Share in the childhood tales of A Girl Named Zippy. Hear Kenneth Branagh read Samuel Pepys' exuberant 17th-century diary. Be transformed by the extraordinary women of Half the Sky. You'll find these and other remarkable life stories under biography and memoir.
Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, "Women owned Hollywood for twenty years." She had a point. Between 1930 and 1950, over forty percent of film industry employees were women, twenty five percent of all screenwriters were female, one woman ran MGM behind the scenes, over a dozen women worked as producers, a woman headed the Screen Writers Guild three times, and press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of the rest of the country in terms of gender equality and employment. Learn More
Since serving in the Carter White House in the late 1970s, Hamilton Jordan has survived non-Hodgkins lymphoma, melanoma, and prostate cancer. Learn More
Featuring never-before-told stories, No Encore! takes you on tour with over sixty iconic musicians as they relive their weirdest, wildest, most embarrassing gigs. Learn More
by Mark Bailey; read by Alana Kerr Collins and Alan Smyth
In the spirit of David McCullough's Brave Companions, this anthology of popular American history presents the stories of nine incredible Irish immigrants as written by nine contemporary Irish Americans. Learn More
Xiaolu Guo is one of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation, an iconoclastic and completely contemporary voice. Her vivid, poignant memoir, Nine Continents is the story of a curious mind coming of age in an inhospitable country, and her determination to seek a life beyond the limits of its borders. Learn More
The Next Better Place explores the thin line between wanderlust and compulsion, between running away and arriving, and leaves us with the understanding that the journey is often more powerful than the destination. Learn More
For readers of Anne Lamott, Abigail Thomas, and Ayelet Waldman, a post-divorce memoir, one woman’s story of starting over at 60—in youth-obsessed, beauty-obsessed Hollywood. Learn More
This definitive biography reclaims Nelson Algren as a towering literary figure and finally unravels the enigma of his disappearance from American letters. Learn More
As a deadly cancer spread inside her brain, leading neuroscientist Barbara Lipska was plunged into madness—only to miraculously survive with her memories intact. In the tradition of My Stroke of Insight and Brain on Fire, this powerful memoir recounts her ordeal and explains its unforgettable lessons about the brain and mind. Learn More
Compelling, poignant, enlightening stories from former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell about growing up in Maine, his years in the Senate, working to bring peace to Northern Ireland and the Middle East, and what he’s learned about the art of negotiation. Learn More
Only a handful of business books have reached the status of a classic, having withstood the test of over fifty years' time. Even today, Bill Gates praises My Years with General Motors as the best book to read on business, and Business Week has named it the number one choice for its "bookshelf of indispensable reading." Learn More
by David Satcher, MD, PhD; read by David Satcher, MD, PhD
In My Quest for Health Equity, Dr. Satcher takes an inspiring and instructive look inside his fifty-year career to shed light on the challenge and burden of leadership. Explaining that he has thought of each leadership role—whether in academia, community, or government—as an opportunity to move the needle toward health equity, he shares the hard-won lessons he has learned over a lifetime in the medical field. Learn More
My Brothers' Keeper carries the listener through a deeply personal and intimate journey, as Gloria Reuben explores her love of the life she shared with her brothers, as well as the myriad of emotions and experiences after their sudden deaths. Learn More
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020 A Best Read of 2020 at Ms. Magazine
Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Learn More
Profoundly moving and often funny, this meditation on tolerance explores what it means to open our hearts to another culture and to embrace our own. Learn More
