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The Facemaker

Lindsey Fitzharris

A New York Times Bestseller
Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize | Named a best book of the year by The Guardian

"Enthralling. Harrowing. Heartbreaking. And utterly redemptive. Lindsey Fitzharris hit this one out of the park." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile


Lindsey Fitzharris, the award-winning author of The Butchering Art, presents the compelling, true story of a visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War’s injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery.

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: humankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to reconstructing the burned and broken faces of the injured soldiers under his care.

Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of practitioners whose task was to rebuild what had been torn apart, to re-create what had been destroyed. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits.

The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

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No Dead Air

Larry Rifkin

From Barney to b-ball and beyond...

Larry Rifkin's life experience is like none other. He never worked in a major media center, yet he helped save a TV show that is well known in homes with kids. Televised women's basketball was a rarity when he took it on. Rifkin took women's basketball from obscurity to stardom and successfully navigated changing technology through several decades of broadcasting.

In this compelling career memoir, Rifkin shares with readers how he became known for several groundbreaking television shows. Telling his complete story of hard-won recognition is Rifkin's personal way of giving back to the community after success. By sharing an insider's perspective on what it's like inside the media, Rifkin hopes to challenge and inspire those interested in similar careers.

Woven throughout is Rifkin's true love of family and home, along with his zeal for creativity, media history, and his audience.

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Why Beethoven

Norman Lebrecht

Without Beethoven, music as we know it wouldn’t exist. By examining one hundred of his compositions, a portrait emerges of the man behind the music.

Lebrecht has immersed himself in the rich catalogue of Beethoven recordings and presents a unique picture of the man through his music. He selects the best recordings of one hundred key pieces, showing the composer as we’ve never seen him before. Unruly, offensive, and hopeless in so much of his life, yet driven to a fault and devoted to his art, conquering deafness to pen masterpieces.

Norman Lebrecht, has been grappling with this icon at the heart of music for his entire life. Who was the irascible, unpredictable, warped genius who stretched what music could do to the breaking point?

In this unique examination, Lebrecht attempts to understand the power of this man through his compositions, the history of who has performed them, and what it has meant to successive generations of audiences. In turn a detective story (we learn who Elise of “Fur Elise” is for the first time) and a confession, Why Beethoven aims to rise to the challenge of how to encompass the relentless energy of this singular genius.

With a narrative that mirrors the wayward sequence of Beethoven’s compositions, Beethoven emerges as a cornerstone of the world as we know it.

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Year of No Garbage

Eve O. Schaub

"Eve’s brave and honest experiment reveals the shocking impact of the throwaway society we’ve become and at the same time showing small ways we can all do better.” —Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder of Plastic Free July

Year of No Garbage is Super Size Me meets the environmental movement.

In this book Eve O. Schaub, humorist and stunt memoirist extraordinaire, tackles her most difficult challenge to date: garbage. Convincing her husband and two daughters to go along with her, Schaub attempts the seemingly impossible: living in the modern world without creating any trash at all. For an entire year. And- as it turns out- during a pandemic.

In the process, Schaub learns some startling things: that modern recycling is broken, and single stream recycling is a lie. That flushable wipes aren’t flushable and compostables aren’t compostable. That plastic drives climate change, fosters racism, and is poisoning the environment and our bodies at alarming rates, as microplastics are being found everywhere, from the top of Mount Everest to the placenta of unborn babies. 
If you’ve ever thought twice about that plastic straw in your drink, you’re gonna want to read this book.

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Jackie: Public, Private, Secret

J. Randy Taraborrelli

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

From the New York Times bestselling author of Jackie, Janet & Lee comes a fresh and often startling look at the life of the legendary former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.


Based on hundreds of interviews with friends, family, and lovers over a thirty-year period—as well as previously unreleased material from the JFK Library—Kennedy historian J. Randy Taraborrelli paints an unforgettable new portrait of a woman whose flaws and contradictions only serve to make her even more iconic. “I have three lives,” Jackie told a former lover, “public, private and secret.” In this revealing biography, readers will become intimately familiar with all three.

New insights from the book include:
· Jackie’s cold feet before her wedding to Jack Kennedy and her secret plan to avoid moving into the White House with him.
· Jackie's plan to meet with the woman with whom her husband, Aristotle Onassis, was again having an affair, Maria Callas...and why, in the end, she decided against it.
· The truth about the nude photos of Jackie which scandalized her in the 1970s...and which family member had betrayed her by selling them.
· Her unusual relationship with Maurice Templesman, which was never what outsiders believed it to be.
· The never-before-reported, last-ditch efforts to save Jackie’s life with experimental cancer treatments, and the doctor who wouldn’t risk jail time in order to treat her.

Twenty-nine years after her death and sixty years after the assassination of President Kennedy, Jackie delivers the last word on one of the most famous women in the world.

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Women We Buried, Women We Burned

Rachel Louise Snyder

"Snyder shows us how to summon the courage to imagine in a cruel and dangerous world. A beautiful book." -Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Rogues, Empire of Pain, and Say Nothing

"How do you remember every detail and make the reader feel like they saw, heard, and felt each moment? I have no idea, actually, but Rachel Louise Snyder has done it.” –Masha Gessen, National Book Award winning author of The Future Is History and Surviving Autocracy

"A gorgeous memoir that parses the patriarchy with an endearing frankness as fierce as it is, astonishingly, forgiving." -Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus

"The hope contained on these pages is hard won, and all the more precious due to the struggles from which it emerges.” -Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage

From the author of the groundbreaking, award-winning No Visible Bruises, a riveting memoir of survival, self-discovery, and forgiveness sure to captivate readers who loved Tara Westover's Educated and Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle.

For decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has been a fierce advocate reporting on the darkest social issues that impact women's lives. Women We Buried, Women We Burned is her own story.

Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age 16. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually travelling the globe.

Survival became her reporter's beat. In places like India, Tibet, and Niger, she interviewed those who had been through the unimaginable. In Cambodia, where she lived for six years, she watched a country reckon with the horrors of its own recent history. When she returned to the States with a family of her own, it was with a new perspective on old family wounds, and a chance for healing from the most unexpected place.

A piercing account of Snyder's journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence, Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a memoir that embodies the transformative power of resilience.

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Birdgirl

Mya-Rose Craig

British-Bangladeshi birder, environmentalist and activist Mya-Rose Craig is an international force. In her moving memoir, Birdgirl, she chronicles her mother’s struggle with mental illness, and shares her passion for social justice and fierce dedication to preserving our planet.

Meet Mya-Rose – otherwise known as “Birdgirl.” In her words: “Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby, or a pastime I can pick up and put down, but a thread running through the pattern of my life, so tightly woven in that there’s no way of pulling it free and leaving the rest of my life intact.”

Birdgirl follows Mya-Rose and her family as they travel the world in search of rare birds and astonishing landscapes. But a shadow moves with them, too—her mother's deepening mental health crisis. In the face of this struggle, the Craigs turn to nature again and again for comfort and meaning.

Each bird they see brings a moment of joy and reflection, instilling in Mya-Rose a deep love of the natural world. But Mya-Rose has also seen first-hand the reckless destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet, as well as the pervasive racism infecting every corner of the world, leading her to campaign for Black, Indigenous, people of color.

Joining the fight of today's young environmental activists, Mya-Rose shares her experiences to advocate for the simple, profound gift of nature, and for making it accessible to all, calling her readers to rediscover the power of our natural world.
Birder, activist, daughter: this is her story.

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Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You

Lucinda Williams

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The iconic singer-songwriter and three-time Grammy winner opens up about her traumatic childhood in the Deep South, her years of being overlooked in the music industry, and the stories that inspired her enduring songs in this “bracingly candid” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir.
 
“[Williams’s] memoir transmutes the wisdom, pain, and hard-won joy of her life into stories that stick with you.”—Vogue

Lucinda Williams’s rise to fame was anything but easy. Raised in a working-class family in the Deep South, she moved from town to town each time her father—a poet, a textbook salesman, a professor, a lover of parties—got a new job, totaling twelve different places by the time she was eighteen. Her mother suffered from severe mental illness and was in and out of hospitals. And when Williams was about a year old, she had to have an emergency tracheotomy—an inauspicious start for a singing career. But she was also born a fighter, and she would develop a voice that has captivated millions.

In Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, Williams takes readers through the events that shaped her music—from performing for family friends in her living room to singing at local high schools and colleges in Mexico City, to recording her first album with Folkway Records and headlining a sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall. She reveals the inspirations for her unforgettable lyrics, including the doomed love affairs with “poets on motorcycles” and the gothic southern landscapes of the many different towns of her youth, including Macon, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. Williams spent years working at health food stores and record stores during the day so she could play her music at night, and faced record companies who told her that her music was not “finished,” that it was “too country for rock and too rock for country.”  But her fighting spirit persevered, leading to a hard-won success that spans seventeen Grammy nominations and a legacy as one of the greatest and most influential songwriters of our time.

Raw, intimate, and honest, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You is an evocative reflection on an extraordinary woman’s life journey.

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Chita

Chita Rivera

 

 

The long-awaited and wildly entertaining memoir of the star of stage and screen, the legendary Chita Rivera--three-time Tony Award-winner, Kennedy Centers honoree, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

 

She was born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero--until the entertainment world renamed her. But Dolores--the irreverent side of the sensual, dark and ferocious Chita--was always present center stage, and was influential in creating some of Broadway most iconic and acclaimed roles, including Anita in West Side Story, the part that made her a star--Rosie in Bye Bye, Birdie, Velma in Chicago, and Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Written in gratitude to her longstanding fans and with the hope that new generations may learn from her extraordinary experience, Chita takes us behind the curtain to reveal the highs and lows of one extraordinary showbusiness career--the creative fermentation, the ego clashes, the miraculous discoveries, the exhilaration when it all went right, and the disappointment when it all went wrong. Chita invites us into workrooms and rehearsal studies, on stage and on set as she works with some of the greatest talents of the age, including Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Hal Prince, Liza Minnelli, Sammy Davis Jr, Gwen Verdon, Shirley MacLaine, and many others. We also learn deeply moving, revelatory details about her upbringing and her heritage, and how they indelibly shaped her work and career.

This colorful and entertaining memoir--as vital and captivating as Chita herself--is the unforgettable and engrossing personal story of a performer who blazed her own trail and inspired countless performers to forge their own unique path to success.

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Scalia

James Rosen

The bestselling historian and journalist James Rosen provides the first comprehensive account of the brilliant and combative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whose philosophy and judicial opinions defined our legal era.

With SCALIA: Rise to Greatness, 1936–1986, the opening installment in a two-volume biography, acclaimed reporter and bestselling historian James Rosen provides the first comprehensive account of the life of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose singular career in government—including three decades on the Supreme Court—shaped American law and society in the twenty-first century.

Decades in the making, Rise to Greatness tells the story of the kid from Queens who became the first Italian American on the Court and one of the most profoundly influential figures of our time. This volume takes us from Scalia’s birth to his ascension to the Court, providing a fresh and probing look at his Catholic upbringing and education; his stints in academia and published works, some of them obscure and long-overlooked; and his service in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when Scalia played a central role in reforming the U.S. intelligence community and in the approval of sensitive covert operations.

Deeply researched and based on unparalleled access to documentary and personal sources, and written with an intellectual rigor and wit befitting its subject, Rosen’s narrative reads like a novel while presenting startling new insight into the life, mind, career, faith, and legacy of the man whom family and friends called “Nino.” The result is a compelling portrait of an American legend with whom the author personally corresponded, broke bread, drank wine, and braved the streets of the capital as a (nervous) passenger in the justice’s famously speedy BMW.

Rosen has unearthed previously unpublished writing from every phase of Scalia’s career, including private Supreme Court emails, and has interviewed Scalia’s family, classmates, students, colleagues from the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, priests, poker buddies, hunting companions, and fellow judges and justices.

Rise to Greatness is a landmark of modern biography, a rich and moving study, accessible to lay readers, that brings to life a towering figure of American history. It is the book Scalia fans, and all citizens interested in history and the law, have long awaited.

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Saved

Benjamin Hall

AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"An affecting, singular story...a bracing tale of life on the edge of death." --Kirkus Reviews

When veteran war reporter Benjamin Hall woke up in Kyiv on the morning of March 14, 2022, he had no idea that, within hours, Russian bombs would nearly end his life. As a journalist for Fox News, Hall had worked in dangerous war zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but with three young daughters at home, life on the edge was supposed to be a thing of the past. Yet when Russia viciously attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Hall quickly volunteered to go. A few weeks later, while on assignment, Hall and his crew were blown up in a Russian strike. With Hall himself gravely injured and stuck in Kyiv, it was unclear if he would make it out alive.

This is the story of how he survived--a story that continues to this day. For the first time, Hall shares his experience in full--from his ground-level view of the war to his dramatic rescue to his arduous, and ongoing, recovery. Going inside the events that have permanently transformed him, Hall recalls his time at the front lines of our world's conflicts, exploring how his struggle to step away from war reporting led him back one perilous last time. Featuring nail-biting accounts from the many people across multiple countries who banded together to get him to safety, Hall offers a stunning look at complex teamwork and heartfelt perseverance that turned his life into a mission.

Through it all, Hall's spirit has remained undaunted, buoyed by that remarkable corps of people from around the world whose collective determination ensured his survival. Evocative, harrowing, and deeply moving, Saved is a powerful memoir of family and friends, of life and healing, and of how to respond when you are tested in ways you never thought possible.

Benjamin Hall's memoir includes a 16-page color photo insert.

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Remember Your Name

Erik G. LeMoullec

2015 winner of the B.R.A.G. Medallion. While sitting in traffic heading to her great-grandfather's eighty-fourth birthday party, Hayden asks her dad why her great-grandfather speaks the way he does. What follows is a car ride she will never forget as she learns about his difficult childhood. From living in the Lodz ghetto at age ten to surviving the hells of Auschwitz and a death march from Görlitz concentration camp at fifteen, Teddy Znamirowski faced unfathomable horrors, narrowly escaping death time and time again. Liberated at sixteen, he took on smuggling as a means to survive. It was not until the Bricha approached him and he became a lead operative - smuggling thousands of refugees across country borders - that he was finally able to begin his life again. Teddy's story is one of survival amidst horrific circumstances. The author does not sensationalize the suffering his grandfather and his family endured, but in this work of narrative nonfiction simply recreates this remarkable man's early life during one of the darkest moments of human history.

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In Search of Amrit Kaur

Livia Manera Sambuy

As she builds her own life anew, an Italian writer embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi.

On a sweltering day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself at a museum in Mumbai, enthralled by a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess. What she reads in the picture’s caption will change her life forever. This alluring Punjabi royal had supposedly sold her jewels in occupied wartime Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year.

Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unreported? Almost against her will, Manera becomes drawn into the mystery of Amrit Kaur. Delving into the history of the British Raj, its durbars and society balls and jubilees, she shows us the precipitous decline of India’s royal caste through the lives of extraordinary figures such as Amrit’s father, the larger-than-life Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala; the Jewish banker Albert Kahn; and the Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich—all while pursuing the elusive Amrit Kaur’s story.

When she meets with the princess’s eighty-year-old daughter, Manera’s search takes on a new dimension, as she strives to reintroduce an orphan to a mother who disappeared in 1933, leaving behind two children, her raja husband, and a legacy of activism in India’s nascent women’s civil rights movement.

