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Biography and Memoir March 2026 |
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Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton
by Martha Ackmann
From her impoverished childhood in the Smoky Mountains to international stardom, Dolly Parton has exceeded everyone's expectations but her own. The day after her high school graduation, she boarded a bus for Nashville, but record executives turned her down. When Dolly finally got her foot in the door, her talent and focus catapulted her to the top of country charts, the pop world, and movie stardom. Shunned by many in Nashville who saw her ambition as a betrayal of her country music roots, Dolly became the target of death threats, lawsuits, and a judge who threatened to throw her in jail, but she came back stronger than ever.
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A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides
by Gisèle Pelicot
The sexual assault that stunned the world. A courageous woman's rallying call for shame to change sides. For the very first time, Gisèle Pelicot tells her story. In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot waived her right to anonymity in her legal fight against her ex-husband and the fifty men accused of sexually assaulting her, a courageous decision that inspired millions of people around the world. Only four years prior, Gisèle had made the shattering discovery that her partner, Dominique Pelicot, had been secretly drugging and raping her, and inviting strangers to also abuse her in their home for nearly a decade. Shame must change sides, Gisèle bravely declared at the opening of the trial in Avignon, France, and the dictum soon became an international rallying cry to radically transform public sentiment and legislation surrounding cases of sexual violence. By the time Dominique and the dozens of men accused were found guilty three and a half months later, Gisèle had become a global figure, and her message--that she and other victims of sexual abuse have no reason to feel ashamed--galvanized a movement that triggered protests and demonstrations around the world. In A Hymn to Life, Gisèle tells her story for the very first time, not as victim, but as witness.
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All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art
by Orlando Whitfield
This tantalizing glimpse by a former dealer into the art world's most rarefied stratum doubles as a cautionary tale about a largely unregulated industry where hubris, greed and fraud abound.--The New York Times Orlando Whitfield and Inigo Philbrick met in 2006 at London's Goldsmiths University where they became best friends. By 2007 they had started I&O Fine Art. Orlando would eventually set up his own gallery and watch as Inigo quickly immersed himself in a world of private jets and multimillion-dollar deals for major clients. Inigo seemed brilliant, but underneath the extravagant façade, his complicated financial schemes were unraveling. With debt, lawsuits, and court summonses piling up, Inigo went into a tailspin of lies and subterfuge. At around the same time, Orlando himself experienced a nervous breakdown and left the art world for good. By 2019 things had spiraled enough out of control for Inigo to flee to the remote island nation of Vanuatu, 300 miles west of Fiji. Within a year, he was arrested by the FBI and extradited to America, where he was sentenced to seven years in prison for having committed more than $86 million in fraud. All That Glitters is at once a shocking and compulsive story of ambition and downfall, a cautionary tale, and an intimate portrait of friendship and its loss.
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The First Survivor: Life with Canada's Deadliest Mass Shooter
by Maureen Banfield
An unflinching memoir that reframes a national tragedy and demands we reckon with the cost of ignoring intimate partner violence.On April 18, 2020, Lisa Banfield's life shattered.After nineteen years in a controlling and often abusive relationship, she escaped a violent assault by her partner, Gabriel Wortman-unaware he was about to carry out the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history. In The First Survivor, Banfield tells her story for the first time: of being groomed and surviving years of intimate partner violence, and of the horrific night she fled barefoot into the freezing woods as Wortman began a murderous rampage that left twenty-two people and an unborn child dead.Told with raw honesty and courage, Banfield's memoir is more than a personal account of life with a man she tried to heal-it's a call to action. With intimate reflections and her own transformation, she exposes the failures in how society sees, supports, and judges survivors of domestic abuse.This is a powerful story of trauma, survival, and one woman's journey reclaiming her voice and redefining her life.
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I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein
by Kieran Fox
A beautifully written (David Fideler) spiritual biography of Albert Einstein that reveals for the first time the scientific and religious origins of his personal philosophy -- a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mind of the great physicist (Jo Marchant) Albert Einstein remains renowned around the world for revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos, but very few realize that the celebrated scientist had a deep spiritual side. Einstein believed that one wondrous force was woven through all things everywhere--and this sense of the pervasive sacred influenced every aspect of his existence, from his marvelous science to his passionate pacifism. I Am a Part of Infinity offers the first in-depth exploration of Einstein's spirituality, showing how he drew on a dazzling diversity of thinkers--from Pythagoras to Plato, Schopenhauer to Spinoza, the Upanishads to Mahatma Gandhi--to create a novel system where mysticism met mathematics, reality was revered, and the human mind was honored as a mirror of the infinite. This wasn't just a new way of seeing the world. Einstein asked us to commune with the cosmos, to treat every living creature with compassion, to channel the power that permeated all things and put it to use for pure purposes. Drawing on little-known conversations, recently published letters, and new archival research, I Am a Part of Infinity reveals what Einstein really believed and why his perspective still matters today.
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The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
Summer, 1856 Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit-into the most treacherous waters in the world. As their ship, Neptune's Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious. The treacherous first mate, confined to the brig for insubordination, was agitating for mutiny. With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days.
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Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
by Belle Burden
A gorgeous memoir about the sudden end to a seemingly happy marriage--an aching, love-filled, and transcendent account of surviving betrayal and discovering joy Riveting...examines the very nature of intimacy.--Joyce Carol Oates It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. In Strangers, Belle revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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Côte Saint-Luc Public Library
5851 Cavendish Blvd.
Côte Saint-Luc, Quebec H4W 2X8
514-485-6900csllibrary.org/ |
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