Selvbiografier

Superb essays on Ireland and the Balkans, considering parallels between Belfast and Sarajevo.

From multi-hyphenate mogul and host of The Breakfast Club and Comedy Central's Tha God's Honest Truth, Charlamagne Tha God, real talk on the many ways in which we've screwed up our world, and what we need to do to climb our way back.

A gripping insider perspective from a former crime scene investigator.

The long-awaited autobiography of Caroline Redman Lusher, the visionary behind Rock Choir, the UK's largest contemporary choir. In this emotional narrative, Caroline recounts her journey from dreaming of becoming a pop star to becoming the founder of the phenomenon that is Rock Choir, with over 32,000 members across 400 groups in the UK.

Fatima Meer (1928-2010), a key figure in South Africa's Liberation Movement, remains less recognized globally despite her impactful role. A distinguished academic, prolific writer, and political activist, she tirelessly advocated for social justice and human rights. Close friend to Nelson Mandela, she authored his biography. Despite adversity, including apartheid bans and imprisonment, her independent spirit left a profound mark on South Africa's history. Her story is vital for future generations.

Nationalism has long been the subject of analysis and debate. Has it been a positive or negative factor in human development? Since nationalism first took hold in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scholars have developed various theories and historical narratives to describe this worldwide ideological and political phenomenon. But how does nationalism work? How do certain groups of people become nationalities? What concrete mechanisms have been adopted by governments and/or intellectual leaders to transform often disparate individuals into groups who become conscious of their common identity and distinctiveness from others? No new theory of nationalism is put forth in From Nowhere to Somewhere. Rather, in a memoiristic and clearly personal manner, the text provides a kind of nuts-and-bolts guide to nationality-building. It focuses on developments during the last half century among Carpatho-Rusyns, or Ruthenians, a numerically mid-sized stateless people living in the heart of Europe and among the diaspora it has spawned in the United States. To paraphrase the most famous person of Carpatho-Rusyn ancestry, Andy Warhol, the reader of this book will discover how Carpatho Rusyns, a previously unknown people from nowhere, have become recognized and can now be found somewhere.

Using the "Parallel Lives" approach adopted by the Greek biographer Plutarch, noted historian of astronomy William Sheehan contrasts the lives and research careers of two famous astronomers, Percival Lowell and Edward Emerson Barnard. Drawing on vast archival materials and hitherto unpublished source materials, Sheehan documents in detail the contributions of these two late 19th and early 20th astronomers.Living at a time when controversies about Mars peaked, when great observatories were being built, and when research increasingly turned away from the Solar System toward the stellar and extra-galactic universe, these observers made spectacular contributions to astronomy. Their work still inspires, and continues in Perseverance rover's explorations of the surface of Mars carrying forward Lowell's dream of showing that Mars may once have been "the abode of life," and in Barnard's pioneering wide-angle photographs of the Milky Way which first showed the sweep, majesty and complexity of the Galaxy. The work of decades of research and writing, Sheehan has produced what is likely to become the definitive work on these two great astronomers. "Parallel Lives marks an important contribution to the history of astronomy. The book is masterful and inventive. William Sheehan could hardly have chosen two more compelling¿or contrasting¿personalities to analyze in this fascinating dual biography." - David Baron, author of American Eclipse and The Martians, and former Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress."Sheehan has united scientific acumen, detailed historical research, penetrating insight into character, and narrative virtuosity¿and adapted it all to an ancient Greek model¿a remarkable achievement!"¿¿- Michael Armstrong, Assoc. Prof. Emeritus of Classics, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva NY William Sheehan's many books include the authoritative biography The Immortal Fire Within: The Life and Work of Edward Emerson Barnard and (with Jim Bell) Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet, which has been called the "gold standard of books on Mars" (Michio Kaku).

From every county in Ireland, meet women who made a real difference to the world we live in today. From creative craftswomen to singing sensations, poets to sporting champions, patriots, scientists and more, the stories of amazing women from our history are too often neglected and forgotten.

A Long Way South: travel narrative about a woman's adventures in Latin America in 1974/5. Journeying through vast landscapes on local buses, boats and trains, these memoirs are as much about remarkable people - including Bruce Chatwin, notorious train robber Ronnie Biggs and female smugglers - as they are about diverse, fascinating places.

'Mark Watson is a national treasure' Richard OsmanWhatever I now know about life - or think I know - I found out through failure, disappointment, mortification. I'm writing it all down as much to remind myself as for anyone else - but now you're here, I'd love you to stick around . . .Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he's died many times. Not just on stage - though he'll tell you about that - but in other ways, too. There's been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all . . .Eye-opening, revealing and painfully funny, this is a book about mortification, failure and all the times life doesn't work out as planned. But it also wisely questions whether the things we strive for - recognition, success, the approval of others - are really the things that matter. It's a book about death that reminds us how to live.'Mark Watson makes the base metal of failure into comedy gold' Adam Kay

Twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for novels about Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, John Updike, though very much aware of his gifts and blessings, believed himself to be, like Rabbit, an everyman- 'a relatively fortunate American male'-and his life a specimen life, 'representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.' This belief animated his more than sixty autobiographical books-fiction, poetry, collections of first-person essays and memoirs-a body of creative work universal in its literary appeal but intimately based upon, as Updike himself called it, 'this massive datum that happens to be mine.'Now, more than a decade after his death, comes a generous volume of letters both personal and professional. We see, at last, Updike in 'real time,' documenting with preternatural facility every stage of his unspooling life, from Pennsylvania farm boy to Harvard scholarship student, from young father negotiating his first book contract to freelance writer revelling in the 'post-Pill paradise' of the swinging 1960s.Here too are letters to fellow practitioners of the writer's craft including Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, John Barth, and Ian McEwan. Central to the collection are dozens of letters to Updike's mother, the aspiring novelist Linda Grace Hoyer, who modelled for him the life of a writer and was, until her death in 1989, his closest confidante. But the most moving, perhaps, are the letters of Updike's final year-farewells to his children, to colleagues and friends, and to a world that, in his letters as much as in every other form of writing he practiced, he had daily strived to give its 'beautiful due.'