Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Biographies & Memoirs

On the island of Lampedusa, the southernmost part of Italy, between Africa and Europe, Davide Enia looks in the faces of those who arrive and those who wait, and tells the story of an individual and collective shipwreck. On one side, a multitude in motion, crossing entire nations and then the Mediterranean Sea under conditions beyond any imagination. On the other, a handful of men and women on the border of an era and a continent, trying to welcome the newcomers.

In 1935 when Phillips H. Lord created Gang Busters, the crime rate was high and confidence in law enforcement was low. Crimes were highly publicized, and their perpetrators were sometimes glamorized in Hollywood movies. With most radio crime programs dramatizing pulp-fiction stories, Lord decided to portray the procedure and practices of real-life law enforcement officers, basing his dramas on court records and police files. Enjoy these 12 exciting Gang Busters episodes in this “true crime” collection!

After growing up in a dysfunctional and emotionally abusive home, Tanya Marquardt runs away on her sixteenth birthday. Her departure is an act of rebellion and survival - whatever she is heading toward has to be better than what she is leaving behind. Struggling with her inner demons, Tanya must learn to take care of herself during two chaotic years in the working-class mill town of Port Alberni, followed by the early-nineties underground goth scene in Vancouver, British Columbia. She finds a chosen family in her fellow misfits, and the bond they form is fierce and unflinching.

In public life for half a century, my image and reputation have had more ups and downs than the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. I have been called savior and sinner, fool and wise man, crusader and exploiter, hothead and dope. The opinions are usually based on when they tuned in. Were you around for my early days as a crusading local newsman? Did you waste an evening inside Al Capone's empty vault? Were you watching when the bombs dropped in Afghanistan or Iraq, or did you tune into the raucous talk show when my nose got broken in the best television studio brawl ever caught on tape?

As the oldest child in an impoverished Amish family, Lydia Lee knows little more of life beyond hard work, sacrifice, and extreme hunger. Yet, even as a young girl, she strives to be content with all that God has provided. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Lydia’s childhood unfolds as her family struggles to survive, finding strength from their Amish faith. But, when tragedy strikes, that very faith is tested beyond what any child should have to endure. When all hope seems lost, Lydia is reminded that all things have seasons.

On August 6, 1993, twenty-year-old Natasha Alexenko was assaulted at gunpoint. After nearly a decade, her backlogged rape kit was finally tested and her rapist, who roamed free for ten years, was brought to justice. On the day he was sentenced, Alexenko vowed that she would no longer be a statistic and would do whatever she could to help police on behalf of other rape victims. In 2011, she founded Natasha’s Justice Project (NJP), a nonprofit committed to ending the rape-kit backlog. This unflinching memoir chronicles her journey from trauma to triumph.

After spending her high school years in Hawaii, Kathleen Norris was woefully unprepared for Bennington College in the 1960s, with its culture of drugs, sex, and bohemianism. But it was also at Bennington that she discovered her great love of poetry, which carried her to New York City at a time when a new generation of poets was emerging and shaking up the establishment of time and place.

One day in 2002 the 50-year old body of former Pittsburgh Steeler and hall of famer Mike Webster was laid on a cold table in front of pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu. Webster's body looked to Omalu like the body of a much older man, and the circumstances of his behavior prior to his death were clouded in mystery. But when Omalu cut into Webster's brain, it appeared to be normal. Something didn't add up.

In fall 1967, friends Linda Tomaszewski and Christine Rothschild are freshmen at the University of Wisconsin. The students in the hippie college town of Madison are letting down their hair - and their guards. But amid the peace rallies lurks a killer. When Christine's body is found, her murder sends shockwaves across college campuses, and the Age of Aquarius gives way to a decade of terror. Linda knows the killer, but when police ignore her pleas, he slips away. For the next forty years, Linda embarks on a cross-country quest to find him.

When Cheryl Dietrich joined the US Air Force, she began a transformation from overweight introvert and military neophyte into one of the key personnel redesigning the structure of the Air Force within the Pentagon. In this stirring and revelatory memoir, Cheryl - one of only a hundred female officers of colonel rank or higher - explains what it takes to stay the course, overcome male domination issues, break the glass ceiling more than once, and deal with the political issues facing the Pentagon.

Desperate to alleviate her son's constant rages and their crushing toll on the family, Donnie Kanter Winokur comes up with an innovative, untested, four-pawed solution: a golden retriever service dog named Chancer. Chancer is specially trained to give Iyal a unique love he desperately needs. But in this true-life tale infused with moments of despair, tenderness, and humor, Chancer turns out to be what the entire family has needed to stay - and grow - together.

How did thousands of premature infants come to be exhibited at America's most popular amusement park? In Miracle at Coney Island: How a Sideshow Doctor Saved Thousands of Babies and Transformed American Medicine, Claire Prentice uncovers the incredible true story of Martin Couney, the "incubator doctor."

In Breaking van Gogh, James Grundvig investigates the history and authenticity of van Gogh's iconic Wheat Field with Cypresses. Relying on a vast array of techniques from the study of the painter's biography and personal correspondence to the examination of the painting's style and technical characteristics, Grundvig proves that the "most expensive purchase" housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a fake.

Like most people, Kimberly Rae Miller does not have the perfect body, but that hasn't stopped her from trying. And trying. And trying some more. Her first attempt to use food to change her body came at age four, when she learned that the Inuit ate fat to stay warm in the winter. If this diet worked in the Arctic, she reasoned, why not in Long Island? Postcollege, after a brief stint as a diet-pill model, she became a health-and-fitness writer and editor working on celebrities' bestselling bios.

On a quest for enlightenment, Benjamin Shalva journeyed through the wilds of Tibet and took a pilgrimage to a white-walled monastery in Rhode Island. He wrestled with demons, danced with temptresses, and sang with hundreds of voices under the stars. Now, using the lessons and techniques gained through years of religious exploration and inward reflection, Shalva offers simple and powerful ways to connect with your spiritual self, whether it be in a place of worship or the yoga studio, or even while sitting in traffic.

Meet the essential Bernie Sanders, an authentic and uncompromising champion of the people. Independent United States Senator Bernie Sanders, who has a 35-year career in public service, first as Burlington, Vermont's mayor then as Vermont's sole representative to Congress, and currently as a United States senator, is now campaigning to become president of the United States.

They were a family. The young father, haunted by his own parents’ disappointment, can’t manage to complete his doctorate, nor can he imagine being able to earn a living or pursue a career. Just as he comes to terms with being a stay-at-home dad, leaving his wife to provide for the family, she hits him with a shocking surprise. As the father begins to hope for a return to the lifestyle he enjoyed before fatherhood, he finally finds the inspiration to see something through to the end.

Gloria Gaynor’s number-one hit single "I Will Survive" debuted in 1978 to overwhelming success. Shortly thereafter, the single went double platinum. Over three decades later, it still strikes a chord among men and women everywhere. Over the years, the disco legend has received thousands of personal messages from adoring fans whose lives have been transformed by this timeless song. Here, she shares 40 of those inspirational, true stories.

The Art of Youth is a moving inquiry into the nature of artistic prodigies who did their major work at an early age. Renowned novelist Nicholas Delbanco gives us a triptych of indelible portraits: the American writer Stephen Crane, British artist Dora Carrington and the legendary composer George Gershwin. All three lived colorful, productive lives before dying early, at an average age of thirty-five. In this audiobook, Delbanco discovers what it is we mourn in authors who pass away so young, and muses on his own life - one marked by both early success and longevity.

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself — what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly — religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.