Biographies
Dearie : the remarkable life of Julia Child
Bob Spitz
BIOGRAPHY Child, Julia
Biographies
Draws on the iconic culinary figure's personal diaries and letters to present a one-hundredth birthday commemoration that offers insight into her role in shaping women's views and influencing American approaches to cooking.
Can't we talk about something more pleasant?
Roz Chast
BIOGRAPHY Chast, Roz
Nonfiction, Biographies
A graphic memoir by a long-time New Yorker cartoonist celebrates the final years of her aging parents' lives through four-color cartoons, family photos and documents that reflect the artist's struggles with caregiver challenges.
Added by Beth
Born a Crime - stories from a South African childhood
Trevor Noah
791.45028092/Noah
Nonfiction, Biographies
The book details Trevor Noah growing up in his native South Africa during the apartheid era. As the mixed-race son of a white father and a black mother, Noah himself was classified as a "coloured" in accordance to the apartheid system of racial classification. According to Noah, he stated that even under apartheid, he felt trouble fitting in because it was a crime "for [him] to be born as a mixed-race baby", hence the title of his book.[
Added by Beth
The diary of a bookseller
Shaun Bythell
BIOGRAPHY Bythell, Shaun
Humor, Biographies
When Bythell first thought of taking over the bookstore in the remote Scottish village of Wigtown, it seemed like a book-lover's paradise. Here he details his experiences at the helm of The Book Shop, Scotland's largest second hand bookstore: the delightfully unusual staff members, eccentric customers, odd townsfolk and surreal buying trips to old estates and auctions. As he struggled to build his business-- and be polite-- he is seduced by the charm of small-town life, and the peculiar characters he meets. -- adapted from jacket
Added by Beth
The years of Lyndon Johnson
Robert A Caro
BIOGRAPHY Johnson, Lyndon B.
Nonfiction, Biographies
The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a biography of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson by Robert Caro. Four volumes have been published, running to more than 3,000 pages in total, detailing Johnson's early life, education, and political career. Book One: The Path to Power (1982), Book Two: Means of Ascent (1990), Book Three: Master of the Senate (2002), Book Four: The Passage of Power (2012).
Added by Beth
Richard Nixon : the life
John A. (John Aloysius) Farrell
BIOGRAPHY Nixon, Richard
Nonfiction, Biographies
"Brilliantly researched, authoritatively crafted by a prize-winning biographer, and lively on the page, this is the Nixon we've been waiting for. Richard Nixon opens with young Navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism. Within four years of that first win, Nixon would be a U.S. senator; in six the vice president of the United States of America. "Few came so far, so fast, and so alone," Farrell writes. Finally president, Nixon's staff was full of bright young men who devised forward-thinking reforms addressing health care, poverty, civil rights, and protection of the environment. It was a fine legacy, but Nixon cared little for it. He aspired to make his mark on the world stage instead, and his 1972 opening to China was the first great crack in the Cold War. Nixon had another legacy, too: an America divided and polarized. It was Nixon who launched the McCarthy era, who set South against North, and who spurred the Silent Majority to despise and distrust the country's elites. He persuaded Americans to gnaw, as he did, on grievances--and to look at one another as enemies. Finally, in August 1974, after two years of the mesmerizing intrigue and scandal known as Watergate, Nixon became the only president to resign in disgrace. Richard Nixon is an enthralling tour de force biography of our darkest president, one that reviewers will hail as a defining portrait, and the full life of Nixon readers have awaited."
Added by Beth
Untamed
Glennon Doyle
BIOGRAPHY Doyle, Glennon
Biographies
"There is a voice of longing inside every woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good mothers, daughters, partners, employees, citizens, and friends. We believe all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives, relationships, and world, and wonder: Wasn't it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful. We hide our simmering discontent--even from ourselves. Until we reach our boiling point. Four years ago, Glennon Doyle--bestselling Oprah-endorsed author, renowned activist and humanitarian, wife and mother of three--was speaking at a conference when a woman entered the room. Glennon looked at her and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. Soon she realized that they came to her from within. Glennon was finally hearing her own voice--the voice that had been silenced by decades of cultural conditioning, numbing addictions, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl Glennon had been before the world told her who to be. She vowed to never again abandon herself. She decided to build a life of her own--one based on her individual desire, intuition, and imagination. She would reclaim her true, untamed self. Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both a memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It offers a piercing, electrifying examination of the restrictive expectations women are issued from birth; shows how hustling to meet those expectations leaves women feeling dissatisfied and lost; and reveals that when we quit abandoning ourselves and instead abandon the world's expectations of us, we become women who can finally look at our lives and recognize: There She Is. Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get"--
Added by Beth
Becoming
Michelle Obama
BIOGRAPHY Obama, Michelle
Biographies
"An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States. When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon look her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton, where she learned for the first time what if felt like to be the only black woman in a room, to the glassy office tower where she worked as a high-powered corporate lawyer--and where, one summer morning, a law student named Barack Obama appeared in her office and upended all her carefully made plans. Here, for the first time, Michelle Obama describes the early years of her marriage as she struggles to balance her work and family with her husband's fast-moving political career. She takes us inside their private debate over whether he should make a run for the presidency and her subsequent role as a popular but oft-criticized figure during his campaign. Narrating with grace, good humor, and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family's history-making launch into the global limelight as well as their life inside the White House over eight momentous years--as she comes to know her country and her country comes to know her. [This book] takes us through modest Iowa kitchens and ballrooms at Buckingham Palace, through moments of heart-stopping grief and profound resilience, bringing us deep into the soul of a singular, groundbreaking figure in history as she strives to live authentically, marshaling her personal strength and voice in service of a set of higher ideals. In telling her story with honesty and boldness, she issues a challenge to the rest of us: Who are we and who do we want to become?"--Dust jacket.
Added by Beth
Sitting pretty : the view from my ordinary resilient disabled body
Rebekah Taussig
BIOGRAPHY Taussig, Rebekah
Biographies
Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous, inspirational, or angelic. She longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Here she writes about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn't fit. Taussig reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. She shows how disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. -- adapted from jacket
Added by Beth
Cross of snow : a life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nicholas A. Basbanes
BIOGRAPHY Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Biographies
"A biography of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his wife, Fanny Appleton Longfellow"--
Longfellow lived a life of contradictions. In some ways, he has this incredibly charmed life--graduated top of his class at Bowdoin, hired to teach languages as a college professor immediately after graduation on the condition he travel through Europe and learn those languages, and gained the position of college librarian as long as he devoted one hour a day to the library. Of course, he was an internationally beloved poet, able to retire as a professor and devote his time to his literary craft. But he also lived a life of tragedy. His first wife passed away within four years of their marriage while traveling through Europe. He recovered the loss and married the delightful Fanny Appleton, an individual in her own right that deserves a full biography. She passed away prematurely as well (in a terrifying way!). I quietly moved through this book. It was a wonderfully, calming read (aside from poor Fanny's demise). Overall, Basbanes made me appreciate how much Longfellow influenced America's literary culture in ways we can still see today. -Anne M
Added by Beth