Your Search Results

      • Biography & True Stories

        The Pale-Faced Lie

        A True Story

        by David Crow

        A violent ex-con forces his son to commit crimes in this unforgettable memoir about family and survival. Growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation, David Crow and his three siblings idolized their dad, a self-taught Cherokee who loved to tell his children about his World War II feats. But as time passed, David discovered the other side of Thurston Crow, the ex-con with his own code of ethics that justified cruelty, violence, lies—even murder. Intimidating David with beatings, Thurston coerced his son into doing his criminal bidding. David’s mom, too mentally ill to care for her children, couldn’t protect him. Through sheer determination, David managed to get into college and achieve professional success. When he finally found the courage to refuse his father’s criminal demands, he unwittingly triggered a plot of revenge that would force him into a deadly showdown with Thurston Crow. David would have only twenty-four hours to outsmart his father—the brilliant, psychotic man who bragged that the three years he spent in the notorious San Quentin State Prison had been the easiest time of his life. Raw and palpable, The Pale-Faced Lie is an inspirational story about the power of forgiveness and the strength of the human spirit.

      • Biography & True Stories

        Mirrored Minds

        Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen

        by Kate Ashton

        In her unique dual biography, Kate Ashton delineates the parallel lives of Hans Christian Anderson and Søren Kierkegaard, their personal relationship, literary careers, and lasting cultural influence on the western and wider world. These two towering literary geniuses followed radically divergent paths, and yet each read and reacted to the immense power and depth of the other's growing oeuvre as it refracted their own.  Against the backdrop of the end of Golden Age Denmark within a warring Europe, and the spiritual and sexual repression of Reformed Christianity, each suffered the fate of the prophet unhonoured in his hometown of Copenhagen. Tracing their lives from childhood trauma to tragic love affairs and anguished isolation, Ashton illuminates counteractive response to experience: one an inward search for truth and self-knowledge, the other flight into distraction and fantasy.  Mirrored Minds offers the reader an opportunity to explore each author and his legacy within the context of the other, just as their long-standing association held up a mirror for Anderson and Kierkegaard themselves.

      • Biography & True Stories

        Falling from Disgrace

        by Tammy Dietz

        Tammy Dietz grew up committed to her family's Mormon faith, a profoundly patriarchal hierarchy that declares men superior and women subordinate, that demands devotion, purity, and chastity. But when the dogma of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints clashes with the forces of a changing world, Tammy's destiny transforms.​ Patriarchy provides order but also chaos in a family with a depressed mother and a hoarding father. Set in the affluent Bay Area, Tammy's coming-of-age story is one of poverty amid wealth and a desire for status, recognition, and inclusion, both inside the Church and out. But when Tammy breaks the most serious of rules, her once certain path falters, her once protective community turns intrusive, and she finds herself on an unexpected journey.

      • Biography & True Stories

        Running from the Mirror

        A Memoir - Three Unspeakable Tragedies

        by Howard Shulman

        As quickly as his face disappeared, so did his mother and father.  Just three days after he was born, Howard Shulman contracted an infection that attacked his face, devouring his nose, lips, lower right eyelid, tear ducts, and palate. Abandoned at the hospital by his parents, he became a ward of New Jersey under the care of a state-employed surgeon who experimentally rebuilt his face.​ Running from the Mirror is a poignant story of one man's struggle to survive against staggering odds and create a meaningful life for himself. With unapologetic candor, Howard gives an unflinching account of growing up a bullied outcast, with no family to officially call his own. Relying on little more than street smarts and grit, he rises from dishwasher to successful entrepreneur. Along the way, a European actress, a schoolteacher, and a fiery Latina help transform his life.​ Filled with heart-wrenching suffering as well as soul-lifting joy, Running from the Mirror is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

      • Biography & True Stories

        Ways of the Ancestors

        From Manchuria to Germany, 1928-68

        by Cornelia Feye

        The project is based on the diary of the author's grandparents, which chronicles forty years of tumultuous personal and political history.  She only found the diary two years ago in her brother’s basement in Berlin.  It begins in Manchuria where Cornelia Feye's grandparents met in 1928, followed by their escape after the Mukden Incident in 1931 and the Japanese occupation, their dramatic journey on the Transsibirian railroad from Harbin to Moscow and Berlin, the years of unemployment during the Weimar Republic, the rise of the National Socialists, and WWII, her grandfather’s four years as POW in Siberia and finally the reconstruction and economic prosperity in post-war Germany. The diary movingly tells the great love story between two very different people – her grandfather Kornelius, a Swabian former’s son, and grandmother Frida, a twelve-year-older cultured Swiss milliner, that fate brought together for unknown reasons in Mukden.  Beside the trans-generational and historical components of this project, it also touches on deeper philosophical themes such as destiny versus free will, and the role of faith in surviving insurmountable obstacles. It offers opportunities for deep-dive research into the Japanese Occupation of Manchuria, the History of the Trans Siberian Railroad in Stalinist Russia, The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln as Archetype, and Russian POW Camps in Siberia, which should be of general interest (see bibliography). Quotes from the diary are used as points of departure and to preserve the eloquent and poetic language. Select incidents will be set in-scene as historical fiction to communicate the emotional impact of this dramatic and traumatic story.

      • Biography & True Stories

        Oh No He Didn't

        Brilliant Women and the Men Who Took Credit for their Work

        by Wendy J. Murphy

        Stories of brilliant women whose inventions, discoveries, and creations were credited to the men who stole them.  Don’t you hate it when someone takes credit for another person’s idea? It happens a lot, and the people who lose out are often women. This book tells the stories of women whose inventions, discoveries, and creations were credited to men - women like Zelda Fitzgerald, the novelist, painter, and playwright who was more than F. Scott’s wife, and Margaret Knight, who invented the flat-bottomed paper bag but saw the patent go to a man who stole off to the Patent Office with her idea.  By telling the stories of the brilliant women artists, inventors, scientists, architects, and mathematicians who were denied their due, Oh No He Didn’t! will help all women tackle obstacles and create a kinship of understanding that will inspire and transcend generations.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter