This work is the author's memoir of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape. Anyone familiar with the author's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a good-time, second-fiddle father who were born into this close-knit community. But...

Vanderbilt: the very name signifies wealth. The family patriarch, "the Commodore," built up a fortune that made him the world's richest man by 1877. Yet, less than fifty years after the Commodore's death, one of his direct descendants died penniless, and no Vanderbilt was counted among the world's richest people. Fortune's Children tells the dramatic story of all the amazingly colorful spenders who dissipated such a vast inheritance.

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One Native Life is a look back down the road Richard Wagamese has traveled from childhood abuse to adult alcoholism in reclaiming his identity. It's about what he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years on Earth. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, making bannock, or attending a sacred bundle ceremony, these are stories told in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese shows readers...

Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James....

A Chance to Die is a vibrant portrayal of Amy Carmichael, an Irish missionary and writer who spent fifty-three years in south India without furlough. There she became known as "Amma," or "mother," as she founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, a refuge for underprivileged children. Amy's life of obedience and courage stands as a model for all who claim the name of Christ. She was a woman with desires and dreams, faults and fears, who gave her life unconditionally...

After her retirement from film and raising her two sons, actress Audrey Hepburn used her fame and influence to capture the media's attention as she charged into the most dangerous places on earth to save children and mothers in dangerous situations. Matzen describes how Hepburn walked away from Hollywood to raise her sons, and then joined UNICEF, the organization that had saved her as a Dutch girl at the end of World War II.

An account of the author's experiences, observations, and reflections as a seasonal park ranger in southeast Utah

"The Tudor period conjures up images of queens and noblewomen in elaborate court dress; of palace intrigue and dramatic politics. But if you were a woman, it was also a time when death during childbirth was rife; when marriage was usually a legal contract, not a matter for love, and the education you could hope to receive was minimal at best. Yet the Tudor century was also dominated by powerful and dynamic women in a way that no era had been before....

The Diary of Anne Frank is read and loved by children throughout the world. Yet few of those readers know what life was really like for the young Jewish girl before and after she wrote her famous diary. Written in a lively yet sympathetic style, Anne Frank's Story follows Anne Frank from her birth in Germany and her happy childhood in Amsterdam through the years she and her family spent in hiding from the Nazis, to her imprisonment and eventual death...

Contains brief biographies that examine the lives and reigns of the forty men and women who have ruled England from 1066 to 2006.