Book picks similar to
The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox by Chief Red Fox
non-fiction
biography
native-american
memoir
Never Settle: Sports, Family, and the American Soul
Marty Smith - 2019
The guy who visits Nick Saban's lake house and somehow gets Coach to jump in the lake. The guy who sits down with Dale Jr. at Daytona to talk through tears about his miraculous return to racing. The guy who interviews Tiger Woods, Tim Tebow, Peyton Manning and Jimmie Johnson -- the guy who gets paid to live the fantasy of every sports fan in America.Never Settle is the funny but oh, it's true story of how Marty got here, and a revealing look at his journey. Never Settle includes all the best stories and behind-the-scenes moments from Marty's wild life, covering topics including: college football, racing, fathers and sons, how sports can bring us together, and how it all goes back to growing up on a farm and playing high school ball in Pearisburg, Virginia.
Tomorrow I'm Dead
Bun Yom - 2010
As his party grew, Pol Pot formed a resistance army in the jungles of Cambodia, known as the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians). In 1970, U.S. military forces entered Cambodia in an attempt to expel North Vietnamese rebels who had fled into Cambodia. Over the next five years the North Vietnamese were successfully driven out of major Cambodian cities, along with several hundred-thousand Cambodian peasants, most of whom fled to the city of Phnom Penh for refuge. Many of these North Vietnamese escaped to the surrounding jungles and allied themselves with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. As the Khmer Rouge strengthened, their plan to overtake Phnom Penh intensified. Having witnessed their friends and families die during the Vietnam War, struggling Cambodian peasants, desperate for hope, began to believe in the social utopia promised by Pol Pot; promises he said would bring them peace and a better life. Pol Pot’s army, which was now well-supplied by communist China, grew exponentially and soon gained the allegiance of many of these displaced Cambodians. By 1975, U.S. troops had withdrawn from Cambodia, leaving the people defenseless against Pol Pot’s army, the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge soon controlled Phnom Penh and much of southern Cambodia. With no military force to oppose them, the Khmer Rouge initiated one of the most atrocious genocide campaigns the world has ever known. At this time many of the well-educated, wealthy Cambodians were residing in modern cities near the Thailand border. It was in these cities and surrounding fields and jungles, that the Khmer Rouge, fueled by fierce contempt for the wealthy and educated, unleashed their greatest brutality. These were the worst of the Killing Fields. It was here that fourteen-year-old Bun (pronounced “boon”) Yom was taken from his parents and forced to work as a slave in conditions so inhumane it seemed only death could free him.The Khmer Rouge’s brutality would soon rival Nazi Germany’s attempt to eradicate the Jews from Europe as the single most horrifying act of violence ever committed against a nation’s people. Over the next four years, two million people (one-fifth of the Cambodian population) were enslaved and either murdered, starved or worked to death. After three years in the Killing Fields, seventeen-year-old Bun Yom escaped from the Khmer Rouge and became a “Freedom Fighter.” Using his wisdom, selfless courage and unprecedented compassion, Bun rescued thousands of Cambodian people and soon become the Cambodian Freedom Army’s greatest soldier.
Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope
Shirin Ebadi - 2006
Best known in this country as the lawyer working tirelessly on behalf of Canadian photojournalist, Zara Kazemi - raped, tortured and murdered in Iran - Dr. Ebadi offers us a vivid picture of the struggles of one woman against the system. The book movingly chronicles her childhood in a loving, untraditional family, her upbringing before the Revolution in 1979 that toppled the Shah, her marriage and her religious faith, as well as her life as a mother and lawyer battling an oppressive regime in the courts while bringing up her girls at home. Outspoken, controversial, Shirin Ebadi is one of the most fascinating women today. She rose quickly to become the first female judge in the country; but when the religious authorities declared women unfit to serve as judges she was demoted to clerk in the courtroom she had once presided over. She eventually fought her way back as a human rights lawyer, defending women and children in politically charged cases that most lawyers were afraid to represent. She has been arrested and been the target of assassination, but through it all has spoken out with quiet bravery on behalf of the victims of injustice and discrimination and become a powerful voice for change, almost universally embraced as a hero. Her memoir is a gripping story - a must-read for anyone interested in Zara Kazemi's case, in the life of a remarkable woman, or in understandingthe political and religious upheaval in our world.
