An acclaimed journalist and human rights activist shares the harrowing yet deeply hopeful story of her troubled childhood in East St. Louis--a memoir of family, faith and the power of books.

An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering. A few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, Jaouad received a diagnosis of leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling...

Relating the story of her unconventional life, the author of the self-help classic "Passages" recounts her challenges and victories as a groundbreaking female journalist in the 1960s, reflects on ambition, and shares her own major life passages.

"The time for do-overs is over. Ever since she became a parent, Mary Louise Kelly has said "next year." Next year will be the year she makes it to her son James's soccer games (which are on weekdays at 4 p.m., right when she is on the air on NPR's All Things Considered, talking to millions of listeners). Drive carpool for her son Alexander? Not if she wants to do that story about Ukraine and interview the secretary of state. Like millions of parents...

"In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism where a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the "women's pages." But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s, and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four...

"Marguerite Higgins was both the scourge and envy of the journalistic world. A longtime reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, she first catapulted to fame with her dramatic account of the liberation of Dachau at the end of World War II. Brash, beautiful, ruthlessly competitive, and sexually adventurous, she forced her way to the front despite being told the combat zone was no place for a woman. Her headline-making exploits earned her a reputation...

In this remarkably honest memoir, award-winning journalist and distinguished author Marton narrates an impassioned and romantic story of love, loss, and life after loss.

The shadda is the key difference between a pigeon (hamam) and a bathroom (hammam). Be careful, our professor advised, that you don't ask a waiter, 'Excuse me, where is the pigeon?'-or, conversely, order a roasted toilet . . . If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know what happens when you first truly and clearly communicate with another person. As Zora O'Neill recalls, you feel like a magician. If that foreign language is Arabic, you just...

"Camera Girl brings to cinematic life Jackie Kennedy's years as a young woman chafing at the expectations of her family and her era as she seeks to follow her dreams of becoming a famous writer. Set primarily during the underexamined years of 1950-1954, when Jackie was 20 to 25 years old, the book recounts the extraordinary story of her late college years, coming-of-age, and her life as a young female journalist. Before she met Jack Kennedy, Jacqueline...