"For almost half a century, celebrated ventriloquist and entertainer Shari Lewis delighted generations of children and adults with the help of her trusted sock puppet sidekick Lamb Chop. For decades, the beloved pair were synonymous with children's television, educating and entrancing their young audience with their symbiotic personalities and their proclivity for song, dance, and the joy of silliness. But as iconic as their television personas were, relatively little inside knowledge has been revealed about Lewis herself and the life-changing moments that led her to the entertainment industry and perhaps, most importantly, to Lamb Chop. Renowned for her skills as a performer, Lewis was an equally skilled businesswoman. Operating in an era when women were largely left out of the conversation, she was one of the few women to run her own television production company. Whether it was singing, dancing, conducting, writing, drawing, or ventriloquism-a skill in which she was virtually unmatched-Lewis spent the entirety of her 65 years in pursuit of performative perfection. Constantly innovating and adapting to the needs of her audience and the market, Lewis extended the longevity of her career decade after decade. Her contributions, and that of Lamb Chop, and the rest of her puppet pals forever changed the history of children's television. Now, two decades after Lewis and Lamb Chop last graced television with their presence, Lewis' daughter Mallory and author Nat Segaloff have set the record straight about the iconic pair in Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop: The Team that Changed Children's Television. In this seminal biography, the pair pull the veritable wool from the eyes of audiences who adored the legendary entertainer to examine the joys, sorrows, triumphs, and sheer hard work that gave Lewis and Lamb Chop their enduring star power"--

A celebration of the relationships that bring us strength, purpose, and joy Ties That Bind honors the people who nourish and strengthen us. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay draws from ten years of the revolutionary oral history project’s rich archives, collecting conversations that celebrate the power of the human bond and capture the moment at which individuals become family. Between blood relations, friends, coworkers, and neighbors, in the most trying circumstances and in the unlikeliest of places, enduring connections are formed and lives are forever changed. The stories shared in Ties That Bind reveal our need to reach out, to support, and to share life’s burdens and joys. We meet two brothers, separately cast out by their parents, who reconnect and rebuild a new family around each other. We encounter unexpected joy: A gay woman reveals to her beloved granddaughter that she grew up believing that family was a happiness she would never be able to experience. We witness lifechanging friendship: An Iraq war veteran recalls his wartime bond with two local children and how his relationship with his wife helped him overcome the trauma of losing them. Against unspeakable odds, at their most desperate moments, the individuals we meet in Ties That Bind find their way to one another, discovering hope and healing. Commemorating ten years of StoryCorps, the conversations collected in Ties That Bind are testament to the transformational power of listening.

A biography of the famous Danish writer of fairy tales, interspersed with excerpts from his stories.

Two years ago, Stephen J. Dubner wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine called "Choosing My Religion." It became one of the most widely discussed articles in the magazine's history. Turbulent Souls, the book that grew out of that article, is an intimate memoir of a man in search of a Jewish heritage he never knew he had. It is also a loving portrait of his parents. Stephen Dubner's family was as Catholic as they come. His devout parents attended mass at every opportunity and named their eight children after saints. Stephen, the youngest child, became an altar boy, studied the catechism, and learned the traditional rituals of the Church -- never suspecting that the religion he embraced was not his by blood. Turbulent Souls is Dubner's personal account of his family; tumultuous journey from Judaism to Catholicism -- and in his own case, back to Judaism -- and the effects, some tragic, some comic, of those spiritual transformations. His parents were Jews, born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents, but -- independent of each other and, indeed, before they met -- each converted to Christianity, only to be shunned by their families. After their marriage, they closed the door on Judaism so firmly that their children had no inkling that their background was far different from what it seemed: They didn't know, for instance, that their mother had a first cousin named Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed for treason in one of the most controversial cases of the cold war era. Stephen Dubner's is a story about discovery: of relatives he never knew existed, of family history he'd never learned, and of a faith he'd never thought of as his own and, in fact, knew nothing about. It's a fascinating, thoughtful, and thought-provoking exploration of a subject of intense interest to spiritually minded men and women everywhere.

"There's a little Jewish mother in every mother," as comedienne Judy Gold reveals in her achingly hilarious and poignant book For a Jewish girl who remembers the first book ever read to her as a child was the pop-up version of The Diary of Anne Frank, learning how to be a Jewish mother who wasnt a carbon copy of HER Jewish mother wasnt easy. Here, Emmy Awardwinning comedienne Judy Gold asks, "Are there any Jewish mothers out there like me, or are they all, G-d forbid, like my mother" In 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, she incorporates her own adventures in Jewish motherdom and her memories of growing up Jewish in suburban New Jersey -- communicating with her mother by putting Ann Landers articles on the fridge ("Dear Ann, My mother wont let me walk alone to school and Im 16! Please help." "Dear Ann, The crossing guard drinks. Please help.") -- with the voices of the fifty other Jewish mothers, she and her co-author, Kathleen Moira Ryan, interviewed. They asked homemakers, lawyers, Holocaust survivors twenty-five questions, including: --Who's your favorite Jewish mother (Judy's is Barbra Streisand.)? --How many times a day do you talk to your children or mother (for Judy, it's anywhere from one to the high double digits)? --Are Jewish mothers really more paranoid (or, "Why do I have to write an entire itinerary with names, addresses, and phone numbers every time I leave the house")? And so on. The culmination of these extraordinary stories confirms that there is ultimately something strong, courageous, and loving in every Jewish mother -- a hopeful -- and very funny -- message to mothers and their children everywhere.

An inspiring memoir about love, race, identity, and contested narratives told with unflinching mettle. Through her childhood spent in 1940s New York being raised by two mothers, her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement, and raising her own children in the coalfields of West Virginia, Faith S. Holsaert has been defined by the intertwined forces of race, activism, and family. As a young woman on the front line of the Civil Rights Movement, she learned the power of contested narratives and came to understand her whiteness, her queer identity, and her stakes in overturning racism. Later in life, she confronted sexual abuse and mental illness across three generations of women in her family to find that these painful histories have played a significant role in the development of her identity as a woman, activist, and mother. Through a lifetime laid bare in prose and poetry, Holsaert beautifully quilts memoir, social history, and historic events into a gripping and inspirational narrative. This powerful and structurally innovative work lends new categories of meaning to those who would strive to find their place, hope, and sense of belonging in efforts to fight against systemic racism and lead lives characterized by openness and love.

A biography of one of baseball's greats, Yogi Berra, who was player, coach, and manager.

"A picture biography of Julio C. Tello, considered to be the founder of modern Peruvian archaeology, that traces his life from an early interest in Peru's ancient cultures to his rise as the most distinguished Indigenous social scientist of the twentieth century. A map and an afterword with additional information, photograph, and source list are included."--

"A down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled." -President Bill Clinton "Fascinating . . . . Made me wish I had been born in the Bronx." -Barbara Walters A touching and provocative collection of memories that evoke the history of one of America's most influential boroughs-the Bronx-through some of its many success stories The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball; where J. Crew's CEO Millard ("Mickey") Drexler found his ambition; where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel fell in love with science; and where local music making inspired singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci and hip-hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel. The parks, the pickup games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food-for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Al Pacino, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, Bobby Bonilla, Mary Higgins Clark, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs-experiences spanning six decades of Bronx living. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, from looking for violets along the banks of the Bronx River to the wake-up calls from teachers who recognized potential, into one great collective story, a filmlike portrait of the Bronx from the early twentieth century until today.

Thomas Jefferson was wild about numbers. He was constantly counting, measuring, and observing things that caught his interest. He loved sharing his discoveries and reading the discoveries of others. But when a famous Frenchman published a book about America, Jefferson was appalled: all the information in the book was wrong. The author insisted that America was a wretched, dismal place, where birds could not sing, dogs could not bark, and everything and everyone was puny and weak. Thomas Jefferson resolved to set the record straight - with numbers - and prove to the world that the new nation was worthy of investment.

