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AUTOBIOGRAPHY / BIOGRAPHY




Dear William by David Magee

Winner
Autobiography/Memoir
2022 Best Book Awards

Award-winning columnist and author David Magee addresses his poignant story to all those who will benefit from better understanding substance misuse so that his hard-earned wisdom can save others from the fate of his late son, William.

The last time David Magee saw his son alive, William told him to write their family’s story in the hopes of helping others. Days later, David found William dead from an accidental drug overdose.

Now, in a memoir suggestive of Augusten Burroughs meets Glennon Doyle, award-winning columnist and author David Magee answers his son's wish with a compelling, heartbreaking, and impossible to put down book that speaks to every individual and family.

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Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn: Lessons from Toyota Leader Isao Yoshino on a Lifetime of Continuous Learning by Katie Anderson

Winner
Biography
2022 Best Book Awards

Refreshing, Timeless Lessons for Those Who Care to Lead

In the international bestselling book Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn, leadership coach Katie Anderson and Toyota leader Isao Yoshino bring you a remarkable book about what it means to learn, to lead, and to care. Created through years of collaboration, this book offers their shared reflections on leadership and learning, providing readers an inspirational experience that defies generational and cultural divides.

“The only secret to Toyota is its attitude towards learning.” -- Isao Yoshino

With a career that spanned nearly four decades at Toyota Motor Corporation, Isao Yoshino’s stories help us understand how Toyota intentionally developed the culture of excellence for which it is renowned today, and how one person learned to lead so that he could lead to learn. Katie Anderson weaves together these heartwarming stories of personal discovery, and offers her own unique perspective on them, with the intention of helping you learn to lead and lead to learn.

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Spirit Embraced: A Guiding Memoir for a Life Authentic and Free by Kim Colella

Winner
Legacy: Autobiography/Memoirs
2022 Best Book Awards

Even from a young age Kim Colella’s spirit urged her to walk a path well beyond her comfort zone. Spirit Embraced highlights the journey that unfolds as Kim allows her spirit to lead as she releases the painful memories of her past, follows her deepest dreams and creates a life that is in alignment with her spirit. Kim shares the transformational tools that illuminate her path and provide essential support for her to live her most authentic and free self. Divided into four section, Kim offers the simple yet powerful exercises to Release our limiting beliefs, Listen to the still, quiet voice within, Manifest our dreams, and Tend our hearts and relationships. Spirit Embraced weaves together Kim’s powerful story, transformational tools, soul psalms and photography to create an inspiring memoir and guide for her readers.

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Black, White, and Gray All Over: A Black Man's Odyssey in Life and Law Enforcement by Frederick Douglass Reynolds

Finalist
Autobiography/Memoir
2022 Best Book Awards

From shootouts and robberies to riding in cars with pimps and prostitutes, Frederick Reynolds' early manhood experiences in Detroit, Michigan in the 1960s foretold a future on the wrong side of the prison bars. Frederick grew up a creative and sensitive child but found himself lured down the same path as many Black youth in that era. No one would have guessed he would have a future as a cop in one of the most dangerous cities in America in the 1980s---Compton, California. From recruit to detective, Frederick experienced a successful career marked by commendations and awards. The traumatic and highly demanding nature of the work, however, took its toll on both his family and personal life---something Frederick was able to conquer but only after years of distress and regret.




Candlelight in a Storm: Born to be a Berliner by Naveen Sridhar

Finalist
Legacy: Autobiography/Memoirs
2022 Best Book Awards

Naveen Sridhar has written a literary love story which is partial memoir, partial biography. Sridhars connection with the subject of the story, his wife Renate, gives a unique..perspective about growing up in Germany during WW II and what life was like behind the Berlin Wall. Whilst most books focus on Allied soldiers and their families or the Holocaust, this book focuses on how the German people also suffered during the pivotal and haunting timewhat life was like for ordinary Germans living the rule of government policies and ideologies in which many could not be trusted.

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Century's Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll by Mary Llewellyn McNeil

Finalist
Biography: General
2022 Best Book Awards

Today when local newspapers are going out of business, corporate profits drive press coverage, and unbiased reporting is seen as almost nonexistent, Wallace Carroll's life is a lesson in excellence. A "journalist's journalist" with unmatched integrity, Carroll covered the most significant events of his time, from the London Blitz to the United States' withdrawal from the Vietnam War. His story is even more relevant today given the war in Ukraine and Russia's assault on the truth. Carroll covered the League of Nations in the 1930s, warning the American public of the dangers of fascism, headed United Press's office in London at the outbreak of the war and was among the first journalists to reach the Russian front following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He later joined the US Office of War Information, tasked with "winning the hearts and minds" of those under the Nazi boot. As such, he was well-placed to understand the power of words, and their heightened importance in a time of war.

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Chasing bin Laden: My Hunt for the World's Most Notorious Terrorist by Barbara K. Janik

Finalist
Autobiography/Memoir
2022 Best Book Awards

A secret truth:

On the early morning of August 16, 2006, Osama bin Laden was arrested in Brooklyn by the New York FBI Terrorism Task Force.

