biography

A biography of Ashoka, who ruled an empire during the Maurya dynasty.

Brandon Webb discusses his life with a focus on his training to become a Navy SEAL.

"NPR's Scott Simon's personal, heartfelt reflections on his beloved Chicago Cubs, replete with club lore, memorable anecdotes, frenetic fandom and wise and adoring intimacy that have made the world champion Cubbies baseball's most tortured--and now triumphant--franchise."--Provided by publisher.

Saroo Brierley discusses his life as an adopted boy living in Tasmania and his time spent finding his birth family in India.

The husband-and-wife authors describe meeting and falling in love in the slums of Kenya where their organization, Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), has created the first tuition-free school for girls and provided health care, clean water, and economic empowerment programs.

Author Lily Raff McCaulou reflects on her experiences learning to hunt after moving from New York to Oregon and what she learned about herself through them.

"At the age of 8, Reyna Grande made the dangerous and illegal trek across the border from Mexico to the United States, and discovered that the American Dream is much more complicated that it seemed"--Provided by publisher.

"Walter Stahr, award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Seward, tells the story of Abraham Lincoln's indispensable Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, the man the president entrusted with raising the army that preserved the Union. Of the crucial men close to President Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (1814-1869) was the most powerful and controversial. Stanton raised, armed, and supervised the army of a million men who won the Civil War. He organized the war effort. He directed military movements from his telegraph office, where Lincoln literally hung out with him. He arrested and imprisoned thousands for "war crimes," such as resisting the draft or calling for an armistice. Stanton was so controversial that some accused him at that time of complicity in Lincoln's assassination. He was a stubborn genius who was both reviled and revered in his time. Stanton was a Democrat before the war and a prominent trial lawyer. He opposed slavery, but only in private. He served briefly as President Buchanan's Attorney General and then as Lincoln's aggressive Secretary of War. On the night of April 14, 1865, Stanton rushed to Lincoln's deathbed and took over the government since Secretary of State William Seward had been critically wounded the same evening. He informed the nation of the President's death, summoned General Grant to protect the Capitol, and started collecting the evidence from those who had been with the Lincolns at the theater in order to prepare a murder trial. Now with this worthy complement to the enduring library of biographical accounts of those who helped Lincoln preserve the Union, Stanton honors the indispensable partner of the sixteenth president. Walter Stahr's essential book is the first major biography of Stanton in fifty years, restoring this underexplored figure to his proper place in American history"--.

Presents the true story of former slave and United States Congressman Robert Smalls. In 1862, twenty-three-year-old Robert Smalls captured a heavily-armed Confederate steamer and delivered it to Union soldiers. Smalls was granted his freedom for this act, and through his bravery in numerous naval campaigns as a civilian he became the first black captain of an army ship, and eventually a United States Congressman.