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Biography and Memoir July 2017
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Life's work : from the trenches, a moral argument for choice
by Willie Parker
An outspoken Christian reproductive-justice advocate draws on his experiences as a physician and abortion provider to trace his fundamentalist upbringing in the American South while explaining why he believes that helping women in need without judgment is in accordance with Christian values.
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Rasputin : faith, power, and the twilight of the Romanovs
by Douglas Smith
On the 100th anniversary of his murder, a biography of the mystical faith healer and close friend of the last Tsar of Russia describes his strange rise to power, his penchant for debauchery and his involvement in the end of the Romanov dynasty.
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| Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women by Susan Burton and Cari LynnAfter her five-year-old son was killed by a car on their street, author Susan Burton turned to cocaine and then crack to dull her pain. The African American resident of South Los Angeles was inevitably arrested and spent 15 years in and out of prison, until she found a private rehab program that set her straight. Burton then created an organization that offers other previously incarcerated women a lifeline: addiction treatment, education, and a path to employment. In this moving and eye-opening memoir, Burton recounts her experiences while advocating for improvements in the prison system. |
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Revolution for dummies : laughing through the Arab Spring
by Bassem Youssef
The creator of Egypt's popular incendiary news lampoon, The Program, chronicles his transition from heart surgeon to political satirist while sharing crucial insights into the Arab Spring, the Egyptian Revolution and the turbulence of the modern Middle East.
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| Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. RicksEnglishmen Winston Churchill and George Orwell never met; their lives had some parallels, but many more differences. Churchill was an extroverted, aristocratic conservative, while Orwell was an introverted, left-leaning member of the middle class. But they both championed democracy against totalitarianism and emphasized the significance of language in politics, offering their distinctively English worldviews to counter the perils of fascism and communism. In this "bracing" (Publishers Weekly) depiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas Ricks provides a biography of each man and assesses their combined impact on 20th-century history. |
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Rosewater : a family's story of love, captivity, and survival
by Maziar Bahari
An former prisoner in one of Iran's most notorious prisons offers a moving memoir of how thoughts of his family got him through the seemingly unending days of torture, in a book that also sheds light on Iran's tumultuous history.
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| A House in the Sky: A Memoir by Amanda Lindhout and Sara CorbettCanadian journalist Amanda Lindhout had an avid desire to travel from the time she was young. Early in her journalism career, she went to Somalia with her friend Nigel Brennan, an Australian photographer. There, they were kidnapped by bandits who demanded impossible sums for ransom and kept them shackled, starved, and in filthy conditions for 15 months. This "well-honed, harrowing account" (Publishers Weekly) details their ordeal and explains how Lindhout found the strength to persevere. |
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| Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man by William Shatner with David FisherIn Leonard, Montreal-born actor William ("Captain Kirk") Shatner offers an absorbing remembrance of his friendship with Leonard ("Spock") Nimoy. Unusual for actors, their on-set camaraderie deepened into lifelong devotion through movies and trekker conventions. Shatner's moving reflections will delight general biography readers as well as fans of the Star Trek universe. |
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99 : stories of the game
by Wayne Gretzky
For the first time, Gretzky discusses candidly what the game looks like to him and introduces us to the people who inspired and motivated him: mentors, teammates, rivals, the famous and the lesser known. Weaving together lives and moments from an extraordinary career, he reflects on the players who inflamed his imagination when he was a kid, the way he himself figured in the dreams of so many who came after; takes us onto the ice and into the dressing rooms to meet the friends who stood by him and the rivals who spurred him to greater heights; shows us some of the famous moments in hockey history through the eyes of someone who regularly made that history. Warm, direct, and revelatory, it is a book that gives us number 99, the man and the player, like never before.
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The life of Saul Bellow : to fame and fortune, 1915-1964
by Zachary Leader
Based on much heretofore unavailable archival material and access to close relations, and extraordinary for the diligence of its scholarship, the unsparingness of its scope, and the engaging clarity of its prose, this book traces not only Bellow's rise to literary eminence--from the roots of his family in St. Petersburg, Russia, to his birth and childhood in Quebec to his years in Chicago and at the University of Chicago, to right before the breakout commercial success of his novel Herzog in 1964 -- but also Bellow's life away from the desk, which was rich with incident. In the mornings he wrote; in the afternoons, he went out and got into trouble. Often this trouble involved women--spirited, intelligent, beautiful women. And more: throughout we are given fresh and fulsome readings of Bellow's work, from his early writings and debut novel Dangling Man to Herzog.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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San Mateo Public Library 55 West 3rd Avenue San Mateo, California 94402 (650) 522-7802www.smplibrary.org |
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