Featured Non-Fiction & Biography
WHEN THE HEAVENS WENT ON SALE
by Ashlee Vance
A momentous look at the private companies driving a revolutionary new economy in space, from the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk
With the launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Elon Musk’s SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. And that milestone carried major implications: Silicon Valley, not NASA or nation states, was suddenly cemented as the epicenter of the new Space Age. Start-ups and the wealthy investors behind them began to realize that the universe—ungoverned and infinite—was open for business. Welcome to the Wild West of aerospace engineering.
When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied intergalactic land grab. Through his trademark immersive reporting, Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies—Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab—as they build new space systems and attempt to launch rockets and satellites into orbit by the thousands. While the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, these new companies arrived with a different set of goals: to make rocket and satellite launches fast and cheap, thereby opening Earth’s lower orbit for business—and setting it up as the next playing field for humankind’s technological evolution, where we can connect, analyze, and monitor everything on Earth.
Vance has had a front-row seat and singular access to this peculiar and unprecedented moment in history. When the Heavens Went on Sale travels through private company headquarters, labs, and top-secret launch locations around the world, including California, Texas, Alaska, New Zealand, Ukraine, India, and French Guiana. He chronicles it all in full color: the private jets, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations, and multimillionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear.
With the most detailed and intimate reporting of Vance’s career, When the Heavens Went on Sale reveals the spectacular chaos of the new business of space, and what happens when the idealistic, ambitious minds of Silicon Valley turn their unbridled vision toward the limitless expanse of the stars. This is the most pressing and controversial technology story of our time, a tale of fascinating characters chasing unimaginable stakes as they race to space.
WILDFLOWER
by Aurora James
This extraordinary memoir of struggle and perseverance offers new ways of envisioning economic equality for everyone—from a leading activist and fashion pioneer.
“With community and sisterhood at its center, Wildflower teaches us that against all odds, we can overcome.”—Rupi Kaur, New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: Harper’s Bazaar
Aurora James’s life is a great American “success story”—precisely because it looks so different from others we’ve seen. Born in Canada to a counterculture mother, James was raised to question everything—specifically the very institutions that have shaped so many of us. When James was seven, her mother married a man who would move them to Jamaica, where James would learn harsh lessons about control, power, abuse, and belonging. Eventually she would find her way back home to Toronto, where her blue-eyed and fair-haired grandmother welcomed her with unconditional love—and inadvertently showed her that racism is the water in which we are all submerged.
Scouted as a model in eighth grade, James struggled with body image and became disenchanted by the industry’s objectification of women and commodification of race and culture. After she dropped out of high school, a flirtation with street racing led to her eventual arrest. She’d hit rock bottom, but as a visionary and optimist, she allowed that experience to become one of many that reshaped her way of thinking about the world. A slew of fashion-related jobs led James to discover the real power in creating for the runway, and she started her own business in a flea market: a sustainable fashion line showcasing traditional African designs that would become an award-winning international brand. But none of this came from a drive to “succeed.” It came from a desire to forge a new creative path—and to lift others up alongside her.
Already a rising star in fashion and the first Black female designer to win a Council of Fashion Designers of America Award, James posted a revolutionary idea in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that connected economics to racial justice in a way that has forever changed the American economic landscape. With that Instagram post, she founded the Fifteen Percent Pledge, which challenges retailers to commit 15 percent of their shelf space and spending power to Black businesses and is one of the fastest-growing social justice nonprofits. To date, more than two dozen of the world’s most recognized retailers have taken the pledge, redirecting $10 billion in annual revenue to Black and BIPOC brands.
Empowering and full of heart, Wildflower is the riveting story of how Aurora James made an indelible mark the American economic system, and a rallying cry for those eager to make change.
THE LAST HONEST MAN
by James Risen
In this “gripping . . . spectacular piece of reporting” (Ken Burns), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines Senator Frank Church, the man at the center of numerous investigations into the abuses of power within the American government.
For decades now, America’s national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it.
Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable.
Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams of unpublished letters, notes, and memoirs, some of which remain sensitive today, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter James Risen tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power—and winning—in The Last Honest Man.
