#memoir #immigrated #biography #middleeastern


Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in New Zealand

In 2000, when I was just seven years old, my family immigrated from Iran to New Zealand. Fresh off the plane, we settled in Timaru, a port 'city' where everyone farms and wears gumboots under their rugby shorts. There, we stood out like a bunch of Middle Eastern immigrants in a town where everyone farms and wears gumboots under their rugby shorts. We arrived with zero knowledge of our new country nor the English language. Surviving Marmite chronicles our wild Kiwi journey; brimming with serious culture shock to hilarious misunderstandings and everything in between. It features my unconventional family: my overly optimistic taxi-driver father, my overly pessimistic eyebrow-threading mother, and my sister and I, frizzy-haired, confused and clearly incongruous third-culture kids.

Surviving Marmite

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John Bolton

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Texas

A White House Memoir

John Bolton served as National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump for 519 days. A seasoned public servant who had previously worked for Presidents Reagan, Bush #41, and Bush #43, Bolton brought to the administration thirty years of experience in international issues and a reputation for tough, blunt talk. In his memoir, he offers a substantive and factual account of his time in the room where it happened.

The Room Where It Happened

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Porter Fox

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Kentucky

A 4,000 Mile Journey along America's Forgotten Border

A quest to rediscover America's other border--the fascinating but little-known northern one.

Northland

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Anna Kendrick

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

A collection of whimsical autobiographical essays by the actress and star of "Up in the Air" recounts memorable milestones, from her New England upbringing to the blockbuster films that have made her one of Hollywood's most popular actresses.

Anna Kendrick: Scrappy Little Nobody

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#hardcover #memoir #hopesolo #soccer #olympics #youngreader

Maryland

The World Cup champion and double Olympic gold medalist shares her story in her own words!

In this young readers' edition of Hope Solo's exciting life story, adapted from Solo: A Memoir of Hope, the former starting goalkeeper for the U.S. women's national soccer team gives readers behind-the-scenes details of her life on and off the field.

Solo offers a fearless female role model for the next generation, driven to succeed on her own terms. Young fans will truly be inspired by Hope's repeated triumphs over adversity. Her relentless spirit has molded her into the person she is today--one of the most charismatic athletes in America.

Includes an exclusive Q&A with Hope!

Hope Solo: My Story Young Readers' Edition

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Stain on back jacket of book, shown in last picture.

North Carolina

Dance While You Can

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#hardcover #nonfiction #annafaris #comedy #memoir #autobiography #unqualified 

New Jersey

The popular actress shares funny stories about her misadventures with romance to offer offbeat advice on navigating the bizarre, chaotic, and ultimately worthwhile challenges of finding love.--Wordcat.

Unqualified

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“I see my story as a suite of songs that have a magical connection. I never understood that connection until I sat down to write. It was then that the magic started to flow.” Let Love Rule is a work of deep reflection. Lenny Kravitz looks back at his life with candor, self-scrutiny, and humor. “My life is all about opposites,” he writes. “Black and white. Jewish and Christian. The Jackson 5 and Led Zeppelin. I accepted my Gemini soul. I owned it. I adored it. Yins and yangs mingled in various parts of my heart and mind, giving me balance and fueling my curiosity and comfort.” Let Love Rule covers a vast canvas stretching from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, Los Angeles’s Baldwin Hills, Beverly Hills, and finally to France, England and Germany. It’s the story of a wildly creative kid who, despite tough struggles at school and extreme tension at home, finds salvation in music. We see him grow as a musician and ultimately a master songwriter, producer, and performer. We also see Lenny’s spiritual growth—and the powerful way in which spirit informs his music. The cast of characters surrounding Lenny is extraordinary: his father, Sy, a high-powered news executive; his mother, Roxie Roker, a television star; and Lisa Bonet, the young actress who becomes his muse. The central character, of course, is Lenny, who, despite his great aspirational energy, turns down record deal after record deal until he finds his true voice. The creation of that voice, the same voice that is able to declare “Let Love Rule” to an international audience, is the very heart of this story. “Whether recording, performing, or writing a book,” says Lenny, “my art is about listening to the inspiration inside and then sharing it with people. Art must bring the world closer together.”

Let Love Rule

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Anonymous

Duchess Goldblatt

Part memoir and part joyful romp through the fields of imagination, the story behind a beloved pseudonymous Twitter personality reveals how a writer deep in grief rebuilt a life worth living.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

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Randy Pausch

Jeffrey Zaslow

Iowa

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

The Last Lecture

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A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After

That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Born blind in Vietnam, she narrowly escaped euthanasia. Her family fled their country's political upheaval in the late 1970s, and in America a surgeon at UCLA gave Julie partial sight. She became a Harvard-educated lawyer with a husband, two little girls, and a life that once seemed impossible. Then, at thirty-seven, she was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. With humor, bracing honesty, and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, Julie set the stage for her lasting legacy and one final miracle: the story of her life.

The Unwinding of the Miracle

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Josh Sundquist

Illinois

Embarrassingly, a True Story

When I was twenty-five years old, it came to my attention that I had never had a girlfriend. At the time, I was actually under the impression that I was in a relationship, so this bit of news came as something of a shock. Why was Josh still single? To find out, he tracked down each of the girls he had tried to date since middle school and asked them straight up: What went wrong? The results of Josh's semiscientific investigation are in your hands. From a disastrous Putt-Putt date involving a backward prosthetic foot, to his introduction to CFD (Close Fast Dancing), and a misguided "grand gesture" at a Miss America pageant, this story is about looking for love--or at least a girlfriend--in all the wrong places. Poignant, relatable, and totally hilarious, this memoir is for anyone who has ever wondered, "Is there something wrong with me?" (Spoiler Alert: the answer is no.)

We Should Hang Out Sometime

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James Whiteside

A Funny, Sexy, Sad Almost-Memoir of a Boy in Ballet

“James Whiteside is an electrifying performer, an incredible athlete, and an artist, through and through. To know James is to love him; with Center Center, you are about to fall in love.” —Jennifer Garner “A frank examination and celebration of queerness.” —Good Morning America A daring, joyous, and inspiring memoir-in-essays from the American Ballet Theatre principal dancer-slash-drag queen-slash-pop star who's redefining what it means to be a man in ballet There's a mark on every stage around the world that signifies the center of its depth and width, called "center center." James Whiteside has dreamed of standing on that very mark as a principal dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre ever since he was a twelve-year-old blown away by watching the company's spring gala. The GLAMOUR. The VIRTUOSITY. The RIPPED MEN IN TIGHTS! In this absurd and absurdist collection of essays, Whiteside tells us the story of how he got to be a primo ballerino—stopping along the way to muse about the tragically fated childhood pets who taught him how to feel, reminisce on ill-advised partying at summer dance camps, and imagine fantastical run-ins with Jesus on Grindr. Also in these pages are tales of the two alter egos he created to subvert the strict classical rigor of ballet: JbDubs, an out-and-proud pop musician, and Ühu Betch, an over-the-top drag queen named after Yoohoo chocolate milk. Center Center is an exuberant behind-the-scenes tour of Whiteside’s triple life, both on- and offstage—a raunchy, curious, and unapologetic celebration of queerness, self-expression, friendship, sex, creativity, and pushing boundaries that will entertain you, shock you*, inspire you, embolden you . . . and maybe even make you cry. *THIS IS NOT A BOOK FOR CHILDREN.

Center Center

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Michael Frank

Book is like new, one owner. No frayed pages, no dog eared corners, no markings, clean cover. 

A Memoir

A psychologically acute memoir about an unusual and eccentric Hollywood family. "My feeling for Mike is something out of the ordinary," Michael Frank overhears his aunt say to his mother when he is a boy. "I wish he were mine." Michael's childless Auntie Hankie and Uncle Irving, glamorous Hollywood screenwriters, are doubly his aunt and uncle--brother and sister married sister and brother. The two families live just blocks away from each other in Laurel Canyon. In this strangely intertwined family, even the author's two grandmothers share an apartment together. Talented, sparkling, and lavish with her money, attention, and love, Auntie Hankie takes charge of Michael's education, showing him which books to read, which painters to admire, which houses to like, which people to adore. She literally trains his eye--until that eye wants to see on its own. As his aunt's moods begin to darken, it becomes apparent that beneath her magical exterior there lies a dangerous rage. His aunt stages a series of tumultuous scenes that devastate Michael, forcing him to reconstruct both himself and his family narrative as he tries to reconcile the woman he once cherished with the troubled figure he discovers her to be. The Mighty Franks is a psychologically acute memoir that asks each of us where the boundaries of family life should be drawn, and who should draw them.

The Mighty Franks

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#hardcover #medical #memoir #thesoulofcare #nonfiction #doctor #caregiving

Kansas

The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor

A moving memoir and an extraordinary love story that shows how an expert physician became a family caregiver and learned why care is so central to all our lives and yet is at risk in today's world.

When Dr. Arthur Kleinman, an eminent Harvard psychiatrist and social anthropologist, began caring for his wife, Joan, after she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, he found just how far the act of caregiving extended beyond the boundaries of medicine. In The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor, Kleinman delivers a deeply humane and inspiring story of his life in medicine and his marriage to Joan, and he describes the practical, emotional and moral aspects of caretaking. He also writes about the problems our society faces as medical technology advances and the cost of health care soars but caring for patients no longer seems important.

Caregiving is long, hard, unglamorous work--at moments joyous, more often tedious, sometimes agonizing, but it is always rich in meaning. In the face of our current political indifference and the challenge to the health care system, he emphasizes how we must ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves, and of our doctors. To give care, to be "present" for someone who needs us, and to feel and show kindness are deep emotional and moral experiences, enactments of our core values. The practice of caregiving teaches us what is most important in life, and reveals the very heart of what it is to be human.

The Soul of Care

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Diane Johnson

Vermont

A personal account by the two-time finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award follows her response to a French friend's accusation that Americans seem indifferent to history and her discoveries about her long-time Midwestern family's complex pioneer heritage.

Flyover Lives

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Josh Peck

Louisiana





A wonderfully candid memoir from one of the most recognizable faces of a generation, actor, writer, Youtuber, and television superstar, Josh Peck. In his warm and inspiring book, Josh reflects on the many stumbles and silver linings of his life and traces a zigzagging path to redemption. Written with such impressive detail and aching honesty, Happy People are Annoying is full of surprising life lessons for anyone seeking to accept their past and make peace with the complicated face in the mirror.

Josh Peck rose to near-instant fame when he starred for four seasons as the comedic center of Nickelodeon's hit show Drake & Josh. However, while he tried to maintain his role as the funniest, happiest kid in every room, Josh struggled alone with the kind of rising anger and plummeting confidence that quietly took over his life.

For the first time, Josh reflects on his late teens and early twenties. Raised by a single mother, and coming of age under a spotlight that could be both invigorating and cruel, Josh filled the cratering hole in his self-worth with copious amounts of food, television, drugs, and all of the other trappings of young stardom. Until he realized the only person standing in his way...was himself. Today, with a string of lead roles on hit television shows and movies, and one of the most enviable and dedicated fanbases on the internet, Josh Peck is more than happy, he's finally, enthusiastically content.

Happy People are Annoying is the culmination of years of learning, growing, and finding bright spots in the scary parts of life. Written with the kind of humor, strength of character, and unwavering self-awareness only someone who has mastered their ego can muster, this memoir reminds us of the life-changing freedom on the other side of acceptance.

Happy People Are Annoying

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#hardcover #nonfiction #biography #memoir #naturallytan #queereye

From one of the stars of Netflix's overnight sensation Queer Eye, Tan France's memoir has his signature wit, style, and tells the origin story of the first openly gay, Muslim man on television. In this heartfelt, funny, touching memoir, Tan France, star of Netflix’s smash-hit QUEER EYE tells his origin story for the first time. With his trademark wit, humor, and radical compassion, Tan reveals what it was like to grow up gay in a traditional Muslim family, as one of the few people of color in Doncaster, England. He illuminates his winding journey of coming of age, finding his voice (and style!), and how he finally came out to his family at the age of 34, revealing that he was happily married to the love of his life--a Mormon cowboy from Salt Lake City. In Tan's own words, “The book is meant to spread joy, personal acceptance, and most of all understanding. Each of us is living our own private journey, and the more we know about each other, the healthier and happier the world will be.”

Naturally Tan

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Alicia Keys

Michelle Burford

Idaho

A Journey

More Myself

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Glennon Doyle

is a story of unexpected love. In it, Glennon Doyle reveals how falling in love with Abby Wambach completely derailed all her plans for her life – but allowed her to become fully herself.

