Biography

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A brave and marvelous book. A page-turner that will rip your heart out." --Jon Krakauer

Gripping. --New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) * Beautiful. --Washington Post * Destined to become an adventure classic. --Anchorage Daily News

In the tradition of Into the Wild comes an instant classic of outdoor literature, a riveting work of uncommon depth: The Adventurer's Son is Roman Dial's extraordinary account of his two-year quest to unravel the mystery of his son's dissapearance in the jungles of Costa Rica.

In the predawn hours of July 10, 2014, the twenty-seven-year-old son of preeminent Alaskan scientist and National Geographic Explorer Roman Dial, walked alone into Corcovado National Park, an untracked rainforest along Costa Rica's remote Pacific Coast that shelters miners, poachers, and drug smugglers. He carried a light backpack and machete. Before he left, Cody Roman Dial emailed his father: "I am not sure how long it will take me, but I'm planning on doing 4 days in the jungle and a day to walk out. I'll be bounded by a trail to the west and the coast everywhere else, so it should be difficult to get lost forever."

They were the last words Dial received from his son.

As soon as he realized Cody Roman's return date had passed, Dial set off for Costa Rica. As he trekked through the dense jungle, interviewing locals and searching for clues--the authorities suspected murder--the desperate father was forced to confront the deepest questions about himself and his own role in the events. Roman had raised his son to be fearless, to be at home in earth's wildest places, travelling together through rugged Alaska to remote Borneo and Bhutan. Was he responsible for his son's fate? Or, as he hoped, was Cody Roman safe and using his wilderness skills on a solo adventure from which he would emerge at any moment?

Part detective story set in the most beautiful yet dangerous reaches of the planet, The Adventurer's Son emerges as a far deeper tale of discovery--a journey to understand the truth about those we love the most.

The Adventurer's Son includes fifty black-and-white photographs.

Foreword by Kim Kardashian West

The true-life story of the woman whose life sentence for non-violent drug trafficking was commuted by President Donald Trump thanks to the efforts of Kim Kardashian West--an inspiring memoir of faith, hope, mercy, and gratitude.

How do you hold on to hope after more than twenty years of imprisonment? For Alice Marie Johnson the answer lies with God.

For years, Alice lived a normal life without a criminal record--she was a manager at FedEx, a wife, and a mother. But after an emotionally and financially tumultuous period in her life left her with few options, she turned to crime as a way to pay off her mounting debts. Convicted in 1996 for her nonviolent involvement in a Memphis cocaine trafficking organization, Alice received a life sentence under the mandatory sentencing laws of the time. Locked behind bars, Alice looked to God. Eventually becoming an ordained minister, she relied on her faith to sustain hope over more than two decades--until 2018, when the president commuted her sentence at the behest of Kim Kardashian West, who had taken up Alice's cause.

In this honest, faith-driven memoir, Alice explains how she held on to hope and gave it to others, from becoming a playwright to mentoring her fellow prisoners. She reveals how Christianity and her unshakeable belief in God helped her persevere and inspired her to share her faith in a video that would go viral--and come to the attention of celebrities who were moved to action.

Today, Alice is an icon for the prison reform movement and a humble servant who embraces gratitude and God for her freedom. In this powerful book, she recalls all of the firsts she has experienced through her activism and provides an authentic portrait of the crisis that is mass incarceration. Linking social justice to spiritual faith, she makes a persuasive and poignant argument for justice that transcends tribal politics. Her story is a beacon in the darkness of despair, reminding us of the power of redemption and the importance of making second chances count.

After Life features 16 pages of color photographs.

Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man--a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money on more and more ostentatious whims. In the face of this troubling model and disillusioned presence in the household, young Gregory rebels. Struggling to distinguish himself on his own terms, he hustles off to Marine Corps boot camp. He moves across the world, returning to the United States only to take a job as a manager-cum-barfly at his family's jazz club.

