Winner Autobiography & Memoirs The 2020 Best Book Awards
Have you ever wondered what being a part of CSI is really like? If so, here’s your chance to experience it…WALK inside the crime scene tape with retired Sergeant Tamara Mickelson as she shares her personal experiences of the most grueling and heartbreaking crime scenes she had ever worked. Catch a glimpse of what she saw, touched, smelled, and even tasted during an average workday. Dare to join her as she takes you through a difficult journey of memories, uncovering layers of emotional trauma left behind. Discover the ways she healed from yesterday's pain to live an emotionally balanced life today.
In this powerful biography, David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito shine a light on the life and accomplishments of civil rights leader T. R. M. Howard. He founded black community organizations, organized civil rights rallies and boycotts, mentored Medgar Evers, antagonized the Ku Klux Klan, and helped lead the fight for justice for Emmett Till. Raised in poverty and witness to racial violence from a young age, Howard was passionate about justice and equality. Ambitious, zealous, and sometimes paradoxical, T. R. M. Howard provides a complete portrait of an important leader all too often forgotten.
Dancing in the Narrows chronicles a mother and daughter’s multiyear journey through illness and trauma. At sixteen, Anna’s youngest daughter, Dana, is stricken with a mysterious and debilitating condition, eventually diagnosed as Lyme disease. Desperate to find a cure, the two women are thrust into the established medical world, then far beyond. Full of adventure, humor, and blind faith, Dancing in the Narrows is an inspiring story of self-discovery as a single mother fights to save the life of her child.
In “Turn and Burn” the author takes the readers with him in the cockpit as he shares the fulfillment of his boyhood dream and some of his most memorable adventures and misadventures during a twenty-four year flying career as a fighter pilot, both in combat and peacetime. Share the author’s emotions when being surrounded by enemy anti-aircraft flak, when having to crash land twice, during occasions when the aircraft’s response was violent and uncontrollable, when having a large turkey buzzard crash through the windscreen into the cockpit when the aircraft was 200 feet off the ground and traveling nearly 600 mph, just to mention a few of those memorable occasions the author shares.
Along the way, the readers are given vivid accounts of the joys and delights, the fears and terrors, the frustrations and fulfillments, the thrills, intensity, and humor involved in the fighter pilot’s unique life, and the special and inseparable bond that exists in the fighter pilot community. The author’s account is also deeply personal as he shares his opinion of the top leadership, both civilian and military, during the Vietnam War. His criticism is shared by the vast majority of those who fought in that war, and includes the leadership’s lack of understanding of the enemy, a prime requisite when going to war, their lack of will to do what was necessary to win, a prime requisite when going to war, and worst of all, their unconscionable willingness to allow the U.S. military to suffer substantial losses in personnel and resources by fighting a war they were not allowed to win.
It's 1973. Our nation is torn apart by the Vietnam War, and the massacre of unarmed students at Kent State. The Vice President has resigned for bribery and tax evasion. The President is being investigated for engaging in criminal activity. At twenty-three, David Reed has become embittered by political strife and corruption. Disenchanted with his future, he wants out. Along with new friends Rusty and Susie, David leaves everything he knows to cross the United States with little more than his bicycle and camera. The trio gets more than they bargain for, with menacing animals, extreme weather, and astonishing encounters. Uphill and Into the Wind recounts an odyssey that spans 5420 miles on bicycles. It chronicles the sudden and surprising glories of nature, the raw beauty of the land, and the majesty of the mountains. But that is just the start. Through it all, the three are changed forever, in ways they did not expect, by their long journey into the unknown.
From author Cindy Collins comes an unblinkingly honest, poignant, and often heartbreaking firsthand account of what it’s like to live with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) . . . and the pervasive trauma she endured as a child that led to her descent into the dark world of BPD. Gaslighted by her mother—who cultivated an outward appearance of being the perfect wife and mother—Cindy suffered ongoing sexual abuse by multiple family members, abandonment, and cruelty at the hands of the one person who should have loved and protected her most. The resulting fits of rage, extreme thinking, difficulty maintaining relations, and depression would set Cindy on a path of destruction until she finally found the hope and courage to fight her demons.
Chronicling her childhood of abuse, her diagnosis of BPD in her twenties, and her ultimate road to recovery, Born Under the Gaslight is a memoir like none you have ever read before. Offering a rare and insightful glimpse into the inner struggles of someone who lives with BPD, Born Under the Gaslight is a must-read for therapists, others living with BPD, and anyone wanting to understand the complexities of BPD and how to offer practical and emotional support.
Can a mother be both loving and selfish? Caring and thoughtless? Deceitful and devoted? These are the questions that fuel psychologist Dr. Judy Rabinor’s quest to understand her ambivalence toward her mother.
While leading a seminar exploring the importance of the mother-daughter relationship, Dr. Judy Rabinor, an eating disorder expert, is blindsided by a memory of a childhood trauma. Realizing how this buried trauma has resonated through her life, she sets off to heal herself. The Girl in the Red Boots weaves together tales from Rabinor’s psychotherapy practice and her life, helping readers understand how painful childhood experiences can linger and leave emotional scars. In the process, Rabinor traces her own journey becoming a wounded healer and ultimately making peace with her mother, and herself.
Not a traditional self-help book outlining “steps” to reconcile or forgive one’s mother, The Girl in the Red Boots is a poignant memoir filled with hard-won life lessons, including the fact that it’s never too late to let go of hurts and disappointments and develop compassion for yourself—and even for your mother.
In 1949, twin sisters came into this world surprising everybody including their parents and the doctor because he had heard only one heartbeat.
On a path ordered by God, these twins touched the lives of many in their roles as teachers, attorneys, and judges. The rocky road they followed to achieve these professions was God's way of preparing them for life.
In Your Honor, Your Honor, author Judge Leonia J. Lloyd tells the story of this dynamic duo whose professional careers led them to become models, schoolteachers, and entertainment lawyers. Eventually, with their unique moniker, Twins for Justice, they became the first identical-twin district court judges to sit on the same bench at the same time in the country. Focusing on restorative justice, their careers were on a meteoric rise until the unexpected and sudden death of Judge Leona Lloyd put an abrupt halt to their successful lives together.
Lost and alone, Leonia was in the storm of her life; despair had an iron-clad grip around her. She turned to God for guidance, and her prayers were answered. Your Honor, Your Honor chronicles her life experiences including her relationship with her twin, her struggles against racism, her account of the grieving process, and her stride toward justice.
Laila Tarraf was the Chief People Officer for Peet’s Coffee and Tea, the iconic Berkeley coffee roaster that launched the craft coffee movement in America, but she had a secret: she was failing in the most important relationships in her life. Yes, she was a strong and effective business leader, the successful daughter of immigrants, and the mother of a toddler; but she was also disconnected from her own feelings and had little patience for the feelings of others.
All that changed when life handed her a trifecta of losses: her husband died of an accidental drug overdose, and her parents' deaths followed in quick succession. Laila had spent her life leading from the head, convinced that any display of vulnerability would make her soft. What she didn’t expect was that soft would turn out to be strong. As she reconnected to her heart, one painful step at a time, something remarkable happened: she became a better leader, a better mother, and a better person. Her heart turned out to be the true source of her power, at home and at work.
What would you do if your child were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness? When his 12-year-old daughter Lilli was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia two weeks before Christmas, Travis Hicks was in the worst shape of his life. Overweight and overworked, Hicks watched his daughter Lilli fight for her life against an aggressive blood cancer. Inspired by his daughter’s strength, Travis took up yoga and walking while giving up sweet tea, a blasphemous adjustment for this Southerner. After wondering, “What’s the worst that could happen if I were to start running?” Hicks ultimately became a long distance runner, shed over 40 pounds, and restored his health in time to help his daughter through the fight of her life. Read this father’s story of life, health, family, and faith to understand the impact of pediatric cancer on a family and their community.
Dance provides a way to travel far beyond the typical tourist experience. By connecting with local people through a shared love of movement, dancers catalyze many unique opportunities. They build cross-cultural friendships with dance as the only shared language, discover ways to train with celebrated teachers, experience cultural immersion key to their personal development, and more. In this anthology, you'll find stories from renowned performers, dance educators, and other avid dance adventurers. Their tales about epic dance adventures across North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa highlight various dance traditions, as well as unique aspects of each country's geography, history, demographics and educational systems. In this way, Dance Adventures celebrates the power of dance to connect us to the best parts of humanity, as well as to the best parts of ourselves.
For more than four decades beginning in 1944, the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State secretly blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with low-dose ionizing radiation, the byproduct of plutonium production. For those who lived in the vicinity, many of them families of Hanford workers, the consequences soon became apparent as rates of illness and death steadily climbed—despite repeated assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the facility posed no threat. Trisha T. Pritikin, who has battled a lifetime of debilitating illness to become a lawyer and advocate for her fellow “downwinders,” tells the devastating story of those who were harmed in Hanford’s wake and, seeking answers and justice, were subjected to yet more suffering.
