Girls Like Us - Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And The Journey Of A Generation

Biographies & Memoirs

Weller, Sheila

Community & Culture

Atria Books

“Weller rivetingly recounts these gutsy ladies' time on the front lines... an inspiration for future generations of journalists.” --Vanity Fair For decades, women battered the walls of the male fortress of television journalism. After fierce struggles, three women—Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour—broke into the newsroom’s once impenetrable “boys’ club.” These women were not simply pathbreakers, but wildly gifted journalists whose unique talents enabled them to climb to the top of the corporate ladder and transform the way Americans received their news. Drawing on exclusive interviews with their colleagues and intimates from childhood on, The News Sorority crafts a lively and exhilarating narrative that reveals the hard struggles and inner strengths that shaped these women and powered their success. Life outside the newsroom—love, loss, child rearing—would mark them all, complicating their lives even as it deepened their convictions and instincts. Life inside the newsroom would include many nervy decisions and back room power plays previously uncaptured in any media account. Taken together, Sawyer’s, Couric’s, and Amanpour’s lives as women are here revealed not as impediments but as keys to their success. Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Diane Sawyer was a young woman steering her own unique political course in a time of societal upheaval. Her fierce intellect, almost insuperable work ethic, and sophisticated emotional intelligence would catapult Sawyer from being the first female on-air correspondent for 60 Minutes, to presenting anchoring the network flagship ABC World News. From her first breaks as a reporter all the way through her departure in 2014, Sawyer’s charisma and drive would carry her through countless personal and professional changes. Katie Couric, always conveniently underestimated because of her “girl-next-door” demeanor, brazened her way through a succession of regional TV news jobs until she finally hit it big. In 1991, Couric became the cohost of Today, where, over the next fifteen years, she transformed the “female” slot from secondary to preeminent while shouldering devastating personal loss. Couric’s greatest triumph—and most bedeviling challenge—was at CBS Evening News, as the first woman to solo-anchor a nighttime network news program. Her contradictions—seriously feminist while proudly sorority-girlish—made her beyond easy typecasting, and as original as she is relatable. A glamorous, unorthodox cosmopolite—raised in pre-revolution Iran amid royalty and educated in England—Christiane Amanpour would never have been picked out of a lineup as a future war reporter, until her character flourished on catastrophic soil: her family’s exile during the Iranian Revolution. Once she knew her calling, Amanpour shrewdly made a virtue of her outsider status, joining the fledgling CNN on the bottom rung and then becoming its “face,” catalyzing its rise to global prominence. Amanpour’s fearlessness in war zones would make her the world’s witness to some of its most acute crises and television’s chief advocate for international justice. Revealing the tremendous combination of ambition, empathy, and skill that empowered Sawyer, Couric, and Amanpour to reach stardom, The News Sorority is a detailed story of three very particular lives and a testament to the extraordinary character of women everywhere.

The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour--and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Co mplicated) Triumph of Women in TV News

Arts & Literature

Penguin Publishing Group

In 1958, young Sheila Weller was living a charmed life with her family in Beverly Hills. Her father was a brilliant and charismatic brain surgeon. Her mother was a movie-magazine writer whose brother owned Hollywood’s most dazzling nightclub, Ciro’s. Then Sheila Weller’s world exploded. After she witnessed her uncle’s frenzied physical assault on her father, a whole store of family secrets and dramas unfolded, rivaling those that transpired in the nightclub’s dressing room and banquettes every night. Weller has written a deeply felt memoir of her family’s richly accomplished but ultimately tragic life, contrasted with those most glamorous days of Hollywood’s golden era. While vividly describing Lana Turner’s, Frank Sinatra’s, and Sammy Davis Jr.’s evenings---and breakdowns---at Ciro’s, she captures a whole subgroup of American dreamers: the New York Jews who bounded from Brooklyn to Broadway and finally to Hollywood. They expected that success and proximity to glamour would erase centuries of anxiety and melancholy---but often discovered they’d only found a higher ledge from which to fall. Weller seamlessly weaves a history of the American nightclub into the saga of an unforgettable family that, while fatally flawed, is never whiny or “dysfunctional.” The dreamy grandeur of Hollywood in the forties and the dark tensions of the fifties come alive through the pages and through the characters, for whom love---and the very idea of family---is almost biblically tested, but never quite extinguished.

Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

St.Martin's Press

In 1958, young Sheila Weller was living a charmed life with her family in Beverly Hills. Her father was a brilliant brain surgeon. Her mother was a movie-magazine writer whose brother owned Hollywood's most dazzling nightclub, Ciro's. Then her world exploded after she witnessed her uncle's brutal attempt to kill her father. Weller has written a deeply felt memoir of her family's life contrasted with those most glamorous days of Hollywood's forties and fifties. While vividly describing Lana Turner's, Frank Sinatra's, and Sammy Davis Jr.'s evenings--and breakdowns--at Ciro's, Weller casts a keen eye on her own family's turmoil and loss.

St. Martin's: Griffin

A remarkably candid biography of the remarkably candid―and brilliant―Carrie Fisher In her 2008 bestseller, Girls Like Us, Sheila Weller―with heart and a profound feeling for the times―gave us a surprisingly intimate portrait of three icons: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon. Now she turns her focus to one of the most loved, brilliant, and iconoclastic women of our time: the actress, writer, daughter, and mother Carrie Fisher.
Weller traces Fisher’s life from her Hollywood royalty roots to her untimely and shattering death after Christmas 2016. Her mother was the spunky and adorable Debbie Reynolds; her father, the heartthrob crooner Eddie Fisher. When Eddie ran off with Elizabeth Taylor, the scandal thrust little Carrie Frances into a bizarre spotlight, gifting her with an irony and an aplomb that would resonate throughout her life. 
We follow Fisher’s acting career, from her debut in Shampoo, the hit movie that defined mid-1970s Hollywood, to her seizing of the plum female role in Star Wars, which catapulted her to instant fame. We explore her long, complex relationship with Paul Simon and her relatively peaceful years with the talent agent Bryan Lourd. We witness her startling leap―on the heels of a near-fatal overdose―from actress to highly praised, bestselling author, the Dorothy Parker of her place and time.
Weller sympathetically reveals the conditions that Fisher lived with: serious bipolar disorder and an inherited drug addiction. Still, despite crises and overdoses, her life’s work―as an actor, a novelist and memoirist, a script doctor, a hostess, and a friend―was prodigious and unique. As one of her best friends said, “I almost wish the expression ‘one of a kind’ didn’t exist, because it applies to Carrie in a deeper way than it applies to others.”
Sourced by friends, colleagues, and witnesses to all stages of Fisher’s life, Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge is an empathic and even-handed portrayal of a woman who―as Princess Leia, but mostly as herself―was a feminist heroine, one who died at a time when we need her blazing, healing honesty more than ever.

Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge

Sarah Crichton Books

The account of the murder of Diane Whitmore Pikul describes how her wealthy and violent Wall Street husband murdered her and then won custody of her children while under indictment for her murder. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

Marrying the Hangman: A True Story of Privilege, Marriage and Murder

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Random House]

Married to a fascinating Wall Street wizard, with two wonderful children and a successful career, Diane Pikul had it all until her "ideal" husband ended their marriage with a bloody bang. Reprint.

Marrying the Hangman: A True Story of Privilege, Marriage, and Murder (True Crime)

True Crime

Onyx

The account of the murder of Diane Whitmore Pikul describes how her wealthy and violent Wall Street husband murdered her and then won custody of her children while under indictment for her murder. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

Marrying the Hangman

Random House Value Publishing

Explores the case of Alex Kelly, a Darien, Connecticut man convicted of rape in 1997 after evading the law for more than ten years

Saint of Circumstance: The Untold Story Behind the Alex Kelly Rape Case, Growing up Rich and Out of Control

Regional U.S.

Atria

Based on the unprecedented cooperation of Nicole Brown Simpson's family, and exclusive access to friends who reveal private information here for the first time, Raging Heart is the intimate, untold story of Nicole and O.J. Simpson.

Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Tragic Marriage of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson

Pocket_Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weller, Sheila. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Weller, Sheila

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weller, Sheila. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Girls Like Us - Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And The Journey Of A Generation

The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour--and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Co mplicated) Triumph of Women in TV News

Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge

Marrying the Hangman: A True Story of Privilege, Marriage and Murder

Marrying the Hangman: A True Story of Privilege, Marriage, and Murder (True Crime)

Marrying the Hangman

Saint of Circumstance: The Untold Story Behind the Alex Kelly Rape Case, Growing up Rich and Out of Control

Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Tragic Marriage of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson