Scrappy Little Nobody


Anna Kendrick - 2016
    Forever. But here’s the thing about crazy: It. Wants. Out.” In Scrappy Little Nobody, she invites readers inside her brain, sharing extraordinary and charmingly ordinary stories with candor and winningly wry observations.With her razor-sharp wit, Anna recounts the absurdities she’s experienced on her way to and from the heart of pop culture as only she can—from her unusual path to the performing arts (Vanilla Ice and baggy neon pants may have played a role) to her double life as a middle-school student who also starred on Broadway to her initial “dating experiments” (including only liking boys who didn’t like her back) to reviewing a binder full of butt doubles to her struggle to live like an adult woman instead of a perpetual “man-child.”Enter Anna’s world and follow her rise from “scrappy little nobody” to somebody who dazzles on the stage, the screen, and now the page—with an electric, singular voice, at once familiar and surprising, sharp and sweet, funny and serious (well, not that serious).

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys


Viv Albertine - 2014
    Her memoir tells the story of how, through sheer will, talent, and fearlessness, she forced herself into a male-dominated industry, became part of a movement that changed music, and inspired a generation of female rockers.After forming The Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious in 1976, Albertine joined The Slits and made musical history in one of the first generations of punk bands. The Slits would go on to serve as an inspiration to future rockers, including Kurt Cobain, Carrie Brownstein, and the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s. This is the story of what it was like to be a girl at the height of punk: the sex, the drugs, the guys, the tours, and being part of a brilliant pioneering group of women making musical history. Albertine recounts helping define punk fashion, struggling to find her place among the boys, and her romance with Mick Jones, including her pregnancy and subsequent abortion. She also gives a candid account of what happened post-punk, beyond the break-up of The Slits in 1982, including a career in film, surviving cancer, and making music again, twenty-five years later.A truly remarkable memoir told in Viv’s frank, irreverent, and distinctive voice, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. is a raw, thrilling story of life on the frontier.

Come to the Edge


Christina Haag - 2010
    and Christina HaagAn elegy to first love, a lost New York, and a young man who led his life with surprising and abundant grace   When Christina Haag was growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was just one of the boys in her circle of prep school friends, a skinny kid who lived with his mother and sister on Fifth Avenue and who happened to have a Secret Service detail following him at a discreet distance at all times. A decade later, after they had both graduated from Brown University and were living in New York City, Christina and John were cast in an off-Broadway play together. It was then that John confessed his long-standing crush on her, and they embarked on a five-year love affair. Glamorous and often in the public eye, but also passionate and deeply intimate, their relationship was transformative for both of them. With exquisite prose, Haag paints a portrait of a young man with an enormous capacity for love, and an adventurous spirit that drove him to live life to its fullest. A haunting book, Come to the Edge is a lasting evocation of a time and a place—of the indelible sting of the loss of young love, and of the people who shape you and remain with you, whether in person or in spirit. It is about being young and full of hope, with all the potential of your life as yet unfulfilled, and of coming of age at a moment in New York’s history when the city at once held danger, magic, and endless possibilities for self-discovery.  Rarely has a love story been told so beautifully.

My G-String Mother: At Home and Backstage with Gypsy Rose Lee


Erik Lee Preminger - 1984
    Too old to be taking my clothes off in front of strangers.' Her endless schemes for staying famous and maintaining their extravagant lifestyle—a best-selling writing career, a musical based on her life, a disastrous attempt to turn her home movies into a blockbuster—make for comedic yet poignant reading. My G-String Mother is a stylish, incisive portrait of two lives: an awkward adolescent who was as much confidante, co-conspirator, and companion as son, and the legendary woman who told police at a raid at the famous Minsky’s burlesque house, 'I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.'

Diane: A Signature Life: My Adventures in Fashion, Business, and Life


Diane Von Furstenberg - 1998
    "Most fairy tales end with the girl marrying the prince. That's where mine began", says Diane Von Furstenberg. She didn't have to work, but she did. She lived the American Dream before she was thirty, building a multimillion-dollar fashion empire while raising two children and living life in the fast lane.Von Furstenberg's wrap dress, a cultural phenomenon in the seventies, hangs in the Smithsonian Institution. "No one was making a little bourgeois dress, so I did," she told Newsweek in her 1976 cover story. The dress achieved such popularity that in the five years it was on the market, Diane sold more than five million of them. Her entry into the beauty business in 1979 was as serendipitous and as successful.Diane learned her trade in the trenches, crisscrossing the country to make personal appearances at department stores, selling her dresses and cosmetics. "As I was learning to be a woman and enjoying being one, I was sharing my discoveries, designing for my needs, and making a business of it", she writes. That business had its ups and downs. Eventually, there was so much demand for and exposure of the dress that the market became saturated; on the verge of bankruptcy, she licensed that part of the business, focusing on her fragrance and beauty products.Von Furstenberg's personal world unraveled a bit in 1980 when her mother, Lily, a survivor of Auschwitz, had a breakdown. Diane of course knew about her mother's experience in the camps, though her mother had never wanted to dwell on it. She understood that her own need for freedom came from her mother's lack of it, and that her resilience derived from her mother's life lesson to always turn a negative into a positive.Leaving the glitz of Manhattan and the music of Studio 54 behind, Diane escaped to Bali with her children, returning inspired and renewed. With all of this energy, the cosmetics business flourished. But it grew so fast that in 1983 she found herself undercapitalized and was forced to sell.In 1985, having given up control of her brand to licensees and with her children away at school, Diane turned her back on America and packed for Paris. She spent four years in her new role as part of the literary scene there, trading in her spike heels for flat shoes and tweed.In 1990, she found she missed the chase and returned to New York to regain control of her name and relaunch her company. Frustrated by the degraded status of her brand and dismissed by the retail community, she searched for a new way to reconnect with her customers. She found it through the revolutionary new medium of teleshopping and once again became a success. However, she still wanted to return to retail.In 1997, as the wrap dress was making a comeback with the nostalgia for the seventies, Von Furstenberg, with the help of her beautiful daughter-in-law, Alexandra, redesigned the dress for the nineties and made her name relevant to a whole new generation.Now, at fifty, Diane works to make sense of the contradictions in her life: glamour vs. hard work, European vs. American, daughter of a Holocaust survivor vs. wife of an Austro-Italian prince, mother vs. entrepreneur, lover vs. tycoon. She emerges wiser, stronger, and ever more determined never to sacrifice her passion for life.

The Senator: My Ten Years with Ted Kennedy


Richard E. Burke - 1992
    Kennedy of Massachusetts. Through ability, hard work, and dedication, Burke rose in the next four years to become one of the Senator's closest staff members. In 1977 he was made Kennedy's personal assistant; after his appointment in 1978 as administrative assistant - the youngest in the Senate - he came to know Edward M. Kennedy perhaps more intimately than anyone outside the closed circle of the Senator's family. He was often the last to see the Senator at night and the first to see him in the morning. This book is the account of what Richard Burke witnessed and experienced during his decade at the Senator's right hand. It is neither a full biography nor an examination of Kennedy's long career in government. Rather, it is the history of a young man who shared the Senator's professional and personal lives during a time marked by exhilarating public achievements and tragic secret misconduct. His story is not only the chronicle of a shattered idol, but of Richard Burke's own fall from grace, and eventual recovery. Burke does not shrink from confronting his own faults, and he agrees with the Senator: It is time for him to confront his.

Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest


Sandra Day O'Connor - 2002
    Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America. In this illuminating and unusual book, Sandra Day O’Connor tells, with her brother, Alan, the story of the Day family, and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B ranch in Arizona.Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, self-reliance, and survival, and how the land, people, and values of the Lazy B shaped them. This fascinating glimpse of life in the Southwest in the last century recounts an important time in American history, and provides an enduring portrait of an independent young woman on the brink of becoming one of the most prominent figures in America.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Dizzy & Jimmy: My Life with James Dean: A Love Story


Liz Sheridan - 1975
    The year was 1951. Dean had recently arrived in Manhattan in search of Broadway stardom. Sheridan was a tall, graceful aspiring dancer. They met one rainy afternoon in the parlor of the Rehearsal Club, a chaperoned boardinghouse for young actresses -- and before long Dizzy and Jimmy were inseparable. Together they hunted for jobs, haunted all-night bars and diners, and gloried in the innocent rebellion of early-'50s bohemian New York. Dizzy Sheridan and James Dean were lovers; they lived together; as even ardent Dean fans may be surprised to learn, they were engaged to be married. But when Dean began to find success on the Broadway stage and then was lured to Hollywood, the couple parted amid tears and broken dreams -- dreams that would be dashed forever when Dean died in a car crash in 1955, not long after seeing Dizzy for the last time.Dizzy & Jimmy marks the first time Liz Sheridan has written about this joyous yet ill-starred romance. She brings us closer than we have ever been to the vibrant young actor before he became a Hollywood icon, capturing his unstudied charm, his complicated psyche, the spontaneous delight he took from the world around him, and the passion he invested in his work and life. It is a journey that takes in many locales, from Dean's boyhood home in Fairmount, Indiana, to Sheridan's recuperative travels through the Caribbean after their breakup. But at its heart Dizzy & Jimmy is the story of a love affair with Manhattan -- of nights spent stealing kisses in Times Square, sharing a walkup in the Hargrave Hotel, dancing after hours beneath the stars in Grand Central Station. And in Sheridan's bittersweet, embraceable telling, it becomes a story no reader, Dean fan or otherwise, will soon forget.

Settle for More


Megyn Kelly - 2016
    She goes behind-the-scenes of her career, sharing the stories and struggles that landed her in the anchor chair and taught her to ask the tough questions. Speaking candidly about her decision to "settle for more"—a motto she credits as having dramatically transformed her life at home and at work—Megyn discusses how she abandoned a thriving legal career to follow her journalism dreams.Admired for her hard work, humor, and authenticity, Megyn sheds light on the news business, her time at Fox News, the challenges of being a professional woman and working mother, and her most talked about television moments. She also speaks openly about Donald Trump’s feud with her, revealing never-before-heard details about the first Republican debate, its difficult aftermath, and how she persevered through it all.Deeply personal and surprising, Settle for More offers unparalleled insight into this charismatic and intriguing journalist, and inspires us all to embrace the principles—determination, honesty, and fortitude in the face of fear—that have won her fans across the political divide.

Beastie Boys Book


Michael DiamondIan Rogers - 2018
    Here is their story, told for the first time in the words of the band. Adam "ADROCK" Horovitz and Michael "Mike D" Diamond offer revealing and very funny accounts of their transition from teenage punks to budding rappers; their early collaboration with Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin; the debut album that became the first hip hop record ever to hit #1, Licensed to Ill--and the album's messy fallout as the band broke with Def Jam; their move to Los Angeles and rebirth with the genre-defying masterpiece Paul's Boutique; their evolution as musicians and social activists over the course of the classic albums Check Your Head, Ill Communication, and Hello Nasty and the Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits conceived by the late Adam "MCA" Yauch; and more. For more than thirty years, this band has had an inescapable and indelible influence on popular culture.With a style as distinctive and eclectic as a Beastie Boys album, Beastie Boys Book upends the typical music memoir. Alongside the band narrative you will find rare photos, original illustrations, a cookbook by chef Roy Choi, a graphic novel, a map of Beastie Boys' New York, mixtape playlists, pieces by guest contributors, and many more surprises.

I.M.: A Memoir


Isaac Mizrahi - 2019
    Yet ever since he shot to fame in the late 1980s, the private Isaac Mizrahi has remained under wraps. Until now.In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi offers a poignant, candid, and touching look back on his life so far. Growing up gay in a sheltered Syrian Jewish Orthodox family, Isaac had unique talents that ultimately drew him into fashion and later into celebrity circles that read like a who's who of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Wintour, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Meryl Streep, and Oprah Winfrey, to name only a few.In his elegant memoir, Isaac delves into his lifelong battles with weight, insomnia, and depression. He tells what it was like to be an out gay man in a homophobic age and to witness the ravaging effects of the AIDS epidemic. Brimming with intimate details and inimitable wit, Isaac's narrative reveals not just the glamour of his years, but the grit beneath the glitz. Rich with memorable stories from in and out of the spotlight, I.M.illuminates deep emotional truths.

