Through plain yet descriptive language seasoned with wry, biting adjectives, he ably conveys the sights, sounds and feelings of his surroundings. His musings are funny and hopeful, and Cheek shapes his childhood voice to suit stories of his tense relationship with his violent, alcoholic father; his mother's endless tolerance and denial; and his admiration for his maternal grandmother, who taught him to "be full of love, not hate." His child's-eye reportage captures the intricacies of his mother's postmarital relationship with Tuck, a strong, kind and gentle black man Cheek had met years earlier, and their secret life as an interracial family. The secret was revealed only after Cheek's mother had Tuck's baby, which enraged her family enough for them to have a court declare her an unfit mother. When the judge ordered her to give up one of the children, the author took the choice out of his mother's hands when he elected to leave the family and become a ward of the state, turning the formerly optimistic young man against the rest of his family. In an epilogue written in his adult voice, Cheek explains that his motivation for writing the book was vengeance, which in the process of writing turned to understanding and, finally, forgiveness. (Publisher's Weekly)

    A warm, witty, and compassionate guide on this journey, Aikman explores surprising new discoveries about how people are transformed by adversity, learning the value of new experiences, humor, and friendship. The Saturday Night Widows band together to bring these ideas to life, striking out on ever more far-flung adventures and navigating the universal perils of finding love and meaning.   Theirs is a transporting true story of six marriages, six heartbreaks, and one shared beginning—an inspiring testament to what friends can achieve when they hold each other up. Saturday Night Widows is the rare book that will make you laugh, think, and remind yourself that despite the utter unpredictability and occasional tragedy of life, it is also precious, fragile, and often more joyous than we recognize.Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader’s guide and bonus content

     Arthur, Duke of Wellington, and Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte were adversaries on an epic scale. Across Europe and beyond, the armies of Great Britain and France clashed, from the Iberian Peninsula to India, from Austerlitz to the final confrontation at Waterloo. What drove the two clever, ambitious, determined men who masterminded these military campaigns? How did the underdog from Corsica develop the strategic military skills and the political cunning that gave him power over swathes of Europe? And how did Wellington, born to be a leader, hone his talents and drive an army to victory after victory?From an outstanding historian and novelist come four epic novels, now available in one volume for the first time, which tell the full story of both these men, from their very early days till the momentous battle at Waterloo which decided the future of Europe.INCLUDES MAPS

    Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.

    Focused on her work as a schoolteacher assistant, it seems that nothing could disturb her peaceful existence. Little did she know that her world would be turned upside down the moment her mother starts receiving mysteriously threatening letters. Wasting no time, Loren turns to the charming sheriff, who will do whatever it takes to help her and the only person she has by her side. However, she has no time for romance, as she needs to find the evil mastermind behind her family's ruin. Will she manage to escape from a painful dilemma of choosing between love and devotion to the only person that was always there for her?Edison Haynes is a determined man who has devoted his life in serving justice after his brother's tragic passing. Upon completing his training under one of the best sheriffs in Tombstone, he moves to Bridgestone at the age of twenty-six to become the local sheriff. Soon, fate brings him in front of an unprotected woman who is desperately asking for help. When he realizes that his mission is not a child's play, it will require all of his skills to rescue the helpless lady. What he could never expect though, is that he would find himself hopelessly in love with her along the way. Will Edison manage to save the helpless woman that could be the missing piece to the puzzle of his lonely life?The clock is ticking for Edison and Loren, who have to quickly discover what lies behind the blackmailing letters that are haunting their dreams. Will they manage to solve the baffling mystery and find their other half against all odds?"Her Port in the Storm" is a historical romance novel of approximately 60,000 words. No cheating, no cliffhangers, and a guaranteed happily ever after.

