When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage-learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio-and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory...

J.R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, he would press his ear to a radio, straining to hear the keys to his own identity. His mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, something he couldn't name. So he turned to the bar on the corner, a grand old New York saloon that was a sanctuary for all types of men--cops and...

The star of "Black-ish" traces her journey from poverty to fame, sharing insights into her battles with undiagnosed mental illness and sex addiction while citing the support of loving friends and her philosophy about self-acceptance that enabled her success.

"For the first time ever, legendary singer-songwriter Dolly Parton brings you behind the lyrics of 175 of her songs to reveal the personal stories and vibrant memories that have inspired sixty years of songwriting. Lushly illustrated and told in Dolly's inimitable voice, this rich collection offers an intimate, exclusive look at the colorful life, prolific career, and rags-to-rhinestones journey of one of the most revered entertainers of our time"--...

At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the...

""In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history." --President Barack Obama, 2016 Presidential Medal of Honor ceremony. "Just As I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once...

A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them. Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, took classes online...

"A fascinating, epic exploration of who gets to record the world's history -- from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare to Ken Burns -- and how their biases influence our understanding about the past. There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as "objective" history? In this lively and thought-provoking book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other...

The story of a family in the making and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. Is it possible for humans to discover the key to happiness through a bigger-than-life, bad-boy dog? Just ask the Grogans.--From publisher description.

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State -- and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little...