Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Biographies & Memoirs

In this collection of more than 30 essays, published in the New York Times, Esquire, and the New Republic, the vast range of Saul Bellow’s nonfiction is made abundantly clear. In Bellow’s capable hands, a single essay can range fluidly across topics as various as the talents of President Roosevelt, the economic narrative of Jay Gatsby, and childhood adventures in Chicago.

In A Dog's Gift, award-winning journalist and author Bob Drury movingly captures the story of a year in the life of Paws4people and the broken bodies and souls the organization mends. The audiobook follows the journey of pups bred by the organization, from their loving if rigorous early training to an emotional event that Terry and Kyria have christened "the bump", where each individual service dog chooses its new owner through an almost mystical connection that ignites the healing process.

Meet our ninth U.S. President before his famous victory over the Native American chief Tecumseh in the Battle of Tippecanoe. Young readers will thrill to hear young Billy Harrison's dramatic rescue of his sister Sally as she struggles to stay afloat after falling into a river, and admire his courage when he captures a British soldier at the age of eight. Find out more about these and the rest of Billy's boyhood adventures in William Henry Harrison: Young Tippecanoe.

Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were united not only as man and wife, but also as writers who shared and debated ideas, values, and literary craft.

Raised an aristocrat in Colombia and educated in European schools, Pilar transfixes everyone with her charm and her guile. She also falls for dangerous men and finds herself drawn into the highest levels of the cocaine trade. After two failed marriages and a harrowing escape from the drug life, she settles down to a quiet existence in Florida with her children - until her second husband tries to cut short his prison term by giving her name over to members of a new task force being formed by the DEA.

Written just 40 years after David Livingstone’s death, this admiring account of the famous missionary’s life and work takes us deep into the “dark continent” of 19th-century Africa, where he labored to bring “Christianity, commerce, and civilization.” A national hero in Victorian Britain, Livingstone earned fame as an explorer and scientific investigator, an antislavery crusader, and imperial reformer, as well as in the role of a Protestant missionary and martyr who eventually died in Africa of malaria.

Martin Luther King Jr. may be America's most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. But despite his stature, the significance of King's writings and political thought remains underappreciated. In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry state that the marginalization of King's ideas reflects a romantic consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative - an effort not at radical reform but at "living up to" enduring ideals laid down by the nation's founders.

In the early 20th century, few women in China were to prove so important to the rise of Chinese nationalism and liberation from tradition as the three extraordinary Soong sisters: Eling, Chingling, and Mayling. As told with wit and verve by Emily Hahn, a remarkable woman in her own right, the biography of the Soong sisters tells the story of China through both world wars. It also chronicles the changes to Shanghai as they relate to a very eccentric family that had the courage to speak out against the ruling regime. Greatly influencing the history of modern China, they interacted with their government and military to protect the lives of those who could not be heard, and they appealed to the West to support China during the Japanese invasion. 

In May 1962, Naval Chief Petty Officer Bryant Arbuckle flew to Saigon to establish a new armed forces radio station. Next to follow were his wife and three boys, Leslie among them. Saigon Kids is the candid, recondite slice of 14-year-old military brat Les Arbuckle's experience at the American Community School during the critical months of the Vietnam War when events would, quite literally, ignite in downtown Saigon.

In 1948 most White people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous White journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a Black man in the Jim Crow South. Escorted through the South's parallel Black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic Black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local Black leaders, and families of lynching victims.

When Candice Curry was a little girl, she put her hand in her father's back pocket so that she wouldn't get lost in large crowds. Little did she know that as she followed him, he was plying his trade: conning people. Her family drove stolen cars, lived in stolen houses, and shopped with stolen credit cards. Drug use was regular, as were visits from strange people who were trying to track her father down. Though she eventually cut ties with her father, Candice could not ignore the scars that were left from her childhood.

This expanded edition of Hall's original 1979 book includes never-before-heard poems and vignettes - read by the author - and new chapters that bring us up to date with Hall as he sits with President Carter, caps his recording career, quits drinking, ponders his legacy, examines the creative process, and retires from the music industry. "If you want to retire, go ahead," he says. "Life will still present innumerable occasions for you to go out and make an ass of yourself."

The life story of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian, lone survivor of an exterminated tribe, is unique in the annals of North American anthropology. Ishi stumbled into the 20th century on the morning of August 29, 1911, when, desperate with hunger and terrified of the white murderers of his family, he was found in the corral of a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California.

He had to sit in a segregated rail car on the journey to army basic training in Mississippi in 1943. But two years later, the 20-year-old African American from New York was at the controls of a P-51, prowling for Luftwaffe aircraft at 5,000 feet over the Austrian countryside. This is the remarkable true story of Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr., one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. Award-winning aviation writer Philip Handleman re-creates the harrowing action and heart-pounding drama of Stewart's combat missions....

From watching his colleague get shot in the testicles by a jealous producer to running Hollywood's most successful television studio, Harris Katleman had a front row seat in the development of the television industry. Through a number of hilarious accounts, Harris Katleman shares his journey from office boy to talent agent to television producer, and finally to studio head at both MGM and 20th Century Fox. Along the way, we meet industry giants including Rupert Murdoch, Bob Iger, Barry Diller, Marvin Davis, Kirk Kerkorian, Mark Goodson, and Lew Wasserman.

Satisfy your craving for extraordinary authors and exceptional fiction: Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond. Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction.

Ronald Kitchen was 21, on his way to buy milk for his four-year-old, when he was picked up by the Chicago police, brutally tortured, and coerced to confess to five counts of heinous murder. He spent 22 years in prison, 13 of those on death row, labeled as a monster. Kitchen was only one of the many victims of Jon Burge and his notorious Midnight Crew that terrorized and incarcerated Black men - 118 have come forward so far - on the south side of Chicago for nearly two decades.

In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim’s body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case.

"I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded. I have known what it was to be a poor man and I have known what it was to be fairly affluent. I have sampled every kind of human experience. I have known many of the most remarkable men of my time. I have had a long literary career after a medical training which gave me the MD of Edinburgh...I have traveled as Doctor to a whaler for seven months in the Arctic and afterwards in the West Coast of Africa." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

In this compelling, behind-the-scenes account, former top CIA officer and Cuba expert Brian Latell examines the extraordinary Castro brothers and the impending dynastic succession of Fidel's younger brother, Raul. Exploring the brothers' remarkable relationship, he reveals how Fidel and Raul have collaborated, divided responsibilities, and resolved disagreements for more than 46 years, a challenge to the notion that the little-known Raul has been an insignificant player.