The founder of ASPIRA, the national non-profit organization devoted to Puerto Rican leadership development, discusses her birth and youth in Puerto Rico, her move to New York City, the founding of ASPIRA, and her involvement in academia and American politics.

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." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse....

One of the most celebrated, beloved, and enduring actors of our time, Sally Field has an infectious charm that has captivated the nation for more than five decades, beginning with her first TV role at the age of seventeen. From Gidget's sweet-faced "girl next door" to the dazzling complexity of Sybil to the Academy Award-worthy ferocity and depth of Norma Rae and Mary Todd Lincoln, Field has stunned audiences time and time again with her artistic...

An advertising executive remembers his childhood with his eccentric foster family and his early adulthood experiences of trying to establish an independent life for himself.

The controversial intellectual and author shares his own life story, explaining his contradictory stances on a variety of issues.

A charming memoir of one woman's unexpected journey from country chic to backwoods barnyard. McGaha never thought she would be pulling camouflage carpet off her ceiling or rescuing opossums from her barn and calling it "date night." Most importantly, she never thought she would only have $4.57 in her bank account. After she and her husband discovered that they owed a lot of back taxes, they foreclosed on their suburban home and moved to a one-hundred-year-old...

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood where rules were unheard of, and the...

Joyce Carol Oates shares her struggle to comprehend a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century.

"In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Middle Place comes a new memoir that examines the bond--sometimes nourishing, sometimes exasperating, occasionally divine--between mothers and daughters. When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as "Your father's the glitter but I'm the glue." This meant nothing to Kelly, who left childhood sure that her mom--with her inviolable commandments and proud...