Collection: Biography & Memoir

Complete with mesmerizing map work that charts Darwin's thrilling five-year voyage, as well as "Fun Facts" and more, author/illustrator Jennifer Thermes's picture book biography Charles Darwin's Around-the-World Adventure captures the beauty and mystery of nature with wide-eyed wonder.

In 1831, Charles Darwin embarked on his first voyage. Though he was a scientist by profession, he was an explorer at heart. While journeying around South America for the first time aboard a 90-foot-long ship named the Beagle, Charles collected insects, dug up bones, galloped with gauchos, encountered volcanoes and earthquakes, and even ate armadillo for breakfast! The discoveries he made during this adventure would later inspire ideas that changed how we see the world.

"A notable choice for both STEM curricula and family sharing." --Kirkus Reviews

"A colorful, childlike presentation of Darwin's eye-opening voyage of discovery." --Booklist

Sophie Grégoire Trudeau invites readers on a deeply personal journey toward self-knowledge, acceptance, and empowerment, drawing on the expertise of top psychologists, psychiatrists, scientists, and thought leaders.

As a passionate advocate for mental health, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau believes that in order to know and accept ourselves fully, we need to understand why we think and feel the way we do, and recognize the experiences, attitudes, and patterns that may be holding us back. And yet, all of us are capable of growth and positive change, if we're willing to stay open and curious throughout our lives.

In Closer Together, Sophie shares moments from her own journey: from her childhood, through her struggles with an eating disorder in her teens and early adulthood; from a career as a speaker and television host to de facto "first lady" and mother of three. Above all, Sophie is a warm and empathetic connector, and her book is enriched by exclusive interviews with experts such as Gabor Maté, Liz Plank, Terrence Real, Catherine Price, Harville Hendrix, and Helen LaKelly Hunt--to name just a few--as she delves into the science behind brain health and our unique emotional signatures. She explores the questions that matter the most for our individual and collective growth, and in how we interact with others:

• How does the way we were raised contribute to our sense of self?
• How can we better prepare ourselves to deal with big emotions?
• What do we need from our relationships, and what can we contribute to them?
• What role do physical activity and creative pursuits play in mental health?
• How can we let go of what doesn't serve us and nurture what does?

Drawing on her own mindfulness and yoga practices, Sophie also offers journalling prompts and other tools that will guide readers as they explore these questions in their own lives. In creating a space for openness, playfulness, and creativity, Sophie inspires us to see that there are more things that bring us together than separate us, allowing us to stand in the light of our true potential.

First published in 1949, Jesse Stuart's now classic personal account of his twenty years of teaching in the mountain region of Kentucky has enchanted and inspired generations of students and teachers.

With eloquence and wit, Stuart traces his twenty-year career in education, which began, when he was only seventeen years old, with teaching grades one through eight in a one-room schoolhouse. Before long Stuart was on a path that made him principal and finally superintendent of city and county schools. The road was not smooth, however, and Stuart faced many challenges, from students who were considerably older--and bigger--than he to well-meaning but distrustful parents, uncooperative administrators and, most daunting, his own fear of failure. Through it all, Stuart never lost his abiding faith in the power of education. A graceful ode to what he considered the greatest profession there is, Jesse Stuart's The Thread That Runs So True is timeless proof that "good teaching is forever and the teacher is immortal."

