A product of a profound journey of self-knowledge, and a reckoning with all that your will can get you and all that it can leave behind, in this memoir, one of the most dynamic and globally recognized entertainment forces of our time opens up fully about his life.

With everything happening on Helen Peppe's backwoods Maine farm--ferocious sibling rivalry, rock-bottom poverty, feral male chauvinism, sex in the hayloft--life was out of control, even for the animals. Despite the chaos, in telling her family's story, Peppe manages deadpan humor, an unerring eye for the absurd, and a touching compassion for her utterly overwhelmed parents. While her feisty resilience and candor will inevitably remind readers of Jeannette...

Although Apollo 11 made Aldrin a famous person as he described the "alien world" of moon and space as "magnificent desolation," his celebrity status led to both personal trials and triumphs back on earth. "The twin demons of depression and alcoholism emerged -- the first of which Aldrin confronteed early and publicly, and the second of which he met with denial until it nearly killed him." He describes the failure of two marriages and renewal once...

Only a few years ago, Alex Honnold was little known beyond a small circle of hardcore climbers. Today, at the age of thirty, he is probably the most famous adventure athlete in the world. In that short time, he has proven his expertise in many styles of climbing and has shattered speed records, pioneered routes, and won awards within each discipline. More spectacularly still, he has pushed the most extreme and dangerous form of climbing far beyond...

Documents the life of the Negro League star and Hall of Famer, tracing Bell's sharecropping heritage, his extraordinary switch-hitting talents, and how Major League Baseball's racial barriers impacted his career.

"The woman behind the icon known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the undisputed Queen of Halloween, reveals her full story, filled with intimate bombshells, told by the bombshell herself. On Good Friday in 1953, at only 18 months old, 25 miles from the nearest hospital in Manhattan, Kansas, Cassandra Peterson reached for a pot on the stove and doused herself in boiling water. Third-degree burns covered 35% of her body, and the prognosis wasn't good....

"Devotion tells the inspirational story of the U.S. Navy's most famous aviator duo: Lieutenant Tom Hudner, a white New Englander from the country-club scene, and Ensign Jesse Brown, an African American sharecropper's son from Mississippi. Tom passed up Harvard to fly fighter planes for his country. Jesse became the navy's first black carrier pilot to defend a nation that wouldn't even serve him in a bar. While much of America remained divided by segregation,...

Now in his 85th year, Hollywood legend Michael Caine shares wisdom and stories from his remarkable career in this "engrossing" memoir that "shines with positive energy" (Library Journal, starred review). One of our best-loved actors, Michael Caine has starred in over 100 films in his six-decade career, spanning classic movies like Alfie, Zulu, and The Italian Job (the inspiration for the book title) to playing Alfred opposite Christian Bale's Batman...

"How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become one of the most successful storytellers in the world? - James nearly died early on the morning he was born. - His grandmother told him something that's been his motto for his entire writing career - 'Hungry dogs run faster'. - When James worked at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, he met the singer James Taylor. And the poet Robert Lowell. - James's first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number,...

"Was Johann Sebastian Bach really a short-tempered organist who constantly fought with his superiors? Was he a composer whose ideas were largely derived from others? Did he fall completely out of fashion by the end of his life? These are but a few of the many legends that have grown up around the greatest musical genius of all time in the 250 years since his death. Klaus Eidam takes on the Bach scholars and corrects their inaccuracies, bringing an...