InAutobiography and Independence, Debra Kelly examines four accomplished Francophone North African writers—Mouland Feroan, Assia Djebar, Albert Memmi, and Abdelkeacute;bir Khatibi—to illuminate the complex relationship of a writer's work to cultural and national histories. The legacies of colonialism and the difficulties of nationalism run throughout all four writers' works, yet in their striking individuality, the four demonstrate the ways in which such heritages are refracted through a writer's personal history. This book will be of interest to students of Francophone literature, colonialism, and African history and culture.

"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

In September 1955 six-year-old Mark O’Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life. For the first time in paperback, How I Became a Human Being is O’Brien’s account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955 he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O’Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his physical limitations, O’Brien crafts a narrative that is as rich and vivid as the life he led.

Prepared in 1821. Apparently first published in the Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies, from the papers of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, 1829.

The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this...coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self. Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness.

The hugely entertaining, and extremely candid, autobiography of one of the most colourful characters in motor sport Eddie Jordan gave Michael Schumacher his first drive, and helped groom a whole series of drivers early in their careers, including Damon Hill and Johnny Herbert. But he funded his first move into motor sport by selling smoked salmon well past its sell-by date to rugby fans leaving Lansdowne Road; when stopped for speeding by a policeman, he ended up selling him his car. Jordan set up his own team, and moved into Formula One at the end of the 1980s. It wasn't long before the team began to pick up podium finishes, and in 1998 won its first race - a remarkable achievement on a comparatively small budget. The following year was even better, but sadly this was to be the peak, as the search for more finance and legal battles with sponsors hit hard. Eventually, in January 2005 he sold the team. AN INDEPENDENT MAN goes behind the scenes to reveal the true personalities of the drivers Jordan worked with, and his battles with Bernie Ecclestone. It shows how, when so much money is involved, nothing is ever simple. His has been a life lived to the full, and his account is packed full of superb stories, colourful adventures and revealing tales.

In 1919 a group of young men barely out of their teens, poorly armed, with no money and little training, renewed the fight, begun in 1916, to drive the British out of Ireland. Dan Breen was to become the best known of them. At first they were condemed on all sides. They became outlaws and My Fight describes graphically what life was like 'on the run,' with 'an army at one's heels and a thousand pounds on one's head'. A burning belief in their cause sustained them through many a dark and bitter day and slowly support came from the people.

Vidal Sassoon's extraordinary life has taken him from an impoverished East End childhood to global fame. The father of modern hairdressing, his slick sharp cutting took the fashion world by storm and reinvented the hairdressers' art. Before Vidal Sassoon, a trip to the hairdressers meant a shampoo and set or a stiffly lacquered up-do that would last a week - or more. After Vidal Sassoon, hair was sleek, smooth and very, very stylish. Along with his lifelong friend and partner in style, Mary Quant, who he first met in 1957 and who to this day sports a Sassoon-style geometric bob, he styled the 1960s. As memorable as the mini - be it car or skirt - he is one of the few people who can genuinely be described as iconic. His memoirs are as rich in anecdote as one might hope and full of surprising and often moving stories of his early life - his time at the Spanish & Portuguese Jewish Orphanage in Maida Vale, fighting Fascists in London's East End and fighting in the army of the fledgling state of Israel in the late Forties. And then there's the extraordinary career, during which he cut the hair of everyone who was anyone, launched salons all over the world, founded the hairdressing school that still bears his name and became a global brand, with Vidal Sassoon products on all our bathroom shelves.

Fitz de Souza's memoirs recount a political story woven through a personal account of migration and integration, with both the hardship and hope that this entailed. His account takes us from Asia to Africa and then to Europe before returning to East Africa where he lived for most of his life. It gives a flavour of lifestyles, moral codes, and politics as they were in early 20th century India, 1930s Zanzibar, and Europe after the war. Most importantly, it takes us to that formative time when the foundations were laid for an independent Kenya, giving the reader a window into those last decades of colonial Africa and those early years of the new nation. The transition was not a peaceful one. It was not a time when the "rule of law" was applied in an undiluted sense. The book gives the inside story of the colonial government's handling of the independence movement including the trial of the Kapenguria six, Jomo Kenyatta and fellow nationalists, and Operation Anvil, the round-up of the Mau Mau. It explains how agreement was eventually reached and compromises found, in particular through the Lancaster House conferences, that enabled a new country to be founded. It portrays the politicians of the time, before independence and after, some hugely idealistic, some charismatic, and others forever enigmatic, many of whose lives in those formative years ended in tragedy. Hilary Ng'weno, a highly regarded Kenyan journalist and editor, provided invaluable support: "I interviewed him many times, so that the interviews, which were recorded, could help him in writing his memoirs. That exercise was an eye opener for me. I had never met an elderly person who could remember so many details about his past. He was remembering personalities and events of the years before and soon after Kenya's independence in 1963 and Fitz wasn't just remembering events touching on his life. He was remembering Kenya's history of which he was one of the great makers. The story you read in this book is not just about Fitz. It is a story about the foundations of the Kenya nation. And it is for that reason that I feel very strongly that Fitz Remedios Santana de Souza will forever remain a legend for many Kenyans." David Steel, The Rt Hon. the Lord Steel of Aikwood, a close personal friend, commented: "This is a remarkable book, beautifully written and describing in graphic detail the author's experience of the transition of Kenya from violence-torn colony to independence. Fitz de Souza speaks with authority as one active at the centre from lawyer to Jomo Kenyatta to Deputy Speaker in the Nairobi Parliament. His sketches of the participants are quite breath-taking and moving. His is a life lived to the full - I could not put it down and read it all in just two sittings." In her introduction, Victoria Brittain, former foreign correspondent for The Guardian in East Africa, writes: "Fitz de Souza is a man of memories from his unique insider/outsider status in Kenya's struggle for independence from Britain and the early days of its uncharted path under Jomo Kenyatta. A vanished world of optimism and idealism rooted in Goa, Zanzibar, Kenya's Rift Valley, London's Inns of Court, and the dying days of British colonial rule in Kenya is unveiled in his subtle understated book. De Souza was Deputy Speaker of the first Parliament of independent Kenya, a trusted friend to Kenyatta and of all the aspiring politicians of the moment, many of whom he knew well from the prisons and courtrooms of violent pre-independence days. He was a man who in those heady days of independent Kenya could have had any ministry he wanted, and was offered any stretches of farmland he wanted by Kenyatta. Unlike so many others he wanted none. The life he chose was a very different one of idealism, matter-of-fact self-sacrifice and extraordinary hard work."