Collection: Biography & Memoir

Tallulah Bankhead was an actress whose talents were greatly overshadowed by her antics. Indeed, the Bankhead personality was much better known than her acting roles. While it is impossible to study her career without exploring her highly charged personality, this bio-bibliography honors Tallulah Bankhead, the actress. In a career that spanned five decades, she conquered practically every medium of entertainment--theater, film, radio, and television--leaving her mark in each one. Biographers have several times attempted to chronicle her life, but Bankhead remains too original, too unconventional, too colorful to be captured fully on paper. What can be noted are her many accomplishments--which have previously been ignored.

This book corrects that oversight by documenting her 19 motion pictures, 56 stage plays, 167 radio appearances, and 56 television appearances, and also listing other professional appearances, recordings, awards and tributes. Additional features include a biographical sketch based on research and interviews with associates, a chronology of highlights in her life, an annotated bibliography of books and magazine articles about her or referring to her, and interesting photographs illustrating her career. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, this is a complete source for any research about Bankhead and will also provide helpful data and insights into the theater, films, persons, and events of her world.

This bio-bibliography focuses on the life and career of Jennifer Jones, reexamining her as a uniquely talented actress rather than as the wife and protegd'e of David O. Selznick. a superior reference work. A concise biography is followed by a chronology, a filmography, a listing of radio, theatre and television credits, a list of awards and nominations, and an annotated bibliography. Classic Images

This bio-bibliography focuses on the life and career of Jennifer Jones, an actress as well known for her marriage to David O. Selznick as she is for her performances. As a research tool for those interested in an academic study and reevaluation of her career, however, this work looks at Jones not as the wife and protegee of Selznick but as an individual with a unique and accomplished acting style. In surveying the history of the relationship with Selznick, and covering the 23 feature films and one serial appearance that make up the career of Jennifer Jones, Jeffrey Carrier has separated the performances from the Selznick influence and discovered a talent that is often surprising.

The book provides a complete view of the professional life of Jennifer Jones, from her earliest screen appearance in 1939 to her current activities with charitable organizations. It is comprised of seven major sections: a detailed biography; a chronology that summarizes the highlights of her life; a complete filmography that includes casts and credits, synopses, release dates, running times, selected reviews, and sources for study; a listing of radio, theater, and television appearances; awards and nominations; an annotated bibliography; and a complete cross-referenced index. An accompanying appendix contains the New York Times obituaries for Robert Walker and David O. Selznick. This important attempt to reexamine the career of Jennifer Jones will be a valuable reference source for courses in film history and for film fans and scholars, as well as a notable addition to both academic and public libraries.

This book isn't perfect - very few things in this world are. It's about being honest, about being flawed, and about surviving the challenging times in our lives. And it isn't just a coming out memoir, it's a story about acceptance. A series of recollections about struggling to gain internal perspective, while remembering that everyone is going through some battle within their own lives. And that by sharing those times, we can actually close the distance between us. It is a true story, my story, as best as I can express to you. Thanks for looking through my eyes, even for a short period of time.

Do you ever state the following:

"I wish I could ask ____ but they're gone."

Capture an old untold story of a loved one, neighbor, stranger, or write your own story.

The Old Untold is an outlined journal with 101 personal questions including extra lined pages.

A great record to keep for caregivers, family, friends, and for the next generation.

An updated and revised edition celebrating the sixteenth anniversary of this cult classic memoir!

Once upon a time, a young girl walked into a world of wonder and delight. But that's not where this story starts.

The young woman published a nationally recognized children's book and edited a star-filled collection of stories to benefit the tsunami relief effort. But that's not where this story ends.

Meet Alethea Kontis, whose life is an adventure that tears through these pages like a hurricane of inspiration. Carrot-a-day cancer cures and Murphy as a guardian angel (yes, that Murphy, the guy with all those irritating laws) are just a part of the daily routine for the Incredible Whirlwind of Beauty and Dynamite, the force of nature masquerading in human form.

Through essays, poetry, and commentary from family, friends, and famous authors alike, a world of Blood Oaths and road trips, broken hearts and mended cars, comes alive with the strength of one woman's conviction that the world is there to be befriended.

You have now been introduced.

Let your adventure begin.

A collection of piano scores from the composer Timothy Arliss OBrien.

Like many children of Holocaust survivors, Judy Stone didn't know the details of her family's story when she was growing up.

In 2008, she attended the annual conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust & Descendants and was told that less than 10 percent of Hungarian Jews from outside Budapest survived. Yet of the seven siblings on her mother's side, six had survived forced labor units, Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and death marches. In addition, Stone's father and his brother were together in labor units and Dachau from late 1942 until May 1945, except for the last six weeks of the war, and both survived.