Audition: A Memoir
Barbara Walters - 2008
After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.Barbara Walters’s perception of the world was formed at a very early age. Her father, Lou Walters, was the owner and creative mind behind the legendary Latin Quarter nightclub, and it was his risk-taking lifestyle that gave Barbara her first taste of glamour. It also made her aware of the ups and downs, the insecurities, and even the tragedies that can occur when someone is willing to take great risks, for Lou Walters didn’t just make several fortunes—he also lost them. Barbara learned early about the damage that such an existence can do to relationships—between husband and wife as well as between parent and child. Through her roller-coaster ride of a childhood, Barbara had a close companion, her mentally challenged sister, Jackie. True, Jackie taught her younger sister much about patience and compassion, but Barbara also writes honestly about the resentment she often felt having a sister who was so “different” and the guilt that still haunts her.All of this—the financial responsibility for her family, the fear, the love—played a large part in the choices she made as she grew up: the friendships she developed, the relationships she had, the marriages she tried to make work. Ultimately, thanks to her drive, combined with a decent amount of luck, she began a career in television. And what a career it has been! Against great odds, Barbara has made it to the top of a male-dominated industry. She was the first woman cohost of the Today show, the first female network news coanchor, the host and producer of countless top-rated Specials, the star of 20/20, and the creator and cohost of The View. She has not just interviewed the world’s most fascinating figures, she has become a part of their world. These are just a few of the names that play a key role in Barbara’s life, career, and book: Yasir Arafat, Warren Beatty, Menachem Begin, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Roy Cohn, the Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, Katharine Hepburn, King Hussein, Angelina Jolie, Henry Kissinger, Monica Lewinsky, Richard Nixon, Rosie O’Donnell, Christopher Reeve, Anwar Sadat, John Wayne . . . the list goes on and on.Barbara Walters has spent a lifetime auditioning: for her bosses at the TV networks, for millions of viewers, for the most famous people in the world, and even for her own daughter, with whom she has had a difficult but ultimately quite wonderful and moving relationship. This book, in some ways, is her final audition, as she fully opens up both her private and public lives. In doing so, she has given us a story that is heartbreaking and honest, surprising and fun, sometimes startling, and always fascinating.
Journey to Mindfulness: The Autobiography of Bhante G.
Henepola Gunaratana - 1998
Ordained at twelve, he would eventually become the first Buddhist chaplain at an American university, the founder of a retreat center and monastery, and a bestselling author. Here, Bhante G. lays bare the often-surprising ups and downs of his seventy-five years, from his boyhood in Sri Lanka to his decades of sharing the insights of the Buddha, telling his story with the "plain-English" approach for which he is so renowned.
Conversations With Myself
Nelson Mandela - 2010
Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has bestowed his entire extant personal papers, which offer an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.A singular international publishing event, Conversations with Myself draws on Mandela's personal archive of never-before-seen materials to offer unique access to the private world of an incomparable world leader. Journals kept on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle of the early 1960s; diaries and draft letters written in Robben Island and other South African prisons during his twenty-seven years of incarceration; notebooks from the postapartheid transition; private recorded conversations; speeches and correspondence written during his presidency--a historic collection of documents archived at the Nelson Mandela Foundation is brought together into a sweeping narrative of great immediacy and stunning power. An intimate journey from Mandela's first stirrings of political consciousness to his galvanizing role on the world stage, Conversations with Myself illuminates a heroic life forged on the front lines of the struggle for freedom and justice.While other books have recounted Mandela's life from the vantage of the present, Conversations with Myself allows, for the first time, unhindered insight into the human side of the icon.
