A powerful and inspiring memoir of a young Yazidi who served as a U.S. combat interpreter but was later forced to flee into the mountains of Iraq to avoid the ISIS slaughter of his peopleShaker Jeffrey's life has been an odyssey of courage, cunning, and desperation. His journey began as a fatherless Iraqi farm boy. As a child he hung out with American troops and practiced his English. Soon he was helping gather information about terrorists, becoming one of the youngest combat interpreters to work for the United States government, even attracting the notice of General Petraeus. When he was barely sixteen, ISIS overran his Yazidi community and slaughtered most of its people. He narrowly escaped to the mountains with the remnants of his community. But with incredible daring, he became a valuable go-between, informing the U.S. military of the plight of the trapped Yazidis. Time and again he risked his life, going into enemy territory disguised as an ISIS fighter to mount daring rescue operations. Shaker saved over 1,000 civilians from ISIS, including hundreds of girls forced into sex slavery, although he was unable to save his own fiance from a terrible fate. Shaker's powerful and inspiring narrative offers a human face to the people and places caught in the crosshairs of a borderless conflict that has come to define our age.
Da Capo Press
|
9780306922831
|
Hardcover
How to Fall in Love with Anyone
By Catron, Mandy Len
An insightful, charming, and absolutely fascinating memoir from the author of the popular New York Times essay, "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This," (one of the top five most popular New York Times pieces of 2015) explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy.What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer. In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists' research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she'd read about - where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions - and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
|
9781501137440
|
Hardcover
The Man He Became
By Tobin, James
Here, from James Tobin, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, is the story of the greatest comeback in American political history, a saga long buried in half-truth, distortion and myth - Franklin Roosevelt's ten-year climb from paralysis to the White House. In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, Roosevelt was the brightest young star in the Democratic Party. One day he was racing his children around their summer home. Two days later he could not stand up. Hopes of a quick recovery faded fast. "He's through," said allies and enemies alike. Even his family and close friends misjudged their man, as they and the nation would learn in time. With a painstaking reexamination of original documents, James Tobin uncovers the twisted chain of accidents that left FDR paralyzed; he reveals how polio recast Roosevelt's fateful partnership with his wife, Eleanor; and he shows that FDR's true victory was not over paralysis but over the ancient stigma attached to the crippled.
Simon & Schuster; First edition
|
9780743265157
|
Hardcover
Hell and Other Destinations
By Albright, Madeleine
Six-time New York Times bestselling author and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright - one of the world's most admired and tireless public servants - reflects on the final stages of one's career, and working productively into your later decades in this revealing, funny, and inspiring memoir.In 2001, when Madeleine Albright was leaving office as America's first female secretary of state, interviewers asked her how she wished to be remembered. "I don't want to be remembered," she answered. "I am still here and have much more I intend to do. As difficult as it might seem, I want every stage of my life to be more exciting than the last."In that time of transition, the former Secretary considered the possibilities: she could write, teach, travel, give speeches, start a business, fight for democracy, help to empower women, campaign for favored political candidates, spend more time with her grandchildren.
Harper
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9780062802255
|
Hardcover
My Berlin Kitchen
By Weiss, Luisa
The Wednesday Chef cooks her heart out finds her way home and shares her recipes with usIt takes courage to turn your life upside down especially when everyone is telling you how lucky you are But sometimes what seems right can feel deeply wrong My Berlin Kitchen tells the story of how one thoroughly confused kitchen-mad perfectionist broke off her engagement to a handsome New Yorker quit her dream job and found her way to a new life a new man and a new home in Berlinmdashone recipe at a timeLuisa Weiss grew up with a divided heart shuttling back and forth between her father in Boston and her Italian mother in Berlin She was always yearning for homemdashuntil she found a new home in the kitchen Luisa started clipping recipes in college and was a cookbook editor in New York when she decided to bake roast and stew her way through her by then unwieldy collection over the course of one tumultuous year The blog she wrote to document her adventures in and out of the kitchen The Wednesday Chef soon became a sensation But she never stopped hankering for BerlinLuisa will seduce you with her stories of foraging for plums in abandoned orchards battling with white asparagus at the tail end of the season orchestrating a three-family Thanksgiving in Berlin and mending her broken heart with batches and batches of impossible German Christmas cookies Fans of her award-winning blog will know the happy ending but anyone who enjoyed Julie and Julia will laugh and cheer and cook alongside Luisa as she takes us into her heart and tells us how she gave up everything only to find love waiting where she least expected it.
Viking Adult; 1 edition
|
9780670025381
|
Book
Ordinary Light
By Smith, Tracy K
National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her "extraordinary range and ambition" (The New York Times Book Review) : a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter.The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God's plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
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9780307962669
|
Print book
Those Angry Days
By Olson, Lynne
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND KIRKUS REVIEWSFrom the acclaimed author of Citizens of London comes the definitive account of the debate over American intervention in World War IIa bitter, sometimes violent clash of personalities and ideas that divided the nation and ultimately determined the fate of the free world. At the center of this controversy stood the two most famous men in America President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who as unofficial leader and spokesman for Americas isolationists emerged as the presidents most formidable adversary. Their contest of wills personified the divisions within the country at large, and Lynne Olson makes masterly use of their dramatic personal stories to create a poignant and riveting narrative.
