"The true story of the world's most prolific art thief--a spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, from the bestselling author of The Stranger in the Woods. For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly ten years--in museums and cathedrals all over Europe--Breitwieser,...

Weller traces Carrie Fisher's life from her Hollywood royalty roots to her untimely and shattering death after Christmas 2016. We follow Fisher's acting career, from her debut in Shampoo to the role in Star Wars which catapulted her to instant fame. We explore her complex relationships with singer/composer Paul Simon and with talent agent Bryan Lourd, as well as her leap from actress to bestselling author. Fisher lived with serious bipolar disorder...

"No one does glamour, severity, girlish charm or tight-lipped witticism better than Dame Maggie Smith, one of Britain's best-loved actors. This new biography shines the stage lights on the life and work of a truly remarkable performer, one whose career spans six decades. From her days as a star of West End comedy and revue, Dame Maggie would cross paths with those of the greatest actors, playwrights, and directors of the era. Whether stealing scenes...

"In the 1960s, Edgar Smith, in prison and sentenced to death for the murder of teenager Victoria Zielinski, struck up a correspondence with William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. Buckley, who refused to believe that a man who supported the neoconservative movement could have committed such a heinous crime, began to advocate not only for Smith's life to be spared but also for his sentence to be overturned. So begins a bizarre and tragic...

"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly...

A meticulously researched account about how an alcoholic prostitute was transformed into a Wild West heroine is presented in this biography of Martha Canary, the woman known as Calamity Jane.

"Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi...

"Kill ?Em and Leave is more than a book about James Brown. Brown?s rough-and-tumble life, through McBride?s lens, is an unsettling metaphor for American life: the tension between North and South, black and white, rich and poor. McBride?s travels take him to forgotten corners of Brown?s never-before-revealed history: the country town where Brown?s family and thousands of others were displaced by America?s largest nuclear power bomb-making facility;...

On an island called Puerto Rico a boy named Roberto Clemente dreamed of nothing but winning at baseball. With no money -- but plenty of determination -- Clemente practiced on muddy fields with a glove made from a coffee sack. Little League became minor league, which turned into winter league ... and, finally, he made it to the major leagues! With lightning speed, towering home runs, and grand slams, Clemente introduced himself to America. Spare, evocative...

This blazingly intimate biography of Janis Joplin establishes the Queen of Rock & Roll as the rule-breaking musical trailblazer and complicated, gender-bending rebel she was. Janis Joplin's first transgressive act was to be a white girl who gained an early sense of the power of the blues, music you could only find on obscure records and in roadhouses along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. But even before that, she stood out in her conservative...