Biographies and Memoirs

Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines

Adriene Cat | Biographies and Memoirs

Adriene Caldwell’s memoir, Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines, chronicles a childhood characterized by trauma. Born to a schizophrenic mother who beat her, neglected her, and eventually surrendered her to the state, Caldwell endures sexual assault, the drowning death of a friend, homelessness, extreme poverty, and a sadistic foster mother she dubs “The Bitch from Hell.” She claws toward stability through academic excellence and a transformative year in Germany. Yet adulthood brings new devastation: stripping, cocaine addiction, a predatory affair with a former foster father, and multiple suicide attempts. Each cycle of hope and collapse exposes the fissures of social safety nets promised...

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Most Recent Reviews

Cultural Excellence: A Leader's Guide to Strengthening the Heart of Your Organization

Michele Herlein (Forbes Books)

| Reviewed by Elena Enger

Michele Herlein’s Cultural Excellence is the definitive playbook for leaders who want to ditch hollow mission statements and build a culture that actually moves the needle. Herlein dismisses the idea that culture is soft “fluff” and illustrates that it is the hard wiring of any organization—the behavior of its leaders and what they tolerate. For her, excellence is not accidental; it must be intentionally architected, and she lays out a battle-tested, practical framework for diagnosing your current culture and then redesigning it through a colla...

In The Mountain

Dottie Lee (Atmosphere Press)

| Reviewed by Yna Erdrich

Dottie Lee’s In the Mountain drops readers into a top-secret facility buried deep inside a mountain. After a catastrophic earthquake, the central Tube collapses, the glass shatters, and floors slide into the abyss, killing most of the staff and leaving a handful of survivors, including Trace, Paul, Pearl, and Joseph, who escape through an emergency exit into the suffocating darkness beyond the Wall. What follows is a struggle for survival as the group, later dubbed the “Dislocated Family,” discovers a subterranean stream, faces pitch-black ruin...

G.A.L.E. Force: Navigating Strategy, Culture, and Value Creation in Modern M&A

J. Michael Coffey (Entrepreneur Books)

| Reviewed by George Buehlman

Executive and strategist J. Michael Coffey (former CEO, Manitex and H-E Parts International) delivers a clever examination of the factors behind the success or failure of acquisitions and mergers in an era marked by local fragmentation and global ambition. Drawing from decades of industrial turnarounds, multinational deal-making, and a fourteen-company buildup across seven countries, Coffrey organizes the book around the G.A.L.E. Force framework—Global Aim, Local Execution—and the four market forces now reshaping the lower-middle market. Each s...

Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines

Adriene Cat ()

| Reviewed by Joanne Higbee

Adriene Caldwell’s memoir, Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines, chronicles a childhood characterized by trauma. Born to a schizophrenic mother who beat her, neglected her, and eventually surrendered her to the state, Caldwell endures sexual assault, the drowning death of a friend, homelessness, extreme poverty, and a sadistic foster mother she dubs “The Bitch from Hell.” She claws toward stability through academic excellence and a transformative year in Germany. Yet adulthood brings new devastation: stripping, cocaine addiction, a predatory a...

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