Collection: Biography & Memoir

"I share the country's admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew. His courage is a model for all Americans."
--President Barack Obama It was just another day on the job for fifty-three-year-old Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, the United States-flagged cargo ship which was carrying, among other things, food and agricultural materials for the World Food Program. That all changed when armed Somali pirates boarded the ship. The pirates didn't expect the crew to fight back, nor did they expect Captain Phillips to offer himself as hostage in exchange for the safety of his crew. Thus began the tense five-day stand-off, which ended in a daring high-seas rescue when U.S. Navy SEALs opened fire and picked off three of the captors. "It never ends like this," Captain Phillips said. And he's right. A Captain's Duty tells the life-and-death drama of the Vermont native who was held captive on a tiny lifeboat off Somalia's anarchic, gun-plagued shores. A story of adventure and courage, it provides the intimate details of this high-seas hostage-taking--the unbearable heat, the death threats, the mock executions, and the escape attempt. When the pirates boarded his ship, Captain Phillips put his experience into action, doing everything he could to safeguard his crew. And when he was held captive by the pirates, he marshaled all his resources to ensure his own survival, withstanding intense physical hardship and an escalating battle of wills with the pirates. This was it: the moment where training meets instinct and where character is everything. Richard Phillips was ready.

Introduce your baby to the stunning artwork of famous naturalist John James Audubon.

John James Audubon was an ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He is known for his stunning illustrations and paintings of North American birds in their natural habitats, painting over 700 species discovering 25 new kinds of birds during his lifetime. John James Audubon Painted Birds shares his legacy and his love of nature with budding bird-watchers through a clever poem and gorgeous illustrations. As Audubon said, "the world is not given by [our] fathers, but borrowed from [our] children."

In the picture book Danza!, award-winning author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh tells the story of Amalia Hernández, dancer and founder of El Ballet Folklórico de México.

Winner of the Pura Belpré Award and the Robert F. Sibert Medal

"A vivid celebration of Mexican culture, art, and life." ―School Library Journal (Starred Review)

As a child, Amalia saw a pair of dancers in the town square. The way they stomped and swayed to the rhythm of the beat inspired her. She knew one day she would become a dancer. Amalia studied ballet and modern dance under the direction of skilled teachers who had performed in world-renowned dance companies. But she never forgot the folk dance she had seen years earlier.

She began traveling through the Mexican countryside, witnessing the dances of many regions, and she used her knowledge of ballet and modern dance to adapt the traditional dances to the stage. She founded her own dance company, a group that became known as El Ballet Folklórico de México.

Using his signature illustration style, inspired by the ancient art of the Mixtecs, Tonatiuh tells the story of Amalia Hernández and the formation of one of the most famous and successful dance companies in the world.

This is a celebration of Mexican heritage, culture, and dance that will entertain young readers and their parents.

"Tonatiuh tells Hernández's story with careful attention to detail and with obvious admiration for the subject. . . . His digitized, hand-drawn illustrations are striking. They showcase, in his signature style based on Mixtec art, the beauty and grace of many different dance styles." ―Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

An engaging picture book biography based on the incredible true story of a Jewish refugee who pioneered home video games and launched a worldwide obsession.

Do you ever wonder how video gaming was invented? What came before your PlayStation or Xbox? This is the story of Ralph Baer, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who used his skills--and a lot of ingenuity and persistence--to make life a little more fun.

Television was new when Ralph returned from serving in World War II, but he didn't settle for watching TV. He knew it could be even more fun if you could play with it. He tinkered and tested, got help and rejected, but with perseverance and skill, he made his vision come true! This is the inspiring story of a fearless inventor who made TV video games a reality.

Delacroix's journal - fresh and unselfconsciously spontaneous - is one of art history's most important documents.

How special and inspiring to read about Rosa Park's life in her own words! This BIOGRAPHY READER is now available in Step into Reading, the premier leveled reader line.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man on December 1, 1955, she made history. Her brave act sparked the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and brought the civil rights movement to national attention. In simple, lively language, Rosa Parks describes her life from childhood to the present and recounts the events that shook the nation. Her story is powerful, inspiring and unforgettable.

An NCSS-CBC Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies

Step 4 Readers use challenging vocabulary and short paragraphs to tell exciting stories. For newly independent readers who read simple sentences with confidence.

Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, FIVE CHIMNEYS does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her very frank, very well written book. Today, with 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, and neo-Nazism on the rise in western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lessons of the Holocaust. FIVE CHIMNEYS is a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen wherever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discriminations are permitted to exist."

The first study of the gardens and landscapes of Bunny Mellon, written by a leading specialist, illustrated with both new and archival photography.

" . . . The Gardens of Bunny Mellon is a tome to treasure." --Architectural Digest

Throughout her long and storied life, Rachel "Bunny" Mellon's greatest passion was garden design. She and her husband, Paul Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in America, maintained homes in New York, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Antigua, and Upperville, Virginia, and she designed the gardens at all of them. She also designed gardens for some of her dearest friends, including the Rose Garden and the East Garden at the White House, at the request of President Kennedy, and the gardens at both the Paris home and the château of couturier Hubert de Givenchy.

All of these gardens are featured in The Gardens of Bunny Mellon, illustrated with Mellon's own garden plans, sketches, and watercolors. Much like one of Mellon's landscapes, The Gardens of Bunny Mellon slowly matured over several years, allowing the gifted landscape photographer Roger Foley to record Oak Spring, her cherished Virginia home, in all four seasons. The book also features vintage photographs by Horst, Aarons, and others of Mellon's gardens for her homes in Cape Cod, Antigua, and New York. Author Linda Jane Holden's text is based on extensive interviews with Mellon before Mellon's death at age 103 in 2014.

"The Gardens of Bunny Mellon is part guide--with gorgeous photographs by Roger Foley that could make even the least inclined to go hunting for a trowel--part biography, and part social history. Mellon's passion is apparent throughout." --Vogue.com

"A master of narrative journalism, [Bowden] employs the same techniques of reconstructing scenes and dialogue that made his bestselling Black Hawk Down gripping reading." -Linda Robinson, New York Times Book Review

On July 22, 1992, drug lord Pablo Escobar walked out of the luxurious prison he built for himself and disappeared into the Colombian jungle. His audacious escape destroyed the nation's tenuous cease-fire with its infamous narcos, and pushed it into open war with the Medell"n drug cartel.

Over the coming days and weeks, the United States would launch a joint military and intelligence operation with the Colombian government, assembling a team of expert personnel and an arsenal of state-of-the-art weaponry and surveillance technology the likes of which the world had never seen. Their mission: to track down Pablo. But this time, nobody was interested in capturing him. This time, they intended to finish the job.

This time, they were going to kill him.

Killing Pablo is the inside story of the brutal rise and violent fall of Colombian cocaine cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, whose criminal empire held a nation of thirty million hostage-a reign of terror that would end only with his death. In an intense, up-close account, best-selling author and award-winning journalist Mark Bowden exposes the never-before-revealed details of how U.S. operatives covertly led the sixteen-month manhunt.

Drawing on unprecedented access to the soldiers, field agents, and officials involved in the chase, as well as hundreds of pages of top-secret documents and transcripts of Escobar's intercepted phone conversations, Bowden creates a gripping narrative that reads as if it were torn from the pages of a military technothriller. At every phase, he brings to life the men who brought the drug lord down. There is the Colombian president, C'sar Gaviria, afraid for his life and the future of his nation, who is forced to do the unthinkable: allow a foreign military to operate within his country's borders. There is the U.S. ambassador, Morris D. Busby, who brings in the most sophisticated surveillance team in the world, code-named Centra Spike, and the best team of manhunters, the mysterious Delta Force. And there is the leader of the Colombian forces, Colonel Hugo Martinez, an incorruptible man who lives under constant threat during the drug lord's reign-and whose own son plays a critical role on the fateful day when Pablo is finally found.

Bowden's last book, the New York Times best-seller Black Hawk Down, was hailed by critics (David Halberstam called it "a brilliant book, a heartbreaking story wonderfully well told-it's everything I admire") and became a finalist for the National Book Award. In Killing Pablo, Bowden's reportage achieves a new level, his narrative an epic scope. Action-packed and unputdownable, Killing Pablo is a tour de force of investigative journalism and a stark portrayal of rough justice in the real world.

Step into the world of Georgian England and learn more about the genteel life of this beloved author.

Although Jane Austen's works were first published anonymously and brought her little personal recognition, today they are rarely out of print and have inspired movies, television shows and mini-series, literary anthologies, and many other adaptations all around the world. Her writing--principally her five novels--is a critique of the British landed gentry at the end of the eighteenth century, and often a comment on the pursuit of a "good match" in matters of marriage. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Northhanger Abbey remain her most famous works. Who Was Jane Austen? reveals the life of this most private author.

"Twilight Man is biography, romance, and nonfiction mystery, carrying with it the bite of fiction." -- Los Angeles Review of Books

"In Twilight Man, Liz Brown uncovers a noir fairytale, a new glimpse into the opulent Gilded Age empire of the Clark family." --Bill Dedman, co-author of The New York Times bestseller Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune

The unbelievable true story of Harrison Post--the enigmatic lover of one of the richest men in 1920s Hollywood--and the battle for a family fortune.

In the booming 1920s, William Andrews Clark Jr. was one of the richest, most respected men in Los Angeles. The son of the mining tycoon known as "The Copper King of Montana," Clark launched the Los Angeles Philharmonic and helped create the Hollywood Bowl. He was also a man with secrets, including a lover named Harrison Post. A former salesclerk, Post enjoyed a lavish existence among Hollywood elites, but the men's money--and their homosexuality--made them targets, for the district attorney, their employees and, in Post's case, his own family. When Clark died suddenly, Harrison Post inherited a substantial fortune--and a wealth of trouble. From Prohibition-era Hollywood to Nazi prison camps to Mexico City nightclubs, Twilight Man tells the story of an illicit love and the battle over a family estate that would destroy one man's life.

Harrison Post was forgotten for decades, but after a chance encounter with his portrait, Liz Brown, Clark's great-grandniece, set out to learn his story. Twilight Man is more than just a biography. It is an exploration of how families shape their own legacies, and the lengths they will go in order to do so.

INWOOD, LONG ISLAND, NY 1944 - Johnny and Rose were popular high school sweethearts when Johnny enlisted to fight in the war. Before shipping out, Johnny proposed, promising his eternal love to Rose. After the war, Johnny returns a hometown hero and the two young lovers make final preparations for their long-awaited nuptials. However, fate delivers a devastating blow when Rose is suddenly struck down on her wedding day. Now, more than fifty years later, Johnny's son - having lived in the shadow of his father's grief for over half a century - digs up the past to solve the mystery of the woman his father intended to marry instead of his mother. Based on a true story.

Wars fought on a grand scale with global consequences are made up of countless smaller battles and events. For the men who fought, bled and died in them they are not small-those little pieces of war-and the personal aftermath and their effect is beyond measure. One such battle pitted a North Vietnamese Army (NVA) battalion of 700+ men against the men of Company I, Third Battalion, Ninth Marines, Third Marine Division. Of the seven officers in the field at the beginning, only three walked out. I was one of them.

I was 24 years old, and this was my first significant combat experience (and surprisingly, what happened-what I was called upon to do, was something I never imagined. What came afterward defined me for the rest of my life). The fighting lasted six hours, and toward the end, we were almost out of ammunition. Those few hours changed forever the lives of the survivors, including me, and the next of kin of the men we lost.

That battle was the crucial event in my life; an ultimate What Now, Lieutenant? moment that taught me so much that came into play in other such moments in my future. True, they would not be as traumatic as what I experienced as a lieutenant, but they were moments that whether I was a lieutenant, major or general, each forced me to call upon my experience, knowledge, training and common sense to respond appropriately. That phrase... that question with all it entails and how one responds when it's asked of them... seemed to fit best as a title for what you're reading now. Seeing that question in the eyes of the men on Hill 70 that day is how I learned a most valuable lesson about leadership over the course of a bloody day in Vietnam, now more than 49 years ago.

Everything that happened to me after that day is now seen through that prism. --Butch Neal

Meriwether Lewis, commander of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition that explored the newly purchased Louisiana Territory from 1804-06, returned home from this perilous journey with every hope as well as his country's expectations of a bright and productive future. Yet within three years, the 35-year-old Lewis was dead in a lonely inn along the Natchez Trace in rural Tennessee, the victim of two gunshots. Various medical and psychological theories have been proposed by historians and others to account for his mysterious death, which was originally reported as a suicide. The authors of "So Hard to Die" provide an in-depth analysis of the various theories that still swirl around his death and draw on their professional backgrounds as a physician and a clinical psychologist to vividly and convincingly explain the mystery of Lewis's death.

The Book of Ulster Surnames has over 500 entries of the most common family names of the nine county province of Ulster, with reference to thousands more.

It gives the meaning and history of each name, its original form, where it came from - Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales or France - and why it changed to what it is today. The index is an essential asset to the publication - providing nearly 3,000 surnames and variant spellings, cross-referenced to the main listing.

The book includes notes on some famous bearers of the name and where in Ulster the name is now most common. This new edition by the Foundation also includes an article by the author on the Riding Clans of the Scottish Borders, many members of which came to Ulster during the Plantation.

The result is a reference book which details much about the history of the Ulster Irish as well as the Scottish and English who arrived from the seventeenth century onwards, and is packed with surprising insights into the origins of a complex, turbulent people.

JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD GOLD STANDARD SELECTION 2023

A moving illustrated biography of the late Joe Delaney, an NFL star in the making who valued helping others above all else

On the football field, Joe Delaney possessed all the qualities of a great running back. He was fast with keen instincts, a burst of red and gold as he sprinted toward the end zone for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Off the field, he embodied the qualities of a great person: generous, hard-working, humble, and honest. Helping people was simply second nature to Joe.

In 1983, on a summer's day in Louisiana, Joe Delaney gave his life trying to save three children from drowning in a pond. While others stood by, Joe didn't hesitate before rushing into the water, though he was not a strong swimmer himself. Now, football fans of all teams honor his legacy as an extraordinarily brave young man who cared fiercely for his community.

Written with the support of the Delaney family, Heroic Heart is a lushly illustrated, lyrical story of selflessness and courage. Adults and children alike will learn about the remarkable life of this compassionate NFL star.