A comprehensive biography of the final leader of the Soviet Union chronicles Gorbachev's rise from peasant to politician and describes how his liberal policies ended the Cold War and unintentionally provoked the breakup of the USSR. "When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR. was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism....

In 1931, seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell pitches against Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game, becoming the first professional female pitcher in baseball history.

"Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, the best-selling author of Shout! delivers a compelling new biography of the legendary guitarist. Celebrated as the most innovative guitarist ever to play, Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) is renowned for symphonic solos and virtuosic picking (sometimes, with his teeth). But, as Philip Norman describes, before Hendrix was setting guitars aflame onstage, he was a shy kid in Seattle, plucking...

A passionate memoir and fearless behind-the-scenes look at the personal lives of the biggest reggae stars in the world. Doctor Dread has committed his life to producing reggae music and releasing it on his label, RAS Records. He has become one of the world's foremost reggae producers and has worked with almost all the genre's icons, Bunny Wailer, Black Uhuru, Ziggy and Damian Marley, Gregory Isaacs, and others. This book, full of behind-the-scenes...

"World champion climber Sasha DiGiulian tells her story-from coming of age under the scrutiny of social media, navigating a male-dominated sport, and tackling her most heart-stopping climbs-and shares the power of perseverance and positivity. At age six, Sasha DiGiulian stepped into a climbing gym for the first time and was competing within a year. Decked out in all-pink gear and with her blonde hair tied into pigtails, Sasha knew from an early age...

Relates the story of nineteenth-century English poet Caroline Norton, who was denied access to her children by her husband after a sensational trial for adultery, and fought tirelessly for the rights of married women and mothers, resulting in the passage of the Infant Custody Act of 1839. After her marriage in 1828 to the MP George Norton, Caroline Norton attracted friends and admirers to her salon in Westminster, which included the young Disraeli...

"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments...

"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman -- rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg -- who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly...