Human Biography

Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the 20th century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up - usually without due process - simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan", lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness.

American Oz is a rollicking, gritty, adventurous story of life in the secretive subculture of traveling carnivals. You'll never see your state fair or street festival the same way again. Comerford writes a bold, inspiring true story of a year working behind the scenes with the colorful characters and legends of carnivals. He shares stories of freaks, a carnival pimp, a tramp gold miner, and the last king of the sideshows.

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.

Do the names Elizabeth Freeman or Charlotte Forten Grimke ring any bells? Have you ever heard of Sarah Mapps Douglass or Maria Fearing? What about Sara Griffith Stanley, Lucy Craft Laney, and Maria Stewart? While these names may not be familiar to you, these women lived faithful and influential lives in a world that was filled with injustice. They worked to change laws, built schools, spoke to thousands, and shared the Gospel all around the world. And while history books may have forgotten them, their stories can teach us so much about how we can live today.

"You can love a dog so much, but you can never love them as much as you will miss them." A witty, heart-warming, and touching tale of a man, and man's best friend, brought together by a moment of fate. The Life and Adventures of Bert will make you smile, laugh, and shed a tear. This irresistibly charming memoir captures hearts and imaginations as we experience Bert's life from escaping a wretched existence, forming unbreakable loving bonds, to becoming one of Twitter's most loved dogs. You'll love this life-affirming book about an ordinary dog from humble beginnings because the love of a ...

Are you tired of juggling anxious thoughts and daily mishaps—like life’s one giant blooper reel? Meet your new playbook for mental health: Half Crazy, Fully Human by Felicity Hartwell. Backed by real psychological insights—and a hearty dose of humor—this book dares to ask: what if laughing at life’s chaos is the best way to conquer it? From playful strategies that tame those intrusive thoughts to reimagining every “failure” as your own comedic outtake, Felicity Hartwell shows how a little laughter and a lot of self-awareness can turn meltdown moments into stepping stones.

When Breezy, as she came to call herself, hit the streets of Chicago as a prostitute in 1973 she was barely a teenager. But she was pretty and funny as hell, and determined to support her daughters and make a living. For the next 25 years, she moved across the country, finding new pimps, parties, drugs, and endless, profound heartache. And she also — astonishingly — managed to find the strength to break from a brutal world and not only save herself but save future Breezys.

Human trafficking, particularly in the context of sex trafficking, represents a grotesque violation of human rights that transcends borders and societal norms. It involves the recruitment, transportation, and exploitation of individuals through coercion, deception, or abuse of power. Victims are often lured with false promises of employment, education, or a better life, only to find themselves trapped in a cycle of abuse and degradation.

In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for 25 years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars - the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive.

Yeonmi Park was not dreaming of freedom when she escaped from North Korea. She didn't even know what it meant to be free. All she knew was that she was running for her life, that if she and her family stayed behind they would die - from starvation, or disease, or even execution.

Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy. Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them.

In 1949, Dorothy Vaughan became the first African American woman to lead a team at NASA's Langley Research Center. Her work as a mathematician was an important part of helping the United States explore space. Learn more about Vaughan's life as a famous mathematician!

Professor David Wilson has spent his professional life working with violent men - especially men who have committed murder. Aged 29 he became, at that time, the UK's youngest ever prison governor in charge of a jail, and his career since then has seen him sat across a table with all sorts of killers: sometimes in a tense interview; sometimes sharing a cup of tea (or something a little stronger); sometimes looking them in the eye to tell them that they are psychopaths.

The award-winning New York Times columnist and former foreign correspondent turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own family - most notably his mother's - in order to understand more profoundly the nature of modern Jewish experience. Through his emotionally lucid prose, we relive the anomie of European Jews after the Holocaust, following them from Lithuania to South Africa, England, the United States, and Israel.

Believing she understands the source of her unhappiness, Minda proposes to her husband, Jack, that they open their marriage. At first, it seems to work like she hoped, bringing new energy to their union and novelty to their lives. Although she’s having a hard time being entirely honest with Jack about what she wants, and she has still never admitted why.

What does it really mean to be a man? In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life - one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

The Work of Human Hands is a timeless medical journey through pioneering surgeon Dr. Hardy Hendren's legendary operating room that the Los Angeles Times called "impossible to forget". Set at Boston Children's Hospital, which U.S. News & World Report consistently rates as America's best children's hospital, The Work of Human Hands is available now for the first time in audio. The new edition includes a fresh introduction and a greatly expanded epilogue updating readers on Hendren and patient Lucy Moore today.

The first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi has inspired millions around the globe through her work as a human rights lawyer defending women and children against a brutal regime in Iran. Now Ebadi tells her story of courage and defiance in the face of a government out to destroy her, her family, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves.

Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but they grew up on neighboring farms in the hinterlands of Afghanistan. By the time they were young teenagers, Zakia, strikingly beautiful and fiercely opinionated, and Ali, shy and tender, had fallen in love. Defying their families, sectarian differences, cultural conventions, and Afghan civil and Islamic law, they ran away together only to live under constant threat from Zakia's large and vengeful family, who have vowed to kill her to restore the family's honor.

In a story that has never been told, Going to the Mountain tells the tale of how Nelson Mandela steered his grandson Ndaba from his reckless youth (shirking school, fighting in gangs) to his maturation into a fully realized and principled adulthood - all as an often-single parent in his years after political imprisonment and through his landmark presidency of South Africa. On a scale both intimate and epic, the book will detail the gripping arc of Ndaba's own extraordinary journey, which mirrors that of South Africa's.