Best of
Biography-Memoir

1984

Blood Brothers


Elias Chacour - 1984
    The townspeople were proud of their ancient Christian heritage and lived at peace with their Jewish neighbors. But early in 1947, their idyllic lifestyle was swept away as tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps. An exile in his native land, Elias began a years-long struggle with his love for the Jewish people and the world's misunderstanding of his own people, the Palestinians. How was he to respond? He found his answer in the simple, haunting words of the Man of Galilee: "Blessed are the peacemakers." In Blood Brothers, Chacour blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the birth of modern Israel. He touches on controversial questions such as "What behind-the-scenes politics touched off the turmoil in the Middle East?," "What does Bible prophecy really have to say?," and "Can bitter enemies ever be reconciled?" Originally published by Chosen Books in 1984 and now expanded with a new introduction by the author, a new foreword by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and a "Since Then" epilogue by writer David Hazard, this compelling book offers readers hope-filled insight into living at peace in the most volatile region of the world.

Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor


Anne Edwards - 1984
    A detailed history of Princess May of Teck who married Duke of Clarence (House Of Windsor) who died before their marriage.

The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton


Michael Mott - 1984
    New Afterword by the Author. Index; photographs.

In Love and War


Jim Stockdale - 1984
    A unique American chronicle of a navy family's life during the Vietnam war years, this widely acclaimed memoir has been updated to include an outspoken account of the Stockdale's experiences in the seventeen years since Jim's release from a Hanoi prison.

Into the Mouth of the Cat: The Story of Lance Sijan, Hero of Vietnam


Malcolm McConnell - 1984
    Although critically injured and virtually without supplies, he evaded capture in savage terrain for six weeks. Finally caught and placed in a holding camp, he overpowered his guards and escaped, only to be captured again. He resisted his interrogators to the end, and he died two weeks later in Hanoi. His courage was an inspiration to other American prisoners of war, and he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

Boy: Tales of Childhood


Roald Dahl - 1984
    From his years as a prankster at boarding school to his envious position as a chocolate tester for Cadbury's, Roald Dahl's boyhood was as full of excitement and the unexpected as are his world-famous, best-selling books. Packed with anecdotes—some funny, some painful, all interesting—this is a book that's sure to please.

At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl


Hans Scholl - 1984
    

My Folks Don't Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in North Carolina


Belinda Hurmence - 1984
    More than 2000 slave narratives are now housed in the Library of Congress. More than 170 interviews were conducted in North Carolina. Belinda Hurmence pored over each of the North Carolina narratives, compiling and editing 21 of the first-person accounts for this collection. These narratives, though artless in many ways, speak compellingly of the joys and sorrows, the hopes and dreams, of the countless people who endured human bondage in the land of the free.

The House by the Dvina: A Russian Childhood


Eugenie Fraser - 1984
    Brought up in Russia but taken on visits to Scotland, Eugenie Fraser marvelously evokes a child's reactions to two totally different environments, sets of customs, and family backgrounds. With the events of 1914 to 1920—the war with Germany, the Revolution, the murder of the Tsar, and the withdrawal of the Allied Intervention in the north—came the disintegration of Russia and of family life. The stark realities of hunger, deprivation, and fear are sharply contrasted with the adventures of childhood. The reader shares the family's suspense and concern about the fates of its members and relives with Eugenie her final escape to Scotland.

Roman by Polanski


Roman Polański - 1984
    He talks of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland; Lodz Film School in the 1950s; Paris in his early struggles to become recognized as a director; and London and Hollywood in the 60s when he first won international acclaim. We follow him through his marriages and friendships; and with him we experience the full force of the tragedy that struck when his wife Sharon Tate and several close friends were brutally murdered by the Manson family. There followed years of disenchantment and self enquiry; arrest and imprisonment on charges alleging the rape of a minor, and finally his professional and personal resurgence in France.

Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith


Linda King Newell - 1984
    This book is a biographical reconstruction of Emma Smith's life from documents and evidence other than the few letters and one page of blessings she left behind.

Voices of the Old Sea


Norman Lewis - 1984
    Voices of the Old Sea describes his three successive summers in that almost medieval community where life revolved around the seasonal sardine catches, Alcade's bar, and satisfying feuds with neighboring villages. It's lucky Lewis was there when he was. Soon after, Spain was discovered by its neighbors in a more prosperous northern Europe, and the tourist tide that ensued flowed inexorably over the old ways of the town and its inhabitants.

