Doing the Business - The Final Confession of the Senior Kray Brother


Charlie Kray - 2011
    Only one man knew everything about Ronnie and Reggie Kray and that was their brother Charlie. Until now nobody has ever revealed the truth about the Firm.- Gossip and rumor have been rife, fact has blended into fiction and the unwritten law of the street meant that the real story was buried. But before his death, the eldest Kray brother, Charlie, decided to set the record straight once and for all. Revealing everything to Colin Fry, his co-author, he finally told his incredible story. By the man who knew them best, this is the ultimate history of the twins who ruled the East End with their peculiar blend of seductive glamour and terrifying violence.

Tunnel Rats


Jimmy Thomson - 2011
    It doesn't matter how small the tunnel is you never know what's around the bend ... You don't know if it's abandoned, you don't know if it's booby trapped and you don't know why the tunnel is there in the first place."They were young, they were Australian, they were Army engineers and they were the first allied soldiers to risk their lives in the darkness of the Vietcong tunnels of South Vietnam. Staring death squarely in the face every day, not only did they follow their enemy down into these unknown underground labyrinths, but matched the Vietcong's jungle warfare skills and defused thousands of their clever booby traps.Off duty, it was a different story. The bad boys of 3 Field Troop were a boozing, brawling, bonking bunch of larrikins, who cut a swathe through the bars and brothels of Saigon, fought American Military Police to a standstill, built a secret casino and booby-trapped their own HQ to teach their officers a lesson.Thrilling, inspiring and action packed, this is the true story of the unsung heroes of Australia's war in Vietnam. Living up to their motto of 'We Make and We Break', they created the legend of the Tunnel Rats.

Gardens of Stone: My Boyhood in the French Resistance


Stephen Grady - 2013
    14-year-old Stephen is living with his family. Stephen and his friend Marcel collect souvenirs from strafed convoys and crashed Messerschmitts. Then they are arrested and imprisoned for sabotage and threatened with deportation or the firing squad. Upon his release, and still only 16, Stephen is recruited by the French Resistance. This is his story.

Jesse Ventura's Marijuana Manifesto: How Lies, Corruption, and Propaganda Kept Cannabis Illegal


Jesse Ventura - 2016
    Now, more than ever before, our country needs to see full legalization of medical/recreational marijuana and hemp. Any way you look at it, for whoever is using it, marijuana is a medicinal plant, in abundant supply. Every month and every year that goes by, we find out more positive things about it. Medicinal marijuana has been demonized through the years but obviously this plant has a great deal of positive attributes, and it’s also a renewable resource. Being a cash crop, marijuana is bad for the pharmaceutical industry. Is Big Pharma pressuring the government to continue to deny sick people access? If so, that’s truly a crime against American citizens. And as Ventura writes: “Our government won’t do the right thing and legalize marijuana unless we the people demand it, because there are so many people within our government on the payroll, all thanks to the War on Drugs." Jesse Ventura’s Marijuana Manifesto calls for an end to the War on Drugs. Just because something is illegal, that doesn’t mean it goes away, it just means that criminals run it. Legalizing marijuana and marijuana dispensaries will serve to rejuvenate our pathetic economy, and just might make people a little happier. Ventura’s book will show us all how we can take our country back.

Fire Strike 7/9


Paul 'Bommer' Grahame - 2010
    He's an elite army JTAC (Joint Terminal Attack Controller- pronounced 'jay-tack') - a specially trained warrior responsible for directing Allied air power with high-tech precision. Commanding Apache gunships, A10 tank-busters, F15s and Harrier jets, he brings down devastating fire strikes against the attacking Taliban, often danger close to his own side. Due to his specialist role, Sergeant Grahame usually operates in the thick of the action, where it's at its most fearsome and deadly. Conjuring the seemingly impossible from apparently hopeless situations, soldiers in battle rely on the skill and bravery of their JTAC to enable them to win through in the heat of the danger zone. Fire Strike 7/9 tells the story of Bommer Grahame and his five-man Fire Support Team on their tour of Afghanistan. Patrolling deep into enemy territory, they were hunted and targeted by the Taliban, shot at, blown-up, mortared and hit by rockets on numerous occasions. Under these conditions Sergeant Grahame notched up 203 confirmed enemy kills, making him the difference between life and death both for his own troops and the Taliban.

Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science's First Family


Shelley Emling - 2012
    Her affair with a younger and married man drew the enmity of a xenophobic French establishment, who denied her entry to the Academy of Sciences and tried to expel her from France. But she was determined to live life how she saw fit, and passed on her resilience to her daughters. Emling draws on personal letters released by Curie's only granddaughter to show how Marie influenced her daughters yet let them blaze their own paths. Irene followed her mother's footsteps into science and was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission. Eve traveled the world as a foreign correspondent and then moved on to humanitarian missions.Emling also shows how Curie, following World War I, turned to America for help. Few people know about Curie's close friendship with American journalist Missy Meloney, who arranged speaking tours across the country for Marie and Eve and Irene. Months on the road, charming audiences both large and small, endeared the Curies to American women and established a lifelong relationship with the United States that formed one of the strongest connections of Marie's life. Without the financial support of American women, Marie might not have been able to go on with her research.Continuing the family story into the third generation, Emling also interviews Marie Curie's granddaughter Helene Joliot-Curie, who is an accomplished physicist in her own right. She reveals why her grandmother was a lot more than just a scientist and how Marie's trips to America forever changed her. Factually rich, personal and original, this is an engrossing story about the most famous woman in science that rips the cover off the myth and reveals the real person, friend, and mother behind it.

Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself


Jill Biden - 2019
    senator Joe Biden when he called her out of the blue to ask her on a date.Growing up, Jill had wanted two things: a marriage like her parents'--strong, loving, and full of laughter--and a career. An early heartbreak had left her uncertain about love, until she met Joe. But as they grew closer, Jill faced difficult questions: How would politics shape her family and professional life? And was she ready to become a mother to Joe's two young sons?She soon found herself falling in love with her three "boys," learning to balance life as a mother, wife, educator, and political spouse. Through the challenges of public scrutiny, complicated family dynamics, and personal losses, she grew alongside her family, and she extended the family circle at every turn: with her students, military families, friends and staff at the White House, and more.This is the story of how Jill built a family--and a life--of her own. From the pranks she played to keep everyone laughing to the traditions she formed that would carry them through tragedy, hers is the spirited journey of a woman embracing many roles.Where the Light Enters is a candid, heartwarming glimpse into the creation of a beloved American family, and the life of a woman at its center.

Madame Curie: A Biography


Ève Curie - 1937
    Written by Curie’s daughter, the renowned international activist Eve Curie, this biography chronicles Curie’s legendary achievements in science, including her pioneering efforts in the study of radioactivity and her two Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. It also spotlights her remarkable life, from her childhood in Poland, to her storybook Parisian marriage to fellow scientist Pierre Curie, to her tragic death from the very radium that brought her fame. Now updated with an eloquent, rousing introduction by best-selling author Natalie Angier, this timeless biography celebrates an astonishing mind and a extraordinary woman’s life.

That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor


Anne Sebba - 2011
    Historian Anne Sebba has written the first full biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, by a woman which attempts to understand this fascinating and enigmatic American divorcee who nearly became Queen of England.

Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography


Margaret Thatcher - 2013
    Now following her death in 2013, this is her account of her remarkable life.Beginning with her upbringing in Grantham, she goes on to describe her entry into Parliament. Rising through the ranks of this man’s world, she led the Conservative Party to victory in 1979, becoming Britain's first woman prime minister.Offering a riveting firsthand version of the critical moments of her premiership – the Falklands War, the miners' strike, the Brighton bomb and her unprecedented three election victories, the book reaches a gripping climax with an hour-by-hour description of her dramatic final days in 10 Downing Street.Margaret Thatcher's frank and compelling autobiography stands as a powerful testament to her influential legacy.

Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale


Gillian Gill - 2004
    We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain’s health-care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, acclaimed author Gillian Gill tells the story of this richly complex woman and her extraordinary family.Born to an adoring wealthy, cultivated father and a mother whose conventional facade concealed a surprisingly unfettered intelligence, Florence was connected by kinship or friendship to the cream of Victorian England’s intellectual aristocracy. Though moving in a world of ease and privilege, the Nightingales came from solidly middle-class stock with deep traditions of hard work, natural curiosity, and moral clarity. So it should have come as no surprise to William Edward and Fanny Nightingale when their younger daughter, Florence, showed an early passion for helping others combined with a precocious bent for power. Far more problematic was Florence’s inexplicable refusal to marry the well-connected Richard Monckton Milnes. As Gill so brilliantly shows, this matrimonial refusal was at once an act of religious dedication and a cry for her freedom–as a woman and as a leader. Florence’s later insistence on traveling to the Crimea at the height of war to tend to wounded soldiers was all but incendiary–especially for her older sister, Parthenope, whose frustration at being in the shade of her more charismatic sibling often led to illness. Florence succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. But at the height of her celebrity, at the age of thirty-seven, she retired to her bedroom and remained there for most of the rest of her life, allowing visitors only by appointment.Combining biography, politics, social history, and consummate storytelling, Nightingales is a dazzling portrait of an amazing woman, her difficult but loving family, and the high Victorian era they so perfectly epitomized. Beautifully written, witty, and irresistible, Nightingales is truly a tour de force.From the Hardcover edition.

Open Book : the life and death of Amy Winehouse


Andy Morris - 2011
    Amy lived a rock-star lifestyle to the max, replacing an addiction to drugs with a battle against alcohol. When she died, aged 27, she joined a long list of musicians whose lives had been tragically cut short at the same age - the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison. She burst onto the scene with her debut album, "Frank," in 2003. But it was her follow-up, "Back To Black," in 2006 that won her millions of fans right around the world as she won five Grammy Awards for the album. Her chart success, though, would always be measured against a personal life full of trauma. She wrote "Back To Black" about Blake Fielder-Civil, who she married in 2007. But they spent little time together as a married couple as Blake was sent to prison. Theirs was a stormy romance, and despite divorcing they would remain in love with each other until she died. There were always plenty of other men in Amy's life, though. In the end she died alone in her bed. A bodyguard kept her protected from the outside world, but nobody could protect her from herself...

Napoleon: A Life


Andrew Roberts - 2014
    Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times. Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century. An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.

Diana: Story of a Princess


Tim Clayton - 2001
    Based on the groundbreaking ITV/The Learning Channel documentary series, and drawn from years of research and dozens of interviews with friends and associates speaking on the record for the first time, Diana contains never-before-revealed information and stunning insights about the beloved -- and largely misunderstood -- Princess of Wales.From claims that Diana was ready to leave Charles just weeks before the wedding to her lifelong battle against depression, from world-exclusive interviews with Diana's beau James Hewitt and her "surrogate mother-in-law" Shirley Hewitt to details about the unconventional "arrangements" in the royal household -- between Diana and James, Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles -- Diana is an honest, objective, and unparalleled biography.With thirty-two photographs -- including several never before published -- Diana shows all facets of this fascinating woman: her magic, her manipulations, her dazzling public persona, and her place in her people's hearts and history.

The French Chef in America: Julia Child's Second Act


Alex Prud'Homme - 2016
    Now, Alex Prud'homme, Child's great-nephew and My Life in France co-author, vividly recounts the myriad ways in which she profoundly shaped how we eat today. He shows us Child in the aftermath of the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, suddenly finding herself America's First Lady of French Food and under considerable pressure to embrace her new mantle. We see her dealing with difficult colleagues and the challenges of fame, ultimately using her newfound celebrity to create what would become a totally new type of food television. Every bit as entertaining, inspiring, and delectable as My Life in France, the book uncovers the Julia Child beyond her "French Chef" persona and reveals her second act to have been as groundbreaking and adventurous as her first.