Showing results for "Last Man Standing" in Biographies & Memoirs

As a small boy in Epping Forest, Jack Straw could never have imagined that one day he would become Britain's Lord Chancellor. As one of five children of divorced parents, he was bright enough to get a scholarship to a direct-grant school, but spent his holidays as a plumbers' mate for his uncles...

The first biography to focus exclusively on Angus Young - from his remarkable rise from working-class Glasgow and Sydney to the biggest stages in the world. Angus Young, the cofounder and the last remaining original member of AC/DC, has for more than 40 years been the face, the sound and sometimes the exposed backside of the trailblazing rock band.

On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl took the stage at San Francisco's hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged - Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers, among others.

In January 1994, Eileen Tessier told Jack McCullough's half sister Janet Tessier that he, her son, kidnapped seven-year-old Maria Ridulph from their neighborhood in Sycamore, Illinois, and killed her in December 1957. It was a case that tore the child’s family apart as well as dividing and terrifying the town as the days, then the months, and finally the years passed with no arrest. In 2008 the Illinois state police reopened the case against Jack after receiving an email from Janet Tessier about their mother's deathbed confession.

As the last don of the Philadelphia mob, Ralph Natale, the first-ever mob boss to turn state's evidence, provides an insider's perspective on the Mafia. Natale's reign atop the Philadelphia and New Jersey underworlds brought the region's Mafia back to prominence in the 1990s. Smart, savvy, and articulate, Natale came up in the mob and saw firsthand as it hatched its plan to control Atlantic City's casino unions.

The day Archie lost his 31-year job as a laborer at a meatpacking company, he was forced to confront the secret he had held so closely for most of his life: at the age of 54, he couldn't read. For all his adult life, he'd been able to skirt around the issue. But now, forced to find a new job to support his family, he could no longer hide from the truth. The Last Reader Standing is the story of Archie's amazing and often painful journey of becoming literate at middle age, struggling with the newfound knowledge of his dyslexia.