PICTURE BOOK BIOGRAPHY OF THE "FERMENTATION REVIVALIST," FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHORS OF CHEF ROY CHOI AND THE STREET FOOD REMIX.
- "Best Picture Book Biographies, 2022" --Kirkus Reviews- "Best Children's Books of the Year 2023"-- Bank Street College of Education, Children's Book Committee
Sandor Katz's love of fermented food started with kosher dill pickles he ate as a New York City kid. As an adult, he left the busy city and moved to a queer community in the mountains of Tennessee. There, his friends grew their own food, cooked and ate together, and sometimes danced in drag when the work was done. One day, the cabbages were all, ALL ready to be harvested. What to do? Sandor tried to make sauerkraut. Delicious! He kept experimenting, finding old recipes, combining old ideas to make something new. Then, he shared what he learned in bestselling books, in classes, and with a growing group of friends around the world.
Written by award-winning authors Jacqueline Briggs Martin and June Jo Lee, Sandor Katz and the Tiny Wild folds timely themes of ecology, community-building, and resilience into a lively biography that closes with a hands-on recipe: just chop, salt, pack, and wait for tiny, wild, invisible microbes to turn raw ingredients into zingy, zangy foods that we love. Sandor believes that making fermented foods connects all, ALL of us on planet Earth--people, plants, and The Tiny Wild. Won't you join Sandor's crew and share your own dash of dazzle with the world?

Step into the spotlight with Lin-Manuel Miranda in this addition to the New York Times #1 Best-Selling series that explains how the Broadway legend got his start before Hamilton and Encanto!

Born in New York to Puerto Rican parents, Lin-Manuel Miranda had a passion for the arts and creativity from a young age. He participated in theater as a child and wrote his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, while he was still in college. That show won him his first Tony Award for Best Musical! He went on to create and star in the beloved musical Hamilton about the life of Alexander Hamilton. A nonstop writer, Lin-Manuel contributed music for other major projects such as Moana, Encanto, Star Wars, and The Little Mermaid. He has won a Pulitzer prize, five Grammy awards, three Tony Awards, and two Emmy awards so far in his successful career as a composer, lyricist, actor, and director.

One of America's few female astronauts reveals the wisdom that helped her overcome the barriers of others' expectations--and learn to work on a team both in close quarters and remotely

In 2010, the day after her fiftieth birthday--and despite having faced feedback for years that she was not astronaut material--Cady Coleman boarded a rocket and blasted off into space for her third NASA mission, the only woman on her six-person crew. She may have been an "unexpected" astronaut, but her determination and her experiences give her a unique perspective on life here on Earth.

In Sharing Space, Cady shares counterintuitive insights integral to her success, such as how to leverage insecurities to beat expectations, how to know when to adapt and when to press for change, and how to be the glue that holds a disparate team together. Illustrated with stories from her life and training, from meteorite hunting in Antarctica to the two weeks she spent living in an underwater habitat to the magic of spending six months living and working in zero gravity, this book will inspire anyone eager to escape a box in which they have been (unfairly) placed or develop the confidence to succeed, even when they're not an obvious "fit."

Founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733, the Georgia colony was envisioned as a unique social welfare experiment. Administered by twenty-one original trustees, the Georgia Plan offered England's "worthy poor" and persecuted Christians an opportunity to achieve financial security in the New World by exporting goods produced on small farms. Most significantly, Oglethorpe and his fellow Trustees were convinced that economic vitality could not be achieved through the exploitation of enslaved Black laborers.

Due primarily to Oglethorpe's strident advocacy, Georgia was the only British American colony to prohibit chattel slavery prior to the American Revolutionary War. His outspoken opposition to the transatlantic slave trade distinguished Oglethorpe from British colonial America's more celebrated founding fathers.

James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia uncovers how Oglethorpe's philosophical and moral evolution from slave trader to abolitionist was propelled by his intellectual relationships with two formerly enslaved Black men. Oglethorpe's unique "friendships" with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano, two of eighteenth-century England's most influential Black men, are little-known examples of interracial antislavery activism that breathed life into the formal abolitionist movement.

Utilizing more than two decades of meticulous research, fresh historical analysis, and compelling storytelling, Michael L. Thurmond rewrites the prehistory of abolitionism and adds an important new chapter to Georgia's origin story.

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined.

Delmore Schwartz was only twenty-four in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published. He received praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. For Tate, it was "the only genuine innovation we've had since Eliot and Pound." A decade later, the short-story collection The World Is a Wedding was published; many critics characterized it as the definitive portrait of their generation.

In this biography, the first about the man whom John Berryman called "the most underrated poet of the twentieth century," James Atlas traces Schwartz's history, from the arrival of his Romanian ancestors in New York, to his youth in Washington Heights, to his career at Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, and onward to the flowering of his generation in the '40s, when he and the critics, poets, and novelists who were his friends made their reputations. Schwartz's brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances, his autobiographical stories, and his letters to his illustrious peers contribute to this vivid portrait of an era--and of that era's most trenchant chronicler.

A chapter book biography for early readers about one of the women who sparked the Civil Rights movement, by legendary author Eloise Greenfield and with illustrations by Gil Ashby.

When Rosa Parks was growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, she hated the unfair rules that black people had to live by--like drinking out of special water fountains and riding in the back of the bus. Years later, Rosa Parks changed the lives of African American in Montgomery--and all across America--starting with one courageous act. How could one quiet, gentle woman have started it all? This is her story.

Complete with black-and-white illustrations by Gil Ashby, this chapter book by bestselling and award-winning author Eloise Greenfield is the perfect introduction to Rosa Parks for early readers.

* Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies (NCSS/CBC) * Carter G. Woodson Book Award *

"In this vibrant memoir, Obama-inaugural poet Richard Blanco tenderly, exhilaratingly chronicles his Miami childhood amid a colorful, if suffocating, family of Cuban exiles, as well as his quest to find his artistic voice and the courage to accept himself as a gay man." -- O, The Oprah Magazine

A poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir from the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet, which explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities.

Richard Blanco's childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents' nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba and his imagined America, the country he saw on reruns of The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver--an "exotic" life he yearned for as much as he yearned to see "la patria."

A prismatic and lyrical narrative rich with the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of Miami, Richard Blanco's personal narrative is a resonant account of how he discovered his authentic self and ultimately, a deeper understanding of what it means to be American. His is a singular yet universal story that beautifully illuminates the experience of "becoming;" how we are shaped by experiences, memories, and our complex stories: the humor, love, yearning, and tenderness that define a life.

Previously published as Becky, this is the heartbreaking story behind the murder of 16-year-old Bristol schoolgirl Becky Watts, a crime that shocked the nation and tore a family in two.

A vulnerable and shy girl, Becky Watts was brutally murdered and dismembered by her own step-brother on 19 February 2015. As her father Darren discovered the horrific details of what happened to his darling girl, his world fell apart.

Writing about the darkest hours, Darren uncovers what Becky's relationship with her step-brother Nathan, a child he had raised as his own son, was really like. He recalls the devastation of discovering the truth about the depravity with which Becky was torn from him in the safety of her own home. And he recounts the torment of the legal battle to see his step-son sentenced to life behind bars.

Both heartfelt and haunting, searingly honest and unflinching, this is the ultimate story of a family tragedy.

What if the great love of your life is friendship?In their twenties, Lissa Soep and her boyfriend forged deep friendships with two other couples--Mercy and Christine; and Emily and Jonnie--until, decades later, Jonnie died suddenly, in an accident, and Christine passed away after a mysterious illness. Christine had been a writer, Jonnie a storyteller. Lissa couldn't imagine a world without their letters, postcards, texts--a world without their voices. Then she found comfort in a surprising place. As a graduate student, she had studied the philosophy of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about the many voices that can echo through a single person's speech. Suddenly, Bakhtin's theory that our language is "filled to overflowing with other people's words" came to life. Lissa began hearing Jonnie and Christine when least expected. In a conversation with Emily, a familiar phrase was spoken, and suddenly, there was Jonnie, with his riotous laugh, vibrant in her mind. Mercy recited an Adrienne Rich poem in just the way Christine used to and, for a moment, Christine was with them in the room.Other People's Words shows us how we carry within us the language of loved ones who are gone, and how their words can be portals to other times and places. Language--as with love--is boundless, and Other People's Words is an intimate, original, and profoundly generous look at its power to nurture life amid the wreckage of grief. Dialogues do not end when a friendship or person is gone; instead, they accrue new layers of meaning, showing how the conversations we share with those we love continue after them, and will continue after us.

