Biographies & Memoirs Books

The Man Who Loved China LP: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

Simon Winchester

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

Winchester continues to please 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Another book well done by Simon Winchester. The large-print version was a joy to read.

Editorial Review:

In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country.

Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping history of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great—by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.

Audition: A Memoir (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))

Barbara Walters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 219 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 made Barbara aware of the ups and downs that can occur when someone is willing to take great risks.

The financial responsibility for her family, the fear, the love all 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 has spent a lifetime auditioning, and 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.

Big Russ and Me (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))

Tim Russert

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Total reviews: 131 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Veteran newsman and Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert is known for his direct and unpretentious style and in this charming memoir he explains why. Russert's father is profiled as a plainspoken World War II veteran who worked two blue-collar jobs while raising four kids in South Buffalo but the elder Russert's lessons on how to live an honest, disciplined, and ethical life are shown to be universal. Big Russ and Me, a sort of Greatest Generation meets Tuesdays with Morrie, could easily have become a sentimental pile of mush with a son wistfully recalling the wisdom of his beloved dad. But both Russerts are far too down-to-earth to let that happen and the emotional content of the book is made more direct, accessible, and palatable because of it. The relationship between father and son, contrary to what one would think of as essential to a riveting memoir, seems completely healthy and positive as Tim, the academically gifted kid and later the esteemed TV star and political operative relies on his old man, a career sanitation worker and newspaper truck driver, for advice. Big Russ and Me also traces Russert's life from working-class kid to one of broadcast journalism's top interviewers by introducing various influential figures who guided him along the way, including Jesuit teachers, nuns, his dad's drinking buddies, and, most notably, the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom Russert helped get elected in 1976. Plenty of entertaining anecdotes are served up along the way from schoolyard pranks to an attempt to book Pope John Paul II on the Today Show. Though not likely to revolutionize modern thought, Big Russ and Me will provide fathers and sons a chance to reflect on lessons learned between generations. --Charlie Williams

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time (Wheeler Large Print Book Series)

Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1213 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The inspiring account of one man’s campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti- American reaches of Asia

In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan’s Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time—Greg Mortenson’s one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

Award-winning journalist David Oliver Relin has collaborated on this spellbinding account of Mortenson’s incredible accomplishments in a region where Americans are often feared and hated. In pursuit of his goal, Mortenson has survived kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, repeated death threats, and wrenching separations from his wife and children. But his success speaks for itself. At last count, his Central Asia Institute had built fifty-five schools. Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world—one school at a time.

Dreams from My Father (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))

Barack Obama

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 271 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

This man is a racist! 1 out of 5 stars.
6 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I think anybody who is thinking about voting for this man needs to read this book. Obama comes across as an angry black man who is extremely prejudice against whites. I can't figure out how so many people like him, he is truly a racist and to see so, all you have to do is read this book!

Editorial Review:

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life

Don Piper, Cecil Murphey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 491 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Now available in large print and Spanish editions, 90 Minutes in Heaven is the runaway best seller of one man's experience with death and life. As Baptist minister Don Piper was driving home from a conference, his car collided with a semi truck that crossed into his lane. He was pronounced dead at the scene. For the next 90 minutes, Piper experienced the glories of heaven, where he was greeted by those who had influenced him spiritually, and he experienced true peace. Back on earth, a passing minister who had also been at the conference was led to pray for the accident victim even though he was told Don was dead. Miraculously, Piper came back to life, and the pleasure of heaven was replaced by a long and painful recovery. For years Don Piper kept his heavenly experience to himself. Finally, friends and family convinced him to share his remarkable story. An inspiring and encouraging account, 90 Minutes in Heaven continues to touch and comfort hundreds of thousands of people around the world as it offers a glimpse of inexpressible heavenly bliss. Now even more people can experience Piper's incredible story through these two new editions.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Elizabeth Gilbert

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1615 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

self absorbed... 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

a self-absorbed portrayal of one year in the life of a woman recovering from a divorce. i could not get past the whining and one person pity party.

Some slow spots 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Overall I enjoyed this book (esp. the Eat and Love parts), but the Pray third can drag on.

If you didn't like it, you didn't get it. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Several people I know have shared with me that they saw Gilbert as self-centered when they read this book. To them and others who feel this way, I must make the following points. First of all, you are reading a book specifically about a woman finding herself - do you expect it to not be about her? Second, the circumstances leading up to her year-long trip around the world were very telling of why her focus in this particular book is so narrow: she was trying to discover who she was as she was trying to pull herself out of a debilitating depression. Now, for those of you who haven't experienced this kind of self-doubt and helplessness, I am very glad for you. It is awful and not to be wished on anyone. The fact that she even had the desire to climb out of the dark hole that is depression and try to be proactive about her life again is entirely commendable and thrilling for me to see. So, when she goes on this trip, she is hoping to learn something about herself in each of these countries. She isn't claiming to have solved the world's problems or to have completely understood each culture, but she is taking the really good things from each place and incorporating them into her life, and in doing so is learning who she is and what she wants for herself. That is something that we all are and should be constantly engaged in. She has no illusions that everything about each country is all roses, that there is no poverty, corruption, prejudice, but that is not the topic of this book. It's really not a topic that you can begin to swallow when you are just getting your legs back under you. I found this book entertaining, inspiring, and a credible and accurate portrait of what it feels like to lose yourself and have to find it again. We may not all be able to travel around the world to do it, but I think that's why we are able to read such beautiful writing. She takes us to the places we cannot go. And I love her for it.

Editorial Review:

The celebrated author of The Last American Man creates an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion.

Unabridged CDs - 13 CDs, 15 hours

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Alice Schroeder

Amazon Price: $23.10 List Price: $35.00 Not yet published By: Random House Large Print

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Editorial Review:

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha.”

Although the media track him constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full life story. His reality is private, especially by celebrity standards. Indeed, while the homespun persona that the public sees is true as far as it goes, it goes only so far. Warren Buffett is an array of paradoxes. He set out to prove that nice guys can finish first. Over the years he treated his investors as partners, acted as their steward, and championed honesty as an investor, CEO, board member, essayist, and speaker. At the same time he became the world’s richest man, all from the modest Omaha headquarters of his company Berkshire Hathaway. None of this fits the term “simple.”

When Alice Schroeder met Warren Buffett she was an insurance industry analyst and a gifted writer known for her keen perception and business acumen. Her writings on finance impressed him, and as she came to know him she realized that while much had been written on the subject of his investing style, no one had moved beyond that to explore his larger philosophy, which is bound up in a complex personality and the details of his life. Out of this came his decision to cooperate with her on the book about himself that he would never write.

Never before has Buffett spent countless hours responding to a writer’s questions, talking, giving complete access to his wife, children, friends, and business associates—opening his files, recalling his childhood. It was an act of courage, as The Snowball makes immensely clear. Being human, his own life, like most lives, has been a mix of strengths and frailties. Yet notable though his wealth may be, Buffett’s legacy will not be his ranking on the scorecard of wealth; it will be his principles and ideas that have enriched people’s lives. This book tells you why Warren Buffett is the most fascinating American success story of our time.


From the Hardcover edition.

The Prince of Frogtown (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))

Rick Bragg

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this final volume of the beloved American saga that began with All Over but the Shoutin’ and continued with Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg closes his circle of family stories with an unforgettable tale about fathers and sons inspired by his own relationship with his ten-year-old stepson.

He learns, right from the start, that a man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog who chases a car and wins. He discovers that he is unsuited to fatherhood, unsuited to fathering this boy in particular, a boy who does not know how to throw a punch and doesn’t need to; a boy accustomed to love and affection rather than violence and neglect; in short, a boy wholly unlike the child Rick once was, and who longs for a relationship with Rick that Rick hasn’t the first inkling of how to embark on. With the weight of this new boy tugging at his clothes, Rick sets out to understand his father, his son, and himself.

