Tag Archives: Biography

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America – Kostya Kennedy

On April 18, 1775, a Boston-based silversmith, engraver, and anti-British political operative named Paul Revere set out on a borrowed horse to fulfill a dangerous but crucial task to alert American colonists of advancing British troops, which would seek to crush their nascent revolt. Revere was not the only rider that night, and indeed, he had completed at least 18 previous rides throughout New England, disseminating intelligence about British movements. But this ride was like no other, and its consequences in the months and years to come—as the American Revolution morphed from isolated skirmishes to a full-fledged war—became one of our founding legends.

In The Ride, Kostya Kennedy presents a dramatic new narrative of the events of April 18 and 19, 1775, informed by fresh primary and secondary source research into archives, family letters and diaries, contemporary accounts, and more. Kennedy reveals Revere’s ride to be more complex than it is usually portrayed—a coordinated series of rides by numerous men, near-disaster, capture by British forces, and finally success. While Revere was central to the ride and its plotting, Kennedy reveals the other men (and, perhaps, a woman with information about the movement of British forces) who helped to set in motion the events that would lead to America’s independence.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Tatas: How a Family Built a Business and a Nation – Girish Kuber

The Tatas is the story of one of India’s leading business families.

It starts in the nineteenth century with Nusserwanji Tata – a middle-class Parsi priest from the village of Navsari in Gujarat, and widely regarded as the Father of Indian Industry – and ends with Ratan Tata – chairman of the Tata Group until 2012.

But it is more than just a history of the industrial house; it is an inspiring account of India in the making. It chronicles how each generation of the family invested not only in the expansion of its own business interests but also in nation building.

For instance, few know that the first hydel project in the world was conceived and built by the Tatas in India. Nor that some radical labour concepts such as eight-hour work shifts were born in India, at the Tata mill in Nagpur.

The National Centre for the Performing Arts, the Tata Cancer Research Centre, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research – the list about the Tatas’ contribution to India is a long one. A bestseller in Marathi when it was first published in 2015, this is the only book that tells the complete Tata story over two hundred years.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Woman Who Wasn’t There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception – Robin Gaby Fisher, Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr.

The astounding story of Tania Head, whose heartrending account of surviving the World Trade Center attacks made her a celebrity—until it all turned out to be an elaborate hoax.

It was a tale of loss and recovery, of courage and sorrow, of horror and inspiration. Tania Head’s astonishing account of her experience on September 11, 2001—from crawling through the carnage and chaos to escaping the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby of the burning south tower to losing her fiancé in the collapsed north tower—transformed her into one of the great victims and heroes of that tragic day.

Tania selflessly took on the responsibility of giving a voice and a direction to the burgeoning World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, helping save the “Survivor Stairway” and leading tours at Ground Zero, including taking then-governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, and former mayor Giuliani on the inaugural tour of the WTC site. She even used her own assets to fund charitable events to help survivors heal. But there was something very wrong with Tania’s story—a terrible secret that would break the hearts and challenge the faith of all those she claimed to champion.

Told with the unique insider perspective and authority of Angelo J. Guglielmo, Jr., a filmmaker shooting a documentary on the efforts of the Survivors’ Network, and previously one of Tania’s closest friends, The Woman Who Wasn’t There is the story of one of the most audacious and bewildering quests for acclaim in recent memory—one that poses fascinating questions about the essence of morality and the human need for connection at any cost.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King – Dan Jones

Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months and died at the age of just thirty-five, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond. The victor of Agincourt, he is remembered as the acme of kingship, a model to be closely imitated by his successors. William Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship. For one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, “the greatest man who ever ruled England.”

For Dan Jones, Henry V is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but one of the hardest to pin down. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal warrior, yet he was also creative and artistic, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family, but he always seemed to triumph when it mattered. As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions, and secured England’s borders; in foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three generations of calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses.

Henry V is a historical titan whose legacy has become a complicated one. To understand the man behind the legend, Jones first examines Henry’s years of apprenticeship, when he saw the downfall of one king and the turbulent reign of another. Upon his accession in 1413, he had already been politically and militarily active for years, and his extraordinary achievements as king would come shortly after, earning him an unparalleled historical reputation. Writing with his characteristic wit and style, Jones delivers a thrilling and unmissable life of England’s greatest king.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row – Anthony Ray Hinton, Lara Love Hardin

A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.

In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.

But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.

With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.