Banner Message
Please note that online availability does not reflect stock in store!
Please check your SPAM folder for communications from us- for some reason our messages are being sent there more than usual :(
Biography / Autobiography
With a foreword by Warren Buffett, 40 Chances is an "inspiring manifesto...both an informative guidebook and a catalyst for igniting real changes" (Booklist) in the struggle against world hunger. If someone granted you $3 billion to accomplish something great in the world, what would you do? In 2006, legendary investor Warren Buffett posed this challenge to his son Howard G. Buffett. Howard set out to help the most vulnerable people on earth--nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security. And Howard gave himself a deadline: 40 years to put the resources to work on this challenge. 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World captures Howard's journey. Beginning with his love for farming, we join him around the world as he seeks out new approaches to ease the suffering of so many. Each of the 40 stories here provides a compelling look at the lessons Howard learned, ranging from his own backyard to some of the most difficult and dangerous places on Earth. But this message goes beyond the pages of this book, it's also a mindset: a way of thinking that speaks to every person wanting to make a difference. It's about reasons to hope and actions we can take. 40 Chances "recounts Howard's personal and professional experiences in surprisingly candid and colorful fashion...successfully blending personal stories with a tough look at the struggle to fight domestic food scarcity and world hunger...A satisfying read" (Publishers Weekly) that provides inspiration to transform each of our limited chances into opportunities to change the world.
With a foreword by Warren Buffett, 40 Chances is an "inspiring manifesto...both an informative guidebook and a catalyst for igniting real changes" (Booklist) in the struggle against world hunger. If someone granted you $3 billion to accomplish something great in the world, what would you do? In 2006, legendary investor Warren Buffett posed this challenge to his son Howard G. Buffett. Howard set out to help the most vulnerable people on earth--nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security. And Howard gave himself a deadline: forty years to put the resources to work on this challenge. 40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World captures Howard's journey. Beginning with his love for farming, we join him around the world as he seeks out new approaches to ease the suffering of so many. Each of the forty stories here provides a compelling look at the lessons Howard learned, ranging from his own backyard to some of the most difficult and dangerous places on Earth. But this message goes beyond the pages of this book, it's also a mindset: a way of thinking that speaks to every person wanting to make a difference. It's about reasons to hope and actions we can take. 40 Chances "recounts Howard's personal and professional experiences in surprisingly candid and colorful fashion...successfully blending personal stories with a tough look at the struggle to fight domestic food scarcity and world hunger...A satisfying read" (Publishers Weekly) that provides inspiration to transform each of our limited chances into opportunities to change the world.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, has authored a personal biography of his father, George H. W. Bush, the 41st President.
Forty-three men have served as President of the United States. Countless books have been written about them. But never before has a President told the story of his father, another President, through his own eyes and in his own words. A unique and intimate biography, the book covers the entire scope of the elder President Bush's life and career, including his service in the Pacific during World War II, his pioneering work in the Texas oil business, and his political rise as a Congressman, U.S. Representative to China and the United Nations, CIA Director, Vice President, and President. The book shines new light on both the accomplished statesman and the warm, decent man known best by his family. In addition, George W. Bush discusses his father's influence on him throughout his own life, from his childhood in West Texas to his early campaign trips with his father, and from his decision to go into politics to his own two-term Presidency.
Forty-three men have served as President of the United States. Countless books have been written about them. But never before has a President told the story of his father, another President, through his own eyes and in his own words. A unique and intimate biography, the book covers the entire scope of the elder President Bush's life and career, including his service in the Pacific during World War II, his pioneering work in the Texas oil business, and his political rise as a Congressman, U.S. Representative to China and the United Nations, CIA Director, Vice President, and President. The book shines new light on both the accomplished statesman and the warm, decent man known best by his family. In addition, George W. Bush discusses his father's influence on him throughout his own life, from his childhood in West Texas to his early campaign trips with his father, and from his decision to go into politics to his own two-term Presidency.
On a freezing winter's night, a few hours before dawn on May 12, 1969, South African security police stormed the Soweto home of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, activist and wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, and arrested her in the presence of her two young daughters, then aged nine and ten.
Rounded up in a group of other antiapartheid activists under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, designed for the security police to hold and interrogate people for as long as they wanted, she was taken away. She had no idea where they were taking her or what would happen to her children. For Winnie Mandela, this was the start of 491 days of detention and two trials.
Forty-one years after Winnie Mandela's release on September 14, 1970, Greta Soggot, the widow of one of the defense attorneys from the 1969-70 trials, handed her a stack of papers that included a journal and notes she had written while in detention, most of the time in solitary confinement. Their reappearance brought back to Winnie vivid and horrifying memories and uncovered for the rest of us a unique and personal slice of South Africa's history.
491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 shares with the world Winnie Mandela's moving and compelling journal along with some of the letters written between several affected parties at the time, including Winnie and Nelson Mandela, himself then a prisoner on Robben Island for nearly seven years.
Readers will gain insight into the brutality she experienced and her depths of despair, as well as her resilience and defiance under extreme pressure. This young wife and mother emerged after 491 days in detention unbowed and determined to continue the struggle for freedom.
The hilarious follow-up to the memoir, Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl. It's been four years since Susan's husband dragged her kicking and screaming from their comfortable, big city East Coast life to a farm in Virginia cattle country. Susan's adjusting as best she can, which isn't easy considering she's been known to wear Manolos in manure. She'll never be a real farm girl, but as readers will see from her side- splitting confessions, she's faking it just fine.