PAVED PARADISE
by Henry Grabar
An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?
These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems—from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.
THE EDGE OF KNOWLEDGE
by Lawrence M. Krauss
Lawrence Krauss explores the greatest unanswered questions at the forefront of science today, and likely for the coming century and beyond.
Internationally known theoretical physicist and bestselling author Lawrence Krauss explores science’s greatest unanswered questions.
Three of the most important words in science are “I don’t know.” Not knowing implies a Universe of opportunities—the possibility of discovery and surprise. Our understanding of science has advanced immeasurably over the last five hundred years, yet many fundamental mysteries of existence persist: How did our Universe begin? How big is the Universe? Is time travel possible? What’s at the center of a black hole? How did life on Earth arise? Are we alone? What is consciousness, and can we create it?
These mysteries define the scientific forefront—the threshold of the unknown. To explore that threshold is to gain a deeper understanding of just how far science has progressed. Covering time, space, matter, life, and consciousness, Krauss introduces readers to topics that will shape the state of science for the next century, providing us all passport to our own journeys of exploration and discovery.
TALK OF CHAMPIONS
by Kenny Smith
A revealing, humorous, behind-the-scenes memoir from Kenny “The Jet” Smith—superstar basketball commentator, host of the top-rated show, Inside the NBA, and two-time NBA champion. Smith reveals memorable inside stories of his playing and broadcasting careers, focusing on the star players, coaches, and mentors who inspired him along the way.
Kenny Smith was a star at the University of North Carolina before his storied NBA run, in which he won two championships with the Houston Rockets. His popularity skyrocketed when he joined TNT’s new show, Inside the NBA, which has thrived for twenty-four years and won multiple Emmys, receiving enormous acclaim for the insight, humor, social commentary, and unrivaled basketball coverage from Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Ernie Johnson, Jr. Kenny is known to fans for his laser-sharp analysis and eloquent observations of the basketball scene and culture.
In this honest and profound memoir, Kenny writes chapters about each of the extraordinary people who taught him invaluable life lessons. He illuminates the personalities, affections, and quirks of friends such as Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Charles Barkley and Kobe Bryant, among others, and what he learned from each of them. He writes about his legendary UNC coach, Dean Smith, and other indelible role models through his career. And he interweaves poignant material about his upbringing in Queens, New York, his parents, his children, and his marriage, explaining the rich knowledge he obtained from the important figures around him. Kenny is also a strong, intelligent voice on race, as his fans and TV viewers will know. Ultimately this is a revealing, humorous, and powerful memoir, offering a candid glimpse inside the rarified world of elite sports and broadcasting, with inspiring takeaways.
SHAKESPEARE WAS A WOMAN
by Elizabeth Winkler
A thrillingly provocative investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be.
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.”
In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking readers from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays’ origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare’s plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem.
As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler’s interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth—and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we’re looking for.
An irresistible work of literary detection, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will forever change how you think of Shakespeare… and of how we as a society decide what’s up for debate and what’s just nonsense, just heresy.
THE WATCHDOG
by Steve Drummond
The story of how a little-known junior senator fought wartime corruption and, in the process, set himself up to become vice president and ultimately President Harry Truman.
Months before Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the United States was on the verge of entering another world war for which it was dangerously ill-prepared. The urgent times demanded a transformation of the economy, with the government bankrolling the unfathomably expensive task of enlisting millions of citizens while also producing the equipment necessary to successfully fight—all of which opened up opportunities for graft, fraud and corruption.
In The Watchdog, Steve Drummond draws the reader into the fast-paced story of how Harry Truman, still a newcomer to Washington politics, cobbled together a bipartisan team of men and women that took on powerful corporate entities and the Pentagon, placing Truman in the national spotlight and paving his path to the White House.
Drawing on the largely unexamined records of the Truman Committee as well as oral histories, personal letters, newspaper archives and interviews, Steve Drummond—an award-winning senior editor and executive producer at NPR—brings the colorful characters and intrigue of the committee’s work to life. The Watchdog provides readers with a window to a time that was far from perfect but where it was possible to root out corruption and hold those responsible to account. It shows us what can be possible if politicians are governed by the principles of their office rather than self-interest.
