Biography & Autobiography

Five compelling essays and fifty stunning portraits and profiles of American environmental activists

This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly's magnificent color portraits and profiles of fifty environmental and climate activists—people who diagnose the truth of the greatest crisis humanity has ever confronted and take action. The book also features original essays by revered environmentalists Bill McKibben, Leah Penniman, Diane Wilson, Bill Bigelow, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose words illuminate the plight and its causes, and point a way forward.

Along with the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the institution of slavery, the third tragic and persistent mistake of the leaders of this country was to attempt to separate economic and political culture from the laws of nature—to operate on the basis that nature could be exploited endlessly for profit. The damage done to the Earth and to the future of life on the planet is incalculable. The people portrayed here have bought warnings, offered solutions, and organized movements to restore ecological sanity.

A deep exploration of how Eleanor Roosevelt’s Christian faith led her to become one of the most well-known and praised humanitarians.​

“A fresh take on the influences that formed a key figure in 20th-century American history.” –Publishers Weekly

A great woman who was heavily involved in politics, Eleanor Roosevelt is considered one of the most important and beloved First Ladies and female leaders. Her faith and beliefs are commonly dismissed as confines of her upbringing that she broke free from; however, her dedication to the Episcopal Church and her reliance on Jesus’s teachings imply otherwise. Her nightly prayer, famously recorded in her writing, demonstrates her approach to serving her community and nation, and her inspiration and strength in the politics she was involved in become apparent when understanding the context of her religion and considering the fulfillment of her beliefs through her actions. In reviewing observations from family members, her own writing, and her participation in the church, Mitchell examines the impact of Eleanor’s faith on her work, and by extension, its impact on the world.

A monumental new biography of a pivotal yet poorly understood pioneer in modern philosophy.

  When a painter once told Goethe that he wanted to paint the most celebrated man of the age, Goethe directed him to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel worked from the credo: To philosophize is to learn to live freely. While he was slow and cautious in the development of his philosophy, his intellectual growth was like an odyssey of the mind, and, contrary to popular belief, his life was full of twists and turns, suspense and even danger.

  In this landmark biography, the philosopher Klaus Vieweg paints a new picture of the life and work of the most important representative of German idealism. His vivid portrait provides readers an intimate account of Hegel's times and the milieu in which he developed his thought, along with detailed, clear-sighted analyses of Hegel's four major works. What results is a new interpretation of Hegel through the lens of reason and freedom.

  Vieweg draws on extensive archival research that has brought to light a wealth of hitherto undiscovered documents and handwritten notes relating to Hegel's work, touching on Hegel's engagement with the leading thinkers and writers of his age: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, and others. Combatting clichés and misunderstandings about Hegel, Vieweg also offers a sustained defense of the philosopher's more progressive impulses. Highly praised upon its release in Germany as having set the new biographical standard, this monumental work emphasizes Hegel's relevance for today, depicting him as a vital figure in the history of philosophy.

Frank Meyer devised the blueprint for American conservatism—fusionism—championed by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and so many to this day. Yet long before and far away, Communists in London chanted “Free Frank Meyer!” to block the deportation of a comrade who was their cause célèbre. Those fervent Marxists could never have predicted that their hero would one day provide the intellectual energy necessary to propel conservatives to political power.

The Man Who Invented Conservatism unveils one of the twentieth century’s great untold stories: a Communist turned conservative, an antiwar activist turned soldier, and a free-love enthusiast turned family man whose big idea captured the American Right. This intellectual migration coincided with a clandestine affair inside 10 Downing Street, service as a lieutenant to the man who later constructed the Berlin Wall, and neighborly chats with the pop-star and poet celebrity next door. Present at the creation of National Review, Meyer helped launch Joan Didion’s writing career. From H. G. Wells to Henry Kissinger to Milton Friedman, he rubbed shoulders with everyone who mattered.

Having discovered Meyer’s previously unexamined correspondence in an old soda warehouse, Daniel J. Flynn documents this saga in The Man Who Invented Conservatism, exposing the rivalries, jealousies, friendships, and fights that shaped the movement and what it means to be a conservative today.

A vivid portrait collection of past and present Americans speaking truth to power

The first volume of Robert Shetterly's Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series, Portraits of Racial Justice takes a multimedia, interdisciplinary approach, blending art and history with today’s issues concerning social, environmental, and economic fairness. Shetterly's paintings, as well as profiles of those portrayed, illuminate a community of people not only willing to recognize the shortcomings of America’s history, but most importantly, individuals who offer their visions of a better world moving forward.

Starting with Michelle Alexander and ending with Dave Zirin, the diverse array of fifty full-color portraits spans multiple generations and struggles. This volume also includes four original opening essays on racial justice in the United States by Ai-jen Poo, Dave Zirin, Sherri Mitchell, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., which provide an intersectional response to the long-term goal of diversity and inclusion.

As Shetterly says, “without activism, hope is merely sentimental.” Portraits of Racial Justice, Shetterly’s homage to transformative game-changers and status-quo fighters, provides the inspiration necessary to spark social change.

Angelo Codevilla, a towering intellect and prolific scholar, left an indelible mark on the study of political philosophy and statesmanship.

An Italian immigrant, Codevilla embraced America with a fervent belief in its republican ideals. His academic journey took him to Rutgers, where his early promise in physics hinted at the analytical rigor he later applied to political philosophy. Pursuing his passion for understanding human governance, he earned a PhD under Harry Jaffa at Claremont Graduate School, where he also studied under Leo Strauss. A naval intelligence officer, foreign service officer, and staffer on the US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Codevilla bridged the worlds of strategic policy and classical thought.

His advocacy for missile defense during the Reagan administration – a concept many deemed visionary – was matched only by his sharp critiques of the bipartisan political class. Codevilla’s profound engagement with the writings of Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and America’s founders informed his incisive works, including The Character of Nations and America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations. A translator of Machiavelli’s The Prince and an unrelenting critic of technocratic governance, he inspired a generation of thinkers to confront uncomfortable truths about modernity and the American regime.

This festschrift gathers the reflections of prominent scholars who honor Codevilla’s enduring legacy and the clarity he brought to questions of liberty, statesmanship, strategy, and the fate of nations. Essential reading for students of history, politics, and statecraft, it celebrates a man whose insights continue to resonate with patriotic Americans and lovers of freedom across the West.

An unforgettable journey from seventh-grade dropout to celebrated professor

Georgiann Davis’ family is white, but not the right kind of white. They’re five star white trash. They borrowed money and tried to buy class.

In this upside-down and queer response to JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, Davis introduces readers to the relatives who shaped her turbulent childhood: the Greek grandparents who guided her, the father who understood cars better than children, and the brother whose violence went unchecked in their home. Looming over them all was Davis’ larger-than-life mother, who displayed her love through gifts they couldn’t afford, empowering Davis with life lessons even as she downplayed their financial struggles. It took years to uncover the shocking medical secrets that her mother had kept from her —secrets that upended everything she thought she knew about gender and the human body.

Davis guides us through her unusual life, from running the family’s ice cream business to selling weed in her “monkey shit green” Dodge Neon. As she chronicles her journey from seventh-grade dropout to sociology professor, she reveals how whiteness colored her family’s struggles. She connects her personal experiences of medical abuse, fatphobia, and fear of the intersex body with incisive critiques of white supremacy, the opioid crisis, and gendered oppression. Faced with unimaginable setbacks—identity theft, medical struggles, and family turmoil—Davis relentlessly pursued education. It was this quest that transformed her life, giving her the tools to tell her own story. The result is a deeply moving memoir which complicates our understanding of upward mobility and familial love.

The autobiography of a courageous singer-songwriter, activist, and American icon.

"Barbara Dane is someone who is willing to follow her conscience. She is, if the term must be used, a hero."—Bob Dylan

A renowned folk, blues, and jazz singer who performed with some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated musicians, from Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan. A proud progressive who has tirelessly championed racial equality and economic justice in America, and who has traveled the world to sing out against war and tyranny. An organizer, a venue owner, a record label founder, and a woman who has charted her own creative and political path for more than ninety years. Barbara Dane has led an epic, trailblazing life in music and activism, and This Bell Still Rings tells her story in her own adventurous voice. Dane’s memoir charts her trajectory from singing in union halls and at factory gates in World War II–era Detroit, to her rise as a respected blues and jazz singer, to her prominence as a folk musician frequently performing at and participating in civil rights and peace demonstrations across the US and abroad—from post-revolutionary Cuba to wartime Vietnam. This Bell Still Rings illuminates “one of the true unsung heroes of American music” (Boston Globe), and it offers a wealth of inspiration for artists, activists, and anyone seeking a life defined by courage and integrity.

Newly expanded, this gripping memoir is hailed as essential by the likes of Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and ELLE magazine.

Bad Indians—part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir—is essential reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Widely adopted in classrooms and book clubs throughout the United States, Bad Indians—now reissued in significantly expanded form for its 10th anniversary—plumbs ancestry, survivance, and the cultural memory of Native California.

In this best-selling, now-classic memoir, Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family and the experiences of California Indians more widely through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. This anniversary edition includes several new poems and essays, as well as an extensive afterword, totaling more than fifty pages of new material. Wise, indignant, and playful all at once, Bad Indians is a beautiful and devastating read, and an indispensable book for anyone seeking a more just telling of American history.

Long before, as the number one draft pick for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1980, Lesch followed his American dream, playing with many baseball greats until a shoulder injury sidelined him. He later became a distinguished professor of Middle East studies at Trinity University in San Antonio and was soon tapped by the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, and policy centers and governments internationally.

Dodgers to Damascus documents a part of the world that has been shrouded in mystery and plagued by conflict, power struggles, and warfare, and offers a firsthand glimpse inside modern Syria, its neighboring countries, and their connections to the rest of the world.
Lesch’s work in Syria resulted in a tenuous relationship with President Bashar al-Assad and many tense situations, including a poisoned meal that almost cost him his life. His encounters with elected officials, diplomats, spies, and conflict resolution specialists have all the elements of a Hollywood thriller and parallel his personal story of loss, crisis, and redemption.

The first comprehensive biography of Philadelphia’s Henry C. Lea (1825–1909): historian, publisher, political activist, and reformer

Writing in 1868, the Philadelphia publisher-cum-historian Henry Charles Lea informed a friend, “I am trying to collect the materials for a history of the Inquisition.” The collecting of these materials—books, manuscripts, and copies of thousands of pages of documents housed in musty European archives and libraries—would occupy Lea (1825–1909) for the remainder of his life. It also led to publication of A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1884–87) and his acknowledged masterpiece, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (1906–7). Regarded as classics, these path-breaking books inaugurated better understanding of the history of an institution whose aims and methods troubled Lea and remain subjects of heated debate.

The first biography of Lea since 1931, The Inquisition’s Inquisitor offers the most comprehensive review to date of his writing on the history of the Catholic Church. Though Lea is generally regarded as a leading practitioner of “scientific” history, Richard L. Kagan examines the extent to which Lea’s religious convictions compromised the ostensibly objective character of his work. Lea’s extensive surviving correspondence also enables Kagan to examine other aspects of Lea’s long and productive career as one of Philadelphia’s most prominent citizens. Lea appears here a young literary critic; a businessman who skillfully transformed his family’s publishing firm into the country’s leading producer of medical books; a dogged political reformer; and a philanthropist whose largesse benefitted many of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions. Newly discovered sources also allow for insights into Lea’s private life, notably his controversial infatuation with his first cousin and future wife, Anna C. Jaudon, and the periodic breakdowns that required abandonment of his beloved “intellectual pursuits.”

