Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Cultural & Regional

Tracing his ancestory through six generations - slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.

Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche, and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote. Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the most gifted biographers working today and his unprecedented access to the Fleming archives and his nose for a story make this a fresh and eye-opening picture of a man who lived his life in the shadow of his famous creation.

In Mother's Boy, Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. Full of Jacobson's trademark humour and infused with bittersweet memories of his parents, this is the story of a writer's beginnings - as well as the twists and turns that life takes - and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be.

Achieving a hit in every decade since the 1950s, Cliff Richard stands alone in pop history. Coming of age in 1950s London, he began his music career at Soho's legendary 2i's Cafe, and now he's approaching his 80th birthday with record sales of over 250 million and counting. Cliff looks back on his humble upbringing and how he went on to fulfil his wildest dreams by becoming a pop star and even a film star. He talks about finding Christianity, reflects on the ups and downs of life in the public eye and reveals how the false allegations against him changed his life forever.

Brought to you by Penguin. In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup; to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ; to India with Indira Ghandi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978; and to Nepal where he reminds us that 'Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot'.  

Former townies Giles and Mary swapped city life for rural Wiltshire over thirty years ago, and they've each embraced it in their own very different ways. Mary has happily traded sophisticated London salons for monthly lectures at the Farmers' Club, competitive school quizzes, church interactions and local Auction House sales. While Giles has immersed himself in the catastrophic consequences of conventional farming, his organic no-dig veg-patch, the increasingly disproportionate response by local landlords to harmless trespassers and the strange death of the village house martins.

“Defiance takes my breath away. A nail-biting tale of astonishing courage.” —Jeannette Walls #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle “A heartbreaking account of a young woman’s struggle for freedom against the rampaging forces of fanaticism and tyranny...

The searing, visionary memoir of founding Black Panther Huey P. Newton Tracing the birth of a revolutionary, Huey P. Newton's famous and oft-quoted autobiography is as much a manifesto as a portrait of the inner circle of America's Black Panther Party. From Newton's impoverished childhood on the...

The warmly welcomed memoir by one of the most influential and beloved musicians of our time In Herbie Hancock: Possibilities, the legendary jazz musician and composer reflects on an extraordinary life and a thriving career that has spanned seven decades. A true innovator who has spent a lifetime...

In those days a private boys' boarding school education was largely the same experience as it had been for generations: a training for the challenges of Empire. He didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was to not let that show. Being separated from the people who love you is traumatic. How did that feel at the time, and what sort of adult does it mould? This is a story about England, and a portrait of a type of boy, trained to lead, who becomes a certain type of man.

In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a writer and activist: from his childhood in Harlem to the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Exploring the visceral reality of life in the American South as well as Baldwin’s impressions of London, Paris and Hamburg, No Name in the Street grapples with the failed promises of global liberation movements in fearless, candid prose.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase into New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They're the guards in dark blue suits, keeping careful watch over this vast treasure house. Caught up in the early days of a glamorous journalism career, Patrick Bringley never thought he'd be one of them. Then his brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he needed to escape the mundane clamour of daily life. So he quit, and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

The New York Times bestselling story from the author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction. Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride...

Naomi and Natalie Evans, founders of Everyday Racism, share their experiences of growing up mixed race in Britain, how they process, understand and learn about their identity and use their privilege to advocate for change, as well as addressing the privileges and complexities of being mixed race in Britain today.

Julian Berrendero's victory in the 1941 Vuelta a Espana was an extraordinary exercise in sporting redemption: the Spanish cyclist had just spent 18 months in Franco's concentration camps, punishment for expressing Republican sympathies during the civil war. Seventy-nine years later, perennially over-ambitious cyclo-adventurer Tim Moore developed a fascination with Berrendero's story, and having borrowed an old road bike with the great man's name plastered all over it, set off to retrace the 4,409-km route of his 1941 triumph - in the midst of a global pandemic.

Tarana Burke and Dr Brené Brown bring together a dynamic group of Black writers, organisers, artists, academics and cultural figures to discuss the topics the two have dedicated their lives to understanding and teaching: vulnerability and shame resilience.

Two days after his eighteenth birthday, Kenny Imafidon was charged with the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in south-east London. The middle child of a single mother with ambitions for her children, Kenny grew up near an estate in Peckham where deprivation and hopelessness were rife, and gang culture flourished in his community. Kenny faced a minimum of thirty years behind bars. A candid and unfiltered take on some of the most challenging topics that define our times, That Peckham Boy is a personal manifesto exploring what it means to be young, Black and poor in the city.

Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language: the places her family stopped and worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lore of their people. But his own experience of life on the road was limited to Ford Transit journeys from West Sussex to Hampshire to sell flowers. In a bid to better understand his Gypsy heritage, the history of Britain's Romanies and the rhythms of their life today, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the atchin tans, or stopping places.

You might know Mo as the critically acclaimed stand-up comedian, BAFTA-winning presenter, Masked Singer judge and social media mega star. But do you know the moments that really made him? Opening up on the turning points, the good times, the challenges and the lessons learned, this is Mo as you've never seen him before.

Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of East London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different, but in a home where being gay was inconceivable, he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up, life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.