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Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 256 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this profoundly affecting memoir from the internationally renowned author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, to her intellectual awakening and activism in the Netherlands, and her current life under armed guard in the West.

One of today's most admired and controversial political figures, Ayaan Hirsi Ali burst into international headlines following an Islamist's murder of her colleague, Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the movie Submission.

Infidel is the eagerly awaited story of the coming of age of this elegant, distinguished -- and sometimes reviled -- political superstar and champion of free speech. With a gimlet eye and measured, often ironic, voice, Hirsi Ali recounts the evolution of her beliefs, her ironclad will, and her extraordinary resolve to fight injustice done in the name of religion. Raised in a strict Muslim family and extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female mutilation, brutal beatings, adolescence as a devout believer during the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four troubled, unstable countries largely ruled by despots. In her early twenties, she escaped from a forced marriage and sought asylum in the Netherlands, where she earned a college degree in political science, tried to help her tragically depressed sister adjust to the West, and fought for the rights of Muslim immigrant women and the reform of Islam as a member of Parliament. Even though she is under constant threat -- demonized by reactionary Islamists and politicians, disowned by her father, and expelled from her family and clan -- she refuses to be silenced.

Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.

Audition: A Memoir

Barbara Walters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 226 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.”

And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and riveting memoir. After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.

Barbara Walters’s perception of the world was formed at a very early age. Her father, Lou Walters, was the owner and creative mind behind the legendary Latin Quarter nightclub, and it was his risk-taking lifestyle that gave Barbara her first taste of glamour. It also made her aware of the ups and downs, the insecurities, and even the tragedies that can occur when someone is willing to take great risks, for Lou Walters didn’t just make several fortunes—he also lost them. Barbara learned early about the damage that such an existence can do to relationships—between husband and wife as well as between parent and child. Through her roller-coaster ride of a childhood, Barbara had a close companion, her mentally challenged sister, Jackie. True, Jackie taught her younger sister much about patience and compassion, but Barbara also writes honestly about the resentment she often felt having a sister who was so “different” and the guilt that still haunts her.

All of this—the financial responsibility for her family, the fear, the love—played a large part in the choices she made as she grew up: the friendships she developed, the relationships she had, the marriages she tried to make work. Ultimately, thanks to her drive, combined with a decent amount of luck, she began a career in television. And what a career it has been! Against great odds, Barbara has made it to the top of a male-dominated industry. She was the first woman cohost of the Today show, the first female network news coanchor, the host and producer of countless top-rated Specials, the star of 20/20, and the creator and cohost of The View. She has not just interviewed the world’s most fascinating figures, she has become a part of their world. These are just a few of the names that play a key role in Barbara’s life, career, and book: Yasir Arafat, Warren Beatty, Menachem Begin, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Roy Cohn, the Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, Katharine Hepburn, King Hussein, Angelina Jolie, Henry Kissinger, Monica Lewinsky, Richard Nixon, Rosie O’Donnell, Christopher Reeve, Anwar Sadat, John Wayne . . . the list goes on and on.

Barbara Walters has spent a lifetime auditioning: for her bosses at the TV networks, for millions of viewers, for the most famous people in the world, and even for her own daughter, with whom she has had a difficult but ultimately quite wonderful and moving relationship. This book, in some ways, is her final audition, as she fully opens up both her private and public lives. In doing so, she has given us a story that is heartbreaking and honest, surprising and fun, sometimes startling, and always fascinating.

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Kay Redfield Jamison

Amazon Price: $11.16 List Price: $13.95 By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 164 new & used starting at $5.22

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Mental Health -> Depression

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 327 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An Unquiet Mind 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

An interesting product for anyone interested in the workings of the mind. Of particular interest to people with or concerned with people who show symptoms of bipolar disorders.

Editorial Review:

In Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist, turned a mirror on the creativity so often associated with mental illness. In this book she turns that mirror on herself. With breathtaking honesty she tells of her own manic depression, the bitter costs of her illness, and its paradoxical benefits: "There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness.... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality." This is one of the best scientific autobiographies ever written, a combination of clarity, truth, and insight into human character. "We are all, as Byron put it, differently organized," Jamison writes. "We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities." Jamison's ability to live fully within her limitations is an inspiration to her fellow mortals, whatever our particular burdens may be. --Mary Ellen Curtin

The Complete Persepolis: Now a Major Motion Picture

Marjane Satrapi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed memoir-in-comic-strips.

Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom--Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.

Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest To Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass LookBig, Or Why Pie is Not The Answer

Jen Lancaster

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 64 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Memoirs By Nature Are Narcissistic 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Think about it. You are the writer. The subject is you. The story is of your experiences based on the ideas generated by you. You have to spend a lot of time with yourself and like yourself enough to put it out there for the world to judge. And they DO judge!

This first person account starts out with the in-your-face notion that she's a fat beyotch, a hearty eater (bring on the butter) and a mean girl to boot. Look out soccer moms and Stepford wives, this is the polar opposite of . . . you.

Between "magically porktastic!" bites of food, Jen decides to try to lose 50 pounds, believing she'll be rewarded with facials and trips to Vegas or Italy to mark her progress. Regardless of her quest, her personality or yes, her narcissism, Jen Lancaster can WRITE. I went through so many pages before I realized I was almost completely finished with the book. It's a writing style I enjoy and admire, as it's conversational, FUNNY, and she doesn't hold back. She makes you feel like you're right in the room with her. Even though I can't say we have a whole lot in common, (I DO, however, like the shows on Bravo), more than anything else, I love a self-actualized, brave woman who writes well and entertains me with a good book.