In Search of Amrit Kaur is an engrossing detective story, a kaleidoscopic history lesson, and a moving portrait of a woman seeking personal freedom against the backdrop of a world in upheaval.

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I Swear

Katie Porter

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An honest, inspiring, and laugh-out-loud funny memoir about re-energizing our politics and standing up to corporate America—while carting three kids around in a minivan.
 
“Just like her whiteboard schoolings of CEOs, this book showcases Katie’s ability to entertain while making the inner workings of Congress more accessible than ever before.”—Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Never having run for office before, Katie Porter charted a new path in 2018 when she was elected to Congress as a Democrat in historically conservative Orange County, California. Underestimated as a single mom and chided for her progressive values, Katie defied expectations. Then, using her signature whiteboard, she began to take CEOs and corrupt government officials to task in Congressional hearings. The videos went viral, introducing Americans to her no-bullshit style, and making her a coveted guest on cable news and late-night television.  
 
I SWEAR: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan is a witty, down-to-earth exploration of what it’s really like to serve in Congress, particularly as a single mom. Katie offers Americans a clear picture of what their elected leaders are doing—and how they’re doing it—exposing the gaps between politicians’ press conferences and real people’s lives. 
 
Katie reveals how her challenges as an Iowa farmgirl diverted her to the Ivy League and how she came to see herself as a Californian, teaching law and raising three kids in Orange County. She shares why she made the jump from academia to politics and how she quickly mastered the art of making CEOs and cabinet members squirm when they bluff and bloviate instead of doing the job for America.
 
With the same clarity she demonstrates in Congressional hearings, Katie makes the case for consumer protection, corporate accountability, and anti-corruption reforms. She pulls back the curtain on the political messaging machine, campaign fundraising, and Congress’ traditions, showing that the way things have always worked, in fact, does not work for a Congressperson without someone at home to do the shopping and take care of the kids. Along the way, she provides whiteboard lessons on where your campaign donations go, how to fight the corporations that cheat you, and how to conduct her trademark robust oversight. 
 
Full of candid and inspiring stories—from how Katie lent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a pair of sneakers during the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, to her kids’ lightly illegal campaign hijinks—this is a book by an exhausted, committed parent who just doesn’t have the time for nonsense in her house or in the House of Representatives.

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Wanderlust

Reid Mitenbuler

 

 

The mesmerizing, larger-than-life tale of an eccentric adventurer who traversed some of the greatest frontiers of the twentieth century, from uncharted Arctic wastelands to the underground resistance networks of World War II.

 

 

Deep in the Arctic wilderness, Peter Freuchen awoke to find himself buried alive under the snow. During a sudden blizzard the night before, he had taken shelter underneath his dogsled and become trapped there while he slept. Now, as feeling drained from his body, he managed to claw a hole through the ice only to find himself in even greater danger: his beard, wet with condensation from his struggling breath, had frozen to his sled runners and lashed his head in place, exposing it to icy winds that needed only a few minutes to kill him... But if Freuchen could escape that, he could escape anything.

Freuchen's life seemed ripped from the pages of an adventure novel--and provided fodder for many books of his own. A wildly eccentric Dane with an out-of-nowhere sense of humor, his insatiable curiosity drove him from the twilight years of Arctic exploration to the Golden Age of Hollywood, and from the burgeoning field of climate research to the Danish underground during World War II. He conducted jaw-dropping expeditions, survived a Nazi prison camp, and overcame a devastating injury that robbed him of his foot and very nearly his life. Through it all, he was guided not only by restlessness but also by ideals that were remarkably ahead of his time, championing Indigenous communities, environmental stewardship, and starting conversations that continue today.

Meticulously researched and grippingly written, Wanderlust is an unforgettable tale of daring and discovery, an inspiring portrait of restlessness and grit, and a powerful meditation on our relationship to the planet and our fellow human beings. Reid Mitenbuler's exquisite book restores a heroic giant of the last century back into public view.

 

 

 

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The Dirty Tricks Department

John Lisle

John Lisle reveals the untold story of the OSS Research and Development Branch—The Dirty Tricks Department—and its role in World War II.

In the summer of 1942, Stanley Lovell, a renowned industrial chemist, received a mysterious order to report to an unfamiliar building in Washington, D.C. When he arrived, he was led to a barren room where he waited to meet the man who had summoned him. After a disconcerting amount of time, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS, walked in the door. “You know your Sherlock Holmes, of course,” Donovan said as an introduction. “Professor Moriarty is the man I want for my staff...I think you’re it.”

Following this life-changing encounter, Lovell became the head of a secret group of scientists who developed dirty tricks for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Their inventions included bat bombs, suicide pills, fighting knives, silent pistols, and camouflaged explosives. Moreover, they forged documents for undercover agents, plotted the assassination of foreign leaders, and performed truth drug experiments on unsuspecting subjects.

Based on extensive archival research and personal interviews, The Dirty Tricks Department tells the story of these scheming scientists, explores the moral dilemmas that they faced, and reveals their dark legacy of directly inspiring the most infamous program in CIA history: MKULTRA.

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Unearthed

Meryl Frank

A thrilling mystery woven into a beautifully constructed family memoir: Meryl Frank's journey to seek the truth about a beloved and revolutionary cousin, a celebrated actress in Vilna before World War II, and to answer the question of how the next generation should honor the memory of the Holocaust.



As a child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed.



Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin--her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?

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While Time Remains

Yeonmi Park

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The North Korean defector, human rights advocate, and bestselling author of In Order to Live sounds the alarm on the culture wars, identity politics, and authoritarian tendencies tearing America apart.

After defecting from North Korea, Yeonmi Park found liberty and freedom in America. But she also found a chilling crackdown on self-expression and thought that reminded her of the brutal regime she risked her life to escape. When she spoke out about the mass political indoctrination she saw around her in the United States, Park faced censorship and even death threats.

In While Time Remains, Park sounds the alarm for Americans by highlighting the dangerous hypocrisies, mob tactics, and authoritarian tendencies that speak in the name of wokeness and social justice. No one is spared in her eye-opening account, including the elites who claim to care for the poor and working classes but turn their backs on anyone who dares to think independently.

Park arrived in America eight years ago with no preconceptions, no political aims, and no partisan agenda. With urgency and unique insight, the bestselling author and human rights activist reminds us of the fragility of freedom, and what we must do to preserve it.

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Honey, Baby, Mine

Laura Dern

"Award-winning actresses and mother-daughter duo Laura Dern and Diane Ladd are the kind of women who draw strength from their lifelong friendships with other women, and most of all, from each other. Ever since Laura was born, the two have leaned on each other through the trials of everyday life and the tribulations that come with even the most storied Hollywood careers. They were always close, but when Diane developed a sudden illness, their relationship grew even deeper. When a doctor prescribed long walks to build back Diane's lung capacity, the pair began taking strolls together every day. These meandering walks soon became epic ones, and the conversations the two women shared began to break down the traditional barriers between mothers and daughters. With topics ranging from ambition and legacy to intimacy and marriage, drifting between humorous and deeply poignant, nothing was off limits. By the time Diane was healed they were more than a close duo; they had covered tremendous ground and formed a true adult relationship. Peppered throughout these intimate exchanges, they enclose personal photos, family recipes, and much more. The result is a book that will make you want to call your own mom--a testament to the intimacy that can be achieved when we are brave enough to speak our truths to those we love most"--

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You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Maggie Smith

“[Smith]...reminds you that you can...survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new.” —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Good Housekeeping, Goodreads, Zibby Mag, Newsweek, BookPage, and LitHub

The bestselling poet and author of the “powerful” (People) and “luminous” (Newsweek) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age.

“Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.”

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet’s attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.

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Wake Up with Purpose!

Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt

 

 

Known to millions as simply "Sister Jean," the Loyola Chicago matriarch and college basketball icon invites you into her remarkable memoir filled with history, wonder, and common-sense wisdom for this century and beyond. As Sister Jean wisely says, "I've seen so many changes in the last 102 years, but the important things remain the same."

 

 

Part life story, part philosophy text, and part spiritual guide, Sister Jean's wit, wisdom, and common sense has broad appeal and application that transcends religious creed, belief, and even feelings on Loyola's basketball team.

Along with her collaborator Seth Davis, an award-winning writer, broadcaster and New York Times best-selling author, Wake Up with Purpose! lets you experience:

  • Sister Jean's words and her spirit.
  • her sharp sense of humor.
  • life lessons gleaned from one hundred years of living.
  • universal themes that connect us all.
  • priceless wisdom.

The driving force inside Wake Up with Purpose! is the narrative of Sister Jean's fascinating life--from teaching at a Catholic school during the Second World War to serving on a Chicago college campus in the sixties and beyond to cheering from the sidelines of a men's basketball tournament in March 2018.

As you learn about Sister Jean's century-long life, you'll feel just like the Loyola students do when they knock on her office door, plop down in a chair, and ask if she would have time to chat, an activity that she still does daily.

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George VI and Elizabeth

Sally Bedell Smith

A revelatory account of how the loving marriage of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth saved the monarchy during World War II, and how they raised their daughter to become Queen Elizabeth II, based on exclusive access to the Royal Archives—from the bestselling author of Elizabeth the Queen and Prince Charles

“An intimate and gripping portrait of a royal marriage that survived betrayal, tragedy, and war.”—Amanda Foreman, bestselling author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

Granted special access by Queen Elizabeth II to her parents’ letters and diaries and to the papers of their close friends and family, Sally Bedell Smith brings the love story of this iconic royal couple to vibrant life. This deeply researched and revealing book shows how a loving and devoted marriage helped the King and Queen meet the challenges of World War II, lead a nation, solidify the public’s faith in the monarchy, and raise their daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.

When King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, shattering the Crown’s reputation, his younger brother, known as Bertie, assumed his father’s name and became King George VI. Shy, sensitive, and afflicted with a stutter, George VI had never imagined that he would become King. His wife, Elizabeth, a pretty, confident, and outgoing woman who became known later in life as “the Queen Mum,” strengthened and advised her husband. With his wife’s support, guidance, and love, George VI was able to overcome his insecurities and become an exceptional leader, navigating the country through World War II, establishing a relationship with Winston Churchill, visiting Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington and in Hyde Park, and inspiring the British people with his courage and compassion during the Blitz. Simultaneously, George VI and Elizabeth trained their daughter Princess Elizabeth from an early age to be a highly successful monarch, and she would reign for an unprecedented seventy years.

Sally Bedell Smith gives us an inside view of the lives, struggles, hopes, and triumphs of King George VI and Elizabeth during a dramatic time in history.

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Walt Disney: an American Original

Bob Thomas

The Walt Disney Company honors its 100th anniversary in 2023. As part of the festivities, this must-have biography tells the story of Walt Disney's life--told as no other book can!

Walt Disney is an American hero. From Mickey Mouse to Disneyland, he changed the face of American culture. His is a success story like no other: a man who developed animated film into an art form and made a massive contribution to the folklore of the world.

After years of research, respected Hollywood biographer Bob Thomas produced a definitive biography of the man behind the legend of Disney: the unschooled cartoonist from Kansas City who when bankrupt on his first movie venture and developed into the genius who produced unmatched works of animation, and ultimately was the creative spirit of an international entertainment empire that has enchanted generations.


Complete with a collection of rare photographs, Walt Disney: An American Original is a fascinating and inspirational work that captures the spirit of Walt Disney.


This Commemorative Edition includes new:

 

  • introductions from Jeff Kurtti and Marcy Carriker Smothers
  • a 32-page photo insert with rare behind-the-scenes photos
  • endnotes to add further context and connect Walt's story to today


Searching for more ways to connect with the Disney Parks and films? Explore these books from Disney Editions:

 

 

  • Delicious Disney: Walt Disney World: Recipes & Stories from The Most Magical Place on Earth
  • A Portrait of Walt Disney World: 50 Years of The Most Magical Place on Earth
  • Birnbaum's 2023 Walt Disney World: The Official Vacation Guide
  • Birnbaum's 2023 Walt Disney World for Kids: The Official Guide
  • Art of Coloring: Walt Disney World
  • Maps of the Disney Parks: Charting 60 Years from California to Shanghai
  • Poster Art of the Disney Parks
  • Holiday Magic at the Disney Parks: Celebrations Around the World from Fall to Winter
  • The Haunted Mansion: Imagineering a Disney Classic
  • The Disney Monorail: Imagineering a Highway in the Sky

 

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An Unplanned Life

Franklin A. Thomas

A major autobiography of a remarkable life that broke down racial barriers, transformed institutions, and energized the struggle for justice, by the former president of the Ford Foundation

"Frank has that quality of honesty and authenticity and people trusted him . . . and because very disparate people trusted him, he could bring them together across their differences."
--Gloria Steinem

 

Franklin Thomas was one of the most influential people of our time. As former president of the Ford Foundation (the first African American to hold this position), former president of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (the first community development organization of its kind), member of countless corporate boards, and a key player in facilitating the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, Thomas shaped public policy, philanthropy, and the movement for human rights for over half a century.

 

 

An Unplanned Life offers an insider's account of some of the most crucial transformations of the contemporary era: efforts to rebuild America's cities, struggles to reform philanthropy, and the quest to establish a global order based on human rights and racial equity. As a story of firsts, Franklin's memoir also chronicles a formative era, when a generation of African Americans first broke through into the halls of power, navigating complicated and sometimes treacherous cultural and political currents.

 

 

Much of Franklin Thomas's life was marked by his desire to stay out of the spotlight, and to let his accomplishments speak for themselves. Now, in An Unplanned Life, we have Thomas's full story, in all of its nuance, drama, and richly narrated detail.

 

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Leonardo Da Vinci

Barrington Barber

The genius behind Leonardo da Vinci's artwork is introduced in this deluxe silkbound guide.

Leonardo da Vinci's desire for accuracy and realism in his work drove him to take an almost forensic approach to recording the world around him, and to produce an enormous number of paintings, drawings, plans and diagrams.

Selected from the entire range of Leonardo's finest drawings, this book presents a comprehensive and inspiring collection that is testament to Leonardo's accurate eye and unfailing hand, showcased with breathtaking full-color images.

Once you have studied these images you will begin to understand why Leonardo believed the eye was the perfect instrument for absorbing all the laws of nature, and that the artist was the perfect instrument for their expression.

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My Century: A memoir of war, peace and pioneering in the operating room

Kristaps Juris Keggi, M.D.

"As a boy in Latvia during World War II, Kristaps Keggi and his family dodged both Soviet Communist and German Nazi invaders, eventually escaping to America. Arriving in New York City, Kristaps proved to be a quick learner, eventually moving on to Yale College, Yale Medical School, and then, in 1965, to the harrowing war in Vietnam, where he was a fast-thinking, common-sense surgeon in the U.S. Army's first MASH unit there. Back in the States, Kristaps and his wife, Julie, built a family together while he embarked on a career as a pioneer and innovator in the field of orthopaedic surgery, especially hip procedures. He became a renowned teacher and mentor to med school students and young doctors, both at home and abroad"--Back cover.

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No Filter

Paulina Porizkova

“A book about a rare life, profound love, profound grief, anxiety, self-assurance, empowerment, aging, loss, and joy. It is nuanced, complex, insightful, helpful, and constantly surprising.” —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of These Precious Days

Writer and former model Paulina Porizkova pens a series of intimate, introspective, and enlightening essays about the complexities of womanhood at every age, pulling back the glossy magazine cover and writing from the heart.


Born in Cold War Czechoslovakia, Paulina Porizkova rose to prominence as a model, appearing on her first Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover in 1984.  As the face of Estée Lauder in 1989, she was one of the highest-paid models in the world. When she was cast in the music video for the song “Drive” by The Cars, it was love at first sight for her and frontman Ric Ocasek. He was forty at the time, and Porizkova was nineteen. The decades to come would bring marriage, motherhood, a budding writing career; and later sadness, loneliness, isolation, and eventually divorce. Following her ex-husband’s death—and the revelation of a deep betrayal—Porizkova stunned fans with her fierce vulnerability and disarming honesty as she let the whole world share in her experience of being a woman who must start over.
 
This is a wise and compelling exploration of heartbreak, grief, beauty, aging, relationships, re-invention and finding your purpose. In these essays, Porizkova bares her soul and shares the lessons she’s learned—often the hard way. After a lifetime of being looked at, she is ready to be heard.

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Breaking History

Jared Kushner

 

 

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

 

 

#1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

#1 PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY BESTSELLER

#1 AMAZON BESTSELLER

Jared Kushner was one of the most consequential presidential advisers in modern history. For the first time, he recounts what happened behind closed doors during the Trump presidency.

Few White House advisors have had such an expansive portfolio or constant access to the president. From his office next to Trump, senior adviser Jared Kushner operated quietly behind the scenes, preferring to leave the turf wars and television sparring to others.

Now, Kushner finally tells his story--a fast-paced and surprisingly candid account of how an earnest businessman with no political ambitions found himself pulled into a presidency that no one saw coming.

Breaking History takes readers inside debates in the Oval Office, double-crosses at the United Nations, tense meetings in Arab palaces, high-stakes negotiations, and the daily barrage of leaks, false allegations, investigations, and West Wing infighting.

A true historical thriller, this book is not your typical political memoir. Kushner details Washington's intense resistance to change and reveals how he broke through the stalemates of the past. An outsider among outsiders, Kushner was a results-driven executive among beltway power brokers. He questioned old assumptions and delivered unprecedented results on trade, criminal justice reform, production of COVID-19 vaccines, and Middle East peace. His successful negotiation of the Abraham Accords, the most significant diplomatic breakthrough in 50 years, earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Written by one of the few people by Trump's side from his trip down the golden escalator to his final departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Breaking History provides the most honest, nuanced, and definitive understanding of a presidency that will be studied for generations.

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Newsroom Confidential

Margaret Sullivan

"Sullivan remains the critic American journalism requires, a veteran practitioner with street cred, still in touch with the ‘unaccountable joy’ of reporting and writing that continues to draw talented young people to the field.” —Steve Coll, The New York Times Book Review

Sullivan began her career at the Buffalo News, where she rose from summer intern to editor in chief. In Newsroom Confidential she chronicles her years in the trenches battling sexism and throwing elbows in a highly competitive newsroom. In 2012, Sullivan was appointed the public editor of The New York Times, the first woman to hold that important role. She was in the unique position of acting on behalf of readers to weigh the actions and reporting of the paper's staff, parsing potential lapses in judgment, unethical practices, and thorny journalistic issues. Sullivan recounts how she navigated the paper’s controversies, from Hillary Clinton's emails to Elon Musk's accusations of unfairness to the need for greater diversity in the newsroom. In 2016, having served the longest tenure of any public editor, Sullivan left for the Washington Post, where she had a front-row seat to the rise of Donald Trump in American media and politics.

With her celebrated mixture of charm, sharp-eyed observation, and nuanced criticism, Sullivan takes us behind the scenes of the nation's most influential news outlets to explore how Americans lost trust in the news and what it will take to regain it.

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Diary of a Misfit

Casey Parks

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life.

"Most moving is Parks’s depiction of a queer lineage, her assertion of an ancestry of outcasts, a tapestry of fellow misfits into which the marginalized will always, for better or worse, fit." —The New York Times Book Review


When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks's life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother’s youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own.

For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and knocked on strangers’ doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy’s own diaries, trying to uncover what Roy was like as a person—what he felt; what he thought; and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else’s story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.

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Against the Wind

Neal Gabler

From the author of Catching the Wind comes the second volume of the definitive biography of Ted Kennedy and a history of modern American liberalism.

“Magisterial . . . an intricate, astute study of political power brokering comparable to Robert A. Caro’s profile of Lyndon Johnson in Master of the Senate.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)


Against the Wind completes Neal Gabler’s magisterial biography of Ted Kennedy, but it also unfolds the epic, tragic story of the fall of liberalism and the destruction of political morality in America. With Richard Nixon having stilled the liberal wind that once propelled Kennedy’s—and his fallen brothers’—political crusades, Ted Kennedy faced a lonely battle. As Republicans pressed Reaganite dogmas of individual freedom and responsibility and Democratic centrists fell into line, Kennedy was left as the most powerful voice legislating on behalf of those society would neglect or punish: the poor, the working class, and African Americans.

Gabler shows how the fault lines that cracked open in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam were intentionally widened by Kennedy’s Republican rivals to create a moral vision of America that stood in direct opposition to once broadly shared commitments to racial justice and economic equality. Yet even as he fought this shift, Ted Kennedy’s personal moral failures in this era—the endless rumors of his womanizing and public drunkenness and his bizarre behavior during the events that led to rape accusations against his nephew William Kennedy Smith—would be used again and again to weaken his voice and undercut his claims to political morality.

Tracing Kennedy’s life from the wilderness of the Reagan years through the compromises of the Clinton era, from his rage against the craven cruelty of George W. Bush to his hope that Obama would deliver on a lifetime of effort on behalf of universal health care, Gabler unfolds Kennedy’s heroic legislative work against the backdrop of a nation grown lost and fractured. In this outstanding conclusion to the saga that began with Catching the Wind, Neal Gabler offers his inimitable insight into a man who fought to keep liberalism alive when so many were determined to extinguish it. Against the Wind sheds new light both on a revered figure in the American Century and on America’s current existential crisis.

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Brave Hearted

Katie Hickman

"Brave Hearted is not just history, it is an incredibly intense page-turning experience. To read what these women endured is to be transported into another universe of courage, loss, pain, and occasionally victory. This book is a triumph." --Amanda Foreman

"Absolutely compelling" ― Christina Lamb, Sunday Times (UK)

The dramatic, untold stories of the diverse array of women who helped transform the American West.

Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route; African-American women in search of freedom from slavery; Chinese sex-workers sold openly on the docks of San Francisco; Native American women brutally displaced by the unstoppable tide of white settlers - these were the women who settled the American West, whose stories until now have remained mostly untold. As the internationally bestselling historian Katie Hickman writes, "Myth and misunderstanding spring from the American frontier as readily as rye grass from sod, and--like the wiry grass-- seem as difficult to weed out and discard." But the true-life story of women's experiences in the Wild West is more gripping, heart-rending, and stirring than all the movies, novels, folk-legends, and ballads of popular imagination.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and other extraordinary contemporary accounts, sifting through the legends and the myths, the laws and the treaties, Katie Hickman presents us with a cast of unforgettable women, all forced to draw on huge reserves of resilience and courage in the face of tumultuous change: the half Cree, Marguerite McLoughlin, the much-admired "First Lady" of Fort Vancouver; the Presbyterian missionary Narcissa Whitman, who in 1837 became the first white woman to make the overland journey west across the Rocky Mountains; Biddy Mason, the Mississippi slave who fought for her freedom through the courts of California; Olive Oatman, adopted by the Mohave, famous for her facial tattoos.

This is the story of the women who participated in the greatest mass migration in American history, transforming their country in the process. This is American history not as it was romanticized but as it was lived.

 

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Grace

Cody Keenan

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"At a time when the meaning of America is up for grabs, Cody Keenan's new book chronicles ten days that tested us and ultimately showed us at our best. It's a captivating story about what's worth fighting for, an antidote to cynicism that will make you believe again."--President Barack Obama, via Twitter

From Barack Obama's chief speechwriter Cody Keenan, a spellbinding account of the ten most dramatic days of the presidency, when a hate-fueled massacre and looming Supreme Court decisions put the character of our country on the line, and a president's words could bring the nation together or tear it apart.

A white supremacist shooting and an astonishing act of forgiveness. A national reckoning with race and the Confederate flag. The fate of marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act. GRACE is the propulsive story of ten days in June 2015, when Obama and his chief speechwriter Cody Keenan composed a series of high-stakes speeches to meet a succession of stunning developments.

Through behind-the-scenes moments--from Obama's suggestion that Keenan pour a drink, listen to some Miles Davis, and "find the silences," to the president's late-night writing sessions in the First Family's residence--Keenan takes us inside the craft of speechwriting at the highest level for the most demanding of bosses, the relentlessly poetic and perfectionist Barack Obama. GRACE also delivers a fascinating portrait of White House insiders like Ben Rhodes, Valerie Jarrett, Jen Psaki, and the speechwriting team responsible for pulling it all off during a furious, historic stretch of the Obama presidency--including a gifted fact-checker who took Keenan's rhetoric to task before taking his hand in marriage. GRACE is the most intimate writing that exists on the rhetorical tightrope our first Black president had to walk, culminating with an unforgettable high point: Obama stunning everybody by taking a deep breath and leading the country in a chorus of "Amazing Grace."

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Sit, Stay, Heal

Renee Alsarraf

“Written with grace and emotional honesty, Sit, Stay, Heal will live with you long after the last page.”— John Grogan, bestselling author of Marley & Me

For more than two decades, esteemed veterinary oncologist Dr. Renee Alsarraf treated cancer in her beloved canine patients. Then, at age fifty-one, she was diagnosed with cancer herself.

Sit, Stay, Heal: What Dogs Can Teach Us About Living Well is Dr. Renee’s unforgettable testament to the extraordinary healing nature of dogs. Every day in her veterinary practice, she bears witness to the undeniable bond between pets and their people. However, while we are busy teaching them to “sit” and “stay,” they have their own, more profound, lessons to impart. In Sit, Stay, Heal, we meet Cosmo, the golden retriever who arrives at Renee’s office just before his fourteenth family vacation to the beach; Daisy, the cocker spaniel, an emotional support dog for a special needs child; and Franny, the bloodhound, a police dog who wasn’t ready to retire from the force. Then there’s Dr. Renee’s own dog Newtie, who falls ill when she needs him most.

Our dogs are wise in ways humans are not. For Dr. Renee, it was her patients—those furry, four-legged, slobbering animals—who seemed to uniquely understand her difficult journey and who showed her the true power of positivity and unconditional love. Full of life lessons and healing metaphors, perfect dogs and their imperfect humans, Sit, Stay, Heal is a captivating, heartwarming story for dog lovers far and wide.

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The New Royals : Queen Elizabeth's Legacy and the Future of the Crown

Katie Nicholl

Vanity Fair Royals correspondent and bestselling author of William and Harry and Kate explores the remarkable life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II and the legacy she has handed down after her death to the next generation. For seventy years, Queen Elizabeth ruled over an institution and a family. During her lifetime she was constant in her desire to provide a steady presence and to be a trustworthy steward of the British people and the Commonwealth. In the face of her uncle's abdication, in the uncertainty of the Blitz, and in the tentative exposure of her family and private life to the public via the press, Elizabeth became synonymous with the crown. But times change. Recent years have brought grief and turmoil to the House of Windsor, and even as England celebrated the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, there were calls for a changing of the guard. In The New Royals , journalist Katie Nicholl provides a nuanced look at Elizabeth's remarkable and unrivalled reign, with new stories from Palace courtiers and aides, documentarians, and family members. She examines King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla's decades in waiting and beyond--where "The Firm" is headed as William and Kate present the modern faces of an ancient institution. In the wake of Harry and Meghan leaving the Royal Family and Prince Andrew's spectacular fall from grace, the royal family must reckon with its history, the light and the dark, in order to chart a course for Britain beyond its Queen and to show that it is an institution capable of leadership in an ever-changing modern world.
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The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

Stacy Schiff

A New York Times Bestseller
Best Books of 2022 -- New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Oprah Daily, Los Angeles Times, TIME, USA Today, New York Magazine, Air Mail, Daily Kos, Boston Globe, Barnes & Noble, BookPage, GoodReads
Best Audiobooks of 2022 -- Apple and AudioFile

A revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father--the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.

"A glorious book that is as entertaining as it is vitally important." --Ron Chernow

"A beautifully crafted, invaluable biography...Schiff ingeniously connects the past to our present and future, underscoring the lessons of Adams while reclaiming our nation's self-evident truths at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten them." --Oprah Daily

Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, "Samuel Adams was the man." With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history.

Stacy Schiff returns Adams to his seat of glory, introducing us to the shrewd and eloquent man who supplied the moral backbone of the American Revolution. A singular figure at a singular moment, Adams amplified the Boston Massacre. He helped to mastermind the Boston Tea Party. He employed every tool available to rally a town, a colony, and eventually a band of colonies behind him, creating the cause that created a country. For his efforts he became the most wanted man in America: When Paul Revere rode to Lexington in 1775, it was to warn Samuel Adams that he was about to be arrested for treason.

In The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, Schiff brings her masterful skills to Adams's improbable life, illuminating his transformation from aimless son of a well-off family to tireless, beguiling radical who mobilized the colonies. Arresting, original, and deliriously dramatic, this is a long-overdue chapter in the history of our nation.

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One Jump at a Time

Nathan Chen

In this exhilarating memoir, three-time World Champion and Olympic gold-medalist Nathan Chen tells the story of his remarkable journey to success, reflecting on his life as a Chinese American figure skater and the joys and challenges he has experienced--including the tremendous sacrifices he and his family made, and the physical and emotional pain he endured.

When three-year-old Nathan Chen tried on his first pair of figure skates, magic happened. But the odds of this young boy--one of five children born to Chinese immigrants--competing and making it into the top echelons of figure skating were daunting. Chen's family didn't have the resources or access to pay for expensive coaches, rink time, and equipment. But Nathan's mother, Hetty Wang, refused to fail her child. Recognizing his tremendous talent and passion, she stepped up as his coach, making enormous sacrifices to give Nathan the opportunity to compete in this exclusive world.

That dedication eventually paid off at the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, where Chen--reverently known as the "Quad King"--won gold, becoming the first Asian-American man to stand at the highest podium in figure skating. In this moving and inspiring memoir Chen opens up for the first time, chronicling everything it took to pursue his dreams. Bolstered by his unwavering passion and his family's unconditional support, Chen reveals the most difficult times he endured, and how he overcame each obstacle-from his disappointment at the 2018 Olympic Games, to competing during a global pandemic, to the extreme physical and mental toll the sport demands.

Pulling back the curtain on the figure skating world and the Olympics, Chen reveals what it was really like at the Beijing Games and competing on the US team in the same city his parents had left--and his grandmother still lived. Poignant and unfiltered, told in his own words, One Jump at a Time is the story of one extraordinary young man--and a testament to the love of a family and the power of persistence, grit, and passion.

This memoir includes 16 pages of color photographs.

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Spare

Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Princess Diana was laid to rest, billions wondered what Prince William and Prince Harry must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.

For Harry, this is that story at last.

Before losing his mother, twelve-year-old Prince Harry was known as the carefree one, the happy-go-lucky Spare to the more serious Heir. Grief changed everything. He struggled at school, struggled with anger, with loneliness—and, because he blamed the press for his mother’s death, he struggled to accept life in the spotlight.

