Showing results by publisher "HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books" in Biographies & Memoirs

Paul Moore's vocation as an Episcopal priest took him - with his wife Jenny and a family that grew to nine children - from robber-baron wealth to work among the urban poor of postwar America, prominence as an activist bishop in Washington during the Johnson years, leadership in the civil rights and peace movements, and two decades as the bishop of New York.

In this comprehensive and stimulating biography, Kathryn Tempest delves into contemporary sources to bring to light the personal and political struggles Brutus faced. As the details are revealed - from his own correspondence with Cicero, from the perceptions of his peers, and from the Roman aristocratic values and concepts that held sway in his time - Brutus emerges from legend, revealed to us more surely than ever before.

William Henry "Chick" Webb (1905-39) was one of the first virtuoso drummers in jazz and an innovative bandleader dubbed the "Savoy King," who reigned at Harlem's world-famous Savoy Ballroom. Along with the likes of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Cab Calloway, Webb helped create the popular dance and music culture, known as Swing, that swept the United States during and after the Great Depression and left an indelible impact on American culture.

On May 14, 1804, a party of explorers dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson set off up the Missouri River into America's newly acquired Louisiana Territory. Under the leadership of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the men of the Corps of Discovery would cross the continent and into history.

Bird Brother is a story about pursuing dreams against all odds and the importance of second chances. Rodney's life was nearly upended when he was arrested on drug charges in 2002. The jail sentence sharpened his resolve to get out of the hustling life. With the fierceness of the raptors he had admired for so long, he began to train to become a master falconer and to develop his own raptor education program and sanctuary.

One-cent magentas were provisional stamps, printed quickly when a shipment of official stamps from London did not arrive in British Guiana. They were mostly thrown out with the newspapers; one stamp survived. Through the stories of the eccentric characters who have bought, owned, and sold the One-Cent Magenta, James Barron delivers a fascinating tale of global history and immense wealth, and of the human desire to collect.

In 1966, just as the American military buildup in Vietnam was going into overdrive, a working-class 22-year-old from Chicago was drafted into the army. Larry Heinemann served one year of combat duty, most of it in the vicinity of Cu Chi. It was the most horrific and consequential year of his life, and it served as the raw material for his two classic war novels. This memoir chronicles a 1992 railway journey Heinemann took from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City as the guest of the Vietnam Writers' Association.

For 25 years, Dr. Pietro Bartolo has run the lone medical clinic on the Italian island of Lampedusa. In that time he has rescued, welcomed, and cared for many of the hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants from the Middle East and Africa who have washed up on the island's shores. In this inspiring account of his life and work, Bartolo shares his quiet dignity, unshakable moral center, and inspirational message - "We can't and we won't be governed by our fears."

Nineteenth-century African Americans felt deep affection for their "liberator" as a "homely" man who did not hold himself apart; Southerners felt a nostalgia for Abraham Lincoln as a humble "conciliator". Later, educators glorified Lincoln as a symbol of nationhood to help assimilate poor immigrants. Monument makers focused not only on a gigantic body but also on a nationalist "union", downplaying "emancipation". Among both Black and White liberals in the 1960s and 1970s, Lincoln was derided or fell out of fashion.

The struggles and humiliations of adolescence are told in an unflinching, funny, surprisingly universal tale of one good Jewish girl's battle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Arthur Briggs's life was Homeric in scope. Born on the the tiny island of Grenada, he set sail for Harlem during the Renaissance, then to Europe in the aftermath of World War I, where he was among the first pioneers to introduce jazz music to the world. During the legendary Jazz Age in Paris, Briggs's trumpet provided the soundtrack while Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the rest of the Lost Generation got drunk. By the 1930s, Briggs was considered "the Louis Armstrong of Paris," and was the peer of the greatest names of his time, from Josephine Baker to Django Reinhardt.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007), known today as the architect of John F. Kennedy's presidential legacy - and the myth of Camelot - blazed an extraordinary path from Harvard University to wartime London to the West Wing. The son of a pioneering historian - and a two-time Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner in his own right - Schlesinger redefined the art of presidential biography. A Thousand Days, his best-selling record of the Kennedy administration, remains immensely influential.

One of life's biggest cliches becomes a horrific reality when Douglas Segal's wife and young daughter are hit head-on by a Los Angeles city bus. Miraculously, his daughter was unharmed, but his wife faced a series of life-threatening injuries. Following the accident, Segal began sending regular email updates to their circle of friends and family - a list that continued to grow as others heard of the event. Segal's compelling memoir is an intimate and honest chronicle built around these email updates and is a profound example of how people show up for one another in times of crisis.

Whether you are building a small business from the ground up or managing a multinational company, you can learn the seven key traits for leadership success from one of the greatest business innovators and creative thinkers of the 20th century: Walt Disney. Whether you know him as the first to produce cartoons in Technicolor, the mastermind behind the theme park Disneyland, or the founder of the largest entertainment conglomerate, Walt's story of creativity, perseverance in spite of obstacles, and achieving goals resonates and inspires as much today as it ever has.

For a time, Nelson Algren was America's most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions bought his books. Algren's third novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. But despite Algren's talent, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away; others cited writer's block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic.

He's a comedy legend whose effortlessly wicked whimsy has enthralled audiences all over the world. His manic humor needs no introduction. But who is Billy Connolly? Where did he come from? Where does he get his material? What motivates him? What drives him crazy? And what is it like to live with him?

In 1919, British scientists led extraordinary expeditions to Brazil and Africa to test Albert Einstein's revolutionary new theory of general relativity in what became the century's most celebrated scientific experiment. The result ushered in a new era and made Einstein a global celebrity by confirming his dramatic prediction that the path of light rays would be bent by gravity. Today, Einstein's theory is scientific fact. Yet the effort to "weigh light" by measuring the gravitational deflection of starlight during the May 29, 1919, solar eclipse has been clouded by myth and skepticism.

Across America and around the world, people wander through flea markets to search for lost treasures. For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more.

In this gorgeous memoir that moves from Jon Kerstetter's impoverished upbringing on an Oneida reservation, to his harrowing stints as a volunteer medic in Kosovo and Bosnia, through the madness of Iraq and his intense mandate to assemble a team to identify the remains of Uday and Qusay Hussein, and the struggle afterward to come to terms with a life irrevocably changed, Kerstetter beautifully illuminates war and survival, the fragility of the human body, and the strength of will that lies within.

For Maureen Stanton's proper Catholic mother, the town's maximum security prison was a way to keep her seven children in line ("If you don't behave, I'll put you in Walpole Prison!"). But as the 1970s brought upheaval to America, and the lines between good and bad blurred, Stanton's once-solid family lost its way. A promising young girl with a smart mouth, Stanton turns watchful as her parents separate and her now-single mother descends into shoplifting, then grand larceny, anything to keep a toehold in the middle class for her children.