Selvbiografier

A trans pastor’s transformation of the Scripture inherited from his closeted, fundamentalist father When his dad died, Malcolm Himshoot inherited his father’s bibles. Rereading them, examining his dad’s notes in their margins, Malcolm weaves details of his upbringing and gender identity into the structures and forms of biblical narratives. For Malcolm, coming out meant exile and verbal excommunication; he embodied all his gay father tried to hide. In Reading Secrets, Malcolm travels alongside the ghost of his father, exploring their inherited homophobia and the American culture that shaped their triumphs and tragedies. With these poetic and evocative meditations, Malcolm transforms the Scripture he inherited, and finds a place in it for himself.

Succinct, inspiring biography of a bridge-building Jewish leader, supplemented by 25 black-and-white photographsOn March 21, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights organizers led 8,000 protesters on a 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery. They invited a distinguished group of national religious figures to join them in the front lines. One of these was Abraham Joshua Heschel—a gifted Jewish scholar, teacher, and speaker, whose recent book, The Prophets (1962)—a detailed study of the ancient biblical champions of justice and mercy—was a source of great inspiration to Dr. King and others.As Heschel walked arm-in-arm with his colleagues, he was easy to spot in the crowd: He was a short, stocky man with flowing white hair, a bushy beard, who wore a dark yarmulke (Jewish head covering). Like the prophets of old, Heschel believed that standing up for others—particularly the most vulnerable members of society—is a sacred obligation. He later wrote, the religious person must seek to hold God and humankind “in one thought at one time,” suffering “harm done to others,” making “compassion” one’s “greatest passion.”Heschel first learned these essential values as a child in Eastern Europe. This little book is his story.

From memorist Jody Goldman, a lively and poignant exploration of aging.In The Rest of Our Lives, memoirist Judy Goldman brings her devoted readers dispatches from the edge of life, when turning eighty can be as surprising and baffling as losing your virginity or seeing The Beatles at Shea Stadium. In this lively and poignant exploration of aging, Goldman circles to those other uncharted moments of our lives when we are at once anxious and excited about just what might happen next. Goldman’s telling and retelling of pivotal stories of her own family and friends—romances, births, late-night taxi-cab rides, falls, frailty, and even death—are altogether new in her hands.

Jeremy B. Jones traces the life of his ancestor William Prestwood, a white Southern Appalachian farmer and witness to astounding history, through Prestwood’s coded diaries from the 1800s.In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, he passed the books to a retired NSA cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood. The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. “The reader is left,” the codebreaker wrote, “with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman’s life from the cradle to the grave.” But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather.Cipher reanimates Prestwood, warts and all, following the author’s ancestor as he courts women and hides runaway slaves, as he fathers children with his wife and with an enslaved woman, as he mines for gold and befriends Daniel Boone’s great nephew, and as he rubs shoulders with a young Zebulon Vance and raises sons soon to die on the fields of Gettysburg. With research, Jones fills in the blank spaces of this Everyman’s life. Along the way, Jones begins tracking his own life alongside the fascinating arc of this long-ago forefather, forging an intimate relationship with a man whose own account, in Jones’s expert hand, begins to take on texture, drama, emotional resonance—even as the author uncovers curious and disturbing details about his ancestor. And thus, about his family. About himself.

This insightful and often witty collection of essays charts the making of a reluctant disability activist—including his commentary for NPR, the New York Times and elsewhere.Ben Mattlin was born in 1962 with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital and progressive neuromuscular weakness. He never stood or walked but grew up expecting a normal life. In this book of essays, he chronicles that life and also charts his growth as a reluctant disability activist and public intellectual.Mattlin’s disability was from birth. Raised in a family that insisted that he be educated in a mainstream setting, he never thought about his disability as being an obstacle until adulthood. It was not until he had graduated from Harvard and could not find a job that he began to understand what disability rights activists were talking about.These collected short pieces chronicle Mattlin’s intellectual coming-of-age including his beginnings, difficult conversations about disability, the social aspects of being disabled in a nondisabled world, and a wider perspective as the author looks back on his sixty years of disability. The book contains a variety of essays intermixed with a few edited podcast transcripts. Some of the pieces are deeply personal; others are stridently political. All of them are guaranteed to make readers see life and the world in a new way.Altogether, this collection is a frank, unsentimental examination of some of the most important and moving issues of our day—always rendered with intelligence, sensitivity, and a liberal sprinkling of humor.

