Other books that might interest you

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  Susanna - The Making of an...

  S M Saunders

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  Thrust into a hostile world, and unable to comprehend the language, Heike, an immigrant and 'enemy' child, struggles to understand the English islanders as she adjusts to the new identity demanded of her.
  
  Intent on escaping the traumas of growing up in fascist Germany and the horrors of its post-war desolation, Heike's mother will marry the charismatic English officer she met during the Allied occupation of Lüneburg. Her daughter, who will be known as 'Susanna' from now on, must be kept innocent of her mother's past and grow up to be English.
  
  As this memoir of displacement, national character, and misunderstandings unfolds, S M Saunders becomes the detective in her own story, searching for the truth that will reconcile her double identity and conflicting emotions.
  
  But this is far from a misery memoir. This is a tale of love—the narrator's intense love for the extraordinary and eccentric English people whose positive influences not only shaped her and her mother, but also lent her the strength to come to terms with both her own identity and with her mother's complex, harrowing story.
  Susanna: the Making of an English Girl explores a childhood that is sad, beautiful, funny, rich in detail and marked, above all, by love.

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  I have been the bad guy -...

  Dr. Bernadette 'bird' Bowen

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  Have you ever been made to feel like the bad guy? Dr. bird has too. In this brief memoir, they reveal secrets about their life that they have kept hidden for over thirty years regarding compulsory heterosexuality, repressed/unexplored queernesses, and the late in life realization that -- turns out -- they're #actuallyautistic! Retold from their 33-year-old Dr. bird’s eye view, these extensively brave disclosures add one whole lifetime of flesh onto the U.S. body politic. This timely manuscript illuminates, historicizes, and contextualizes the f***ing fact that autism is not “just a trend” taking off just on TikTok recently, but that there are massive neuroqueer self-realizations happening worldwide in the algorithmic envirusment (environment + virus = envirusment). Dr. bird’s unmasked writing voice puts the “cut-the-shit” into “slice-of-life,” providing deep and raw disclosures of lifelong confusion, gaslighting, and struggles with family dysfunction, friendship loss, vulnerability, intimacy, sexual violence, and substance abuse. After extensive sharing, it’s time to grieve. They usher in a eulogy for their lifetimes that once were, by diagnosing how foundational U.S. ideas did and continue to dehumanize, sicken, disable, and deaden us. Then, they preach to the global choir about the single most connected time in history. Dr. bird has a lot more puns and trauma than answers, but in the end, recommends some liberatory antibodies for moving forward, far less miserably.

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  Summary of Jennette McCurdy's...

  Falcon Press

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  Buy now to get the main key ideas from Jennette McCurdy's I'm Glad My Mom Died 
  	  
  Many of us who watched kiddie TV dreamed of having the lives of our favorite child stars. However, in her autobiography I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), Jennette McCurdy shows us that childhood stardom can be far from a dream – and is closer to a nightmare. She presents a collection of vignettes from moments in her life when she felt she was abused by stardom, by weight issues, by producers, and most of all, by her own mother.

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  Sho-Time - The Inside Story of...

  Jeff Fletcher

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  Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels is playing baseball like no other since the legendary Babe Ruth. Ohtani’s dominance as a two-way player, one that pitches and bats effectively, has taken the Major League by storm. Since entering the league, he won the 2018 AL Rookie of the Year, competed in the 2021 Home Run Derby, started in the 2021 All Star Game as both a pitcher and hitter (the first player to ever do so), won the 2021 Most Valuable Player award, and was named to Time 100’s list of most influential people of 2021. The question on everyone’s mind is this: How is this Japanese phenom doing this, and how far can he go? As the next generation of baseball superstars cement themselves, Ohtani, who can pitch a 100mph fastball and was a Top 3 home run leader at the end of the season, stands out amongst them all. Major League Baseball has found the new face of the sport. In Sho-time, Jeff Fletcher examines the player’s path from his early days in Japan, his transition to the MLB, and a start-to-finish inside look at his historic 2021 MVP season. Along the way, Fletcher details other players who have crossed over from Japan to the major leagues, how Ohtani brought his phenomenal talent to the game at a time when technology is exploding as a means toward maximizing performance, and the role that Ohtani and his otherworldly teammate Mike Trout are playing in helping to lead baseball into the next generation.

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  Learning to Think - A Memoir of...

  Tracy King

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  Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictions—her family was happy and creative, yet shadowed by debt, phobias, her father's alcoholism, and the illusory promises of a born-again Christian church. The uneasy balance of the King household was irrevocably upended on a rainy spring night in 1988, when her father was killed by teenagers just blocks from their public housing estate. 
   
   
   
  The account of her father's death remained hazy, made worse by the fact that four of the accused teenagers—neighborhood boys she could not avoid—were never charged. What could have triggered such an act of aggression? 
   
   
   
  Over the years, in a bid to balm her grief and gaps in formal education, King journeyed through multiple belief systems: she distanced herself from fundamentalism, searching for clarity instead in the occult, paranormal beliefs, and conspiracy theories. Amid the chaos of her coming of age, she stumbled upon a copy of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World on the shelves of a Birmingham bookshop—a discovery that proved transformative. 
   
   
   
  Learning to Think is a resounding battle cry for the value of education and the freedom to think critically, imaginatively, and for oneself.

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  Izabela the Valiant: The Story...

  Adam Zamoyski

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  A Spectator Best Book of the Year 
  Trawling through a vast family archive and arcane sources in half a dozen languages, Adam Zamoyski has revealed the dramatic life of his great-great-great grandmother, an uneducated, vulnerable girl cast into a man’s world. 
  Her aristocratic position enmeshed her in high politics and close encounters with Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau, Joseph II, Marie-Antoinette and Tsar Alexander I, and earned her the enmity of Catherine the Great. She lived through revolution and no less than five wars, in which her cherished homes were devastated, her possessions looted and her children scattered. Caught up in tempestuous love affairs which led her to nervous breakdown and the brink of suicide, exploited by her lovers, she remained undaunted and liberated herself through education. And, unusually for her time, she became a caring mother devoted to her children. 
  She learned much by travelling extensively around Europe at a time of political and ideological change, and her observations, particularly on Georgian Britain, are remarkable. She gradually won the admiration of learned men and intellectual honours. She pioneered schooling for children of the poor and developed her own educational methods. Fascinated by the power of objects to kindle memories and arouse emotions, she was an avid collector of anything with a sensuous association and built two unique museums to act as teaching aids. 
  This is a story of triumph over adversity and betrayal. It was not achieved by her looks: ‘I have never been beautiful, but I have sometimes been pretty,’ she wrote. It was achieved by force of character and resilience. 
  This non-fiction biography of Izabela the Valiant, a woman of character and resilience, takes the reader on a journey through the rebellions and revolutions of her time. Her story, deeply intertwined with the history of Poland, is a captivating exploration of royalty, politics, and personal strength. 
  For fans of Christopher Clark (Kaiser Wilhelm II), Martyn C. Rady (The Habsburgs), Norman Davies (George II), Tom Holland (Athelstan), and Simon Sebag Montefiore (Jerusalem). 
  HarperCollins 2024

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