At the center of The Hanford Plaintiffs are the oral histories of twenty-four people who joined In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation, the class-action suit that sought recognition of, and recompense for, the grievous injury knowingly caused by Hanford. Radioactive contamination of American communities was not uncommon during the wartime Manhattan Project, nor during the Cold War nuclear buildup that followed. Pritikin interweaves the stories of people poisoned by Hanford with a parallel account of civilians downwind of the Nevada atomic test site, who suffer from identical radiogenic diseases.
Finalist Autobiography & Memoirs The 2020 Best Book Awards
In 1988, a young, mid-level employee named Art Bell pitched a novel concept—a television channel focused 100% on just one thing: comedy—to the chairman of HBO. The station that would soon become Comedy Central, with celebrated programs like South Park, Chapelle’s Show, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, was born.
Constant Comedy takes readers behind the scenes into the comedy startup on its way to becoming one of the most successful and creative purveyors of popular culture in the United States. From disastrous pitch meetings with comedians to the discovery of talents like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, this intimate biography peers behind the curtain and reveals what it’s really like to work, struggle, and ultimately succeed at the cutting edge of show business.
Finalist Autobiography & Memoirs The 2020 Best Book Awards
As a journalist he dug up the truth. But deep inside, he hid a life-shattering secret.
CBS News reporter Charles Gomez was fearless when facing down dictators. Earning an Emmy and an Edward R. Murrow Award, the Latin correspondent and son of a Cuban immigrant seemed on top of the world. But the terror of exposing his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis led him down a dark path of drugs and depression that nearly destroyed him. Cuban Son Rising is an honest and raw memoir detailing Gomez's lifelong battle to overcome stigma and self-loathing. Meticulously researched, Gomez's story takes you from interviews with despots and the front lines of civil wars to the silent struggles he faced seeking his father's acceptance. And after a lifetime of anxiety and regret, Gomez embarks on an emotional journey with his father to his homeland. Will Gomez finally reconcile with the man he's looked up to for his whole life? Or will disclosing his sexuality and the shame and stigma of AIDS cause his father to reject him? Cuban Son Rising is a testament to survival and the triumph of hope over fear.
Finalist Autobiography & Memoirs The 2020 Best Book Awards
It’s 1971 in Connecticut, and sixteen-year-old Sharon’s parents think that, because she’s a girl, she should become a clerical office worker after high school and live at home until she marries and has a family. But Sharon wants to join the hippies and be part of the changing society, so she leaves home and heads to California.
Upon arriving in California, Sharon is thrown into an adult world for which she is unprepared, and she embarks on a precarious journey amid the 1970s counterculture. On her various adventures across the country and while living on a commune, with friends and lovers filtering in and out of her life, she realizes she must learn quickly in order to survive―as well as figure out a way to reconcile her developing spirituality with her Catholic upbringing.
In this colorful memoir, Sharon reflects upon the changes that reshaped her during the 1970s women’s movement, and how they have transformed society’s expectations for girls and women today―and, through it all, shares moments of triumph, joy, love, and awakening.
Finalist Autobiography & Memoirs The 2020 Best Book Awards
A vivid, true-life tale of service, survival and sacrifice
This gripping memoir vividly recounts Al Moreno's rise as a gifted and fearless Los Angeles police officer, surviving gangs and homicidal situations in brutal urban war zones as he strove to achieve his personal and professional dreams. Packed with unforgettable scenes of both beauty and despair, it culminates in his vocal stand against corruption within the L.A.P.D., and the political retribution that ensued--a dirty internal investigation that unleashed the murderous vendetta of a violent ex-con from the Aryan Brotherhood.
Finalist Autobiography & Memoirs The 2020 Best Book Awards
Award-winning investigative reporter Matthew Schwartz was ordered to lie on TV in the name of sensationalism. He was arrested for trespassing on the property of a business he exposed for committing fraud. A target of one of his investigations swung a baseball bat at his head. He's been shoved, sued, and cursed out. He caught a car dealership rolling back odometers and selling used cars as new. In Confessions of an Investigative Reporter, this veteran journalist reveals his inner thoughts and the inside stories viewers never saw. Confessions of an Investigative Reporter is funny, fast-moving, and dishy. It provides a rare look inside the world of local news from someone who spent four decades in it. It's not only for news viewers. It's for anyone who cares about justice and their community. And about that time he was ordered to lie? His answers lie within.