Air Traffic follows Gregory as he builds a life that honors his history without allowing it to define his future. Slowly, he embraces the challenges of being a poet, a son, and a father as he enters recovery for alcoholism and tends to his family. In this memoir, written in lyrical and sparkling prose, Gregory tries to free himself from the overwhelming expectations of race and class, and from the tempting yet ruinous legacy of American masculinity.

Air Traffic is a richly realized, deeply felt ode to one man's remarkable father, to fatherhood, and to the frustrating yet redemptive ties of family. It is also a scrupulous, searing examination of how manhood can be fashioned in our cultural landscape.

When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed -- a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood -- didn't exist. So she decided to write it herself.

And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, the fantasies of a "natural" birth experience that erode maternal self-esteem, post-partum body and sex issues, and the fascinating strangeness of stepping into a new, not-yet-comfortable identity.

Channeling fears and anxieties that are still taboo and often unspoken, And Now We Have Everything is an unflinchingly frank, funny, and visceral motherhood story for our times, about having a baby and staying, for better or worse, exactly yourself.

Smart, funny, and true in all the best ways, this book made me ache with recognition." -- Cheryl Strayed

From the bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues--a powerful, life-changing examination of abuse and atonement.

"A triumph of artistry and empathy." --Naomi Klein

"A crucial step forward . . . This is an urgently needed book right now." --Jane Fonda

"Unflinching candor . . . immeasurable grace." --Anita Hill

"Courageous, transformative, and yes--healing." --Anne Lamott

"Unflinchingly increases our understanding of the human experience." --Michael Cunningham

"[The Apology] will change how all of us think about our souls." --Johann Hari

"Shatteringly brilliant." --The Times

"The geometry of toxic masculinity is contained within these pages." --Marc Maron

Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father, Eve has struggled her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an anti-violence activist, she decided she would wait no longer; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her. The Apology, written by Eve from her father's point of view in the words she longed to hear, attempts to transform the abuse she suffered with unflinching truthfulness, compassion, and an expansive vision for the future.

Through The Apology Eve has set out to provide a new way for herself and a possible road for others, so that survivors of abuse may finally envision how to be free. She grapples with questions she has sought answers to since she first realized the impact of her father's abuse on her life: How do we offer a doorway rather than a locked cell? How do we move from humiliation to revelation, from curtailing behavior to changing it, from condemning perpetrators to calling them to reckoning? What will it take for abusers to genuinely apologize?

Remarkable and original, The Apology is an acutely transformational look at how, from the wounds of sexual abuse, we can begin to re-emerge and heal. It is revolutionary, asking everything of each of us: courage, honesty, and forgiveness.

Muhammad Ali's daughter captures the legendary heavyweight boxing champion, Olympic Gold medalist, activist, and philanthropist as never before in this candid and intimate family memoir, based on personal recordings he kept throughout his adult life.

Athlete. Activist. Champion. Ambassador. Icon. Father. The greatest, Muhammad Ali, is all of these things. In this candid family memoir, Hana Ali illuminates this momentous figure as only a daughter can. As Ali approached the end of his astonishing boxing career, he embraced a new purpose and role, turning his focus to his family and friends. In that role, he took center stage as an ambassador for peace and friendship.

Dedicated to preserving his family's unique history, Ali began recording a series of audio diaries in the 1970s, which his daughter later inherited. Through these private tapes, as well as personal journals, love letters, cherished memories, and many never-before-seen photographs, she reveals a complex man devoted to keeping all nine of his children united, and to helping others. Hana gives us a privileged glimpse inside the Ali home, sharing the everyday adventures her family experienced--all so "normal," with visitors such as Clint Eastwood and John Travolta dropping by. She shares the joy and laughter, the hardship and pain, and, most importantly, the dedication and love that has bonded them.