They were acting on a tip called in by Barbara Janik.

Janik tells her story:

Chasing bin Laden takes readers along with Janik on an emotional journey through the hidden world of lay investigations, which is charged with high-stakes puzzle solving, Arabic message boards, and anxiety-provoking collaborations with the FBI.

A Pulitzer prize-winning journalist backs her up!

In The Killing of Osama bin Laden, Seymour Hersh states that “bin Laden was a prisoner of the ISI [Pakistani intelligence] at the Abbottabad compound since 2006…”

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Ennobling Encounters by Dick Bishirjian

Finalist
Biography
2022 Best Book Awards

In this memoir, Dick Bishirjian tells of how his life has been enriched by the many noble persons he has met over the course of his professional life. That time coincides with the early years of the conservative “movement” in America. In such a world as ours, he argues, it is important to remember the great souls who ennoble us.




Ever Vigilant: Tales of the Vietnam War by Michael J. Hebert

Finalist
Autobiography/Memoir
2022 Best Book Awards

War is carried out by young people trained for the task. It occurs at the edge, or just over the edge, of what passes for civilized behavior. During the Vietnam War, the US military employed heavily-armed high-speed gunboats to intercept and disrupt enemy travel on the rivers and bays of South Vietnam.

In this variant from standard Vietnam War works, Michael Hebert takes the reader along for a ride in this engaging memoir of his year in Vietnam. This light yet quick-witted nautical adventure entertains readers with tales of romance, daring exploits, and abject fear. It is full of mayhem peppered with humorous undertones.

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Gifts from the Garden by Carol Siyahi Hicks

Finalist
Legacy: Autobiography/Memoirs
2022 Best Book Awards

"Gifts from the Garden" is a philosophical and joyful look at gardening, nature, and life. The author's intricate and poetic descriptions of her family's gardens and their life on their Ohio land probe the subtleties of everyday experience to unearth profound questions and observations about our relationship to nature and to life. "Gifts" offers the reader a very personal and unique view of nature that will speak to nature lovers, gardeners, and even those who believe they are neither.




Paris Blue, a memoir of first love by Julie Scolnik

Finalist
Autobiography/Memoir
2022 Best Book Awards

PARIS, 1976: Twenty-year-old American student Julie Scolnik had just arrived in the City of Light to study the flute when, from across a sea of faces in the chorus of the Orchestre de Paris, she is drawn to Luc, a striking (married) French lawyer in the bass section. This moving tale of an ebullient young American and a reserved Frenchman will transport readers to the cafés, streets, and concert halls of Paris in the late seventies, and, spanning three decades, evolves from deep romance to sudden heartbreak, and finally to a lifelong quest for answers to release hidden, immutable grief.

Against a magical backdrop of Paris and classical music, Paris Blue is a true fairy-tale memoir (with a dark underbelly) about the tenacious grip of first love.

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Salt & Light: The Complete Jesus by Jonathan Geoffrey Dean

Finalist
Biography: General
2022 Best Book Awards

Salt & Light: The Complete Jesus is the highly acclaimed and award-winning definitive statement concerning Jesus of Nazareth, history's most compelling figure. The single most important book about the Historical Jesus in the last 30 years, more comprehensive than Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict and more powerful than C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.

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Ten Days with Dad: Finding Purpose, Passion, & Peace During the Darkest Days of Alzheimer's and COVID-19 by Mark J. Resnick

Finalist
Autobiography/Memoir
2022 Best Book Awards

Have you ever learned more from someone in ten days than you did during their entire lifetime? What if that person was your father as he battled Alzheimer’s during a global pandemic?

From the Author: "Within four years of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, my dad could no longer drive, cook, or take his medications. When the dementia demons took over, he couldn’t stay in his home, either.

He spent ten unforgettable days with my family prior to moving into assisted living, and eventually a nursing home. Over the course of eighteen months, we shared more than 200 meals and 600 cups of coffee, during which time I got to know him—and myself—better than at any point in our lives."

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Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death by Dan Flanigan

Finalist
Legacy: Autobiography/Memoirs
2022 Best Book Awards

“Mink Eyes” introduces us to Dan Flanigan the novelist. “Tenebrae” shows us another side of Dan – the poet. The lead poem in this collection, “Tenebrae: A Memoir of Love and Death,” is a lovely bracelet of verse and prose poems that link brilliantly together in a gripping narrative and wrenching emotional journey through the illness and death of his wife. Other poems in the book – including several snapshot portraits of Dan’s extended family under the title “The Irish in America” – reflect this same grappling with the fundamental issues of our lives – loss, change, growth, hope, despair and acceptance, reflecting throughout a compassionate embrace of the human condition. These are truly poems for the people – plain but exquisitely crafted, direct as a dagger, and expressed in a language that is both elegant and easy to understand at the same time. They reach from the heart to the heart.




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