The Inquisition’s Inquisitor concludes with a survey of Lea’s legacy with respect to current understanding of the Inquisition and to Philadelphia, where reminders of his accomplishments include an eponymous library at the University of Pennsylvania and public elementary school in nearby West Philadelphia.

An important new biography of Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress

During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where Americans stood in that bicentennial year. “Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.” The civil rights movement had changed American politics by opening up elected office to a new generation of Black leaders, including Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress. Though her life in elected politics lasted only twelve years, in that short time, Jordan changed the nation by showing that Black women could lead their party and legislate on behalf of what she called “the common good.”

In She Changed the Nation, biographer Mary Ellen Curtin offers a new portrait of Jordan and her journey from segregated Houston, Texas, to Washington, DC, where she made her mark during the Watergate crisis by eloquently calling for the impeachment of President Nixon. Recognized as one of the greatest orators of modern America, Jordan inspired millions, and Black women became her most ardent supporters. Many assumed Jordan would rise higher and become a US senator, Speaker of the House, or a Supreme Court justice. But illness and disability, along with the obstacles she faced as a Black woman, led to Jordan’s untimely retirement from elected office—though not from public life. Until her death at the age of fifty-nine, Jordan remained engaged with the cause of justice and creating common ground, proving that Black women could lead the country through challenging times.

No change in the law alone could guarantee the election of Black leaders. It took courage and ambition for Barbara Jordan to break into politics. This important new biography explores the personal and the political dimensions of Jordan’s life, showing how she navigated the extraordinary pressures of office while seeking to use persuasion, governance, and popular politics as instruments of social change and betterment.

The Meese Revolution explores how Ed Meese became the most powerful and important Attorney General in American history.

Edwin Meese III is the most influential person ever to hold the office of U.S. Attorney General – and almost no one knows it. Ed Meese was at the center of virtually every major accomplishment of Ronald Reagan’s transformative presidency, from winning the Cold War without firing a shot to the economic boom that by the end of the 1980s was the envy of the world. More to the point for this book, Ed Meese is the person most responsible for the rise of constitutional originalism, which treats the text and original meaning of the Constitution rather than the policy fads of the moment as authoritative law. 

In 2024, originalism is a major force in the courts, with a majority of Supreme Court justices and a raft of lower-court and state-court judges at least taking it seriously as a major contributor to decision-making. That result was unthinkable in 1985 when Meese took office and originalism was essentially unknown to the legal academy and almost wholly absent from the judicial process. Ed Meese turned the U.S. Department of Justice into “the academy in exile,” where originalism was developed, refined, theorized, and put into practice.

This book describes the rise of originalism, which necessitates telling the story of Ed Meese, without whom it surely does not happen. Meese’s story threads through virtually all important legal and policy events of the 1980s, many of which continue to shape the world of the twenty-first century. We are still living through the Meese Revolution.

In 1934, at the age of fourteen, Colette Brull-Ulmann knew that she wanted to become a pediatrician. By the age of twenty-one, she was in her second year of studying medicine. By 1942, Brull-Ulman and her family had become registered Jews under the ever-increasing statutes against them enacted by Petain’s government. Her father had been arrested and interned at the Drancy detention camp and Brull-Ulman had become an intern at the Rothschild Hospital, the only hospital in Paris where Jewish physicians were allowed to practice and Jewish patients could go for treatment.

Under Claire Heyman, a charismatic social worker who was a leader of the hospital’s secret escape network, Brull-Ulmann began working tirelessly to rescue Jewish children treated at the Rothschild. Her devotion to the protection of children, her bravery, and her imperviousness in the face of the deadly injustices of the Holocaust were always evident—whether smuggling children to safety through the Paris streets in the dead of night or defying officers and doctors who frighteningly held her fate in their hands. Ultimately, Brull-Ulmann was forced to flee the Rothschild in 1943, when she joined her father’s resistance network, gathering and delivering information for De Gaulle’s secret intelligence agency until the Liberation in 1945.

In 1970, Brull-Ulmann finally became a licensed pediatrician. But after the war, like so many others, she sought to bury her memories. It wasn’t until decades later when she finally started to speak publicly—not only about her own work and survival, but about the one child who affected her most deeply. Originally published in French in 2017, Brull-Ulmann’s memoir fearlessly illustrates the horrors of Jewish life under the German Occupation and casts light on the heretofore unknown story of the Rothschild Hospital during this period. But most of all, it chronicles the life of a truly exceptional and courageous woman for whom not acting was never an option.

REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“A beautiful love letter to nature and the world around us.”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club September ’24 Pick)

THE PERFECT GIFT FOR NATURE LOVERS, BIRDERS, AND GARDENERS, WITH ORIGINAL COLOR ART THROUGHOUT * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER  * INDIE NEXT PICK

From the beloved New York Times opinion writer: a luminous book that traces the passing of seasons, both personal and natural.

In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer.

Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author—and from us. For, as Renkl writes, “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.”

With fifty-two original color artworks by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world.

Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.

Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexamined aspects of Foucault’s childhood, including his wartime ordeals, it proposes an original interpretation of Foucault’s oeuvre. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault, in addition to being a theorist of power, knowledge, and selfhood, was also a philosopher of experience. He was a thinker intent on making sense of the events that he lived through. Behrent identifies four specific experiences in Foucault’s childhood that exercised a decisive influence on him and that, in various ways, he later made the subject of his philosophy: his family’s deep connections to the medical profession; his upbringing in a bourgeois household; the German Occupation during World War II; and his Catholic education.

Behrent not only reconstructs the specific nature of these experiences but also shows how reference to them surfaces in Foucault’s later work. In this way, the book both sheds light on a formative period in the philosopher’s life and offers a unique interpretation of key aspects of his thought.

A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller

2023 Southwest Book of the Year Selection

"The arid land that starts in Arizona and stretches into Mexico's west coast is Ronstadt's foothold in the world. It's a story she has told through music, and now wants to tell through food."—The New York Times

"The book is many things at once. It’s a portrait of a place, the Sonoran Desert, and it’s a genealogy of sorts, an archival romp through Ronstadt’s family history."—Vogue

"An album of loves for the high desert of Sonora and Ronstadt's hometown of Tucson."—NPR

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Linda Ronstadt takes readers on a journey to the place her soul calls home, the Sonoran Desert, in this candid new memoir.

In Feels Like Home, Grammy award-winning singer Linda Ronstadt effortlessly evokes the magical panorama of the high desert, a landscape etched by sunlight and carved by wind, offering a personal tour built around meals and memories of the place where she came of age. Growing up the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a descendant of Spanish settlers near northern Sonora, Ronstadt’s intimate new memoir celebrates the marvelous flavors and indomitable people on both sides of what was once a porous border whose denizens were happy to exchange recipes and gather around campfires to sing the ballads that shaped Ronstadt’s musical heritage. Following her bestselling musical memoir, Simple Dreams, this book seamlessly braids together Ronstadt’s recollections of people and their passions in a region little understood in the rest of the United States. This road trip through the desert, written in collaboration with former New York Times writer Lawrence Downes and illustrated throughout with beautiful photographs by Bill Steen, features recipes for traditional Sonoran dishes and a bevy of revelations for Ronstadt’s admirers. If this book were a radio signal, you might first pick it up on an Arizona highway, well south of Phoenix, coming into the glow of Ronstadt’s hometown of Tucson. It would be playing something old and Mexican, from a time when the border was a place not of peril but of possibility.

In his newest book, Daniel J. Mahoney offers refreshing historical antidotes to the displays of despotism in today's political arena.

"A brilliantly written and researched tribute to the pantheon of classically trained and thinking men of action." —Victor Davis Hanson

In The Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of statesmen who struggled to preserve freedom during times of crisis: Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar’s encroaching autocracy; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny in revolutionary France; Tocqueville defending liberty and human dignity against blind reaction, democratic impatience, and revolutionary fanaticism; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to chattel slavery; Churchill defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; and Havel fighting Communism before 1989 and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace.

Mahoney makes sense of the mixture of magnanimity and moderation that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.

A gently powerful memoir about deepening your relationship with your homeland.

Moving between his childhood and the present day, Sarris creates a kaleidoscopic narrative about the forces that shaped his early years and his eventual work as a tribal leader. He considers the deep past, historical traumas, and possible futures of his homeland. His acclaimed storytelling skills are in top form here, and he charts his journey in prose that is humorous, searching, and profound. Described as "jewellike" by the San Francisco Chronicle, Becoming Story is also a gently powerful guide in the art of belonging to the place where you live.

J. E. Wallace Sterling was Stanford University's fifth president, serving from 1949 until 1968. During his presidency, Stanford evolved from a notable regional university into a leading national and eventually international university—developments in which Sterling played a critical part. Taking advantage of a postwar economic boom, federal interest in university research, and popular interest in higher education, Sterling championed robust fundraising, ambitious faculty recruitment, increasing selectivity in student admissions, and the construction of major new research facilities. This deeply researched historical study of Sterling's role at Stanford thus simultaneously illuminates a remarkable career in university leadership along with the development of one of America's top-ranked universities.

This is not, however, a simple success story, but instead a nuanced exploration of experimentation, uncertainty, disagreement, leaps of faith, accommodation, and compromise—within the university as well as between the university and its alumni, neighbors, and the public. Although Stanford had survived the Depression and World War II better than many of its peers, it did so at the cost of seriously deferred maintenance, notoriously low faculty salaries and morale, inadequate scholarship support, and outdated labs and libraries. Favoring gradualism and pragmatism, Sterling drew faculty into university governance and long-term planning, building a strong and able administrative team. The result was a remarkable and steadily sustained rise in the university's fortunes, which survived the campus turmoil of the Vietnam War era along with significantly changed expectations on the part of students, faculty, parents, and the wider public.

"Muggeridge's masterpiece, the greatest achievement of his life as a writer."—The London Times

One of the most arrestingly insightful reflections ever written on the life, person, and teachings of Christ. 

In Jesus, the Man Who Lives, the celebrated British author Malcolm Muggeridge offers a meditation that was deemed by The London Times to be his “masterpiece, the greatest achievement of his life as a writer.” Muggeridge's portrait of Christ is at once deeply personal and universally accessible.

Beginning with the assertion that the “coming of Jesus into the world is the most stupendous event in human history,” Muggeridge provides astute commentary on the events of Christ’s life, his teachings, his parables, his prophecies, and his relationships. Along the way, he happily punctures many of the cherished myths held about Jesus—and about itself—by the modern, self-satisfied, largely post-Christian world. With his trademark honesty and wit, Muggeridge concludes that “either Jesus never was or he still is. I assert that he still is." 

This new, fiftieth-anniversary edition proudly reintroduces Malcolm Muggeridge’s profound spiritual meditation to a new generation of readers.

Essays and short stories from a celebrated Cupeño/Cahuilla journalist.

"Johnson is by turns tender and hilarious—as ever. This book is a welcome addition to his loving history of the world as he knows it." —Susan Straight, author of Sacrament

In this deeply moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson's stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise,” as they face down circumstances by turns ordinary and devastating. From the noir-tinged mystery of "Unholy Wine" to the gripping intensity of "Tukwut," Johnson effortlessly switches genre, perspective, and tense, vividly evoking people and places that are fictional but profoundly true to life. The nonfiction featured in Bird Songs Don't Lie is equally revelatory in its exploration of complex connections between past and present. Whether examining his own conflicted feelings toward the missions as a source of both cultural damage and identity, sharing advice for cooking for eight dozen cowboys and -girls, or recounting an influx of New Age seekers of enlightenment in the Pushcart-nominated "100 White Women," Johnson plumbs the comedy, catastrophe, and beauty of his life on the Pala Reservation to thunderous effect.

IPPY Awards Gold Medal Winner in the memoir category

Colorado Independent Book Publishers Association (CIPA) Gold Medal Winner in the memoir category

National Indie Excellence Awards finalist in the new non-fiction category

A deeply personal memoir about finding family and belonging from White House staffer Robin F. Schepper. 

Growing up torn between her single Pan Am–stewardess mom and brothel-owning grandmother in 1960s New York City, Robin F. Schepper never imagined that she’d one day have an office in the East Wing of the White House. Her childhood in a German American neighborhood on the Upper East Side was peppered with half-truths, from the family secrets surrounding her grandmother’s immigration to deceptions about her biological father. 

In a world of self-absorbed adults, Robin largely raised herself: she secured a scholarship to a prestigious private school and worked several jobs as a teenager to pay her own living expenses before finally escaping to California for college. Street-smart and undeniably driven, once in the professional world Robin quickly ascended in the male-dominated political sphere, traveling the globe while being subjected to sexual harassment and assaults that echoed obstacles her mother and grandmother had faced. Through it all, Robin searched for her biological father. She felt that if she could understand why he abandoned her, she could free herself from secrets, lies, and shame. 

Robin eventually rose to work for the First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama and, in the meantime, created her own family by adopting two sons from Kazakhstan. Intimate and captivating, Finding My Way follows an ambitious woman who reached the highest pinnacles of a political career while simultaneously fulfilling her own quest to heal from family trauma and discover her true identity. 

“An affirmation and celebration of our deep and radical connections with the world and each other . . . Reading this book is like finding a friend.”—Ruth Ozeki

A spirited and timely exploration of group living that encourages readers to reconsider the meaning of family and home.

Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both her parents threw open their rambling house in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates—an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in furthering the experiment of communal living into a new generation.

Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman House—of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopian—with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life. From spending time at her aunt and uncle’s intentional community in Washington State to finding her footing in the kitchen as a student in Japan to mushroom hunting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Milholland offers an expansive and vibrant reevaluation of the structures at the very center of our lives.

Thoughtful, quirky, candid, and wise, Group Living and Other Recipes introduces a gifted memoirist and thinker, making a convincing case that “now is always the right time to reimagine home and family.”

An examination of how settler colonialism shaped the thinking of America’s leading philosopher of democracy and education, John Dewey

John Dewey is regarded as a towering figure in the history of American philosophy, widely remembered by educators as an advocate for experiential and child-centered pedagogy, as evidenced by the mantra “learning by doing.” At first blush, such ideas appear to a share strong resonance with Indigenous ways of teaching and learning. After all, Native educators have long emphasized the importance of hands-on learning drawn from close relationships to place. This resemblance begs the question: What might Dewey have learned from Indigenous people?

Instrumental Indians shows that, despite such affinities, Dewey wrote a great deal about Indians as he imagined them rather than as they are. He did so through the lens of the frontier discourse, a pervasive cultural mythology that represented Indigenous people as savage foils and background actors in the settlement of a frontier across North America. Consequently, Dewey’s imagined Indians became both instrumental and instrumentalized in his philosophy, a paradox that reduced Indigenous people to mere evidence for his pragmatism rather than as a contemporary constituency who might have benefited from its application. By instrumentalizing Indians, Dewey’s contributions to American philosophy were made under the shadow of US settler colonialism.

As Matthew Villeneuve demonstrates, Dewey’s disregard for his Indigenous contemporaries was far from harmless. His career coincided with the height of the federal Indian boarding school system, an era when Native families were subjected to the violence of imposed schooling. Where Dewey failed to offer a critique of such antidemocratic schools, a contemporary of his, Oneida philosopher of education Laura Cornelius, succeeded. In 1920, Cornelius offered an Indigenous theory of democracy and education, an alternative the US government failed to pursue. In Instrumental Indians, Villeneuve provides the first comprehensive account of Dewey’s relationship to Indigenous people—one that challenges the philosopher’s place in the canon of democratic education.

Role of a Lifetime is the story of the crucial role Larry Farmer played on teams that won three NCAA titles for UCLA under Coach John Wooden. Farmer’s record at UCLA was 89–1, the greatest winning percentage in NCAA history. (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was 88–2.)

Role of a Lifetime also details how Farmer, a self-taught player from the playgrounds of Denver, managed to secure a full scholarship, make the varsity team as a sophomore, and ultimately become the head basketball coach at UCLA at the age of 30—the first black head coach for any sport at UCLA.

The book chronicles the reactions of black leaders to his role as the first black head coach, as well as the inside politics that led him to resign after three years as coach, just days after accepting a two-year extension. Farmer also shares new insights about UCLA athletic booster Sam Gilbert and his role in the team’s NCAA probation.

Farmer’s insider perspective during UCLA basketball’s most fabled period, combined with his natural ability to relate entertaining and informative anecdotes about legendary figures such as John Wooden, Bill Walton, Jamaal Wilkes, Reggie Miller, and many other famous players and coaches from throughout the world of college basketball, makes Role of a Lifetime a must-have for all Bruin fans and fans of basketball everywhere!

*As heard on FRESH AIR and THIS AMERICAN LIFE*

Now, for the first time, Winner tells her own story: her unusual childhood in South Texas, with a brilliant but unstable father whose obsession with politics, ancient history, philosophy, and religion sparked her own interests in ancient civilizations and the study of foreign languages, including Latin, Arabic, Farsi, Dari, and Pashto; her patriotism, after 9/11, which led her to enlist in the Air Force and join the NSA, where the work she did in the hope of protecting American security was part of the US campaign in Afghanistan; and, most movingly, her life in the American prison system and how it nearly broke her.

I Am Not Your Enemy is Winner’s bold, brave examination of the moral choices that compel us to act, as well as an account of the risks one young woman took to protect her country and the price she paid for it. It is also a powerful argument for standing up for what you believe in during uncertain times—an inspiring message as relevant now as it was when she made her fateful decision.

“An extraordinary story of resilience. In his moving memoir, Stephen Thompson opens up about how he broke cycles of abuse, poverty, and neglect to build a better life. It’s filled with lessons for anyone who’s ever questioned their resolve.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again

Left with a gift, in a motel room in Reno

The Rubik’s cube was left behind, and so were they. It was January 1980, in a motel room in Reno. Stephen Jon Thompson was just nine years old, left behind with his four younger siblings, the youngest just a year old. Their mother had left two days before to go to the laundromat. She never returned. Now the power was out, the Nilla wafers were running low, and the Rubik’s cube that his mother had brought home from her waitressing job could not be solved. Stephen, the oldest, had a bigger problem to solve, what to do with the four young souls he was now in charge of. He finally determined they all needed to get out of that motel room. He dialed the front desk. Thus begins Hotel Goodbyes, Stephen Jon Thompson’s gripping memoir about making it in America against incredible odds.

Few knew of Stephen’s past. Maybe he didn’t know it himself. For his colleagues at companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, or Nike, he was a successful human resource executive, who had an uncanny ability to read people, to find the right person for the job, and to convince them that it was right for them. More than anything, they remember his infectious smile. But that grinning face hid a difficult past, a childhood spent in dingy motel rooms, dreary foster homes, and a cold, concrete juvenile home. It took Stephen years to tell his story, to write his memoir, to come to grips with a childhood he would just as soon forget. But when his young son came home with a school assignment to tell his family history, Stephen knew he needed to come clean. He could no longer bury the past, not to his friends and co-workers, and not to his two sons, to whom this book is dedicated.

Hotel Goodbyes is one man’s journey to come to grips with his past. From Ohio to California to Nevada and back, Stephen takes us on his journey from foster child to wildfire fighter to college graduate to blackjack dealer to state assembly candidate to successful technology executive. Along the way, he reconnects with his younger siblings and tracks down his Aunt Ouida, his mother’s sister, to find the answer to the question he has always had: why did his mother leave that day and never come back? In the end, Stephen determines that his mother abandoned him, but also left him with a gift, a gift of a better life.

A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. In her new memoir, noted scholar and author Susan Rubin Suleiman uses such everyday objects and the memories they evoke to tell the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the intergenerational complexities of immigrant families and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as an example of how historical events shape our private lives.

After the Nazis marched into Hungary in 1944, five-year old Susan learned to call herself by a Christian name, hiding with false papers in Budapest with her parents. While her relatives in the provinces would be among the 450,000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz, Susan's close family survived and even thrived in the years following the war. But when the Communist Party took over Hungary, Susan and her parents emigrated to Chicago by way of Vienna, Paris, Haiti, and New York. In her adult life as a prominent feminist professor, she rarely allowed herself to think about these chapters of her past—but eventually, when she had children of her own, she found herself called back to Budapest, unlocking memories that would change the direction of her scholarship and career.

At the center of this richly textured memoir is a little girl who grows up happy despite the traumas of her early years, surrounded by a loving family. As a teenager in the 1950s, she is determined to become "100% American," until a post-college year in Paris leads her to realize that her European roots and Americanness can coexist. At once an intellectual autobiography and a reflection on the nature of memory, identity, and home, Daughter of History invites us to consider how the objects that underpin our lives become gateways to our past.

An unusual, searching, and poignant memoir of one man's quest to make sense of depression

George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong sufferer from clinical depression. In How To Be Depressed, Scialabba presents an edited selection of his mental health records spanning decades of treatment, framed by an introduction and an interview with renowned podcaster Christopher Lydon. The book also includes a wry and ruminative collection of "tips for the depressed," organized into something like a glossary of terms—among which are the names of numerous medications he has tried or researched over the years. Together, these texts form an unusual, searching, and poignant hybrid of essay and memoir, inviting readers into the hospital and the therapy office as Scialabba and his caregivers try to make sense of this baffling disease.

In Scialabba's view, clinical depression amounts to an "utter waste." Unlike heart surgery or a broken leg, there is no relaxing convalescence and nothing to be learned (except, perhaps, who your friends are). It leaves you weakened and bewildered, unsure why you got sick or how you got well, praying that it never happens again but certain that it will. Scialabba documents his own struggles and draws from them insights that may prove useful to fellow-sufferers and general readers alike. In the place of dispensable banalities—"Hold on," "You will feel better," and so on—he offers an account of how it's been for him, in the hope that doing so might prove helpful to others.

A captivating biography that celebrates the audacious, inspiring life and works of John Milton, revealing how he speaks to our times.

John Milton is unrivalled—for the music of his verse and the breadth of his learning. In this brisk, topical, and engaging biography, Stephen B. Dobranski brushes the scholarly dust from the portrait of the artist to reveal Milton's essential humanity and his unwavering commitment to ideals—freedom of religion and the right and responsibility of all persons to think for themselves—that are still relevant and necessary in our times.

Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, is considered by many to be English poetry's masterpiece. Samuel Johnson, not one for effusive praise, claimed that from Milton's "books alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned." But Milton's renown rests on more than his artistic achievements. In a time of convulsive political turmoil, he justified the killing of a king, pioneered free speech, and publicly defended divorce. He was, in short, an iconoclast, an independent, even revolutionary, thinker. He was also an imperfect man—acrimonious, sometimes mean. Above all, he understood adversity. Afflicted by blindness, illness, and political imprisonment, Milton always sought to "bear up and steer right onward" through life's hardships.

Dobranski looks beyond Milton's academic standing, beyond his reputation as a dour and devout purist, to reveal the ongoing power of his works and the dauntless courage that he both wrote about and exemplified.

Winner of the 2024 Michel Déon Prize for Non-Fiction

A lyrical portrait of a young Irish woman reinventing herself at the turn of the twentieth century in America

Ellen O’Hara was a young immigrant from Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century who, with courage and resilience, made a life for herself in New York while financially supporting those at home. Hereafter is her story, told by Vona Groarke, her descendant, in a beautiful blend of poetry, prose, and history.

In July 1882, Ellen O’Hara stepped off a ship from the West of Ireland to begin a new life in New York. What she encountered was a world of casual racial prejudice that characterized her as ignorant, dirty, and feckless, the butt of many jokes. From the slim range of jobs available to her she, like, many of her kind, found a position as a domestic servant, working long hours and living in to save on rent and keep. After an unfortunate marriage, Ellen determined to win financial security on her own, and eventually opened a boarding house where her two children were able to rejoin her.

Vona Groarke builds this story from historical fact, drawing from various archives for evidence of Ellen. However, she also considers why lives such as Ellen’s seem to leave such a light trace in such records and fills in the gaps with memory and empathetic projection. Ellen—scrappy, skeptical, and straight-talking—is the heroine of Hereafter, whose resilience animates the story and whose voice shines through with vivid clarity. Hereafter is both a compelling account of an incredible figure and a reflection on how one woman’s story can speak for more than one life.

Charles R. Kesler, an eminent scholar and prodigious editor, has exerted a profound influence on the study of American politics and the practice of American conservatism.

A precocious high-school student, he impressed a visiting William F. Buckley Jr. who, before becoming a life-long friend, wrote him a recommendation letter to Yale. Kesler asked for another—to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree and earned a PhD under the legendary professor Harvey C. Mansfield. An early passion for political journalism, played out largely on the pages of National Review, led Kesler to author an NR cover story on his third great influence, Harry V. Jaffa.

Kesler became a faculty colleague of Jaffa’s at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and is perhaps best known as the editorial helmsman of the Claremont Review of Books. The author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism and Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness, Kesler also co-edited (with William F. Buckley Jr.) Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His edited volume of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling edition version in the country.

In this volume, Kesler’s students, friends, and colleagues commemorate his four-decade career as a teacher, mentor, and scholar. 

Now You’re One of Us is the definitive statement about Redd Kross, an in-depth and riveting tale told in the voices of the talented and tempestuous brothers at the core of this iconic outfit.

Emerging from humble beginnings in suburban Los Angeles, the McDonalds took their rock ‘n’ roll fantasy and ran with it — and wound up becoming one of the most influential American bands of their time. The band’s flamboyant, genre-defying, joyously tuneful blend of musical, sartorial and pop cultural elements profoundly influenced the punk rock, glam metal and grunge movements and won them a worldwide cult of fervent admirers that includes bands like Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, L7 and The Bangles.

Redd Kross continue rocking to this day, much to the intense delight of fans old and new. And now the McDonalds team up with award-winning music journalist Dan Epstein to tell their wild, hilarious and gloriously star-spangled tale.

“To me, Redd Kross will always be one of the most important bands of the last 30-40 years.” Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth)

A thorough investigation of how Jane Jacobs’s ideas about the life and economy of great cities grew from her home city, Scranton

Jane Jacobs’s First City vividly reveals how this influential thinker and writer’s classic works germinated in the once vibrant, mid-size city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Jane spent her initial eighteen years. In the 1920s and 1930s, Scranton was a place of enormous di­versity and opportunity. Small businesses of all kinds abounded and flourished, quality public education was available to and supported by all, and even recent immi­grants could save enough to buy a house. Opposing political parties joined forces to tackle problems, and citizens worked together for the public good.

Through interviews with contemporary Scrantonians and research of historic newspapers, city directories, and vital records, author Glenna Lang has uncovered Scranton as young Jane experienced it and shows us the lasting impact of her growing up in this thriving and accessible environment. Readers can follow the development of Jane’s acute observational abilities from childhood through her passion in early adulthood to understand and write about what she saw. Reflecting Jane’s belief in trusting one’s own direct observation above all, this volume has been richly illustrated with historic and modern color images that help bring alive a lost Scranton. The book demonstrates why, at the end of Jacobs’s life, her thoughts and conversations increasingly returned to Scranton and the potential for cohesion and inclusiveness in all cities.

A fascinating exploration of three individuals in fin-de-siècle France who pushed the boundaries of gender identity.

Before the term "transgender" existed, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Before Trans examines the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three French writers whose gender expression did not conform to nineteenth-century notions of femininity.

Dieulafoy fought alongside her husband in the Franco-Prussian War and traveled with him to the Middle East; later she wrote novels about girls becoming boys and enjoyed being photographed in her signature men's suits. Rachilde became famous in the 1880s for her controversial gender-bending novel Monsieur Vénus, published around the same time that she started using a calling card that read "Rachilde, Man of Letters." Montifaud began her career as an art critic before turning to erotic writings, for which she was repeatedly charged with "offense to public decency"; she wore tailored men's suits and a short haircut for much of her life and went by masculine pronouns among certain friends.

Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud established themselves as fixtures in the literary world of fin-de-siècle Paris at the same time as French writers, scientists, and doctors were becoming increasingly fascinated with sexuality and sexual difference. Even so, the concept of gender identity as separate from sexual identity did not yet exist. Before Trans explores these three figures' lifelong efforts to articulate a sense of selfhood that did not precisely align with the conventional gender roles of their day. Their intricate, personal stories provide vital historical context for our own efforts to understand the nature of gender identity and the ways in which it might be expressed.

A window into the world of nineteenth-century California, from two women who experienced it firsthand.

In the early years of California’s statehood, Emily Brist Ketchum Bancroft (1834–1869) and Matilda Coley Griffing Bancroft (1848–1910) had front-row seats to the unfolding of the Golden State’s history. The first and second wives of historian extraordinaire Hubert Howe Bancroft, these two women were deeply engaged members of society and perceptive chroniclers of their times, and they left behind extensive records of their lives and work. Writing Themselves into History offers a rich immersion in nineteenth-century California, detailing Emily’s and Matilda’s experiences with public life, motherhood, and business against the backdrop of San Francisco’s high society and the state’s growth amidst the tumult of the American Civil War. The book also highlights Matilda’s significant involvement in Hubert Howe’s trailblazing research on the history of the American West—including her work collecting oral histories from women members of the LDS Church—and her evocative descriptions of travels throughout the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Kim Bancroft’s commentary offers historical context and points up Emily’s and Matilda’s keen insights, and she pays special attention to the two women’s complex and nuanced portraits of gender, race, and class in the nineteenth-century West. This book is a valuable resource for American West and women’s studies scholars, and for anyone with an interest in California’s first decades as a state.

American Trojan is the captivating story of a refugee who lost everything and then rebuilt it all,  an immigrant who defied the odds and achieved the American Dream; a visionary technologist who transformed the University of Southern California into one of the nation’s most prestigious private research universities.

At a time when many universities have succumbed to ideology over truth, under Nikias’s leadership, USC retained its academic integrity in the face of high-stakes negotiations, high-rolling donors, and the profound challenges of modern leadership.

Hailing from a humble village on the island of Cyprus, Nikias steeped in thousands of years of history as he grew up. But when the Turkish invasion of 1974 destroyed everything his family had built, he came to America to see what the Land of Opportunity had to offer.

Upon completion of his graduate engineering studies, he embarked on an academic career that established him as a pioneer in digital signal analysis, lead him to collaborate on military projects with the U.S. Navy, and eventually led him to USC, which would forever alter the trajectory of his career and life.

Against this dramatic backdrop, American Trojan offers candid insights into how Nikias’ bold vision transformed USC into one of America’s most elite universities. More than a personal story, it is a blueprint for leadership, offering insights into how Nikias and his team strategized to meet formidable challenges to USC.

An urgent examination of higher education’s current crisis, American Trojan provides a roadmap for renewal, offering specific recommendations for how universities can reclaim their true mission of transmitting knowledge and cultivating young minds.

The definitive biography of a distinguished public servant, who as US Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of State, was pivotal in steering the great powers toward the end of the Cold War.

Deftly solving critical but intractable national and global problems was the leitmotif of George Pratt Shultz's life. No one at the highest levels of the United States government did it better or with greater consequence in the last half of the 20th century, often against withering resistance. His quiet, effective leadership altered the arc of history. While political, social, and cultural dynamics have changed profoundly since Shultz served at the commanding heights of American power in the 1970s and 1980s, his legacy and the lessons of his career have even greater meaning now that the Shultz brand of conservatism has been almost erased in the modern Republican Party.

This book, from longtime New York Times Washington reporter Philip Taubman, restores the modest Shultz to his central place in American history. Taubman reveals Shultz's gift for forging relationships with people and then harnessing the rapport to address national and international challenges, under his motto "trust is the coin of the realm"—as well as his difficulty standing up for his principles, motivated by a powerful sense of loyalty that often trapped him in inaction. Based on exclusive access to Shultz's personal papers, housed in a sealed archive at the Hoover Institution, In the Nation's Service offers a remarkable insider account of the behind-the-scenes struggles of the statesman who played a pivotal role in unwinding the Cold War.

“[A] remarkable journey.”—The Telegraph

The incredible life story of legendary cardiac surgeon and scientist Magdi Yacoub, an outsider who succeeded against the odds

Veteran journalists Simon Pearson and Fiona Gorman follow the remarkable life of heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub from his formative years in Egypt, through spectacular success at Cairo University, to his long and distinguished career in Britain. Although at times he clashed with the medical establishment in London, Yacoub pioneered great advances in heart surgery. He was knighted in 1992, and in 2014, he was awarded the highest honor in the gift of the Queen, the Order of Merit.

Written with unprecedented access and drawing on extensive interviews and research, the biography recounts how Yacoub transformed the treatment of children with congenital heart disease. He performed some of the first heart transplants in Britain and the first heart-lung transplants in Europe. At London’s Harefield Hospital, he created the greatest heart transplant center in the world. Among his patients are men and women who are still thriving more than thirty-five years after he gave them new hope.

This story is also about science, the development of new medical techniques, and a deeper understanding of how the human body works. Today, at an age when most people have long since retired, Yacoub is still pushing the boundaries of scientific understanding and surgical know-how. He is also taking heart surgery to places that until now have had little access to cardiac treatment, developing centers of excellence across Africa, including in Egypt, where his hospital in Aswan has an international reputation, and a new center is rising in Cairo.

Yacoub’s life is one of triumph and tragedy, success and failure, fierce criticism and high praise—it is also an enthralling journey through the worlds of scientific research and medical politics and ethics at the highest levels.

