Featured Non-Fiction & Biography
KNIFE
by Salman Rushdie
AN UNFINISHED LOVE STORY
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.
Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.
Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.
The Goodwins’ last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.
Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.
DID I EVERF TELL YOU
by Genevieve Kingston
THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY, LIFE-AFFIRMING MEMOIR YOU WILL EVER READ ABOUT THE POWER OF LOVE.
Did I Ever Tell You? reads like a novel but is an unforgettable true story.
Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston was just eleven years old when her mother passed away, leaving behind a chest filled with gifts and letters to celebrate the milestones of Gwen’s life and each of her birthdays until age thirty.
When Did I Ever Tell You? opens, just three packages remain: engagement, marriage, and first baby. Tracing Gwen’s coming-of-age, the book reveals a treasure hunt, with each gift and letter unveiling more about her mother, her family, and—ultimately—herself.
Like Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, Did I Ever Tell You? is a riveting book filled with unexpected twists and powerful life lessons. Through her mother’s fierce and courageous love, Gwen was granted the tools not only to move through grief but to cherish life.
For as her mother says in one of her letters: “love is stronger than death.”
NEW COLD WARS
by David E. Sanger
Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a volatile rivalry with the other two great nuclear powers—Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia—in a world far more complex and dangerous than that of half a century ago.
New Cold Wars—the latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon David E. Sanger—is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations with two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace—so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. By the time America emerged from the age of terrorism, it was clear that this had been a fantasy.
Now the three powers are engaged in a high-stakes struggle for military, economic, political, and technological supremacy, with nations around the world pressured to take sides. Yet all three are discovering that they are maneuvering for influence in a far more turbulent world than they imagined.
Based on a remarkable array of interviews with top officials from five presidential administrations, U.S. intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and tech companies, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical questions: Will the mistakes Putin made in his invasion of Ukraine prove his undoing and will he reach for his nuclear arsenal—or will the West’s famously short attention span signal Kyiv’s doom? Will Xi invade Taiwan? Will both men deepen their partnership to undercut America’s dominance? And can a politically dysfunctional America still lead the world?
Taking readers from the battlefields of Ukraine—where trench warfare and cyberwarfare are interwoven—to the Taiwan headquarters where the world’s most advanced computer chips are produced and on to tense debates in the White House Situation Room, New Cold Wars is a remarkable first-draft history chronicling America’s return to superpower conflict, the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.
BRIEFLY PERFECTLY HUMAN
by Alua Arthur
A deeply transformative memoir that reframes how we think about death and how it can help us lead better, more fulfilling and authentic lives, from America’s most visible death doula.
“A truly unique, inspiring perspective on the time we have, what we do with it, and how we let go of this world…. There is no one I’d trust more to guide me through an understanding of death, and how it informs life.” — Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Mad Honey and The Book of Two Ways
“Briefly Perfectly Human is a beautiful, raw, light-bringing experience. Alua’s voice is shimmering, singular, and pulses with humor, vulnerability, insight, and refreshing candor…. Be prepared for it to grab you, hold you tight, and raise the roof on the power of human connection.” — Tembi Locke, author of From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
For her clients and everyone who has been inspired by her humanity, Alua Arthur is a friend at the end of the world. As our country’s leading death doula, she’s spreading a transformative message: thinking about your death—whether imminent or not—will breathe wild, new potential into your life.
Warm, generous, and funny AF, Alua supports and helps manage end-of-life care on many levels. The business matters, medical directives, memorial planning; but also honoring the quiet moments, when monitors are beeping and loved ones have stepped out to get some air—or maybe not shown up at all—and her clients become deeply contemplative and want to talk. Aching, unfinished business often emerges. Alua has been present for thousands of these sacred moments—when regrets, fears, secret joys, hidden affairs, and dim realities are finally said aloud. When this happens, Alua focuses her attention at the pulsing center of her clients’ anguish and creates space for them, and sometimes their loved ones, to find peace.
This has had a profound effect on Alua, who was already no stranger to death’s periphery. Her family fled a murderous coup d’état in Ghana in the 1980s. She has suffered major, debilitating depressions. And her dear friend and brother-in-law died of lymphoma. Advocating for him in his final months is what led Alua to her life’s calling. She knows firsthand the power of bearing witness and telling the truth about life’s painful complexities, because they do not disappear when you look the other way. They wait for you.
