"The Girl from Aleppo: Nujeen's Escape from War to Freedom" is an inspiring true story penned by the prize-winning journalist and co-author of the New York Times bestseller I Am Malala, Christina Lamb. This memoir brings to light the remarkable journey of Nujeen Mustafa, a teenager born with cerebral palsy.
Despite being confined to a wheelchair and denied formal schooling in Syria, Nujeen taught herself English by watching American soap operas. Her tale is a breathtaking account of fortitude, grit, and hope, as she embarked on a harrowing journey from war-ravaged Syria to Germany. Her story lends a face to one of the greatest humanitarian issues of our time - the Syrian refugee crisis.
In 2014, when her hometown became the epicenter of a brutal conflict, Nujeen and her family were forced to flee. Her journey to safety was a grueling sixteen-month odyssey that took her across Turkey, the Mediterranean, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and finally to Germany. Despite the physical hardships, Nujeen's extraordinary optimism never wavered.
In this unforgettable memoir, Nujeen's positivity and resolve shine through as she remains determined to make a better life for herself. Her story is a powerful reminder of the strength of the human spirit, offering an inspiration to change the world.
In America’s Daughter, the second book of the trilogy, the author arrives in the United States in the company of Catherine Murray, an American high-school teacher. Her adjustment to a new culture includes shocking doses of American-style racial discrimination and Nhambu’s discovery that she must learn to be a Black American. She graduates from college, thus fulfilling her dream of becoming a teacher, and teaches high school in the inner city. She marries, has two children, and establishes herself in the American way of life.
Then a visit to Africa, and especially to Tanzania, reawakens the drumbeats and dancing that she carries in her soul. On her return home, she teaches Swahili and African Studies, performs African dance at schools, and creates Aerobics With Soul®, a fitness workout based on African dance. She both finds and creates the family she longed for as a child and connects with her unknown background.
The first book of the trilogy, Africa’s Child, was released in 2016. The final book of her memoir series—Drum Beats, Heart Beats—reveals more of Nhambu’s life as she searches for her father.
You'll Grow Out of It hilariously and candidly explores the journey of the twenty-first-century woman.
As both a tomboy and a late bloomer, comedian Jessi Klein grew up feeling more like an outsider than a participant in the rites of modern femininity.
In You'll Grow Out of It, Klein offers—through an incisive collection of real-life stories—a relentlessly funny yet poignant take on a variety of topics she has experienced along her strange journey to womanhood and beyond. These include her transformation from a Pippi Longstocking-esque tomboy to an "are-you-a-lesbian-or-what" tom man, attempting to find watchable porn, and identifying the difference between being called "ma'am" and "miss" ("Miss" sounds like you weigh ninety-nine pounds).
Raw, relatable, and consistently hilarious, You'll Grow Out of It is a one-of-a-kind book by a singular and irresistible comic voice.
Birds, Beasts and Relatives is a delightful sequel to My Family and Other Animals, based on Gerald Durrell's boyhood on Corfu from 1933 to 1939. This charming autobiography is filled with amusing anecdotes, boyhood memories, and childlike wonder.
Part coming-of-age story and part nature guide, this book captures the unconventional life of the Durrell family on the sun-drenched, thyme-scented Greek island of Corfu before World War II. Young Gerry, a budding naturalist, is captivated by the fascinating flora and fauna of their adopted home, much to the bemusement of his long-suffering siblings and mother.
Whether it's lamp fishing by night or roving the countryside with his mentor Theodore, Gerry encounters intoxicated hedgehogs, tarantulas, dung beetles, water spiders, and other animals, some of which become the family's very unwanted pets.
This delightful and funny chronicle will enchant readers with its vivid depiction of a young naturalist's life and the wild adventures of the Durrell family.
The Drowned and the Saved is a profound exploration by Primo Levi as he attempts to understand the rationale behind the atrocities of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen. Levi dismisses the stereotyped images of brutal Nazi torturers and helpless victims, drawing extensively on his own experiences to delve into the minds and motives of oppressors and oppressed alike.
He describes the difficulty and shame of remembering, the limited forms of collaboration between inmates and SS goalers, the exploitation of useless violence, and the plight of the intellectual. Levi writes about the issue of power, mercy, and guilt, and their effects on the lives of the ordinary people who suffered so incomprehendingly.
