Sex Pistols: The Inside Story


Fred Vermorel - 1978
    The complete account of the Sex Pistols saga.

Paddle Your Own Canoe


Robert Baden-Powell - 1939
    Contents: Observation and Deduction; Self-Education; On Not Being a Sily Ass; Common Sense; Resourcefulness; Endurance; On Being Accurate; Patience; Gratitude; Courtesy; Goodwill; Honour; Keeping You Nerve; Courage; Keeping Your Pecker Up; Humour; Don't Swank; On 'Sticking it Out"; How To Be Fit; The Duty of Service; Helpfulness; Responsibility; Self-Sacrifice.

Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide


Karen Kilgariff - 2019
    Includes special bonus material!Sharing never-before-heard stories ranging from their struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, Karen and Georgia irreverently recount their biggest mistakes and deepest fears, reflecting on the formative life events that shaped them into two of the most followed voices in the nation.In Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen and Georgia focus on the importance of self-advocating and valuing personal safety over being ‘nice’ or ‘helpful.’ They delve into their own pasts, true crime stories, and beyond to discuss meaningful cultural and societal issues with fierce empathy and unapologetic frankness.

Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality


Jacob Tomsky - 2012
    Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&M's out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge.Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.

Dad Is Fat


Jim Gaffigan - 2013
    Though he grew up in a large Irish-Catholic family, Jim was satisfied with the nomadic, nocturnal life of a standup comedian, and was content to be "that weird uncle who lives in an apartment by himself in New York that everyone in the family speculates about." But all that changed when he married and found out his wife, Jeannie "is someone who gets pregnant looking at babies."Five kids later, the comedian whose riffs on everything from Hot Pockets to Jesus have scored millions of hits on YouTube, started to tweet about the mistakes and victories of his life as a dad. Those tweets struck such a chord that he soon passed the million followers mark. But it turns out 140 characters are not enough to express all the joys and horrors of life with five kids, so hes' now sharing it all in Dad Is Fat.From new parents to empty nesters to Jim's twenty-something fans, everyone will recognize their own families in these hilarious takes on everything from cousins ("celebrities for little kids") to growing up in a big family ("I always assumed my father had six children so he could have a sufficient lawn crew") to changing diapers in the middle of the night ("like The Hurt Locker but much more dangerous") to bedtime (aka "Negotiating with Terrorists").Dad is Fat is sharply observed, explosively funny, and a cry for help from a man who has realized he and his wife are outnumbered in their own home.

When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine


Monica Wood - 2012
    The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on a father’s wages from the Oxford Paper Company. Until the sudden death of Dad, when Mum and the four closely connected Wood girls are set adrift. Funny and to-the-bone moving, When We Were the Kennedys is the story of how this family saves itself, at first by depending on Father Bob, Mum’s youngest brother, a charismatic Catholic priest who feels his new responsibilities deeply. And then, as the nation is shocked by the loss of its handsome Catholic president, the televised grace of Jackie Kennedy—she too a Catholic widow with young children—galvanizes Mum to set off on an unprecedented family road trip to Washington, D.C., to do some rescuing of her own. An indelible story of how family and nation, each shocked by the unimaginable, exchange one identity for another.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life


Pamela Smith Hill - 2007
    Using Wilder’s stories, personal correspondence, an unpublished autobiography, and experiences in South Dakota, Hill has produced a historical-literary biography of the famous and much-loved author. Following the course of Wilder’s life, and her real family’s journey west, Hill provides a context, both familial and literary, for Wilder’s writing career.Laura Ingalls Wilder examines Wilder’s inspirations as a writer, particularly her tumultuous, but ultimately successful, professional and personal relationship with her daughter—the hidden editor—Rose Wilder Lane. Wilder produced her timeless classics with the help of, but not reliance upon, her daughter’s editorial insights. Over the course of more than thirty years, Lane and Wilder engaged in a dynamic working relationship, shifting between trust, distrust, and respect. Hill argues that they differed in their visions of the path Wilder’s career should follow, but eventually Lane’s editing brought out the best of her mother’s writing, and allowed her creativity, expression, and experiences to shine through.

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.

Breaking Free: How I Escaped My Father-Warren Jeffs-Polygamy, and the FLDS Cult


Rachel Jeffs - 2017
    No one in this radical splinter sect of the Mormon Church was more powerful or terrifying than its leader Warren Jeffs—Rachel’s father.Living outside mainstream Mormonism and federal law, Jeffs arranged marriages between under-age girls and middle-aged and elderly members of his congregation. In 2006, he gained international notoriety when the FBI placed him on its Ten Most Wanted List. Though he is serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, Jeffs’ iron grip on the church remains firm, and his edicts to his followers increasingly restrictive and bizarre.In Breaking Free, Rachel blows the lid off this taciturn community made famous by John Krakauer’s bestselling Under the Banner of Heaven to offer a harrowing look at her life with Warren Jeffs, and the years of physical and emotional abuse she suffered. Sexually assaulted, compelled into an arranged polygamous marriage, locked away in "houses of hiding" as punishment for perceived transgressions, and physically separated from her children, Rachel, Jeffs’ first plural daughter by his second of more than fifty wives, eventually found the courage to leave the church in 2015. But Breaking Free is not only her story—Rachel’s experiences illuminate those of her family and the countless others who remain trapped in the strange world she left behind.A shocking and mesmerizing memoir of faith, abuse, courage, and freedom, Breaking Free is an expose of religious extremism and a beacon of hope for anyone trying to overcome personal obstacles.

