Akron Public Library

The rollicking story of the Leadville waitress who reached the top of Newport society -- and a permanent place in American lore -- as a heroine of the Titanic disaster. Miss Bancroft's biography gives the true story of the unsinkable lady from Colorado and makes an amusing contrast with the legend.

Profiles John Adams, an influential patriot during the American Revolution who became the nation's first vice president and second president. "In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second president of the United States...

Continues the memoirs of Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriot, as life for Herriot, his wife, and two children gets back to normal after World War II.

Dave Pelzer, victim of one of the worst child abuse cases in California history, tells the story of his adolescent years after he was removed from his home and placed in foster care, and discusses the influence on his life of Dan Brazell, the man he came to regard as his father.

The Deep South of the late 1950's was another country: a land of lynchings, segregated lunch counters, whites-only restrooms, and a color line etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. White journalist John Howard Griffin, working for the black-owned magazine Sepia, decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a southern white man for the disenfranchised...

"Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a...

H.A.W. Tabor and his bride Augusta left New England for Kansas and then to the Colorado Mountains to pursue wealth. They were a part of Denver's early history. Tabor became very wealthy and became lieutenant governor , U.S. Senator, politician, capitalist, parton of the arts, and an empire builder on a grand scale. He divorced Augusta and married a divorcee of the mining camps Baby Doe. He died a pauper. Three women shared his struggles, Augusta,...

In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, the two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind the scenes drama the way it really happened. Here is their amazing story, from the first suspicions, through the tortuous trail of false leads, lies, secrecy, and high level pressure, to the final moments when they were able to out...

"The King is dead. The Walrus is shot. The Greatest is no more. Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Muhammad Ali. These three icons changed not only the worlds of music, film, and sports, but the world itself. Their faces were known everywhere, in every nation, across every culture. And their stories became larger than life-until their lives spun out of control at the hands of those they most trusted. In Killing the Legends, Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard...

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland....