Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

"Maud Newton's ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother's father, who came of age during the Great Depression in Texas, was supposedly married thirteen times, and survived being shot in the stomach by one of his wives. His father purportedly killed a man in the str...

An artist's solitude is a sacred space, one to be guarded and kept apart from the chaos of the world. This isolation allows for uninhibited wandering, uninterrupted meditation and the nurturing of sparks of inspiration into fires of creation. But in the artist's quiet there is also loneliness, se...

From the bestselling neurosurgeon and author of Do No Harm, an unflinching and deeply personal exploration of death, life and neuroscience. As a neurosurgeon, I lived in a world filled with fear and suffering, death and cancer. But rarely, if ever, did I think about what it would be like if what ...

The author Lawrence Weschler began spending time with Oliver Sacks in the early 1980s, when he set out to profile the neurologist for his own new employer, The New Yorker. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Sacks had published his masterpiece Awakenings - the account of his long-dormant patients' mirac...

Known to most as Lemony Snicket, the tormented narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler spends his days writing - for children and adults; film and television; and, occasionally, the accordion. Mainly, he writes about horrible things: orphans, abusive uncles, poison, murder, ars...

Noel Tovey's previous memoir, Little Black Bastard ( Hodder Headline Australia 2004, shortlisted Victorian Premier's Prize for Indigenous Writing, Australian Human Rights Award) chronicled his extraordinary life - from a childhood lived in poverty, through to his international stage career, retur...

"[This book] gives us a very human Lincoln--an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment was essential to the story of justice in America. Here is the Lincoln who, as a boy, was steeped in the sermons of emancipation by Baptist preachers; who insisted that slavery was a moral evil; and who...

"From a young age, food was Sumayya's portal to nurturing, love and self-expression. She spent the first eight years of her life at sea, with a father who captained merchant ships and a mother who preferred to cook for the family herself on a tiny electric stove in their cabin rather than eat in ...

From the thirty-two canvas Campbell's Soup Cans to the Marilyn Diptych, Andy Warhol's silk-screen prints are the epitome of Pop Art: witty, gimmicky and unafraid of repetition. Obsessed with consumerism and the cult of celebrity, Warhol exalted the "surface of things" and yet he was a man of dee...