"It's been said that my father is one of the most written-about people in the world," Hana writes. "As the chronicles continue to grow, the deepest and most essential essence of his spirit is still largely unknown." A moving and poignant love letter from a daughter to a father, At Home with Muhammad Ali is the untold story of Ali's family legacy--a gift both eternal and priceless.

German by birth, British by naturalization, Communist by conviction, Klaus Fuchs was a fearless Nazi resister, a brilliant scientist, and an infamous spy. He was convicted of espionage by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians, and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous agents in American and British history. He put an end to America's nuclear hegemony and single-handedly heated up the Cold War. But, was Klaus Fuchs really evil?

Using archives long hidden in Germany as well as intimate family correspondence, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan brings into sharp focus the moral and political ambiguity of the times in which Fuchs lived and the ideals with which he struggled. As a university student in Germany, he stood up to Nazi terror without flinching, and joined the Communists largely because they were the only ones resisting the Nazis. After escaping to Britain in 1933, he was arrested as a German émigré--an "enemy alien"--in 1940 and sent to an internment camp in Canada. His mentor at university, renowned physicist Max Born, worked to facilitate his release. After years of struggle and ideological conflict, when Fuchs joined the atomic bomb project, his loyalties were firmly split. He started handing over top secret research to the Soviets in 1941, and continued for years from deep within the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Greenspan's insights into his motivations make us realize how he was driven not just by his Communist convictions but seemingly by a dedication to peace, seeking to level the playing field of the world powers.

With thrilling detail from never-before-seen sources, Atomic Spy travels across the Germany of an ascendant Nazi party; the British university classroom of Max Born; a British internment camp in Canada; the secret laboratories of Los Alamos; and Eastern Germany at the height of the Cold War. Atomic Spy shows the real Klaus Fuchs--who he was, what he did, why he did it, and how he was caught. His extraordinary life is a cautionary tale about the ambiguity of morality and loyalty, as pertinent today as in the 1940s.

The publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015 forever changed how we think about Atticus Finch. Once seen as a paragon of decency, he was reduced to a small-town racist. How are we to understand this transformation?

In Atticus Finch, historian Joseph Crespino draws on exclusive sources to reveal how Harper Lee's father provided the central inspiration for each of her books. A lawyer and newspaperman, A. C. Lee was a principled opponent of mob rule, yet he was also a racial paternalist. Harper Lee created the Atticus of Watchman out of the ambivalence she felt toward white southerners like him. But when a militant segregationist movement arose that mocked his values, she revised the character in To Kill a Mockingbird to defend her father and to remind the South of its best traditions. A story of family and literature amid the upheavals of the twentieth century, Atticus Finch is essential to understanding Harper Lee, her novels, and her times.

E. E. Cummings is one of our most popular and enduring poets, one whose name extends beyond the boundaries of the literary world. Renowned for his formally fractured, gleefully alive poetry, Cummings is not often thought of as a war poet. But his experience in France and as a prisoner during World War I (the basis for his first work of prose, The Enormous Room) escalated his earliest breaks with conventional form?the innovation with which his name would soon become synonymous.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter World War I, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, shipped out to Paris, and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention center at La Ferté-Macé. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice.

Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity, and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries, and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings's career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

Becoming a Man is a "moving narrative [that] illuminates the joy, courage, necessity, and risk-taking of gender transition" (Kirkus Reviews). For fifty years P. Carl lived as a girl and then as a queer woman, building a career, a life, and a loving marriage, yet still waiting to realize himself in full. As Carl embarks on his gender transition, he takes us inside the complex shifts and questions that arise throughout--the alternating moments of arrival and estrangement. He writes intimately about how transitioning reconfigures both his own inner experience and his closest bonds--his twenty-year relationship with his wife, Lynette; his already tumultuous relationships with his parents; and seemingly solid friendships that are subtly altered, often painfully and wordlessly.