North Dakota

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Over two million copies sold! “Packed with incredible insight about what it means to be a woman today.”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick) In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, bestselling author, and “patron saint of female empowerment” (People) explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • Cosmopolitan • Marie Claire • Bloomberg • Parade • “Untamed will liberate women—emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It is phenomenal.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat Pray Love This is how you find yourself. There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves. For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living. Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is. Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

Untamed

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Salman Rushdie

Florida

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
San Francisco Chronicle * Newsweek/The Daily Beast * The Seattle Times * The Economist * Kansas City Star * BookPage

On February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran."
 
So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov--Joseph Anton.
 
How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom.
 
It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.

Praise for Joseph Anton
 
"A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie's work throughout his career."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
"A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year."--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
 
"Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book."--USA Today
 
"Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie's ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . [He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism."--The Wall Street Journal
 
"Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written."--The Independent (UK)
 
"A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty."--Le Point (France)
 
"Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie's eye is a camera lens --firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus."--Los Angeles Review of Books
 
"Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book."--de Volkskrant (The Netherlands)
 
"One of the best memoirs you may ever read."--DNA (India)
 
"Extraordinary . . . Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing--at all costs--any curtailment on a writer's freedom."--The Boston Globe

Joseph Anton

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Taylor Harris

A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown

A Black mother bumps up against the limits of everything she thought she believed—about science and medicine, about motherhood, and about her faith—in search of the truth about her son. One morning, Tophs, Taylor Harris’s round-cheeked, lively twenty-two-month-old, wakes up listless, only lifting his head to gulp down water. She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same. With every question the doctors answer about Tophs’s increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. She spends countless hours trying to navigate health and education systems that can be hostile to Black mothers and children; at night she googles, prays, and interrogates her every action. Some days, her sweet, charismatic boy seems just fine; others, he struggles to answer simple questions. A long-awaited appointment with a geneticist ultimately reveals nothing about what’s causing Tophs’s drops in blood sugar, his processing delays—but it does reveal something unexpected about Taylor’s own health. What if her son’s challenges have saved her life? This Boy We Made is a stirring and radiantly written examination of the bond between mother and child, full of hard-won insights about fighting for and finding meaning when nothing goes as expected.

This Boy We Made

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An engrossing memoir of escaping the First Liberian Civil War and building a life in the United States When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally, a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on yet another journey, this time to the United States. Spanning this harrowing journey in Moore’s early childhood, her years adjusting to life in Texas as a black woman and an immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a deeply moving story of the search for home in the midst of upheaval. Moore has a novelist’s eye for suspense and emotional depth, and this unforgettable memoir is full of imaginative, lyrical flights and lush prose. In capturing both the hazy magic and the stark realities of what is becoming an increasingly pervasive experience, Moore shines a light on the great political and personal forces that continue to affect many migrants around the world, and calls us all to acknowledge the tenacious power of love and family.

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women

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#nonfiction #memoir #inspirational #family #lifelessons #love #lastlecture #lecture

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Anisa MacLean

Surviving Marmite

John Bolton

The Room Where It Happened

Porter Fox

Northland

Anna Kendrick

Anna Kendrick: Scrappy Little Nobody

Hope Solo

Hope Solo: My Story Young Readers' Edition

Shirley MacLaine

Dance While You Can

Anna Faris; Chris Pratt (Foreword by)

Unqualified

Lenny Kravitz; David Ritz

Let Love Rule

Anonymous; Duchess Goldblatt

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

Randy Pausch; Jeffrey Zaslow

The Last Lecture

Julie Yip-Williams

The Unwinding of the Miracle

Josh Sundquist

We Should Hang Out Sometime

James Whiteside

Center Center

Michael Frank

The Mighty Franks

Arthur Kleinman

The Soul of Care

Diane Johnson

Flyover Lives

Josh Peck

Happy People Are Annoying

Tan France

Naturally Tan

Alicia Keys; Michelle Burford

More Myself

Glennon Doyle

Untamed

Salman Rushdie

Joseph Anton

Taylor Harris

This Boy We Made

Wayétu Moore

The Dragons, the Giant, the Women

Randy Pausch; Jeffrey Zaslow (As told to)

The Last Lecture