Biographies & Memoirs Books - Page 9

Rex: A Mother, Her Autistic Child, and the Music that Transformed Their Lives

Cathleen Lewis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

inspirational story of hope and determination 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Cathleen Lewis tells a truly remarkable story of motherly love coupled with faith and steely determination. This well-written book is a page turner, you simply can't put it down as you travel with her through the depths of the challenges and the highs of the victories as they unfold. To me it was the story of both hope as well as an account of what patience, love and determination can bring to the life of a child who otherwise might never have blossomed. Bravo to Cathleen Lewis!

Editorial Review:

The inspiring story of Rex, a boy who is not only blind and autistic, but who also happens to be a musical savant.

How can an 11-year old boy hear a Mozart fantasy for the first time and play it back note-for-note perfectly-but struggle to navigate the familiar surroundings of his own home? Cathleen Lewis says her son Rex's laugh of total abandon is the single most joyous sound anyone could hear, but his tortured aversion to touch and sound breaks her heart and makes her wonder what God could have had in mind. In this book she shares the mystery of Rex and the highs, lows, hopes, dreams, joy, sorrows, and faith she has journeyed through with him.

Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives

Brian Weiss

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 351 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Many lives, many masters 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

"Many Lives,Many Masters" has explained many experiences and stories that I could not understand before. The reincarnation and the wisdom passed on by the masters are very similar to the belief of Buddhism. I am not a religious person but born in a Buddhist family. I refuse to read religious books because I simply felt that they are written to sell their religious believes. This book certainly will help me understand the purpose of life & religions better.

It is highly recommended for all. The interesting experiences of Catherine and the messages from the Masters will makes you think and help answering many soul searching questions.

Editorial Review:

The true story of a prominent psychiatrist, his young patient, and the past-life therapy that changed both their lives.


As a traditional psychotherapist, Dr. Brian Weiss was astonished and skeptical when one of his patients began recalling past-life traumas that seemed to hold the key to her recurring nightmares and anxiety attacks. His skepticism was eroded, however, when she began to channel messages from the "space between lives," which contained remarkable revelations about Dr. Weiss' family and his dead son. Using past-life therapy, he was able to cure the patient and embark on a new, more meaningful phase of his own career.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza

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Total reviews: 380 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.

FDR

Jean Edward Smith

Amazon Price: $13.60 List Price: $20.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Trade Paperbacks Amazon Marketplace: 25 new & used starting at $13.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 47 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of today’s premier biographers has written a modern, comprehensive, indeed ultimate book on the epic life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this superlative volume, Jean Edward Smith combines contemporary scholarship and a broad range of primary source material to provide an engrossing narrative of one of America’s greatest presidents.

This is a portrait painted in broad strokes and fine details. We see how Roosevelt’s restless energy, fierce intellect, personal magnetism, and ability to project effortless grace permitted him to master countless challenges throughout his life. Smith recounts FDR’s battles with polio and physical disability, and how these experiences helped forge the resolve that FDR used to surmount the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the wartime threat of totalitarianism. Here also is FDR’s private life depicted with unprecedented candor and nuance, with close attention paid to the four women who molded his personality and helped to inform his worldview: His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, formidable yet ever supportive and tender; his wife, Eleanor, whose counsel and affection were instrumental to FDR’s public and individual achievements; Lucy Mercer, the great romantic love of FDR’s life; and Missy LeHand, FDR’s longtime secretary, companion, and confidante, whose adoration of her boss was practically limitless.

Smith also tackles head-on and in-depth the numerous failures and miscues of Roosevelt’s public career, including his disastrous attempt to reconstruct the Judiciary; the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans; and Roosevelt’s occasionally self-defeating Executive overreach. Additionally, Smith offers a sensitive and balanced assessment of Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, noting its breakthroughs and shortcomings.

Summing up Roosevelt’s legacy, Jean Smith declares that FDR, more than any other individual, changed the relationship between the American people and their government. It was Roosevelt who revolutionized the art of campaigning and used the burgeoning mass media to garner public support and allay fears. But more important, Smith gives us the clearest picture yet of how this quintessential Knickerbocker aristocrat, a man who never had to depend on a paycheck, became the common man’s president. The result is a powerful account that adds fresh perspectives and draws profound conclusions about a man whose story is widely known but far less well understood. Written for the general reader and scholars alike, FDR is a stunning biography in every way worthy of its subject.


From the Hardcover edition.

The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul

Patrick French

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since V. S. Naipaul left his Caribbean birthplace at the age of seventeen, his improbable life has followed the global movement of peoples, whose preeminent literary chronicler he has become. In The World Is What It Is, Patrick French offers the first authoritative biography of the controversial Nobel laureate, whose only stated ambition was greatness as a writer, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred.

Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul’s childhood in colonial Trinidad, French gives us the boy born to an Indian family, the displaced soul in a displaced community, who by dint of talent and ambition finds the only imaginable way out: a scholarship to Oxford. London in the 1950s offers hope and his first literary success, but homesickness and depression almost defeat Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman who will devote herself to his work and well-being. She will stand by him, sometimes tenuously, for more than four decades, even as Naipaul embarks on a twenty-four-year affair, which will awaken half-dead passions and feed perhaps his greatest wave of dizzying creativity. Amid this harrowing emotional life, French traces the course of the fierce visionary impulse underlying Naipaul’s singular power, a gift to produce masterpieces of fiction and nonfiction.