At twenty-one, he joined the British Army. The discipline gave him structure, and two combat tours made him a hero at home. But he soon felt more lost than ever, suffering from post-traumatic stress and prone to crippling panic attacks. Above all, he couldn’t find true love. 

Then he met Meghan. The world was swept away by the couple’s cinematic romance and rejoiced in their fairy-tale wedding. But from the beginning, Harry and Meghan were preyed upon by the press, subjected to waves of abuse, racism, and lies. Watching his wife suffer, their safety and mental health at risk, Harry saw no other way to prevent the tragedy of history repeating itself but to flee his mother country. Over the centuries, leaving the Royal Family was an act few had dared. The last to try, in fact, had been his mother. . . .

For the first time, Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

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Elizabeth Taylor : The Grit and Glamour of an Icon

Kate Andersen Brower

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Residence and First Women, the first ever authorized biography of the most famous movie star of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor. No celebrity rivals Elizabeth Taylor's glamour and guts or her level of fame. She was the last major star to come out of the old Hollywood studio system and she is a legend known for her beauty and her magnetic screen presence in a career that spanned most of the twentieth century and nearly sixty films. But her private life was even more compelling than her Oscar-winning on-screen performances. During her seventy-nine years of rapid-fire love and loss she was married eight times to seven different men. Above all, she was a survivor--by the time she was twenty-six she was twice divorced and once widowed. Her life was a soap opera that ended in a deeply meaningful way when she became the first major celebrity activist to lead the fight against HIV/AIDS. A co-founder of amfAR, she raised more than $100 million for research and patient care. She was also a shrewd businesswoman who made a fortune as the first celebrity perfumer who always demanded to be paid what she was worth. In the first ever authorized biography of the Hollywood icon, Kate Andersen Brower reveals the world through Elizabeth's eyes. Brower uses Elizabeth's unpublished letters, diary entries, and off-the-record interview transcripts as well as interviews with 250 of her closest friends and family to tell the full, unvarnished story of her remarkable career and her explosive private life that made headlines worldwide. Elizabeth Taylor captures this intelligent, empathetic, tenacious, volatile, and complex woman as never before, from her rise to massive fame at age twelve in National Velvet to becoming the first to negotiate a million-dollar salary for a film, from her eight marriages and enduring love affair with Richard Burton to her lifelong battle with addiction and her courageous efforts as an AIDS activist. Here is a fascinating and complete portrait worthy of the legendary star and her legacy. Elizabeth Taylor features a photo insert.
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Waypoints

Sam Heughan

Journey deep into the Scottish Highlands in the first memoir by #1 New York Times bestselling author and award-winning star of Outlander, Sam Heughan--exploring his life and reflecting on the waypoints that define him



"I had to believe, because frankly, I had come so far there could be no turning back."



In this intimate journey of self-discovery, Sam sets out along Scotland's rugged ninety-six-mile West Highland Way to map out the moments that shaped his views on dreams and ambition, family, friendship, love, and life. The result is a love letter to the wild landscape that means so much to him, full of charming, funny, wise, and searching insights into the world through his eyes.



Waypoints is a deeply personal journey that reveals as much about Sam to himself as it does to his readers.
 

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Savor

Fatima Ali

 

A young chef whose dreams were cut short savors every last minute as she explores food and adventure, illness and mortality in Savor, an “inspiring” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir and family story that sweeps from Pakistan to Manhattan and beyond.
“Ali’s strength and passion for food and her culture shines through. . . . This memoir is a tribute to the extraordinary life and impact she made in twenty-nine years.”—Oprah Daily (Best Books of the Year)

Fatima Ali won the hearts of viewers as the Fan Favorite of Bravo’s Top Chef in season fifteen. Twenty-nine years old, she was a dynamic, boundary-breaking chef and a bright new voice for change in the food world. After the taping wrapped and before the show aired, Fati was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Not one to ever slow down or admit defeat, the star chef vowed to spend her final year traveling the world, eating delicious food, and making memories with her loved ones. But when her condition abruptly worsened, her plans were sidelined. She pivoted, determined to make her final days count as she worked to tell the story of a brown girl chef who set out to make a name for herself, her food, and her culture. 

Including writing from Fatima during her last months and contributions by her mother, Farezeh, and her collaborator, Tarajia Morrell, Savor is a deftly woven account and an inspiring ode to the food, family, and countries Fatima loved so much. Alternating between past and present, readers are transported back to Pakistan and the childhoods of both Fatima and Farezeh, each deeply affected by cultural barriers that shaped the course of their lives. From the rustic stalls of the outdoor markets of Karachi to the kitchen and dining room of Meadowood, the acclaimed three-star Michelin restaurant where she apprenticed, Fati reflects on her life and her identity as a chef, a daughter, and a queer woman butting up against traditional views. 

Savor is a triumphant memoir, at once an exploration of the sense of wonder that made Fatima so special and a shining testament to the resilience of the human spirit. At its core, it is a story about what it means to truly live, a profound and exquisite portrait of savoring every moment.

 

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Waxing On

Ralph Macchio

Since The Karate Kid first crane-kicked its way into the pop culture stratosphere in June 1984, there hasn’t been a week Ralph Macchio hasn’t heard friendly shouts of “Wax on, wax off” or “Sweep the leg!” Now, with Macchio reprising his role as Daniel LaRusso in the #1 ranked Netflix show Cobra Kai, he is finally ready to look back at this classic movie and give the fans something they’ve long craved.
 
The book will be Ralph Macchio’s celebratory reflection on the legacy of The Karate Kid in film, pop culture, and his own life. It will be a comprehensive look at a film that shaped him as much as it influenced the world. Macchio will share an insider's perspective of the untold story behind his starring role—the innocence of the early days, the audition process, and the filmmaking experience--as well as take readers through the birth of some of the film’s most iconic moments.

Ultimately, the book centers on the film itself, focusing on the reason that the characters and themes have endured in such a powerful way and how these personal experiences have impacted Macchio's life. It will bring readers back to the day they met Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi for the first time, but will also provide a fascinating lens into how our pasts shape all of us and how the past can come back to enrich one's life in surprising and wonderful ways.

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One Hundred Saturdays

Michael Frank

One of Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of the Year and a Recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award

The remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi whose conversations with the writer Michael Frank over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale.


With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood in Rhodes where she’d grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium.

Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays over the course of six years that they would spend in each other’s company. During these meetings Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possession in 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey—measured by both time and distance—of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival.

Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship that develops between storyteller and listener as they explore the fundamental mystery of what it means to collect, share, and interpret the deepest truths of a life deeply lived.

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The Stories We Tell

Joanna Gaines

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Imagine if all the worn-out, untrue, painful chapters of our lives started to quiet, and the beautiful, unique pieces of who we are were to rise. Imagine if the stories we tell brought us back to our true selves, back to one another. Imagine if they spoke of how we loved and lost and tried our best. How we saw it all, even the parts that hurt.

Joanna Gaines' new book, The Stories We Tell, invites us on an authentic and deeply vulnerable journey into her story--and helps shine a light on the beauty of our own--guiding us to release the weights that hold us back so we may live and share our story in truth.

We've all dropped anchor in places that suited us for a time: a city, a perspective, a lie we mistook as truth. This book is an invitation to a kind of life where you know how to hold what you believe--about yourself and the quiet worlds behind the people you pass--with gracious and open hands. To see your story as greater than any past or future thing, but for all the beauty and joy and hope it holds today.

It's an invitation to take stock of the chapters you've lived--the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly--glean what's gold, and carry only that forward. Let it slow your feet and steady your life-in-motion so you can see where you stand today from a new point of view. No longer through weary or uncertain eyes, but a lens brimming with hope.

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"The only way to break free was to rewrite my story. Because something would happen every time my pen stopped: It was like my soul was coming back to my body. Like the deepest parts of me that got knocked around and drowned out by all the crap I let the world convince me about who I was came back to the surface. And what was left was only what was real and true. I was, finally, standing in the fullness of my story. I felt hopeful. I felt full. Our story may crack us open, but it also pieces us back together.

We all have a story to tell. This happens to be mine--every chapter a window into who I am, the journey I'm on, and the season I'm in right now. Because this is my story, maybe you won't always relate, or maybe it will feel like you're looking in a mirror. Whatever we have in common and whatever differences lie between us, I only hope my story can help shine a light on the beauty of yours. That my own soul work will stir something of your own. And that by the time you get to the end of my story, you're also holding the beautiful beginnings of your own.

A story only you can tell. And I hope that you will."
-Joanna

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A Heart That Works

Rob Delaney

New York Times bestseller * The New Yorker Best Books of 2022 * Entertainment Weekly Best Books of 2022 * USA Today Best Books of 2022 * Time 100 Must-Read Books of 2022 * Mother Jones Books We Needed in 2022 * People Fall Must Read * 2022 BuzzFeed Fall Reading pick

A visceral and deeply personal memoir by the star of the Amazon Prime series Catastrophe, about love, loss, and fatherhood.

In 2016, Rob Delaney's one-year-old son, Henry, was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The family had moved from Los Angeles to London with their two young boys when Rob's wife was pregnant with Henry, their third. The move was an adventure and a challenge that would bind them even more tightly together as they navigated the novelty of London, the culture clashes, and the funhouse experience of Rob's fame--thanks to his role as co-creator and co-star of the hit series Catastrophe. Henry's illness was a cataclysm that changed everything about their lives. Amid the hospital routine, surgeries, and brutal treatments, they found a newfound community of nurses, aides, caregivers, and fellow parents contending with the unthinkable. Two years later, Henry died, and his family watched their world fall away to reveal the things that matter most.

A Heart That Works is Delaney's intimate, unflinching, and fiercely funny exploration of what happened - from the harrowing illness to the vivid, bodily impact of grief and the blind, furious rage that followed through to the forceful, unstoppable love that remains. In the madness of his grief, Delaney grapples with the fragile miracle of life, the mysteries of death, and the question of purpose for those left behind.

Delaney's memoir--profound, painful, full of emotion, and bracingly honest--offers solace to those who have faced devastation and shows us how grace may appear even in the darkest times.

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README.txt

Chelsea Manning

An intimate, revealing memoir from one of the most important activists of our time.

While working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq for the United States Army in 2010, Chelsea Manning disclosed more than seven hundred thousand classified military and diplomatic records that she had smuggled out of the country on the memory card of her digital camera. In 2011, she was charged with twenty-two counts related to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military records, and in 2013, she was sentenced to thirty-five years in military prison.

The day after her conviction, Manning declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition, seeking hormones through the federal court system. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison.

In README.txt, Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. Manning details the challenges of her childhood and adolescence as a naive, computer-savvy kid, what drew her to the military, and the fierce pride she has about the work she does. This powerful, observant memoir will stand as one of the definitive testaments of our digital, information-driven age.

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The Lives of Brian

Brian Johnson

Brian Johnson's memoir from growing up in a small town to starting his own band to ultimately replacing Bon Scott, the lead singer of one of the world biggest rock acts, AC/DC. They would record their first album together, the iconic Back in Black, which would become the biggest selling rock album of all time.

Brian Johnson was born to a steelworker and WWII veteran father and an Italian mother, growing up in New Castle Upon Tyne, England, a working-class town. He was musically inclined and sang with the church choir. By the early '70s he performed with the glam rock band Geordie, and they had a couple hits, but it was tough going. So tough that by 1976, they disbanded and Brian turned to a blue-collar life.

Then 1980 changed everything. Bon Scott, the lead singer and lyricist of the Australian rock band AC/DC died at 33. The band auditioned singers, among them Johnson, whom Scott himself had seen perform and raved about. Within days, Johnson was in a studio with the band, working with founding members Angus and Malcolm Young, Cliff Williams, and Phil Rudd, along with producer Mutt Lange.

When the album, Back in Black, was released in July--a mere three months after Johnson had joined the band--it exploded, going on to sell 50 million copies worldwide, and triggering a years-long worldwide tour. It has been declared "the biggest selling hard rock album ever made" and "the best-selling heavy-metal album in history."

The band toured the world for a full year to support the album, changing the face of rock music--and Brian Johnson's life--forever.

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Indivisible

Joel Richard Paul

The story of how Daniel Webster popularized the ideals of American nationalism that helped forge our nation’s identity and inspire Abraham Lincoln to preserve the Union

When the United States was founded in 1776, its citizens didn’t think of themselves as “Americans.” They were New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians. It was decades later that the seeds of American nationalism—identifying with one’s own nation and supporting its broader interests—began to take root. But what kind of nationalism should Americans embrace? The state-focused and racist nationalism of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson? Or the belief that the U.S. Constitution made all Americans one nation, indivisible, which Daniel Webster and others espoused? 

In Indivisible, historian and law professor Joel Richard Paul tells the fascinating story of how Webster, a young New Hampshire attorney turned politician, rose to national prominence through his powerful oratory and unwavering belief in the United States and captured the national imagination. In his speeches, on the floors of the House and Senate, in court, and as Secretary of State, Webster argued that the Constitution was not a compact made by states but an expression of the will of all Americans. As the greatest orator of his age, Webster saw his speeches and writings published widely, and his stirring rhetoric convinced Americans to see themselves differently, as a nation bound together by a government of laws, not parochial interests. As these ideas took root, they influenced future leaders, among them Abraham Lincoln, who drew on them to hold the nation together during the Civil War.

As he did in Without Precedent and Unlikely Allies, Joel Richard Paul has written in Indivisible both a compelling history and a fascinating account of one of the founders of our national perspective.

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Kick Up Some Dust

Bernie Marcus

A candid, rollicking business memoir from the Home Depot cofounder, filled with personal stories, savvy business advice, and timeless lessons for a life well lived

With a foreword by Pitbull

"An extraordinary story. ... [Tells] Marcus's version of the American dream, from tenement to boardroom, homespun into lessons for readers wanting to make it in business or philanthropy." -- Financial Times

The start of Home Depot sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: Two Jews and an Italian decide to build a new kind of hardware store... In 1978, Bernie Marcus's livelihood depended on just such a scenario. Having been fired at the age of forty-nine, he teamed up with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone on a bold new endeavor. Their first day in business was so disastrous that the next morning, Marcus's wife wouldn't let him shave because she didn't want a razor in his hands. But the last laugh would be theirs, as the business partners grew Home Depot into the world's largest home improvement retailer, empowering millions of Americans to "do it yourself."

"Doing it yourself" has been the theme of Bernie Marcus's entire life. By the time he was fifteen, he had held more than a dozen jobs, joined a gang, and worked as a hypnotist in the Catskills. The son of a cabinetmaker and garment worker who survived the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Bernie overcame a hardscrabble upbringing to author one of the best entrepreneurial stories in American history. Today, Home Depot employs 500,000 associates at 2,300 stores and is one of the most recognized and admired companies in the world.

The same energy that made Home Depot successful has helped Bernie give away more than $2 billion and pioneer a new model for philanthropy, transforming millions of lives. There is no single, winning formula for trying to make the world a better place, but Bernie shares what he's learned--that the skills needed to build a Fortune 500 company are the same ones that can help cure cancer, treat veterans with PTSD, and transform autism treatment. And it doesn't take a fortune to make a big difference in your community.

Kick Up Some Dust will inspire you to dream, build, and give--and, maybe, change the world.

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Battle Cry of the Siamese Kitten

Philipp Schott

From Dr. Schott's 30 years in veterinary practice come over 60 heartwarming, funny, and adorable stories about angry pelicans, bug-eyed goldfish, and plenty of cats and dogs

In the third book in this bestselling series, we meet the oddest creatures, from an escaped newt to a baby snow leopard, but the focus is on the dogs and cats that make up most of a pet vet's day and on the wacky and wonderful people who bring them in.

Dr. Schott also pulls back the curtain on what it's really like to be a veterinarian. Do some vet students faint at the sight of blood? (Yes.) Is it easier for vets to bring their own pets in for procedures? (No.) Did the pandemic change veterinary practice? (Yes, and how.)

You will also learn how to bathe a dog, why some rats love cats, why Dr. Schott is afraid of parrots, and a surprising way for a dog to accidentally get drunk. And, of course, you will meet Supercat, the Siamese kitten with the mightiest lungs.

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The New Yorkers : 31 Remarkable People, 400 Years, and the Untold Biography of the World's Greatest City

Sam Roberts

From award-winning New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, the story of the world's most exceptional city, told through 31 little-known yet pivotal inhabitants who helped define it. In Sam Roberts's pulsating history of the world's most exceptional metropolis, greet the city anew through thirty-one unique New Yorkers you've probably never heard of-just in time for the city's 400th birthday. The New Yorkers introduces the first woman to appear nude in a motion picture, becoming the face of Civic Fame as Miss Manhattan; the couple whose soirée ended the Gilded Age with an embarrassing bang; and the husband and wife who invented the modern celebrity talk show. It reveals the victim of the city's first recorded murder in the seventeenth century and the high school dropout who slashed crime rates in the twentieth. The notorious mobster who was imperiously banished from the city and the woman who successfully sued a bus company for racial discrimination a century before Rosa Parks. Some deserved monuments, but their grandeur was overlooked or forgotten. Others shepherded the city through its perpetual evolution, but discreetly. Virtually all have vanished into New York's uncombed history. The New Yorkers is a living biography of the world's greatest city, and no one knows New York better than Sam Roberts-or is better at bringing its history to life.
Descriptive content provided by Syndetics™, a ProQuest® service.

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Like a Rolling Stone

Jann S. Wenner

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER



Rolling Stone founder, co-editor, and publisher Jann Wenner offers a "touchingly honest" and "wonderfully deep" memoir from the beating heart of classic rock and roll (Bruce Springsteen).

Jann Wenner has been called by his peers "the greatest editor of his generation."



His deeply personal memoir vividly describes and brings you inside the music, the politics, and the lifestyle of a generation, an epoch of cultural change that swept America and beyond. The age of rock and roll in an era of consequence, what will be considered one of the great watersheds in modern history. Wenner writes with the clarity of a journalist and an essayist. He takes us into the life and work of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Bono, and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few. He was instrumental in the careers of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Annie Leibovitz. His journey took him to the Oval Office with his legendary interviews with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, leaders to whom Rolling Stone gave its historic, full-throated backing. From Jerry Garcia to the Dalai Lama, Aretha Franklin to Greta Thunberg, the people Wenner chose to be seen and heard in the pages of Rolling Stone tried to change American culture, values, and morality.



Like a Rolling Stone is a beautifully written portrait of one man's life, and the life of his generation.


 

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The Long Alliance

Gabriel Debenedetti

New York Magazine national correspondent Gabriel Debenedetti reveals an inside look at the historically close, complicated, occasionally co-dependent, and at-times uncertain relationship between Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Delving far deeper than the simplistic “bromance” narrative that’s long held the public eye, The Long Alliance reveals the past, present, and future of the unusual partnership, detailing its development, its twists and turns, its ruptures and reunions, and its path to this pivotal moment for each man’s legacy.

The true story of this relationship, from 2003 into 2022, is significantly more layered and consequential than is widely understood. The original mismatch between the veteran Washington traditionalist and the once-in-a-generation outsider has transformed repeatedly in ways that have molded not just four different presidential campaigns and two different political parties, but also wars, a devastating near-depression, movements for social equality, and the fight for the future of American democracy. The bond between them has been, at various times over the past two decades, tense, affectionate, nonexistent, and ironclad — but it has always been surprising. Now it is shaping a second presidential administration, and the future of the world as we know it.

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What the Children Told Us

Tim Spofford

Does racial discrimination harm Black children's sense of self?

The Doll Test illuminated its devastating toll.

Dr. Kenneth Clark visited rundown and under-resourced segregated schools across America, presenting Black children with two dolls: a white one with hair painted yellow and a brown one with hair painted black. "Give me the doll you like to play with," he said. "Give me the doll that is a nice doll." The psychological experiment Kenneth developed with his wife, Mamie, designed to measure how segregation affected Black children's perception of themselves and other Black people, was enlightening—and horrifying. Over and over again, the young children—some not yet five years old—selected the white doll as preferable, and the brown doll as "bad." Some children even denied their race. "Yes," said brown-skinned Joan W., age six, when questioned about her affection for the light-skinned doll. "I would like to be white."

What the Children Told Us is the story of the towering intellectual and emotional partnership between two Black scholars who highlighted the psychological effects of racial segregation. The Clarks' story is one of courage, love, and an unfailing belief that Black children deserved better than what society was prepared to give them, and their unrelenting activism played a critical role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. The Clarks' decades of impassioned advocacy, their inspiring marriage, and their enduring work shines a light on the power of passion in an unjust world.

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Bridge to the Sun

Bruce Henderson

One of the last, great untold stories of World War II—kept hidden for decades—even after most of the World War II records were declassified in 1972, many of the files remained untouched in various archives—a gripping true tale of courage and adventure from Bruce Henderson, master storyteller, historian, and New York Times best-selling author of Sons and Soldiers—the saga of the Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater, in Burma, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, with their families back home in America, under U.S. Executive Order 9066, held behind barbed wire in government internment camps.

After Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was desperate to find Americans who spoke Japanese to serve in the Pacific war. They soon turned to the Nisei—first-generation U.S. citizens whose parents were immigrants from Japan. Eager to prove their loyalty to America, several thousand Nisei—many of them volunteering from the internment camps where they were being held behind barbed wire—were selected by the Army for top-secret training, then were rushed to the Pacific theater. Highly valued as expert translators and interrogators, these Japanese American soldiers operated in elite intelligence teams alongside Army infantrymen and Marines on the front lines of the Pacific war, from Iwo Jima to Burma, from the Solomons to Okinawa.

Henderson reveals, in riveting detail, the harrowing untold story of the Nisei and their major contributions in the war of the Pacific, through six Japanese American soldiers. After the war, these soldiers became translators and interrogators for war crime trials, and later helped to rebuild Japan as a modern democracy and a pivotal U.S. ally.

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The Yank: The True Story of a Former US Marine in the Irish Republican Army

John Crawley

"1975: A young Irish-American man joins an elite US Marine unit to get the most intensive military training possible -- then joins the Irish Republican Army, during the days of some of the bloodiest fighting ever in the Irish-British conflict . . . In a powerful, brutally honest, no-holds-barred recounting of his experience, John Crawley details, first, the grueling challenges of his Marine Corps training, then how he put his hard-earned munitions and demolitions skills to use back in Ireland in service of the Provos. It is a story that will see him running guns with notorious American mobster -- and secret IRA fundraiser -- Whitey Bulger; running, under cover of night, from safe house to safe house in the Irish countryside, one step ahead of British troops; being captured, imprisoned, and being part of a mass escape attempt; fending off a recruitment offer from the CIA; and being one of the masterminds behind a campaign to take out London's electrical system. Along the way, Crawley is blisteringly candid about the memorable people he worked with, including behind-the-scenes portrayals of revered IRA leader Martin McGuinness, and of the psychopathic Whitey Bulger, as well as others in the Boston IRA support network. There are vivid portraits of colleagues and enemies, and Crawley is unflinching in his commentary on IRA leadership and their tactics, both military and political. Through it all comes the steadfast voice of a man on a mission, providing an evocative, detailed, and passionate recounting of where that mission led him and why -- as well as why, to this day, he remains ready to serve." -- Publisher description.

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A Place in the World

Frances Mayes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A lyrical and evocative collection of personal stories from the author of Under the Tuscan Sun, in which the queen of wanderlust reflects on the comforts of home.

Veranda Book Club Pick • “A soulful meditation on ‘what home means, how it hooks the past and pushes into the future’ . . . spellbinding.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Though Frances Mayes is known for her travels, she has always sought a sense of home wherever she goes. In this poetic testament to the power of place in our lives, Mayes reflects on the idea of home, from the earliest imprint of four walls to the startling discoveries of feeling the strange ease of homes abroad, friends’ homes, and even momentary homes that spark desires for other lives. Her musings are all the more poignant after so many have spent their long pandemic months at home. From her travels across Italy—Tuscany, of course, but also Venice and Capri—to the American South, France, and Mexico, Mayes examines the connective tissue among them through the homes she’s inhabited.
 
A Place in the World explores Mayes’s passion and obsessions with houses and the things that inhabit them—old books, rich food, beloved friends, transportive art. The indelible marks each refuge has left on her and how each home influenced the next serve as the foundations of its chapters.

Written in Mayes’s signature intimate style, A Place in the World captures the adventure of moving on while seeking comfort in the cornerstone closest to all of us—home.

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Me and Paul

Willie Nelson

“I’ve got this song that begs to be a book and a book that begs to read like a song--a long, romping ballad of sweetness and scandal bridging seven decades of friendship . . .”

Immortalized in Willie Nelson’s road song “Me and Paul,” Paul English was the towering figure who for 70 years acted as Willie’s drummer, bodyguard, accountant, partner in crime, and right-hand man.

Together, the two men roamed the country, putting on shows, getting into a few scrapes, raising money for good causes, and bringing the joy of their music to fans worldwide. Stories of Willie and Paul’s misadventures became legendary, but many have gone untold--until now.

Set against the backdrop of the exploding Americana music scene and told in Willie’s inimitable, colorful style, Me and Paul follows the two performers through their decades-long careers.

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Tears of My Mother

Wendy Osefo

When star of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Potomac Dr. Wendy Osefo was growing up, her mother was her everything. But when she became a mother herself, everything changed. In this “exquisitely-drawn portrait of the intense bond that only a mother can have with a daughter” (Katie Haufner, author of Mother Daughter Me), Wendy explores how her Nigerian upbringing has affected her life, her success, and her role as a parent.

Wendy Osefo’s mother, Iyom Susan Okuzu, arrived in the United States from Nigeria with two things: a single suitcase and the fierce determination to make a better life for herself and her future family. And she succeeded: starting out working in a fast-food restaurant and ultimately becoming the director of nursing at a major metropolitan hospital.

While Susan may have taken pride in triumphing over every financial and emotional challenge, in Nigerian culture, a parent is only as successful as his or her children. And so her daughter, with gratitude and appreciation for her mother’s sacrifices, worked hard to meet every demand Susan made of her. With four advanced degrees and a position at Johns Hopkins University as a professor—as well as being a highly sought-after political commentator, a cherished wife, and a loving mother of three—Dr. Wendy has given her mother bragging rights for life. But at what cost to herself?

In Tears of My Mother, the star of The Real Housewives of Potomac describes growing up as a first-generation American, balancing two distinct cultures. And she takes a critical look at the paradox of her mother’s parenting: approval conditioned by achievement. As a teenager, Wendy struggled to carve out her own identity while still walking the narrow path of her mother’s expectations. Unwavering family loyalty and obedience gave Wendy the road map to making it in America, but it also drove a wedge between mother and daughter, never more so than when she began to build her own family.

“A love letter to Dr. Osefo’s mother and first-generation immigrants all across America” (Library Journal), this book is for anyone who has faced conflict in the mother-daughter relationship or wondered how much of their own upbringing they want to pass on to the next generation.

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Boldly Go

William Shatner

The beloved star of Star Trek, recent space traveler, and living legend William Shatner reflects on the interconnectivity of all things, our fragile bond with nature, and the joy that comes from exploration in this inspiring, revelatory, and exhilarating collection of essays.

Long before Gene Roddenberry put him on a starship to explore the galaxy, long before he actually did venture to space, William Shatner was gripped by his own quest for knowledge and meaning. Though his eventful life has been nothing short of extraordinary, Shatner is still never so thrilled as when he experiences something that inspires him to simply say, “Wow.”

Within these affecting, entertaining, and informative essays, he demonstrates that astonishing possibilities and true wonder are all around us. By revealing stories of his life—some delightful, others tragic—Shatner reflects on what he has learned along the way to his ninth decade and how important it is to apply the joy of exploration to our own lives. Insightful, irreverent, and with his signature wit and dramatic flair, Boldly Go is an unputdownable celebration of all that our miraculous universe holds for us.

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Where the Children Take Us

Zain E. Asher

In this spellbinding memoir, popular CNN anchor Zain E. Asher pays tribute to her mother's strength and determination to raise four successful children in the shadow of tragedy.

Awaiting the return of her husband and young son from a road trip, Obiajulu Ejiofor receives shattering news. There's been a fatal car crash, and one of them is dead.

In Where the Children Take Us, Obiajulu's daughter, Zain E. Asher, tells the story of her mother's harrowing fight to raise four children as a widowed immigrant in South London. There is tragedy in this tale, but it is not a tragedy. Drawing on tough-love parenting strategies, Obiajulu teaches her sons and daughters to overcome the daily pressures of poverty, crime and prejudice--and much more. With her relentless support, the children exceed all expectations--becoming a CNN anchor, an Oscar-nominated actor--Asher's older brother Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)--a medical doctor, and a thriving entrepreneur.

The generations-old Nigerian parenting techniques that lead to the family's salvation were born in the village where young Obiajulu and Arinze meet with their country on the brink of war. Together, they emigrate to London in the 1970s to escape the violence, but soon confront a different set of challenges in the West.

When grief threatens to engulf her fractured family after the accident, Obiajulu, suddenly a single mother in a foreign land, refuses to accept defeat. As her children veer down the wrong path, she instills a family book club with Western literary classics, testing their resolve and challenging their deeper understanding. Desperate for inspiration, she plasters newspaper clippings of Black success stories on the walls and hunts for overachieving neighbors to serve as role models, all while running Shakespeare theatre lines with her son and finishing homework into the early morning with Zain. When distractions persist, she literally cuts the TV cord and installs a residential pay phone.

The story of a woman who survived genocide, famine, poverty, and crushing grief to rise from war torn Africa to the streets of South London and eventually the drawing rooms of Buckingham Palace, Where the Children Take Us is an unforgettable portrait of strength, tenacity, love, and perseverance embodied in one towering woman.

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The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures

Paul Fischer

A “spellbinding, thriller-like” (Shelf Awareness) history about the invention of the motion picture and the mysterious, forgotten man behind it—detailing his life, work, disappearance, and legacy.

The year is 1888, and Louis Le Prince is finally testing his “taker” or “receiver” device for his family on the front lawn. The device is meant to capture ten to twelve images per second on film, creating a reproduction of reality that can be replayed as many times as desired. In an otherwise separate and detached world, occurrences from one end of the globe could now be viewable with only a few days delay on the other side of the world. No human experience—from the most mundane to the most momentous—would need to be lost to history.

In 1890, Le Prince was granted patents in four countries ahead of other inventors who were rushing to accomplish the same task. But just weeks before unveiling his invention to the world, he mysteriously disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. Three and half years later, Thomas Edison, Le Prince’s rival, made the device public, claiming to have invented it himself. And the man who had dedicated his life to preserving memories was himself lost to history—until now.