To support his family, Billy Crystal's father, Jack, worked two jobs, having only one day a week to spend with his family. Based on Crystal's one-man Broadway show of the same name, 700 Sundays--referring sadly to the time shared by an adoring father and his devoted son--offers a heartfelt, hilarious memoir.
In '700 Sundays', a memoir based on his one-man Broadway play of the same name, Billy Crystal tells his own story, dissecting an often complex relationship with his father and how that relationship resonated in other aspects of his life.
A moving, funny, tongue-in-cheek memoir about a woman who lost and found herself online. Nancy Makin weighed an astounding 703 pounds in May 2000. She was forty-five and suffered from obesity-related maladies. Due to shame and logistics, she was homebound for a dozen years. But all that changed when she received a computer. In cyberspace she found the friendliness, the connection, the acceptance and the nurturing she'd been missing for so long. She followed no particular diet plan; no surgeries, pills, potions or ab-crunching exercises played a part, and yet today Nancy has lost more than 530 pounds and kept it off for more than seven years. Her tale is one of redemption and shows a growing America that there is hope...if you believe.
A moving, funny, tongue-in-cheek, and deadly serious story about how one woman lost and found herself by going online.
Nancy Makin weighed an astounding 703 pounds in May 2000. She was forty-five years old and had diabetes and heart disease. Thanks in equal parts to shame and logistics, she'd been homebound for a dozen years.
But all that changed after a gift from her sister: a computer. A technophobe, Nancy ignored it for months, until finally boredom and curiosity pushed her into cyberspace. And there, in a chat room, she found the friendliness, the support, and even the love she'd been missing for so long. Nobody flinched when Nancy spoke up; people treated her with the same respect accorded to everybody else. Thanks to these emotional connections, Nancy's life was transformed.
She followed no diet plan; no pills, potions or ab-crunching exercises played a part. There was no silver bullet, no magical, elusive ingredient-and yet today Nancy has lost more than 530 pounds. Nancy's tale is one of redemption, a story of reevaluating her worth and insisting she had value simply because she was human. It will show a growing America that life is sweet and always worth living.
747 is the thrilling story behind "the Queen of the Skies"--the Boeing 747--as told by Joe Sutter, one of the most celebrated engineers of the twentieth century, who spearheaded its design and construction. Sutter's vivid narrative takes us back to a time when American technology was cutting-edge and jet travel was still glamorous and new. With wit and warmth, he gives an insider's sense of the larger than life-size personalities--and the tensions--in the aeronautical world.
Those who have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel comprised of only letters between the characters, will see how much that best-seller owes 84, Charing Cross Road. -- Medium.com A heartwarming love story about people who love books for readers who love books This funny, poignant classic love story showcases the power of the written word to bring people together. The story unfolds through a series of letters between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London at 84, Charing Cross Road. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that has touched the hearts of thousands of readers around the world and was the basis for the film starring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft.
The mania of early motherhood, the intimacy of marriage and the quest for healing are the raw materials from which writer Amy Fusselman has wrought her latest work - a daring exploration of the perversities of time.
Hostessing, she comes to find, has "very little to do with sex, quite a lot to do with psychology, and nothing to do with prostitution." Her personality and conversation skills are her top commodity, and Chelsea quickly finds herself charmed by these billionaire men, many of whom are funny, intelligent, even kind, and often, very lonely. But as she becomes more and more attached to her clients, Chelsea soon finds herself getting burned at her own game, as the endless presents, compliments, and destructive atmosphere of alcohol and drugs threaten to take both her marriage, and her sanity, to the edge.
The spectacularly dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity in Somalia--a story of courage, resilience, and extraordinary grace. The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world's most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity--an exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and grace As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia--"the most dangerous place on earth." On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives "wife lessons" from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory--every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity--and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured. Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.
Esteemed biographer and legendary literary editor Claire Tomalin's stunning memoir of a life in literature "[An] intelligent and humane book...There is genuine appeal in watching this indomitable woman continue to chase the next draft of herself." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times In A Life of My Own, the renowned biographer of Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys, and Thomas Hardy, and former literary editor for the Sunday Times reflects on a remarkable life surrounded by writers and books. From discovering books as a form of escapism during her parents' difficult divorce, to pursuing poetry at Cambridge, where she meets and marries Nicholas Tomalin, the ambitious and striving journalist, Tomalin always steered herself towards a passionate involvement with art. She relives the glittering London literary scene of the 1960s, during which Tomalin endured her husband's constant philandering and numerous affairs, and revisits the satisfaction of being commissioned to write her first book, a biography of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In biography, she found her vocation. However, when Nick is killed in 1973 while reporting in Israel, the mother of four put aside her writing to assume the position of literary editor of the New Statesman. Her career soared when she later moved to the Sunday Times, and she tells with dazzling candor of this time in her life spent working alongside the literary lights of 1970s London. But, the pain of her young daughter's suicide and the challenges of caring for her disabled son as a single mother test Claire's strength and persistence. It is not until later in life that she is able to return to what gave her such purpose decades ago, writing biographies, and finds enduring love with her now-husband, playwright Michael Frayn. Marked by honesty, humility, and grace, rendered in the most elegant of prose, A Life of My Own is a portrait of a life, replete with joy and heartbreak. With quiet insight and unsparing clarity, Tomalin writes autobiography at its most luminous, delivering an astonishing and emotionally-taut masterpiece.
SIGNED CLOTHBOUND BOOK IN SLIPCASE - A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making--from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times - NPR - The Guardian - Marie Claire In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation's highest office. Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune's Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective--the story of one man's bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of "hope and change," and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama's conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.