Carl "has written a poignant and candid self-appraisal of life as a 'work-of-progress'" (Booklist) and blends the remarkable story of his own personal journey with incisive cultural commentary, writing beautifully about gender, power, and inequality in America. His transition occurs amid the rise of the Trump administration and the #MeToo movement--a transition point in America's own story, when transphobia and toxic masculinity are under fire even as they thrive in the highest halls of power. Carl's quest to become himself and to reckon with his masculinity mirrors, in many ways, the challenge before the country as a whole, to imagine a society where every member can have a vibrant, livable life. Here, through this brave and deeply personal work, Carl brings an unparalleled new voice to this conversation.

You've heard Mr. Skin on The Howard Stern Show. You've seen his website in the blockbuster comedy Knocked Up. Maybe you've spent some time poking around on MrSkin.com, the world's #1 resource for celebrity nudity. Now, Jim McBride--"Mr. Skin" himself--tells his story in uproarious, SKINtastic fashion...nip-slips, cheek-peeks, muff-scruffs and all!

Being Mr. Skin details how Jim rose from being a suburban teen in the '80s with an impressively annotated videotape collection and an expert recall of the most sensational and sensuous scenes from every movie ever made, to his current status as Chief Sexecutive Officer of MrSkin.com--a naked-star-studded pop culture powerhouse. You'll be riveted as Jim chronicles the unbelievable journey of juggling suburban family life while establishing his online sensation, quickly becoming the "World's Foremost Authority on Celebrity Nudity."

Throughout this upward (and outward) saga of Tinseltown T&A triumphs, you'll get the inside skinny on:

- The first time Mr. Skin appeared on The Howard Stern Show and how he became a regular on the greatest radio program of all time!

- How Judd Apatow turned Mr. Skin into the surprise breakout star of Knocked Up!

- The time, effort, and tissues it takes to track every nude rack and crack in every movie and TV show ever made!

- How some of your favorite actresses feel about being featured on the website--including several Anatomy Award winners!

- The truth about Mr. Skin, The Family Man--There is a real Mrs. Skin and there are three lovely "skinfants."

- Mr. Skin's most stunning showcases and shout-outs in top-tier media, including Saturday Night Live, Family Guy, The People's Choice Awards, American Idol, and The Adam Carolla Show!

- How (and why) Mr. Skin.com became one of the first-ever commercially successful websites.

Throughout it all, Jim's story amuses and amazes on every page. Being Mr. Skin supplies one-of-a-kind insights into how he transformed an offbeat passion into a popular and profitable phenomenon against all manner of odds--only some of which involve unclothed body parts--all with the help of his dedicated staff, friends, and, yes...even his mom!

Being Mr. Skin is what Jim McBride does, it's who he is. And now--for the first time in book form--you can enjoy nothing but "the good parts" (no fast-forwarding necessary).

Featuring brand-new comics from Eisner Award nominee Johnny Ryan!

Betty Ford: First Lady, Women's Advocate, Survivor, Trailblazer is the inspiring story of an ordinary Midwestern girl thrust onto the world stage and into the White House under extraordinary circumstances. Setting a precedent as First Lady, Betty Ford refused to be silenced by her critics as she publicly championed equal rights for women, and spoke out about issues that had previously been taboo--breast cancer, depression, abortion, and sexuality. Privately, there were signs something was wrong. After a painful intervention by her family, she admitted to an addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. Her courageous decision to speak out publicly sparked a national dialogue, and in 1982, she co-founded the Betty Ford Center, which revolutionized treatment for alcoholism and inspired the modern concept of recovery.

Lisa McCubbin also brings to light Gerald and Betty Ford's sweeping love story: from Michigan to the White House, until their dying days, their relationship was that of a man and woman utterly devoted to one another other--a relationship built on trust, respect, and an unquantifiable chemistry.

Based on intimate interviews with her children, Susan Ford Bales and Steven Ford, as well as family, friends, and colleagues, Betty Ford is "a vivid picture of a singularly influential woman" (Bookpage).