New arrivals added to our Biographies Collection in the last 7 days
Date added:
Apr 16, 2024
"Arctic historian Ken McGoogan approaches the legacy of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin from a contemporary perspective and offers a surprising new explanation of an enduring Northern mystery. Two of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin's expeditions were monumental failures--the last one leading to more than a hundred deaths, including his own. Yet many still see the Royal Navy man as a heroic figure who sacrificed himself to discovering the Northwest Passage. This book, McGoogan's s
"In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family's fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and sexuality. Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9
Date added:
Apr 15, 2024
"Little Seed is an experimental memoir that braids together the narrative of the author's relationship with her brother and family with a deeply personal field guide to ferns. The chapters move associatively, commenting on each other indirectly and drawing out questions of assimilation, race, class, gender, nature and the general problem of being and knowing. When the author's brother has a psychotic break, the rigid structure of the book itself breaks apart and the protagonist adventures to the
Date added:
Mar 25, 2024
"An unforgettable memoir about a girl who escapes her childhood as a preschool drug dealer to earn a divinity degree from Duke University-and then realizes she must confront her past to truly find her way home. "Home, it turns out, is where the war is. It's also where the healing begins." Born to drug-dealing parents in rural Indiana, Dana Trent is a preschooler the first time she uses a razor blade to cut up weed and fill dime bags for her schizophrenic father, King. While King struggles with h
"A ferocious inquiry into art and desire, style and politics, madness and salvation, and coming of age in our volatile, image-obsessed present. You know them when you see them: mean boys take up space, wielding cruelty to claim their place in the pecking order. Some mean boys make art or music or fashion; others make memes. Mean boys stomp the runways in Milan and Paris; mean boys marched at Charlottesville. And in the eyes of critic and style expert Geoffrey Mak, mean boys are the emblem of our
Date added:
Mar 7, 2024
Date added:
Mar 7, 2024
"The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas, the first principals in the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who traveled the world as highly celebrated stars in their field and whose legacy was erased from history until now. At the height of the Civil Rights movement, Lydia Abarc¸a was a Black prima ballerina with a major international dance company-the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She was the first Black ballerina on the cover of Dance magazine, an Essence cover star, cast in The Wiz
Date added:
Feb 22, 2024
Date added:
Feb 22, 2024
"A raw and riveting coming-of-age story about the wild love of teenage friendships and the casual oppression of 1990s rape culture. Emelia Symington-Fedy grew up with her girl gang on the railroad tracks of a small town in British Columbia. Unsupervised and wild, the girls explored the power and shortcomings of “best” friendships and their growing sexuality. Two decades later an eighteen-year-old girl is murdered on Halloween on the same tracks, and Emelia returns to her hometown to stay with he
With emotions like fear, guilt and empathy eluding her, the author, trying to replace the nothingness with something, realizes, after connecting with an old flame, if she's capable of love, it must mean she isn't a monster and sets out to prove the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren't all monsters either.
"Anne grew up in an abusive home, leading to severe depression and a determination to do better as a mother. One of her sons wants a dog from the time he is a baby; Anne very much does not. For years she appeases him with creatures who live in cages and tanks, but on his tenth birthday she can no longer say no--and she proceeds to fall in love with their new four-legged family member, Mattie. Then Mattie dies a sudden and tragic death, and Anne feels herself begin to sink back into depression. T
Date added:
Jan 25, 2024
"The groundbreaking biography of a forgotten civil rights hero. In the tempestuous mid-19th century, as slavery consumed Congressional debate and America careened toward civil war and split apart--when the very future of the nation hung in the balance--Charles Sumner's voice rang strongest, bravest, and most unwavering. Where others preached compromise and moderation, he denounced slavery's evils to all who would listen and demanded that it be wiped out of existence. More than any other person o
"Jochen "Jack" Wurfl lived two lives. Jack was born in 1932 in Germany to his Jewish mother and Catholic father, and lived in Austria until 1936. Anticipating Hitler's invasion of Austria, his parents sent Jack and his brother, Peter, back to Germany to live with their Jewish grandparents in Berlin. As Hitler's persecution of the Jews intensified, Jack's grandfather sneaked the boys into hiding at a children's summer camp in the resort village of Dangast, 200 miles northwest of Berlin on the Nor
Date added:
Jan 8, 2024