Family Biography

To contemporaries, the Wars of the Roses were known collectively as a "cousins' war." The series of dynastic conflicts that tore apart the ruling Plantagenet family in 15th-century England was truly a domestic drama, as fraught and intimate as any family feud before or since. As acclaimed historian Sarah Gristwood reveals in Blood Sisters, while the events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of the male leads who fought and died seeking the throne, a handful of powerful women would prove just as decisive as their kinfolks' clashing armies.

From Vanity Fair and The New York Times contributor comes a beautifully written, deeply felt memoir recounting the solo cross-country journey she made along the Ten across the American southwest: a mission to uncover both what harrowing violence may or may not have happened to her late mother, but also, to look within and discover who she herself is—where her mother ends and she begins.

Daisy is a black baby adopted into a white family in rural 1970’s England. Alienation and loss of identity dominate her childhood. After discovering she was conceived through child rape, she begins a lifelong mission to find and prosecute her birth father using the only irrefutable evidence left. Her own DNA. But justice isn’t just for her birth mother. She too, is a victim, and when the world around her doesn’t agree, she is forced to reckon with external and internal powers out of her control.

The book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell. The book is divided into three sections, marking the three villas in which the family lived on the island. Apart from Gerald (the youngest) and Larry, the family comprised their widowed mother, the gun-mad Leslie, and diet-obsessed sister Margo together with Roger the dog.

Helen Rappaport, an expert in the field of Russian history, brings you the riveting day-by-day account of the last 14 days of the Russian Imperial family, in this first of two books about the Romanovs. The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July 16 to 17, 1918, has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded.

Here is the critically acclaimed inside story, now in an expanded edition, about the rise and fall of Philadelphia's notorious Scarfo organization. Blunt and unsparing, it is a firsthand account of murder, money, and corruption told by wiseguy-turned-witness Nick Caramandi, whose testimony put Nicky Scarfo and many of his associates behind bars for the rest of their lives. In this updated edition of Blood and Honor, author George Anastasia picks up the story where he left off, filling us in on the fates of all the characters - major and minor - in recent years.

In this blistering street-level account, "Mafia survivor" Frank DiMatteo teams up with true-crime master Michael Benson to take down one of the most notorious figures in the American La Cosa Nostra. This is the real inside story of Carmine "The Snake" Persico, from his crime-filled childhood on the streets of Brooklyn to the long-term jail sentences that didn't stop him from controlling his criminal empire, with the help of his brother - the equally kill-crazy Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico.

Twelve-year-old Ji-li Jiang has brains, friends, and a bright future. Then Mao Zedong launches China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. Soon school is suspended and students are getting caught up in the fervor of Mao’s extreme politics. When Ji-li’s family is accused of capitalist crimes, all of her beautiful dreams burst like soap bubbles. Because Ji-li’s grandfather was a landlord, her family is harassed and humiliated. Their home is searched, and they live in constant fear. Nonetheless, Ji-li remains loyal to her beloved Chairman Mao....

In this intimate, haunting, literary memoir read by the author, an American icon tells her story for the first time, in her own gorgeous words - about a challenging and lonely childhood, the craft that helped her find her voice, and a powerful emotional legacy that shaped her journey as a daughter and a mother.

Set in California's lush Napa Valley and spanning four generations of a talented and visionary family, The House of Mondavi is a tale of genius, sibling rivalry, and betrayal. From 1906, when Italian immigrant Cesare Mondavi passed through Ellis Island, to the Robert Mondavi Corporation's 21st-century battle over a billion-dollar fortune, award-winning journalist Julia Flynn Siler brings to life both the place and the people in this riveting family drama.

The Kennedy wives saw history up close - and made history in some cases. They knew wealth and privilege, but we are bonded to them by losses that are our losses, too. The Kennedy women - fierce, intelligent, and very private - belong to us. Not because of their glamour but because of their grief and misfortunes. The Kennedy Wives takes an unflinching look at the women who married into the Kennedy family and their distinct roles.

Christine Brown Woolley had always dreamed of having a picture-perfect family—beautiful children, an adoring husband, and of course, a sisterhood of wives to share him with. Raised in Utah by practicing polygamists, Christine knew her life was less than normal, but that didn’t stop her from loving the full house of her childhood any less. Becoming Kody Brown’s third wife in 1994, Christine finally found the big, happy family she had hoped for.

Roger Stringer grew up in rural Mississippi, hunting and eating everything from deer to rabbits. When he had two sons, Zac and Justin, he gave them guns and took them to the woods as well. Then one day when the boys were home alone, he got a call from Zac that Justin had been shot. What follows is an intimate and gripping memoir about the shooting’s aftermath. The story moves between the perspectives of Roger and Zac as they take us through their journey of betrayal, redemption, and ultimately confrontation with a company that had kept its corruption a secret for decades.

A moving, compelling memoir about growing up and escaping the tragic legacy of mental illness, suicide, addiction, and depression in one of America's most famous families: the Hemingways.

Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too. A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most and how an innocent baby finally saved her.

The Tudors are England's most notorious royal family. But, as Leanda de Lisle's gripping new history reveals, they are a family still more extraordinary than the one we thought we knew. The Tudor canon typically starts with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 before speeding on to Henry VIII and the Reformation. But this leaves out the family's obscure Welsh origins and the ordinary man known as Owen Tudor who would fall (literally) into a queen's lap - and later her bed.

From New York Times best-selling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler, The First Family Detail tells eye-opening, behind-the-scenes stories from Secret Service agents about presidents and their families.

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said that "words are loaded pistols". In the hands of Russ Baker, they are hydrogen bombs. On each and every page of his masterpiece, Family of Secrets, he explodes the myths and lies that powerful forces have perpetrated on the American consciousness. He digs beneath the surface in a form of journalistic archeology to reveal the hidden history of one of America's most powerful families, leaving no stone unturned.

In 1920, in small-town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store". That's how Stella Suberman's father's store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee, was known locally. The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.

In 1973, Norma Cobb, her husband Lester, and their five children pulled up stakes in the lower 48 and headed north to Alaska to follow a pioneer dream of claiming land under the Homestead Act. The only land available lay north of Fairbanks near the Arctic Circle where grizzlies outnumbered humans 20 to one. In addition to fierce winters and predatory animals, the Alaskan frontier drew the more unsavory elements of society's fringes. From the beginning, the Cobbs found themselves pitted in a life or death feud with unscrupulous neighbors who would rob from new settlers.