Biographies & Memoirs

I Know You Are, but What Am I?
Free Gift with Purchase
by Jean Godfrey-June
You know all the studies, how beautiful people make more money, do better in school, etc., etc., than everyone else? I think when you look at a truly beautiful person, you think, We're still the same species, no?

How Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Reinvented Their Company
Microsoft Rebooted
by Robert Slater
I have been thinking about writing a book on Bill Gates and Microsoft for a very long time. As part of the research I conducted for Portraits in Silicon (MIT Press, 1987), a book about computer pioneers and developers.

Scientist and Mechanic
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe
by Katrina S. Firlik, M.D.
The brain is soft. Some of my colleagues compare it to toothpaste, but that's not quite right. It doesn't spread like toothpaste. It doesn't adhere to your fingers the way toothpaste does.

Part 1
Marlon Brando
by Patricia Bosworth
Marlon Brando, nicknamed Bud, was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time much of the state was recovering from a grasshopper plague that had turned the sky green.

Part 1
George Herbert Walker Bush
by Tom Wicker
Not long after George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first president of the United States, left office in 1993 and returned to Texas, an old acquaintance found himself at loose ends in Houston.

Steeples and Spires
Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader
by Philip Stephens
Tony Blair grew up on a journey through the pages of British history. The nation's future prime minister lived his early life among the church steeples, ancient clock towers, and medieval quadrangles that are the childhood playgrounds of England's

The Eye of Childhood
'Shakespeare' by Another Name
by Mark Anderson
On april 12, 1550, in the private apartments of a british stone-walled medieval fortress, a lord and lady welcomed their heir into the world. If the boy survived, the child's father John de Vere, sixteenth earl of Oxford could henceforth rest assured

There's no running away from Picasso
Picasso, My Grandfather
by Marina Picasso
It's one o'clock in the afternoon. I'm in Geneva, driving down the quai Gustave-Ador in a steady flow of traffic, taking my children, Gaël and Flore, to school. On my right is Lake Geneva and its famous geyser, the Jet d'Eau.

Eugene McCarthy & The Red Leather Wallet
Expecting to Fly
by Martha Tod Dudman
Back when I was at Alice Deal Junior High School, I got a huge crush on a boy with perfect features. One day he came up to me in the hall. 'I heard you were in a protest march,' he told me.

Inside eBay
The Perfect Store
by Adam Cohen
In this brisk, engaging chronicle of one of the most stunning success stories in American business history, Adam Cohen takes us inside eBay the corporation as well as into the community of eBay's passionate users.

Damned If You Do, and Damned If You Don't
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
by Debby Applegate
No one predicted success for Henry Ward Beecher at his birth in 1813. The blithe, boisterous son of the last great Puritan minister, he seemed destined to be overshadowed by his brilliant siblings-especially his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Marriage, First child
Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes
A child's writing case. The pale yellow ribbon curled inside is stitched with small glass beads. The goose-feather quills have dried ink on their tips, and the sealing wax has been melted over a candle flame.

A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart
The Tao of Willie
by Willie Nelson, Turk Pipkin
This book is my way of sharing a little of what I've learned in seventy-two years of making music and friends on this beautiful planet. I don't know if the things I write here will change your life, but they sure changed mine.

Part 3
Farewell, Jackie
by Edward Klein
After Onassis died in 1975, Jackie was automatically eligible again to receive the sacraments of the Church. But almost fifteen years after his death, Jackie was still struggling to cleanse her reputation of the tabloid sludge.

Chapter 1
The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
by Ken Dornstein
In this stunning, emotionally charged memoir, Ken Dornstein interweaves the moving story of his own coming-of-age with the promise of greatness his brother never lived to fulfill. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a heartbreaking but profoundly hopeful

Part 3
George Herbert Walker Bush
by Tom Wicker
On its fifth anniversary, Offshore was listed on the American Stock Exchange and had attracted twenty-two hundred stockholders. The company occupied offices in the Houston Club building, had a fleet of four monster drilling rigs, employed 195 people

Introduction
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton
By the early 1970s John Fowles, still in the midst of his active career as a writer, was already the subject of academic scrutiny. He was beginning, at this point, to critique the critics, wondering why they devoted far too much

Beginning
Fat, Stupid, Ugly: One Woman's Courage to Survive
by Debrah Constance, J.I. Kleinberg
Despite a life fraught with cycles of abuse and addiction, cancer and catastrophe, Debrah defied the odds, never losing hope in herself or humanity. Her story is one of triumph: how one woman overcame her past and provided a community with the love

At the Movies
A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance
by Jane Juska
'Round-heeled' is an old-fashioned label for a woman who is promiscuous - someone who nowadays might be called 'easy.' It's a surprising way for a cultured English teacher with a passion for the novels of Anthony Trollope to describe herself

You Have the Power Within
Barefootin'
by Unita Blackwell, JoAnne Prichard Morris
The news whipped through Mayersville like a brushfire: 'A bunch of niggers are over at the courthouse.' And soon a gang of folks had gathered to see what was going on.