Collection: Biography & Memoir

The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.

His name wasn't Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn't stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength--both physical and mental--to excel as a marine.

During World War II, the Japanese had managed to crack every code the United States used. But when the Marines turned to its Navajo recruits to develop and implement a secret military language, they created the only unbroken code in modern warfare--and helped assure victory for the United States over Japan in the South Pacific.

INCLUDES THE ACTUAL NAVAJO CODE AND RARE PICTURES

Villages of Poland hide the lost secrets of World War II

1944: Heavy footfalls thud on the road on a rainy May night. A band of gunmen scour a hilltop farm, acting on rumors that it harbors a Jewish family. For 18 months, the Rozeneks have been hiding safely, but their luck is about to run out. Only one from the family of six will live to see the sunrise. Sixteen-year-old Hena Rozenek shelters in the woods until morning... and then she runs.

Forty years later: Holocaust survivor Sam Rakowski Ron has lived in the United States for decades, never thinking he could return to the Polish village he fled as a teenager. But now he's ready to talk about what he heard, what he saw, and what he knows about two separate families of cousins who were his neighbors, and presumably were killed during the war. The story Poland presents to the world is that Poles saved more Jews than citizens of any other nation, that any murders in Poland were committed by Nazis and Nazis alone. But Sam, while defending his countrymen, suspects a painful truth. The stories he shares with his younger cousin, Judy, an investigative journalist, send them off on a decades-long journey unlike any other to find out what happened to the Rozenek family and ultimately reveal the secrets the Polish government is still desperate to keep.

Jews in the Garden is a globe-trotting detective story that turns investigative eyes and ears toward the hidden events in Poland during the Holocaust. Judy and Sam, the unlikeliest of sleuthing duos, knock on doors, petition court documents, seek clandestine meetings, and ultimately discover what really happened to the "Jews in the garden next door."

Learn from home and explore the world with these fun and easy board books!

Every young child loves to listen to music, bang on drums, and pound the keys of a piano. Now here's a Hello, World! board book that can teach babies and toddlers all about musical instruments and the sounds they make--with colors, shapes, sizes, and super-simple facts.

Hello, World! board books introduce first nonfiction concepts to babies and toddlers. Told in clear and easy terms with read-aloud sound words ("Plink! There are 88 keys on a piano, and they each make a different sound") and featuring bright, cheerful illustrations, Hello, World! makes learning fun for young children. And each page offers helpful prompts for engaging with your child. It's a perfect way to bring science and culture into the busy world of a toddler, where learning never stops.

Look for all the books in the Hello, World! series:
- Solar System
- Weather
- Backyard Bugs
- Birds
- Dinosaurs
- My Body
- How Do Apples Grow?
- Ocean Life
- Moon Landing
- Pets
- Arctic Animals
- Construction Site
- Rainforest Animals
- Planet Earth
- Reptiles
- Cars and Trucks
- Music
- Baby Animals
- On the Farm
- Garden Time
- Planes and Other Flying Machines
- Rocks and Minerals
- Snow
- Let's Go Camping
- School Day

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A "beautiful and eye-opening" (Jacqueline Woodson), "hilarious and heart-rending" (Celeste Ng) graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing.

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly - ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, BuzzFeed, Esquire, Literary Journal, Kirkus Reviews

"How brown is too brown?"
"Can Indians be racist?"
"What does real love between really different people look like?"

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.

Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation--and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD

"Jacob's earnest recollections are often heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humor. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love."--Time

"Good Talk uses a masterful mix of pictures and words to speak on life's most uncomfortable conversations."--io9

"Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book-as-art-object into the garbage. Her new book changes everything."--Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

"Narrative history that fizzes with life and feeling." -- Benjamin Wallace, New York Times bestselling author of The Billionaire's Vinegar

The New York Times bestselling biography of the visionary young woman who built a champagne empire, became a legend, and showed the world how to live with style

Veuve Clicquot champagne epitomizes glamour, style, and luxury. In The Widow Clicquot, Tilar J. Mazzeo brings to life--for the first time--the fascinating woman behind the iconic yellow label: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, who, after her husband's death, defied convention by assuming the reins of the fledgling wine business they had nurtured together. Steering the company through dizzying political and financial reversals, she became one of the world's first great businesswomen and one of the richest women of her time.

As much a fascinating journey through the process of making this temperamental wine as a biography of a uniquely tempered woman, The Widow Clicquot is the captivating true story of a legend and a visionary.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From licensed therapist and popular Instagram relationship expert Vienna Pharaon (@mindfulmft, +683K followers) comes a profound guide to understanding and overcoming wounds from your Family of Origin--the foundation of how we relate to others, ourselves, and the world around us.

None of us had a perfect childhood; we are all carrying around behaviors that don't serve us--and may in fact be hurting us. But it doesn't have to be that way, says licensed marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon. Our past might create our patterns, but we can change those patterns for the better...with the right tools.

