New English Memoires

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York - the revolutionary hero, back from the dead, at the dawn of the great Irish immigration to America.

When Rachel Bertsche first moves to Chicago, she’s thrilled to finally share a zip code, let alone an apartment, with her boyfriend. But shortly after getting married, Bertsche realizes that her new life is missing one thing: friends. Sure, she has plenty of BFFs—in New York and San Francisco and Boston and Washington, D.C. Still, in her adopted hometown, there’s no one to call at the last minute for girl talk over brunch or a reality-TV marathon over a bottle of wine. Taking matters into her own hands, Bertsche develops a plan....

The first comprehensive collection of writings by the Black Panther Party founder and revolutionary icon of the Black liberation era, The Huey P. Newton Reader combines now-classic texts ranging in topic from the formation of the Black Panthers, African Americans and armed self-defense, and FBI infiltration of civil rights groups with never-before-published writings from the Black Panther Party archives and Newton’s private collection, including articles on President Nixon, prison martyr George Jackson, Pan-Africanism, affirmative action, Cuba, and more.

From the authors of the New York Times best-selling The Heart of Everything That Is and Halsey's Typhoon comes the dramatic untold story of a daredevil bomber pilot and his misfit crew who fly their lone B-17 into the teeth of the Japanese Empire in 1943, engage in the longest dogfight in history, and change the momentum of the war in the Pacific - but not without making the ultimate sacrifice.

A nurse aide position in the local maternity annexe at the age of sixteen gave Julie a love for being with women during labour and birth and caring for mothers and their babies. Life could not have been happier until the tragic death of her own baby in the first hour of life led to depression, loneliness and despair. This true story tells of Julie’s struggle to triumph over adversity and follows her journey to fulfil her dream and become the midwife she was born to be.

After decades as a long-haul trucker, Finn Murphy left the road and settled in Boulder County, Colorado. Before long he noticed that many of his neighbors were captivated by the prospect of vast riches in “the Hemp Space.” When hemp was legalized, after eighty years in federal exile, Colorado became the center of a hemp growing and processing boom. Figuring he’d harvest some of that easy money, Murphy bought a thirty-six-acre farm. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything…

“Playing changes”, in jazz parlance, has long referred to an improviser’s resourceful path through a chord progression. Playing Changes boldly expands on the idea, highlighting a host of significant changes - ideological, technological, theoretical, and practical - that jazz musicians have learned to navigate since the turn of the century. Nate Chinen, who has chronicled this evolution firsthand throughout his journalistic career, vividly sets the backdrop, charting the origins of jazz historicism and the rise of an institutional framework for the music.

Steven Adams overcame extreme odds to become a first-round prospect in the 2013 NBA draft. From there he signed a major contract with the Oklahoma City Thunder - making him New Zealand's highest-paid athlete ever - and went on to forge a reputation for his intense, physical style of basketball. Adams takes you inside the draft process from the fascinating whirlwind tour of pre-draft workouts with dozens of teams to the draft itself where dreams are made or dashed and the Gatorade bottles on every table are glued shut.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. Until now, the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here.

For the first time, Nicole Curtis, the star of the megahit HGTV and DIY Network show Rehab Addict, reveals her private struggles, her personal victories, and the inspiring lessons we can all learn from them. Nicole Curtis is the tough, soulful, charismatic dynamo who, for the past 20 years, has worked tirelessly to restore historical houses, often revitalizing neighborhoods in the process.

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.

It is impossible to overstate the cultural significance of the four men described in Don Lattin's The Harvard Psychedelic Club. Huston Smith, tirelessly working to promote cross-cultural religious and spiritual tolerance. Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, inspiring generations with his mantra "be here now". Andrew Weil, undisputed leader of the holistic medicine revolution. And, of course, Timothy Leary, the charismatic, rebellious counterculture icon and LSD guru.

While highlighting his 20-year career in the Secret Service during which he protected Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, US Secret Service Agent Rufus W. Youngblood describes the complexities, risks, and constant tensions involved in protecting America's chief executive. Along with several humorous anecdotes, archival audio inserts enhance this personalized journey through a critical period in American history.

With brutal honesty and his trademark take-no-prisoners humor, Tracy tells the story of his rise to fame, with all its highs and its many lows - from the very public battles with alcohol and diabetes that threatened both his career and his life to the private and poignant end of his 20-year marriage. In his singularly warped and brilliant way, he muses on family, love, sex, race, politics, ambition, and what it takes to bring the funny.

At a distance of 20 centuries, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth can seem impossibly obscure - indeed, some skeptics even question whether he existed. And yet we have an eyewitness account of his life, death, and resurrection from one of his closest companions, the sherman Simon Bar-Jonah, better known as the Apostle Peter. Peter's disciple Mark wrote down the apostle's account of the life of Jesus as he told it to the first Christians in Rome. The vivid, detailed, unadorned prose of the Gospel of Mark conveys the unmistakable immediacy of a firsthand account.

The Kremlin intrigues, the private worlds of the Soviet Empire's ruling class, Radzinsky thrillingly brings them to life. And the riddle of that most cold-blooded of leaders, a man for whom nothing was sacred in his pursuit of absolute might, and perhaps the greatest mass murderer in Western history, is solved.

This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.

This compelling counter-narrative to the familiar story of the Puritans combines a rich understanding of the period with a close reading of early texts to bring the contentious Morton to life. This volume sheds new light on the tumultuous formative decades of the American experience.

Human exploration of Mars is the most ambitious and exciting scientific goal of the 21st century. Few people know as much about this fascinating planet as Dr. Larry Crumpler. As one of the long-term planning leads for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, he helped control the daily communications between NASA and the rovers.

Growing up, Lisa Nikolidakis tried to make sense of her childhood, which was scarred by abuse, violence, and psychological terrors so extreme that her relationship with her father was cleaved beyond repair. Having finally been able to leave that relationship behind, surviving meant forgetting. For years, “I’m fine” was a lie Nikolidakis repeated. Then, on her twenty-seventh birthday, Nikolidakis’s father murdered his girlfriend and her daughter, and turned the gun on himself.