Shadow on the Mountain
By Jeffrey, Shaker
A powerful and inspiring memoir of a young Yazidi who served as a U.S. combat interpreter but was later forced to flee into the mountains of Iraq to avoid the ISIS slaughter of his peopleShaker Jeffrey's life has been an odyssey of courage, cunning, and desperation. His journey began as a fatherless Iraqi farm boy. As a child he hung out with American troops and practiced his English. Soon he was helping gather information about terrorists, becoming one of the youngest combat interpreters to work for the United States government, even attracting the notice of General Petraeus. When he was barely sixteen, ISIS overran his Yazidi community and slaughtered most of its people. He narrowly escaped to the mountains with the remnants of his community. But with incredible daring, he became a valuable go-between, informing the U.S. military of the plight of the trapped Yazidis. Time and again he risked his life, going into enemy territory disguised as an ISIS fighter to mount daring rescue operations. Shaker saved over 1,000 civilians from ISIS, including hundreds of girls forced into sex slavery, although he was unable to save his own fiance from a terrible fate. Shaker's powerful and inspiring narrative offers a human face to the people and places caught in the crosshairs of a borderless conflict that has come to define our age.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone
By Catron, Mandy Len
An insightful, charming, and absolutely fascinating memoir from the author of the popular New York Times essay, "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This," (one of the top five most popular New York Times pieces of 2015) explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy.What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer. In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists' research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she'd read about - where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions - and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.
The Man He Became
By Tobin, James
Here, from James Tobin, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, is the story of the greatest comeback in American political history, a saga long buried in half-truth, distortion and myth - Franklin Roosevelt's ten-year climb from paralysis to the White House. In 1921, at the age of thirty-nine, Roosevelt was the brightest young star in the Democratic Party. One day he was racing his children around their summer home. Two days later he could not stand up. Hopes of a quick recovery faded fast. "He's through," said allies and enemies alike. Even his family and close friends misjudged their man, as they and the nation would learn in time. With a painstaking reexamination of original documents, James Tobin uncovers the twisted chain of accidents that left FDR paralyzed; he reveals how polio recast Roosevelt's fateful partnership with his wife, Eleanor; and he shows that FDR's true victory was not over paralysis but over the ancient stigma attached to the crippled.
Hell and Other Destinations
By Albright, Madeleine
Six-time New York Times bestselling author and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright - one of the world's most admired and tireless public servants - reflects on the final stages of one's career, and working productively into your later decades in this revealing, funny, and inspiring memoir.In 2001, when Madeleine Albright was leaving office as America's first female secretary of state, interviewers asked her how she wished to be remembered. "I don't want to be remembered," she answered. "I am still here and have much more I intend to do. As difficult as it might seem, I want every stage of my life to be more exciting than the last."In that time of transition, the former Secretary considered the possibilities: she could write, teach, travel, give speeches, start a business, fight for democracy, help to empower women, campaign for favored political candidates, spend more time with her grandchildren.
My Berlin Kitchen
By Weiss, Luisa
The Wednesday Chef cooks her heart out finds her way home and shares her recipes with usIt takes courage to turn your life upside down especially when everyone is telling you how lucky you are But sometimes what seems right can feel deeply wrong My Berlin Kitchen tells the story of how one thoroughly confused kitchen-mad perfectionist broke off her engagement to a handsome New Yorker quit her dream job and found her way to a new life a new man and a new home in Berlinmdashone recipe at a timeLuisa Weiss grew up with a divided heart shuttling back and forth between her father in Boston and her Italian mother in Berlin She was always yearning for homemdashuntil she found a new home in the kitchen Luisa started clipping recipes in college and was a cookbook editor in New York when she decided to bake roast and stew her way through her by then unwieldy collection over the course of one tumultuous year The blog she wrote to document her adventures in and out of the kitchen The Wednesday Chef soon became a sensation But she never stopped hankering for BerlinLuisa will seduce you with her stories of foraging for plums in abandoned orchards battling with white asparagus at the tail end of the season orchestrating a three-family Thanksgiving in Berlin and mending her broken heart with batches and batches of impossible German Christmas cookies Fans of her award-winning blog will know the happy ending but anyone who enjoyed Julie and Julia will laugh and cheer and cook alongside Luisa as she takes us into her heart and tells us how she gave up everything only to find love waiting where she least expected it.
Ordinary Light
By Smith, Tracy K
National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her "extraordinary range and ambition" (The New York Times Book Review) : a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter.The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God's plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America.
Those Angry Days
By Olson, Lynne
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND KIRKUS REVIEWSFrom the acclaimed author of Citizens of London comes the definitive account of the debate over American intervention in World War IIa bitter, sometimes violent clash of personalities and ideas that divided the nation and ultimately determined the fate of the free world. At the center of this controversy stood the two most famous men in America President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who as unofficial leader and spokesman for Americas isolationists emerged as the presidents most formidable adversary. Their contest of wills personified the divisions within the country at large, and Lynne Olson makes masterly use of their dramatic personal stories to create a poignant and riveting narrative.