The Stones Cry Out: A Cambodian Childhood, 1975-1980


Molyda Szymusiak - 1984
    It is also an important addition to a thin historical record.... Her account of the revolutionary rhetoric, set against the reality of what the revolutionaries were actually doing, is as macabre as any of the descriptions of bodies." --The Wall Street Journal"This is a powerful and compelling story of terror, struggle and death sprinkled with moments of tenderness, written by a woman who writes not of politics but only of what she experienced." --New York Times Book ReviewIn 1975, Molyda Szymusiak (her adoptive name), the daughter of a high Cambodian official, was twelve years old and leading a relatively peaceful life in Phnom Penh. Suddenly, on April 17, Khmer Rouge radicals seized the capital and drove all its inhabitants into the countryside. The chaos that followed has been widely publicized, most notably in the movie The Killing Fields. Murderous brutality coupled with raging famine caused the death of more than two million people, nearly a third of the population. This powerful memoir documents the horror Cambodians experienced in daily life.

100 Prison Meditations: Cries of Truth From Behind the Iron Curtain


Richard Wurmbrand - 1984
    . . Richard Wurmbrand had plenty of time to think during his fourteen years in a Communist prison. He reflected on his life, his world, and especially his Creator. His fellow prisoners included other pastors, theologians, and Bible scholars. They shared ideas and insights, and even preached sermons to each other. The captivity he endured included three years of solitary confinement. Although deprived of human companionship, he remained in intimate communion with God. He examined in depth the revelation of the Bible and its mandates for the Christian life. His meditations from those years are provocative, challenging, sometimes disturbing. They are the thoughts of a man who has been close to God and close to death. After reading his contemplations, you will read the Bible with a fresh perspective. You will look on your fellow man in a different light. You may even live in a new way.

From A to Biba: The Autobiography of Barbara Hulanicki


Barbara Hulanicki - 1984
    This lively autobiography evokes the adventurous spirit of the 1960s and describes an extraordinary life with clarity and wit.

Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy


Albert Race Sample - 1984
    Born in 1930, the mixed-race son of a hard-drinking black prostitute and a white cotton broker, Sample was raised in the Jim Crow South by an abusive mother who refused to let her son—who could pass for white—call her Mama. He watched for the police while she worked, whether as a prostitute, bootlegger, or running the best dice game in town. He loved his mother deeply but could no longer take her abuse and ran away from home at the age of twelve. In his early twenties, Sample was arrested for burglary, robbery, and robbery by assault and was sentenced to nearly twenty years in the Texas prison system in the 1950s and 60s. His light complexion made him stand out in the all-black prison plantation known as the “burnin’ hell,” where he and over four hundred prisoners picked cotton and worked the land while white shotgun-carrying guards followed on horseback. Sample earned the moniker “Racehoss” for his ability to hoe cotton faster than anyone else in his squad. A profound spiritual awakening in solitary confinement was a decisive moment for him, and he became determined to turn his life around. When he was finally released in 1972, he did just that. Though Sample was incarcerated in the twentieth century, his memoir reads like it came from the nineteenth. With new stories that had been edited out of the first edition, a foreword by Texas attorney and writer David R. Dow, and an afterword by Sample’s widow, Carol, this new edition of Racehoss: Big Emma’s Boy offers a more complete picture of this extraordinary time in America’s recent past.

The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka


Ernst Pawel - 1984
    A comprehensive and interpretative biography of Franz Kafka that is both a monumental work of scholarship and a vivid, lively evocation of Kafka's world.

Diane Arbus: A Biography


Patricia Bosworth - 1984
    Her startling photographic images of dwarfs, twins, transvestites, and freaks seemed from the first to redefine both the normal and the abnormal in our lives and they were already becoming part of the iconography of the age when Arbus committed suicide in 1971. Arbus herself remained an enigma until the publication of this first full biography. Patricia Bosworth examines the life behind the eerie, mesmerizing photographs: Diane's pampered childhood; her passionate marriage to Allan Arbus and their work together as fashion photographers during the fifties; the emotional upheaval surrounding the end of that marriage; and the radically dark, liberating, and ultimately tragic turn Diane's art took during the sixties. Bosworth's engrossing book is a compassionate portrait of the woman behind some of the most powerful photographs of our time.