Self-Portrait
Gene Tierney - 1979
Recreating the glamour of Hollywood in the 1940s, the actress tells of the roles she played, the rich and famous men who have pursued her, the failure of her first marriage, and her struggle against mental illness
Moonshiner's Daughter
Mary Judith Messer - 2010
Her father, an ardent moonshiner when he wasn't in prison, and her mother, often showing mental illness from an earlier brain injury, raised their four children in some of the grimmest circumstances that you will ever read about. Messer eventually escaped her extreme living conditions by going to live with a family as their mother's helper outside of Washington, DC. She then moved to New York City to join her oldest sister who had fled an abusive arranged marriage when she was fifteen and left behind a young son. These two teenage girls, uneducated but determined, found freedom from their Appalachian abuse yet encountered a culture and some inhabitants who provided scars even so. Messer's memoir is told through the eyes and with the words of a barely educated child and young woman yet their meaning and her descriptions are clear as a mountain stream. Messer changed the names of many people and places she wrote about to protect her still living family members and herself as well. In the final chapter, Messer shares one legacy from her father....he even taught the infamous "Popcorn" Sutton of Maggie Valley how to be a moonshiner when Popcorn was a teenager. The moonshiner's daughter did survive and ultimately thrive. This is her story. You won't be able to put it down.
Louie, Take a Look at This!: My Time with Huell Howser
Luis Fuerte - 2017
He lives with his wife in Rialto, CA. Writer David Duron is a writer and longtime television-news producer who lives in Yucaipa, CA.
Diana
Sarah Bradford - 2006
Yet throughout her brief life, Diana was plagued by rumor, innuendo, and scandal. With exclusive access to those closest to Diana, Sarah Bradford now casts aside the gossip and lies and takes us to the very heart of the royal family to separate the myth from the truth of the Diana years. Diana follows the old-fashioned courtship that saw her captivate the Prince of Wales; the transformation of an unworldly teenager into an emotionally demanding, but adoring, wife and mother; the damage caused by the ever-present specter of Camilla Parker Bowles; and the eventual collapse of a doomed marriage once hailed as the ultimate fairy tale. Bradford examines Diana’s lovers and her relationships with her staff, friends, and family, as well as her children, husband, and the royal family. She also charts Diana’s profound commitment to her charities and her rare connection to and empathy with all those she met; the struggle to find an identity after the separation from Charles; and the final, complicated year as a single woman. With the authority missing from all previous accounts, as well as remarkable new sources and firsthand accounts, acclaimed royal biographer Sarah Bradford delivers a complex and explosive study of one of the most popular figures of the twentieth century.
Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist's Wife
Irene Spencer - 2007
Yet Irene managed to overcome these obstacles to seek a life that she believed would be better for her and her children. She made a bold step into the "outside world" and into a freedom she never knew existed.The details of her harrowing experience will appall, astonish, and in the end, greatly inspire. This dramatic story reveals how far religion can be stretched and abused, and how one woman and her children found their way into truth and redemption.
Crazy Horse: A Life
Larry McMurtry - 1999
This superb biography looks back across more than 120 years at the life and death of this great Sioux warrior who became a reluctant leader at the Battle of Little Bighorn. With his uncanny gift for understanding the human psyche, Larry McMurtry animates the character of this remarkable figure, whose betrayal by white representatives of the U.S. government was a tragic turning point in the history of the West. A mythic figure puzzled over by generations of historians, Crazy Horse emerges from McMurtry’s sensitive portrait as the poignant hero of a long-since-vanished epoch.
Love and Hatred: The Troubled Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy
William L. Shirer - 1994
Shirer's new book - written in his ninth decade - explores the passionate, highly charged, and extraordinary lives of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy. It is a compelling illumination both of the nature of genius and of the universal problems of love, sex, and marriage - themes that Tolstoy played out in his great fiction and that haunted him in his tangled domestic life. Rich in anecdotes, wise, full of sweeping history, and imbued with Shirer's profound knowledge of literature and life, Love and Hatred ranks beside such works as Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra and Nigel Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage as a masterly, intuitive, and sympathetic exploration of the love/hate relationship between two famous, bigger-than-life people. Beginning in 1862, when Tolstoy committed the blunder of asking his young bride to read his diaries of his bachelor life so there should be no secrets between them, and ending with his tragic flight from home (and marriage) in 1910 while the whole world waited for news of him, Love and Hatred tells the story of a great romance between two people who could live neither together nor apart - a romance that exhausted and obsessed them both, and that forms the basis for much of Tolstoy's work. The final book of William L. Shirer's long and brilliant career, it is - appropriately - a masterly re-creation of a time, of two extraordinary people, and of the very nature of love, marriage, and old age.
Courting Justice: From NY Yankees v. Major League Baseball to Bush v. Gore, 1997-2000
David Boies - 2004
16 pages of photos.