I Am the Central Park Jogger


Trisha Meili - 2003
    As featured in When They See Us—the Netflix limited series created, written, and directed by Ava DuVernay that retells the story of the Central Park Five, the young men wrongly accused of this crime.Shortly after 9:00 p.m. on April 19, 1989, a young woman jogs alone near 102nd Street in New York City's Central Park. She is attacked, raped, savagely beaten, and left for dead. Hours later she arrives at the emergency room—comatose—she has lost so much blood that her doctors believe it’s a miracle she's still alive. Meet Trisha Meili, the Central Park Jogger. I Am the Central Park Jogger recounts the mesmerizing, inspiring, often wrenching story of human strength and transcendent recovery. Called “Hero of the Month” by Glamour magazine, Meili tells us who she was before the attack—a young Wall Street professional with a promising future—and who she has become: a woman who learned how to read, write, walk, talk, and love again...and turn horrifying violence and certain death into extraordinary healing and victorious life. With “moments of unexpected grace and insights into life’s challenges….Meili’s story—the story the public never knew—is unforgettable” (The Buffalo News).

'Isms & 'Ologies: All the Movements, Ideologies and Doctrines That Have Shaped Our World


Arthur Goldwag - 2007
    Here is the ultimate guide to over 450 of the most significant intellectual terms, movements, and religions that help shape the society we live in. Simply, concisely, and with personality, ‘Isms and ‘Ologies clarifies buzz terms like jihad, often defined as “holy war” but which literally means “striving” ;and illustrates the differences between Conservatism, Paleoconservatism, and Neoconservatism. It explains String Theory (which attempts to unify Quantum Mechanics and Einsteinian Relativity); describes Fauvism (an artistic movement that paved the way for Expressionism and Cubism); defines Locofocoism (an American political ideology named after a “self-lighting cigar)”; and identifies and explores so much more. Helpfully divided into categories–including politics, history, philosophy and the arts, economics, religion, science, and medicine–cross referenced, and thoroughly indexed, ‘Isms and ‘Ologies is a must have for the budding intellectual in everyone.

A New Model: What Confidence, Beauty, and Power Really Look Like


Ashley Graham - 2017
    Discovered at a shopping mall in her native Nebraska, her stunning face and sexy curves have graced the covers of top magazines, including Cosmopolitan and Elle, and she was the first plus-size model to appear on the front of the wildly popular Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. The face of H&M Studio, she is also a judge for America’s Next Top Model. And that's only the beginning for this extraordinary talent.Ashley is on the leading edge of a new generation of women breaking ground and demolishing stereotypes, transforming our ideals about body image and what is fashionable. A woman who proves that when it comes to beauty, size is just a number, she is the voice for the body positivity movement today and a role model for all women—no matter their individual body type, shape, or weight.In this collection of insightful, provocative essays illustrated with a dozen photos, Ashley shares her perspective on how ideas around body image are evolving—and how how they aren’t; the fun—and torture—of a career in the fashion world; her life before modeling; and her path to accepting her size without limiting her dreams—defying rigid industry standards and naysayers who told her it couldn’t be done. As she talks about her successes and setbacks, Ashley offers support for every woman coming to terms with who she is, helps her bolster her self-confidence, and motivates her to be her strongest, healthiest, and most beautiful self.

Riot Days


Maria Alyokhina - 2017
    That trial and Alyokhina's subsequent imprisonment became an international cause. For Alyokhina, her two-year sentence launched a bitter struggle against the Russian prison system and an iron-willed refusal to be deprived of her humanity. Teeming with protests and police, witnesses and cellmates, informers and interrogators, Riot Days gives voice to Alyokhina's insistence on the right to say no, whether to a prison guard or to the president. Ultimately, this insistence delivers unprecedented victories for prisoners' rights.Evocative, wry, laser-sharp, and laconically funny, Alyokhina's account is studded with song lyrics, legal transcripts, and excerpts from her jail diary--dispatches from a young woman who has faced tyranny and returned with the proof that against all odds even one person can force its retreat.