Biography & Autobiography

The Last Interview: Frida Kahlo

9,000.00

Frida Kahlo’s legacy continues to grow in the public imagination in the nearly fifty years since her “discovery” in the 1970s. This collection of conversations over the course of her brief career allows a peek at the woman behind the hype. And allows us to see the image of herself she carefully crafted for the public.

Frida Kahlo is now an icon. In the decades since her death, Kahlo has been celebrated as a proto-feminist, a misunderstood genius, and a leftist hero, but during her lifetime most knew her as … Diego Rivera’s wife. Featuring conversations with American scholar and Marxist, Bertram D. Wolfe, and art critic Raquel Tibol, this collection shows an artist undervalued, but also a woman in control of her image. From her timid beginnings after her first solo show, to a woman who confidently states that she is her only influence, the many faces of Kahlo presented here clearly show us the woman behind the “Fridamania” we know today.

An Unusual Biography: Wale Adenuga

10,000.00

In this compelling book, An Unusual Biography, Wale Adenuga MFR, the visionary founder of Wale Adenuga Productions (WAP) and the creative mastermind behind the iconic television shows “The Ajasco Family”, “Binta My Daughter”, and “The Super Story”, takes readers on an extraordinary journey through his inspirational life.

The book shares a wealth of life lessons drawn from his childhood, adolescence, and the challenges and joys of building a family. The book also provides profound insights on the quest for discovering one’s passion, and indispensable business and management advice gleaned from his illustrious career at WAP. This riveting biography is a tapestry of a great man’s journey of self-discovery and triumph spanning the last four decades. It will leave every reader inspired, motivated, and brimming with a renewed zeal for life.

The Last Interview: John Lewis

9,000.00

Featuring interviews of civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis at almost every stage of his career, this collection illustrates why Lewis has become a human rights icon and remains an inspiration to activists today

Throughout John Lewis’s long and storied career he maintained a seemingly unwavering hope for a better future. This hope can be traced throughout the inteviews collected here. From a young activist testifying in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday to recounting the violence he met as a Freedom Rider to an elder statesman inspired by today’s civil rights activists, this collection forms a portrait of a man whose life was spent fighting for a better world and never lost hope.

Stepping On Toes

6,000.00

Stepping on toes is the story of some of the most important events that defined the five-year leadership of Hadiza Bala Usman at the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA). Told in breezy, captivating everyday language, this book exposes the elite capture of the Nigerian states and their struggle to retain the stranglehold, no matter what it takes.

The Dark Child

8,000.00

The Dark Child is a distinct and graceful memoir of Camara Laye’s youth in the village of Koroussa, French Guinea, a place steeped in mystery. Laye marvels over his mother’s supernatural powers, his father’s distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood, which is marked by animistic beliefs and bloody rituals of primeval origin.

Eventually, he must choose between this unique place and the academic success that lures him to distant cities. More than the autobiography of one boy, this is the universal story of sacred traditions struggling against the encroachment of a modern world. A passionate and deeply affecting record, The Dark Child is a classic of African literature.

My Life In Red And White

8,000.00

There is only one Arsene Wenger – and for the very first time, in his own words, this is his story.

In this definitive autobiography, the world-renowned, revolutionary football manager discusses his life and career, sharing his leadership principles for success on and off the field. At Arsenal, Wenger won multiple Premier League titles, a record number of FA Cups, and masterminded the historic ‘Invincibles’ season of 2003-2004. He changed the game in England forever, popularising an attacking approach and changing attitudes towards nutrition, fitness and coaching methods – and towards foreign managers. The book charts his extraordinary career, from his rise in France and Japan where he managed Nancy, Monaco and Nagoya Grampus Eight – clubs that also play in red-and-white – to his twenty-two years at the helm in north London.

A must-read not only for Arsenal supporters but football fans everywhere, MY LIFE IN RED AND WHITE illuminates the mystique surrounding one of the most respected managers in the world’s most popular sport.

The Last Interview: James Baldwin

9,000.00

Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin

“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.

The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.

Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.

Brutally Frank

20,000.00

Brutally Frank is the autobiography of an elder statesman and frontline advocate of truth, fairness, justice, and equity in Nigeria, Chief (Dr.) Edwin Kiagbodo Clark, OFR, CON. Written in a simple language, the book tells the story of Edwin Clark right from his forebears till his present. But beyond being the story of just a man and his life, Edwin Clark’s story intersects with those of the Ijaws, the Urhobos, and the entire Niger Delta on one hand, and the Nigerian nation on the other hand. Therefore, in this book, the history of Nigeria and the vital events that contributed to its current outlook are captured and told as they are in a brutally frank manner!

Furthermore, important facts and salient truths which must be stated, understood, and appreciated should Nigeria desire to move forward and reclaim its rightful place in the comity of nations are well articulated by Chief Clark in this book.

The Last Interview: Julia Child

9,000.00

A delightful collection of interviews with the beloved Julia Child–“The French Chef,” author, and television personality who revolutionized home cooking in 20th century America

This delightful collection of interviews with “The French Chef” Julia Child traces her life from her first stab at a writing career fresh out of college; to D.C., Sri Lanka, and Kunming where she worked for the Office of Strategic Services (now the CIA); to Paris where she and her husband Paul, then a member of the State Department, lived after World War II, and where Child attended the famous cooking school Le Cordon Bleu. From there, Child catapulted to fame–first with the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961 and the launch of her home cooking show, “The French Chef” in 1963. In this volume of carefully selected interviews, Child’s charm, guile, and no-nonsense advice are on full, irresistibly delicious display. Includes an Introduction from Helen Rosner, food critic for the New Yorker.