Through his writing, Levi warns and reminds us that the unimaginable can happen again, urging us to learn from the past to make sense of the senseless.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself.
“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”
In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.
In Hunger, she explores her past—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers along on her journey to understand and ultimately save herself.
With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and power that have made her one of the most admired writers of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
From Senator Al Franken - #1 bestselling author and beloved SNL alum - comes the story of an award-winning comedian who decided to run for office and then discovered why award-winning comedians tend not to do that.
This is a book about an unlikely campaign that had an even more improbable ending: the closest outcome in history and an unprecedented eight-month recount saga, which is pretty funny in retrospect.
It's a book about what happens when the nation's foremost progressive satirist gets a chance to serve in the United States Senate and, defying the low expectations of the pundit class, actually turns out to be good at it.
It's a book about our deeply polarized, frequently depressing, occasionally inspiring political culture, written from inside the belly of the beast.
In this candid personal memoir, the honorable gentleman from Minnesota takes his army of loyal fans along with him from Saturday Night Live to the campaign trail, inside the halls of Congress, and behind the scenes of some of the most dramatic and/or hilarious moments of his new career in politics.
Has Al Franken become a true Giant of the Senate? Franken asks readers to decide for themselves.
For those battling autoimmune disease or thyroid conditions—or just seeking healthy life balance—the voice behind the popular blog Feed Me Phoebe shares her yearlong investigation of what truly made her well.
After she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in her early twenties, Phoebe Lapine felt overwhelmed by her doctor’s strict protocols and confused when they directly conflicted with information on the bestseller list. After experiencing mixed results and a life of deprivation that seemed unsustainable at best, she adopted 12 of her own wellness directives—including eliminating sugar, switching to all-natural beauty products, and getting in touch with her spiritual side—to find out which lifestyle changes truly impacted her health for the better.
The Wellness Project is the insightful and hilarious result of that year of exploration—part memoir and part health and wellness primer (complete with 20 healthy recipes). It’s a must-read not just for those suffering from autoimmune disease, but for anyone looking for simple ways to improve their health without sacrificing life’s pleasures.
Under The Rug is a memoir chronicling the unforgettable childhood & adolescence of L. Marie Williams. She illustrates her unconventional upbringing in this heart-rendering story of neglect, abuse, and loss.
L. Marie Williams captures the essence of a lost childhood in this recount of her youth. Physically and sexually abused at a young age, she was passed through her family and the foster care system, neglected and lost.
She met Tony, and despite their age difference, he showed her an unconditional love and loyalty that she had never experienced before. When he ended up in prison, Marie found herself homeless and a victim of the Juvenile Justice System.
This is a story of the trials she experienced, her journey of survival, and the lasting effects it has had on her life.
After a life-altering medical fiasco, Addison spends the next few years fighting to get her old life back and beat the original diagnosis of left-side hemiplegia. Through this journey, she discovers the most significant hindrances as well as the most helpful tips and tricks along the way.
In this book, you will find out what she did to recover from her stroke at age sixteen when she was told she would never walk on her own again.
Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning--a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.
Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence. Artful, intensely emotional work from one of our finest writers.
From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language, comes a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s. Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold.
Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)—in his head—as "The Thunderbolt Kid." Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality—a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy.
It was, he reminds us, a happy time, when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from atmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and of his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it. The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit tells the remarkable true story of Christopher Knight, a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own.
In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food. Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. He broke into nearby cottages for food, clothing, reading material, and other provisions, taking only what he needed but terrifying a community never able to solve the mysterious burglaries.
Based on extensive interviews with Knight himself, author Michael Finkel provides a vividly detailed account of Knight's secluded life—why did he leave? what did he learn?—as well as the challenges he has faced since returning to the world. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded.
I always thought twenty-five was the year I’d finally be grown up, the year the world would finally start taking me seriously, the year I would finally know what I wanted. And yet…
The Year I Turned 25 catalogues the ups and downs of a TV reporter in her mid-twenties, who takes on the added challenge of training an adorable, but misbehaving puppy. Sometimes melancholic and other times hilarious, this brave and thought-provoking memoir approaches dating, sexual assault, and mental health in a personal, but relatable way.
This book is for every woman who ever asked herself if something was wrong with her and for every dog lover who discovered true love in a puppy.
This project isn't about – and was never about – figuring out who I am. It’s about figuring out how to figure out who I am.