Recalling memoirs like Wild and Educated, an internationally renowned whitewater rafting guide offers a gripping and inspiring memoir about overcoming hardship and coming into her own through her relationship with the rivers she has known.After Bridget Crocker's parents split in a vicious divorce, she moved with her mother from California to Wyoming, to a trailer park on the banks of the Snake River. Her childhood was nearly idyllic, with a stepfather she loved and a new baby brother, and with the river as her companion. When her mother underwent a drastic personality change seemingly overnight and left her stepfather for an eco-warrior and radical new lifestyle, Bridget's world upended. She returned to California to live with her explosive father--until his violence sent her back to Wyoming.The river was the most constant and nurturing influence in Bridget's life; it helped instill in her the resilience she needed to overcome sexual assault and betrayals by those close to her and taught her to trust her intuition and embrace her strength as a woman. She became a world-class whitewater rafting guide, leading expeditions on the Snake, the Kern, the Salmon, and Zambia's Zambezi rivers. Ultimately, her relationship with the rivers she came to know led her to reunite with her family and work with them to transform multi-generational cycles of poverty, trauma, and abuse.In this propulsive story of finding hope and belonging in a life outdoors, Bridget Crocker not only takes us on exhilarating, and at times terrifying, adventures on the water but opens up a new way of experiencing the world--through its rivers, which can guide us, just as we can navigate them--and introduces a bold and vibrant new voice in adventure writing.

In The Immortals of English Cricket, Bill Ricquier tells the cricketing life stories of eleven of England's greatest (male) cricketers. Ricquier selects his Immortal English team from players who didn't just dominate, they changed the game with their sheer will.Those portrayed include: Jack Hobbs, the highest run-scorer in the history of first-class cricket; Ian Botham, who was the most famous sportsman in the country in the 1980s; and James Anderson, England's leading Test wicket taker. Selected also is Wilfred Rhodes, the legendary slow left arm bowler who made almost 40,000 first-class runs and took over 4,000 first-class wickets, and the extraordinary Fred Trueman, described as the "e;finest bloody fast bowler that ever drew breath."e;The Immortals of English Cricket will inspire discussion, debate and controversy but indisputably represents a team of remarkable skill and character, one to proudly represent the Crown and Three Lions on any Elysian field.

John Blanke is the first person of African descent in British history for whom we have both an image and a record. He was a Black trumpeter to the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Inspired by this enigmatic figure, Michael Ohajuru invited over 100 artists and historians to imagine John Blanke’s world.

A vivid portrayal of the life of Yayoi Kusama - Queen of Polka Dots, creator of infinity - from her unusual childhood to international artistic acclaim.

Published in partnership with Jane Austen's House, the idyllic country cottage where the beloved author lived and wrote all her novels, this chronologically arranged and beautifully illustrated book is a glorious miscellany of Austen's life and works.

The legacy of the greatest teacher the world has known, the greatest man to ever walk the Earth, the Messenger of Allah, is attested to by the greatness of his students: the Ṣaḥābah. None more so than his four successors, the four men famed as the Rightly Guided Caliphs. The Blessed Prophet’s words and deeds have reached us from across the centuries and still inspire billions. It was these men who were charged with carrying those teachings to others, and within one short century spread them across the breadth of the world.This book collects the teachings of these great men; their words and their actions; how they lived and how they died. Each of them was a giant upon whose shoulders the great scholars and sages; the orators and leaders; the warriors and heroes; the ascetics and mystics in every age of this Ummah have built their places in the halls of history. Each of them was shaped for greatness by the blessed hands of the Beloved in a singular and unique manner. Together, they built a community, an empire, and a legacy that shall inspire this Ummah until the end of time.

Conversations with the author of They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and the American Book award-winning So Long, See You Tomorrow

Interviews with the author of the on-going column "Real Life Top Ten"

Merle Oberon attained Hollywood immortality with a nomination for a Best Leading Actress Oscar for her role in the 1935 film The Dark Angel. It was the first time a performer of color had received an acting nomination at the Academy Awards, but because Oberon concealed her South Asian identity throughout her lifetime and "passed" for white, very few people knew it. In Love, Queenie, the first biography in more than forty years of the India-born actress, Mayukh Sen draws on family interviews and previously untapped archival research to animate the Wuthering Heights star's hard-won journey to fame. From an upbringing in poverty, she rose to the highest echelons of the film-world elite during Hollywood's racially exclusionary Golden Age. A major biography of an often-overlooked talent, Love, Queenie empathetically captures one woman's story while illuminating truths on race, gender, and power that still resonate today.

From graphic novelist Youssef Daoudi comes a radically new look at the director of Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil: legendary filmmaker Orson Welles.Long after his death in 1985, the shadow of Orson Welles still looms over Hollywood. By twenty-three, Welles had revolutionized theatre and radio with The War of the Worlds; by twenty-five, he had secured his place in history with his debut film, Citizen Kane. Yet four films and less than a decade later, his career suffered a spectacular collapse, and Welles, once the most promising director in America, was written off as a "would-be genius"-a bad bet in an increasingly money-conscious industry. In The Giant, Youssef Daoudi weaves together reality and mythology to create a radical new look at one of Hollywood's most legendary figures and poses a question as timeless as Orson Welles himself: What happens when a true artist comes up against the rest of the world?

First published in 1939, Marshal Pilsudski presents a comprehensive biographical history of Józef Klemens Pi¿sudski (1867-1935). This book discusses various facets of his life and is an important historical reference work.

Today William Gladstone is known as a great Victorian statesman whose father was a slave owner and who tried to rescue prostitutes. In this biography, Michael Wheeler focuses on his complex and often troubled spiritual life, and on his earnest attempts to follow the precepts of Christianity in both the public realm and in private philanthropy.

For the first time, music legend Tom Petty’s spouse and muse of 25 years opens up about their intimate, shared lives in this memoir filled with personal anecdotes, and bittersweet reminiscing.Inseparable from their first kiss playing Spin the Bottle, Tom and Jane Petty were rock and roll monarchs cruising around the country on wild band tours and spreading their musical magic. But before heading to Hollywood, or “Hollyweird” as Jane refers to it, she and Tom were just two lost and confused teenagers from Gainesville, Florida whose lives became completely intertwined the minute they met. At the age of 13, Jane’s younger sister Robin was killed by a car while in her care, and Jane’s world shattered. Her mother threw herself into the church, leaving Jane to struggle with her grief and guilt. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Tom was suffering abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father, as his passive mother watched. As a result, both Jane and Tom found peace and solace in their teenage romance and the growing bond between them. Jane’s abrupt loss of childhood had turned her into a caretaker and protector, something Tom desperately needed. She’d continue to inspire and challenge him through their decades together. Many of Tom’s greatest hits, including “Here Comes My Girl,” “Listen To Her Heart,” and, of course, “American Girl” were written for Jane.With Tom on the road and holding down the fort while raising their two daughters, Jane had Tom’s back through their shared drug abuse, bankruptcy, a devastating house fire (which inspired the hit “I Won’t Back Down”), until her battle with depression and his disappearance into hard drugs split them up after 25 years of marriage.Complete with a Foreword by respected music journalist, David Wild, and exclusive photos, American Girl, American Dreams rounds out a complete portrait of the All-American girl who was Runnin’ Down a Dream.

Ever wondered what it was really like for a nurse on the frontline during the Covid pandemic? How did they juggle work and home life during this unprecedented time? This book shares one nurse's experience of being redeployed to set up and manage a ward during the first wave of the pandemic, all while running a household and caring for her parents after her mother's two recent brain haemorrhages. This day-by-day account offers you, the reader, a chance to truly understand and live through this unique experience, warts and all. It's an honest depiction of the feelings, challenges, and triumphs of balancing all aspects of life, celebrating the successes, and finding joy in the role. Relive it all as if you are walking in her shoes.

From late 1994 to June 1997 Fine Gael, Labour and Democratic Left were a coalition government led by John Bruton, arguably the most left-wing government in the history of the state. Shane Kenny provides the reader with the ultimate fly-on-the-wall insider account of this crucial period in Irish politics: one which contained highly significant breakthroughs in the Northern Ireland peace process, the most high-profile murder in the history of the state (Veronica Guerin), the establishment of the 'payments to politicians' tribunal which finally exposed the sources of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey's wealth, and a divorce referendum which heralded a changing Ireland.This is also a story of tragedy, both political and human; of those who died and were injured needlessly by the resumption of IRA violence; of a government with good potential which fell; of timing which was wrong, and of an economic disaster that could have been averted, or at least substantially mitigated.