The first book about the Nobel Laureate's transformative but conflicted time in the Golden State.

"There is much to learn from this book about Miłosz and California, yes, but also about poetry and the world."—Ilya Kaminsky

Czesław Miłosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley—more time than any other single place he lived—and he wrote many of his most enduring works there. This is the first book to look at his life through a California lens. Filled with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a novel, it is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a perfect introduction for newcomers.

Miłosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Miłosz learned from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.

A sweeping biography that opens a window onto the gilded age of Jewish philanthropy.

Baron Maurice de Hirsch was one of the emblematic figures of the nineteenth century. Above all, he was the most influential Jewish philanthropist of his time. Today Hirsch is less well known than the Rothschilds, or his gentile counterpart Andrew Carnegie, yet he was, to his contemporaries, the very embodiment of the gilded age of Jewish philanthropy. Hirsch's life provides a singular entry point for understanding Jewish philanthropy and politics in the late nineteenth century, a period when, as now, private benefactors played an outsize role in shaping the collective fate of Jewish communities.

Hirsch's vast fortune derived from his role in creating the first rail line linking Western Europe with the Ottoman Empire, what came to be known as the Orient Express. Socializing with the likes of the Austrian crown prince Rudolph and "Bertie," Prince of Wales, Hirsch rose to the pinnacle of European aristocratic society, but also found himself the frequent target of vicious antisemitism. This was an era when what it meant to be Jewish—and what it meant to be European—were undergoing dramatic changes. Baron Hirsch was at the center of these historic shifts.

While in his time Baron Hirsch was the subject of widespread praise, enraged political commentary, and conspiracy theories alike, his legacy is often overlooked. Responding to the crisis wrought by the mass departure of Jews from the Russian Empire at the turn of the century, Hirsch established the Jewish Colonization Association, with the goal of creating a refuge for the Jews in Argentina. When Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, advertised his plan to create a Jewish state (not without inspiration from Hirsch), he still wondered whether to do so in Palestine or in Argentina—and left the question open. In The Baron, Matthias Lehmann tells the story of this remarkable figure whose life and legacy provide a key to understanding the forces that shaped modern Jewish history.

The authoritative Beethoven biography, endorsed by and produced in close collaboration with the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, is timed for the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth.

With unprecedented access to the archives at the Beethoven House in Bonn, renowned Beethoven conductor and scholar Jan Caeyers expertly weaves together a deeply human and complex image of Beethoven—his troubled youth, his unpredictable mood swings, his desires, relationships, and conflicts with family and friends, the mysteries surrounding his affair with the “immortal beloved,” and the dramatic tale of his deafness. Caeyers also offers new insights into Beethoven’s music and its gradual transformation from the work of a skilled craftsman into that of a consummate artist.

Demonstrating an impressive command of the vast scholarship on this iconic composer, Caeyers brings Beethoven’s world alive with elegant prose, memorable musical descriptions, and vivid depictions of Bonn and Vienna—the cities where Beethoven produced and performed his works. Caeyers explores how Beethoven’s career was impacted by the historical and philosophical shifts taking place in the music world, and conversely, how his own trajectory changed the course of the music industry. Equal parts absorbing cultural history and lively biography, Beethoven, A Life paints a complex portrait of the musical genius who redefined the musical style of his day and went on to become one of the great pillars of Western art music.

John Quincy Adams is widely recognized as America’s most distinguished diplomat, taking into account the length and breadth of his public service and his influence on American foreign policy. In the course of this remarkable journey, John Quincy documented his ideas and actions through his writings, speeches, letters, diary entries, and state papers. To aid those interested specifically in learning more about the man and his views on foreign policy, the editors have compiled a collection of the most important and often-cited works, such as his famous July 4, 1821 Oration: “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

The selections in this volume provide insights into Adams's diplomatic practices and the critical issues that marked the young American nation. To give the readers context, the editors have provided introductions for both particular periods in John Quincy's life as well as individual documents. Wherever possible, the editors have included the full text but, given the immensity of the available material and John Quincy Adams’s style of writing, they have used discretion to abridge certain documents.

“This stirring memoir proves what readers of Nicholas’s debut novel, Freshwater Road, already know: that Nicholas, a pioneer Black actress, is also a writer of deep talent and understated eloquence. This is not your typical Hollywood tell-all, full of ‘I did this, and I did that,’ complete with cheap shots and horrible reveals about the rich and famous with whom she worked. Rather, it’s a long thoughtful moment, in which an artist peers into the looking glass and reflects on her life in a manner that allows us to see every corner of every room she’s ever been in—and every corner of every room we’ve ever been in. Because her story is ours. Nicholas is a distinct American voice. Her inspiring story, written with deep humility and refreshing honesty, is further proof that women will one day save this country. And I’m a witness.” —James McBride, National Book Award winner

A poignant, revelatory memoir from acclaimed novelist and actor Denise Nicholas that offers an episodic exploration of her multifaceted life, delving intimately into themes of artistic self-invention, race, and grief. 

Long before writing her acclaimed novel Freshwater Road, or her career as a path-breaking TV and film star, Denise Nicholas was a middle-class Black girl growing up in 1950s Detroit, struggling to decipher her family’s profound secrets. She loved Detroit’s vibrant culture despite the harsh realities of its racial segregation, which deeply influenced her perspective on identity. In her early twenties, she dropped out of the University of Michigan to tour the Deep South with the Free Southern Theater at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a path that ultimately ignited her lifelong commitment to social justice and activism. A few short years later she would launch from stage work to meteoric national fame as a series lead on the groundbreaking ABC-TV show Room 222, a role that earned her three consecutive Golden Globe nominations.

With eloquence, vulnerability, and resolve, Nicholas mines her six-decade journey through TV and film stardom, the complexities of her three marriages, and her reconstituting her creative life to become a celebrated novelist, reflecting on the personal, professional, and societal pressures that buffeted her throughout. Constructed of episodic reflections from both personal and professional high points and low points of her life, Nicholas navigates the intersections of love and identity, exploring how her experiences in Hollywood shaped her understanding of success, intimacy, and commitment. Her narrative is rich with anecdotes from her career in Hollywood, as an actor and, later, a successful screenwriter for television and eventually a novelist, providing a backdrop to the struggles and achievements that marked her path. She outspokenly discusses the challenges she faced as a trailblazing actress of color, shedding light on the systemic barriers and biases within the entertainment industry. 

But at the deepest level, this memoir is a heartfelt exploration of grief, as Nicholas recounts the profound losses—including the unsolved, targeted slaying of her sister, the telling of which occupies the center of her story—that have shaped her.  Her reflections on mourning and resilience paint a vivid, moving portrait of how to journey through healing to new dimensions of self-discovery. Through her powerful, stylish, and evocative storytelling, Nicholas not only chronicles her own remarkable life but also provides a resonant narrative of what it means to live, work, and succeed as a Black woman in America over the past half-century.

In the spirit of Eat, Pray, Love, Carol Wright Folbre’s story is of a young suburban Texas woman’s path to self-discovery in the early 1980s. Newly married, she embarked with her husband on a journey that morphed into an eighteen-month reassessment and discovery of her core skills, values, and presumptions.

Folbre’s travels across India, Nepal, China, and Russia were replete with challenge and adventure. Travel by foot, plane, passenger and industrial rail, bus rooftop, riverboat, bicycle, camelback, and donkey cart landed her in places she had never imagined and introduced her to centuries- and millennia-old cultures she had only read about in books. Staying in yurts, hostels, monasteries, and teahouses along the way, she met many people who captivated her.

What started as a headstrong journey driven by a Western tourist’s curiosity became a progression of discovery as Folbre learned the value of getting lost and embracing surprises, listening deeply, and finding strength in the unknown. Throughout her travels, she journaled and illustrated her encounters. What emerged was a framework for her to rethink her worldview and adopt a journey-over-destination and process-over-outcome perspective, recognizing a way of living that holds as many questions as answers and can be genuinely beautiful.

This searing memoir shares the trauma and triumphs of Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir's time inside America's most notorious prison.

Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Bosnia when, in October 2001, they were arrested and accused of participating in a terrorist plot. After a three-month investigation uncovered no evidence, all charges were dropped and Bosnian courts ordered their freedom. However, under intense U.S. pressure, Bosnian officials turned them over to American soldiers. They were flown blindfolded and shackled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were held in outdoor cages for weeks as the now-infamous military prison was built around them.

Guantanamo became their home for the next seven years. They endured torture and harassment and force-feedings and beatings, all the while not knowing if they would ever see their families again. They had no opportunity to argue their innocence until 2008, when the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in their case, Boumediene v. Bush, confirming Guantanamo detainees' constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. Weeks later, the George W. Bush–appointed federal judge who heard their case, stunned by the absence of evidence against them, ordered their release. Now living in Europe and rebuilding their lives, Lakhdar and Mustafa are finally free to share a story that every American ought to know.

Learn more at witnessesbook.com or donate to a crowdsourced restitution fund at GoFundMe.com/witnesses.

A vivid memoir of life in one of New York City’s most dynamic neighborhoods

Growing Up Bank Street is an evocative, tender account of life in Greenwich Village, on a unique street that offered warmth, support, and inspiration to an adventurous and openhearted young girl. Bank Street, a short strip of elegant brownstones and humble tenements in Greenwich Village, can trace its lineage back to the yellow fever epidemics of colonial New York. In the middle of the last century, it became home to a cast of extraordinary characters whose stories intertwine in this spirited narrative.

Growing up, Donna Florio had flamboyant, opera performer parents and even more free-spirited neighbors. As a child, she lived among beatniks, artists, rock musicians, social visionaries, movie stars, and gritty blue-collar workers, who imparted to her their irrepressibly eccentric life rules. The real-life Auntie Mame taught her that she is a divine flame from the universe. John Lennon, who lived down the street, was gracious when she dumped water on his head. Sex Pistols star Sid Vicious lived in the apartment next door, and his heroin overdose death came as a wake-up call during her wild twenties. An elderly Broadway dancer led by brave example as Donna helped him comfort dying Villagers in the terrifying early days of AIDS, and a reclusive writer gave her a path back from the brink when, as a witness to the attacks of 9/11, her world collapsed. These vibrant vignettes weave together a colorful coming of age tale against the backdrop of a historic, iconoclastic street whose residents have been at the heart of the American story.

As Greenwich Village gentrifies and the hallmarks of its colorful past disappear, Growing Up Bank Street gives the reader a captivating glimpse of the thriving culture that once filled its storied streets.

New York Times Editor’s Choice * Indie Next Pick * Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2023 * Kirkus Best Nonfiction 2023 * Amazon Best of the Month * B&N Most Anticipated * Jennette McCurdy Book Club Pick

A “remarkable” (New York Times Book Review) memoir that tells of a young woman’s coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect, and the love affair that, against the odds, allows her to save herself.

Alice Carrière grew up in a converted factory in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, an extravagant home based on the hyper-aestheticized vision of her artist mother, Jennifer Bartlett—with two studios, an indoor swimming pool, a rooftop garden with a koi pond, and multiple, cavernous rooms through which a steady stream of visitors flowed. Alice’s iconoclastic European father was a fleeting, atmospheric disturbance.

