Vietnam: A Tale Of Two Tours


James Mooney - 2018
    This is a detailed description of the life of one helicopter pilot and what he did in the air, on the ground, with the people during his first tour in the Central Highlands while assigned to and flying for an Infantry Division, the Cambodia Invasion, and what it was really like living in Vietnam. The second tour was in the Saigon area with an Air Cavalry Troop and recounts live for Americans at the final months of the War, final cease fire events, prisoner exchanges, life on the ground, Saigon, the final flight of combat troops to leave Vietnam and the end of American combat operations and involvement. For those who want to know what it was like to be there -- without the hidden agenda, embellishment, or hype normally associated with the Vietnam War

God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales


Penn Jillette - 2011
    A scathingly funny reinterpretation of the Ten Commandments from the larger, louder half of world-famous magic duo Penn and Teller reveals an atheist's experience in the world: from performing on the Vegas strip with Siegfried and Roy to children and fatherhood to his ongoing dialogue with proselytizers of the Christian Right and the joys of sex while scuba-diving, Penn has an outrageous sense of humor and a brilliantly entertaining opinion on, well, anything you care to think of.

The Wild Heart of Stevie Nicks


Rob Sheffield - 2019
    Best-selling author and Rolling Stone columnist Rob Sheffield explores the music and artistry of the rock goddess who has kept generations of music lovers totally bewitched and spellbound, with such classic rock hits as "Rhiannon" and "Gypsy". With her recent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (the only female artist to be honored for both her group and solo work), Nicks, who turns 70 this month, is being celebrated for living the seasons of her life with ferocious wit, fierce honesty, unstoppable talent, and a lot of rock & roll. Drawing from Rolling Stone magazine’s extensive archives, and his long time appreciation of Nicks, Sheffield shares the stories behind the best-selling records and the spitfire 1997 Fleetwood Mac reunion show that put the band back on top of the charts—and why Stevie Nicks still speaks to us today. A dynamic, revelatory sketch of the one-of-a-kind icon, The Wild Heart of Stevie Nicks is a portrait as revealing as it is dazzling, as human as it is pure magic

Hemingway in Love: His Own Story


A.E. Hotchner - 2015
    Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade.In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway divulged to Hotchner the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley, the real part of each literary woman he'd later create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. And he told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which he stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice; of midnight champagne with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human error, and life after lost love. This is Hemingway as few have known him: humble, thoughtful, and full of regret.To protect the feelings of Ernest's wife, Mary - also a close friend - Hotch kept the conversations to himself for decades. Now he tells the story as Hemingway told it to him. "Hemingway in Love "puts you in the room with the master as he remembers the definitive years that set the course for the rest of his life and dogged him until the end of his days.

The Liars' Club


Mary Karr - 1995
    In this funny, devastating, haunting memoir and with a raw and often painful honesty, she looks back at life with a painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip over into psychosis, and a hard-drinking, fist-swinging father who liked nothing better than to spin tales with his cronies at the Liars' Club.

Working Class Boy


Jimmy Barnes - 2016
    But long before Cold Chisel and 'Barnesy', long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life.Working Class Boy is a powerful reflection on a traumatic and violent childhood, which fuelled the excess and recklessness that would define, but almost destroy, the rock'n'roll legend. This is the story of how James Swan became Jimmy Barnes. It is a memoir burning with the frustration and frenetic energy of teenage sex, drugs, violence and ambition for more than what you have.Raw, gritty, compassionate, surprising and darkly funny, Jimmy Barnes's childhood memoir is at once the story of migrant dreams fulfilled and dashed. After arriving in Australia in the summer of 1962, things went from bad to worse for the Swan family - Dot, Jim and their six kids. The scramble to manage in the tough northern suburbs of Adelaide in the 60s would take its toll on the Swans as dwindling money, too much alcohol and fraying tempers gave way to violence and despair. This is the story of a family's collapse, but also of a young boy's dream to escape the misery of the suburbs with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a rock'n'roll band and get out of town for good.

Me: Stories of My Life


Katharine Hepburn - 1991
    Now Miss Hepburn breaks her long-kept silence about her private life in this absorbing and provocative memoir.A NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book of the YearA Book-of-the-Month-Club Main Selection

The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star


Nikki Sixx - 2007
    It follows him during the year he plunged to rock bottom and his courageous decision to pick himself up and start living again."

Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl


Donald Sturrock - 2010
    But the man behind the mesmerizing stories has remained largely an enigma. A single-minded adventurer and an eternal child who gave us the iconic Willy Wonka and Matilda Wormwood, Dahl was better known during his lifetime for his blunt opinions on taboo subjects—he was called an anti-Semite, a racist and a misogynist—than for his creative genius. His wild imagination, dark humor and linguistic elegance were less than fully appreciated by critics and readers alike until after his death.Granted unprecedented access to the Dahl estate's extraordinary archives—personal correspondence, journals and interviews with family members and famous friends—Donald Sturrock draws on a wealth of previously unpublished materials that informed Dahl's writing and his life. It was a life filled with incident, drama and adventure: from his harrowing experiences as an RAF fighter pilot and his work in wartime intelligence, to his many romances and turbulent marriage to the actress Patricia Neal, to the mental anguish caused by the death of his young daughter Olivia. Tracing a brilliant yet tempestuous ascent toward notoriety, Sturrock sheds new light on Dahl's need for controversy, his abrasive manner and his fascination for the gruesome and the macabre.A remarkable biography of one of the world's most exceptional writers, Storyteller is an intimate portrait of an intensely private man hindered by physical pain and haunted by family tragedy, and a timely reexamination of Dahl's long and complex literary career.

Catch a Fire: The Autobiography


Melanie B. - 2002
    Not bad for the rebellious, mixed-up girl from Leeds who is still only in her 20s. Born to a working-class mixed-race family from Leeds, Melanie B grew up feeling different from her schoolfriends. Her hyperactive energy was channelled into drama school, and in 1994 the Spice Girls were formed. The rest is history.

Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.


Rob Delaney - 2013
    He is the author of an endless stream of beautiful, insane jokes on Twitter. He is sober. He is sometimes brave. He speaks French. He loves women with abundant pubic hair and saggy naturals. He has bungee jumped off of the Manhattan Bridge. He enjoys antagonizing political figures. He listens to metal while he works out. He likes to fart. He broke into an abandoned mental hospital with his mother. He played Sir Lancelot in Camelot. He has battled depression. He is funny as s***. He cleans up well. He is friends with Margaret Atwood. He is lucky to be alive.   Read these hilarious and heartbreaking true stories and learn how Rob came to be the man he is today.

How to Ruin Everything: Essays


George Watsky - 2016
    The essays in How to Ruin Everything range from the absurd (how he became an international ivory smuggler) to the comical (his middle-school rap battle dominance) to the revelatory (his experiences with epilepsy), yet all are delivered with the type of linguistic dexterity and self-awareness that has won Watsky more than 765,000 YouTube subscribers. Alternately ribald and emotionally resonant, How to Ruin Everything announces a versatile writer with a promising career ahead.

Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir


Ezra Pound - 1916
    An enlarged edition, including thirty pages of illustrations (sculpture and drawings) as well as Pound's later pieces on Gaudier, was brought out in 1970, and is now re-issued as an ND Paperbook. The memoir is valuable both for the history of modern art and for what it shows us of Pound himself, his ability to recognize genius in others and then to publicize it effectively. Would there today be a Salle Gaudier-Brzeska in the Musée de L'Art Moderne in Paris if Pound had not championed him? Gaudier's talent was impressive and his Vorticist aesthetic important as theory, but he was killed in World War I at the age of twenty-three, leaving only a small body of work. Pound knew Gaudier in London, where the young artist had come with his companion, the Polish-born Sophie Brzeska. whose name he added to his own. They were living in poverty when Pound bought Gaudier the stone from which the famous "hieratic head" of the poet was made. Pound arranged exhibitions and for the publication of Gaudier's manifestoes in Blast and The Egoist. And he wrote and sent packages to him in the trenches, where Gaudier––a sculptor to the last––carved a madonna and child from the butt of a captured German rifle, just two days before he died.

Bowie: Loving The Alien


Christopher Sandford - 1997
    Nowhere else is the man and musician so convincingly deconstructed and so compellingly humanized.

Lust for Life


Irving Stone - 1934
    "Vincent is not dead. He will never die. His love, his genius, the great beauty he has created will go on forever, enriching the world... He was a colossus... a great painter... a great philosopher... a martyr to his love of art. "Walking down the streets of Paris the young Vincent Van Gogh didn't feel like he belonged. Battling poverty, repeated heartbreak and familial obligation, Van Gogh was a man plagued by his own creative urge but with no outlet to express it. Until the day he picked up a paintbrush.Written with raw insight and emotion, follow the artist through his tormented life, struggling against critical discouragement and mental turmoil and bare witness to his creative journey from a struggling artist to one of the world's most celebrated artists.