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At age 30, Maya Golden appeared to be living a charmed life. She was an award-winning sports reporter, a loyal wife, and a new mom. Outwardly, she was the picture of the American Dream for many women. Privately, she was battling addiction, perfectionism, dissociation disorder, and rage due to sexual abuse endured at the hands of her cousin and other predators. After years of harboring pain and channeling her anger into unhealthy outlets, Maya wanted...
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With emotions like fear, guilt and empathy eluding her, the author, trying to replace the nothingness with something, realizes, after connecting with an old flame, if she's capable of love, it must mean she isn't a monster and sets out to prove the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren't all monsters either.
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Jihyun Park is one of these rare survivors. Twice she left the land of the 'socialist miracle' to flee famine and dictatorship. By the age of 29 she had already witnessed a lifetime of suffering. Family members had died of starvation; her brother was beaten nearly to death by soldiers. Even smiling and laughing was discouraged. The first time she ran, she was forced abandon her father on his deathbed - crossing the border under a hail of bullets....
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"Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before. Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing...
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"Cecily Strong had a special bond with her cousin Owen. And so she was devastated when, in early 2020, he passed away at age thirty from the brain cancer glioblastoma. Before Strong could attempt to process her grief, another tragedy struck: the coronavirus pandemic. Following a few harrowing weeks in the virus epicenter of New York City, Strong relocated to an isolated house in the woods upstate. Here, trying to make sense of Owen's death and the...
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In 1999, after a series of adventurous jobs around the world, Sam Sheridan found himself in Australia, loaded with cash and intent on not working until he'd spent it all. It occurred to him that, without distractions, he could finally indulge a long-dormant obsession: fighting. Within a year, he was in Bangkok training with the greatest fighter in muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) history and stepping through the ropes for a professional bout. That one...
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"Combining the soul-baring confessional of Brain on Fire and the addictive storytelling of The Queen's Gambit, a renowned puzzle creator's compulsively readable memoir and history of the crossword puzzle as an unexpected site of women's work and feminist protest. The indisputable 'queen of crosswords,' Anna Shechtman published her first New York Times puzzle at age nineteen, and later, spearheaded the The New Yorker's popular crossword section. Working...
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"Jennifer Klinec is fearless. In her thirties, she abandons her bland corporate job to launch a cooking school from her London apartment and travel the world in search of delicious recipes and obscure culinary traditions. Her journey takes her to Iran, where she seeks out a local woman to learn the secrets of Persian cuisine. Vahid is suspicious of the strange foreigner who turns up in his mother's kitchen. Unused to such a bold and independent woman,...
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"This compelling and deeply personal memoir from WWE superstar Rebecca Quin-a.k.a. The Man, a.k.a. Becky Lynch-delves into her earliest wrestling days, her scrappy beginnings, and her meteoric rise to fame. By age seven, Rebecca Quin, now known in the ring as Becky Lynch, was already defying what the world expected of her. Raised in Dublin, Ireland in a devoutly Catholic family, Rebecca constantly invented new ways to make her mother worry-roughhousing...
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"Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a "contract wife," a second-class citizen who was hired as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Switzerland. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to her apartment, and she performed menial duties for the CIA. Despite battling sexism at all levels of the agency, Mendez's talent for espionage was clear, and she soon took on bigger and more significant...
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It begins with a child's hunger for love and acceptance and continues through years of withering criticism, perverse expectations, and unfounded competition from a narcissistic father who couldn't tolerate his son's happiness and libertine spirit. In the end, the author unravels a relationship that could never be fixed -- but perhaps didn't need to be.
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In this deeply personal memoir in the vein of Andre Agassi's Open and Megan Rapinoe's One Life , the winningest snowboardcross rider of all time chronicles her career, a story of self-growth that reveals the secret of her resilience and how she overcame crushing early failure to win Olympic gold. On February 16, 2006, twenty-year old American snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis was poised to win the first gold medal in women's snowboardcross, a sport making...
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"CAT AND BIRD, a 'memoir in animals,' is anchored around Kyoko Mori's relationship with the six house cats who defined major eras of her life as a writer: Dorian, Oscar, Ernest, Algernon, Miles, and Jackson. Detailing the rhythms of their days together, she weaves a narrative tapestry out of her past: the deep family tragedy that marked her childhood in Japan, her move to the American Midwest as a young adult, her experiences as a bird rehabilitator,...
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"An unbeliever writes his way out of a "doomsday cult," one chapter at a time. As an adolescent, Daniel Allen Cox was a dutiful Jehovah's Witness, preaching door to door even before his baptism marked a formal dedication to the movement. Then, at eighteen, whispers of his sexual orientation made their way to his congregation's presiding elder and catalyzed his disassociation from the group. But the difference between "in" and "out" is never that simple....
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"Thirty-eight years old, fit and handsome, John Blackburn was a former Air Force pilot and evangelical Christian. His wife, a veterinarian, healed animals and homeschooled their five children with the Bible as their textbook. The coming end of days was certainty, not poetry, and for John, the end did arrive--cancer. The healing hands of his community hovered over growing tumors in his torso, but his disease continued to progress. At the time, no one...