This is the biography of one of the most colourful and dashing young monarchs who ever lived. His shortcomings-impulsiveness, quick temper, weakness for women-were offset by his truly generous nature. He became a surprising liberal, the only reigning monarch to defy and outwit Metternich, "the evil genius of the reaction," and he was at one time offered the thrones of Spain and Greece. With a mad grandmother, a mother whose lovers and political intrigues...

The true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing 1914 exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth, a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights...

"The Parrot's Perch opens in 2013, when Karen Keilt, age sixty, receives an invitation to testify at the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN in New York. The email sparks memories of her "previous life"--the one she has kept safely bottled up for more than thirty-seven years. Hopeful of helping to raise awareness about ongoing human rights violations in Brazil, she wants to testify, but she anguishes over reliving the horrific events of...

"In the vein of Educated and The Glass Castle, Daniella Mestyanek Young's Uncultured is more than a memoir about an exceptional upbringing, but about a woman who, no matter the lack of tools given to her, is determined to overcome. Behind the tall, foreboding gates of a commune in Brazil, Daniella Mestyanek Young was raised in the religious cult The Children of God, also known as The Family, as the daughter of high-ranking members. Her great-grandmother...

"From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a brilliantly rendered life of one of our most admired American poets. Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America's best-loved poets. And yet -- painfully shy and living out of public view in Key West and Brazil, among other hideaways -- she has never been seen so fully as a woman and an artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving...

"Why would a mother ever abandon her child? And is an abandoned child destined to grow up and make the same mistake? These were some of Melissa Cistaro's questions after her mother drove off without explanation one summer. Decades later Melissa finds herself at her dying mother's bedside with 6 days to find answers, fearful that she could do the same to her own little girl. Then she discovers a cache of letters her mother wrote but never sent and...

Loves of Yulian is the poignant conclusion to the three-part memoir recounting the author's harrowing WWII escape from occupied Poland to America. After fleeing over the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary, eight-year-old Yulian and his resourceful but self-involved mother, Barbara, are on board a ship to Rio de Janeiro to await their turn for immigration to the United States. A former Warsaw socialite, Barbara has no marketable skills, only her looks,...

A biography of Pelé that discusses his childhood in Brazil, professional soccer career, fame, achievements, and other related topics.