OH MY MOTHER
by Connie Wang
“Hilarious, candid, and heartfelt . . . It’s like Eat Pray Love meets The Amazing Race with hints of Cathy Park Hong’s hit essay collection, Minor Feelings.” —Oprah Daily
A dazzling mother-daughter adventure around the world in pursuit of self-discovery, a family reckoning, and Asian American defiance
In Chinese, the closest expression to oh my god is wo de ma ya. It’s an interjection, a polite expletive, something to say when you’re out of words. Translated literally, it means oh my mother—the instinctual first person you think of when you’re on the cusp of losing it, or putting it all together.
In each essay of this hilarious, heartfelt, and pitch-perfectly honest memoir, journalist Connie Wang explores her complicated relationship to her stubborn and charismatic mother, Qing Li, through the “oh my god” moments in their travels together. From attending a Magic Mike strip show in Vegas to experimenting with edibles in Amsterdam to flip-flopping through Versailles, this iconic mother-daughter duo venture into the world to find their place in it, and sometimes rail against it—as well as against each other.
There are hijinks, capers, and adventures. There is also tenderness, growth, and discovery. In telling these stories about the places they’ve gone and the things they’ve done, Wang reveals another story: the true story of two women who finally learned that once we are comfortable with the feeling of not belonging—once we can reject the need to belong to any place, community, census, designation, or nation—we can experience something almost like freedom.
Still Hot in Non-Fiction & Biography
THE WAGER
by David Grann
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.
“Riveting…Reads like a thriller, tackling a multilayered history—and imperialism—with gusto.” —Time
“A tour de force of narrative nonfiction.” —The Wall Street Journal
On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.
But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.
The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.
POVERTY, BY AMERICAN
by Matthew Desmond
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
“Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.”—The New Yorker
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.
Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.
IT. GOES. SO. FAST.
by Mary Louise Kelly
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
“This voice-driven, relatable, heartfelt and emotional story will make any parent tear up.”
—Good Morning America, “15 Delightful Books Perfect for Spring Reading”
Operating Instructions meets Glennon Doyle in this new book by famed NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly that is destined to become a classic—about the year before her son goes to college—and the joys, losses and surprises that happen along the way.
The time for do-overs is over.
Ever since she became a parent, Mary Louise Kelly has said “next year.” Next year will be the year she makes it to her son James’s soccer games (which are on weekdays at 4 p.m., right when she is on the air on NPR’s All Things Considered, talking to millions of listeners). Drive carpool for her son Alexander? Not if she wants to do that story about Ukraine and interview the secretary of state. Like millions of parents who wrestle with raising children while pursuing a career, she has never been cavalier about these decisions. The bargain she has always made with herself is this: this time I’ll get on the plane, and next year I’ll find a way to be there for the mom stuff.
Well, James and Alexander are now seventeen and fifteen, and a realization has overtaken Mary Louise: her older son will be leaving soon for college. There used to be years to make good on her promises; now, there are months, weeks, minutes. And with the devastating death of her beloved father, Mary Louise is facing act three of her life head-on.
Mary Louise is coming to grips with the reality every parent faces. Childhood has a definite expiration date. You have only so many years with your kids before they leave your house to build their own lives. It’s what every parent is supposed to want, what they raise their children to do. But it is bittersweet. Mary Louise is also dealing with the realities of having aging parents. This pivotal time brings with it the enormous questions of what you did right and what you did wrong.
This chronicle of her eldest child’s final year at home, of losing her father, as well as other curve balls thrown at her, is not a definitive answer―not for herself and certainly not for any other parent. But her questions, her issues, will resonate with every parent. And, yes, especially with mothers, who are judged more harshly by society and, more important, judge themselves more harshly. What would she do if she had to decide all over again?
Mary Louise’s thoughts as she faces the coming year will speak to anyone who has ever cared about a child or a parent. It. Goes. So. Fast. is honest, funny, poignant, revelatory, and immensely relatable.
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