A young woman follows winter across five continents on a physical and spiritual journey that tests her body and soul, in this transformative memoir, full of heart and courage, that speaks to the adventurousness in all of us.
Steph Jagger had always been a force of nature. Dissatisfied with the passive, limited roles she saw for women growing up, she emulated the men in her life—chasing success, climbing the corporate ladder, ticking the boxes, playing by the rules of a masculine ideal. She was accomplished. She was living The Dream. But it wasn't her dream.
Then the universe caught her attention with a sign: Raise Restraining Device. Steph had seen this ski lift sign on countless occasions in the past, but the familiar words suddenly became a personal call to shake off the life she had built in a search for something different, something more.
Steph soon decided to walk away from the success and security she had worked long and hard to obtain. She quit her job, took a second mortgage on her house, sold everything except her ski equipment and her laptop, and bought a bundle of plane tickets. For the next year, she followed winter across North and South America, Asia, Europe, and New Zealand—and up and down the mountains of nine countries—on a mission to ski four million vertical feet in a year.
What hiking was for Cheryl Strayed, skiing became for Steph: a crucible in which to crack open her life and get to the very center of herself. But she would have to break herself down—first physically, then emotionally—before she could start to rebuild. And it was through this journey that she came to understand how to be a woman, how to love, and how to live authentically.
Electrifying, heartfelt, and full of humor, Unbound is Steph's story—an odyssey of courage and self-discovery that, like Wild and Eat, Pray, Love, will inspire readers to remove their own restraining devices and pursue the life they are meant to lead.
Finding the Rainbow is a fascinating and honest insight into a world that most would find difficult to understand, and many would be quietly thankful not to need to. Rachel McGrath tells the story of her battle to conceive and carry a baby, with unrestricted honesty, leaving the reader in no doubt as to her thoughts and feelings, and the courageousness with which she deals with a very difficult period in her and her husband's lives.
This emotive account draws attention to some of the otherwise unknown aspects of infertility and miscarriage, whilst still leaving room for humour, happiness and philosophy. The first book for Rachel McGrath, she writes about her battle with her body, her mind and the health service, whilst showing an incredible amount of inner strength, elegance and poise.
An incredible memoir from one of the world’s most eminent heart surgeons, Professor Stephen Westaby, detailing some of the most remarkable and poignant cases he has worked on. Grim Reaper sits on the heart surgeon's shoulder. A slip of the hand and life ebbs away. The balance between life and death is so delicate, and the heart surgeon walks that rope between the two. In the operating room, there is no time for doubt. It is flesh, blood, rib-retractors, and pumping the vital organ with your bare hand to squeeze the life back into it. An off-day can have dire consequences – this job has a steep learning curve, and the cost is measured in human life. Cardiac surgery is not for the faint of heart.
Professor Westaby took chances and pushed the boundaries of heart surgery. He saved hundreds of lives over the course of a thirty-five-year career. Now, in his astounding memoir, Westaby details some of his most remarkable and poignant cases – such as the baby who had suffered multiple heart attacks by six months old, a woman who lived the nightmare of locked-in syndrome, and a man whose life was powered by a battery for eight years.
A powerful, important, and incredibly moving book, Fragile Lives offers an exceptional insight into the exhilarating and sometimes tragic world of heart surgery, and how it feels to hold someone's life in your hands.
Spy for Nobody is an intriguing and riveting book that sheds light on the plight of the Syrian people. Authored by the renowned security expert and journalist, Basel Saneeb, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Middle Eastern politics and intelligence adventures.
The book delves into the author's life, particularly his work in the Syrian Military Intelligence during the regimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, despite being an opponent of both regimes. It provides a detailed account of the strange events and the author's testimonies on the crimes of the Assad regime.
From his early youth, Basel Saneeb was involved in forming a secret student organization against the Assad regime. The book is a political memoir that narrates the oppressive practices and intelligence operations against the Syrian people during the reigns of the Assad dictators, father and son. It also covers the beginnings of the Syrian revolution and the author's participation, including his arrest and the torture he endured.
The book offers a unique perspective, as the author was privy to secrets of the regime as a security officer. It also recounts his experiences during his detention in the notorious Syrian prisons, including the infamous Tadmor prison.
This book is more than just a memoir; it is a historical document and a political security testimony that provides an unprecedented experience in Syria, seldom found elsewhere in the world.