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  Meet Me in the In-Between - A...

  Bella Pollen

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  A fashion designer turned writer details her bohemian life in this illustrated memoir—“Think Eat, Pray, Love . . . only cooler” (Marie Claire).   Bella Pollen wants to feel like she belongs, but she never learned how. The middle child of transatlantic parents, she constantly moved back and forth between England and America, home and away, family and freedom. Now an adult, she struggles to contain an adventurous spirit within the confines of conventional living.   In Meet Me in the In-Between, the international bestselling author takes us on an illustrated journey through her life, from her privileged childhood in Upper Manhattan through her marriage to the son of a Mafioso, to Mexican border towns where she falls in with a crowd of Pink Floyd–loving smugglers. Throughout all, Bella grapples with relationships, motherhood, career ups and downs, and a pathological fear of being boring.   With a mix of humor and pain, this is “a poignant, beautifully written memoir” of one woman’s quest for the extraordinary in her ordinary life (The Mail on Sunday).

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  I Am Spartacus! - Making a Film...

  Kirk Douglas

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  A “lively” memoir by the Hollywood legend about the making of Spartacus, with a foreword by George Clooney (Los Angeles Times).  One of the world’s most iconic movie stars, Kirk Douglas has distinguished himself as a producer, philanthropist, and author of ten works of fiction and memoir. Now, more than fifty years after the release of his enduring epic Spartacus, Douglas reveals the riveting drama behind the making of the legendary gladiator film. Douglas began producing the movie in the midst of the politically charged era when Hollywood’s moguls refused to hire anyone accused of Communist sympathies. In a risky move, Douglas chose Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, to write Spartacus. Trumbo was one of the “Unfriendly Ten,” men who had gone to prison rather than testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about their political affiliations. Douglas’s source material was already a hot property, as the novel Spartacus was written by Howard Fast while he was in jail for defying HUAC. With the financial future of his young family at stake, Douglas plunged into a tumultuous production both on- and off-screen. As both producer and star of the film, he faced explosive moments with young director Stanley Kubrick, struggles with a leading lady, and negotiations with giant personalities, including Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and Lew Wasserman. Writing from his heart and from his own meticulously researched archives, Kirk Douglas, at ninety-five, looks back at his audacious decisions. He made the most expensive film of its era—but more importantly, his moral courage in giving public credit to Trumbo effectively ended the notorious Hollywood blacklist. A master storyteller, Douglas paints a vivid and often humorous portrait in I Am Spartacus! The book is enhanced by newly discovered period photography of the stars and filmmakers both on and off the set.

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  The Story of Charlotte's Web - E...

  Michael Sims

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  While composing what would become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White obeyed that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats-White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours as a child and adult. Painfully shy, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people." It's all the more impressive, therefore, how many people have felt a kinship with E. B. White. 
   
  Michael Sims chronicles White's animal-rich childhood, his writing about urban nature for the New Yorker, his scientific research into how spiders spin webs and lay eggs, his friendship with his legendary editor, Ursula Nordstrom, the composition and publication of his masterpiece, and his ongoing quest to recapture an enchanted childhood.

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  Inside Apartheid - One Woman's...

  Janet Levine

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  In Inside Apartheid, South African-born Janet Levine recounts the horrors and struggles she faced against the minority white government’s brutal system of repression from a rare perspective—that of a white woman who worked within the system even as she fought to transform it.   With candor and courage, Levine skillfully interweaves her personal story of a privileged white citizen’s growing awareness of the evils of apartheid with a moving account of the increasing violence in and radical polarization of South Africa.  Inside Apartheid brings to life both the unsurpassed physical beauty and the institutionalized brutality of the country Levine loves so deeply. We accompany her on a daring trip to the devastated black township of Soweto immediately following the unrest in 1976. There she visits the home of a “colored” family with no way out of apartheid induced poverty. On a journey through the “black” homelands where Levine discovers firsthand the horrifying evidence of the long-term genocide of three million people.   As a student activist, as a journalist, and as an elected member of the Johannesburg City Council, Levine openly attacked the government’s policies in hundreds of speeches and articles, led election campaigns for one of her mentors, member of Parliament Helen Suzman, and was associated with Steve Biko and other less internationally famous but equally important South African figures. Levine was a founding member of the first black taxi co-operative in South Africa, and instrumental in having hundreds of illegally fired black workers reinstated with back pay after the Johannesburg strikes of 1980.   We feel Levine’s pain when she finally asks soul-searching questions about the effectiveness of being a white activist. Inside Apartheid, with such honest witness-bearing, may be her most important act of all.

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  Dr Jerome Groopman: Second Opinion

  PBS NewsHour

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  Dr. Jerome Groopman shares personal experiences as a patient and physician in his book Second Opinions: Stories of Intuition and Choice in the Changing World of Medicine. In this interview, Groopman expands on the concepts of intuition and choice in medical care, patient participation, his personal experiences, and more.

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  A Doctor at War - The story of...

  Matthew Hall

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  A Doctor at War' charts the fascinating account of one man's wartime experiences. Born in Geneva in 1909, Colonel Martin Herford served in the Spanish Civil War, then, on the outbreak of World War II, he saw service in Finland and across Europe as the Allies drove the Germans back to their homeland. Herford was even present at the liberation of Belsen, the notorious concentration camp. Even though the doctors, nurses and stretcher-bearers of the military are every bit as courageous as the front line soldiers, they are very seldom written about. The image of a team of medics tucked away behind the front lines is far from accurate as very often the wounded were treated in the midst of battle with bullets flying and shells exploding all around. A testament to Churchill's famous maxim 'when you're going through hell, keep going', Herford is an inspiration, and this book is a moving account of his heroism, utilising contemporary diaries, letters, notes and official dispatches.

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