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Biography and Memoir November 2025 |
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Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run
by Peter Ames Carlin
From the opening piano notes of 'Thunder Road, ' to the final outro of 'Jungleland'--with American anthems like 'Born to Run' and 'Tenth Avenue Freeze Out' in between--Bruce Springsteen's seminal album, Born to Run, established Springsteen as a creative force in rock and roll. With his back against the wall, he wrote what has been hailed as a perfect album, a defining moment, and a roadmap for what would become a legendary career. Peter Ames Carlin, whose bestselling biography Bruce gave him rare access to Springsteen's inner circle, now returns with the full story of the making of this epic album. Released in August, 1975, Born to Run now celebrates its 50th anniversary. Carlin reveals a treasure trove of untold stories, detailing the writing and recording of every song, as well as the intense and at times tortuous process that mimicked the fault lines in Springsteen's psyche and career, even as it revealed the depth of his vision.
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Awake
by Jen Hatmaker
Popular Christian living author and podcaster Jen Hatmaker courageously explores the heartbreaking and humiliating end of her marriage of 26 years and the challenges of reclaiming her independence. Hatmaker, suddenly a single mother of five, is relatable as she searchingly poses questions about her purpose and identity that she had taken for granted for so long. For fans of: Untamed by Glennon Doyle.
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Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane
by Devoney Looser
Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser. Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wilder in her time than we've given her credit for, and Looser traces the fascinating and fantastical journey her legacy has taken over the past 250 years. All six of Austen's completed novels are examined here, and Looser uncovers striking new gems therein, as well as in Austen's juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even essays and poetry. Looser also takes on entirely new scholarship, writing about Austen's relationship to the abolitionist movement and women's suffrage. In examining the legacy of Austen's works, Looser reveals the film adaptations that might have changed Hollywood history had they come to fruition, and tells extraordinary stories of ghost-sightings, Austen novels cited in courts of law, and the eclectic members of the Austen extended family whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction. Written with warmth, humor, and remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen.
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The Book of Sheen: A Memoir
by Charlie Sheen
Charlie Sheen was born the third of four children to actor Martin Sheen and his wife Janet. He grew up on film sets--from his father's all over the world, to his own in Malibu. There he made ambitious Super 8s, with a roster of friends who went on to become household names themselves, including his brother Emilio, Sean and Chris Penn, and the Lowe brothers. Sheen broke into movies in the 1980s, playing a hoodlum in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a young soldier in Platoon, and an ethically compromised trader in Wall Street. But somewhere along the way, despite a successful transition to TV leading man in Spin City and Two and a Half Men, Sheen descended into a vortex of extracurricular activities. Now sober, Sheen delivers a clear-eyed narrative of his highs and lows with humor, candor, and a vivid ... writing style that is uniquely his. The Book of Sheen reads like a far-fetched, overstuffed novel of Hollywood life--yet it is all true--
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Anonymous Male: A Life Among Spies
by Christopher Whitcomb
In September 2001, Christopher Whitcomb was the most visible FBI agent in the world. His best-selling memoir, Cold Zero, had led to novels, articles in GQ, and op-eds in the New York Times. He appeared on Imus in the Morning, Larry King, and Meet the Press; he was nominated for a Peabody reporting for CNBC. He played poker with Brad Pitt while contracting for the CIA. Then one day in 2006, without warning, Whitcomb packed a bag, flew into Somalia and dropped off the face of the earth. For 15 years, he waged a mercenary war on himself, traveling the world with aliases, cash, and guns. He built a private army in the jungles of Timor-Leste, working contracts for intelligence agencies, where he survived a coup d'âetat only to lose his friends, abandon his family, and give up on God. And though many stories might have ended there, Anonymous Male is a tale of redemption. While surfing the wilds of Indonesia, Whitcomb found himself trapped beneath a giant wave, where, at the edge of drowning, he came to terms with the chaos of his own clandestine life. He survived the wave to find his way home and rebuild the world that he had abandoned--
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Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age
by Henry Wiencek
The celebrated architect Stanford White was a louche man-about-town and a canny cultural entrepreneur, the creator of landmarks that raised the stature of the American built environment. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a sculptor and the son of an immigrant shoemaker, was a moody introvert and a committed procrastinator whose painstaking work brought emotional depth to American statuary. Over years of acquaintance, their relationship evolved into a partnership that defined the art of the Gilded Age. In Stan and Gus, the acclaimed historian Henry Wiencek tells the story of a fruitful, complicated relationship. After pursuing their own careers in Italy and France, the two men met again back home, where they forged era-defining monuments, including White's Washington Square Arch and Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan and Saint-Gaudens's memorials to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and Clover Adams in Boston and Washington, D.C., respectively. Over the course of decades, White helped sustain his friend's troubled spirits and protected Saint-Gaudens from impatient clients when he failed to complete projects on time. Meanwhile, Saint-Gaudens challenged White to take his artistic gifts seriously. But alongside the brilliant commissions were sordid debaucheries--and White's sensational murder in 1906. Throughout, Wiencek sets White and Saint-Gaudens within the larger story of the era known as the American Renaissance, when a new upper class sought to fortify its ascendancy, and its aspirations and delusions of grandeur collided with new aesthetic ideas and two ambitious young men to yield work of lasting beauty.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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