    *Includes some of Martin's most colorful quotes. *Includes a Bibliography for further reading. "If people want to think I get drunk and stay out all night, let 'em. That's how I got here, you know." - Dean Martin A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors' American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America's most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. Like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin is an American legend for his longevity and success across a garden variety of different platforms. Martin began as a nightclub singer, performed in a comedy act, starred in films, recorded hit albums, and capped his career by serving as a television host. In fact, there may be no star who was better able to transcend the different avenues of entertainment. Martin's success was made all the more amazing by the fact that he never had to change his personality or persona to find success in his different endeavors. From the beginning, Martin's public persona remained largely unchanged. He grew more famous and wealthy, but he always remained the smooth-talking Italian with the easy charm and the cool veneer. As Jerry Lewis noted in his memoirs about Martin, "Dean had this uncanny way of making everything bad look like it wasn't all that bad." If anything, Martin suggested that no matter the circumstances, people can always face their situation with leisurely charm. Martin's versatility is unprecedented even today, an era in which stars routinely alternate between film and musical careers. Martin was able to simultaneously work across different media at the same time; even after rising to fame as a singer, he continued to perform with Jerry Lewis and star in films. But after his film career took off, he continued to perform the crooning style of music that had made him famous and had long since been outdated. While other actors were forced to drastically alter their persona to keep up with the times, Martin's ability to fuse suave glamour with an everyday ordinariness ensured he didn't need to transform anything. Martin's life and career are often compared to his close friend and contemporary Frank Sinatra, and for good reason. Both came from proud Italian families, both were cohorts in the famed Rat Pack in the 1960s, and they each maintained success even late in their careers. However, Sinatra's career was filled with far more ups and downs than Martin, and his public image experienced highs and lows along with it. It's also somewhat ironic that it was Martin who Anglicized his name but remained a bigger Italian icon than Sinatra. They each began their careers as Italian crooners, but Martin maintained his style while Sinatra adopted a brasher, more "All-American" singing method. Martin never strayed far from his humble background, even as he became one of America's biggest stars. American Legends: The Life of Dean Martin profiles the life and career of one of America's most famous performers. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Dean Martin like you never have before, in no time at all.

    I found myself thinking about your story -- wanting to read more. Your writing is so revealing and beneficial to others. The impact of your last few lines -- perfect.Kirkus Review:"A chilling memoir of a family tragedy and its painful aftermath. . . . This book is an act of witness, and the author’s motivation is palpable throughout: 'I have a right to know. Our family has a right to know. Society has a right to know.” . . . A powerful testament to a son’s unyielding determination to tell his parents’ story.'In his book, Larry Edwards unmasks the emotional trauma of violent loss as he ferrets out new facts to get at the truth of how and why his parents were killed.In 1977, Loren and Joanne Edwards left Puget Sound aboard their 53-foot sailboat Spellbound, destined for French Polynesia. Six months later they lay dead aboard their boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.Larry's younger brother became the prime suspect in the FBI's murder investigation. But federal prosecutors never indicted him, leaving the case unresolved and splitting the Edwards family into feuding factions.Three decades later, a dispute over how to respond to a true-crime book by Ann Rule--which contained an inaccurate account of the case -- ripped the tattered family even farther apart. In Dare I Call It Murder?, Larry Edwards sets the record straight, revealing previously undisclosed facts from the FBI investigation as he lays out the case never presented in court.Larry's memoir, however, goes beyond simply telling the untold story of his parents' deaths and refuting the errors in previously published material. His broader goal is to see the book generate greater awareness of and conversations about violent loss, its impact on the survivors and their families, and the troubling effects of post-traumatic stress (PTSD).Website: DareICallItMurder.com

    Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship--at age eighteen--with the famously reclusive author J.D. Salinger, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for "The New York Times" in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life.With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her self of sense in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later--having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own--Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells--of the girl she was and the woman she became--is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.

    Was she “the people’s princess,” who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy? Only Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of Tatler, England’s glossiest gossip magazine; Vanity Fair; and The New Yorker could possibly give us the truth. Updated with a new foreword.

    A story of hope, a story of survival, and an incredible journey of escape, 'The Unwanted' is the only memoir by an Amerasian who stayed behind in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon and who is now living in America.