Understanding for the first time that her family is unique, Stone started more seriously trying to put together the family's story. Thus came the story of Resilience, a unique perspective on the Holocaust.

To gather the information needed for this book, the author interviewed nine Holocaust survivors in her family and eight of their children, in addition to viewing USC Visual History Foundation tapes of other survivors and conducting extensive research.

A mid-life crisis, a sailing adventure, and a rescue at sea, Coming About tells a harrowing story of survival and inner-strength through a foundational loving relationship. Coming About is a memoir of Mario and Jim who, at 40, quit their jobs and sell their home in San Francisco to follow their dream. They buy a 50-foot sailboat and move to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands where they discover many quirky facets of adjusting to life on the island as well as its many cultural idiosyncrasies. During the maiden voyage from the US mainland to St. Thomas, they encounter treacherous weather conditions and a series of life-threatening events that lead to a rescue at sea and the destruction of their dreams of retirement in a Caribbean paradise. Battling relentlessly crushing waves and shark-infested waters, their lives hang in the balance. Their struggles are vividly recounted as they search for meaning in the near loss of their lives and the shattering of their dreams.

Mahatma Gandhi redefined nutrition as fundamental to building a more just world. What he chose to eat was intimately tied to his beliefs, and his key values of nonviolence, religious tolerance, and rural sustainability developed in tandem with his dietary experiments. His repudiation of sugar, chocolate, and salt expressed his active resistance to economies based on slavery, indentured labor, and imperialism.

Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet sheds new light on important periods in Gandhi's life as they relate to his developing food ethic: his student years in London, his politicization as a young lawyer in South Africa, the 1930 Salt March challenging British colonialism, and his fasting as a means of self-purification and social protest during India's struggle for independence. What became the pillars of Gandhi's diet--vegetarianism, limiting salt and sweets, avoiding processed food, and fasting--anticipated many twenty-first-century food debates and the need to build healthier and more equitable global food systems.

If you are transgendered, the feeling of wanting your body to match the sex you feel you are never goes away. For some, though, especially those who grew up before trans people were widely out and advocating for equality, these feelings were often compartmentalized and rarely acted upon. Now that gender reassignment has become much more commonplace, many of these people may feel increasing pressure to finally undergo the procedures they have always secretly wanted.

Ken Koch was one of those people. Married twice, a veteran, and a world traveler, a health scare when he was sixty-three prompted him to acknowledge the feelings that had plagued him since he was a small child. By undergoing a host of procedures, he radically changed his appearance and became Anne Koch. In the process though, Anne lost everything that Ken had accomplished. She had to remake herself from the ground up. Hoping to help other people in her age bracket who may be considering transitioning, Anne describes the step by step procedures that she underwent, and shares the cost to her personal life, in order to show seniors that although it is never too late to become the person you always knew you were, it is better to go into that new life prepared for some serious challenges. Both a fascinating memoir of a well-educated man growing up trans yet repressed in the mid-twentieth century, and a guidebook to navigating the tricky waters of gender reassignment as a senior, It Never Goes Away shows how what we see in the television world of Transparent translates in real life.

Today, Gigi Gorgeous is beloved for her critically-acclaimed documentary, her outrageous sense of humor, her no-holds-barred honesty, and her glam Hollywood lifestyle. Ten years ago, she was a gawky Canadian teen named Gregory. In He Said, She Said, Gigi brings us on her personal journey from Gregory to Gigi, going deeper than ever before and exposing her vulnerability behind each struggle and triumph, with her signature humor on every page.

With stunning photography and heirloom snapshots, He Said, She Said takes us back to Gigi's early years as an Olympic-bound diver and high school mean girl, losing her mom at a tragically young age, and her journey of opening up about her sexuality and gender identity. She walks us through her transition, baring it all about dating and heartbreak in her stories of falling in love with both men and women.

Uproarious, unconventional, and unabashedly candid, Gigi shares never-before-heard stories, inspiration, and advice about how your life can take you to incredible places once you get real with yourself.

Younger star and LGBTQIA+ advocate Nico Tortorella investigates love, sex, gender, addiction, family, fame, and fluidity through their personal story and the lens of their nonbinary identity

"Nico Tortorella embodies the twenty-first-century human."--RuPaul

Nico Tortorella is a seeker. Raised on a steady regimen of Ram Dass and raw food, they have always been interested in the more spiritual aspects of life. That is, until the desire for fame and fortune eclipsed their journey toward enlightenment and sent them into a downward spiral of addiction and self-destructive behavior. It wasn't until Nico dug deep and began to examine the fluidity of both their sexuality and gender identity that they became more comfortable in their own skin, got sober from alcohol, entered into an unconventional marriage with the love of their life, and fully embraced a queer lifestyle that afforded them the opportunity to explore the world outside the gender binary. It was precisely in that space between that Nico encountered the diverse community of open-minded, supportive peers they'd always dreamed of having.

