My granddaddy would get mad at all of us. He couldn't just get mad at one of us. 'Ain't nobody got... You know what? Go to bed! All y'all, go to bed!' It'd be like two o'clock in the afternoon. 'Go to bed!' Bernie Mac, the royal king of the Original Kings of Comedy, is salty and pissed off. The Chicago ... more »

Even a short list of Bette Davis's most famous films -- Of Human Bondage; Jezebel; Dark Victory; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex; Now, Voyager; All About Eve; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? -- reveals instantly what a major force she was in Hollywood. Her distinctive voice, her remarkable ... more »

My brother saw the face of God. You never recover from a trauma like that. So begins Angelhead , a taut, powerful memoir of the madness and crime that rips a family apart. I didn't see God, of course, but I saw my brother seeing God; I saw how petrified he was, how convinced. Set in Tidewater, Virginia ... more »

Fabulosity (n): 1: a state of everything that is fabulous 2: a quality ascribed to that which expresses glamour, style, charisma, power, and heart Kimora Lee Simmons knows what it means to have fabulosity -- and she wants to tell you how to get it. In this empowering new book, Kimora -- a top model, ... more »

The Generation No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution. On the inevitability side, it is true there were voices back then urging prospective patriots to regard American independence as an early version of manifest ... more »

In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing up in a privileged Havana household -- and of being ... more »

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Here is the poignant journey of a minority student ... more »

What do you need to make money making movies? The answer, according to cult hero, creator of the sexploitation film, and the man the Wall Street Journal once dubbed the King Leer of Hollywood, Russ Meyer, is: "big bosoms and square jaws." In the first candid and fiendishly researched account ... more »

Souad was a 17-year-old girl living in a small village in Palestine when she had the misfortune of falling in love.  It was an emotion that would lead to an unspeakable act of violence-to near-death and to a lifetime of exile from her homeland.This is Souad's true story of a childhood filled with ... more »

The White Witch, Aslan, fauns and talking beasts, centaurs and epic battles between good and evil -- all these have become a part of our collective imagination through the classic volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia . Over the past half century, children everywhere have escaped into this world and delighted ... more »

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother's childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter ... more »

Almost everyone can claim a crazy childhood. But did you have a childhood with: An electroshock machine as your favorite toy? Parades through the neighborhood led by your adopted psychiatrist/father? The whole family sleeping on the front lawn for weeks on end? Scotch for breakfast at age 13? A faked ... more »