Briefly Perfectly Human is a life-changing, soul-gathering debut, by a writer whose empathy, tenderness, and wisdom shimmers on the page. Alua Arthur combines intimate storytelling with a passionate appeal for loving, courageous end-of-life care—what she calls “death embrace.” Hers is a powerful testament to getting in touch with something deeper in our lives, by embracing the fact of our own mortality. “Hold that truth in your mind,” Alua says, “and wondrous things will begin to grow around it.”
THE FIXER
by Josh Young & Manfred Westphal
A riveting tell-all biography that delves into the extraordinary life of Hollywood’s most infamous private detective and “fixer” to the stars, revealing newly discovered shocking revelations from his never-before-seen investigative files.
During the height of Hollywood’s golden age, one man lorded over the city’s lurid underbelly of forbidden sin and celebrity scandal like no other: Fred Otash. An ex-Marine turned L.A.P.D. vice cop, Otash became the most sought-after private detective and fixer to the stars by specializing in the dark arts that would soon dominate the entertainment industry.
Otash was notorious for bugging the homes, offices, and playpens of movie stars, kingmakers, and powerful politicians, employing then state-of-the-art methods of electronic surveillance and wiretapping for a who’s who list of clients for whom he’d do “anything short of murder.” He lied to federal authorities to protect Frank Sinatra from criminal liability; recorded Rock Hudson’s coming out confession to his estranged wife; moved in with Judy Garland to help her get sober; taped President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s tragic love affairs with the greatest sex symbol of all time, and he listened to Marilyn Monroe die.
Based on Otash’s never-before-seen investigative files and personal archives, THE FIXER takes readers inside the sensational and nefarious world of the man whose art imitating life inspired the private eye characters portrayed by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown and Russell Crowe in LA Confidential.
ALIEN EARTHS
by Lisa Kaltenegger
“In the grand tradition of Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, we now have a new tour guide to the cosmos.”―Charles Cockell, Professor of Astrobiology, University of Edinburgh
“Absorbing, informative, and entertaining.”―Kirkus (starred)
Riveting and timely, a look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos in the quest to discover whether we are alone.
For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we’re alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. But once you look for life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life?
As founding director of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger has built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In Alien Earths, she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth’s history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search. With infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview – planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and others with more than one sun in their sky! And the best contenders for Alien Earths. We also see the imagined worlds of science fiction and how close they come to reality.
With the James Webb Space Telescope and Dr. Kaltenegger’s pioneering work, she shows that we live in an incredible new epoch of exploration. As our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, Dr. Kaltenegger shows how we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars and how we could spot life there. Worlds from where aliens may even be gazing back at us. What if we’re not alone?
CHAMBER DIVERS
by Rachel Lance
The previously classified story of the eccentric researchers who invented cutting-edge underwater science to lead the Allies to D-Day victory
In August 1942, more than 7,000 Allied troops rushed the beaches of Normandy, France, in an all but-forgotten landing. Only a small fraction survived unscathed. It was two summers before D-Day, and the Allies realized that they were in dire need of underwater intelligence if they wanted to stand a chance of launching another beach invasion and of winning the war.
Led by the controversial biologists J. B. S. Haldane and Dr. Helen Spurway, an ingenious team of ragtag scientists worked out of homemade labs during the London Blitz. Beneath a rain of bombs, they pioneered thrilling advances in underwater reconnaissance through tests done on themselves in painful and potentially fatal experiments. Their discoveries led to the safe use of miniature submarines and breathing apparatuses, which ultimately let the Allies take the beaches of Normandy.
Blast injury specialist Dr. Rachel Lance unpacks the harrowing narratives of these experiments while bringing to life the men and women whose brilliance and self-sacrifice shaped the outcome of the war, including their personal relationships with one another and the ways they faced skepticism and danger in their quest to enable Allied troops to breathe underwater.
The riveting science leading up to D-Day has been classified for generations, but Chamber Divers finally brings these scientists’ stories—and their heroism—to light.
EVEREST, INC.
by Will Cockrell
Featuring original interviews with mountain guides and climbers—including Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker—this vivid and authoritative adventure history chronicles one of the least likely industries on Earth: guided climbing on Mount Everest.