Informed by exclusive access to V. S. Naipaul’s private papers and personal recollections, and by great feeling for his formidable body of work, French’s revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.

Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

William Least Heat-Moon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Quoz 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I wasn't sure there was a word for what happens to me when I read Heat-Moon's works. I find treaures in them that seem to be written just for me to find. How can that be?

"PrairyErth" was such a treasure-box; I have read it every year since it was written, each time finding something new. "Roads to Quoz" is also such a book. Its wisdom, depth and humor take you on journeys that are pure joy for the intellect and the imagination.

Heat-Moon's "roads to Quoz" cover a vast area, so I was suprised that one of his Quoz stories mentioned a tiny town in Kansas called "Otis". It is where my mother grew up. I cannot explain such crossings of paths, but at least now I have a word for them: Quoz.

This is simply a gem of a book. It looks forward and backward at the same time, giving insights along the way, and finding wonder.
Gary Gackstatter, St Louis

Editorial Review:

About a quarter century ago, a previously unknown writer named William Least Heat-Moon wrote a book called Blue Highways. Acclaimed as a classic, it was a travel book like no other. Quirky, discursive, endlessly curious, Heat-Moon had embarked on an American journey off the beaten path. Sticking to the small places via the small roads--those colored blue on maps--he uncovered a nation deep in character, story, and charm.
Now, for the first time since Blue Highways, Heat-Moon is back on the backroads. ROADS TO QUOZ is his lyrical, funny, and touching account of a series of American journeys into small-town America.

Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs

Deborah Willis, Kevin Merida

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Portrait of an unprecedented campaign 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This beautifully produced photo book chronicles Barack Obama's presidential campaign. There are no official "posed" photographs. They all appear to be candids, all 150 of them. Dozens of photographers contributed, including the famed Annie Leibovitz. Her relaxed portrait of Obama is in the introduction to the book.

Topics range from the obviously historic to the small and intimate. Huge rallies are juxtaposed with a close-up of Obama's wrist wearing a bracelet of a soldier killed in Iraq. Here he is on a cell phone, on a Blackberry, with Bill Clinton, playing basketball. In a deep conversation with Hillary on a campaign plane. Delivering pizza to his staff and volunteers. One spread is nothing but magazines with the candidate's face on the cover.

The Obama family is well represented. The famous fist-bump with wife Michelle is shown over five frames. The future first lady glows in photos showing off her sense of style. Several shots feature the young Obama daughters, appearing at ease and relaxed.

This is a worthy keepsake of an unprecedented campaign.

Editorial Review:

Through 150 striking color photographs, Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs charts the road to Barack Obama's nomination as the first African American to lead the presidential ticket of a major party. Announcing his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007, Obama stood on the grounds of the Old State Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous "House Divided" speech against slavery in 1858. During an eighteen-month campaign, from the snows of Iowa to the hunt for Democratic "superdelegates," this junior senator from Chicago confounded the party establishment and rewrote the playbook on modern presidential campaigning. This amazing collection of photographs captures the public and private moments of his journey, and offers a unique window into one of the great triumphs in American politics.

Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945

Carlo D'este

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Carlo D'Este's brilliant new biography examines Winston Churchill through the prism of his military service as both a soldier and a warlord: a descendant of Marlborough who, despite never having risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel, came eventually at age sixty-five to direct Britain's military campaigns as prime minister and defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito for the democracies. Warlord is the definitive chronicle of Churchill's crucial role as one of the world's most renowned military leaders, from his early adventures on the North-West Frontier of colonial India and the Boer War through his extraordinary service in both World Wars.

Even though Churchill became one of the towering political leaders of the twentieth century, his childhood ambition was to be a soldier. Using extensive, untapped archival materials, D'Este reveals important and untold observations from Churchill's personal physician, as well as other colleagues and family members, in order to illuminate his character as never before. Warlord explores Churchill's strategies behind the major military campaigns of World War I and World War II—both his dazzling successes and disastrous failures—while also revealing his tumultuous relationships with his generals and other commanders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.

As riveting as the man it portrays, Warlord is a masterful, unsparing portrait of one of history's most fascinating and influential leaders during what was arguably the most crucial event in human history.

A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive

Dave Pelzer

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Total reviews: 1930 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Heartbreaking 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

What a wonderful heartbreaking book. I read this book in one night. I tried to put it down after the chapter The Accident. I lay there in my bed and cannot stop my mind from wondering, what happened to this little boy. I had to finish it, that night. The next morning I ordered 3 more of David's books. 5 STAR BOOK

Editorial Review:

This book chronicles the unforgettable account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games--games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."

Dave's bed was an old army cot in the basement, and his clothes were torn and raunchy. When his mother allowed him the luxury of food, it was nothing more than spoiled scraps that even the dogs refused to eat. The outside world knew nothing of his living nightmare. He had nothing or no one to turn to, but his dreams kept him alive--dreams of someone taking care of him, loving him and calling him their son.

Truman

David McCullough

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Total reviews: 288 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters -- Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson -- and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man -- a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined -- but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman's story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman's own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary "man from Missouri" who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.