Fe del Mundo's sister dreamt of becoming a doctor--a big dream for a girl in the Philippines in the early 1900s. When her sister dies, young Fe vows to take her place, a promise she carries with her the rest of her life. In 1936 she becomes the first woman and first person of Asian descent to study at Harvard Medical School. When WWII begins in the Pacific, Fe faces a choice: remain in Boston, where she is safe, or return to the Philippines, where she is needed most. Fe follows her vision and returns home to care for the American and British children forced into the internment camp at Santo Tomas. Beautiful color drawings bring to life this gentle and courageous character, her family and her patients. The story of the courageous Dr. Fe del Mundo, recipient of the Elizabeth Blackwell Award for distinguished women "whose life exemplifies outstanding service to humanity," and the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, will inspire children to pursue science and medicine in the service of humanity.

HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN has attained canonical status, having ushered in a new way of writing about film. Kier-La Janisse's acclaimed book is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films that examines hundreds of films through a daringly personal lens. In this pioneering work, anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and a consideration of female madness, both onscreen and off.

Following the extraordinary success of its 10th anniversary expanded hardcover re-issue, which features new reviews of 100 more films - many of which were inspired in part by the book itself - and hundreds of new images, FAB Press have now published an affordable paperback edition.

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - 'the eccentric' - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

This sharply-designed book, including a 48-page full-colour section, is packed with 680 rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork throughout, that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, The Corruption of Chris Miller, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more!

The death of someone we hold dear may be inevitable; being paralyzed by our grief is not. Recent research has revealed our capacity for resilient grieving, our innate ability to respond to traumatic loss by finding ways to grow--by becoming more engaged with our lives, and discovering new, profound meaning.

In this completely updated and expanded second edition, author and resilience/well-being expert Lucy Hone, a pioneer in positive psychology and bereavement research, continues to push her field forward. In 2014, Lucy was faced with her own inescapable sorrow after her 12-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident. By following the strategies of resilient grieving, she found a proactive way to move through her grief, and, over time, embrace life again. Since then, Lucy has become a leading voice in resilience and bereavement science, overturning widely held myths and misconceptions, making plain the harms of rigid models such as Kübler-Ross's five stages, and advocating for a more adaptive grieving process that emphasizes emotions, relationships, attention, forgiveness, and self-compassion.

As heard on NPR's Hidden Brain and CBS News

2017 Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner

"Alpine Rising is a fascinating history of the crucial and frequently tragic role of local Nepalis, Tibetans, and Pakistanis on mountaineering expeditions to the world's highest peaks."-- Jon Krakauer

The name of Maurice Herzog, the first man to reach the summit of Annapurna, is widely recognized, but how many know Ang Tharkay, the Sherpa who carried the seriously frostbitten Herzog on his back for miles? Although rarely mentioned in published accounts of early expeditions, local climbers have long been significant members of first ascents on the world's tallest and most challenging peaks. In Alpine Rising, award-winning writer Bernadette McDonald sets the record straight by shining a light on these too often forgotten heroes.

Now, in the 21st century, it is often local climbers who are setting records. A Nepali team was the first to climb K2 in winter; they reached the summit while singing their national anthem. Pakistani climbers like Little Karim and Ali Sadpara devoted their lives to helping others survive and succeed on and off the mountains and their stories deserve to be more widely known. Not only a timely reminder of the need to recognize the contributions of local climbers and the importance of correcting the historical record, Alpine Rising is a celebration of a region's local heroes.

Sales benefit the Khumbu Climbing Center (Nepal) and the ASCEND climbing program for girls (Pakistan)