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain and presents a “passionate, detailed defense of Louis Le Prince…unfurled with all the cliffhangers and red herrings of a scripted melodrama” (The New York Times Book Review). This “fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) presents the never-before-told history of the motion picture and sheds light on the unsolved mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance.

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Still Alright

Kenny Loggins

You know Kenny Loggins for his megahit soundtrack themes and chart-topping collaborations. Now you can know him through the intimate stories behind his five-decade career as a legendary songwriter and pop icon.



In a remarkable career, Kenny Loggins has rocked stages worldwide, released ten platinum albums, and landed hits all over the Billboard charts. His place in music history is marked by a unique gift for collaboration combined with the vision to evolve, adapt, and persevere in an industry that loves to eat its own. Loggins served as a pivotal figure in the folk-rock movement of the early '70s when he paired with former Buffalo Springfield member Jim Messina, recruited Stevie Nicks for the classic duet "Whenever I Call You 'Friend,'" then pivoted to smooth rock in teaming up with Michael McDonald on their back-to-back Grammy-winning hits "What a Fool Believes" and "This Is It" (a seminal moment in the history of what would come to be known as yacht rock). In the '80s, Loggins became the king of soundtracks with hit recordings for Caddyshack, Footloose, and Top Gun; and a bona fide global superstar singing alongside Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson on "We Are the World."



In Still Alright, Kenny Loggins gives fans a candid and entertaining perspective on his life and career as one of the most noteworthy musicians of the 1970s and '80s. He provides an abundance of compelling, insightful, and terrifically amusing behind-the-scenes tales. Loggins draws readers back to the musical eras they've loved, as well as addressing the challenges and obstacles of his life and work--including two marriages that ended in divorce, a difficult but motivating relationship with the older brother for which "Danny's Song" is named, struggles with his addiction to benzodiazepines, and the revelations of turning seventy and looking back at everything that has shaped his music--and coming to terms with his rock-star persona and his true self.

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The Summer Friend

Charles McGrath

Alive with the intoxicating magic of summer in New England, former editor of the New York Times Book Review Charles McGrath’s evocative memoir looks back at that sun-soaked season, at family, youth, and a singular bond made at a time when he thought he was beyond making friends.

“To read Chip McGrath’s gentle, elegant memoir … is to lose yourself in your own past summers, especially the ones of your youth, when you imagined there’d be an infinite number of them, and also friends to share those summers with. That both turn out to be numbered makes this book positively ache with beauty and loss.” —Richard Russo


It was early evening and a new acquaintance had come to retrieve his daughter from a play date. Instead of driving up in a minivan, he arrived by water, tacking his sailboat smartly across a squiggly channel in the marsh, throwing a rope overboard, and zipping back home, his gleeful daughter riding in the wake. Who knew you could do such a thing? And how could you resist befriending a man such as that?

Over the course of this rich memoir, McGrath recalls with a gimlet eye the pleasures of summers past: amateur lobstering, 9-hole golf, family costume charades, bridge-jumping, and a friendship forged between two men from different backgrounds who came together late in life.

Recounting the vagaries of summer with such precision and warmth-- peeling long strips of sunburnt skin from your shoulder as if “shuffling off your own cocoon,” the outdoor shower curtain blowing open in the breeze, an M80 firework in the mailbox--The Summer Friend is simultaneously a potent evocation of the rhythms and rituals of summer and a stirring remembrance of a friend found and then lost.

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Rebel

Rahaf Mohammed

In January 2019, then 18-year-old Saudi woman Rahaf Mohammed escaped from her family while holidaying in Kuwait.

She was fleeing systematic abuse of her human rights as a woman growing up in Saudi Arabia and, specifically, her family's threats to kill her because she desired the freedoms Western women take for granted.

She boarded a plane bound for Bangkok, en route to Australia where she intended to seek asylum. But on her arrival the Thai authorities, acting on the instructions of Saudi officials, detained Rahaf with the aim of returning her to her family. Knowing this would mean her death, Rahaf barricaded herself in an airport hotel room and appealed for help through social media, creating a Twitter storm and capturing the attention of government leaders, human rights advocates and media around the world.

Rahaf was eventually taken under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and granted refugee status. When Australian authorities failed to respond with the urgency the situation required, she was granted asylum in Canada. Seven days after her ordeal began, she arrived in Toronto to begin a new life.

Rebel is a passionate story by a woman who refused to allow a system to define who she was and what she could be. It shines a light on the rampant and dangerous inequalities that persist in Saudi society, and inspires women everywhere to dream of a better future for themselves, and their daughters.


Praise for Rebel:

'Rebel makes it clear that the cultural honour/shame dynamic and the male guardianship system continue to weigh heavily on the daily lives of Saudi women ... Rahaf ultimately fled the Kingdom, under cover of darkness by the skin of her teeth, in order to spread her wings.' - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel

'The astonishing story of how one incredibly courageous teenager took on Saudi Arabia's archaic male guardianship system and won! An inspiring read that will leave you shaking with fury, and then cheering in solidarity.' - Sophie McNeill, Human Rights Watch

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Knocking Myself Up

Michelle Tea

From PEN/America Award winner, 2021 Guggenheim fellow, and beloved literary and tarot icon Michelle Tea, the hilarious, powerfully written, taboo-breaking story of her journey to pregnancy and motherhood as a 40 year-old, queer, uninsured woman

Written in intimate, gleefully TMI prose, Knocking Myself Up is the irreverent account of Tea’s route to parenthood—with a group of ride-or-die friends, a generous drag queen, and a whole lot of can-do pluck. Along the way she falls in love with a wholesome genderqueer a decade her junior, attempts biohacking herself a baby with black market fertility meds (and magicking herself an offspring with witch-enchanted honey), learns her eggs are busted, and enters the Fertility Industrial Complex in order to carry her younger lover’s baby.

With the signature sharp wit and wild heart that have made her a favorite to so many readers, Tea guides us through the maze of medical procedures, frustrations and astonishments on the path to getting pregnant, wryly critiquing some of the systems that facilitate that choice (“a great, punk, daredevil thing to do”). In Knocking Myself Up, Tea has crafted a deeply entertaining and profound memoir, a testament to the power of love and family-making, however complex our lives may be, to transform and enrich us.

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Stepping Back from the Ledge

Laura Trujillo

In this “seismically moving memoir” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice), one woman asks a seemingly impossible question in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide: How do you mourn a loved one as you repair the injuries they inflicted?
 
“Laura Trujillo resurfaces from the dark ‘sub-basement’ of despair with assurances for us all: There is hope. There is healing. Always, there is love. This book will save lives.”—Connie Schultz, author of The Daughters of Erietown

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker

Laura Trujillo had been close to her mother for most of her adult life, raising her four children within a few miles of their beloved grandmother’s Phoenix home. But just three months after moving her young family to Cincinnati for a new job, Laura receives shocking news: Her mother had taken her own life—by jumping off a ledge into the Grand Canyon, a place Laura knew her mother had always loved. 

Laura and her mother had shared a profound and special bond, yet each had also kept from the other the deepest truths about their lives. As an adult, Laura finally broke her silence about the sexual abuse she had suffered as a teenager at the hands of her stepfather—a secret Laura had buried to protect her mother. After her mother’s death, Laura embarks on an emotional odyssey, searching for clues that could explain the depression, intergenerational trauma, and shared heartbreaks in her family. When she returns to the Grand Canyon, it becomes an oasis that nurtures Laura’s search for redemption and peace. As Laura wrestles with her feelings, she forges a new path forward. 

Moving and intimate, powerfully told, Stepping Back from the Ledge is a remarkable exploration of the bond between a mother and daughter, and of the hope that can come from facing the truth.

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Proving Ground

Kathy Kleiman

For fans of Code Girls and Hidden Figures, PROVING GROUND is the untold, World War II-era story of the six American women who programmed the world's first modern computer.

After the end of World War II, top-secret research continued across the United States as engineers and programmers rushed to complete their confidential assignments. Among them were six pioneering women, tasked with figuring out how to program the world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer -- a machine built to calculate a single ballistic trajectory in twenty seconds rather than forty hours by human hand -- even though there was no instruction codes or programming languages in existence. But their story, never told to the reporters and scientists who thronged the huge computer after it became public, was lost.

Kathy Kleiman, through meticulous research and vivid prose, brings these women back to life, and back into the historical record. For more than two decades, she met with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers, pored over documentation and images, and recorded extensive oral histories with the women about their work. She found stories that had been relegated and dismissed by even computer history experts, who had assumed the women in the old black-and-white pictures with ENIAC were nothing more than models. PROVING GROUND is a character-driven narrative that restores these women to their rightful place as technological revolutionaries. As the tech world continues to struggle with gender imbalance and its far-reaching consequences, the story of the ENIAC Programmers' groundbreaking work is more urgently necessary than ever before, and PROVING GROUND is the celebration they deserve.

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The Spy Who Knew Too Much

Howard Blum

“Howard Blum writes history books that read like thrillers.”—New York Times

A retired spy gets back into the game to solve a perplexing case—and reconcile with his daughter, a CIA officer who married into the very family that derailed his own CIA career—in this compulsive true-life tale of vindication and redemption, filled with drama, intrigue, and mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Goodnight, It’s a real-life thriller whose stunning conclusion will make headline news. 

On a sunlit morning in September 1978, a sloop drifts aimlessly across the Chesapeake Bay. The cabin reveals signs of a struggle, and “classified” documents, live 9 mm cartridges, and a top-secret “burst” satellite communications transmitter are discovered aboard. But where is the boat’s owner, former CIA officer John Paisley? 

One man may hold the key to finding out. Tennent “Pete” Bagley was once a rising star in America’s spy aristocracy, and many expected he’d eventually become CIA director. But the star that burned so brightly exploded when Bagley—who suspected a mole had burrowed deep into the agency’s core—was believed himself to be the mole. After a year-long investigation, Bagley was finally exonerated, but the accusations tarnished his reputation and tainted his career. 

When Bagley’s daughter Christina, a CIA analyst, married another intelligence officer who was the son of the man who had played a key role in the investigation into Bagley, it caused a painful rift between the two. But then came Paisley’s strange death. A murder? Suicide? Or something else? Pete, now a retired spy, launches his own investigation that takes him deep into his own past and his own longtime hunt for a mole. What follows is a relentless pursuit to solve a spy story—and an inspiring tale of a man reclaiming his reputation and his family. It’s a very personal quest that leads to a shocking conclusion.

The Spy Who Knew Too Much includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

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The Scenic Route

Leigh Merryday Porch

Reflections on autism, parenting, and embracing destinations unknown.

In The Scenic Route, Leigh Merryday Porch offers insight into how parents of children with autism can redefine hope in a world that often has a narrow view of what hope is supposed to look like for their kids. As an educator and expert on autism spectrum disorders as well as the mother of a son who is autistic, Porch knows well the pressure parents of special needs children feel to overcome any and all challenges their children face. But not all disabilities result in heartwarming viral stories. According to Porch, we must write our own stories about what is possible for our kids and love them just as they are.

A chronicle of one family’s journey from the shock and uncertainty of a severe autism diagnosis to acceptance and advocacy, in this beautifully written book Porch shares the lessons she has learned about charting your own course. From learning to cope with sleepless, worry-filled nights to asking friends and family for the help and support you actually need, she offers readers a road map for helping our children thrive while still taking the time to stop and enjoy the beauty in life’s unforeseen detours.

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The Facemaker

Lindsey Fitzharris

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

The poignant story of the visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War's injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind's military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. The war's new weaponry, from tanks to shrapnel, enabled slaughter on an industrial scale, and given the nature of trench warfare, thousands of soldiers sustained facial injuries. Medical advances meant that more survived their wounds than ever before, yet disfigured soldiers did not receive the hero's welcome they deserved.

In The Facemaker, award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the astonishing story of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to restoring the faces - and the identities - of a brutalized generation. Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world's first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction in Sidcup, south-east England. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of doctors, nurses and artists whose task was to recreate what had been torn apart. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits.

Meticulously researched and grippingly told, The Facemaker places Gillies's ingenious surgical innovations alongside the poignant stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine and art can merge, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

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The Man Who Could Move Clouds

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

 

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER From the bestselling author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.

“Rojas Contreras reacquaints herself with her family’s past, weaving their stories with personal narrative, unraveling legacies of violence, machismo and colonialism… In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.”—New York Times Book Review 

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.”

In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often amusing guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

 

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The Fighting Soul: On the Road with Bernie Sanders

Ari Rabin-Havt

An unparalleled and intimate account of Bernie Sanders from one of his most trusted confidants.

Bernie Sanders inspires fervent love and, even among his enemies, a measure of grudging respect—yet, curiously, we know little about who the man really is, with Sanders deliberately keeping the focus on his policies.

Now, with The Fighting Soul, Ari Rabin-Havt takes us where no profiles or televised interviews have been able to go. As a close advisor and deputy campaign manager on Sanders’s most recent—and likely last—presidential campaign, the tireless Rabin-Havt spent more hours between 2017 and 2020 with the Vermont senator than anyone else. Traveling the country for rallies and to support striking workers, the two visited thirty-six states, drove tens of thousands of miles, and ate in countless chain restaurants. One result was a meteoric and galvanizing presidential campaign. Another is The Fighting Soul, an unforgettable chronicle of life on the road with Sanders and the first in-depth portrait of this fiercely independent, and famously private, left-wing firebrand.

Sanders’s second bid for the presidency began in Rabin-Havt’s apartment in Washington DC in January 2018. From there, Rabin-Havt offers a behind-the-scenes account of Sanders’s run, including his heart attack in Las Vegas, his notorious debate encounter with fellow-progressive Elizabeth Warren, and a momentous conversation between Sanders and Barack Obama that has never been reported before. At every step, Rabin-Havt shows us Bernie Sanders when the cameras turn off: his dry sense of humor; his views of his young supporters; the pivotal role his wife, Jane, plays in every decision he makes; and more. Delving into Sanders’s life and career, with moving glimpses of his childhood in Brooklyn and first forays into politics in Burlington, Rabin-Havt discloses that Sanders is shocked by his ascent: “Ari, my parents would tell me I was crazy if I told them I would become a senator, much less could become president of the United States.”

Though his campaign ended in abrupt and unexpected defeat, Sanders has pushed the Democratic Party to the left and helped remake American politics—as Rabin-Havt suggests, he has done more to shape our history than anyone else who has not reached the White House. Revelatory and heartfelt, The Fighting Soul depicts the rare politician motivated by principle, not power.

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The School that Escaped the Nazis

Deborah Cadbury

The extraordinary true story of a courageous school principal who saw the dangers of Nazi Germany and took drastic steps to save those in harm’s way
 
In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England.
 
As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives.
 
Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.

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Magnificent Rebels

Andrea Wulf

'A witty, gossipy, sparkling history, full of bright jewels of anecdote... Magnificent Rebels is a triumph' THE TIMES, Book of the Week

'Extraordinary... A thrilling intellectual history that reads like a racy, intelligent novel, with a cast of unforgettable characters' SUNDAY TIMES

'Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession' SPECTATOR

'A thrilling page-turner, by turns comical & tragic... My book of the year so far' TOM HOLLAND

'Elegantly written, deeply researched and totally gripping' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution's rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics.

Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.We're still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet. This extraordinary group of friends changed our world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas.

