The classic account of moving from slavery to freedom, by the celebrated African-American educator and university founder. Booker T. Washington believed that every man and woman deserved a chance, regardless of their skin color. This classic work of literature, originally published in 1901, relays the story of a man born into slavery who, once freed, pursued education and racial equality. This new edition of Booker T. Washington's autobiography features...

"The beloved star of Friends takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this candid, funny, and revelatory memoir that delivers a powerful message of hope and persistence. In an extraordinary story that only he could tell, Matthew Perry takes readers onto the soundstage of the most successful sitcom of all time while opening up about his private struggles with addiction. Candid, self-aware, and told with his...

At the end of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity, but also never to get legally married. The U.S. government gave them a choice: either get married, or Felipe would never be allowed to enter the country again. Sentenced to wed, Gilbert tackles her fears of marriage.

“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. Born a slave circa 1818 (slaves weren't told when they were born) on a plantation in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write. This book calmly but dramatically recounts...

The premier publishing of Frederick Douglass' bestselling autobiography was in 1845, wherein he documents his life as a young slave learning to read, his subsequent escape from slavery, and how he established himself as a freeman under a false name. Douglass was forced to flee the country to evade recapture after the original pressing and only returned after buying his freedom. Two more autobiographies were published, in 1855 and 1881, where Douglass...

On the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. Kalanithi chronicles his transformation from a na�ive medical student into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

"When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies ... But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. His father's impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission,...

Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young...

""In her long and extraordinary career, Cicely Tyson has not only succeeded as an actor, she has shaped the course of history." --President Barack Obama, 2016 Presidential Medal of Honor ceremony. "Just As I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. In these pages, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once...

Reflections of a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who lectured on "Really achieving your childhood dreams," shortly after having been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His advice concerned seizing the moment while living, rather than dying.