The definitive account of Whitney Houston’s astonishing life, ground-breaking career, and tragic death — complete with never-before-seen photographs — from the only one who truly knows the story behind the headlines: her mother, Cissy Houston.
Cissy has said little publicly about Whitney’s heart-breaking death. Now, for the first time, she opens up and shares the unbelievable story of her daughter’s life, as well as her own, and addresses Whitney’s brightest and darkest moments.
A legendary Grammy Award–winning gospel singer in her own right, Cissy Houston shows how the lessons from her own musical journey helped to shape Whitney’s career — from teaching Whitney to use her voice, to keeping her level-headed throughout her meteoric rise to fame.
With candor and respect, she sets the record straight about Whitney, exploring both her turbulent marriage and her misunderstood struggles with drug abuse. Cissy goes behind the tabloid headlines to show fans around the world the true, human side of a strong, successful — yet flawed — musical icon who died much too young.

Remembering Whitney

CISSY HOUSTON

Lisa Dickey

Humor & Entertainment

Harper

Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped

Harper Paperbacks

“AOL had found itself at the edge of disaster so frequently that one of its first executives, a brassy Vietnam veteran and restaurateur named Jim Kimsey, had taken the punch line of an old joke popularized by Ronald Reagan and made it into an unlikely mantra for the company. It concerned a very optimistic young boy who happened upon a huge pile of horse manure and began digging excitedly. When someone asked him what he was doing covered in muck, the foolish boy answered brightly, ‘There must be a pony in here somewhere!’” —From the Prologue If you’re wondering what happened after “a company without assets acquired a company without a clue,” as Kara Swisher wryly writes, it’s time to crack open this trenchant book about the doomed merger of America Online and Time Warner. On a quest to discover how the deal of the century became the messiest merger in history, Swisher delivers a rollicking narrative and a keen analysis of this debacle that is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it all means for the digital future. Packed with new revelations and on-the-record interviews with key players, it is the first detailed examination of the merger’s aftermath and also looks forward to what is coming next. It certainly has not been a pretty picture so far—with $100 billion in losses, a sinking stock price, employees in revolt, and lawsuits galore. As Swisher writes, “It is hard not to feel a bit queasy about the whole sorry mess. . . . It felt a bit like I was watching someone fall down a flight of stairs in slow motion, and every bump and thump made me wince. It made me reassess old ideas and wonder what I had gotten wrong. And it left me deeply confused as to what had happened and, more important, what was coming next.” For Swisher, finding the answers to what went awry is important because she remains a staunch believer in the digital future—maybe not in the AOL Time Warner merger, but in the essential idea at the heart of it that someday the distinction of old and new media will no longer exist. Borrowing from Winston Churchill, Swisher calls it “the end of the beginning” of the digital revolution. “By that, I mean that it is from the ashes of this bust that the really important companies of the next era will emerge. And that evolution will, I believe, be shaped by what happened—and what is happening now—at AOL Time Warner.” To figure it all out, Swisher takes her reader on a journey that begins with a portrait of two wildly different corporate cultures and businesses that somehow came to believe, in the crucible of the red-hot Internet era, that they could successfully join forces and achieve unprecedented growth and success. When the merger was announced in early 2000, the irresistible combination was hailed as the new paradigm and its executives—Steve Case, Jerry Levin, Bob Pittman—as popular icons of the future. But after the boom so spectacularly turned to bust and the visions of New Media Supremacy lay in ruins, Swisher searches for clues about where the merger went wrong and who is to blame. More important, she looks to the future of both AOL Time Warner and the Internet as she seeks to answer the key question that the noise of the disaster has all but drowned out. Will the demise of the AOL Time Warner merger be the final and inevitable chapter of the dot-com debacle or will it herald a new paradigm altogether? This book, then, is a primer for the time to come, using the story of the AOL Time Warner merger as the vehicle to show the troubled journey into the future.

There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future

Business & Money

Kara Swisher

Industries

Crown Business

How did the Democratic Party-of JFK, LBJ, and civil rights-fall from glory? How did Texas, home of its most promising players, become Bush territory? What do politicians on either side need to do today to get our country back on track? Ben Barnes has the answers. His political savvy and bravado made him a standout in the rough-and-tumble world of Texas politics. He won a seat in the Texas Legislature in 1960, and four years later he became the youngest speaker of the House since the Civil War. In 1968, he helped Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush get his son into the National Guard-a controversy that would rage during the 2004 presidential election. In 1970, Lyndon Johnson told the public that Ben was destined to be the next U.S. president to hail from Texas. Barnes's rollicking memoir recalls the glory days of his Texas past and blazes a trail for our country's future.

Barn Burning Barn Building: Tales of a Political Life, From LBJ to George W. Bush and Beyond

Biographies & Memoirs

Ben Barnes

Leaders & Notable People

Bright Sky Press

Situation Room - Carton Of 10 Signed Copies

George Stephanopoulos

Grand Central Publishing

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Books by Lisa Dickey