In this powerful and intimate memoir, the beloved bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini, find some common ground at long last. Pat Conroy’s father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son’s life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, “I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for ‘hate.’” As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father’s behavior took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg.
One of the real-life heroes featured in HBO(r)'s The Pacific tells his own true story. R.V. Burgin reveals his experiences as a Marine at war in the Pacific Theater, where Company K confronted snipers, ambushes along narrow jungle trails, abandoned corpses of hara-kiri victims, and howling banzai attacks as they island-hopped from one bloody battle to the next. During his two years of service, Burgin rose from a green private to a seasoned sergeant, and earned a Bronze Star for his valor at Okinawa. With unforgettable drama and an understated elegance, Burgin's gripping narrative chronicles the waning days of World War II, bringing to life the hell that was the Pacific War.
The writer of the horrific journal is James Maybrick, a depraved drug-taking, womanising 49-year-old Liverpool cotton merchant with a history of domestic violence. In this bestselling analysis of his diary, investigative author Shirley Harrison explains all about the origins of the text, the rigorous scientific analysis it has endured and reveals startling new information about Maybrick's shadowy background. All this, combined with a chilling confession scratched into a watch, 'I am Jack. J Maybrick,' provide powerful justification that Maybrick was Jack the Ripper.
From the author of In the Country of Men, a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, comes a beautifully written, uplifting memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. “Hope,” as he writes, “is cunning and persistent.”
An Outback Life is a story of a woman who spent the prime of her life in the wilds of Australia's Northern Territory, when it really was an untamed frontier. In this earthy tale of love, hope, loss, and survival, Mary Groves describes the sometimes heart-breaking loneliness, the hard work and the rises and falls in her family's fortunes as they battle to survive in Australia's Top End.
