Coming Clean


Kimberly Rae Miller - 2013
    Kim Miller is an immaculately put-together woman with a great career, a loving boyfriend, and a beautifully tidy apartment in Brooklyn. You would never guess that she spent her childhood hiding behind the closed doors of her family’s idyllic Long Island house, navigating between teetering stacks of aging newspaper, broken computers, and boxes upon boxes of unused junk festering in every room—the product of her father’s painful and unending struggle with hoarding. In this coming-of-age story, Kim brings to life her experience of growing up in a rat-infested home, concealing her father’s shameful secret from friends for years, and of the emotional burden that ultimately led to an attempt to take her own life. And in beautiful prose, Miller sheds light on her complicated yet loving relationship with her parents that has thrived in spite of the odds. Coming Clean is a story about recognizing where we come from and the relationships that define us—and about finding peace in the homes we make for ourselves.

Captive: A Mother's Crusade to Save Her Daughter from the Terrifying Cult Nxivm


Catherine Oxenberg - 2018
    And I am not alone. In 2011, former Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg joined her daughter, India, at a leadership seminar for a new organization called NXIVM. Her then twenty-year-old daughter was on the threshold of starting her own professional life and they both thought this program might help her achieve her dream. But quickly, Catherine saw a sinister side to the program that claimed to simply want to help its clients become the best versions of themselves. Catherine watched in horror as her daughter fell further and further down the rabbit hole, falling under the spell of NXIVM's hypnotic leader, Keith Raniere. Despite Catherine’s best efforts, India was drawn deeper into the cult, eventually joining an elite “sorority” of women members who were ordered to maintain a restricted diet, recruit other women as “slaves,” and were branded with their leader’s initials. In Captive, Catherine shares every parent’s worst nightmare, and the lengths that a mother will go to save her child. Catherine’s efforts finally led the FBI to take notice—and the journey is not yet over. A powerful depiction of a mother’s love and determination, and with horrifying insider details never revealed in any news story, Captive will keep you reading until the very last page.

A Sucky Love Story: Overcoming Unhappily Ever After


Brittani Louise Taylor - 2018
    Tinder, Bumble, Match.com, OkCupid—I tried them all.  My thirty-two-year-old self clicked and swiped her little heart out, leading to more dates than I could count, and more disappointment than I was prepared for.Maybe you can relate. Maybe you know all too well the perils of modern dating. But let’s say, eventually, you meet someone. You think to yourself, “Wow, they’re perfect! Take me off the market, put a ring on it, knock me up, the whole enchilada, because they are ‘the one.’” Let’s also say that they “feel the same way” about you. Your life starts to make sense! All the pain, heartbreak, and frustration from past failed relationships was worth it.  Slow clap.That’s how I felt about Milos. He was from Europe, a doctor, wealthy, athletic.  He had an accent and a dog.  Milos was textbook marriage material.For him it was “love at first sight,” but for me, it was “anxiety on every date.”Something was telling me to run—but for two years, the only running I did was straight into his arms.If only I would have listened.This isn’t a love story.It’s my story of survival.

The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State


Nadia Murad - 2017
    A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon.On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just twenty-one years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. Six of Nadia's brothers were killed, and her mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into the ISIS slave trade.Nadia would be held captive by several militants and repeatedly raped and beaten. Finally, she managed a narrow escape through the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son risked his life to smuggle her to safety.Today, Nadia's story - as a witness to the Islamic State's brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a Yazidi - has forced the world to pay attention to an ongoing genocide. It is a call to action, a testament to the human will to survive, and a love letter to a lost country, a fragile community, and a family torn apart by war.

A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea


Richard Phillips - 2010
    His courage is a model for all Americans."--President Barack Obama It was just another day on the job for fifty-three-year-old Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, the United States-flagged cargo ship which was carrying, among other things, food and agricultural materials for the World Food Program. That all changed when armed Somali pirates boarded the ship. The pirates didn't expect the crew to fight back, nor did they expect Captain Phillips to offer himself as hostage in exchange for the safety of his crew. Thus began the tense five-day stand-off, which ended in a daring high-seas rescue when U.S. Navy SEALs opened fire and picked off three of the captors. "It never ends like this," Captain Phillips said. And he's right. A Captain's Duty tells the life-and-death drama of the Vermont native who was held captive on a tiny lifeboat off Somalia's anarchic, gun-plagued shores. A story of adventure and courage, it provides the intimate details of this high-seas hostage-taking--the unbearable heat, the death threats, the mock executions, and the escape attempt. When the pirates boarded his ship, Captain Phillips put his experience into action, doing everything he could to safeguard his crew. And when he was held captive by the pirates, he marshaled all his resources to ensure his own survival, withstanding intense physical hardship and an escalating battle of wills with the pirates. This was it: the moment where training meets instinct and where character is everything. Richard Phillips was ready.

Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood


William J. Mann - 2014
    Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now.In a fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to unpack the story of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him—including three beautiful, ambitious actresses; a grasping stage mother; a devoted valet; and a gang of two-bit thugs, any of whom might have fired the fatal bullet. And overseeing this entire landscape of intrigue was Adolph Zukor, the brilliant and ruthless founder of Paramount, locked in a struggle for control of the industry and desperate to conceal the truth about the crime. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.A true story recreated with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a storyteller at the peak of his powers—and the solution to a crime that has stumped detectives and historians for nearly a century.

The Wolf of Wall Street


Jordan Belfort - 2007
    By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids waiting at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called . . .THE WOLF OF WALL STREETIn the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess that no one could invent.Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits—for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down . . .