamilton Scheme brings to life Hamilton's vision and the hard-knock struggles over democracy, wealth, and the meaning of America that drove the nation's creation and hold enduring significance today.

In UNDIAGNOSED, The Ugly Side of Dyslexia, Emmy nominated actor Ameer Baraka depicts how coming of age in the murderous streets of 1980s New Orleans collided with an unrecognized learning difference. Incarcerated for manslaughter at the age of fourteen, Ameer must reconcile his past with the will to persevere through the misconception that he's unable to learn.

At age twenty-three, Ameer re-enters the prison system, where he reclaims an education denied to so many who struggle to read. His rage transforms into determination to help other inmates and young people recognize that through perseverance and education, there is an alternative to living a life of crime and a method to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Stories speak louder than statistics, and in this tale of redemption, the good we do is measured by what we've overcome and the lives we inspire after discovering our truth.

Ameer Baraka is an award-winning and Daytime Emmy Nominated Actor, author, dyslexia advocate, youth mentor, and prison coach. Born to humble beginnings in New Orleans, Ameer's early life was as gloomy and as ill-fated as a young life could have been. In and out of the prison system as a kid for transgressions ranging from youthful indiscretions to major crimes, he was seemingly on a one-way trip to oblivion. Almost illiterate when he went to prison, he was diagnosed with dyslexia and learned to read in his mid-twenties while behind bars.

Seeing how education and ability to read have changed his life, Ameer is dedicated to inspiring young people with his message that they, too, can overcome meager beginnings and obstacles in their way to eventually triumph through hard work, dedication, strong faith, and the pursuit of education.

This autobiographically-inspired graphic novel explores mental health and schizophrenia in a surprising and emotionally honest story with a fantastical cast of animal characters.

Fox Foxerson's got a new roommate. Fox Foxerson's got a new job. Fox Foxerson's got a date. The roommate is only a little strange, sometimes. The job seems to involve . . . filing? It's not very clear. The date seems to be more interested in someone else. Fox would rather be making art.

As the oppressive weight of the everyday routine beats down on Fox, nothing is going right. And it doesn't seem like anyone can help -- not Fox's roommate, not Fox's friends, and definitely not the nurses and doctors at the hospital, who don't seem to take notice of anything Fox tries to tell them. Fox needs some time and space to figure things out. This quirky, humorous graphic novel tinged with pathos, immerses readers in the constant question: are you okay? Fox is not okay, but Fox is working on it.

Over four seasons, he describes Maine half a century ago - smelting and rescuing ice houses, moose encounters and indoor ermine, raising mischievous rabbits and conversing with pigs, hunting a legendary "football-sized emerald" and learning from legendary World War II vets.
He takes readers down through thin ice, and up spires of one-match fires. He lollygags Dead River and confronts hair-raising disorientation out on the open sea. He rolls from distance running to downhill skiing, comedy to calamity, whimsy to courage with a fluid pen. Gratitude pervades this volume. Light shines from each essay. Along the way, bits of illumination, encouragement, humor and reflection paint a bigger picture. Like a pointillist, he dabs the canvas gently, turning discrete dots into a cogent, uplifting whole. The impression left is redeeming, the celebration of self-reliance and interdependence, together the essence of all Maine towns. He reminds readers of timeless contentment in nature and human connectivity, both ultimately restorative. At heart, his vignettes celebrate freedom, and honor those who risked their lives to preserve it. The author credits good neighbors, good fortune, and thoughtfully taught good humor for his later doings.
From Maine's woods and lakes, Charles found his way to Dartmouth, Oxford and Columbia Law School. From there, he clerked, entered law practice, spent time in two White Houses, conducted oversight for Congress and taught. Along the way, he became a Navy Intelligence Officer, and served as Assistant Secretary of State to Colin Powell. He and his wife have two children. Living "away," he has stayed close to the town he still calls "home."