Anyone who has read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have the mountain pretty well figured out. It’s an extreme landscape where bad weather and incredible altitude can occasionally kill, but more so an overcrowded, trashed-out recreation destination where rich clients pad their egos—and social media feeds—while exploiting local Sherpas.
There’s some truth to these clichés, but they’re a sliver of the story. Unlike any book to date, Everest, Inc. gets to the heart of the mountain through the definitive story of its greatest invention: the Himalayan guiding industry. It all began in the 1980s with a few boot-strapping entrepreneurs who paired raw courage and naked ambition with a new style of expedition planning. Many of them are still living and climbing today, and as a result of their astonishing success, ninety percent of the people now on Everest are clients or employees of guided expeditions.
Studded with quotes from original interviews with more than a hundred western and Sherpa climbers, clients, writers, filmmakers, and even a Hollywood actor, Everest, Inc. foregrounds the voices of the people who have made the mountain what it is today. And while there is plenty of high-altitude drama in unpacking the last forty years of Everest tragedy and triumph, it ultimately transcends stereotypes and tells the uplifting counternarrative of the army of journeymen and women who have made people’s dreams come true, and of the Nepalis who are pushing the industry into the future.
Still Hot in Non-Fiction & Biography
AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
by Fareed Zakaria
A New York Times Bestseller
The CNN host and best-selling author explores the revolutions―past and present―that define the polarized and unstable age in which we live.
Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, war, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk―the early decades of the twenty-first century may be the most revolutionary period in modern history. But it is not the first. Humans have lived, and thrived, through more than one great realignment. What are these revolutions, and how can they help us to understand our fraught world?
In this major work, Fareed Zakaria masterfully investigates the eras and movements that have shaken norms while shaping the modern world. Three such periods hold profound lessons for today. First, in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, a fascinating series of transformations made that tiny land the richest in the world―and created politics as we know it today. Next, the French Revolution, an explosive era that devoured its ideological children and left a bloody legacy that haunts us today. Finally, the mother of all revolutions, the Industrial Revolution, which catapulted Great Britain and the US to global dominance and created the modern world.
Alongside these paradigm-shifting historical events, Zakaria probes four present-day revolutions: globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. For all their benefits, the globalization and technology revolutions have produced profound disruptions and pervasive anxiety and our identity. And increasingly, identity is the battlefield on which the twenty-first century’s polarized politics are fought. All this is set against a geopolitical revolution as great as the one that catapulted the United States to world power in the late nineteenth century. Now we are entering a world in which the US is no longer the dominant power. As we find ourselves at the nexus of four seismic revolutions, we can easily imagine a dark future. But Zakaria proves that pessimism is premature. If we act wisely, the liberal international order can be revived and populism relegated to the ash heap of history.
As few public intellectuals can, Zakaria combines intellectual range, deep historical insight, and uncanny prescience to once again reframe and illuminate our turbulent present. His bold, compelling arguments make this book essential reading in our age of revolutions.
THE MAN
by Becky Lynch & Rebecca Quin
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
This compelling and candid memoir from WWE superstar Rebecca Quin—a.k.a. The Man, a.k.a. Becky Lynch—delves into her earliest wrestling days, her scrappy beginnings, and her meteoric rise to fame.
Raised in Dublin, Ireland, in a devoutly Catholic family, Rebecca Quin constantly invented new ways to make her mother worry—roughhousing with the neighborhood kids, hosting secret parties while her parents were away, enrolling in a warehouse wrestling school, nearly breaking her neck and almost kneecapping a WWE star before her own wrestling career even began—and she was always in search of a thrilling escape from the ordinary.
Rebecca’s childhood love of wrestling set her on an unlikely path. With few female wrestlers to look to for guidance, Rebecca pursued a wrestling career hoping to change the culture and move it away from the antiquated disrespect so often directed at the elite female athletes who grace the ring. Even as a teenager, she knew that she would stop at nothing to earn a space among the greatest wrestlers of our time and to pave a new path for female fighters.
Culled from decades of journal entries, Rebecca’s memoir offers a raw, exclusive, and honest depiction of the complex woman behind the character Rebecca Quin plays on TV.
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