Collection: Biography & Memoir

They Never Threw Anything Away

Memories of the Great Depression by Americans Who Lived It

The parallels to the present are ominous: an international pandemic killing nearly 700,000 Americans, followed by a booming stock markets and political turmoil....then years of unimaginable misery for so many - an era so difficult and challenging that it became known as The Great Depression....SOUND FAMILIAR? CAN HISTORY REPEAT?

They Never Threw Anything Away provides an entertaining, informative, but all-too-plausible comparison of then and now from memories of 22 Americans who lived through The Great Depression. In their own words they tell of experiences gained while living during the social and economic chaos of that era. During the late 1990's author Ed Linz traveled throughout the U.S. gathering stories of lives permanently scarred by the disaster years of the 1930's. His interviews of a wide array of Americans from varying geographic regions and differing social strata produce an eclectic collection of captivating memories of life during the Great Depression: a Black man in southern Georgia who toiled in a turpentine forest, but called this period "the happiest of my life"; a young socialite (and friend of Ginger Rogers) whose famous engineer grandfather took her on a steamship to visit his masterpiece, the Panama Canal; a teenager whose big band played in all the "gin mills" on Long Island; the daughter of Greek immigrants who found herself in a L.A. tuberculosis sanitarium at age nine; a Seattle barnstorming aviator; Mennonite farm families in northern Indiana; young women who worked by themselves as teachers in one-room schoolhouses in the Dust Bowl of the Midwest; a group of nursing students from the coal mining regions of Kentucky - and many other captivating memories of life during the Great Depression. Each story is interspersed with anecdotal facts about the events and circumstances mentioned during the interviews. A time-line of major events during the Great Depression is an included Appendix.

This engrossing, timely, and highly illustrated biography of the father of modern surgery reveals the shocking practices of surgeons before Joseph Lister proved where infections come from.

In 1841, a quiet, curious boy who stuttered when nervous committed to becoming a surgeon--a profession then more feared than respected.

Through study, persistence, and careful research, Joseph Lister proved that unsanitary conditions contribute to infections. Despite others scoffing at his ideas, Lister slowly changed the way all surgeons work, saving countless lives.

Sibert Honor-winner Lori Alexander's accessible and lively biography of Lister contains fun--and sometimes gory--facts about the history of science and engaging illustrations by Daniel Duncan.

From the scene-stealing star of Pitch Perfect and Bridesmaids comes a refreshingly candid, hilarious, and inspiring book about her unconventional journey to Hollywood success and loving herself.

For decades, Rebel Wilson had single-mindedly focused on her career, making a name for herself through her iconic roles in Pitch Perfect, Bridesmaids, and Isn't It Romantic. Now, she's ready to chronicle the emotional and physical lessons she learned, as well as her most embarrassing experiences. A malaria-induced hallucination? An all-style martial arts fighting tournament? Junior handling at dog shows? And this was all BEFORE she moved to Hollywood!

Rebel Rising follows Rebel Wilson's incredible journey of "making it," constantly questioning, "Am I good enough? Will I ever find love? Will I ever change and become healthy?" Rebel writes for the first time about the most personal and important moments in her life--from fertility issues, weight gain and loss, sexuality, overcoming shyness, rejections, and, well...okay there's at least one story thrown in about Brad Pitt! It's all here. This memoir shows us how to love ourselves while making us laugh uncontrollably.

The real story of Hollywood as told by such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Harold Lloyd, and nearly four hundred others, assembled from the American Film Institute's treasure trove of interviews, reveals a fresh history of the American movie industry from its beginnings to today.

From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture of what it was like to work in Hollywood from its beginnings to its present day. Gleaned from nearly three thousand interviews, involving four hundred voices from the industry, Hollywood: The Oral History, lets a reader "listen in" on candid remarks from the biggest names in front of the camera--Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Harold Lloyd--to the biggest behind it--Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele, as well as the lesser known individuals that shaped what was heard and seen on screen: musicians, costumers, art directors, cinematographers, writers, sound men, editors, make-up artists, and even script timers, messengers, and publicists. The result is like a conversation among the gods and goddesses of film: lively, funny, insightful, historically accurate and, for the first time, authentically honest in its portrait of Hollywood. It's the insider's story.

Legendary film scholar Jeanine Basinger and New York Times bestselling author Sam Wasson, both acclaimed storytellers in their own right, have undertaken the monumental task of digesting these tens of thousands of hours of talk and weaving it into a definitive portrait of workaday Hollywood.

A "fresh, fast-paced, and bracing" (Wall Street Journal) new biography of Winston Churchill, revealing how his relationships with the other great figures of his age shaped his own triumphs and failures as a leader

Winston Churchill remains one of the most revered figures of the twentieth century, his name a byword for courageous leadership. But the Churchill we know today is a mixture of history and myth, authored by the man himself. In Mirrors of Greatness, prizewinning historian David Reynolds reevaluates Churchill's life by viewing it through the eyes of his allies and adversaries, even his own family, revealing Churchill's lifelong struggle to overcome his political failures and his evolving grasp of what "greatness" truly entailed.

Through his dealings with Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, we follow Churchill's triumphant campaign against Nazi Germany. But we also see a Churchill whose misjudgments of allies and rivals like Roosevelt, Stalin, Gandhi, and Clement Attlee blinded him to the British Empire's waning dominance on the world stage and to the rising popularity of a postimperial, socialist vision of Great Britain at home.

Magisterial and incisive, Mirrors of Greatness affords Churchill his due as a figure of world-historical importance and deepens our understanding of his legend by uncovering the ways his greatest contemporaries helped make him the man he was, for good and for ill.

Everybody knows the record the stuff of almanacs, trade magazines and clipping services. A handful know the man. But only Muhammad Ali knows his life as he lived it. The Greatest is Ali's own story. For six years he worked, traveled and talked with Richard Durham, a writer with a stunning talent, and the result is mesmerizing in its brilliance, drama, humanity and sheer entertainment. This is no documented scrapbook of wins and losses strung together with anecdotes; nor is it a thin potpourri of locker room gags. This book, like Ali who has incited every reaction except indifference goes straight to the place where responses to him have always been the gut. When the history of the twentieth century is finally recorded, it must include Muhammad Ali. He is "The Greatest."

Named a Best Biography Book for 2023

Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Books of 2023

"Richard Norton Smith had brought a lifetime of wisdom, insight, and storytelling verve to the life of a consequential president--Gerald R. Ford. Ford's is a very American life, and Smith has charted its vicissitudes and import with great grace and illuminating perspective. A marvelous achievement!" -- Jon Meacham

From the preeminent presidential scholar and acclaimed biographer of historical figures including George Washington, Herbert Hoover, and Nelson Rockefeller comes this eye-opening life of Gerald R. Ford, whose presidency arguably set the course for post-liberal America and a post-Cold War world.

For many Americans, President Gerald Ford was the genial accident of history who controversially pardoned his Watergate-tarnished predecessor, presided over the fall of Saigon, and became a punching bag on Saturday Night Live. Yet as Richard Norton Smith reveals in a book full of surprises, Ford was an underrated leader whose tough decisions and personal decency look better with the passage of time.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Smith recreates Ford's hardscrabble childhood in Michigan, his early anti-establishment politics and lifelong love affair with the former Betty Bloomer, whose impact on American culture he predicted would outrank his own. As president, Ford guided the nation through its worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War and broke the back of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression--accomplishing both with little fanfare or credit (at least until 2001 when the JFK Library gave him its prestigious Profile in Courage Award in belated recognition of the Nixon pardon).

Less coda than curtain raiser, Ford's administration bridged the Republican pragmatism of Eisenhower and Nixon and the more doctrinaire conservatism of Ronald Reagan. His introduction of economic deregulation would transform the American economy, while his embrace of the Helsinki Accords hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Illustrated with sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, this definitive biography, a decade in the making, will change history's views of a man whose warning about presidential arrogance ("God help the country") is more relevant than ever.

Winner of the 2022 Palestine Book Award

"An artistic triumph that will stand as an enduring testament to the spirit of the Palestinian people. Mohammad Sabaaneh is a master."--Joe Sacco, winner of the American Book Award for Palestine

What does freedom look like from inside an Israeli prison?

A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: "You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories," stories of family, of community, of Gaza, of the West Bank, of Jerusalem, of Palestine. The two collect threads of memory and intergenerational trauma from ongoing settler-colonialism. Helping us to see that the prison is much larger than a building, far wider than a cell; it stretches through towns and villages, past military checkpoints and borders. But hope and solidarity can stretch farther, deeper, once strength is drawn of stories and power is born of dreams. Translating headlines into authentic lived experiences, these stories come to life in the striking linocut artwork of Mohammad Sabaaneh, helping us to see Palestinians not as political symbols, but as people.

In this exciting book, a former NASA astronaut inspires the next generation of space travelers with answers to all kids' questions on how people become astronauts, how they prepare for space travel, and what it's like to live and work in space.

A kid's guide to leaving the planet from someone who's done it! Former astronaut Terry Virts guides readers through the practical elements of becoming an astronaut, along with the wonders (and challenges!) of space travel. With insider information on training, piloting a ship, and working in space, readers and aspiring astronauts will be inspired to start their own journey to the stars. This practical guide is full of valuable wisdom and insight that will guide the astronaut candidates of tomorrow!

This thrilling biography tells the story of Tiny Broadwick, the first woman to ever parachute from a plane and the inventor of the parachute rip cord, and how her determination, courage, adventurousness, and joy in doing what she loved lifted her up to stand as tall as a pioneer in flight.

The crack of a pistol shattered the silence-
Tiny's signal to jump.
Her hands trembled as she cut her parachute away from the balloon.

Tiny Broadwick, a teeny, uneducated mill girl, had big dreams of soaring above the earth, out of poverty, and above expectations. She became the first woman to parachute from an airplane, and her idea for the rip cord paved the way for pilots to safely escape in-flight emergencies.

This thrilling biography shows how Tiny's determination, courage, adventurousness, and joy lifted her up to stand tall as a pioneer in flight.

For readers of Meghan O'Rourke's The Invisible Kingdom, Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias, and Melissa Febos's Girlhood, a powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays that sheds light on the silent epidemic of head trauma.

Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In Sex with a Brain Injury, she writes about what it means to be one of the "walking wounded," facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother's battle with addiction, Liontas finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability--particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Encountering Liontas's sharp, affecting prose, the reader can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one's way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others.

For the millions of people who have suffered from concussions and for those who have endeavored to support loved ones through the painful and often baffling experience of head trauma, this astonishing and compassionate narrative offers insight and hope in equal measure.

A collection of 12 award-winning short stories concerning the true adventures of Game Wardens and the wildlife-destroying outlaws they pursue.

Delta Ghosts - A team of wardens ambush outlaw gillnetters at Grizzly Bay, in the same Delta waters patrolled 80 years earlier by Fish Patrol Warden and famous writer, Taylor London .

Smooth Operator - Wardens stalk a cagy and arrogant abalone-poaching commercial sea urchin diver.

Time Bomb - A dangerous and mentally unstable deer poacher proves highly troubling for pursuing wardens.

Cheaters - An inexperienced warden consults an old pro of his profession to capture a pair of super-wary striped bass snaggers.

Tigers Revenge - A cocky and confident salmon poacher makes the mistake of "pulling the tail of the tiger," that is, taunting a local game warden.

A Calculated Risk - Despite a comedy of errors, wardens close in on highly destructive pig poachers.

Killer John - Future serial killer? Wardens deal with a scary deer poacher and born killer.

New Talent - A new warden astounds a mentor with his almost super-human sensory skills.

Slow Learners - A once major league pitcher proves to be a highly interesting adversary for wardens.

Davie Crockett and the Bush Baby - A Hollywood stunt man and elk poacher tangles with border wardens.

Then Came Speedy - A Peruvian sheepherder and a small sheepdog pay dearly to save their sheep from marauding bears in high meadows of the Sierra Nevada range.

Lethal Intent - Would-be assassins are thwarted by a fearless warden who puts his life on the line for the intended victims.

The true story of award-winning pianist and environmental activist Mahani Teave and the beloved island she is helping to save.

"This upbeat and fascinating story will leave readers feeling as though they, too, can make a difference when it comes to helping the planet."--Kirkus Reviews

Imagine living on a tiny island more than a thousand miles from any other inhabited place! That's where a girl named Mahani lived--on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. Mahani grew up taking music lessons on the island's only piano. She had the talent to become a great pianist, but pursuing that dream meant leaving the home she loved.

As Mahani toured the world as an acclaimed concert pianist, Rapa Nui stayed close to her heart. She knew the island struggled with problems like ocean trash and wondered how she could help. So she returned to Rapa Nui with a new dream--to build a music school! The unique building is constructed with recycled trash and has solar panels and a food garden. Now Mahani is helping build a more sustainable future for her island home--where the music continues.

The perfect choice for parents looking for:

• Inspiring nonfiction about women making a difference
• Stories about sustainability and saving the environment
• Kids STEAM books

Explore Native American narratives--for kids ages 6 to 9

Native Americans have a long tradition of storytelling. Now, you can easily introduce your children to these rich cultures with a compilation of powerful tales from multiple tribes like the Cheyenne and the Lenape.

What sets this book apart from other Native American books for kids:

• Tales from 12 tribes--Kids will embark on a literary adventure with 12 stories from tribes around America, exploring lore about how the mountain Denali formed, why the North Star stays still, and more.
• Tribal history--Every story ends with a brief historical sketch of the tribe, providing context and offering a glimpse into their way of life and their traditions.
• Fun facts--The learning doesn't stop with the stories; a collection of fascinating facts, suggestions for additional reading, and a glossary of important words give kids a deeper understanding and appreciation.

Spark excitement in Native American history and culture with enchanting stories from tribes across the continent.

In this international bestseller from the critically acclaimed Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the life of Amelia Earhart, the American aviation pioneer.

When Amelia was young, she liked to imagine she could stretch her wings and fly away like a bird. As a grown woman, she set a new female world record for flying up to 14,000 feet. She also flew across the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, and eventually undertook the most dangerous mission of all: to fly all the way around the world. This moving book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the aviator's life.

Little People, BIG DREAMS is a best-selling biography series for kids that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.

This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardcover and paperback versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the treasuries each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in boxed gift sets. Activity books and a journal provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.

Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!

This classic history of America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies is "a gripping technothriller in which the technology is real" (New York Times Book Review). From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of Cold War confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists and engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century. "Thoroughly engrossing." --Los Angeles Times Book Review