Herself Defined: H. D. and Her World


Barbara Guest - 1984
    A woman of great beauty, H.D. enthralled the literary worlds of London and Paris and counted among her intimates such figures as Ezra Pound--to whom she was briefly engaged--William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and D.H. Lawrence. Herself Defined not only helps to define this enigmatic force in modern literature and poetry, but also provides a fascinating glimpse into the heart and mind of an artist in her creative yet tormented search for self.

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes


Ted Conover - 1984
    So, he decided to take a year off and ride the rails. Equipped with rummage-store clothing, a bedroll, and a few other belongings, he hops a freight train in St. Louis, becoming a tramp in order to discover their peculiar culture. The men and women he meets along the way are by turns generous and mistrusting, resourceful and desperate, philosophical and profoundly cynical. And the narrative he creates of his travels with them is unforgettable and moving.

Dialogues With Myself Personal Essays on Mormon Experience


Eugene England - 1984
    Personal Essays on Mormon Experience. New Book. Great Buy. We will ship daily. Satisfaction Guaranteed. We sell the best products!

Yesteryear I Lived in Paradise: The Story of Caladesi Island


Myrtle Scharrer Betz - 1984
    Her account of growing up on Caladesi Island is one of the richest portraits available of life in Florida when it truly was the natural, tropical paradise that tourists and residents alike can only dream of discovering today.Told with compelling honesty and humanity, this tale by the only child ever born on Caladesi Island captures the natural wonders, discomforts, challenges, and joys of pioneer life on a Florida West Coast barrier island, spanning the time from when her father, Henry Scharrer, first arrived in America from Switzerland in 1883 until his death in 1934.This new and enlarged edition includes more than 130 historic illustrations providing a visual legacy to complement Myrtle s narrative, and granddaughter Terry Fortner has added a timeline to clarify the history, extending to the years before and after the narrative itself.With wisdom, insight, and poetry, Myrtle Sharrer Betz has written a book that is sure to become a Florida treasure. In consideration of the future as well as preservation of the past, sales from the book support the Henry Scharrer Memorial Fund to underwrite projects at Caladesi and Honeymoon Island State Parks.

Amy Carmichael: Let the Little Children Come


Lois Hoadley Dick - 1984
    Amy rescues these children and provides a safe, healthy home for them.

The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp


Quentin Crisp - 1984
    Carefully selected from his published and unpublished writing, his performances, critical commentaries, and interviews, this collection is the essence of Crisp: a must have for the initiated and the perfect introduction for the unCrisped.

D.V.


Diana Vreeland - 1984
    In this glittering autobiography she takes us around the world with her, revealing her obsession with fashion high and low--pink plastic poodles, for example--and dropping timeless sayings like, "As you know, the French like the French very much." A fabulous, witty read.

White Road: A Russian Odyssey, 1919-1923


Olga Ilyin - 1984
    

The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography


Charles White - 1984
    When Little Richard burst onto the scene in the early 1950s, he sounded like nothing on earth. Drenched in sweat, screaming, hollering and pumping his piano, his stage act was so explosive that for years people assumed the real man could never match the flamboyant public image. Then came Charles White's sensational book exposing the even more astonishing life and times of Richard Wayne Penniman from Georgia.Little Richard made himself a star through sheer force of personality, breaking racial and sexual taboos on his way to becoming the primal force of Fifties rock 'n' roll. Elvis Presley called him 'the greatest'. Otis Redding called him his 'inspiration' and James Brown called him his idol. Charles White is the only author to have captured the true energy of Little Richard. Using Richard's own words, White chronicles a staggering career that spanned the very rules of rock 'n' roll, the rise of The Beatles, tussles with God and The Devil and an erratic series of comebacks. Illustrated with pictures from Little Richard's own archive and including a comprehensive discography.

The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook of His Life and Writings


Homer A. Jack - 1984
    Here is Gandhi in his own words and those of his closest associates, including selections from his autobiography; descriptions of Gandhi by Romain Rollard, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Louis Fischer; Gandhi's letters to Roosevelt, Hitler, Chiang Kai-shek; and many of his most famous addresses.