Finalist Autobiography & Memoirs The 2020 Best Book Awards
The Blue Chameleon details the journey of Detective Daril Cinquanta, now retired from the Denver Police Department, as he evolves into a Super Cop. Despite the efforts by some of his own commanders, community activists and even many other fellow officers who felt (threatened) by his hard work and exemplary successes, they attempted, but failed, to render him ineffective for years. Through his investigations, he generated a great deal of positive and negative publicity. His work is legendary in Colorado police circles. He often bent, and at times, broke departmental rules and regulations. But he followed the law, resulting in an outstanding and extraordinary conviction rate. Routinely, his police administration, lawyers, judges and even citizen activists would attack his credibility and style. Despite the harassment, he goes on to arrest thousands of felons and put 1,000 individuals in prison nationwide. During his career, he received the Police Medal of Honor,the Police Distinguished Service Cross,The Service Cross, The Purple Heart, 6 Police Merit Awards, Optimist Club Policeman of the Year, Citizens Appreciate Police Award of Honor and over 160 official departmental and outside jurisdiction commendations. This book takes you deep into the inner mechanics of a big city police department and the world of informants, search warrants, investigations and the creative way Detective Cinquanta was able to become a controversial legend among fellow officers and criminals alike.
In the 1940s, Veronica Lake stirred a nation of filmgoers into a frenzy with her memorable screen performances and famous hairdo draped over one eye. The sultry blonde bombshell rocketed to stardom for Paramount Pictures only for it all to spiral out of control and be over in a flash. By age twenty-nine, Veronica was washed up with her career on the ash heap of movie history. Her climb to the top started with her dominating mother pouring everything into her daughter’s future for the sake of her career until ending tragically after years of personal struggles with paranoid schizophrenia and alcoholism that set her on a path of self-destruction and put her so far out of reach that not even her mother’s love could save her in the end.
Fully revised and expanded, this authorized, intimate biography, featuring exclusive interviews with Lake’s mother, friends and co-workers, tells the entire, unvarnished truth of the rise and fall of one of the silver screen's most beloved beauties. Copious new discoveries, revelations, personal stories and insights; scores of previously unknown unproduced and rumored starring feature films and television projects and undocumented radio and television appearances; and a full accounting of her off-Broadway and legitimate stage work in the United States and abroad illuminate this richly detailed, lavishly illustrated volume, including many never-before published photographs from private and personal collections, in what is the most complete record ever written about this fallen star’s life and career.
In the early years of TB sanatoriums, mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents … both the young and the old, the rich and the poor … went away to recover at hospitals ... sometimes for years.
Because fresh air was believed to cure TB, patients slept by open windows, even in winter, sometimes waking to snow and ice on their thick covering of blankets, frozen water in their glasses, and frozen urine in their pots.
Today, while tuberculosis casts its sinister shadow back to earlier times by reemerging in new, drug-resistant forms and infecting one-fourth of the world’s population, Open Window takes you inside the Lake Julia Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Northern Minnesota where the author’s family once lived and worked—a place where a community was created and bound together by a bacterium called the tubercle bacillus.
Leopold’s Ice Cream: A Century of Tasty Memories 1919-2019 chronicles the lives and history of the Leopold brothers and their family in Savannah, Georgia, between 1901 and 2019, including the incredible life of renowned ice cream maker and Hollywood film producer Stratton Leopold.
The book is richly illustrated with historic photographs and includes a foreword by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter as well as vintage recipes, celebrity quotes and customer memories.
Written by Melanie Bowden Simón, A Century of Tasty Memories provides a detailed, intimate look at the history of a growing Southern city through two World Wars and in modern times through the lens of a family and their local business. The book also explores Georgia’s early film history that was a catalyst for today’s multibillion-dollar industry.
This book spotlights 100 people and events central to the civil rights movement. Too many are unfamiliar with black history, with the trials and challenges suffered by those who came before. Many people in this book were beaten, humiliated and died in their quest for racial justice. Most of them triumphed over the inequities and discrimination to accomplish miracles.
Life for Autumn Toelle-Jackson started out on a happy and ordinary timeline. When she entered her thirties, however, tragedy made up for lost time. Over the span of a few short years, she endured several miscarriages and the loss of her husband, a dear cousin, and child.
But one small cross-section of a life doesn't do justice to the amount of love, resilience, growth, and blessings a person experiences after such titanic losses. With each new harbinger of grief, Toelle-Jackson was forced to discover another way to survive the pain. In Boldly into the Darkness, she examines all the lessons and outcomes of her life story with aching intimacy and insight. The result is a portrait of healing so complete, it transcends the traditional survivor narrative and enters new territory, a bold light shining where before was only darkness.
