Biography 
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There are a total of 99 valid entries on the list.
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When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor seemed destined to become inseparable. The boys, both children of college professors, grew up on the same street in intellectually vibrant homes shaped by ideas, liberal Jewish culture, the trauma of the Holocaust, and a shared love of basketball and standup comedy. But the two best friends were also keen competitors bearing the same great expectations, and when Michael...
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When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming the center of Black life in the West. But, just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood. They laid waste to 35 blocks and murdered as many as 300 people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst acts of racist violence in United States history. The Goodwins...
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Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905–1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood’s most famous Chinese American actress, a screen siren who captivated global audiences and signed her publicity photos -- with a touch of defiance -- “Orientally yours.” Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong’s tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown...
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3 stars
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"What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self -- a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience -- she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she...
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"An autobiography of one of the towering figures of contemporary American music and a powerful meditation on history, race, capitalism and art"--
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4 stars
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In 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted to discriminating against women on its faculty, forcing institutions across the country to confront a problem they had long ignored: the need for more women at the top levels of science. This is the untold story of how sixteen highly accomplished women on the MIT faculty came together to do the work that triggered the historic admission. centers on the life of Nancy Hopkins, a reluctant feminist...
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4 stars
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"[This] is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. [It] is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about." --Publisher.
8. King: a life
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5 stars
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The first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the...
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A witty look at the complex and fascinating but tumultuous marriages of five well-known figures in the literary world, including British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, and authors Roald Dahl and Kingsley Amis.
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In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them. When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn't hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university...
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3.7 stars
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"In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North....
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5 stars
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"The long-awaited memoir by the superstar of stage, screen, recordings, and television Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. She is among the handful of EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) and has one of the greatest and most recognizable voices in popular music. She has been nominated for a Grammy 46 times, and with Yentl she became the...
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"A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetry was at the heart of the American Revolution"--
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4 stars
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The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his truth. "Can I kiss you?" It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans...
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"In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth...
16. Sink: a memoir
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Stranded within an ever-shifting family’s desperate but volatile attempts to love, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas grew up feeling he was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable...
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For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations...
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Average Rating:
3.5 stars
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In 2016, the fate of Paramount - the entertainment conglomerate that includes Viacom, CBS, and Simon & Schuster - hung precariously in the balance. Its founder and head, ninety-three-year-old Sumner M. Redstone, was facing a very public lawsuit brought by a former romantic companion, Manuela Herzer--a lawsuit that placed Sumner's deteriorating health and questionable judgment under a harsh light. As one of the last in a long line of all-powerful media...
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"Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity to light the two crowded rooms, no books to read. Yet despite this-or, in her words, because of it-Simmons would become one of America's preeminent educators. The former president of Smith College and Brown University, and now the outgoing president of Prairie View A&M, Texas's oldest HBCU, for decades Simmons has inspired...
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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Winner of the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, awarded to the best first book of the year
Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ECONOMIST • TIME
A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide
One...
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, awarded to the best first book of the year
Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ECONOMIST • TIME
A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide
One...