Personal Biographies

The Man Who Quit Money is an account of how one man learned to live, sanely and happily, without earning, receiving, or spending a single cent. Suelo doesn't pay taxes, or accept food stamps or welfare. He lives in caves in the Utah canyonlands, forages wild foods and gourmet discards. He no longer even carries an I.D. Yet he manages to amply fulfill not only the basic human needs - for shelter, food, and warmth - but, to an enviable degree, the universal desires for companionship, purpose, and spiritual engagement.

Why is religion still around in the 21st century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions. Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, tells the story of his life in his own words. In this opening volume, Grant covers his early years, including his time at the U.S. military academy at West Point and his service during the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor. Grant wrote his memoirs in order to rescue his family from debt and they were published as he lay dying of throat cancer. Today, they are an American classic.

In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known - and controversial - writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end, fits into none of them. The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal.

For decades, Kathleen Buhle chose to play the role of the good wife, beginning when, as a naïve young woman from a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago, she met the dashing son of a senator in Oregon. Within months, Kathleen found herself pregnant and engaged. Determined to build her family on a foundation of love, Kathleen was convinced her and Hunter’s commitment to each other could overcome any obstacle. But when Hunter’s drinking evolved into dependency, she was forced to learn how irrevocably a marriage can fall apart under the merciless power of addiction.

In his book To Catch a Predator, Chris Hansen, the on-air correspondent for one of Dateline's most successful series, looks deeper into the world of child predators. The book expands beyond the Dateline series to include more commentary from psychological and criminal experts about the origins and methods of child predators, and includes substantive advice for both parents and children on how to protect kids who use the Internet.

As Jenny Lawson’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken (in the Best Possible Way), Jenny brings listeners along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way. With people experiencing anxiety and depression now more than ever, Jenny humanizes what we all face in an all-too-real way, reassuring us that we’re not alone and making us laugh while doing it.

Since the publication of their successful book Real Life, Real Love, DJ Envy and Gia, collectively known as the Caseys, have constantly been inundated with questions from people all around the world wondering how they create and maintain the patience, focus, and time to raise happy and successful children after all these years. In Real Life, Real Family, they dive deeper into how they’ve created a family unit that’s filled with unwavering love and share with listeners the ways they manage to raise low-stress children while nurturing a solid and thriving partnership together.

The shocking first true account from one of the young girls who lived through and survived the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. In the summer of 2014, the Rotherham sex abuse scandal sent shockwaves through the nation. A report revealed that since the 1990s, up to 1,400 young girls in the town had been regularly abused by sex gangs, predominantly comprised of Pakistani men.

Helene Hadsell was "the woman who won every contest prize she desired". In Contesting: The Name It & Claim It Game, she shares her winning secrets in the vibrant, warm, and folksy manner that was uniquely her.

Based partly on the author's experience, partly on her in-depth interviews, and partly on a questionnaire she developed with psychologist Holly Barrett to which almost 600 women responded, Father Loss provides the clearest portrait yet of a very special group of women. As a group, they express their insecurities ("Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to love a man totally...because that would mean I didn't love my father anymore." - Leslie).

Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart shows for the first time how four of the biggest names on Wall Street - Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine - created the greatest insider-trading ring in financial history and almost walked away with billions - until a team of downtrodden detectives triumphed over some of America's most expensive lawyers to bring this powerful quartet to justice.

From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of 15 adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots.

After Eric Davis spent over 16 years in the military, including a decade in the SEAL teams, his family was more than used to his absence on deployments and secret missions that could obscure his whereabouts for months at a time. Without a father figure in his own life since the age of 15, Eric was desperate to maintain the bonds he'd fought so hard to forge when his children were young - particularly with his son, Jason, because he knew how difficult it was to face the challenge of becoming a man on one's own.

When you've come out the other side of the bizarre, twisted world of the Playboy mansion, where do you land? If you're Holly Madison...there's no place like Las Vegas. After making the sudden decision to reclaim her life, Holly broke free from the sheltered, deceptive confines of the mansion (which meant exiting a hit television show) and was determined to start her life over...from scratch. Without the security of a job or a relationship, she set out to reinvent herself on no one's terms but her own.

Raising an Entrepreneur presents 76 stories from the mothers of some of the most successful entrepreneurs today. Entrepreneurs are the new rock stars - they're the ones who turn their passions into ingenious projects, because they're willing to risk failure to make their dreams come true.

Allison Holker was just eighteen when she found fame as a contestant on the reality TV show So You Think You Can Dance. Over the next several years, she had her first child, built a successful career as a professional dancer despite the industry being hostile to working moms, and fell in love with and married fellow dancer Stephen Boss, the former hype man and DJ of The Ellen DeGeneres Show known for his charisma and relentless positivity

At the end of her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government....

Using the written word as her witness statement, Jessica Willis Fisher tells a lacerating story of finding her voice after two decades of silence and an unforgettable story of risk and faith.

A stand-up comedian beloved for her combination of feisty wit and Southern charm, Pierce knows all too well that life is funny—until it’s not. But she also knows that it will become funny again. She’s held on to that hope—and that promise—through tragedy and triumph. And now she’s finally ready to tell her full story. In Life Is Funny until It’s Not, Pierce recounts a preacher’s daughter’s childhood filled with heartbreak, including abuse, her parents’ divorce, and the sudden deaths of her two sisters in the span of two years.