Southern Memoirs

Gloria Burtzlaff feared for her life one day back in April of 1991 when her abusive husband, Larry, drunk and violent, slapped her, hit her, and began pelting her with glasses. After he tried to drown her in a tub, she got the family shotgun and confronted him in his underwear. “Larry, I’m going to kill you,” she declared. Defense lawyers would later claim he lifted a glass as if to say, “Have at it, sister.” Have at It, Sister is a true-crime tale about Gloria, a South Dakota woman who shot her abusive husband and was put on trial in a precedent-setting case.

In this award-winning Audible Studios production, Trevor Noah tells his wild coming-of-age tale during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa. It’s a story that begins with his mother throwing him from a moving van to save him from a potentially fatal dispute with gangsters, then follows the budding comedian’s path to self-discovery through episodes both poignant and comical.

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s powerful influence on her life. The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes...

Blood in the Soil is the first book about the investigation into the shooting of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and his country attorney in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in 1978. But this book is not primarily about Larry Flynt, or even his shooter (the serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin), though both men are of course important characters in the story. This true account is told alternately from the perspective of Detective J. Michael Cowart and by following Franklin's life from childhood through his execution.

A tale of one family’s trajectory through America and a changing modern world through a charming story. From relatives who fought in the Civil War to societal struggles of overcoming the Southern legacy and moving past the “lost cause,” this page-turner story bounces between nations, philosophies, and different sides of the political aisle. Though a second installment is planned for the more recent past, this first volume is a fully-realized portrait of a proud American bloodline.

Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A White man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a Black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a Black woman and three Black men, all of them innocent. For Karen Branan, the great-granddaughter of that sheriff, this isn't just history; this is family history.

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the civil rights movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

The close knit community in San Miguel de Allende Mexico was plagued by a string of sophisticated kidnappings for nearly a decade. When the police finally made an arrest the townspeople were shocked by who was accused of masterminding the criminal enterprise. It's everyone's favorite neighbor and a pillar of the community, Ramon Guerra. Except Ramon isn't who he says he is.

This Is Not Real Life is a memoir about the total, unfiltered chaos behind the scenes of my time in media. From an evangelical upbringing and a steady diet of Fox News to going viral and playing my first part in media disinformation, to meeting with terrorists, neo-Nazis, intelligence agents, and political crime rings.

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story... From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a...

What was it like to fly a MiG or Mirage in combat over Angola? Most books on the Angolan Bush War, especially those in English, present the South African perspective of events. Now a former MiG-23 Squadron Commander of the Cuban Air Force has collaborated with an ex-SAAF pilot to paint a remarkable new picture of the aerial conflict over Angola in the 1980s. In The MiG Diaries the recollections of Lt-Col Eduardo González Sarría are blended by Lionel Reid with those of air combatants from the Angolan, Cuban and South African air forces. Many are being published for the first time. Using ...

Winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, this is the most comprehensive book ever written about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. David J. Garrow had unrestricted access to Martin Luther King's personal papers, to thousands of pages of newly released FBI documents and more than 700 interviews with King's closest friends and enemies.

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

In this enchanting memoir, Patricia Altschul, the “dowager countess” (The New York Times) of Bravo’s Southern Charm, reveals the exciting adventures of a storied life—from working as an academic and art dealer to her three marriages, to her star turn on the show—offering candid...

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

Of the hundreds of murder cases that noted South Carolina attorney Dick Harpootlian has prosecuted, one in particular haunts him. Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins was a serial killer and rapist, a master manipulator who claimed to have killed over 100 people and is known to have murdered over a dozen. Yet it was on Death Row that he pulled off his most audacious murder—killing another inmate with a military grade explosive. As personable as he was ruthless, Pee Wee defied easy categories. He killed to avenge minor slights as well as for pleasure, using any convenient method.

On an August night in 1994, French counterespionage officers seized the world's most wanted terrorist from a villa in the Sudan. After more than two decades on the run, Carlos "the Jackal" had finally been caged. For years he had murdered and bombed his way to notoriety, evading capture thanks to powerful backers and the blunders of Western secret services. Jackal is the definitive biography of this self-proclaimed "professional revolutionary", ladies man, and cold-blooded killer.

In the rolling fields of the Deep South, where the bonds between humans and animals run deeper than the soil, Horses Who Made Me–Me! takes you on an emotional journey of love, loss, and self-discovery. Dee Jordan built her life around horses—magnificent creatures that offered her joy, purpose, and a connection to something greater than herself. From the spirited Lipizzans she raised to the beloved Freyja, who taught her about strength and resilience, Dee’s equine companions shaped her world as she navigated the triumphs and tragedies of marriage, motherhood, and mental health. But ...

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.