|
|
Biography and Memoir January 2025 |
|
|
|
|
| Raised by a Serial Killer: Discovering the Truth About My Father by April BalascioApril Balascio adapts her 2019 true crime podcast The Clearing for her suspenseful and unflinching debut, which chronicles the 2009 arrest and subsequent sentencing of her father, serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards, after the author called in a tip to a cold case hotline. Try this next: A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming by Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader. |
|
|
|
Freedom
by Angela Merkel
For sixteen years, Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany and at the forefront of European and international politics. In her memoir, she looks back on her life in two German states--East Germany until 1990, and reunified Germany thereafter. How did she, coming from the East, rise to the top of the Christian Democratic Union to become the first woman to hold the office of chancellor? And how did she then become one of the most powerful heads of government in the Western world? What guided her? Reflecting on politics in a time of increasing confrontation and division, Angela Merkel's memoir offers a unique insight into the inner workings of power- and is a determined and timely plea for freedom.
|
|
|
|
Hiding Mengele
by Betina Anton
Josef Mengele was a fugitive in South America for thirty-four years after World War II, sought by the Israeli secret service and Nazi Hunters. Hidden for half that time in Brazil, thanks to a small group of expatriate Europeans, Mengele created his own paradise where he could speak German with new friends, maintain his beliefs, stay one step ahead of the global manhunt, and avoid answering for his crimes. Translated from the Brazilian Tropical Bavaria edition and based on extensive research, including revelatory interviews and never-before-seen letters and photos, Hiding Mengele is a suspenseful narrative not only haunted by the doctor's horrific actions but also by the motivations driving a community to protect an evil man.
|
|
|
|
Lifeform
by Jenny Slate
From actor, comedian, co-creator of Marcel the Shell, and New York Times bestselling author of Little Weirds, Jenny Slate, a wild, soulful, hilarious collection of genre-bending essays depicting the journey into motherhood as you've never seen it before. Herein lies an account of this journey, told in five phases- Single, True Love, Pregnancy, Baby, and Ongoing- through luminous, laugh-out-loud funny, unclassifiable essays that take the form of letters to a doctor, dreams of a stork, fantasy therapy sessions, gossip between racoons, excerpts from an imaginary olden timey play, obituaries, theories about post-partum hair loss, graduation speeches, and more. No one writes like Jenny Slate.
|
|
|
|
Her Lotus Year
by Paul French
Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl "Win" Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China. In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her "Lotus Year," referring to Homer's Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. Though faced with challenges, Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics. China molded her in terms of her style and provided her with friendships that lasted a lifetime. But that "Lotus Year" would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment.
|
|
|
|
One Life
by Barbara Winton
Sir Nicholas Winton rescued 669 Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia at the brink of World War II. Most never saw their parents again. This is his story. In 1938, 29-year-old 'Nicky' cancelled a ski holiday and instead spent 9 months masterminding a seemingly impossible plan to rescue hundreds of children and find them homes in the UK. There are around 6000 people who are alive today because of him. What motivated an ordinary man to do something so extraordinary? This book, written by his daughter, Barbara, explores the 106-year life of an incredible humanitarian, a man whose astounding feats only came to public light decades later. His legacy is to encourage us all to act when we see injustice or need, and to remind us that every one of us can change the world for the better.
|
|
|
|
Agent Zo
by Clare Mulley
During World War II, Elzbieta Zawacka- the WWII female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo- was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the "Silent Unseen." She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland. There, while being hunted by the Gestapo (who arrested her entire family), she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland. After the war, she was discharged as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned and tortured her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Agent Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to brilliant life- while transforming how we value the history of women resistance fighters during World War II.
|
|
|
|
Earth to Moon
by Moon Unit Zappa
From Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of musical visionary Frank Zappa, comes a memoir of growing up in her unconventional household in 1970s Los Angeles, coming of age in the Hollywood Hills in the 1980s as the "Valley Girl," gaining momentum as an accidental VJ on a new network called MTV, and finding herself after losing her father, then her mother, and the testing of her most important relationships. How can you navigate life as the "normal" child of an extraordinary creative? What is it like to live in a hothouse of individuality that on one hand fosters freedom of expression, and on the other tamps down the basic desires of a child for boundaries and affection? Should you call your parents Frank and Gail from birth? With love, humor, and humility, Earth to Moon reminds us that every family is faced with problems that are unique to their particular makeup, but the journey to growing into yourself with grace is as universal as it gets.
|
|
Contact your librarian for more great books!
|
|
|
Michigan City Public Library
100 E. 4th Street
Michigan City, Indiana 46360
219-873-3044mclib.org/ |
|
|
|