Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey

Author: The Countess of Carnarvon

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: April 20, 2024

Deal ends: April 20, 2024

Description:

The real-life inspiration and setting for the Emmy Award-winning Downton Abbey, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the 5th Countess of Carnarvon.Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war. Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de Rothschild, who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon's ancestral home. Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman.This rich tale contrasts the splendor of Edwardian life in a great house against the backdrop of the First World War and offers an inspiring and revealing picture of the woman at the center of the history of Highclere Castle.

Look Me in the Eye

Author: John Elder Robison

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: April 19, 2024

Deal ends: April 19, 2024

Description:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “As sweet and funny and sad and true and heartfelt a memoir as one could find.” —from the foreword by Augusten Burroughs Ever since he was young, John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits—an inclination to blurt out non sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother, Augusten Burroughs, in them)—had earned him the label “social deviant.” It was not until he was forty that he was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger’s syndrome. That understanding transformed the way he saw himself—and the world. A born storyteller, Robison has written a moving, darkly funny memoir about a life that has taken him from developing exploding guitars for KISS to building a family of his own. It’s a strange, sly, indelible account—sometimes alien yet always deeply human.

High Price

Author: Dr. Carl Hart

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: April 18, 2024

Deal ends: April 18, 2024

Description:

High Price is the harrowing and inspiring memoir of neuroscientist Carl Hart, a man who grew up in one of Miami’s toughest neighborhoods and, determined to make a difference as an adult, tirelessly applies his scientific training to help save real lives. Young Carl didn't see the value of school, studying just enough to keep him on the basketball team. Today, he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist—Columbia University’s first tenured African American professor in the sciences—whose landmark, controversial research is redefining our understanding of addiction.In this provocative and eye-opening memoir, Dr. Carl Hart recalls his journey of self-discovery, how he escaped a life of crime and drugs and avoided becoming one of the crack addicts he now studies. Interweaving past and present, Hart goes beyond the hype as he examines the relationship between drugs and pleasure, choice, and motivation, both in the brain and in society. His findings shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and explain why current policies are failing.

Arnold

Author: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: April 18, 2024

Deal ends: April 18, 2024

Description:

New York Times

Bestseller: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s classic candid memoir of his extraordinary bodybuilding career and the secrets behind his success.

I still remember that first visit to the bodybuilding gym. I had never seen anyone lifting weights before. Those guys were huge and brutal.

 . . .

The weight lifters shone with sweat; they were powerful looking, Herculean. And there it was before me—my life, the answer I’d been seeking. It clicked. It was something I suddenly just seemed to reach out and find, as if I’d been crossing a suspended bridge and finally stepped off onto solid ground.

Five-time Mr. Universe, seven-time Mr. Olympia, and Mr. World—all before he became a major movie star and then governor of California—Arnold Schwarzenegger, nicknamed the “Austrian Oak,” is the most famous name in bodybuilding. This is his classic bestselling account of his experiences in bodybuilding—his discovery of the sport as a teenager; his parents’ pressure to give up on it; his obsessive determination and ambition; and his rise to international celebrity. In addition, Arnold shares his fitness and training secrets—demonstrating with a comprehensive step-by-step program and dietary hints how to use bodybuilding for better health. His program includes a special four-day regimen of specific exercises to develop individual muscle groups—each exercise illustrated with photos of Arnold in action.

Someone Will Be With You Shortly

Author: Lisa Kogan

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Regular price: $6.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: April 18, 2024

Deal ends: April 18, 2024

Description:

“[Kogan’s] wry observations of everyday life will hearten you on your worst days, validate you on your best, and make you laugh any day at all.” — Martha Beck, author of Expecting Adam and Finding Your Own North Star

“Someone Will Be with You Shortly is a delectable blend of wit, whimsy, pith, and poignancy. If David Sedaris were a girl... this is the book he’d write.” — Evan Handler, author of It's Only Temporary

Someone Will Be with You Shortly is a collection of the hilarious and poignant essays from beloved O Magazine columnist Lisa Kogan. Writing in the vein of Nora Ephron, Kogan has been called "the Erma Bombeck of our generation" (Kelly Corrigan, author of The Middle Place and Lift). In Someone Will Be with You Shortly, she brings her trademark humor to such real-life quandaries as single motherhood, aging, and sex.

Maid

Author: Stephanie Land

Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: April 18, 2024

Deal ends: April 18, 2024

Description:

"A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide (Barack Obama)," this

New York Times

bestselling memoir is the inspiration for the Netflix limited series, hailed by Rolling Stone as "a great one." 

  At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet.

Maid

is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper middle class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets. Driven to carve out a better life for her family, she cleaned by day and took online classes by night, writing relentlessly as she worked toward earning a college degree. She wrote of the true stories that weren't being told: of living on food stamps and WIC coupons, of government programs that barely provided housing, of aloof government employees who shamed her for receiving what little assistance she did. Above all else, she wrote about pursuing the myth of the American Dream from the poverty line, all the while slashing through deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor.

Maid

is Stephanie's story, but it's not hers alone. It is an inspiring testament to the courage, determination, and ultimate strength of the human spirit.

"A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work." 

-PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, Obama's Summer Reading List