Profiles the critically acclaimed performer known for such roles as Dirty Harry, tracing his rise from a disaffected youth to a dynamic Hollywood actor, producer, and director.

Traces the personal crisis the author endured after the death of her mother and a painful divorce, which prompted her ambition to undertake a dangerous 1,100-mile solo hike that both drove her to rock bottom and helped her to heal.

According to Eric Clapton, John Mayer, and the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy is the greatest blues guitarist of all time. An enormous influence on these musicians as well as on Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck, he is the living embodiment of Chicago blues. Guy's epic story stands at the absolute nexus of modern blues. He came to Chicago from rural Louisiana in the fifties—the very moment when urban blues were electrifying our culture....

"The vivid biography of two pioneering sisters who, together, became America's first female doctors and transformed New York's medical establishment by creating a hospital by and for women. Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for greatness beyond the scope of "ordinary" womanhood. Though the world recoiled at the notion of a woman studying medicine, her intelligence and intensity won her the acceptance of the all-male...

Traces the author's discovery of a half-frozen kitten in the drop-box of her small-community Iowa library and the feline's development into an affable library mascot whose intuitive nature prompted hundreds of abiding friendships.

A portrait of the passionate performer and civil rights advocate Josephine Baker, the woman who worked her way from the slums of St. Louis to the grandest stages in the world. Meticulously researched by both author and artist, Josephine's powerful story of struggle and triumph is an inspiration and a spectacle, just like the legend herself.

A personal account of the iconic actress's pre-fame life traces the time between her birth in 1935 and her discovery by Walt Disney during her 1962 Broadway performance in "Camelot."

After Daniel Hays and his father built a twenty-five-foot boat and sailed it around Cape Horn, he thought he'd finally put his wanderlust to rest. He went back to school, bought a house, took a job, got married. But as it turned out, in the real world Daniel Hays felt lost. So he took his love for the sea and his need to escape civilization and pushed it further: he bought an island off the coast of Nova Scotia; built a tiny house; packed up his...

Besides being a politician, he was also a cowboy, a soldier, a historian, an intrepid explorer, and an unsurpassed environmentalist, all in all perhaps the most accomplished chief executive in our nation's history. Historian Aida D. Donald masterfully chronicles the life of this first modern president.