Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist and explorer of his day. "I view him as one of the greatest ornaments of the age," wrote Thomas Jefferson, and he received Humboldt in the White House in 1804. Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated Humboldt as "one of those wonders of the world," and ...

"The definitive biography of an American icon, from a New York Times best-selling author with unique access to Ali's inner circle. He was the wittiest, the prettiest, the strongest, the bravest, and, of course, the greatest (as he told us over and over again). Muhammad Ali was one of the twentiet...

"Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer has the heartbeat of one American woman's life in the twentieth century. It tells an intimate story of how Alice Adams-white, privileged, talented-endured a lonely childhood as a child in the racially distressed South and came of age during the Great Depression ...

The man who invented shock rock tells how he slayed his demons--with a golf club. One day between concerts, when Cooper was bored and drunk on a quart-of-whiskey-a-day habit, a friend dragged the rocker out of his room and suggested a round of golf. Cooper has been a golf addict ever since. This ...

Whether working the mobs of cattle with the stockmen, playing cattleduffing on horseback or singing and doing lessons at their School of the Air desks, Tanya Heaslip and her siblings led a childhood unimaginable to many Australians. Growing up on a vast and isolated cattle property just north of ...

"Phoebe Hoban's definitive biography of the renowned American painter Alice Neel tells the unforgettable story of an artist whose life spanned the twentieth century, from women's suffrage through the Depression, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and feminism. Througho...

'I loved it! I laughed and cried and it was very hard to put down.' Fleur McDonald, bestselling author of Where the River Runs 'Vivid and detailed...captures the pain and freedom of dislocation and questions what it is to belong.' Kathryn Heyman, author of Storm and Grace In 1994, with a battered...

What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn? The story of a Jewish chef whose bestselling cookbook was expropriated under the Nazi regime. Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was impri...