Expanding on themes explored on their popular podcast, The Love Bomb, Nico shares the intimate details of their romantic partnerships, the dysfunction of their loud but loving Italian family, and the mingling of their feminine and masculine identities into one multidimensional, sexually fluid, nonbinary individual. Nico has become a leading voice of the fluidity movement by encouraging open dialogue and universal acceptance. Space Between is at once an education for readers, a manifesto for both the labeled and label-free generations, and a personal memoir of love, identity, and acceptance.

Praise for Space Between

"In an industry that thrives on artifice, Nico Tortorella's candid soul-searching is precious and invigorating. As with the best truth-telling, it gives language to a thirst we had forgotten, while also quenching it. This is a book about addiction, familial trauma, and gender--yes--but more so it is about living. Living is an art form that Nico does well, and this book is an argument for making meaning from the messiness that surrounds us rather than simply muting it. Nico's distinct and relatable prose tangos us past binaries, toward an intimacy beyond language."--Alok Vaid-Menon

A Publishers Weekly Notable Book
49^th Shelf Recommended Read

A modern gay memoir exploring love, death, pain, and community that will resonate long after the last page.

"This is an embodied story of love, loss, and recovery -- raw, candid, and filled with a sense of awe at human resilience." -- Shelf Awareness

"A timely story so human, so beautiful, so bravely told with heart and humour." -- Rosie O'Donnell

A lifetime of finding punchlines in his heartache comes to a shuddering stop when comedian and writer Shawn Hitchins loses two great loves, five months apart, to sudden death. In this deeply poignant memoir that combines sober self-portrait with tender elegy, Hitchins explores the messiness of being alive: the longing and desire, scorching-earth anger, raw grief -- and the pathway of healing he discovers when he lets his heart remain open.

Never without an edge of self-awareness, The Light Streamed Beneath It invites the reader into Hitchins's world as he reckons with his past and stays painfully in the present. As he builds an embodied future, he confronts the stories that have shaped him, sets aside his ambition, and seeks connection in what he used to deflect with laughter -- therapy, community and chosen family, movement, spirituality, and an awareness of death's ever-presence.

A heartrending and hope-filled story of resilience in the wake of death, The Light Streamed Beneath It joyfully affirms that life is essentially good, as Hitchins weaves his tale full of tenacious spirit, humor, kindness, and grit through life's most unforgiving challenges.

A stunning portrait of community, identity, and sexuality by the critically acclaimed author of The Narrow Door

When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging. At the same time, the center of this community is consumed by the AIDS crisis, and the very structure of town life is being rewired out of necessity: What might this utopia look like during a time of dystopia?

Later dramatizes a spectacular yet ravaged place and a unique era when more fully becoming one's self collided with the realization that ongoingness couldn't be taken for granted, and staying alive from moment to moment exacted absolute attention. Following the success of his acclaimed memoir, The Narrow Door, Lisicky fearlessly explores the body, queerness, love, illness, community, and belonging in this masterful, ingenious new book.

"A thrilling read.... One of the most mercilessly candid and outspoken memoirs in years. If Holly Golightly existed, this might have been her true story. I couldn't put it down."--Scott Wittman, Tony and Grammy award-winning lyricist of Hairspray

Imagine experiencing life not as the gender dictated by birth but as one of your own design. In Trans Figured, Brian Belovitch shares his true story of life as a gender outlier and his dramatic journey through the jungle of gender identity.

Brian has the rare distinction of coming out three times: first as a queer teenager; second as a glamorous transgender woman named Tish, and later, Natalia Gervais; and finally as an HIV-positive gay man surviving the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. From growing up in a barely-working-class first-generation immigrant family in Fall River, Massachusetts, to spinning across the disco dance floor of Studio 54 in New York City . . . from falling into military lock-step as the Army wife of a domineering GI in Germany to having a brush with fame as Natalia, high-flying downtown darling of the boozy and druggy pre-Giuliani New York nightclub scene, Brian escaped many near-death experiences.

Trans Figured chronicles a life lived on the edge with an unforgettable cast of characters during a dangerous and chaotic era. Rich with drama and excitement, this no-holds-barred memoir tells it all. Most importantly, Brian's candid and poignant story of recovery shines a light on the perseverance of the human spirit.