Make ‘Em Laugh

Author: Debbie Reynolds

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 25, 2024

Deal ends: August 25, 2024

Description:

“A frothy collection of stories and gossip from the comedic actress . . . [she] looks back happily at her sixty-five-year career on stage, screen, and TV.” —

Kirkus Reviews

From her acclaimed performances to her headline-making divorce from Eddie Fisher, raising a famous daughter to hitting the road with a successful one-woman show, Debbie Reynolds was in the spotlight for decades. Over her more than six-decade-long career she met presidents, performed for the Queen of England, and partied with kings.In this fabulous personal tour, she recalls wonderful moments with the greats of the entertainment world—Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis, Phyllis Diller, and many, many more—sharing stories that shed new light on her life and career and the glittering world of Hollywood then and now. Debbie has plenty to tell—and in 

Make ‘Em Laugh

, she dishes it in the warm, down-to-earth voice her fans adore.Debbie shares memories of late-night pals and some of the greatest comedians of all time, stories from the big screen and small, and tales of marriage, motherhood, and children. Combining her wicked sense of humor and appealing charm, she reveals the personal side of show business and fame in funny, poignant, and delightful reminiscences. Nothing is off limits: Debbie talks about her sex life, her family drama—and even shares a few secret recipes.A true Hollywood icon, beloved by millions of fans around the world, Debbie Reynolds died on December 28, 2016, at the age of eighty-four, just one day after the death of her daughter, actress and author Carrie Fisher.

Wife No. 19

Author: Ann Eliza Young

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $2.99

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Deal starts: August 25, 2024

Deal ends: August 25, 2024

Description:

"I think no more of taking a wife than I do of buying a cow."

In 1863 24-year old Ann Eliza became the 19th wife of the 67-year old head of the Mormon Church

Brigham Young.

Ten years later, in a landmark case that would rock the nation and lead to the rewriting of laws, Ann divorced her powerful husband alleging neglect and cruel treatment.

In 1876 Ann Eliza published an autobiography entitled

Wife No. 19.

In it she wrote that she had

"a desire to impress upon the world what Mormonism really is; to show the pitiable condition of its women, held in a system of bondage that is more cruel than African slavery ever was, since it claims to hold body and soul alike.”

Researchers believe Ann Eliza was in fact Brigham Young’s 52nd wife. Her blistering expose is a harrowing document revealing how Brigham Young and other Mormon men lived in households that were essentially harems, using their religion to justify what amounted to sexual slavery. Mormon men were said to be

“building their kingdoms”

while their wives were forced to share their love and suffer in silence at the degradation.

Upon commencement of her divorce proceedings, Ann Eliza was excommunicated from the LDS Church. The divorce was granted in January 1875 and Brigham Young was ordered to pay a $500 per month allowance and $3000 in court fees. When Young initially refused, he was found in contempt of court and sentenced to a day in jail and a $25 fine. The alimony award was later set aside on the grounds that a polygamous marriage was legally invalid, potentially indicting them both for unlawful cohabitation.

Ann Eliza Young subsequently traveled the United States and spoke out against polygamy, Mormonism, and Brigham Young himself. She testified before the U.S. Congress in 1875; these remarks were credited, by some to have contributed to a passage of the Poland Act (1874) that reorganized the judicial system of Utah Territory and made it easier for the Federal Government to prosecute polygamists.

*Illustrated with Mormon image gallery.

Blood, Sweat, & Tea

Author: Tom Reynolds

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: August 25, 2024

Deal ends: August 25, 2024

Description:

A collection of true life stories from “one of the most gripping blogs around” recounting life as a paramedic for a British ambulance service. (

The Guardian)

Have you ever wondered what's going on inside the ambulance screaming past you during your rush-hour commute? Since 2003, Tom Reynolds (writing under an alias so as not to get sacked from his job), has kept a blog where he chronicles the day-in, day-out realities of his life on the job as an EMT with the London Ambulance Service. By turns both poignant and profound, Reynolds's writing captures the very essence of life and death. From the mundane to the surreal, from the heartwarming to the cynical, from the calm to the frenetic, more than 300 entries from his award-winning blog, Random Acts of Reality (randomreality.blogware.com) are included in the book. The tales are the stuff of Grey's Anatomy, House, and ER—only these events aren't unfolding on a Hollywood soundstage but on the front lines of a first responder’s real life.“An alluring mix of humor, bravery, cynicism, and compassion.” —

London Daily Telegraph

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night

Author: Tahir Hamut Izgil

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 24, 2024

Deal ends: August 24, 2024

Description:

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, awarded to the best first book of the yearNamed one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ECONOMIST • TIMEA poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocideOne by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China’s internment camps for Muslim minorities.Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government’s radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs' legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs’ radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world.Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahir’s daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.

The Tooth Fairy

Author: Clifford Chase

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $15.26

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: August 22, 2024

Deal ends: August 22, 2024

Description:

In shimmering prose that weaves among intimate confessions, deadpan asides, and piercing observations on the fear and turmoil that defined the long decade after 9/11, Clifford Chase tells the stories that have shaped his adulthood. There are his aging parents, whose disagreements sharpen as their health declines; and his beloved brother, lost tragically to AIDS; and his long-term boyfriend—always present, but always kept at a distance. There is also the revelatory, joyful music of the B-52s, Chase’s sexual confusion in his twenties, and more recently, the mysterious appearance in his luggage of weird objects from Iran the year his mother died. In the midst of all this is Chase’s singular voice—incisive, wry, confiding, by turns cool or emotional, always engaging. The way this book is written—in pitch-perfect fragments—is crucial to Chase’s deeper message: that we experience and remember in short bursts of insight, terror, comedy, and love. As ambitious in its form as it is in its radical candor, The Tooth Fairy is the rare memoir that can truly claim to rethink the genre.

Identical Strangers

Author: Paula Bernstein

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: August 22, 2024

Deal ends: August 22, 2024

Description:

As seen in the hit documentary Three Identical Strangers • “[A] poignant memoir of twin sisters who were split up as infants, became part of a secret scientific study, then found each other as adults.”—Reader’s Digest (Editors’ Choice) WINNER OF A BOOKS FOR A BETTER LIFE AWARD Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn’t until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What’s more, after being separated as infants, she and her sister had been, for a time, part of a secret study on separated twins. Paula Bernstein, a married writer and mother living in New York, also knew she was adopted, but had no inclination to find her birth mother. When she answered a call from her adoption agency one spring afternoon, Paula’s life suddenly divided into two starkly different periods: the time before and the time after she learned the truth.  As they reunite, taking their tentative first steps from strangers to sisters, Paula and Elyse are left with haunting questions surrounding their origins and their separation. And when they investigate their birth mother’s past, the sisters move closer toward solving the puzzle of their lives. Praise for Identical Strangers “Remarkable . . . powerful . . . [an] extraordinary experience . . . The reader is left to marvel at the reworking of individual identities required by one discovery and then another.”—Boston Sunday Globe “Absorbing.”—Wired“[A] fascinating memoir . . . Weaving studies about twin science into their personal reflections . . . Schein and Bernstein provide an intelligent exploration of how identity intersects with bloodlines. A must-read for anyone interested in what it means to be a family.”—Bust “Identical Strangers has all the heart-stopping drama you’d expect. But it has so much more—the authors’ emotional honesty and clear-eyed insights turn this unique story into a universal one. As you accompany the twins on their search for the truth of their birth, you witness another kind of birth—the germination and flowering of sisterly love.”—Deborah Tannen, #1 New York Times bestselling author of You Just Don’t Understand “A transfixing memoir.”—Publishers Weekly