Descended from West African kings and healers, raised in theturbulence of Guinea in the 1960s, Kadiatou Diallo was married offat the age of thirteen and bore her first child when she wassixteen. Twenty-three years later, that child–a gentle, innocentyoung man named Amadou Diallo–was gunned down without cause on thestreets of New York City. Now Kadi Diallo tells the astonishing,inspiring story of her life, her loss, and the defiant strength shehas always found within.
The author of classic novels including Indiana and Lélia , George Sand is perhaps better known for herunconventional life. Belinda Jack unravels the many facets of thiswriter who counted among her friends and lovers everyone fromChopin and Liszt to Dostoyevsky and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.Sand defied convention by writing novels; but the fact that she wasa cigar-smoking cross-dresser who took male and female lovers,declared marriage “barbarous,” and championed socialism made her alegend. Allowing Sand’s voice to be heard, but wise enough toquestion it, Jack presents a riveting study of a woman raised byher aristocratic grandmother and her prostitute mother, and whoselife and work were forever fueled by rival worlds.
Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strangeadventures of William Willis, one of the world’s original extremesportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challengeand a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted asingle-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of FrenchGuiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his owndesign, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. Hisfirst voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleventhousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australiashortly after Willis’s seventieth birthday. A marvel of vigor andfitness, William Willis was a connoisseur of ordeal, all butorchestrating short rations, ship-wreck conditions, and crushingsolitude on his trans-Pacific voyages. He’d been inspired by Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s bid to provethat a primitive raft could negotiate the open ocean. Willis’strips confirmed tha