Time to order the rest of her books and continue laughing in this woman's world.

Michele Cozzens is the author of It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club

Editorial Review:

A NOTE FROM JEN LANCASTER:

"To whom the fat rolls…I'm tired of books where a self-loathing heroine is teased to the point where she starves herself skinny in hopes of a fabulous new life. And I hate the message that women can't possibly be happy until we all fit into our skinny jeans. I don't find these stories uplifting; they make me want to hug these women and take them out for fizzy champagne drinks and cheesecake and explain to them that until they figure out their insides, their outsides don't matter. Unfortunately, being overweight isn't simply a societal issue that can be fixed with a dose healthy of positive self-esteem. It’s a health matter, and here on the eve of my fortieth year, I've learned I have to make changes so I don't, you know, die. Because what good if finally being able to afford a pedicure if I lose a foot to adult onset diabetes?"

Epilogue: A Memoir

Anne Roiphe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Widowed novelist, near seventy, ex-Park Avenue girl, ex-beatnik, ex-many other things too complicated to list here, loves big parties, summers at the beach, grandchildren, seeks interesting man for dinner and a movie.

Anne Roiphe was not quite seventy years old when her husband of nearly forty years unexpectedly passed away. But it was not until her daughters placed a personal ad in a literary journal that Roiphe began to consider the previously unimagined possibility of a new man. Moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day-to-day routine, Epilogue takes us on her journey into the unknown world of life after love.

Roiphe decides to reenter the dating world. But between new lunches, coffee dates, and e-mail exchanges, she wrestles with an unsettling loneliness. Recollections of marriage evoke complex, unexpected emotions on her journey through grief toward new companionship. In beautifully wrought vignettes, she recalls hailing a cab for the first time and learning to lock and unlock the front door—tasks her husband had always done.

Eloquent and astute, Epilogue tells the story of love rekindled and life remade. Roiphe offers us an elegant literary pastiche not of grief, but of hope and renewal.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 367 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.

Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them.

It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers.

The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 352 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

I liked the book, but it may not be for you. 3 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I have mixed feelings about the book Wild Swans. It certainly was not a page turner, rather it was a book I could lay down at any time, and even walk away from for a couple of days, which I did a number of times. It didn't read like a novel, as some memoir/biographies do, rather it was as though the author, Jung Chang was narrating to me the history of her family, beginning with her grandmother. The narration is well written, but long, and ends when she is 26. A short epilogue at the end then updates you as to what she has done with her life in the 10 years following the writing of the book. So if you are looking for a wildly entertaining book you can hardly put down, this is not a book for you.

Having said this, I do not consider reading the book was time wasted. If you are at all interested in the history of China, especially what it was like under Mao's years in power, you would find many fascinating passages in the book. Of course most of us know that Mao was not good for the people of China, but I was truly surprised at what all went on under Mao and his wife. Some of it was so strange, that it seemed down right bizarre to me, such as when Mao determined that grass and beautiful things should be removed from the cities. People all over China were pulling up flowers and grass. Students even spent school time out in the yard pulling up the grass. Reading the book was a learning experience about a time that it turned out I really knew very little about.

Editorial Review:

In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 630 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A beloved classic since its initial publication in 1947, this vivid, insightful journal is a fitting memorial to the gifted Jewish teenager who died at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Born in 1929, Anne Frank received a blank diary on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Her marvelously detailed, engagingly personal entries chronicle 25 trying months of claustrophobic, quarrelsome intimacy with her parents, sister, a second family, and a middle-aged dentist who has little tolerance for Anne's vivacity. The diary's universal appeal stems from its riveting blend of the grubby particulars of life during wartime (scant, bad food; shabby, outgrown clothes that can't be replaced; constant fear of discovery) and candid discussion of emotions familiar to every adolescent (everyone criticizes me, no one sees my real nature, when will I be loved?). Yet Frank was no ordinary teen: the later entries reveal a sense of compassion and a spiritual depth remarkable in a girl barely 15. Her death epitomizes the madness of the Holocaust, but for the millions who meet Anne through her diary, it is also a very individual loss. --Wendy Smith

Staging Your Comeback: A Complete Beauty Revival for Women Over 45

Christopher Hopkins

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Helpful Hints for the Older Woman 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Staging Your Comeback: Beauty Revival for Women Over 45; Christopher Hopkins.

I thought this book was very well done, and had some great before and after pictures for all body types (could have been better with more photos). The women featured looked wonderful after the makeovers, but the clothing selections could have been improved. Great tips on choosing the right clothing styles, hair styles, makeup etc.

If as a 45++ woman, looking your best is important to you, I would recommend this book.

Editorial Review:

Known as The Makeover Guy ® from his appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and other national television programs, Christopher Hopkins believes that as they age, women become more beautiful but often feel less attractive. He's out to change that. For more than twenty years he's encouraged women who often feel like they' have taken a backseat to everything and everyone else to come out of the shadows and take center stage. Now it's your turn. Using Christopher's step-by-step strategies and detailed advice,you will learn to:

• Restore your hair with your ideal cut, color, and style.
• Revamp your wardrobe to flatter a changing body.
• Refresh your face with 'visible lift' makeup techniques.
• Renew your spirit and maintain your look using Christopher's revival guide.