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Bully Market

Jamie Fiore Higgins

A rare, riveting insider’s account on Wall Street—an updated Liar’s Poker—where greed coupled with misogyny and discrimination enforces a culture of exclusion in the upper echelons of Goldman Sachs

Jamie Fiore Higgins became one of the few women at the highest ranks of Goldman Sachs. Spurred on by the obligation she felt to her working-class immigrant family, she rose through the ranks and saw it all: out-of-control, lavish parties flowing with never-ending drinks; affairs flouted in the office; rampant drug use; and most pervasively, a discriminatory culture that seemed designed to hold back the few women and people of color employed at the company.

Despite Goldman Sachs having the right talking points and statistics, Fiore Higgins soon realized that these provided a veneer to cover up what she found to be an abusive culture. Her account is one filled with shocking stories of harassment and jaw-dropping tales of exclusionary behavior: when she was told she only got promoted because she is a woman; when her coworkers mooed at her after she pumped for her fourth child, defying the superior who had advised her not to breastfeed; or when a male boss used a racial epithet in front of her, other colleagues, and clients without any repercussions.

Bully Market sounds the alarm on the culture of finance and corporate America, while offering clear, actionable ideas for creating a fairer workplace. Both a revealing, extraordinary look at the industry and a top Wall Streeter’s explosive personal story, Bully Market is an essential account of one woman’s experience in a flawed system that speaks to the challenge and urgency for change.

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Revenge

Tom Bower

This instant #1 internationally bestselling “explosive tell-all” (Daily Express, London) reveals the inside story about Meghan Markle’s journey from minor actress and attempted activist to the woman powerful enough to drive a wedge within the British Royal Family.

After a childhood spent on Hollywood film sets, Meghan Markle fought hard for stardom. But even when she landed her breakthrough role on Suits, her dream of worldwide celebrity remained elusive until she met the man who would change her life—Prince Harry. Their whirlwind romance culminated with Meghan’s ultimate fairy tale ending: their 2018 wedding at Windsor Castle. Finally, the world was her stage.

It seemed that the dizzying success of the wedding between the new Duke and Duchess of Sussex marked the beginning of a fresh era for the British Royal Family. Yet, within one tumultuous year, the dream became a nightmare. In the aftermath of the infamous Megxit split and their Oprah Winfrey interview, the increasingly toxic relationship between the two Windsor sides seemed forever ruptured.

What does the future hold for Meghan and Harry? And can the rest of the Windsors restore their reputation?

Now, with extensive research and exclusive insider interviews, Britain’s leading investigative biographer unravels the tangled web of courtroom drama, courtier politics, and thwarted childhood dreams to reveal this “bombshell” (The Mirror, London) story of love, betrayal, secrets, deceit, and revenge.

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Confidence Man

Maggie Haberman

 

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller.

“This is the book Trump fears most.” - Axios

“Will be a primary source about the most vexing president in American history for years to come.” - Joe Klein, The New York Times

"A uniquely illuminating portrait." - Sean Wilentz, The Washington Post

“[A] monumental look at Donald Trump and his presidency.” — David Shribman, Los Angeles Times

From the Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has defined Donald J. Trump's presidency like no other journalist, Confidence Man is a magnificent and disturbing reckoning that chronicles his life and its meaning from his rise in New York City to his tortured post-presidency.

Few journalists working today have covered Donald Trump more extensively than Maggie Haberman. And few understand him and his motivations better. Now, demonstrating her majestic command of this story, Haberman reveals in full the depth of her understanding of the 45th president himself, and of what the Trump phenomenon means.

Interviews with hundreds of sources and numerous interviews over the years with Trump himself portray a complicated and often contradictory historical figure. Capable of kindness but relying on casual cruelty as it suits his purposes.  Pugnacious. Insecure. Lonely. Vindictive. Menacing. Smarter than his critics contend and colder and more calculating than his allies believe. A man who embedded himself in popular culture, galvanizing support for a run for high office that he began preliminary spadework for 30 years ago, to ultimately become a president who pushed American democracy to the brink.

The through-line of Trump’s life and his presidency is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests.    

Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage. It is also about a series of relentlessly transactional relationships. The ones that shaped him most were with girlfriends and wives, with Roy Cohn, with George Steinbrenner, with Mike Tyson and Don King and Roger Stone, with city and state politicians like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani, with business partners, with prosecutors, with the media, and with the employees who toiled inside what they commonly called amongst themselves the “Trump Disorganization.”  

That world informed the one that Trump tried to recreate while in the White House. All of Trump’s behavior as President had echoes in what came before.  In this revelatory and newsmaking book, Haberman brings together the events of his life into a single mesmerizing work. It is the definitive account of one of the most norms-shattering and consequential eras in American political history.

 

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The Daughter of Auschwitz

Tova Friedman

*INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*



WITH A FOREWORD BY SIR BEN KINGSLEY



A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.



"I am a survivor. That comes with a survivor's obligation to represent one and half million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. They cannot speak. So I must speak on their behalf."



Tova Friedman was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was four when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labour camp, and almost six when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck and sent to Auschwitz II, also known as the Birkenau extermination camp, while her father was transported to Dachau.



During six months of incarceration in Birkenau, Tova witnessed atrocities that she could never forget, and experienced numerous escapes from death. She is one of a handful of Jews to have entered a gas chamber and lived to tell the tale.



As Nazi killing squads roamed Birkenau before abandoning the camp in January 1945, Tova and her mother hid among corpses. After being liberated by the Russians they made their way back to their hometown in Poland. Eventually Tova's father tracked them down and the family was reunited.



In The Daughter of Auschwitz, Tova immortalizes what she saw, to keep the story of the Holocaust alive, at a time when it's in danger of fading from memory. She has used those memories that have shaped her life to honour the victims. Written with award-winning former war reporter Malcolm Brabant, this is an extremely important book. Brabant's meticulous research has helped Tova recall her experiences in searing detail. Together they have painstakingly recreated Tova's extraordinary story about the world's worst ever crime.

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Becoming FDR

Jonathan Darman

“An illuminating account of how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s struggles with polio steeled him for the great struggles of the Depression and of World War II.”—Jon Meacham

“A valuable book for anyone who wants to know how adversity shapes character. By understanding how FDR became a deeper and more empathetic person, we can nurture those traits in ourselves and learn from the challenges we all face.”—Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci

In popular memory, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the quintessential political “natural.” Born in 1882 to a wealthy, influential family and blessed with an abundance of charm and charisma, he seemed destined for high office. Yet for all his gifts, the young Roosevelt nonetheless lacked depth, empathy, and an ability to think strategically. Those qualities, so essential to his success as president, were skills he acquired during his seven-year journey through illness and recovery. 

Becoming FDR traces the riveting story of the struggle that forged Roosevelt’s character and political ascent. Soon after contracting polio in 1921 at the age of thirty-nine, the former failed vice-presidential candidate was left paralyzed from the waist down. He spent much of the next decade trying to rehabilitate his body and adapt to the stark new reality of his life. By the time he reemerged on the national stage in 1928 as the Democratic candidate for governor of New York, his character and his abilities had been transformed. He had become compassionate and shrewd by necessity, tailoring his speeches to inspire listeners and to reach them through a new medium—radio. Suffering cemented his bond with those he once famously called “the forgotten man.” Most crucially, he had discovered how to find hope in a seemingly hopeless situation—a skill that he employed to motivate Americans through the Great Depression and World War II. The polio years were transformative, too, for the marriage of Franklin and Eleanor, and for Eleanor herself, who became, at first reluctantly, her husband's surrogate at public events, and who grew to become a political and humanitarian force in her own right.
 
Tracing the physical, political, and personal evolution of the iconic president, Becoming FDR shows how adversity can lead to greatness, and to the power to remake the world.

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Not My First Rodeo

Kristi Noem

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem tells her rough and tumble story of growing up on a ranch, and how a blessed life of true grit taught her how to lead.

“We don’t complain about things, Kristi. We fix them.” Taking her father’s words to heart, South Dakota's first woman governor Kristi Noem shares heartfelt – and heartbreaking – lessons on making things right in the world, from her childhood on a farm in the vastness of rural America, to the marbled halls of Congress, to the national spotlight amid a global pandemic.

From humorous barnyard battles with feisty cattle and rodeo horses, to the tragic and untimely death of her larger-than-life father, to her decision to her decision to return and run the farm and ranch with her family, Noem invites readers into a life defined by work, faith, and helping others. Noem's reflections are offered in the familiar, unvarnished voice of a woman who later defied Washington’s most powerful politicians and led the people of her small, hardscrabble state through natural disasters, the pain of a global pandemic, and the fear and turmoil that gripped the nation after.
 
While filled with plenty of candid observations and refreshingly frank assessments of the country's leading figures, the memoir's most powerful moments nevertheless come from honest glimpses into marriage, motherhood, and leadership in an unpredictable time. 
 
Far from a book about politics, Not My First Rodeo is the story of a life lived so far – with characters as richly textured as the Black Hills, and reflections as gentle and powerful as America itself.  

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Killing the Legends : The Lethal Danger of Celebrity

Bill O'Reilly

"The King is dead. The Walrus is shot. The Greatest is no more. Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Muhammad Ali. These three icons changed not only the worlds of music, film, and sports, but the world itself. Their faces were known everywhere, in every nation, across every culture. And their stories became larger than life-until their lives spun out of control at the hands of those they most trusted. In Killing the Legends, Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard explore the lives, legacies, and tragic deaths of three of the most famous people of the 20th century. Each experienced immense success, then failures that forced them to change; each faced the challenge of growing old in fields that privilege youth; and finally, each became isolated, cocooned by wealth but vulnerable to the demands of those in their innermost circles. Dramatic, insightful, and immensely entertaining, Killing the Legends is the twelfth book in O'Reilly and Dugard's Killing series: the most popular series of narrative history books in the world, with more than 18 million copies in print"-- Provided by publisher

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LeBron: Life Lessons from the King

Brian Boone

A biographical account featuring the secrets to success from one of the greatest basketball players of all time: LeBron James

“Nothing is given. Everything is earned.”

His power, speed, and killer instincts made him a basketball phenom, but it was blood, sweat, and determination that turned him into an undisputed champion. From the day Sports Illustrated deemed him “The Chosen One” when he was still in high school, LeBron James, a skinny kid from Akron, Ohio, rose to stardom for his world-class athleticism. Two decades, four NBA championships, three Olympic medals, four MVP awards, three teams, and eighteen All-Star selections later, LeBron is the reigning king of the NBA.

The world watches in awe as he breaks countless records and sets jaw-dropping new ones. He has taken his success further than anyone imagined, proving himself a savvy investor and businessman, making a splash in the entertainment industry, and emerging as a powerful voice for social justice. Brian Boone's LeBron: Life Lessons from The King offers courtside seats to the highs and lows of LeBron’s unbelievable journey and reveals valuable insights for anyone trying to make their own lofty dreams come true.

- Motivating and empowering quotes from King James himself
- A biographical look at LeBron’s early years, his rise to fame, and his most spectacular achievements
- Original art from Gilang Bogy that captures the spirit of a champion
- Guiding truths and hard-earned lessons to inspire your own path to excellence

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I'm Glad My Mom Died

Jennette McCurdy

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,” eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?” She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

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Dinners with Ruth : A Memoir on the Power of Friendships

Nina Totenberg

Celebrated NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg delivers an extraordinary memoir of her personal successes, struggles, and life-affirming relationships, including her beautiful friendship of nearly fifty years with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Four years before Nina Totenberg was hired at NPR, where she cemented her legacy as a prizewinning reporter, and nearly twenty-two years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Nina called Ruth. A reporter for The National Observer, Nina was curious about Ruth's legal brief, asking the Supreme Court to do something revolutionary: declare a law that discriminated "on the basis of sex" to be unconstitutional. In a time when women were fired for becoming pregnant, often could not apply for credit cards or get a mortgage in their own names, Ruth patiently explained her argument. That call launched a remarkable, nearly fifty-year friendship. Dinners with Ruth is an extraordinary account of two women who paved the way for future generations by tearing down professional and legal barriers. It is also an intimate memoir of the power of friendships as women began to pry open career doors and transform the workplace. At the story's heart is one, special relationship: Ruth and Nina saw each other not only through personal joys, but also illness, loss, and widowhood. During the devastating illness and eventual death of Nina's first husband, Ruth drew her out of grief; twelve years later, Nina would reciprocate when Ruth's beloved husband died. They shared not only a love of opera, but also of shopping, as they instinctively understood that clothes were armor for women who wanted to be taken seriously in a workplace dominated by men. During Ruth's last year, they shared so many small dinners that Saturdays were "reserved for Ruth" in Nina's house. Dinners with Ruth also weaves together compelling, personal portraits of other fascinating women and men from Nina's life, including her cherished NPR colleagues Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer; her beloved husbands; her friendships with multiple Supreme Court Justices, including Lewis Powell, William Brennan, and Antonin Scalia, and Nina's own family--her father, the legendary violinist Roman Totenberg, and her "best friends," her sisters. Inspiring and revelatory, Dinners with Ruth is a moving story of the joy and true meaning of friendship.

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My Brother, Muhammad Ali

Rahaman Ali

“Rahaman has, at last, written the definitive biography on his late brother, which tells the real Ali story.” —Mike Tyson

More words have been written about Muhammad Ali than almost anyone else. He was, without doubt, the world’s most-loved sportsman. At the height of his celebrity he was the most famous person in the world. And yet, until now, the one voice missing belonged to the man who knew him best—his only sibling, and best friend, Rahaman Ali.

No one was closer to Ali than Rahaman. Born Cassius and Rudolph Arnett Clay, the two brothers grew up together, lived together, trained together, travelled together, and fought together in the street and in the ring. A near-constant fixture in his sibling’s company, Rahaman saw Ali at both his best and his worst: the relentless prankster and the jealous older brother, the outspoken advocate, the husband and father. In My Brother, Muhammad Ali, Rahaman offers an insider's perspective on the well-known stories as well as never-before-told tales, painting a rich and intimate portrait of a proud, relentlessly polarizing, yet often vulnerable man.

In this extraordinary, poignant memoir, Rahaman tells a much bigger and more personal story than in any other book on Muhammad Ali—that of two brothers, almost inseparable from birth to death. It is the final and most important perspective on an iconic figure.

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The Mind and the Moon

Daniel Bergner

“A profound and powerful work of essential reporting." —The New York Times Book Review

An important—and intimate—interrogation of how we treat mental illness and how we understand ourselves

In the early 1960s, JFK declared that science would take us to the moon. He also declared that science would make the “remote reaches of the mind accessible” and cure psychiatric illness with breakthrough medications. We were walking on the moon within the decade. But today, psychiatric cures continue to elude us—as does the mind itself. Why is it that we still don’t understand how the mind works? What is the difference between the mind and the brain? And given all that we still don’t know, how can we make insightful, transformative choices about our psychiatric conditions?

When Daniel Bergner’s younger brother was diagnosed as bipolar and put on a locked ward in the 1980s, psychiatry seemed to have achieved what JFK promised: a revolution of chemical solutions to treat mental illness. Yet as Bergner’s brother was deemed a dire risk for suicide and he and his family were told his disorder would be lifelong, he found himself taking heavy doses of medications with devastating side effects.

Now, in recounting his brother’s journey alongside the gripping, illuminating stories of Caroline, who is beset by the hallucinations of psychosis, and David, who is overtaken by depression, Bergner examines the evolution of how we treat our psyches. He reveals how the pharmaceutical industry has perpetuated our biological view of the mind and our drug-based assumptions about treatment—despite the shocking price paid by many patients and the problematic evidence of drug efficacy. And he takes us into the pioneering labs of today’s preeminent neuroscientists, sharing their remarkably candid reflections and fascinating new theories of treatment.