Narendra Modi: A Political Biography

12,000.00

Andy Marino recorded interviews with Narendra Modi during more than half-a-dozen exclusive meetings – unprecedented access to a very private man. What emerged is this riveting, objective biography of a man who became India’s prime minister. Not shying away from the controversies that have dogged Narendra Modi, including the Gujarat riots and questions about the Gujarat model of governance and development, this political biography provides an unbiased account of possibly the most important figure in Indian politics today. Marino records hour-by-hour details of the 2002 Gujarat riots, presenting a balanced analysis of that raw wound on India’s polity. It also reveals hitherto unpublished, authenticated documents.

The author analyses Narendra Modi’s values, the people who shaped his thinking and the sort of national leader he will make. Personal details of Modi’s early life, his wanderings in the Himalayas between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, his rise through the political ranks, his vision for India and his personal philosophy on religion and politics are revealed in a book that is lucid, fast-paced and readable. Narendra Modi: A Political Biography is an insightful, exhaustive and impeccably researched account of the ascent of a political leader.

The Last Interview: Marilyn Monroe

9,000.00

Nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains an icon whom everyone loves but no one really knows. The conversations gathered here–spanning her emergence on the Hollywood scene to just days before her death at age 36–show Monroe at her sharpest and most insightful on the thorny topics of ambition, fame, femininity, desire, and more. Together with an introduction by Sady Doyle, these pieces reveal yet another Marilyn: not the tragic heroine she’s become in the popular imagination, but a righteously and justifiably angry figure breaking free of the limitations the world forced on her.

The Beauty In Breaking

10,000.00

An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself.

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.

The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present. In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician.

Putin

13,000.00

Vladimir Putin is the world’s most dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story.

Unflinching, hard-hitting, and objective, Philip Short’s biography gives us the whole tale, up to the present day. To the fullest extent anyone has yet been able, Short cracks open the strongman’s thick carapace to reveal the man underneath those bare-chested horseback rides. In this deeply researched account, readers meet the Putin who slept in the same room as his parents until he was twenty-five years old, who backed out of his wedding right beforehand, and who learned English in order to be able to talk to George W. Bush.

Vladimir Putin is wreaking havoc in Europe, threatening global peace and stability and exposing his fellow citizens to devastating economic countermeasures. Yet puzzlingly many Russians continue to support him. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the many facets of the man behind the mask that Putin wears on the world stage.

Drawing on almost two hundred interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States, and Europe and on source material in more than a dozen languages, Putin will be the last word for years to come.

Where The Children Take Us

8,000.00

This spellbinding memoir opens with a woman receiving shattering news that her husband and son have been in a terrible accident. In that instant, she becomes a widowed immigrant left to raise four children in a neighborhood consumed by poverty and violence. There is tragedy in this tale, but it is not a tragedy. Her struggle awakens an inner strength that—coupled with the rituals of radical mothering from her village—leads to the family’s salvation. The fierce parenting style she adopts ultimately produces an Oscar-nominated actor, an Oxford-educated CNN anchor, a medical doctor, and a successful entrepreneur.

Where the Children Take Us is the story of a woman who battled genocide, famine, poverty, and crushing grief to rise from war-torn Africa to the streets of South London and, eventually, the drawing rooms of Buckingham Palace. It paints an unforgettable portrait of strength, tenacity, and love—and it is a testimony to the sacrifices Nigerian parents make to raise successful children.

Betsey

9,000.00

A memoir by the internationally famous fashion designer and style icon

Mention the name “Betsey Johnson” and almost every woman from the age of 15 to 75 can rapturously recall a favorite dress or outfit; whether worn for a prom, a wedding, or just to stand out from the crowd in a colorful way. They may also know her as a renegade single mom who palled around with Edie Sedgwick, Twiggy, and The Velvet Underground, or even as a celebrity contestant on Dancing with the Stars. Betsey is also famous for her iconic pink stores (she had 65 shops across the US) and for her habit of doing cartwheels and splits down the runway at the close of her fashion shows. Throughout her decades-long career, she’s taken pride in producing fun but rule-breaking clothing at an accessible price point. What they might not know is that she built an empire from scratch, and brought stretch clothing to the masses in the 80s and 90s.

Betsey will take the reader behind the tutu and delve deeply into what it took to go from a white picket fence childhood in Connecticut to becoming an internationally known force in a tough, competitive business. The book will feature Betsey’s candid memories of the fashion and downtown scene in the 60s and how she started her own business from the ground up after designing successfully for multiple other companies. She will discuss that business’s ups and downs and reinventions (including bankruptcy), and her thoughts on body image, love, divorce, men, motherhood, and her bout with breast cancer. Betsey will be richly illustrated with many of her landmark clothes, fashion sketches, and personal photos–making the book the perfect memento and gift for every girl (of any age) for whom Betsey is, as a recent New York Times profile noted, “a role model still.”

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