Western Biography

In 2001, at 47, Thomas DeWolf was astounded to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in American history, responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans to the Americas. His infamous ancestor, U.S. senator James DeWolf of Bristol, of Rhode Island, curried favor with President Jefferson to continue in the trade after it was outlawed.

In 1980, I was thirty years old, and my son, ten, when we traveled to Guinea, then a closed country in West Africa. My fiancé was a geologist working in a diamond exploration camp in Baoule Valley, near Kérouané. During my time there I kept a diary. Once back in the United States, I wrapped the diary in a silk scarf and tucked it away. I had had planned to return to Guinea and the diamond camp, but life took me in a different direction. I didn't open and read the diary until autumn of 2023, forty-four years later.

Lang Lang started learning to play the piano when he was three years old in Shenyang, China. Today he is one of the world's most outstanding pianists. In this engrossing life story, adapted by Michael French, Lang Lang not only recounts the difficult, often thrilling, events of his early days, but also shares his perspective on his rapidly changing homeland.

Thirty years since the death of Fred West and the conviction of his wife Rose, in 1995, the West murder case exerts a magnetic fascination for true crime readers. The Wests claimed twelve victims, young women and girls including members of their own family. Nine mutilated bodies were found buried under their home at 25 Cromwell St, Gloucester, the so-called House of Horrors. The Fred West Tapes incorporates remarkable new evidence and primary source testimony, including the experiences of the West children and victim families.

In this gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, and their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in Southwest Montana. The Sun's 20,000 acres of rangeland occupy a still-wild corner of Southwest Montana - a high valley surrounded by mountain ranges and steep creeks with portentous names like Grizzly, Dead Man, and Bad Luck.

At the Crossroads is the heartfelt story of Bridgie Ned, a woman whose life began in the rugged beauty of rural Doona, Ballycroy, in the West of Ireland. From the simplicity of her childhood in a small stone cottage without electricity or running water, to her journey across the Atlantic at just 17, Bridgie’s story is one of resilience, love, and laughter. Settling in America, she built a new life, but her heart never truly left her village, with its windswept shores, close-knit neighbors, and the ever-watchful Slieve Mor. Through her wit, humor, and enduring spirit, Bridgie brings to ...

Whilst it’s impossible to capture the essence of Nigeria in one story, its writers have given listeners the opportunity to experience the many different parts that make up Africa’s most populous nation. In Of This Our Country, acclaimed and award-winning Nigerian writers go a step further and describe their Nigeria, sharing personal essays about a country that holds so much more than any one perspective could. Through the words of these writers, a living portrait of Nigeria is woven, one that is as beautiful as it is complex.

I feared for their lives and their ears. Our local weekly newspaper showed pictures of them dangling from ropes hanging in woven baskets off the embankment of a mountain in order to tap sticks of dynamite into the holes they drilled in the granite cliff faces they blasted away. One could hear that awful, loud dynamite blasting all the way in town. But the booming had been even worse for the ears of the railroad workers who detonated the charges for the grading and tunneling, especially the Chinese who were given these most dangerous jobs.

Bryce Andrews was raised to do no harm. The son of a pacifist and conscientious objector, he moved from Seattle to Montana to tend livestock and the land as a cowboy. For a decade, he was happy. Yet, when Andrews inherited his grandfather’s Smith & Wesson revolver, he felt the weight of the violence braided into his chosen life. Other white men who’d come before him had turned firearms like this one against wildlife, wilderness, and the Indigenous peoples who had lived in these landscapes for millennia. This was how the West was “won.”

Because of the painstaking work of this tireless American astronomer, we were given a clearer picture of our place in the universe. Shapley was a prodigious astronomer who completed significant work on globular clusters, Cepheid variables, as well as key aspects of cosmology and stellar astronomy, including nebular and stellar spectroscopy and photometry.

If you are a hip hop fan and want "the real" about the "World's Most Dangerous Group" and all the players that paved the way for West Coast hip hop, this is the audiobook for you, told by the man who was there from the very beginning.

Army scout, buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and impresario of the world-renowned "Wild West show", William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody lived the real American West. Bobby Bridger draws on many historical accounts and Cody's own memoirs to show how deeply intertwined Cody's life was with the Plains Indians. In particular, he demonstrates that the Lakota and Cheyenne were active cocreators of the Wild West shows. This dual story of Buffalo Bill and the Plains Indians clearly reveals how one West was lost, and another born, within the lifetime of one remarkable man.

Edwin Hubble was a man ahead of his time. For him only astronomy really mattered. He took advantage of the opportunity given to him to use the most advanced telescope of his time to determine the truth behind the most distant clouds of light visible to Earth-based observers. His major discoveries changed our knowledge of our place in the universe forever. His determination that the universe is expanding served as the foundation for the big bang theory.

Born of humble beginnings, Ronald Reagan came into the world as the son of working class parents in Illinois. During his youth, he wasn't a particularly gifted student, but he did graduate from college. A Hollywood actor and union leader turned politician, he served as the 33rd governor of California during the tumultuous period from 1967 to 1975. Though his hard work, determination, and a bit of good luck, Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the United States, in office between 1981 and 1989.

They were the first outlaws to rob a moving train. But from 1864 to 1868, the Reno brothers and their gang of counterfeiters, robbers, burglars, and safecrackers also held the town of Seymour, Indiana, hostage, making a large hotel near the train station their headquarters. When the gang robbed the Adams Express car of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad on the outskirts of Seymour on October 6, 1866, it shocked the world - and made other burgeoning outlaws like Jesse James sit up and take notice. The extraordinary efforts to take them out defined the term "frontier justice".

Joseph Laroche was an anomaly among the passengers of the Titanic. He was exceptionally well-educated in a time when few Black men had access to an education - and when even fewer were able to travel on a luxurious ship in first or second class. When his family arrived in the United States without him after the Titanic's tragic crash, they were received well along with the other survivors and even sponsored by a wealthy New York heiress. Who was Joseph Laroche? Where was he going, and what was his story? This biography recounts the life of Joseph Laroche.

Stefanie Sargnagels Blick auf die USA ist so unverwechselbar wie ihr Schreiben: Sarkastisch, schonungslos ehrlich und doch voll Sympathie bringt sie uns das ländliche Amerika nahe und berichtet nebenbei herzerwärmend über die Lebensnotwendigkeit von Frauenfreundschaften. 2022 tauscht Stefanie Sargnagel widerstrebend das bequeme Wiener Sofa gegen ein Flugticket in die USA ein. In Iowa soll sie an einem College mitten im Nirgendwo Creative Writing unterrichten.

While Pang-Mei Natasha Chang was a Chinese Studies major at Harvard University, she stumbled across the name of her 83-year-old great aunt Chang Yu-i in a history book. Over the next several years, Pang-Mei spent long afternoons drawing forth her aunt's story. Born in Shanghai to a well-to-do family, Chang Yu-i lived a life of defiance, continually breaking class and culture barriers.

The most famous woman of the Wild West was also possibly the most colorful and mysterious. "Considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age", Calamity Jane claimed to be a veteran of the Indian Wars, a scout, and the wife of Wild Bill Hickok, all on the way to becoming a dime novel heroine.

Inayat's Song is the story of a young man who struggled with the great questions of existence. Who is God? And who am I? And what is our relationship? Inayat Khan's first-person narrative is read by award-winning actor Tom Alter. Inayat Khan was a gold medal-winning musician, a child prodigy from a musical family, including the renowned musician and music educator, Maulbakhsh Shole Khan. Along with his music education, he showed an aptitude for mystical training and was taken as a pupil of Sufi Master Abu Hashim Madani of Hyderabad.