The Mind and the Moon raises profound questions about how we understand ourselves and the essential human divide between our brains and our minds. This is a book of thought-provoking reframings, delving into the science—and spirit—of our psyches. It is about vulnerability and personal dignity, the terrifying choices confronted by families and patients, and the prospect of alternatives. In The Mind and the Moon, Bergner beautifully explores how to seek a deeper engagement with ourselves and one another—and how to find a better path toward caring for our minds.

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As It Turns Out

Alice Sedgwick Wohl

The story of the model, actress, and American icon Edie Sedgwick is told by her sister with empathy, insight, and firsthand observations of her meteoric life.

As It Turns Out is a family story. Alice Sedgwick Wohl is writing to her brother Bobby, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1965, just before their sister Edie Sedgwick met Andy Warhol. After unexpectedly coming across Edie’s image in a clip from Warhol’s extraordinary film Outer and Inner Space, Wohl was moved to put her inner dialogue with Bobby on the page in an attempt to reconstruct Edie’s life and figure out what made Edie and Andy such iconic figures in American culture. What was it about Andy that enabled him to anticipate so much of contemporary culture? Why did Edie draw attention wherever she went? Who exactly was she, who fascinated Warhol and captured the imagination of a generation?

Wohl tells the story as only a sister could, from their childhood on a California ranch and the beginnings of Edie’s lifelong troubles in the world of their parents to her life and relationship with Warhol within the silver walls of the Factory, in the fashionable arenas of New York, and as projected in the various critically acclaimed films he made with her. As Wohl seeks to understand the conjunction of Edie and Andy, she writes with a keen critical eye and careful reflection about their enduring impact. As It Turns Out is a meditation addressed to her brother about their sister, about the girl behind the magnetic image, and about the culture she and Warhol introduced.

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Be My Baby

Ronnie Spector

“Do I have to tell you that Ronnie’s got one of the greatest female rock-and-roll voices of all time? She stands alone.”
—Keith Richards

Be My Baby is the behind-the-scenes story—newly updated, and with an especially timely message—of how the original bad girl of rock and roll, Ronnie Spector, survived marriage to a monster and carved out a space for herself amid the chaos of the 1960s music scene and beyond.

Ronnie’s first collaboration with producer Phil Spector, “Be My Baby,” shot Ronnie and the Ronettes to stardom. No one sounded like Ronnie, with her alluring blend of innocence and knowing, but her voice would soon be silenced as Spector sequestered her behind electric gates, guard dogs, and barbed wire.

It took everything Ronnie had to escape her prisonlike marriage and wrest back control of her life, her music, and her legacy. And as shown in this edition, which includes a 2021 postscript from Ronnie, her life became proof that our challenges do not define us and there is always the potential to forge a fuller life.

In Be My Baby, the incomparable Ronnie Spector offered a whirlwind account of the ever-shifting path of an iconic artist. And, more than anything else, she gave us an inspiring tale of triumph.

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The Movement Made Us

David J. Dennis Jr.

SOUTHERN INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS ALLIANCE BESTSELLER

"The Movement Made Us takes literature to a momentous Southern Black space to which I honestly never thought a book could take us. This is literally the Movement that made us and both Davids love us whole here with a creation that is as ingenious as it is soulfully sincere. Stunning."--Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

A dynamic family exchange that pivots between the voices of a father and son, The Movement Made Us is a unique work of oral history and memoir, chronicling the extraordinary story of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and its living legacy embodied in Black Lives Matter. David Dennis Sr, a core architect of the movement, speaks out for the first time, swapping recollections both harrowing and joyful with David Jr, a journalist working on the front lines of change today.

Taken together, their stories paint a critical portrait of America, casting one nation's image through the lens of two individual Black men and their unique relationship. Playful and searching, anxious and restorative, fearless and driving, this intimate memoir features scenes from across David Sr's life, as he becomes involved in the movement, tries to move beyond it, and ultimately returns to it to find final solace and new sense of self--revealing a survivor who travels eternally with a cabal of ghosts.

A crucial addition to Civil Rights history, The Movement Made Us is the story of a nation reckoning with change and the hopes, struggles, setbacks, and triumphs of modern Black life. This is it: the extant chronicle of why we live, why we move, and for what we are made.

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Normal Family

Chrysta Bilton

“Hilarious, wrenching, and achingly tender”memoir of one wildly unconventional family that gains new meaning with each newly discovered member (Susan Orlean).

PEOPLE Magazine’s “Book of the Week”

What is a “normal family,” and how do you go about making one? Chrysta Bilton’s magnetic, larger-than-life mother, Debra, yearned to have a child, but as a single gay woman in 1980s California, she had few options. Until one day, while getting her hair done in a Beverly Hills salon, she met a man and instantly knew he was the one she’d been looking for. Beautiful, athletic, artistic, and from a well-to-do family, Jeffrey Harrison appeared to be Debra’s ideal sperm donor. 
 
A verbal agreement, a couple of thousand in cash, and a few squirts of a turkey baster later, and Chrysta was conceived. Over the years, Jeffrey would make regular appearances at the family home, which grew to include Chrysta’s baby sister. But how much did Debra really know about the man she’d chosen to father her daughters? And as a single mother torn between ferocious independence and abject dependence—on other women, alcohol, drugs, and the adrenaline of get-rich-quick schemes—what secrets of her own was she keeping?
 
It wasn’t until Chrysta was a young adult that she discovered just how much her parents had hidden from their daughters—and each other—including a shocking revelation with far-reaching consequences not only for Debra, Chrysta, and her sister, but for dozens and possibly hundreds of unsuspecting families across the country. After a lifetime of longing for a “normal family,” can Chrysta face the reality of her own, in all its complexity? 

Bringing us into the fold of a deeply dysfunctional yet fiercely loving clan that is anything but “normal,” this emotional roller coaster of a memoir will make you cry, laugh, and rethink the meaning of family.  

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This Story Will Change

Elizabeth Crane

Rachel Cusk meets Nora Ephron in this intimate and evolving portrait about the end of a marriage and how life can fall apart and be rebuilt in wonderful and surprising ways

One minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in Upstate New York, finally setting down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, when his unexpected admission—I’m not happy—changes everything. Suddenly she finds herself separated and in couples therapy, living in an apartment in the city with an old friend and his kid. It’s understood that the apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her marriage.

Crafting the story as the very events chronicled are unfolding, Crane writes from a place of guarded possibility, capturing through vignettes and collected moments a semblance of the real-time practice of healing. At turns funny and dark, with moments of poignancy, This Story Will Change is an unexpected and moving portrait of a woman in transformation, a chronicle of how even the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are bound to change.

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Burn the Page

Danica Roem

An inspirational memoir-meets-manifesto by Danica Roem, the nation's first openly trans person elected to US state legislature

Danica Roem made national headlines when--as a transgender former frontwoman for a metal band and a political newcomer--she unseated Virginia's most notoriously anti-LGBTQ 26-year incumbent Bob Marshall as state delegate. But before Danica made history, she had to change her vision of what was possible in her own life. Doing so was a matter of storytelling: during her campaign, Danica hired an opposition researcher to dredge up every story from her past that her opponent might seize on to paint her negatively.

In wildly entertaining prose, Danica dismantles all the stories her opponents tried to hedge against her, showing how through brutal honesty and loving authenticity, it's possible to embrace the low points, and even transform them into her greatest strengths. Burn the Page takes readers from Danica's lonely, closeted, and at times operatically tragic childhood to her position as a rising star in a party she's helped forever change. Burn the Page is so much more than a stump speech: it's an extremely inspiring manifesto about how it's possible to set fire to the stories you don't want to be in anymore, whether written by you or about you by someone else--and rewrite your own future, whether that's running for politics, in your work, or your personal life. This book will not just encourage people who think they have to be spotless to run for office, but inspire all of us to own our personal narratives as Danica does.

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Gun Barons

John Bainbridge, Jr.

John Bainbridge, Jr.'s Gun Barons is a narrative history of six charismatic and idiosyncratic men who changed the course of American history through the invention and refinement of repeating weapons.

Love them or hate them, guns are woven deeply into the American soul. Names like Colt, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, and Remington are legendary. Yet few people are aware of the roles these men played at a crucial time in United States history, from westward expansion in the 1840s, through the Civil War, and into the dawn of the Gilded Age. Through personal drive and fueled by bloodshed, they helped propel the young country into the forefront of the world's industrial powers.

Their creations helped save a nation divided, while planting seeds that would divide the country again a century later. Their inventions embodied an intoxicating thread of American individualism—part fiction, part reality—that remains the foundation of modern gun culture. They promoted guns not only for the soldier, but for the Everyman, and also made themselves wealthy beyond their most fevered dreams.

Gun Barons captures how their bold inventiveness dwelled in the psyche of an entire people, not just in the minds of men who made firearm fortunes. Whether we revere these larger-than-life men or vilify them, they helped forge the American character.

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The Stone Age

Lesley-Ann Jones

An acclaimed rock and roll journalist evokes the legacy of The Rolling Stones—iconic, granitic, commercially unstoppable as a collective; and fascinating, contradictory, and occasionally disturbing as individuals.

As Lesley-Ann Jones writes, the Rolling Stones are "still roaming the globe like rusty tanks without a war to go to. Jumping, jacking, flashing, posturing, these septuagenarian caricatures with faces that might have been microwaved but coming on like eternal thirty-year-olds.”

On 12th July 1962, the Rollin’ Stones performed their first-ever gig at London’s Marquee jazz club. Down the line, a ‘g’ was added, a spark was lit and their destiny was sealed. No going back.

These five white British kids set out to play the music of black America. They honed a style that bled bluesy undertones into dark insinuations of women, sex, and drugs. Denounced as ‘corruptors of youth’ and ‘messengers of the devil,’ they created some of the most thrilling music ever recorded.

Now their sound and attitude seem louder and more influential than ever. Elvis is dead and the Beatles are over, but Jagger and Richards bestride the world. The Stones may be gathering moss, but on they roll.

Yet how did the ultimate anti-establishment misfits become the global brand we know today? Who were the casualties, and what are the forgotten legacies? Can the artist ever be truly divisible from the art?

Lesley-Ann Jones’s new history tracks this contradictory, disturbing, granitic and unstoppable band through hope, glory and exile, into the juggernaut years and beyond into rock’s ongoing reckoning . . . where the Stones seem more at odds than ever with the values and heritage against which they have always rebelled. Good, bad, and often ugly, here are the Rolling Stones as never seen before.

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Queen Elizabeth II

Deborah Hart Strober

A stunning and revelatory oral history of Queen Elizabeth II and her reign.

There seems an unquenchable fascination with the British royal family on both sides of the Atlantic, borne out by the popularity of The Crown on Netflix, the spotlight on the Sussexes and Cambridges, and the media attention on the death of Prince Philip.

These detailed interviews and insightful accounts range from the very early years of her reign to Prince Phillip’s death in 2021. Covering the shocking death of her father and the adjustment required of a newly married couple as well as the turmoil of the later years and her grandchildren’s families.

This lavishly produced hardback with rarely seen color photos paints a full, detailed and sympathetic portrait of a life lived in service.

Featuring interviews from diverse sources from private staff at Buckingham Palace and family friends, to international figures like Nelson Mandela, it contains a broad spectrum of views on Queen Elizabeth II—her story and her personality and how her life has intersected and impacted others.

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I Cried to Dream Again : Trafficking, Murder, and Deliverance : a Memoir

Sara Kruzan

"At once disturbing and empowering, the memoir of a courageous woman, who, between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, was manipulated, exploited, and abused as a sex worker; who killed her pimp/father figure-and was unjustly sentenced to life in prison without parole. "I was 11 when I met GG. I realized later that he had to have been aware of the chaos that was my life... because he played me perfectly. I was walking home after school... I heard his red Mustang purring like a huge lion behind me before it pulled up catty corner and cut off my path. He leaned out of the open window and motioned with his right hand that I should come closer. 'Hey, excuse me.' I popped down to the window and politely, cheerfully and helpfully replied, 'Yes?' He said, 'I've been noticing you a lot, and I just want to talk to you. I'm gonna go get some ice cream and go to the park. I would love for you to come and join me. We won't be gone long. Is that okay with you?' The appeal of ice cream for me was like, 'YES! I want ice cream.' He leaned over and opened the passenger door, 'What's your name? People call me GG.' I shyly answered, 'Sara.'""-- Provided by publisher.

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Putin

Philip Short

The first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last sixty years

Vladimir Putin is the world’s most dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story.

Unflinching, hard-hitting, and objective, Philip Short’s biography gives us the whole tale, up to the present day. To the fullest extent anyone has yet been able, Short cracks open the strongman’s thick carapace to reveal the man underneath those bare-chested horseback rides. In this deeply researched account, readers meet the Putin who slept in the same room as his parents until he was twenty-five years old, who backed out of his wedding right beforehand, and who learned English in order to be able to talk to George W. Bush.

Vladimir Putin is wreaking havoc in Europe, threatening global peace and stability and exposing his fellow citizens to devastating economic countermeasures. Yet puzzlingly many Russians continue to support him. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the many facets of the man behind the mask that Putin wears on the world stage.

Drawing on almost two hundred interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States, and Europe and on source material in more than a dozen languages, Putin will be the last word for years to come.

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Miss Chloe

A. J. Verdelle

"The award-winning author of The Good Negress shares invaluable insights on the precarious journey toward creativity that is the writer's life, and tells the compelling story of her relationship with Toni Morrison, painting an illuminating portrait of this towering yet enigmatic cultural icon. With the publication of her debut novel The Good Negress in 1995, A. J. Verdelle became an overnight sensation, winning critical acclaim and competing for prestigious literature prizes. But for Verdelle, the most unexpected consequence was the friendship she formed with the legendary Toni Morrison. Receiving an advance copy of the book, the Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning author-notorious for never giving early praise-called The Good Negress, "Truly Extraordinary." It was a writer's dream come true-a dream that for Verdelle would become simultaneously exhilarating and challenging. Now, twenty-five years later, Verdelle tells the story of that success and what came after. Miss Chloe begins with the story of young Verdelle's persistent aim to become an author, spending countless pre-dawn hours writing the novel that became The Good Negress. Verdelle then turns to the heady period after publication, focusing on her relationship with Toni-a precious gift that was most of the time a grace and a blessing, and at other times, confusing and too separate from literature. While Morrison continued to rise as an icon, Verdelle's writing career took a sharp turn. Verdelle's next novel-a Western featuring Black characters-is quickly bought by a young editor who leaves for another job before the manuscript is finished. Searching for direction, Verdelle moves to another publisher. Yet this second book will languish for more than fifteen years. In chronicling her journey, Verdelle offers an honest assessment of what it means to be a writer, including the expectations and let downs that famous friendships do not defray. Miss Chloe ends with the period after Morrison has passed away, when Verdelle is left to face the reality of her writing career, pondering what it means to have promise that is yet to materialize. She finds comfort in advice Morrison offered over the years, insight she shares in this wise book. "In order for Morrison to take you seriously, to have patience with you, to be interested, you had to be able to hear her," Verdelle writes. "You had to be able to sit still and listen. You had to be able to pipe up in the pauses, and prove you understood. You needed demonstrate that language was a skill you had, that Black culture was known to you and respected by you""--

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