Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Biographies & Memoirs

In Walt Whitman Speaks, acclaimed author Brenda Wineapple draws from Traubel’s extensive interviews an extraordinary gathering of Whitman’s observations that conveys the core of his ethos and vision. Here is Whitman the sage, champion of expansiveness and human freedom. Here, too, is the poet’s more personal side - his vivid memories of Thoreau, Emerson, and Lincoln, his literary judgments on writers such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Tolstoy, and his expressions of hope in the democratic promise of the nation he loved.

Following a game warden’s adventures from the woods of Maine to the swamps of New Orleans as he and his canine companions investigate murder, search for missing persons, and rescue survivors from natural disasters, this is a memoir that reads like a true crime novel. A Good Man with a Dog explores Roger Guay’s life as he and his canine partners are exposed to terrible events, from tracking down hostile poachers to searching for victims of violent crimes,

Kurt Vonnegut was 20 years old when he enlisted in the United States Army. Less than two years later, he was captured by the Germans in the single deadliest US engagement of the war, the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken to a POW camp, then transferred to a work camp near Dresden, and held in a slaughterhouse called Schlachthof Fünf where he survived the horrific firebombing that killed thousands and destroyed the city. Writing during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam conflict, Vonnegut took his trauma and created a work of art, one that still resonates today.

At the turn of the last century, the Guggenheim family ran the most powerful mining conglomerate on earth. Decades later came the Guggenheim museum, which became the hub of the world’s most powerful art brand. In between, the Guggenheim name was uttered in every field from aviation to politics, from journalism to rocketry.

“They’re not dead, are they?” The officer’s body visibly slumped as he delivered his final nod. From that July day in 1968 on, the Morris family became the Morris orphans: 10 children who attracted nationwide attention, and a trust fund that didn’t bring out the best in those who fostered them. Kathi, the oldest, was only 17 when her parents were killed by a drunk driver. This is her story - behind the headlines - of when the Morris orphans only had their mutual loss and each other.

All her life, Katherine Keith has hungered for remote, wild places that fill her soul with freedom and peace. Her travels take her across America, but it is in the vast and rugged landscape of Alaska that she finds her true home. Alaska is known as a place where people disappear - at least a couple thousand go missing each year. But the same vast and rugged landscape that contributed to so many people being lost is precisely what has gotten her found.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her 30s, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas - or the kissing bug disease - is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

Peregrine Spring, Nancy Cowan’s memoir of her 30 years living intimately with raptors, gives us a new perspective on the relationship between humans and the natural world. Cowan shares her experiences running a world-famous falconry school, and the lessons she’s learned from her birds. From retrieving her falcon from the local police "lock up", to a heartbreaking race to save her young peregrine from attack by a wild hawk, Cowan’s life is a constant, ever-changing adventure.

Award-winning journalist and host of Black Enterprise Business Report Caroline Clarke’s moving memoir of her surprise discovery of her birth mother - Cookie Cole, the daughter of Nat King Cole - and the relationship that blossomed between them through the heartfelt messages they exchanged on hundreds of postcards. A heartfelt, inspiring tribute to both Caroline’s adoptive parents and her biological mother, Postcards from Cookie illuminates the enduring power of love to shape and guide our lives.

July 18, 1969: A car driven by Senator Edward M. Kennedy plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, off the coast of Cape Cod. Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old former staffer for Kennedy’s brother Robert, died in the crash. The scandal that followed demeaned Kopechne’s reputation and scapegoated her for Ted Kennedy’s inability to run for the presidency instead of acknowledging her as an innocent victim in a tragedy that took her life. Kashatus’s biography of Mary Jo Kopechne illuminates the life of a politically committed young woman who embodied the best ideals of the 60s.

On October 19, 1965, American Special Forces in Vietnam came under attack at their camp at Plei Me. This marked the first major confrontation between the North Vietnamese and US armies during the war. Throughout six days of constant hostile fire, Captain Lanny Hunter sorted the seriously wounded from the dead and saved those comrades-in-arms he could. For his actions, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. In Exit Wounds, Hunter recalls his tour in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1965/66 at the bloody interface of medicine and combat.

When Louisa Deasey receives a message from a Frenchwoman called Coralie, who has found a cache of letters in an attic, written about Louisa’s father, neither woman can imagine the events it will set in motion. The letters, dated 1949, detail a passionate affair between Louisa’s father, Denison, and Coralie’s grandmother, Michelle, in post-war London. They spark Louisa to find out more about her father, who died when she was six.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels achieved stunning global success in part because of the mystery surrounding their pseudonymous author. English-speaking audiences were tantalized by her enigmatic biography as well as what they took to be her authentic portrayal of working-class Naples. However, we now know that the person behind the writing is most likely Anita Raja, a prominent translator of German literature whose background is very different from Ferrante’s supposed life.

Eric Dickerson is the greatest player in Los Angeles Rams history and the NFL’s single-season record holder for most rushing yards. In 2019, Dickerson was named to the National Football League’s 100th Anniversary All-Time Team. With an elegant upright running style that produced some of football’s most-watched highlights, it was said he was so smooth you couldn’t hear his pads clack as he glided past you. But during his Hall of Fame career, his greatness was often overshadowed by his contentious disputes with Rams management about his contract.

Wife | Daughter | Self investigates identity and the writing life through the perspective of one of the nation’s top memoir teachers and critics.

Many authors have traveled and explored the out-of-doors, both in life and then in their books, proving themselves stalwart, audacious, even heroic; Andrew Farkas is not among them. He is brave enough to admit that the outdoors isn’t for him. Instead, in these essays Farkas reports on his bold explorations of a very different territory: the in-of-doors, the waiting rooms, kitchens, malls, bars, theaters, roadside motel rooms, and other places that feature temperature control, protection from rampaging predators, and a higher degree of comfort than can be found outside.

For 35 years, it has been a riddle which has gripped the world. Part love story, part tragedy, it has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster: a beautiful actress, a handsome leading man, a brooding sidekick...and a moment of sickening terror with the most horrific consequences. When Natalie Wood - one-time America’s sweetheart and star of West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause, and Miracle on 34th Street - was found washed up in the cold waters off Catalina Island, California on Thanksgiving weekend 1981, it initially looked like a freak accident.

In her riveting memoir, Susan recounts her struggle to be the perfect traditional “Chinese” wife to her increasingly controlling and abusive husband. With keen insight and heart-wrenching candor, she confronts the hopes and hazards of intercultural marriage, including dismissing her own values and needs to save her relationship and protect her newborn son, Jake. But when Cai threatens to take Jake back to China for good, Susan must find the courage to stand up for herself, her son, and her future.

This is the untold story of Collins Catch the Bear, a Lakota Sioux, who was wrongfully charged as part of a conspiracy with the murder of a white man at Russell Means's Yellow Thunder Camp in 1982, a controversial American Indian encampment in the national forest. Though Collins was innocent, he took the fall for the actual killer, a man placed in the camp with the sole intention of destroying the reputation of AIM. This story reveals the struggle of the American Indian people in their attempt to survive in a white world, on land that was stolen from them.

For players, fans, managers, and executives, Jackie Robinson remains baseball’s singular figure, the person who most profoundly extended, and continues to extend, the reach of the game. Beyond Ruth. Beyond Clemente. Beyond Aaron. Beyond the heroes of today. Now, a half-century since Robinson’s death, letters come to his widow, Rachel, by the score. But Robinson’s impact extended far beyond baseball: he opened the door for Black Americans to participate in other sports, and was a national figure who spoke and wrote eloquently about inequality.