Alice grows up as a child living in an adult’s world, with little-to-no boundaries or supervision. As she enters adolescence, a dissociative disorder erases her identity, and overzealous doctors medicate her further into madness. In the absence of self, she inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men, a provocateur who weaponizes intellectual dazzle and outrageous candor—until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Finally, a soulful connection with a generous and sensitive musician allows her to free herself from the pathologies that defined her and recognize her true self. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Carrière has written a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, at last, cure.

Carol Loeb Shloss creates a compelling portrait of a complex relationship of a daughter and her literary-giant father: Ezra Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound’s child by his long-time mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge. Brought into the world in secret and hidden in the Italian Alps at birth, Mary was raised by German peasant farmers, had Italian identity papers, a German-speaking upbringing, Austrian loyalties common to the area and, perforce, a fascist education.

For years, de Rachewiltz had no idea that Pound and Rudge, the benefactors who would sporadically appear, were her father and mother. Gradually the truth of her parentage was revealed, and with it the knowledge that Dorothy Shakespear, and not Olga, was Pound’s actual wife. Dorothy, in turn, kept her own secrets: while Pound signed the birth certificate of her son, Omar, and claimed legal paternity, he was not the boy’s biological father. Two lies, established at the birth of these children, created a dynamic antagonism that lasted for generations.

Pound maneuvered through it until he was arrested for treason after World War II and shipped back from Italy to the United States, where he was institutionalized rather than imprisoned. As an adult, de Rachewiltz took on the task of claiming a contested heritage and securing her father’s literary legacy in the face of a legal system that failed to recognize her legitimacy. Born on different continents, separated by nationality, related by natural birth, and torn apart by conflict between Italy and America, Mary and Ezra Pound found a way to live out their deep and abiding love for one another.

Let the Wind Speak is both a history of modern writers who were forced to negotiate allegiances to one another and to their adopted countries in a time of mortal conflict, and the story of Mary de Rachewiltz’s navigation through issues of personal identity amid the shifting politics of western nations in peace and war. It is a masterful biography that asks us to consider cultures of secrecy, frayed allegiances, and the boundaries that define nations, families, and politics.

What led a former United States Attorney General to become one of the world's most notorious defenders of the despised? Defending the Public's Enemy examines Clark's enigmatic life and career in a quest to answer this perplexing question.

The culmination of ten years of research and interviews, Lonnie T. Brown, Jr. explores how Clark evolved from our government's chief lawyer to a strident advocate for some of America's most vilified enemies. Clark's early career was enmeshed with seminally important people and events of the 1960s: Martin Luther King, Jr., Watts Riots, Selma-to-Montgomery March, Black Panthers, Vietnam. As a government insider, he worked to secure the civil rights of black Americans, resisting persistent, racist calls for more law and order. However, upon entering the private sector, Clark seemingly changed, morphing into the government's adversary by aligning with a mystifying array of demonized clients—among them, alleged terrorists, reputed Nazi war criminals, and brutal dictators, including Saddam Hussein.

Is Clark a man of character and integrity, committed to ensuring his government's adherence to the ideals of justice and fairness, or is he a professional antagonist, anti-American and reflexively contrarian to the core? The provocative life chronicled in Defending the Public's Enemy is emblematic of the contradictions at the heart of American political history, and society's ambivalent relationship with dissenters and outliers, as well as those who defend them.

AWARD: CRT Biography of the year 2025!

'The late South African president Nelson Mandela once famously declared, "It always seems impossible until it is done." His words could easily have been applied to the life of Rose Hudson-Wilkin... there is a genuine exuberance in her narration that is both contagious and inspiring.'
THE MOST REVD MICHAEL B. CURRY, XXVII PRESIDING BISHOP OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH, from the foreword

The Girl from Montego Bay is the autobiography of trailblazer Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Britain's first black woman bishop, who has been right at the heart of a changing nation for over forty years.

As a student, Rose had a poster over her desk that read: 'Do not go where the path leads. Instead, go where there is no path and leave a trail.'

And she does! Offering eye-opening insights into her humble and challenging beginnings in Jamaica, Rose charts her call to train as an evangelist at the Church Army College in London, where she met her future husband, Ken. Captivatingly open to the nudging of the Spirit, Rose simply has a go at everything that comes her way. The discrimination she's faced, due to her gender and minority-ethnic background, is very real. Yet Rose's infectious energy and humour shine through stories of her beloved Hackney, the ten years she ministered to (sometimes wayward) colleagues in Parliament, and her joy at playing a major role in the Coronation of King Charles and Queen Camilla in 2023.

Rose discloses that if there's one thing she would like to see change in her lifetime, it's that accomplishments like hers stop being 'firsts' and simply become normal.

Appointed MBE in the 2020 New Year Honors for 'services to young people and the Church', and listed in the 2020 and 2021 Power list of the 100 the most influential people in the UK of African/African-Caribbean descent, Rose discloses that if there’s one thing she would like to see change in her lifetime, it's that accomplishments like hers stop being 'firsts' and simply become normal.

THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN POPE

The Life, Teachings, Rise and Leadership Qualities of Pope Leo XIV.

"Kengor’s deep understanding of both Catholicism and America make him the right scholar to introduce Americans to a deeper understanding of the first American Pontiff."—HON. NEWT GINGRICH

From New York Times bestselling author and noted Catholic historian Dr Paul Kengor: A portrait of Robert Francis Prevost, his background and life, theological beliefs and teachings, relationship with his predecessors and fellow cardinals and clergy, and surprising rise to become the 267th elected Pontiff and first American Pope, and the challenges he will face and how he is likely to lead the Catholic Church, including interviews with Catholic and papal experts.

In this first major biography of the new American pontiff, Editor of The American Spectator, chief academic fellow at the Institute for Faith & Freedom, professor of political science at Grove City College, historian and New York Times bestselling author of over twenty books, including A Pope and a President, The Divine Plan, and God and Ronald Reagan, Dr Paul Kengor delivers an engaging and gripping deep dive into the life and times of Robert Francis Prevost, whose election to the Chair of St. Peter on May 8, 2025, stunned the world. There had never been an American pope, and until this book, there has not been an in-depth examination of the new American pontiff and his extraordinary election. Professor Kengor takes readers on a spiritual sojourn from the very first pope, Peter, through the Medieval popes, through the turbulence of the Francis years, and through today’s pope and the figures who influenced him, from St. Augustine to Pope Leo XIII. He shows how this so-called “least American American” among the cardinals is actually quintessentially American, and yet also, remarkably, is quintessentially universal—ideally so for the head of the universal Roman Catholic Church.

In this definitive biography, Dr. Kengor provides fascinating information on Prevost’s sudden rise from priest to bishop to cardinal and the inside story on how the vote went down in the Conclave, leading to the highly unexpected and yet overwhelming choice of Prevost on the fourth ballot. Kengor also provides a detailed treatment of the very revealing opening 40 days of Leo XIV’s pontificate and offers unique insights into where the world might expect the pope to proceed hereafter. The pope’s first word from the Loggia was “peace,” and he has committed himself to a mission of peace and unity for the Church and the wider world.

If you want to get to know this mystery man who became pope—who became the first American pontiff—this is the book, a must-read for every Catholic and for non-Catholics as well.

At the height of the McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, John Paton Davies, Jr., was summoned to the State Department one morning and fired. His offense? The career diplomat had counseled the U.S. government during World War II that the Communist forces in China were poised to take over the country—which they did, in 1949. Davies joined the thousands of others who became the victims of a political maelstrom that engulfed the country and deprived the United States of the wisdom and guidance of an entire generation of East Asian diplomats and scholars.

The son of American missionaries, Davies was born in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Educated in the United States, he joined the ranks of the newly formed Foreign Service in the 1930s and returned to China, where he would remain until nearly the end of World War II. During that time he became one of the first Americans to meet and talk with the young revolutionary known as Mao Zedong. He documented the personal excesses and political foibles of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. As a political aide to General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, the wartime commander of the Allied forces in East and South Asia, he traveled widely in the region, meeting with colonial India's Nehru and Gandhi to gauge whether their animosity to British rule would translate into support for Japan. Davies ended the war serving in Moscow with George F. Kennan, the architect of America's policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan found in Davies a lifelong friend and colleague. Neither, however, was immune to the virulent anticommunism of the immediate postwar years.

China Hand is the story of a man who captured with wry and judicious insight the times in which he lived, both as observer and as actor.

The rarely told story of Savitri Devi—a Frenchwoman and one of Hitler's most powerful advocates

In this window onto the roots and evolution of international neo-Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reveals the powerful impact of one of fascism's most creative minds.

Savitri Devi's influence on neo-Nazism and other hybrid strains of mystical fascism has been continuous since the mid-1960s. A Frenchwoman of Greek-English birth, Devi became an admirer of German National Socialism in the late 1920s. Deeply impressed by its racial heritage and caste-system, she emigrated to India, where she developed her racial ideology, in the early 1930s. Her works have been reissued and distributed through various neo-Nazi networks and she has been lionized as a foremother of Nazi ideology. Her appeal to neo-Nazi sects lies in the very eccentricity of her thought—combining Aryan supremacism and anti-Semitism with Hinduism, social Darwinism, animal rights, and a fundamentally biocentric view of life—and has resulted in curious, yet potent alliances in radical ideology.

As one of the earliest Holocaust deniers and the first to suggest that Adolf Hitler was an avatar—a god come to earth in human form to restore the world to a golden age—Devi became a fixture in the shadowy neo-Nazi world. In Hitler's Priestess, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke examines how someone with so little tangible connection to Nazi Germany became such a powerful advocate of Hitler's misanthropy.

Hitler's Priestess illuminates the life of a woman who achieved the status of a prophetess for her penchant for redirecting authentic religious energies in the service of regenerate fascism.

Born just one year before the United Nations itself, Ban Ki-moon came of age with the world body. His earliest memories are haunted by the sound of bombs dropping on his Korean village and the sight of fires consuming what remained. The six-year-old boy fled with his family, trudging for miles in mud-soaked shoes, suffering from incessant hunger, and wondering how they would survive—until the United Nations rescued them. Young Ban Ki-moon grew up determined to repay this lifesaving generosity.

Resolved is Ban Ki-moon’s personal account of his decade at the helm of the organization during a period of historic turmoil and promise. Meeting challenges and resistance with a belief in the UN’s mission of peace, development, and human rights, he steered the United Nations through a volatile period that included the Arab Spring, nuclear pursuits in Iran and North Korea, the Ebola epidemic, and brutal new conflicts in Central Africa. As secretary-general, Ban also forged global agreements to fight extreme poverty and address the climate crisis.

Ban performed what has been called “the most impossible job on this earth” with a genuine belief in collective action and global transformation. Freed from the diplomatic constraints of a lifetime of public service, he offers a candid assessment of the people and events that shape our era and a bracing analysis of what lies ahead.

At a time when almost all African American college students attended black colleges, philosopher William Fontaine was the only black member of the University of Pennsylvania faculty—and quite possibly the only black member of any faculty in the Ivy League. Little is known about Fontaine, but his predicament was common to African American professionals and intellectuals at a critical time in the history of civil rights and race relations in the United States.

Black Philosopher, White Academy is at once a biographical sketch of a man caught up in the issues and the dilemmas of race in the middle of the last century; a portrait of a salient aspect of academic life then; and an intellectual history of a period in African American life and letters, the discipline of philosophy, and the American academy. It is also a meditation on the sources available to a practicing historian and, frustratingly, the sources that are not. Bruce Kuklick stays close to the slim packet of evidence left on Fontaine's life and career but also strains against its limitations to extract the largest possible insights into the life of the elusive Fontaine.

