by Tara Westover (2018)
Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills" bag. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Through self-education, she entered Brigham Young University and eventually Cambridge.
Michelle Obama
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women.
Phil Knight
Fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his car in 1964, Knight grossed eight thousand dollars that first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top thirty billion.
Larry Woiwode
"What I Think I Did is two stories at once: a gripping account of surviving the severest recorded winter in North Dakota's history (1996), and the equally compelling tale of Woiwode's hungry years as an actor and writer leading up to the publication of his first novel. As with all of Woiwode's writing, however, there are wells and eddies and surfaces along the way that make reading him pure joy. Act One, Snow with Tints of Then, revolves around the purchase, installation and increasingly desperate feeding of a giant wood-burning furnace to heat the buildings on Woiwode's farm during the record snow and cold of the winter months. Feeding the furnace and keeping it running become a real life or death obsession for Woiwode, and this struggle in turn becomes both a central metaphor for exploring the sources of his craft as a writer and a means of joining the disparate threads of his boyhood and family life. Act Two, Then with Tints of Snow, recounts, in a more chronological fashion, his university and early New York days, the beginning of his writing career and his friendship with the young Robert DeNiro."--BOOK JACKET.
George Pahomov, Nickolas Lupinin
"The Russian Century is the most comprehensive and accessible collection of readings devoted to Russian culture and civilization. The fascinating first-person accounts paint a vivid picture of the Russian people through the turbulent years of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This book allows readers to see Russia through the private lives of people who come from diverse backgrounds, various educational and socio-economic experiences, and a broad geographic spectrum. Diary entries, personal sketches, memoirs, and letters tell these stories in an intimate and authentic voice of immediate experience rather than the distant, general flow of history. Translated into English for the first time, personal matters as well as the larger social and political context are revealed in a manner that provides significant insight into a powerful, distinctive, and influential culture." "All too often the Russian experience has been presented as either horrific or heroic. This volume goes beyond that approach and deals with areas which have received little or no attention to existing studies of Russian history and culture - love, sexuality, courtship, marriage, family life, work, education, and religion."--BOOK JACKET.