The Volunteer

Author: Jack Fairweather

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.39

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: September 04, 2024

Deal ends: September 04, 2024

Description:

The story of one Polish man’s efforts to destroy the Nazi camp from within and escape to warn the Allies of the Final Solution before it was too late.To uncover the fate of the thousands being interned at a mysterious Nazi facility named Auschwitz, Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: intentionally get himself sent to the camp and report back his findings. Once inside Pilecki forged an underground army that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazis, and amassed evidence revealing the horrifying truth of Germany’s plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews. But to warn the West before all was lost, he would then have to attempt the impossible: escape from Auschwitz.COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER“Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. . . . Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe

Violette Szabo

Author: Susan Ottaway

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $3.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: September 01, 2024

Deal ends: September 01, 2024

Description:

The story of Violette Szabo is one of the most extraordinary in the annals of World War II espionage and covert operations. Totally fearless and a dead shot, Violette Szabo volunteered to become part of the Special Operations Executive, Britain's premier sabotage and subversion organization of the time. On 7 June 1944, Violette left behind a two-year-old daughter to parachute into France on a special mission.
Szabo and other British agents were assigned to organise French resistance fighters to hinder the advance of the SS Das Reich Division to the Normandy beaches. Unfortunately, Szabo's party was soon ambushed by the SS.
Unable to walk due to a twisted ankle, Szabo covered the retreat of her comrades with machine-gun fire. Captured, she went through a series of interrogations and changes of confinement before ending up at Ravensbruck, the German all-women's concentration camp. She was finally executed on 26 January 1945. She was twenty-three years old.
This exceptional work has been written with the assistance of Violette Szabo's daughter Tanya and unravels fact and fiction about one of the most fascinating characters of World War II.
Praise for Violette Szabo: the life that I have: ‘Ottaway confirms that she is a meticulous researcher and first-rate historian’ - Alliance Advocate ‘Extensive research and interviews with people who knew and worked with her have enabled the author to set out the facts and re-examine Violette's remarkable life’ - This England Susan Ottaway has had a lifelong enthusiasm for aeroplanes, books and twentieth century history. She worked for four different airlines over a period of twenty years, mainly in the UK but also in Germany and Australia, and wrote her first book, a biography of Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, before leaving the world of aviation. She has since written seven more books including the acclaimed Fly with the Stars, a history of British South American Airways, with her brother and co-author Ian Ottaway, and the bestselling Sisters, Secrets and Sacrifice, the story of Jacqueline and Eileen Nearne, who were agents with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. She lives in Hampshire with Nick and their dog and three cats.

Jack and Jackie

Author: Christopher Andersen

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $9.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 30, 2024

Deal ends: August 30, 2024

Description:

"Of the recently published Jackie books, Christopher Andersen's ''Jack and Jackie" -- which sketches the childhoods of both, then focuses on the marriage -- is the most worth reading."
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Heartbreaking … First rate … A great American love story. This may be the best Kennedy book ever--meticulously researched, elegantly written, a biography worthy of its brilliant subjects." -- USA Today
Theirs was one of the great love stories of our time. Indeed, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Lee Bouvier captured and have held the world's imagination as perhaps no other husband and wife in modern history. Yet despite the billions of words that have been written about this most golden of couples, the true nature of their relationship has been veiled in mystery and mystique.
Until now. With stunning information from important sources and previously sealed archival material, No. 1 NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Christopher Andersen examines their unique partnership and the courage, grace, and humor that defined it.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Kennedy intimates--many speaking here for the first time--Andersen delivers an important work packed with startling revelations and penetrating insights into the secrets and events that shaped America's ultimate power couple, including:
*Never-before-known details of their courtship, and the other man Jackie almost married
*The world-famous women whose romances with JFK have previously been unreported,including Audrey Hepburn
*Their concerns about infertility, and Jackie's troubled pregnancies; the way Caroline and John Jr. transformed their lives--and the story of how the death of their infant son Patrick brought them closer together than ever before
*Moving first-hand accounts of the family's most private moments, before and after Dallas
An inspiring, sympathetic, and compelling look at two mythic figures, JACK AND JACKIE is more than just the definitive portrait of their marriage. It is a glittering fairy tale, a stirring saga of triumph and tragedy, and--above all else--an American love story.
"Swift and astounding reading." -- Time Magazine
"Andersen tells us not only about the hero and heroine we created, but about ourselves." -- Newsday

A Royal Experiment

Author: Janice Hadlow

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.39

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 30, 2024

Deal ends: August 30, 2024

Description:

This groundbreaking royal biography offers “a fascinating, story-filled account” of King George III’s radical—and doomed—pursuit of familial happiness (The Guardian, UK).King George III of Great Britain was determined to be different from his Hanoverian predecessors. Neither of the previous Georges was faithful to his wife, and both hated their own sons. Overall, their children were angry, jealous, and disaffected schemers, whose palace shenanigans made for royal embarrassment and salacious scandals.Pained by his childhood amid this cruel and feuding family, George came to the throne aspiring to be a new kind of king—a force for moral good. And to be that new kind of king, he had to be a new kind of man. Against his irresistibly awful family background—of brutal royal intrigue, infidelity, and betrayal—George fervently pursued a radical domestic dream: he would have a faithful marriage and raise loving, educated, and resilient children.In this acclaimed biography, Janice Hadlow shares a vivid and revelatory account of King George, Queen Charlotte, and their fifteen children as they struggled to undo generations of bitter dysfunction and pursue a passion for family.A Times and Sunday Times Best Books of the Year

You Never Know

Author: Ellis Henican

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: August 29, 2024

Deal ends: August 29, 2024

Description:

***THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER***There are many miles from the business school and basketball court at the University of Southern California to 50 million viewers for the final episode of a TV show called Magnum P.I. Tom Selleck has lived every one of those miles in his own iconoclastic and joyful way. Frank, funny and open-hearted, You Never Know is an intimate memoir from one of the most beloved actors of our time, the highly personal story of a remarkable life and thoroughly accidental career. In his own voice and uniquely unpretentious style, the famed actor brings readers on his uncharted but serendipitous journey to the top in Hollywood, his temptations and distractions, his misfires and mistakes and, over time, his well-earned success. Along the way, he clears up an armload of misconceptions and shares dozens of never-told stories from all corners of his personal and professional life. His rambunctious California childhood. His clueless arrival as a good-looking college jock in Hollywood (from the Dating Game to the Fox New Talent Program to co-starring with Mae West and escorting her to black-tie social functions). What it was like to emerge as a mega-star in his mid-thirties and remain so for decades to come, an actor whose authenticity and ease in front of the camera connected with audiences worldwide while embodying and also redefining the clichés of onscreen manhood.In You Never Know, Selleck recounts his personal friendships with a vivid army of A-listers, everyone from Frank Sinatra to Carol Burnett to Sam Elliott, paying special tribute to his mentor James Garner of The Rockford Files, who believed, like Selleck, that TV protagonists are far more interesting when they have rough edges.He also more than tips his hat to the American western and the scruffy band of actors, directors and other ruffians who helped define that classic genre, where Selleck has repeatedly found a happy home. Magnum fans will be fascinated to learn how Selleck put his career on the line to make Thomas Magnum a more imperfect hero and explains why he walked away from a show that could easily have gone on for years longer.Hollywood is never easy, even for stars who make it look that way. In You Never Know, Selleck explains how he’s struggled to balance his personal and professional lives, frequently adjusting his career to protect his family’s privacy and normalcy. His journey offers a truly fresh perspective on a changing industry and a changing world. Beneath all the charm and talent and self-deprecating humor, Selleck’s memoir reveals an American icon who has reached remarkable heights by always insisting on being himself.

Life on the Line

Author: Emma Goldberg

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $12.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 28, 2024

Deal ends: August 28, 2024

Description:

The gripping account of six young doctors enlisted to fight COVID-19, an engrossing, eye-opening book in the tradition of both Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial and Scott Turow’s One L.In March 2020, soon-to-graduate medical students in New York City were nervously awaiting “match day” when they would learn where they would begin their residencies. Only a week later, these young physicians learned that they would be sent to the front lines of the desperate battle to save lives as the coronavirus plunged the city into crisis.Taking the Hippocratic Oath via Zoom, these new doctors were sent into iconic New York hospitals including Bellevue and Montefiore, the epicenters of the epicenter. In this powerful book, New York Times journalist Emma Goldberg offers an up-close portrait of six bright yet inexperienced health professionals, each of whom defies a stereotype about who gets to don a doctor’s white coat. Goldberg illuminates how the pandemic redefines what it means for them to undergo this trial by fire as caregivers, colleagues, classmates, friends, romantic partners and concerned family members.Woven together from in-depth interviews with the doctors, their notes, and Goldberg’s own extensive reporting, this page-turning narrative is an unforgettable depiction of a crisis unfolding in real time and a timeless and unique chronicle of the rite of passage of young doctors.