Winner of the Reading the West Book Award

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

A People Best Memoir of the Year

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of the Year Selection

A Book Riot Best Book of the Year

“I’m in awe of Chris La Tray’s storytelling. Becoming Little Shell creates a multilayered narrative from threads of personal, family, community, tribal, and national histories.”—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.

When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray embarks on a journey into his family’s past, discovering along the way a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—as well as the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition. 

Both personal and historical, Becoming Little Shell is a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray’s remarkable journey is both revelatory and redemptive.

2024 WINNER Autobiography/Memoir Best Book Awards
2025 Nautilus Award Winner | Silver | Death & Dying / Grief & Loss
2025 Foreword INDIES Award Winner | Bronze | Grief/Grieving (Adult Nonfiction)

“A wondrous, hopeful, heart-breaking witness to one of the darkest journeys imaginable… This will be one of those rare books that people re-read, think about, and encourage others to read.” —Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D, author, with Oprah Winfrey, of What Happened to You

“I love this book. I absolutely could not put it down. It is beautifully written and cuts to the very heart of life and love: The story of Havi’s short, beautiful life and early death from Tay-Sachs is harrowing, heartbreaking, uplifting, profound and sometimes funny. Havi will charm the socks off you.”—Anne Lamott

Life is unfolding as planned for Myra Sack and her husband Matt until their beautiful year-old daughter Havi is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, and given only a year to live. Myra and Matt decide to celebrate Havi’s short life and vow to show her as much of the world as they can, surrounded by friends and family who relocate to be in Havi’s orbit. Tapping their Judaism, they transform Friday night Shabbats into birthday parties—“Shabbirthdays”—to replace the birthdays Havi will never have.

From New York Times contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl comes an unusual, captivating portrait of a family—and of the cycles of joy and grief that inscribe human lives within the natural world.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father—and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.

And here, braided into the overall narrative, Renkl offers observations on the world surrounding her suburban Nashville home. Ringing with rapture and heartache, these essays convey the dignity of bluebirds and rat snakes, monarch butterflies and native bees. As these two threads haunt and harmonize with each other, Renkl suggests that there is astonishment to be found in common things: in what seems ordinary, in what we all share. For in both worlds—the natural one and our own—“the shadow side of love is always loss, and grief is only love’s own twin.”

Gorgeously illustrated by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, Late Migrations is an assured and memorable debut.

In a book that will touch hearts and minds, acclaimed cultural historian Marilyn Yalom presents firsthand accounts of six witnesses to war, each offering lasting memories of how childhood trauma transforms lives.

The violence of war leaves indelible marks, and memories last a lifetime for those who experienced this trauma as children. Marilyn Yalom experienced World War II from afar, safely protected in her home in Washington, DC. But over the course of her life, she came to be close friends with many less lucky, who grew up under bombardment across Europe—in France, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Holland. With Innocent Witnesses, Yalom collects the stories from these accomplished luminaries and brings us voices of a vanishing generation, the last to remember World War II.

Memory is notoriously fickle: it forgets most of the past, holds on to bits and pieces, and colors the truth according to unconscious wishes. But in the circle of safety Marilyn Yalom created for her friends, childhood memories return in all their startling vividness. This powerful collage of testimonies offers us a greater understanding of what it is to be human, not just then but also today. With this book, her final and most personal work of cultural history, Yalom considers the lasting impact of such young experiences—and asks whether we will now force a new generation of children to spend their lives reconciling with such memories.

When World War I began, Karnig Panian was only five years old, living among his fellow Armenians in the Anatolian village of Gurin. Four years later, American aid workers found him at an orphanage in Antoura, Lebanon. He was among nearly 1,000 Armenian and 400 Kurdish children who had been abandoned by the Turkish administrators, left to survive at the orphanage without adult care.

This memoir offers the extraordinary story of what he endured in those years—as his people were deported from their Armenian community, as his family died in a refugee camp in the deserts of Syria, as he survived hunger and mistreatment in the orphanage. The Antoura orphanage was another project of the Armenian genocide: its administrators, some benign and some cruel, sought to transform the children into Turks by changing their Armenian names, forcing them to speak Turkish, and erasing their history.

Panian's memoir is a full-throated story of loss, resistance, and survival, but told without bitterness or sentimentality. His story shows us how even young children recognize injustice and can organize against it, how they can form a sense of identity that they will fight to maintain. He paints a painfully rich and detailed picture of the lives and agency of Armenian orphans during the darkest days of World War I. Ultimately, Karnig Panian survived the Armenian genocide and the deprivations that followed. Goodbye, Antoura assures us of how humanity, once denied, can be again reclaimed.

A reflection on how trauma is passed from generation to generation

In The Listener, a daughter receives a troubling gift: her mother’s stories of surviving World War II in Poland. During the Holocaust, Irene Oore’s mother escaped the death camps by concealing her Jewish identity. Those years found her constantly on the run and on the verge of starvation, living a harrowing and peripatetic existence as she struggled to keep herself and her family alive.

Throughout the memoir, Oore reveals a certain ambivalence towards the gift bestowed upon her. The stories of fear, love, and constant hunger traumatised her as a child. Now, she shares these same stories with her own children, to keep the history alive.

When Jennifer Risher joined Microsoft in 1991, she met her husband, and with him became an extra-lucky beneficiary of the dot-com boom. By their early thirties, they had tens of millions of dollars. Today, there are millions of people like her. Jennifer’s thought-provoking, personal story includes the voices of others in her demographic and explores the hidden impact of wealth on identity, relationships, and sense of place in the world. At a time when income inequality is a huge problem, our country’s economic system is broken, and money is still a taboo subject even among those closest to us, this engaging, introspective memoir is essential reading: a catalyst for conversation that demystifies wealth and inspires us to connect.

A Son of the Forest (1829) is an autobiography by William Apes. An indentured servant, soldier, minister, and activist, Apes lived an uncommonly rich life for someone who died at just 41 years of age. Recognized for his pioneering status as a Native American public figure, William Apes was an astute recorder of a life in between. His autobiography explores the psychological effects of oppression, addiction, and cultural change from the viewpoint of a man who experienced them all. “[T]he great fear I entertained of my brethren, was occasioned by the many stories I had heard of their cruelty towards the whites—how they were in the habit of killing and scalping men, women and children. But the whites did not tell me that they were in a great majority of instances the aggressors—that they had imbrued their hands in the life blood of my brethren, driven them from their once peaceful and happy homes…” While out on a berry picking expedition as a boy, William—by then living as an indentured servant with a local white family—spots a group of Native women. From the reaction of his foster family, he realizes for the first time in his life the inherent racial biases he has absorbed despite recognizing his own Pequot heritage. A Son of the Forest is a groundbreaking autobiography from a pioneering author and activist of the early nineteenth century. This edition of William Apes’ A Son of the Forest is a classic of Native American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Life Among the Paiutes (1883) is a book by Sarah Winnemucca. Written toward the end of a lifetime of advocacy on behalf of Native Americans, Life Among the Paiutes is a hybrid work of history and memoir by Sarah Winnemucca, who witnessed firsthand the dangers of unchecked occupation by US government and military forces. Intended as a rallying cry to white Americans, Life Among the Paiutes is considered the first autobiographical work written by a woman of Native American heritage. Oh my dear good Christian people, how long are you going to stand by and see us suffer at your hands?” First and foremost, Winnemucca’s groundbreaking text is intended for an Anglo-American audience, whose political status the author hopes to use as a means of bringing her message to the halls of Congress. In the memoir section, Winnemucca describes her upbringing among the Northern Paiute in Nevada, whose lives were irrevocably disrupted by incursions from white settlers and military raids. After the murder of her mother and several members of her family by the US Cavalry, Winnemucca dedicated herself to social work and activism, using her knowledge of the English language to reach a larger audience. Weaving her own story into the story of her people, Winnemucca makes a compelling case for the reparation of land and sovereignty to the Northern Paiutes, who had been devastated and dispersed for decades after making contact with American settlers. This edition of Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Paiutes is a classic work of Native American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

In his exceptionally thought-provoking and moving memoir, neurosurgeon Joseph D. Stern explores how personal loss influences the way physicians relate to patients and their families.

How does a doctor who deals with the death of patients on a regular basis confront his own loss when his beloved sister is living out her last days?

Despite a career as a neurosurgeon, Joseph Stern learned more about the nature of illness and death after his younger sister, Victoria, developed leukemia than his formal medical training ever taught him. Her death broke down the self-protective barriers he had built to perform his job and led to a profound shift in his approach to medicine.

During the year of his sister’s illness, Dr. Stern developed a greater awareness of the needs of patients and their families; of the burdens they carry; of the importance of connection, communication, and gratitude; and of what it means to ask the right questions.

No matter which side of the patient-doctor relationship you find yourself on, listening with empathy, a willingness to be vulnerable, and emotional agility are skills we can all develop to improve how we meet difficult, unavoidable challenges.

On July 13, 1942, French gendarmes arrested Irène Némirovsky in southern Burgundy. She was deported to Auschwitz where she died on August 19. Who was this woman, author of more than a dozen popular novels and more than thirty short stories, whose posthumous novel, Suite Française, won France's prestigious Renaudot prize in 2004? Born in Russia to wealthy parents, Irène Némirovsky immigrated to Paris in 1919. Although she was Jewish, she consorted with authors and politicians on the extreme right, some of whom were openly anti-Semitic. She was sure that these friends would protect her from deportation after the Nazis invaded France. Instead, they abandoned her. Yet she never lost faith in France, even after she was refused French nationality. In this fascinating biography, Jonathan Weiss analyzes the discrepancy between Némirovsky's real and imagined identities, and explores a literary work that revisits in a unique way Jewish identity, exile, betrayal, and the solidarity of a persecuted people.

Published in 1924, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson is a biography by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Featuring detailed biographical essays and her letters, for the first time arranged chronically, the book stands as a retelling of her aunt’s life from the perspective of family in an attempt to challenge the image of Emily Dickinson as a cold, isolated woman of mystery. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson is a must-read biography reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

John G. Johnson, who died in 1917, became a legend soon after his death. His prodigious intellect and energy, his consummate skill in court, his independence of thought and action are still spoken of with the same awe his name provoked when it was considered the magic answer to almost any knotty problem of law.

This is the first attempt to put this remarkable, nationally famous figure between the covers of a book. His career is traced, step by step, from his humble birth, through his rapid rise in legal circles, to the crowning rewards of his later years when he was considered the most brilliant corporation lawyer in America. He is shown as a man of single-minded, tireless devotion to the study and application of the law in all its aspects, who gave equally efficient service to big clients and little. He was one of the last general practitioners of law, handling every kind of case to the total of over 10,000 in his lifetime, but his greatest reputation was made in the early years of the century when he tried the Northern Securities Case before the United States Supreme Court, The Government case against the U. S. Steel Corporation and other legal battles of the antitrust era.

The story of Johnson's life is the story of his legal activities, for he had only one other genuine interest—art collecting. This aspect of his character is also described, but the book deals primarily with Johnson the living symbol of the law who well deserves this lasting record.