In The Origins of You, Pharaon has unlocked a healing process to help us understand our Family of Origin--the family and framework we grew up within--and examine what worked (and didn't) in that system. Unhealed pain (or "wounds") in that Family of Origin will manifest in our adult behaviors in surprising ways, from work challenges to interpersonal struggles. But the good news: armed with the knowledge about our past, we can actually rewire our programming to meaningfully improve our relationships and our lives, right now and in the future.

It doesn't matter whether you've been in therapy for decades, or whether therapy isn't for you. It doesn't matter if you had a great childhood, or a terrible one. You can create change and resolve things from the past that need your attention. Complete with guided introspection, personal experiences, client stories, frameworks for having difficult conversations, and worksheets to complement each chapter, The Origins of You will teach you how to break family patterns and help you liberate the way you live and love.

The lyrics notebook and personal journals of Kurt Cobain, revealing new insight and meaning to the iconic signer of the band Nirvana.

Kurt Cobain filled dozens of notebooks with lyrics, drawings, and writings about his plans for Nirvana and his thoughts about fame, the state of music, and the people who bought and sold him and his music. His journals reveal an artist who loved music, who knew the history of rock, and who was determined to define his place in that history. Here is a mesmerizing, incomparable portrait of the most influential musician of his time.

A captivating dual biography of two famous women whose sons would change the course of the 20th century--by award-winning historian Charlotte Gray.

Born into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated much of their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicenter of political power on two continents.

In the mid-19th century, the British Empire was at its height, France's Second Empire flourished, and the industrial vigor of the United States of America was catapulting the republic towards the Gilded Age. Sara and Jennie, raised with privilege but subject to the constraints of women's roles at the time, learned how to take control of their destinies--Sara in the prosperous Hudson Valley, and Jennie in the glittering world of Imperial London.

Yet their personalities and choices were dramatically different. A vivacious extrovert, Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill, a rising politician and scion of a noble British family. Her deft social and political maneuverings helped not only her mercurial husband but, once she was widowed, her ambitious son, Winston. By contrast, deeply conventional Sara Delano married a man as old as her father. But once widowed, she made Franklin, her only child, the focus of her existence. Thanks in large part to her financial support and to her guidance, Franklin acquired the skills he needed to become a successful politician.

Set against one hundred years of history, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons is a study in loyalty and resilience. Gray argues that Jennie and Sara are too often presented as lesser figures in the backdrop of history rather than as two remarkable individuals who were key in shaping the characters of the sons who adored them and in preparing them for leadership on the world stage.

Impeccably researched and filled with intriguing social insights, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons breathes new life into Sara and Jennie, offering a fascinating and fulsome portrait of how leaders are not just born but made.

The first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world, by the author of The Mirror and the Palette.

It's not so long ago that a woman's expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her. And yet spiritualism, in various incarnations, has influenced numerous men--including lauded modernist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Paul Klee--without repercussion. The fact that so many radical female artists of their generation--and earlier--also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has been sorely neglected for too long.

In The Other Side, we explore the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer, and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York's Guggenheim broke all attendance records to the 'Desert Transcendentalist', Agnes Pelton, who painted her visions beneath the vast skies of California. We also learn about the Swiss healer, Emma Kunz, who used geometric drawings to treat her patients and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun, whose estate of more than 5,000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions.

Weaving in and out of these myriad lives while sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. A radical reappraisal of a marginalized group of artists, The Other Side is an intoxicating blend of memoir, biography, and art history.

In 1992, the Screaming Trees were expected to become the next big band to come out of the Seattle music scene during the heyday of grunge. Except it never happened. It wasn't because the band didn't have great songs-indeed, the Trees were revered for their ability to write a great song that was both artistically original and commercially viable, which is no easy task. Other Seattle bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden were fans of the Screaming Trees, playing shows with them and collaborating on albums, long before their own bands broke through into the mainstream. That kind of success eluded the Screaming Trees, and it seemed as if there were more demons than angels in the band's corner when it came time for the Trees to make their mark. Their songwriting skills, however, remain as their greatest legacy.

Written by Screaming Trees long-serving drummer, Barrett Martin, The Greatest Band That Ever Wasn't reads like a Greek comedy or tragedy, depending on your viewpoint. Each of the three acts contained in this book features 11 short stories, for a combined total of 33 stories. These tales will make you laugh and perhaps even cry, which is why the saga of the Screaming Trees reads more like a great myth-one that is incredible, at times unbelievable, yet still contains volumes of humor and wisdom.

An uplifting and empowering illustrated anthology of joyful contributions from 52 contemporary Black voices, including chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley, scientist Dr. Raven the Science Maven, and award-winning author Patrice Lawrence.

Curated by award-winning author Jamia Wilson, A Year of Black Joy celebrates the joy, talent, and contributions of 52 Black people from around the world. By sharing the many layers and dimensions of Black life and contributions that exist outside of trauma, readers of all backgrounds will be empowered to share their joy too. Each contributor is an expert in their own field, and the book covers a multitude of topics, from astrology and astronomy to beekeeping and baking.

The collection includes an entry for every week of the year, and each contribution is tied to a particular season, event, or celebration. An illustrated, nonfiction component to each entry--such as a guide to healing plants or a tour of the night sky--lets readers dive further into the activity. Presented in a beautiful hardcover format and featuring stunning full-color illustrations from Jade Orlando, AYear of Black Joy is a book to be treasured for years to come.

Walt Disney always loved to entertain people. Often it got him into trouble. Once he painted pictures with tar on the side of his family's white house. His family was poor, and the happiest time of his childhood was spent living on a farm in Missouri. His affection for small-town life is reflected in Disneyland Main Streets around the world. With black-and-white illustrations throughout, this biography reveals the man behind the magic.

This book is not authorized, licensed or endorsed by the Walt Disney Company or any affiliate.

The Savannah Bananas have peeled back the game of baseball and made it fun again.

This is their story.

For his entire childhood, Jesse Cole dreamed of pitching in the Majors. Now, he has a life in baseball that he could have only imagined: he met the love of his life in the industry; they shaped Savannah, Georgia's professional team into the league champion Savannah Bananas; and now the Bananas have restyled baseball itself into something all their own: Banana Ball.

Fast, fun, and outrageously entertaining, Banana Ball brings fans right into the game. The Bananas throw out a first banana rather than a ball. Their first-base coach dances to "Thriller" or Britney between innings. Players run into the crowd to hand out roses. And the rules themselves are bananas: if a fan catches a foul ball it's an out; and players might go to bat on stilts or wearing a banana costume. And their fans absolutely love it.

But the reason this team is on the forefront of a movement is less about the play on the field and more about the atmosphere that the team culture creates. For the first time in this book, Jesse reveals the ideas and experiences that allowed him to reimagine America's oldest sport by creating a phenomenon that is helping fans fall in love with the game all over again.

This is a story that's bigger than baseball and bigger than the yellow tuxedo Jesse wears as the "ringmaster" of every game. And to understand the movement, you have to understand the story at its core. In Jesse's telling, it takes heart, innovation, and joy (and a bit of tropical fruit) to make something wholly original out of one of America's great traditions. His story is part Moneyball, part Field of Dreams, part The Greatest Showman. It is a personal story, a creativity story, and the story of a business scrapping for every success. And it has several distinct love stories--love stories like Jesse and his father, Jesse and his wife, the team and the sport of baseball, the team and the fans.

This is Jesse calling his dad from the outfield after each Bananas game, and putting unending creativity into a team with the ultimate goal of bringing the Bananas to the professional ballparks he himself never got to play in. This is his story of baseball, love, leadership, and going just a bit bananas for all.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

An Amazon "Best Book of 2019"
A Washington Post "10 Books To Read in July"
A Los Angeles Times "Seven Highly Anticipated Books for Summer Reading"
A USA Today "20 of the Season's Hottest New Books"
A New York Post "25 Best Beach Reads of 2019 You Need to Pre-Order Now"
A Bustle "The Best New True Crime Books You Can Read Right Now"

"Maureen Callahan's deft reporting and stylish writing have created one of the all-time-great serial-killer books: sensitive, chilling, and completely impossible to put down." --Ada Calhoun, author of St. Marks Is Dead

Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer. The names of notorious serial killers are usually well-known; they echo in the news and in public consciousness. But most people have never heard of Israel Keyes, one of the most ambitious and terrifying serial killers in modern history. The FBI considered his behavior unprecedented. Described by a prosecutor as "a force of pure evil," Keyes was a predator who struck all over the United States. He buried "kill kits"--cash, weapons, and body-disposal tools--in remote locations across the country. Over the course of fourteen years, Keyes would fly to a city, rent a car, and drive thousands of miles in order to use his kits. He would break into a stranger's house, abduct his victims in broad daylight, and kill and dispose of them in mere hours. And then he would return home to Alaska, resuming life as a quiet, reliable construction worker devoted to his only daughter.

When journalist Maureen Callahan first heard about Israel Keyes in 2012, she was captivated by how a killer of this magnitude could go undetected by law enforcement for over a decade. And so began a project that consumed her for the next several years--uncovering the true story behind how the FBI ultimately caught Israel Keyes, and trying to understand what it means for a killer like Keyes to exist. A killer who left a path of monstrous, randomly committed crimes in his wake--many of which remain unsolved to this day.

American Predator is the ambitious culmination of years of interviews with key figures in law enforcement and in Keyes's life, and research uncovered from classified FBI files. Callahan takes us on a journey into the chilling, nightmarish mind of a relentless killer, and to the limitations of traditional law enforcement.

This honest, engrossing graphic memoir tells the story of professional athlete and activist Akim Aliu's incredible life as a hockey prodigy in Canada.

Akim Aliu -- also known as "Dreamer" -- is a Ukrainian-Nigerian-Canadian professional hockey player whose career took him all around the world and who experienced systemic racism at every turn. Dreamer tells Akim's incredible story, from being the only Black child in his Ukrainian community, to his family struggling to make ends meet while living in Toronto, to confronting the racist violence he often experienced both on and off the ice. This is a gut-wrenching and riveting graphic novel memoir that reminds us to never stop dreaming, and is sure to inspire young readers everywhere.

"With honesty and courage, Akim Aliu's Dreamer will inspire readers of all ages to move confidently in the direction of their future." - Colin Kaepernick