The Prince of Frogtown documents a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of Rick’s youth, to Jacksonville’s one-hundred-year-old mill, the town’s blight and salvation; and to a troubled, charismatic hustler coming of age in its shadow, Rick’s father, a man bound to bring harm even to those he truly loves. And the book documents the unexpected corollary to it, the marvelous journey of Rick’s later life: a journey into fatherhood, and toward a child for whom he comes to feel a devotion that staggers him. With candor, insight, tremendous humor, and the remarkable gift for descriptive storytelling on which he made his name, Rick Bragg delivers a brilliant and moving rumination on the lives of boys and men, a poignant reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (Thorndike Press Large Print Basic Series)

Ishmael Beah

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 389 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Fact Vs. Fiction - Say "NO" to "poetic license" 2 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

FACT OR FICTION

Do a background check on the author and you'll see articles in SLATE, the NY TIMES and others in which the author's veracity is, tragically, in question.

Please don't shoot the messenger when you find some disturbing questions, and just as importantly, don't shoot the _message_.

After all, these events did take place, and it's important that we recognize and absorb them, so we can act quickly to help when they happen. (Think the Rwandan genocide, when the international community sat on the sidelines as 1,000,000 people were killed over 100 days.)

IF, however you are interested in the controversy surrounding this particular book and my take on it, read on:

CONTROVERSY

This is an important, gripping work that brings attention to some of what's happening in other parts of the world.

However ....

... if you read-up on this author, you'll find out about the ongoing controversy over the accuracy of events that occur in the book. (Look for articles in Slate, the New York times, among others.)

As a result, several salient points emerge:

1) Some of the work appears to have been written originally as _fiction_ with the aid of his Oberlin University Creative Writing teacher Dan Chaon, which was then changed to non-fiction.

2) Having said that, the author probably *did* experience some of what was written about in Memoirs, although to a different degree than described. How much, unfortunately we'll never know.

This means that:

3) The book contains BOTH FICTIVE AND NON-FICTIVE ELEMENTS, the fictive elements (in the Creative Writing teacher's own words, captured on tape by an Australian journalist) added as "poetic license."

And here is where I take umbrage.

FACT VS. FICTION: WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

With the relatively-recent publication and retraction of fake biographies (such as "Love and Consequences," a fake memoir of growing up in an L.A. gang, since discredited and pulled by the publisher), I think the blowback against this book is reasonable.

There's a REASON we have categories such as "fiction" and "non-fiction," and why we keep them separate.

Fact is the opportunity to examine the nuances of history and its consequences, and learn something from the net result. Fiction is highly subjective, one person (or group's) untested ideas of what might be (even if the fictive work is set in the past). To blur the line is to cheapen the lessons of history.

SAY NO TO FACT-ION

Faction has become a bit too rampant nowadays, from "historical movies" that invent unsubstantiated love affairs (think Truman Capote kissing Perry Smith in "Infamous," or Queen Elizabeth having an historically unsubstantiated affair with Sir Walter Raleigh in "Elizabeth: The Golden Years,") to books like "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan," which blessedly received the ridicule it deserved.

And perhaps it's true that it's the publishing houses -- or even the public's taste for only the most sensationalistic -- that are to blame, putting pressure on well-intentioned authors such as Ishmael Beah to color stories that are already horrific enough, for the sake of maximum marketability.

By all means, read and absorb Ishmael Beah's tragic story.

You can be sure some of these things happened to him, and certainly to others.

COMMERCE ABOVE ALL?

But let's start thinking about saying "no" to another machine, although one less horrific than the one Beah had to endure: the machine of sensationalism-over-truth, which encourages writers and publishers to color facts to maximize sales, thus potentially discrediting what is an important core message.