    Carrie Davies, an 18-year-old domestic servant, quickly confessed. But who was the victim here? Charles “Bert” Massey, a scion of a famous family, or the frightened, perhaps mentally unstable Carrie, a penniless British immigrant? When the brilliant lawyer Hartley Dewart, QC, took on her case, his grudge against the powerful Masseys would fuel a dramatic trial that pitted the old order against the new, wealth and privilege against virtue and honest hard work. Set against a backdrop of the Great War in Europe and the changing faceof a nation, this sensational crime is brought to vivid life for the first time.As in her previous bestselling book, Gold Diggers—now in production as a Discovery Television miniseries—multi-award-winning historian and biographer Charlotte Gray has created a captivating narrative rich in detail and brimming with larger-than-life personalities, as she shines a light on a central moment in our past.

    He changed the world of sports and went on to change the world itself. As Muhammad Ali, he would become the most recognized face on the planet. Ali was a transcendent athlete and entertainer, a heavyweight Fred Astaire, a rapper before rap was born. He was a mirror of his era, a dynamic figure in the racial and cultural battles of his time. This unforgettable story of his rise and self-creation, told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, places Ali in a heritage of great American originals. Cassius Clay grew up in the Jim Crow South and came of athletic age when boxers were at the mercy of the mob. From the start, Clay rebelled against everything and everyone who would keep him and his people down. He refused the old stereotypes and refused the glad hand of the mob. And, to the confusion and fury of white sportswriters, who were far more comfortable with the self-effacing Joe Louis, Clay came forward as a rebel, insistent on his political views, on his new religion, and, eventually, on a new name. His rebellion nearly cost him the chance to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. King of the World features some of the pivotal figures of the 1960s--Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, John F. Kennedy--and its pivotal events: the civil rights movement, political assassinations, the war in Vietnam. Muhammad Ali is a great hero and a beloved figure in American life. King of the World takes us back to the days when his life was a series of battles, inside the ring and out. A master storyteller at the height of his powers, David Remnick has written a book worthy of America's most dynamic modern hero.

    Pascal said the shape of her nose changed the history of the world. Shakespeare portrayed her as an icon of tragic love. But who was Cleopatra, really?Cleopatra was the last ruler of the Macedonian dynasty of Ptolemies. Highly intelligent, she spoke many languages and was rumored to be the only Ptolemy to read and speak Egyptian. Her famous liaisons with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony had as much to do with politics as the heart. Ruthless in dealing with her enemies, many within her own family, Cleopatra steered her kingdom through difficult times, and very nearly succeeded in creating an eastern empire to rival the growing might of Rome.Her story was well documented by her near contemporaries, and the tragic tale of contrasts and oppositions—the seductive but failing power of ancient Egypt versus the virile strength of modern Rome—is so familiar we almost feel that we know Cleopatra. But our picture is highly distorted. Cleopatra is often portrayed as a woman ruled by emotion rather than reason; a queen hurtling towards inevitable self-destruction. But these tales of seduction, intrigue, and suicide by asp have obfuscated Cleopatra’s true political genius.Stripping away our preconceptions, many of them as old as Egypt’s Roman conquerors, Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley offers a magnificent biography of a most extraordinary queen.

    She was a stewardess for first-class passengers on the Titanic and she wrote an absolutely unique eyewitness account on the most written about disaster of our time. Four years later, Violet was a nurse onboard the hospital ship Britannic when it struck a mine and sank to the bottom of the Aegean. But Titanic Survivor is much more. A unique autobiography for those who want to know how it really felt, a story that could be told only by a Titanic Survivor.

    All but anonymous even in his own city, carefully maintaining his privacy, this man, Greene's father would point out to him, had "won the war." He was Paul Tibbets. At the age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a plane—which he called Enola Gay, after his mother—to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb.On the morning after the last meal he ever ate with his father, Greene went to meet Tibbets. What developed was an unlikely friendship that allowed Greene to discover things about his father, and his father's generation of soldiers, that he never fully understood before. Duty is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood; indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world—and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty—lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life.What Greene came away with is found history and found poetry—a profoundly moving work that offers a vividly new perspective on responsibility, empathy, and love. It is an exploration of and response to the concept of duty as it once was and always should be: quiet and from the heart. On every page you can hear the whisper of a generation and its children bidding each other farewell.