English Biography

The 15th century saw the longest and bloodiest series of civil wars in British history. The crown of England changed hands five times as two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty fought to the death for the right to rule. Now, celebrated historian Dan Jones describes how the longest reigning British royal family tore itself apart until it was finally replaced by the Tudors. Some of the greatest heroes and villains in history were thrown together in these turbulent times.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson rocked the literary world with his mind-bending style of Gonzo journalism. First published in 1966, Hell’s Angels is Thompson’s up-close and personal look at the infamous motorcycle gang during the time when its moniker was most feared.

Best-selling author Bryan Burrough recently made a shocking discovery: The small town of Temple, Texas, where he had grown up, had harbored a dark secret. One of his high school classmates, Danny Corwin, was a vicious serial killer. In this chilling tale, Burrough raises important questions of whether serial killers can be recognized before they kill or rehabilitated after they do. It is also a story of Texas politics and power that led the good citizens of the town of Temple to enable a demon who was their worst nightmare.

At the age of 22, Jennifer Worth left her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in postwar London’s East End slums. The colorful characters she met while delivering babies all over London - from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lived to the woman with 24 children who couldn't speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city’s seedier side - illuminate a fascinating time in history.

The close knit community in San Miguel de Allende Mexico was plagued by a string of sophisticated kidnappings for nearly a decade. When the police finally made an arrest the townspeople were shocked by who was accused of masterminding the criminal enterprise. It's everyone's favorite neighbor and a pillar of the community, Ramon Guerra. Except Ramon isn't who he says he is.

Gold Dust Woman gives "the gold standard of rock biographers" (the Boston Globe) his ideal topic: Nicks' work and life are equally sexy and interesting, and Davis delves deeply into each, unearthing fresh details from new, intimate interviews and interpreting them to present a rich new portrait of the star. Just as Nicks (and Lindsay Buckingham) gave Fleetwood Mac the "shot of adrenaline" they needed to become real rock stars - according to Christine McVie - Gold Dust Woman is vibrant with stories and with a life lived large and hard.

Coming Home to Myself is the result of that emotional journey, a song of personal discovery that taught Wynonna Judd to love not just what she does, but who she is. From a truly exceptional woman comes an unexpected memoir of survival, strength, hope, and forgiveness, filled with an exultant and empowering message certain to resonate with those who have dreamed of finding themselves, and who only needed the courage and inspiration to begin their own journey.

In 2011, when she was in her late 50s, beloved author and journalist Joyce Maynard met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn't mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of. Then, just after their one-year wedding anniversary, her new husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

James Keene had it all: cars, girls, houses up and down the Gold Coast. But behind his well-connected star athlete façade was a money-obsessed drug dealer desperate to make the big score to get him out of the business. When he was sentenced to prison, it seemed the only lessons he would learn would be about navigating convict society. Instead, he was offered a chance to regain his freedom in return for going undercover in the nation’s highest security prison for the criminally insane.

This work offers a firsthand account of the Battle of Tora Bora and an insider's look at the extraordinary nature of America's supersecret counterterrorist unit---an elite and mysterious group known as Delta Force.

In 1851, Olive Oatman was a 13-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own.

As a young man, Randall Woodfield had it all; he was a star athlete with good looks and an award-winning student. Working in the swinging West Coast bar scene, he had more than his share of women. But he wanted more than just sex. An appetite for unspeakable violent acts led him to cruise the I-5 highway through California to Washington, leaving a trail of victims along the way. As the list of the dead grew, the police mobilized to stop a twisted killer who had 44 known deaths to his name.

Of the 44 presidents who have led the United States, nine made mistakes that permanently scarred the nation. Which nine? Brion McClanahan, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers and The Founding Fathers' Guide to the Constitution, will surprise listeners with his list, which he supports with exhaustive and entertaining evidence.

The author graduates from an elite university and enters the submarine service in the mid-1980s when rhetoric between the US and USSR threatens to turn the Cold War hot. He encounters an unforgiving world where submarines hunt each other unseen and unheralded in the ocean depths and in which minor mistakes can result in catastrophe. On four classified missions to the Mediterranean Sea, the North Atlantic, the Barents Sea, and the North Pole, he gradually and painfully learns the trade of a nuclear submarine officer in a world few people know of and even fewer have experienced. These ...

George S. Patton was a general who achieved greatness in his field by contradicting his own nature. A cavalryman steeped in romantic military tradition, he nevertheless pulled a reluctant American military into the most advanced realms of highly mobile armored warfare. An autocratic snob, Patton created unparalleled rapport and loyalty with the lowliest private in his command.

He was the billionaire financier and close confidant of presidents, prime ministers, movie stars, and British royalty, the mysterious self-made man who rose from blue-collar Brooklyn to the heights of luxury. But while he was flying around the world on his private jet and hosting lavish parties at his private island in the Caribbean, he also was secretly masterminding an international child sex ring-one that may have involved the richest and most influential men in the world.

World War II tail gunner Gene Moran fell four miles through the sky without a parachute and lived. Captured by the Germans, he survived a harrowing eighteen months as a prisoner of war, including a six-hundred-mile death march in 1945 across Central Europe. When Gene returned home, he kept those memories locked up for nearly seventy years. His nine children knew little of their dad's war story. But when John, a young history teacher, learns of Gene's amazing fall, he's desperate to learn more. Finally, Gene agrees.

Getting shot in the chest as a rookie ATF agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 miles per hour, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols - these are just a few of the high-adrenaline experiences Jay Dobyns recounts in this action-packed, hard to imagine, but true story of how he infiltrated the legendary Hells Angels.

He was one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history, a great natural politician who looked, and often seemed to behave, like a caricature of the red-neck Southern politico - and yet he had become, at the time of his assassination, a serious rival to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency. In this "masterpiece of American biography" ( New York Times), Huey Long stands wholly revealed, analyzed, and understood.