Southern Memoirs

In 1560, General Pedro de Ursua led an expedition through the Amazon in search of El Dorado. Three months later, Ursua was murdered. His replacement, Fernando de Guzman, was also murdered. Emerging from the chaos was the Biscayan Lope de Aguirre, who turned away from El Dorado and led his men to Peru to overthrow the royal forces and declare independence from the Spanish Crown. When Aguirre was finally killed, the aftermath was astonishing: hundreds dead, entire towns depopulated, and a nascent revolution quashed.

The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa. The 26-year-old white American Fulbright scholar was brutally murdered on August 25, 1993, during the final, fiery days of apartheid by a mob of young black men in a township outside Cape Town. Her parents' forgiveness of two of her killers became a symbol of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. Justine van der Leun decided to introduce the story to an American audience. But as she delved into the case, the prevailing narrative started to unravel.

No matter how hard she tries, Ellen Burns will never be Scarlett O'Hara. As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen, she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans.

This audiobook tells the story of the Brown family of Caswell County, NC, and their journey over four generations, captured in short stories, vignettes, and whimsical narrative glimpses. The Brown family’s journey began two generations earlier with my grandmother’s grandmother, Queen Evans, who was kidnapped in Africa and brought to North Carolina as a slave on a plantation of a White slave owner. One of the many duties of Queen, the seven-year-old enslaved girl, was to serve as a “foot-warmer”.

Suffused with her much-loved warmth and wit, Emma John's memoir follows her moving and memorable journey to master one of the hardest musical styles on earth - and to find her place in an alien world. Emma had fallen out of love with her violin when a chance trip to the American South introduced her to bluegrass music. Classically trained, highly strung and wedded to London life, Emma was about as country as a gin martini. So why did it feel like a homecoming?

Many veterans of war, upon their return home, choose to never speak about their time serving in the military, hoping to put it behind them and forget. But some veterans don’t hesitate to share their stories and experiences with anyone who will listen. Whether talking about it is their way of coping with what they witnessed and endured, an effort to pass on to the next generation a small slice of history, or an attempt to preserve the memories for themselves, doesn’t really matter.

After an arduous overland journey, Levi Scott and his son John arrived in Oregon City in November 1844. Scott joined the Jesse Applegate's 1846 expedition seeking a better, safer way through the Cascades to the Willamette Valley. Their new southern route wound through the Umpqua Valley, three mountain ranges, and the Black Rock Desert before meeting the established California Trail.

Featured on an enormously popular 20/20 segment and the real-life inspiration for the cinematic classic Fly Away Home, this heartwarming story tells of the late William Lishman, a reclusive sculptor, who adopted a gaggle of geese, flew with them in an ultralight glider, and actually taught them to migrate—earning himself the nickname "Father Goose".

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family - a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.

In Tallulah, first published in 1952 and a New York Times bestseller for twenty-six weeks, Bankhead's literary voice is as lively and forthright as her public persona. She details her childhood and adolescence, discusses her dedication to the theater, and presents amusing anecdotes about her life in Hollywood, New York, and London. Along with a searing defense of her lifestyle and rambunctious habits, she provides a fiercely opinionated, wildly funny account of American stage at a time when the movies were beginning to cast theater into eclipse.

La de De Rokha es una historia llena de piezas extraviadas que Álvaro Bisama reconstruye de forma admirable. Cómo fue armándose su clan y familia, la fulminante historia de amor con Winétt, la guerrilla literaria en la que disparó sin piedad, su soledad como escritor, sus viajes por el Chile rural, sus inolvidables celebraciones, su compleja adhesión al Partido Comunista, el relato de sí mismo que construyó en su obra, las muertes trágicas que enlutaron sus días, entre otras circunstancias, dibujan aquí no solo la vida del poeta, también un momento histórico.

En 2008, Txema Guijarro pidió una excedencia en Telefónica, y viajó a Latinoamérica para participar como asesor demoscópico de los candidatos de izquierda en los procesos electorales de Paraguay y El Salvador. Tras acumular experiencia política, pasó a ser analista de la Cancillería de Relaciones Exteriores del Gobierno ecuatoriano de Rafael Correa. El analista describe, desde el punto de vista de un testigo privilegiado, la fenomenal tormenta política, judicial y mediática que enfrentó al Gobierno ecuatoriano de Rafael Correa con Estados Unidos y Reino Unido.

Sir Walter Ralegh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth. She showered him with estates and political appointments. He envisioned her becoming empress of a universal empire. She gave him the opportunity to lead the way. In Walter Ralegh, Alan Gallay shows that, while Ralegh may be best known for founding the failed Roanoke colony, his historical importance vastly exceeds that enterprise. Inspired by the mystical religious philosophy of hermeticism, Ralegh led English attempts to colonize in North America, South America, and Ireland.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

This is a summary with key takeaways and analysis of Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, television star Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up as a mixed-race child.

Robert Falcon Scott and the men of his polar expedition were heroes of their age, enduring tremendous hardships to further the reputation of the empire they served. But they were also husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Now for the first time, and with unprecedented access to family archives, Katherine MacInnes retells the story of the race for the South Pole from the perspective of the women whose lives would be forever changed by it, five women who offer a window into a lost age.

This is the life story of Pierre Charette, who became a key figure in the war on drugs in the United States and Europe. His adventures span a heart-pounding 33 years as a police officer, undercover detective, federal DEA agent. It includes some of the most famous cases ever developed by this agent. His investigative ability and imagination took him into the French criminal underworld, behind the Iron Curtain and all over the planet. He supervised, and with his agent solved the largest cocaine conspiracy in US history.

En la misma línea de sus trabajos anteriores, Jorge Baradit construye siete perfiles de personajes de la historia chilena considerados díscolos, incómodos o derechamente peligrosos para statu quo de sus épocas. En este audiolibro desfilan Arturo Fernández Vial, Manuel Rodríguez, Águeda Monasterio, Luis Emilio Recabarren, Francisco Bilbao, Ramón Freire y Pedro Aguirre Cerda: personajes de origines tan disímiles, pero que comparten - de diversas formas - el rótulo de agitadores o transgresores.

Tras el rotundo éxito de William Ospina con Pa' que se acabe la vaina, Enrique Serrano escribe aquí su propia visión del pasado y el futuro del país desde una acera ideológica distinta y con un resultado igualmente notable.

In the enormous literature of the Second World War, there are surprisingly few accounts of fighting in the southwest Pacific, fewer still by common infantrymen. This memoir, written with a simple and direct honesty that is rare indeed, follows a foot soldier’s career from basic training to mustering out. It takes the listener into the jungles and caves of New Guinea and the Philippines during the long campaign to win the war against Japan.