The Beatles, Lennon, and Me


Peter Shotton - 1984
    

David


Marie Rothenberg - 1984
    The mother of a six-year-old boy describes his struggle to survive after he received third-degree burns on ninety-eight percent of his body

Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull


Stanley Vestal - 1984
    He had been on the warpath against whites and other Indians for more than a decade when he fought the greatest battle of his life. On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, five troops of the U. S. Seventh Cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer rode into the valley of the Little Big Horn River, confidently expecting to rout the Indian encampments there. Instead, the cavalry met the gathered strength of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, who did not run as expected but turned the battle toward the soldiers. White Bull charged again and again, fighting until the last soldier was dead. The battle was Custer's Last Stand, and White Bull was later referred to as the warrior who killed Custer.In 1932 White Bull related his life story to Stanley Vestal, who corroborated the details, from other sources and prepared this biography. "All that I told him is straight and true," said White Bull. His story is a matchless account of the life of an Indian warrior.Purchase the audio edition.

Growing Pains: Diaries And Drawings From The Years 1908-17


Wanda Gág - 1984
    Her early diaries, first published in 1940, are the touching, often humorous record of her youth and her struggles to develop her talent.

The Princess Of Siberia


Christine Sutherland - 1984
    Despite her family's and the tsar's opposition, Maria was determined to join her husband thousands of miles from St. Petersburg. She was more than halfway there when the tsar's decree that she could never return from Siberia was read to her. The reunion occured in the depths of a silver mine, where she fell at her husband's feet and kissed his chains.Christine Sutherland's fascinating portrait of Maria and members of the Decembrist circle is based on the unpublished memoirs and diaries of the princess, which the Volkonsky family made available to her. The exile in Siberia lasted for almost thirty years, when an amnesty following the tsar's death freed them.In exile, Maria brought to Prince Volkonsky her love, gaiety, and artistic talents, together with a force of character, courage, and integrity which sustained them through the long years. A second son and a daughter were born to them in the detention camp of Chita in Transbaikalia. The Volkonskys were eventually allowed to settle in Irkutsk in a large, well-furnished wooden house. Maria's benevolent influence on the govenor of the province, in establishing local schools, in building the first theater in Siberia, and in promoting farm cooperatives, won her the love of the populace as "our Princess."

A Flying Tiger's Diary


Charles R. Bond Jr. - 1984
    Yet, the glory remains undiminished . . . A Flying Tiger's Diary is highly readable and is wholeheartedly recommended."—Military Review The Flying Tigers, under the leadership of Claire Chennault, fought legendary air battles in the skies over Burma and China. This journal of ace pilot Charles Bond, now in its fifth printing, vividly preserves his experiences in aerial combat against the Japanese, all recorded within twenty-four hours of the action. It also documents the training and living conditions of the men whom Gen. Bruce K. Holloway has called "the most colorful group of warriors in modern times." A limited, specially bound edition of A Flying Tiger's Diary, signed and with a laid-in print by Terry Pyles, is available while supply lasts.”

Women & Beauty


Sophia Loren - 1984
    The author Sophia Loren gives her opinions gently but firmly and she makes reading about her life both entertaining and informative. Here are some of the chapters:Some Thoughts on BeautyThe Pursuit of Beauty (in which she covers discipline, hair, skin, make-up, fashion and style, healthy diet, and exercise.)The Mystery of Beauty (in which she covers charm, men and love, pregnancy and motherhood, tranquility, and coming to terms with age.I certainly think any woman interested in beauty, especially women over 30 years of age would find much useful information in this book."

Mark Twain? What Kind of Name is That?: A Story of Samuel Langhorne Clemens


Robert M. Quackenbush - 1984
    The life of the famous humorist whose numerous occupations included printer's apprentice, steamboat pilot, gold miner, frontiersman, and reporter.

The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster


John H. Davis - 1984
    The author is first cousin to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

Little by Little: A Writer's Education


Jean Little - 1984
    The noted Canadian writer's autobiography.

Days of Glory, Seasons of Night


Marilee Pierce Dunker - 1984
    What makes this strategy so compelling? Because he understood the secret of living forward—spiritual multiplication through intentionally influencing a few people at a time. He knew that by concentrating on a few faithful men and women they would leave behind them a legacy of people whose influence would extend beyond a generation or two; in fact, a legacy that would continue to multiply until he returned. This book is written to stimulate you toward a passionate desire to change people. The key is not so much how you pour your life into people but that you are a person worth following. God placed you here to invest your life in others. This book will show you how to live and speak truth into the lives of others in a way that will transform them forever. Some of the essential leadership characteristics discussed in this book: • Self-disipline • Encouragment • Gentleness • Confrontation

The Trapp Family Book


Hans Wilhelm - 1984