He has been one of the brightest stars in Hollywood, a hard-charging actor whose intensity on the screen has been mirrored in his personal life. As Kirk Douglas has grown older - he turned ninety in December 2006 - he has become less impetuous and more reflective. In this poignant and inspiring new memoir, Douglas contemplates what life is all about, weighing current events from his present frame of mind while summoning the passions of his younger days. Kirk Douglas is a born storyteller, and throughout Let's Face It he tells wonderful tales and shares favorite jokes and hard-won insights. In the book, he explores the mixed blessings of growing older and looks back at his childhood, his young adulthood, and his storied, glamorous, and colorful life and career in Hollywood. He tells delightful stories of the making of such films as Spartacus, Lust for Life, Champion, The Bad and the Beautiful, and many others. He includes anecdotes about his friends Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan, Ava Gardner, Henry Kissinger, Fred Astaire, Yul Brynner, John Wayne, and Johnny Cash. He reveals the secrets that have kept him and his wife, Anne, happily married for more than five decades, and talks fondly and movingly of times spent with his sons, Michael, Peter, Eric, and Joel, and his grandchildren. Douglas's life has been filled with pain as well as joy. In Let's Face It , he writes frankly for the first time about the tragic death of his son Eric from a drug overdose at age forty-five. Douglas tells what it was like to recover from several near-death episodes, including a helicopter crash, a stroke, and a cardiac event. He writes of his sadness that many of his closest friends are no longer with us; the book includes many moving stories such as one about a regular poker game at Frank Sinatra's house at which he and Anne have been fixtures along with Gregory Peck, Jack Lemmon, and their wives. Though many of the players are gone, the game continues to this day. In Let's Face It , Douglas reflects on how his Jewish faith has become more and more important to him over the years. He offers strong opinions on everything from anti-Semitism to corporate greed, from racism to Hurricane Katrina, and from the war in Iraq to the situation in Israel. He writes about the importance in his life of the need to improve education for all children and about how we need to care more about the world and less about ourselves. A must-read for every fan, this engrossing memoir provides an indelible self-portrait of a great star - while sharing the wit and wisdom Kirk Douglas has accumulated over a lifetime.

Relates the life story of Josef Mengele and quotes from the testimonies of twin children who were the victims of his sadistic pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz. They speak about the complicated psychological problems which they confronted after the war, and which caused their silence in the 1950s-70s. In 1984 the organization of surviving twins, CANDLES, was established, which organized a trip to Auschwitz in 1985 and publicized their reminiscences.

"The first middle-grade book from a picture book master-a harrowing, heartrending, illustrated account of his childhood escape from the terrors of war"--

Traces the story of dancer-turned-magician's assistant Adelaide Herrmann, placing her achievements against a backdrop of period conventions about women in the arts and her determination to continue her work after the death of her husband.

Jacqueline van Maarsen's first book My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank ends in 1947, two years after the death of her close friend Anne Frank. But Anne's death did not spell the end of the friendship. Otto Frank clung desperately to his deceased daughter's dearest friend. Having remained silent about her friendship with Anne Frank for decades after the war, Jacqueline van Maarsen finally decided to tell her story, hoping to expose half-truths and fabrications surrounding her former friend and to respect Anne Frank's legacy for what it is. While her books have been written in close cooperation with the Anne Frank Foundation, there are times when she has felt obliged to disagree with the Foundation and she has not shied away from confrontation. In her second book, van Maarsen returns in detail to the most dominant person in her life, her French mother who died in 1992 at the age of 101. The aftermath of an inheritance question in France in which the author had an important role to play, takes on tragic proportions, although the hilarity of the sometimes grotesque situation surfaces now and then. Inheriting Anne Frank is the continuation of Jacqueline van Maarsen's My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank, and is an important documentary contribution to our knowledge of Anne Frank and what happened to and on account of her renowned diary. It is also a stirring portrait of a woman's turbulent life in the twentieth century

"In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family. Beginning with her own long-suppressed secret, the story spirals through the hidden lives of her parents and relatives--revealing the truth about their origins, personal traumas, marital misery, abandoned children, religious transgressions, sexual identity, radical politics, and supposedly embarrassing illnesses. While unmasking their charades and disguises, Pogrebin also showcases her family's remarkable talent for reinvention in a narrative that is, by turns, touching, searing, and surprisingly universal." --

"The fabulous life and times of one of our wittiest and most endearing and enduring caricaturists--in his own words and inimitable art. Alongside more than 150 of his drawings, cartoons, and caricatures--and in prose as spirited and wickedly pointed as his artwork--Edward Sorel gives us an unforgettable self-portrait: a poor Depression-era childhood in the Bronx (surrounded by loving Romanian-immigrant grandparents and a clan of mostly left-leaning aunts and uncles); his first stabs at drawing when pneumonia kept him out of school at the age of eight; his time as a student at New York's famed High School of Music & Art; the scrappy early days of Push Pin Studios, founded with fellow Cooper Union alums Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast and which became the hottest design group of the 1960s; his two marriages and four children; his many friends in New York's art and literary circles. Sorel charts the highlights of his remarkable career as the "young lefty becomes an older lefty," and, in magazines and newspapers, murals, cartoons, and comic strips, he steadily lampooned--and celebrated--American cultural and political life. He sets his story in the parallel trajectory of American presidents, from FDR to the present day--with the candor and depth of insight that could only come from someone who lived through it all--revealing the uproarious ways in which the personal and political collide in his mordant artwork"--

"100 Inspirational Stories and Beautiful, Uplifting Photos of Survivors. "You have cancer" are three of the most terrifying words a person can hear, and our culture does little to ease the fear. New Beginnings: 100 Cancer Survivors follows one hundred survivors who discovered that those words were the start of a new beginning, not an end to their lives. New Beginnings is a collection of narratives and energetic photographic portraits of men, women, children, and families that inspire and provide hope for anyone diagnosed with cancer as well as for their families and friends. The survivors vary in age, ethnicity, and diagnosis, but they all share the ability to turn a diagnosis of cancer into a positive force in their lives. Coming from all walks of life, survivors include Sally Craigen, who beat two different cancers three decades apart but who never let it stop her from enjoying life; Rabbi William Cutter, who had already survived three heart attacks by the time he faced down prostate cancer on two occasions; Sophia Colby, diagnosed with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis at fifteen months of age, who has survived more in her ten years than many people do in their entire lives; and professional basketball player Coby Karl, who hasn't let two bouts from thyroid cancer stop him from chasing his dreams; and ninety-six others. This is a project by and for cancer survivors: their words, Bill Aron's photographs, in collaboration with their ideas and sensibilities. This is their book"--

The father of the young actor best known for his performances in "Deadwood" describes his son's congenital heart defect, the young man's theatrical achievements, and the family's effort to find life-saving medical answers.

"A riveting story of how one brave and adventurous woman turned her life upside down for God. Firestone teaches us, through the joys and sorrows of her life, how our ancient traditions are calling out to us for renewal, and how, through faith, honesty, and struggle, we are learning to respond. At age seventeen, Tirzah Firestone left the oppressive home of her Orthodox Jewish parents and set off on a spiritual odyssey. With Roots in Heaven is the story of that journey, a fascinating and moving account of her evolution from rebellious young seeker to renegade rabbi. This is an inspiring, true account of a courageous woman with strong convictions and a passion to know and feel God. It is also a book that goes beyond one person's story of wandering and redemption to explore the dangers of modern religion and the joys and conflicts of intermarriage and raising interfaith children. An unforgettable story of love, sacrifice, and transformation-of grace sought and found-With Roots in Heaven offers hope, wisdom, and encouragement to anyone seeking deeper spiritual meaning in today's world"--