Biography and Memoir
July 2025
Recent Releases
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir
by Molly Jong-Fast

Molly Jong-Fast, the daughter of Fear of Flying author Erica Jong, chronicles her "wildly conflicted" relationship with her mother, whose neglect spurred Jong-Fast's battles with addiction and whose dementia diagnosis in 2023 helped the two reconnect. For fans of: Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden.
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
by Sam Tanenhaus

Former New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus' incisive and richly detailed biography surveys the life and legacy of public intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr., whose philosophies shaped the modern conservatism movement. Further reading: Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism by Carl T. Bogus.
Medicine River : a story of survival and the legacy of Indian boarding schools
by Mary Annette Pember

"A sweeping and trenchant exploration of the history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S., and the legacy of abuse wrought by systemic attempts to use education as a tool through which to destroy Native culture. From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise "assimilate" into American life. In reality, these boarding schools-sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation-were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people. Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, forced to complete menial tasks in terrible conditions, and utterly deprived of love and affection. Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions-a seminary in Wisconsin, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary's own childhood, and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities. Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it"
Children of radium : a buried inheritance
by Joe Dunthorne

"In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis. When novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their heroic escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. Instead, what he found in his great-grandfather's voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. "I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I betrayed myself, my most sacred principles," he wrote. "I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience." Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various household items, including a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad. But then he was asked by the government to work on products with a strong military connection-first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. Between 1933 and 1935, he was a Jewish chemist making chemical weapons for the Nazis. While he and his nuclear family escaped safely to Turkey before the war, Siegfried never got over his complicity, particularly after learning that members of his extended family were murdered in Auschwitz. Armed only withhis great-grandfather's rambling, 2,000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg-a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil-to reckon with the remarkable, unsettling legacy of his family's past"-- Provided by publisher
Books You Might Have Missed
Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star
by Mayukh Sen

Mayukh Sen's thought-provoking biography of British South Asian actress Merle Oberon (1911-1979) poignantly illuminates how the star navigated passing as a white woman within the Golden Age of Hollywood's racist and classic system, becoming the first actor of color nominated for an Academy Award while disguising her heritage. For fans of: Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang. 
The dragon from Chicago : the untold story of an American reporter in Nazi Germany
by Pamela D. Toler

Drawing on extensive archival research, this captivating look at one of the earliest reporters to warn Americans of the growing dangers of Nazism shows how she exposed the Nazis for misreporting the news to their own people?—?a powerful example for how we can reclaim truth in an era of disinformation and“fake news.” Illustrations.
Charlie Hustle : the rise of Pete Rose and the fall of baseball
by Keith O'Brien

"A page-turning work of narrative nonfiction chronicling the incredible story of one of America's most iconic, charismatic, and still polarizing figures, baseball immortal Pete Rose; and an exquisite cultural history of baseball and America in the secondhalf of the twentieth century Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He had compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago, which still stands. At the same time, he was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati whomade it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn't. In the 1980s Pete Rose came to be at the center of the biggest scandal in baseballhistory. Baseball no longer needed Pete Rose, and he was magnificently, publicly cast out for betting on baseball and lying about it. The revelations that followed ruined Pete, changed life in Cincinnati, and forever altered the game. Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America's most epic tragedies, the rise and fall of Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Drawing on first-hand interviews with Pete himself, his associates, as well as on investigators, FBI and court records, archives, a mountain of press coverage, Keith O'Brien chronicles how Pete fell so far from being America's "great white hope." It is Rose as we've never seen before. This is no ordinary sport biography, but cultural history at its finest. What O'Brien shows is that while Pete Rose didn't change, America and baseball did. This is the story of that change"
Crusade to heal America : the remarkable life of Mary Lasker
by Judith Pearson

"Mary Lasker: The Woman Who Healed America paints the never-before-told story of a remarkable woman and her remarkable life. As a health activist and philanthropist Lasker worked to raise funds for medical research and was co-creator of the Lasker Foundation. The Lasker Award is considered the most prestigious American award in medical research. Lasker and her husband joined the American Society for the Control of Cancer which at the time was sleepy and ineffectual and transformed it into the American Cancer Society. Following her husband's death, she founded the National Health Education Committee. She also played major roles in promoting and expanding the National Institutes of Health, helping its budget expand by a factor of 2000 times from $2.4 million in 1945 to $5.5 billion in 1985. Lasker was also instrumental in getting the US government to fund the War on Cancer in 1971. The portrait that emerges in Persons's engaging and deeply researched biography is one of a feminist who used her femininity wisely. She was savvy, steely, and deliberate. At a time when women in research laboratories and the halls of Congress were an anomaly, Mary Lasker knew how to play the long game, smashing stereotypes in the fashion of female icons like Jeannette Rankin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Shirley Chisholm. She is inspirational not because she was poor, down-trodden, or in ill health. In fact, she was quite the opposite of all of thos"
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