Memoir Project

In April 2014, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter died after a long battle with cancer. David McCallum was exonerated and freed two months later, after serving 29 years in prison. This is the story of how Carter and his friend and coauthor Ken Klonsky worked for 10 years to help free the wrongfully convicted McCallum, along with a group of committed friends and professionals.

“Growing up in the Patterson Projects: A South Bronx Tale — Keeping Our Roots Alive” is a poignant collaboration by authors, offering an intimate portrayal of their experiences in the Patterson Projects of the South Bronx. With raw honesty and heartfelt storytelling, they navigate the challenges and triumphs of life in public housing, weaving a narrative that resonates with perseverance and hope.

From the East Baltimore playground courts where he earned his nickname by muggin' opponents for possession of the ball to Dunbar High School where he excelled alongside future NBA players, Muggsy Bogues set the tone in his early years for the great heights he'd reach professionally. In this new autobiography, Bogues delves deep into his life and career, reflecting on legendary battles with Michael Jordan, John Stockton, and other generational stars of ’80s and ’90s hoops.

In part one, experience the painful, tragic story of Julia's upbringing, and how she was born into the house of a cult leader in Pennsylvania. Feel her passion and energy come alive as she pursues bold, money-making ideas at a young age, eventually building a brand. Hear about the night she escaped his house, in 2012 at 21-years-old.

It has been the public's perception that Madoff investors were all extremely wealthy and all belonged to exclusive clubs. This perception has been reinforced by the media and the powers that be. The truth is, with very few exceptions, such as Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Picower and Stanley Chais, most were average, small time investors. This is their story.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American innovator, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who helped establish the contemporary rotating present (AC) electrical energy delivery system.

In 1989, Texas executed Carlos DeLuna, a poor Hispanic man with childlike intelligence, for the murder of Wanda Lopez, a convenience store clerk. His execution passed unnoticed for years until a team of Columbia Law School faculty and students found that DeLuna almost certainly was innocent. This book documents DeLuna's conviction, which was based on a single, nighttime, cross-ethnic eyewitness identification with no corroborating forensic evidence. DeLuna's defense, that another man named Carlos had committed the crime, was not taken seriously.

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives.

The remarkable story of a T-shirt company that sparked a global movement to aid people living in poverty. All his life, Derek Evans felt a spiritual pull to be a part of something greater than himself, but it wasn’t until he and a friend embarked on a transformational trip to LA’s infamous skid row that he found his true calling. They returned home with a plan to build a mission-minded business that would change the world - one T-shirt at a time.

Annita Sawyer's memoir is a harrowing, heroic, and redeeming story of her battle with mental illness, and her triumph in overcoming it. In 1960, as a suicidal teenager, Sawyer was institutionalized, misdiagnosed, and suffered through 89 electroshock treatments before being transferred, labeled as "unimproved". The damage done has haunted her life.

It's the most shocking, unknown tale of our era: a defense contractor who bribed US Navy officers with cash, prostitutes, and luxury items in return for multimillion-dollar deals. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. With exclusive access to Leonard Glenn Francis himself, Fat Leonard reveals the true story of the misogynistic men at the heart of the navy and the brave women who brought them down.

"War Diary: The Diary of Mike Rogers" is a poignant historical record that chronicles the experiences of a young boy, Mike Rogers, during World War II. The diary begins in 1939, capturing the tense atmosphere as Britain enters the war. It provides detailed daily entries that cover the significant and mundane aspects of wartime life, from the fear of air raids and the impact of rationing to personal reflections and observations of everyday occurrences.

Growing up in a trailer park, by her 21st birthday Ash was a jobless, homeless orphan with only $26 to her name. But even with the odds stacked against her, she changed her fortune forever by starting her million-dollar business from the backseat of her car. Ash gave the finger to convention, blazed her own path, and finally found work she loved. And she wants to show you how she did it.

More than thirty years have passed since The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air premiered on NBC but unlike other family sitcoms of its era, it has remained culturally relevant and beloved by new generations of fans. With fresh eyes on the show in the wake of 2022’s launch of Bel-Air, a Fresh Prince reboot on NBC’s Peacock, The Fresh Prince Project brings us never-before-told stories based on exclusive interviews with the show’s cast, creators, writers, and crew.

Prem Pradhan was a Hindu. And he was a soldier. A Gurkha in the British Royal Air Force, then commander of a tank regiment in the Indian Army. But God had other plans for his life. It wasn’t that long ago that Nepal had few known Christians. Today? Over one million. Prem Pradhan is an important part of the reason. Prem answered God’s call to take the gospel back to his home country in 1954.

How does a woman go from a normal Midwestern mom to sitting across the table from a bounty hunter? That's what Kathleen English Cadmus wondered as she took one more surreal step in her quest to find and save her teenage daughter, Laura. The beautiful baby Kathleen had adopted from Korea was on the run again, fueled by another manic episode brought on by her bipolar disorder. Having already lost her son Shawn to a tragic accident, Kathleen couldn't bear the thought that she had failed to protect another one of her children.

Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project is a short biography and history that tells the story of the man and his mission; his loves and his losses; and his rise and fall.

A memoir of second chances, healing, and how rescuing a dog rescued me Having never had a dog of his own before, Don was not prepared for what it meant to adopt one of the most behaviorally difficult rescues in the shelter. But something about Barbie, a mutt that everyone had given up on and so fearful and unresponsive that she was within days of being put down, convinced Don to open his home and his heart for the first time to a canine companion, changing both of their lives forever.

Every photograph is a frozen moment, a story waiting to be told. A wedding photograph of a secret marriage. A dapper man who may be a lost relative. Three women covered in funeral shrouds. A brother. A father. A sonogram. These are six of the seventeen that comprise an album of photographs and their stories—nonfiction short stories found and told by a group of Columbia Journalism students. Perhaps in discovering these stories you may set off to find your own photographs, and with them, the stories they tell.

The first collection of Timothy Leary's (1920-1996) selected papers and correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. The man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality, with a passion to determine what lies beyond our consciousness.