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Adventuress : The Life and Loves of Lucy, Lady Houston
by Teresa Crompton
In the 1930s, Lady Houston was one of the richest women in England and a household name. Chiefly remembered now for her involvement with the development of the Spitfire aircraft and for being a prominent suffragette, this extraordinary biography tells a more complete story: how she acquired her enormous wealth, and how she spent it.
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Inga Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
by Scott Farris
She was the great love of President John F. Kennedy's life, but also Adolf Hitler's special guest at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was an actress, a journalist, an explorer, an MGM screenwriter, and also a suspected Nazi spy. Inga Arvad lived where gossip intersected with history, and her story, as told by author Scott Farris in Inga, demonstrates the great influence of the private life on public events.
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In the land of men : a memoir
by Adrienne Miller
At twenty-two, a naive Midwesterner, Adrienne Miller got a lucky break when she was hired as an editorial assistant at GQ. The mid-nineties were still the golden age of print journalism, and a publication like GQ then seemed the red-hot center of the literary world, even if their sensibilities were manifestly mid-century-the martinis, the male egos, and the unquestioned authority of kings.
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Things we didn't talk about when I was a girl : a Memoir
by Jeannie Vanasco
A part-memoir, part-true-crime account and testament to female friendship describes how the author navigated sexual trauma by contacting her former friend and rapist, who agreed to come forward and explore how biases shape sexual violence and its perceptions.
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The World According to Harry
by Harry Redknapp
This book is full of my best stories - kickabouts with jumpers for goalposts with Bobby Moore, mine and Sandra's disastrous honeymoon to Torquay in a dodgy car and my funniest `Mr Pastry' moments - as well as my thoughts on the important things in life.
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Vet on the Go
by Graham Wallace
In February 1945, with no veterinary training available in New Zealand, Graham Wallace braved a German raider in the Tasman Sea to begin his studies in Sydney. The potentially explosive journey setting the tone for a colourful life working with big farm animals in rural New Zealand as a travelling vet, later specialising in disease prevention and vaccine creation. "Vet on the go" is a collection of tales about his time as a vet that is both informative and funny, and addresses changes in practice and attitudes in the profession over seventy years.
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Why Karen Carpenter matters
by Karen Tongson
In the '60s and '70s, America's music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international fame belied a different sort of tragedy the underconsumption that led to Karen's death at age thirty-two from the effects of an eating disorder. This hybrid of memoir and biography excavates the destructive perfectionism at the root of the Carpenters' sound, while finding the beauty in the singer's all too brief life.
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The Mother of the Brontës : When Maria Met Partick
by Sharon Wright
They were from different lands, different classes, different worlds almost. The chances of Cornish gentlewoman Maria Branwell even meeting the poor Irish curate Patrick Brontë in Regency England, let alone falling passionately in love, were remote. Yet Maria and Patrick did meet, making a life together as devoted lovers and doting parents in the heartland of the industrial revolution. An unlikely romance and novel wedding were soon followed by the birth of six children. They included Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, the most gifted literary siblings the world has ever known. Her children inherited her intelligence and wit and wrote masterpieces such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Yet Maria has remained an enigma while the fame of her family spread across the world.
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Truganini : Journey Through the Apocalypse
by Cassandra Pybus
Cassandra Pybus's ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne. For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy.
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The Knife's Edge The Heart and Mind of A Cardiac Surgeon
by Stephen Westaby
Although Professor Stephen Westaby was born with the necessary coordination and manual dexterity, it was a head trauma sustained during university that gifted him the qualities of an exceptional heart surgeon: qualities that are frequently associated with psychopathy.
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The magical language of others : a memoir
by EJ Koh
Left behind when work requires her parents to return to Korea, a teen poet reconnects with family history to manage the impact of absent caregivers on her sense of self.
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Marshal of Victory : The Autobiography of General Georgy Zhukov
by Georgy Zhukov
Covers Zhukov's rise from peasant boy to Marshal of the Soviet Union. Detailed inside view of the operations of Stalin's high command throughout the Second World War. Zhukov's own insights into the major battles fought on the Eastern Front.
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Hunt the Banker : The Confessions of a Russian Ex-Oligarch
by Alexander Lebedev
Hunt the Banker is a memoir of Lebedev's own hair-raising experiences as someone who aspires to show that an 'honest banker' is not an oxymoron. There is the thread of a whodunit as his attempts at constructive and charitable business enterprises are systematically torpedoed by a person or persons unknown.
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Books You Might Have Missed
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| The Toni Morrison Book Club by Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Cassandra Jackson, and Piper Kendrix Williams Starring: a diverse quartet of College of New Jersey English professors who formed a book club to discuss the enduring relevance of beloved novelist Toni Morrison's works. On the reading list: The Bluest Eye; Song of Solomon; Beloved; A Mercy. |
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| Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition by P. CarlWhat it is: an incisive memoir in essays chronicling author P. Carl's midlife gender transition. What's inside: Carl's conflicted reckoning with the white male privilege he now experiences, as well as how his understanding of toxic masculinity changed post-transition. |
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The glass castle : a memoir
by Jeannette Walls
The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.
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| The House of Yan: A Family at the Heart of a Century in Chinese History by Lan YanWhat it's about: how three generations of Lan Yan's well-to-do family navigated the tumultuous changes of 20th-century China, including the Cultural Revolution that led to their persecution. Reviewers say: "a deeply personal, accessible, and worthy introduction to modern Chinese history" (Booklist).
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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