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Description
"Best known as a patriot and hero of the American War of Independence, Ethan Allen led the famed Green Mountain Boys in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Later that year, he spearheaded a failed assault on Montreal that resulted in his arrest by British authorities. Imprisoned aboard Royal Navy ships, paroled in New York City, and finally released in a prisoner exchange, Ethan Allen recorded his experiences in this stirring firsthand account of the...
Author
Description
"For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and...
Author
Description
Presents a biography of Alexander Hamilton, one of the most important figures in the history of American politics never elected to the presidency, discussing his childhood as an orphan in the Caribbean, his marriage and family, and his death in a duel, and examining his multifaceted role in the formation of U.S. government.
Author
Description
"He was history's most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The [bestselling biographer] brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Drawing on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity,...
6) Life
Author
Description
This book is the long awaited autobiography of the guitarist, songwriter, singer, and founding member of the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards. With the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards created the songs that roused the world, and he lived the original rock and roll life. Now, at last, the man himself tells his story of life in the crossfire hurricane; his listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records, learning guitar and forming a band...
Author
Appears on these lists
2023 Youth Media Award Winners
NYT - Audio Nonfiction
NYT - Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction
More Lists...
NYT - Audio Nonfiction
NYT - Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction
More Lists...
Description
"Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called 'calorie restriction,' eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, 'Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?'...
9) Born to run
Author
Description
Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs. He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as "The Big Bang": seeing Elvis Presley's debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. He vividly recounts his...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
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Description
"These twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays explore, up close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities, of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in New England today. The storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's...
Author
Pub. Date
1985
Edition
1st ed.
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Description
[In] Vermont Saints & Sinners, you'll meet grave robbers, horse thieves, war heroes, genius inventors, religious fanatics, ne'er-do-wells, adventurers, stalwart immigrants, and many others.
To uncover these characters and the events in which they found themselves, author Lee Dana Goodman dusted off century-old court and jailhouse records, slogged through many of Vermont's numerous (and revealing) graveyards, and deciphered handwritten, eyewitness...
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Series
Formats
Description
Regarded as one of the finest literary biographies ever published, this book reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities, and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature. This edition collates and corrects the textual inaccuracies of previous versions, returning to the original manuscript in order to present a definitive edition of this landmark text.
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Description
"Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom. There was a script for a family like the Galvins--hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they all tried to play their parts. But behind the closed doors of the house on Hidden Valley Road was a far different reality: psychological breakdown,...
Author
Description
The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. With his careful attention to detail and his lyrical prose, Ellis has set a new standard for biography.
Author
Formats
Description
J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress. In this biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer's life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War.
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Description
"When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor...
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Description
"From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the...
Author
Description
"With authoritative reporting honed through eight presidencies from Nixon to Obama, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump's White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive debates and the...
Author
Description
"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland....
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