Stronger


Jeff Bauman - 2014
    When he realized he couldn't, he asked for a pad and paper and wrote down seven words: Saw the guy. Looked right at me, setting off one of the biggest manhunts in the country's history.Just thirty hours before, Jeff had been at the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon cheering on his girlfriend, Erin, when the first bomb went off at his feet. As he was rushed to the hospital, he realized he was severely injured and that he might die, but he didn't know that a photograph of him in a wheelchair was circulating throughout the world, making him the human face of the Boston Marathon bombing victims, or that what he'd seen would give the Boston police their most important breakthrough.In Stronger, Jeff describes the chaos and terror of the bombing itself and the ongoing FBI investigation in which he was a key witness. He takes us inside his grueling rehabilitation, and discusses his attempt to reconcile the world's admiration with his own guilt and frustration. . Brave, compassionate, and emotionally compelling, Jeff Bauman's story is not just his, but ours as well.

The Stovepipe


Bonnie E. Virag - 2011
    Over the next fourteen years, the children are split up and reunited multiple times, always hoping to find one another again. By luck or providence, the four sisters spend the majority of their lives together working on a tobacco farm and living in an attic, where the stovepipe offers warmth, comfort, and news from the outside world. Surviving some of the worst torments a child can know, Bonnie and her sisters form an unbreakable bond.In an unflinching voice, Virag's memoir engrosses readers with not only the darkness that she endured but, more important, the siblings' ability to create a sense of light.This unforgettable story is informed by Bonnie's recollections, remembrances from her sisters, and the official records of the Children's Aid Society.

An Unseemly Man: My Life as a Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast


Larry Flynt - 1996
    He is this century's most ardent advocate of First Amendment rights, a man whose landmark Supreme Court cases are studied by every law student in America. He is the founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, a journal often described as tasteless, crude, scatological, and gynecologically explicit - to which he would reply, "Good!" For Flynt, tastelessness is "a necessary tool in challenging preconceived notions in a world where people are afraid to discuss their attitudes, prejudices, and misconceptions." Born in the hills of Kentucky, in the poorest county in America, Flynt became a teenage runaway, an underage recruit in both the army and the navy, a bootlegger, a scam artist, a bar owner, the proprietor of a string of go-go clubs, an evangelical Christian, an atheist, and eventually a millionaire pornographer and publisher. A prodigious sexual athlete, Flynt was shot down in his prime by an assailant's bullet and paralyzed from the waist down. Wheelchair bound and racked by years of searing pain, he became a pain-medicine junkie and habitue of America's courtrooms. Persecuted by the self-righteous Charles Keating, prosecuted by ambitious district attorneys, sued by moral crusaders like Jerry Falwell, and hounded by the government, Flynt forged a blazing trail through the American legal system. Remarkably, Larry Flynt has never told his story before. This highly personal and reflective account will surprise everyone, offend a few, and entertain many.

What Disturbs Our Blood: A Son's Quest to Redeem the Past


James Fitzgerald - 2010
    John Fitzgerald was a Canadian hero. He founded Connaught Labs, saved untold lives with his vaccines and transformed the idea of public health in Canada and the world. What so darkened his reputation that his memory has been all but erased?A sensitive, withdrawn boy is born into the gothic house of his long dead grandfather, a brilliant yet tormented pathologist of Irish blood and epic accomplishment whose memory has been mysteriously erased from public consciousness. As the boy watches his own father - also an eminent doctor - plunge into a suicidal psychosis, he intuits, as the psychiatrists do not, some unspeakable secret buried like a tumour deep in the multi-generational layers of the family unconscious. Growing into manhood, he knows in his bones that he must stalk an ancient curse before it stalks him. To set himself free, he must break the silence and put words to the page. His future lies in the past.

Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House


Alyssa Mastromonaco - 2017
    Alyssa Mastromonaco worked for Barack Obama for almost a decade, and long before his run for president. From the then-senator's early days in Congress to his years in the Oval Office, she made Hope and Change happen through blood, sweat, tears, and lots of briefing binders.But for every historic occasion-meeting the queen at Buckingham Palace, bursting in on secret climate talks, or nailing a campaign speech in a hailstorm-there were dozens of less-than-perfect moments when it was up to Alyssa to save the day. Like the time she learned the hard way that there aren't nearly enough bathrooms at the Vatican.Full of hilarious, never-before-told stories, WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? is an intimate portrait of a president, a book about how to get stuff done, and the story of how one woman challenged, again and again, what a "White House official" is supposed to look like. Here Alyssa shares the strategies that made her successful in politics and beyond, including the importance of confidence, the value of not being a jerk, and why ultimately everything comes down to hard work (and always carrying a spare tampon).Told in a smart, original voice and topped off with a couple of really good cat stories, WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? is a promising debut from a savvy political star.

Through My Eyes


Tim Tebow - 2011
    Written with Nathan Whitaker, the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Quiet Strength, with Tony Dungy, Through My Eyes gives fans a first look into the heart of an athlete whose talent and devotion have made him one of the most provocative figures in football.