Human Biography

Jackie Speier was twenty-eight when she joined Congressman Leo Ryan’s delegation to rescue defectors from cult leader Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Ryan was killed on the airstrip tarmac. Jackie was shot five times at point-blank range. While recovering from what would become one of the most harrowing tragedies in recent history, Jackie had to choose: Would she become a victim or a fighter? The choice to survive against unfathomable odds empowered her with a resolve to become a vocal proponent for human rights.

In 1844, George Michelsen Foy's great-great grandfather, captain of a Norwegian cargo ship, perished at sea after getting lost in a snowstorm. Foy decides to unravel the mystery surrounding Halvor Michelsen's death - and the roots of his own obsession with navigation - by re-creating his ancestor's trip using only period instruments.

What can you learn from a CIA spy who spent his career artfully manipulating regular people to steal high-value secrets? Plenty! In this explosive book, former intelligence officer Peter Warmka unveils detailed methodologies that he and other threat actors use to breach the security of their targets, whether they’re high-profile individuals or entire organizations.

Thomas Paine was one of the greatest political propagandists in history. The Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the uprising of the French people, Paine's text is a passionate defense of the rights of man. Paine argued against monarchy and outlined the elements of a successful republic, including public education, pensions, and relief of the poor and unemployed, all financed by income tax.

Habiburahman was born in 1979 and raised in a small village in western Burma. When he was three years old, the country’s military leader declared that his people, the Rohingya, were not a recognized ethnic group. Since 1982, millions of Rohingya have had to flee their homes as a result of extreme prejudice and persecution. Here, for the first time, a Rohingya speaks up to expose the truth behind this global humanitarian crisis. Through the eyes of a child, we learn about the historic persecution of the Rohingya people and witness the violence Habiburahman endured.

At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older Than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives and indeed affects all aspects of life on Earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community and how we can make things better.

A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction. As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time, he was immersed in street life. Today he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist - Columbia University's first tenured African American professor in the sciences.

Shyima Hall was born in Egypt on September 29, 1989, the seventh child of desperately poor parents. When she was eight, her parents sold her into slavery. Shyima then moved two hours away to Egypt's capitol city of Cairo to live with a wealthy family and serve them eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. When she was ten, her captors moved to Orange County, California, and smuggled Shyima with them. Two years later, an anonymous call from a neighbor brought about the end of Shyima's servitude - but her journey to true freedom was far from over.

Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring; she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport as thousands of Afghans, including some of her colleagues, struggled to evacuate.

On July 22, 2009, a special meeting was held with 24 leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health to discuss early findings that a newly discovered retrovirus was linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), prostate cancer, lymphoma, and eventually neurodevelopmental disorders in children. When Dr. Judy Mikovits finished her presentation the room was silent for a moment, then one of the scientists said, "Oh my God!" The resulting investigation would be like no other in science.

At thirty-seven, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo was content to be single. She was fulfilled by her work on the neuroscience of romantic love—how finding and growing with a partner literally reshapes our brains. That was, until she met the foremost neuroscientist of loneliness. A whirlwind romance led to marriage, to sharing an office at the University of Chicago. After seven years of being inseparable at work and home, she lost her beloved husband following a devastating battle with cancer.

At a hospital down the road from where Nelson Mandela grew up, the rural community still lived without the standard of health care their compatriots took for granted. More than a decade into the country’s democratic era, the hope and promise of freedom hadn’t yet changed the chance babies had of being born alive, or children making it to their fifth birthday. Making life “better for all” takes more than rhetoric and policy. It requires real people, doing real jobs, often under difficult circumstances. At Zithulele, a “sticky core” of four doctor friends responded to the call to ...

In the tradition of the late, great George Carlin, Corey Taylor, the lead singer of Slipknot and Stone Sour, sounds off in hilarious fashion about the many vagaries of modern life that piss him off. Whether it's people's rude behavior in restaurants and malls, the many indignities of air travel, eye-searingly terrible fashion choices, dangerously clueless drivers, and - most of all - the sorry state of much modern music, Taylor's humor and insight cover civil society's seeming decline.

Who is psychologist, professor, best-selling author, and YouTube personality Dr. Peterson? What does he believe in? Who are his followers? And why is he so controversial? These are among the many questions raised in this compelling, exhaustively researched account of his life - from Peterson’s early days as a religious-school student in small-town Canada to his tenure at Harvard to his headline-making persona of the present day.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Malala Yousafzai introduces some of the people behind the statistics and news stories we read or hear every day about the millions of people displaced worldwide.

Rob Delaney is a comedy superstar. But if you’re ever watched him steal scenes as Peter in Deadpool 2, binged his streaming series Catastrophe, encountered his raunchy and mischievous Twitter presence, or witnessed the hilarious and painful sharing he does in his stand-up, you already know that. In his first book, he traces his journey from middle-class theater geek to public menace to devoted family man and passionately engaged model citizen.

In this riveting memoir, Wade challenges Africans to redefine their narrative, casting aside imposed inferiority to reclaim their innate brilliance. This is not a recounting of poverty and politics. It's an indictment of a world that views Africa as nothing more than a colonial chessboard, with charity acting as the block that keeps Africans stuck. The surprising truth: Africa’s problems are not due to colonialism, corruption, bad leadership, poor skills, or a lack of education. It’s something much bigger, and yet it’s only been visible to entrepreneurs...until now.

As one of the world's leading experts on disaster, Lucy Easthope has been at the centre of the most seismic events of the last few decades - advising on everything from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to the 7/7 bombings, the Salisbury poisonings, the Grenfell fire and the COVID-19 pandemic. She has travelled across the world in this unusual role, seeing the very worst that people have to face and finding that even the most extreme of situations, we find the very best of humanity. In her moving memoir, she reveals what happens in the aftermath.

One Breath is a gripping and powerful exploration of the strange and fascinating sport of freediving, and of the tragic, untimely death of America's greatest freediver Competitive freediving - a sport built on diving as deep as possible on a single breath - tests the limits of human ability in the most hostile environment on earth.

This is Diablo's captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen's clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer's keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.