Biography & Autobiography

The New York Times–bestselling autobiography of a legendary political and military leader

It could be said that Leon Panetta has had two of the most consequential careers of any American public servant in the past fifty years. His first career, beginning as an Army intelligence officer and including a distinguished run as one of the most powerful and respected members of Congress, lasted thirty-five years and culminated in his transformational role as budget czar and White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration. But after a brief “retirement,” he returned to public service in 2009 as the CIA director who led the intelligence war that killed Osama Bin Laden and then became the U.S. secretary of defense, inheriting two troubled wars in a time of austerity and painful choices. Like his career, Worthy Fights is a reflection of Panetta’s values. It is also a testament to a lost kind of political leadership that favors progress and duty to country over partisanship.

Leon Panetta calls them as he sees them in Worthy Fights. Suffused with its author’s decency and common sense, the book is an inspiring American success story, a great political memoir, and a revelatory view onto many of the defining figures and events of our time.

A series of provocative, moving and illuminating interviews with (arguably) the greatest soccer player ever…

Diego Armando Maradona’s death on November 25, 2020, at the age of 60, was a death that had been foretold many times. Even when he was alive accounts of his life had a tragic register, of the kid from the slums whose magical talent on the soccer field was squandered by drug addiction.

But his death allowed millions of people to ponder both the tragedy and triumph of his life, of a man who was arguably the world’s greatest soccer player, who was also a champion for the world’s poor. Adorned in the talismanic number 10 shirt that Maradona made his own while playing Boca Juniors, Barcelona, Napoli and Argentina, hundreds of thousands flocked to the presidential palace in Buenos Aires to pay their last respects; millions around the world were similarly moved, creating makeshift altars and murals in his honor. Vatican News called him “soccer’s poet.”

The interviews collected in Diego Maradona: The Last Interview span the breadth of his life and career as a player, coach, and public figure, providing a panoramic and extremely candid accounting of his rollercoaster life, many translated into English for the first time. Included in the book are encounters with Pele and Gary Lineker, who Maradona played against in the 1986 England-Argentina game that sent shockwaves around the world. The book also features his reflections on his stuggles with drug addiction, the highs and low of his experience playing for Napoli, his strong views on Lionel Messi, the governance of world soccer, and his worries about the impact of Covid on the world’s poor.

Maradona: The Last Interview is a fitting tribute to a complicated and brilliant soccer player who moved the world and changed the game of soccer forever.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.

In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.

Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

The first thing you will notice when you meet Kechi Okwuchi is her scars. One of just two survivors of a devastating plane crash that killed more than 100 people, 16-year-old Kechi was left with third-degree burns over 65 percent of her body. More Than My Scars is her incredible story. A story of not just surviving impossible odds but thriving in a world that is too often caught up with how we look on the outside rather than seeing that our true value is within.

Now in her early 30s, Kechi has spent the last 16 years refusing to be defined by her trauma. Follow her as she decides for herself what role her scars will play in her life before society decides for her. Her strong sense of identity, rooted in seeing herself the way God sees her, has allowed her to live authentically in a world that constantly seeks to define us by its ever-changing (and ever-shallow) standards. Kechi’s story will inspire you to love and accept yourself as you are and confidently present your true self to the world.

This heartbreaking, hilarious, and brutally honest memoir shares the deeply personal life story of a girl next door and her transformation into a household name.

For more than forty years, Katie Couric has been an iconic presence in the media world. In her brutally honest, hilarious, heartbreaking memoir, she reveals what was going on behind the scenes of her sometimes tumultuous personal and professional life – a story she’s never shared, until now. Of the medium she loves, the one that made her a household name, she says, “Television can put you in a box; the flat-screen can flatten. On TV, you are larger than life but smaller, too. It is not the whole story, and it is not the whole me. This book is.”

Beginning in early childhood, Couric was inspired by her journalist father to pursue the career he loved but couldn’t afford to stay in. Balancing her vivacious, outgoing personality with her desire to be taken seriously, she overcame every obstacle in her way: insecurity, an eating disorder, being typecast, sexism . . . challenges, and how she dealt with them, setting the tone for the rest of her career. Couric talks candidly about adjusting to sudden fame after her astonishing rise to co-anchor of the TODAY show, and guides us through the most momentous events and news stories of the era, to which she had a front-row seat: Rodney King, Anita Hill, Columbine, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11, the Iraq War . . . In every instance, she relentlessly pursued the facts, ruffling more than a few feathers along the way. She also recalls in vivid and sometimes lurid detail the intense pressure on female anchors to snag the latest “get”—often sensational tabloid stories like Jon Benet Ramsey, Tonya Harding, and OJ Simpson.

Couric’s position as one of the leading lights of her profession was shadowed by the shock and trauma of losing her husband to stage 4 colon cancer when he was just 42, leaving her a widow and single mom to two daughters, 6 and 2. The death of her sister Emily, just three years later, brought yet more trauma—and an unwavering commitment to cancer awareness and research, one of her proudest accomplishments.

Couric is unsparing in the details of her historic move to the anchor chair at the CBS Evening News—a world rife with sexism and misogyny. Her “welcome” was even more hostile at 60 Minutes, an unrepentant boys club that engaged in outright hazing of even the most established women. In the wake of the MeToo movement, Couric shares her clear-eyed reckoning with gender inequality and predatory behavior in the workplace, and downfall of Matt Lauer—a colleague she had trusted and respected for more than a decade.

Couric also talks about the challenge of finding love again, with all the hilarity, false-starts, and drama that search entailed, before finding her midlife Mr. Right. Something she has never discussed publicly—why her second marriage almost didn’t happen.

If you thought you knew Katie Couric, think again. Going There is the fast-paced, emotional, riveting story of a thoroughly modern woman, whose journey took her from humble origins to superstardom. In these pages, you will find a friend, a confidante, a role model, a survivor whose lessons about life will enrich your own.

America’s most prominent Latino chef shares the story behind his food, his family, and his professional journey.

Before Chef Aarón Sánchez rose to fame on shows such as MasterChef and Chopped, he was a restless Mexican American son, raised by a fiercely determined and talented woman who was a successful chef and restaurateur in her own right—credited with bringing Mexican cuisine to the New York City dining scene. Aarón Sánchez was destined to follow in his mother’s footsteps. He spent nights as a child in his family’s dining room, surrounded by some of the most influential chefs and restaurateurs in New York. He lost his father at a young age, and at 16 he was sent to work for renowned chef Paul Prudhomme in New Orleans.

In this memoir, Sánchez delves into his formative years with remarkable candor, injecting his story with adrenaline and revealing how he fell in love with cooking and made a go of it in the fast-paced culinary world. Sánchez shares invaluable lessons he learned—both inside and outside the kitchen—and offers an intimate look into the chaotic and untraditional life of a professional chef and television personality. This is Sánchez’s highly personal account of a fatherless Latino kid whose talent and passion took him to the top of his profession.

Men like John Wayne and John Lennon, Nolan Ryan and Bruce Lee, Cesar Chavez, Christopher Reeve, and Miles Davis have touched the lives of millions. But at home, to their children, they were not their public personas. They were Dad. Maybe Davis didn’t leave the office at five o’clock to come home and play catch with his son Erin, but the man we see through Erin’s eyes is so alive, so real, so not the “king of cool” (he taught his son to box, made a killer pot of chili, watched MTV alongside him) that it brings us to a whole new appreciation for the artist.

Each of these forty first-person narratives—intimate, heartfelt, unvarnished, surprising, and profoundly universal—shows us not only a very different view of a figure we thought we knew but also a wholly fresh and moving idea of what it means to be a father.