An extensively researched account of the infamous Benedict Arnold, framed in Martin's biography as a hero rather than a traitor

Benedict Arnold stands as one of the most vilified figures in American history. Stories of his treason have so come to define him that his name, like that of Judas, is virtually synonymous with treason.

Yet Arnold was one of the most heroic and remarkable men of his time, indeed in all of American history. A brilliant military leader of uncommon bravery, Arnold dedicated himself to the Revolutionary cause, sacrificing family life, health, and financial well-being for a conflict that left him physically crippled, sullied by false accusations, and profoundly alienated from the American cause of liberty. By viewing Arnold's life backward through the prism of his treason, we invariably succumb to the demonizations that arose only after his abandonment of the rebel forces. We thereby overlook his critical role as one of the influential actors in the American Revolution.

Distinguished historian James Kirby Martin's landmark biography, the result of a decade's labor, stands as an invaluable antidote to this historical distortion. Careful not to endow the Revolutionary generation with mythical proportions of virtue, Martin shows how self-serving, venal behavior was just as common in the Revolutionary era as in our own time. Arnold, a deeply committed patriot, suffered acutely because of his lack of political savvy in dealing with those who attacked his honor and reputation. Tracing Arnold's life, from his difficult childhood through his grueling winter trek across the howling Maine wilderness, his valiant defense of Lake Champlain, and his crucial role in the Quebec and Saratoga campaigns, Martin has given us an entirely new perspective on this dramatic and exceptional life, set against the tumultuous background of the American Revolution.

Florence Nightingale is best known as a woman of action—a founder of modern nursing, a reformer in the field of public health, and a pioneer in the use of statistics. What is not generally appreciated is that Nightingale was deeply engaged in the religious and philosophical thought of her time and that the primary aim of her life was not to reform social institutions but to serve God.

Although Nightingale gave primacy to her spiritual life, few of the books written about her have done so, and, until recently, few of her own writings about religion have been published. This failure to attend to Nightingale's spiritual life began to change during the 1980s, most significantly with the 1994 publication of Suggestions for Thought, her own presentation of her religious views.

At the heart of The Friendship of Florence Nightingale and Mary Clare Moore are forty-seven letters written by Nightingale to Moore—her "Dearest Reverend Mother"—the founding superior of the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Bermondsey, London; ten letters written by Moore to Nightingale; and five letters written by Nightingale about Clare to other Sisters of Mercy. These letters illustrate the personal lives and spiritual struggles and aspirations of two highly influential women in Victorian England: one working to achieve military and governmental reforms, the other designing and implementing new church-related services to the poor-both bound together by their devotion to those who were neglected, by nursing and other skills, by mature Christian faith, and by their engaging affection for one another.

Described as "a harmonious human multitude," Ben Franklin's life and careers were so varied and successful that he remains, even today, the epitome of the self-made man. Born into a humble tradesman's family, this adaptable genius rose to become an architect of the world's first democracy, a leading light in Enlightenment science, and a major creator of what has come to be known as the American character. Journalist, musician, politician, scientist, humorist, inventor, civic leader, printer, writer, publisher, businessman, founding father, philosopher—a genius in all fields and a bit of a magician in some.

Volume 3 begins in the year 1748, when Franklin was known in Pennsylvania as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly and in the Middle Colonies as the printer and editor of Poor Richard's Almanac and the Pennsylvania Gazette, the best-known colonial publications. By the middle of 1757, where this volume leaves off, he had become famous in Pennsylvania as a public-spirited citizen and soldier in the conflicts of the Seven Years' War; well known throughout America as a writer, politician, and the most important theorist and patriot of the American empire; and renowned in the western world as a natural philosopher. This volume tells the story of that transformation.

Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples and Spain, claimed that he had never wanted the overpowering roles thrust upon him by his illustrious younger brother Napoleon. Left to his own devices, he would probably have been a lawyer in his native Corsica, a country gentleman with leisure to read the great literature he treasured and oversee the maintenance of his property. When Napoleon's downfall forced Joseph into exile, he was able to become that country gentleman at last, but in a place he could scarcely have imagined.

It comes as a surprise to most people that Joseph spent seventeen years in the United States following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. In The Man Who Had Been King, Patricia Tyson Stroud has written a rich account—drawing on unpublished Bonaparte family letters—of this American exile, much of it passed in regal splendor high above the banks of the Delaware River in New Jersey.

Upon his escape from France in 1815, Joseph arrived in the new land with a fortune in hand and shortly embarked upon building and fitting out the magnificent New Jersey estate he called Point Breeze. The palatial house was filled with paintings and sculpture by such luminaries as David, Canova, Rubens, and Titian. The surrounding park extended to 1,800 acres of luxuriously landscaped gardens, with twelve miles of carriage roads, an artificial lake, and a network of subterranean tunnels that aroused much local speculation.

Stroud recounts how Joseph became friend and host to many of the nation's wealthiest and most cultivated citizens, and how his art collection played a crucial role in transmitting high European taste to America. He never ceased longing for his homeland, however. Despite his republican airs, he never stopped styling himself as "the Count de Survilliers," a noble title he fabricated on his first flight from France in 1814, when Napoleon was exiled to Elba, nor did he ever learn more than rudimentary English. Although he would repeatedly plead with his wife to join him, he was not a faithful husband, and Stroud narrates his affairs with an American and a Frenchwoman, both of whom bore him children. Yet he continued to feel the separation from his two legitimate daughters keenly and never stopped plotting to ensure the dynastic survival of the Bonapartes.

In the end, the man who had been king returned to Europe, where he was eventually interred next to the tomb of his brother in Les Invalides. But the legacy of Joseph Bonaparte in America remains, and it is this that Patricia Tyson Stroud has masterfully uncovered in a book that is sure to appeal to lovers of art and gardens and European and American history.

1833, Catherine Jane Hamilton returned from India to Edinburgh to seek a divorce from her husband, the physician Alexander Lesassier. The charge was adultery, and proof for it lay in a trunk containing her husband's personal papers. Catherine won her suit without difficulty and the trunk was deposited in the library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Alexander Lesassier died in 1839 during the First Afghan War; his trunk and its contents remained untouched for the next century and a half.

It has now been opened and a remarkable tale, told in remarkable detail, has spilled forth. The life of Alexander Lesassier, as expertly reconstructed by Lisa Rosner, affords startling insight into the sensibilities of an era and of the man who, in his own eyes and those of the women who adored him, was its most perfect creation.

Affable and self-absorbed, engaging and ignoble Lesassier was a physician, military surgeon, and novelist, who was also a shameless opportunist, charming scoundrel, seducer, and survivor. His is the story of a failed medical man who wanted to be something different and saw himself as entitled to more than he had; someone who can always be guaranteed to make the wrong choice, and then protest that he has done well.

This fascinating and deeply absorbing book offers rare insights into Georgian, Regency, and early Victorian Britain through the fortunes and misfortunes, hopes and whims, of "the most beautiful man in existence."

In his long and fascinating life, black activist and intellectual Max Yergan (1892-1975) traveled on more ground—both literally and figuratively—than any of his impressive contemporaries, which included Adam Clayton Powell, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and A. Phillip Randolph. Yergan rose through the ranks of the "colored" work department of the YMCA, and was among the first black YMCA missionaries in South Africa. His exposure to the brutality of colonial white rule in South Africa caused him to veer away from mainstream, liberal civil rights organizations, and, by the mid-1930s, into the orbit of the Communist Party. A mere decade later, Cold War hysteria and intimidation pushed Yergan away from progressive politics and increasingly toward conservatism. In his later years he even became an apologist for apartheid.
Drawing on personal interviews and extensive archival research, David H. Anthony has written much more than a biography of this enigmatic leader. In following the winding road of Yergan’s life, Anthony offers a tour through the complex and interrelated political and institutional movements that have shaped the history of the black world from the United States to South Africa.

The English novelist E.M. Forster and the Greek–Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy met when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the First World War. Their subsequent correspondence bears witness to a complex relationship and serves as a fascinating testament to Forster’s relentless determination to promote Cavafy by bringing out an English translation of his work. The letters also chronicle Cavafy’s calculated refusal to comply fully with Forster’s plans. The story they tell involves a number of major twentieth century literary personalities—Arnold Toynbee, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf all participated in Forster’s early translation project. Forster ultimately succeeded in launching Cavafy’s reputation in the English-speaking world, setting an important precedent for his present global literary fame.
The volume includes all extant letters, the earliest Cavafy translations by George Valassopoulos (incorporating Cavafy’s own authorial emendations), poems by E.M. Forster, archival photographs, and related letters.

First appearing in 1845 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, with its painfully vivid depiction of life in bondage, was both a bestseller in its day and one of the most powerful, authoritative texts lending support to the abolitionist movement.

The author traces his life from an infant born into slavery and taken from his mother at birth, to a displaced child hungry for knowledge, to an abused and beaten laborer seeking freedom and a chance to marry the woman he loved. Offering bright, cameo glimpses into a world that should not be forgotten, Douglass chronicles both the cruel violence of a system that saw him as little more than livestock, and the brighter moments of success, of courageous support from friends and allies. Initially greeted by some with doubt that it could have been written by a black man and former slave, the book had a profound effect on American society, making the author something of a celebrity and his cause less an abstract ideal and more of an urgent human concern. Solemn, powerful and passionate The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is more than an important historical document—it is a personal account of striving for human freedom in a world where the author was regarded as neither free nor human.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Editions title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791) is an unfinished memoir by Benjamin Franklin. Addressing the work to his son William, Franklin intended to provide a private account of his life and accomplishments. Published after his death, however, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has since been recognized as one of the most influential works of autobiography in history, as well as a foundational text for the American ideal of the self-made man.

Born in Boston, Franklin joins his brother’s printing business at a young age, learning the ropes in an industry which will later bring him both wealth and fame. Secretly, however, he publishes a series of essays under the pseudonym “Silence Dogood,” satirical pieces written from the perspective of a middle-aged widow. When his authorship is revealed, a dispute ensues between Franklin and his brother that leads the young Benjamin to look for work elsewhere. Unable to find work in New York City, Franklin continues south toward Philadelphia, where he establishes himself as the printer and editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette. After describing his system of thirteen virtues aimed at moral perfection, Franklin returns to his work as a publisher of Poor Richard’s Almanack, a successful yearly pamphlet containing meteorological information, practical tips, and puzzles. Franklin also focuses on his diplomatic work, scientific research and inventions, and his appointment as an honorary member of the prestigious Royal Society.

This edition of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

First appearing in 1845 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, with its painfully vivid depiction of life in bondage, was both a bestseller in its day and one of the most powerful, authoritative texts lending support to the abolitionist movement.

The author traces his life from an infant born into slavery and taken from his mother at birth, to a displaced child hungry for knowledge, to an abused and beaten laborer seeking freedom and a chance to marry the woman he loved. Offering bright, cameo glimpses into a world that should not be forgotten, Douglass chronicles both the cruel violence of a system that saw him as little more than livestock, and the brighter moments of success, of courageous support from friends and allies. Initially greeted by some with doubt that it could have been written by a black man and former slave, the book had a profound effect on American society, making the author something of a celebrity and his cause less an abstract ideal and more of an urgent human concern. Solemn, powerful and passionate The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is more than an important historical document—it is a personal account of striving for human freedom in a world where the author was regarded as neither free nor human.

With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is both modern and readable.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

A Stanford University Press classic.