Tag Archives: Biography

In My Hands Today…

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Crazy Love – Leslie Morgan Steiner

At 22, Leslie Morgan Steiner seemed to have it all: a Harvard diploma, a glamorous job at Seventeen magazine, a downtown New York City apartment. Plus a handsome, funny, street-smart boyfriend who adored her. But behind her façade of success, this golden girl hid a dark secret. She’d made a mistake shared by millions: she fell in love with the wrong person.

At first Leslie and Conor seemed as perfect together as their fairy-tale wedding. Then came the fights she tried to ignore: he pushed her down the stairs of the house they bought together, poured coffee grinds over her hair as she dressed for a critical job interview, choked her during an argument, and threatened her with a gun. Several times, he came close to making good on his threat to kill her. With each attack, Leslie lost another piece of herself.

Gripping and utterly compelling, Crazy Love takes you inside the violent, devastating world of abusive love. Conor said he’d been abused since he was a young boy, and love and rage danced intimately together in his psyche. Why didn’t Leslie leave? She stayed because she loved him. Find out for yourself if she had fallen truly in love – or into a psychological trap. Crazy Love will draw you in — and never let go.

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No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run – Tyler Wetherall

Tyler had lived in fifteen houses and five countries by the time she was nine. She didn’t think this was strange until Scotland Yard showed up in her bucolic English village, and she discovered her family had been living a lie. Her father was a fugitive and their family name was an alias.

They had been living in California back in 1983 when the Feds originally caught up with her dad; it was the same year Tyler was born. Her parents decided to go on the run with the three young children, and they spent the next few years traveling across Europe, assuming different identities, living in a series of beautiful places, from Portugal to Tuscany, paid for with drug money. Now her dad had fled once more, except this time he didn’t take her with him.

Despite the danger involved, for the following two years he flew Tyler and her siblings out to see him in secret wherever he was in hiding, until on her 12th birthday Scotland Yard followed Tyler to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, where her father was eventually captured. It was over the summers spent visiting her dad in prison in California, as she grew into an increasingly self-destructive teenager, that he told her the truth about his criminal life. He had been a pot smuggler in the seventies, and his organization had bought in marijuana worth nearly a half billion dollars from Thailand.

In this emotionally detailed and carefully wrought memoir about growing up as a fugitive’s daughter, Tyler Wetherall pieces together the story of her parents’ past, which ultimately helps her understand her own.

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The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War – Gioconda Belli, translated by Kristina Cordero

Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.

Her memoir is both a revelatory insider’s account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.

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Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World – Amy Stanley

The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother’s. But after three divorces—and a temperament much too strong-willed for her family’s approval—she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo, a bustling metropolis at its peak.

With Tsuneno as our guide, we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture—and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions.

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The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War – Ben Macintyre

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation’s communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union’s top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.

For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States’s nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky’s name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain’s obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.