Featured Non-Fiction & Biography
THE WIDE WIDE SEA
by Hampton Sides
THE WIVES
by Simone Gorrindo
“A haunting, beautifully written celebration of found sisterhood.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A fearless, engaging, and important memoir.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“[A] gorgeously rendered peek behind the curtain of military life.” —Booklist (starred review)
A captivating memoir that tells the story of one woman’s experience of joining a community of army wives after leaving her New York City job—a profoundly intimate look at marriage, friendship, and the power of human connection.
When her new husband joins an elite Army unit, Simone Gorrindo is uprooted from New York City and dropped into Columbus, Georgia—a town so foreign she might as well have landed on the moon. With her husband frequently deployed, Simone is left to find her place in this new world, alone—until she meets the wives.
Gorrindo gives us an intimate look into the inner lives of a remarkable group of women and a tender, unflinching portrait of a marriage. A love story, an unforgettable coming-of-age tale, and a bracing tour of the intractable divisions that plague our country today, The Wives offers a rare and powerful gift: a hopeful stitch in the fabric of a torn America.
THE KING OF DIAMONDS
by Rena Pederson
The thrilling story of a brazen, uncatchable jewel thief who roamed the homes of Dallas high society—and a window into the dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of the Swinging Sixties.
As a string of high profile jewel thefts went unsolved during the Swinging Sixties, the press dubbed the elusive thief “the King of Diamonds” because he eluded police and the FBI for more than a decade.
Like Cary Grant in “To Catch a Thief,” the King was so bold that he tip-toed into the homes of millionaires while they were watching television, or hosting parties. He hid in their closets. And dared to smoke a cigarette while they were sleeping not far away. Rena Pederson, then a young reporter withUPI, started following the elusive thief while she managed the night desk.
With gymnastic skill, this thief climbed trees or crawled across rooftops to get into sprawling mansions. He took jewels from heiresses, oil kings, corporate CEOs. These were not just some of the richest people in Texas; they were some of the richest people of their time. Scotland Yard and Interpol were on the look-out. But the thief was never caught and the jewels never recovered.
To follow the tracks of the thief, Rena has interviewed more than two hundred people, from veteran cops to strippers. She went to pawn shops, Las Vegas casinos, and a Mafia hangout—and discovered that beneath the glittering façade of Dallas debutante parties was a world of sex trafficking, illegal gambling, and political graft. When one of the leading suspects was found dead in highly unusual circumstances, the story darkened. High society crashed head-first into Mickey Spillane.
The odd psychological aspects of the The King of Diamonds give us different kind of crime story. Detectives were stumped: Why did the thief break into houses when his targets were inside, increasing the risk of being captured? Why did he hide in their closets? Many times, he was so close he could hear their breathing as they slept. As one socialite put it, “It was a very peculiar business.”
SOMEHOW
by Anne Lamott
“Anne Lamott is my Oprah.” —Chicago Tribune
From the bestselling author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Help, Thanks, Wow, a joyful celebration of love
“Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.”
In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won’t be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere” and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.
In each chapter of Somehow, Lamott refracts all the colors of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life. The bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens. The sustaining love among a group of sinners, for a community in transition, in the wider world. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, sustains as it surprises.
Somehow is Anne Lamott’s twentieth book, and in it she draws from her own life and experience to delineate the intimate and elemental ways that love buttresses us in the face of despair as it galvanizes us to believe that tomorrow will be better than today. Full of the compassion and humanity that have made Lamott beloved by millions of readers, Somehow is classic Anne Lamott: funny, warm, and wise.
THE AGE OF MAGICAL OVERTHINKING
by Amanda Montell
From the bestselling author of Cultish and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking.
Utilizing the linguistic insights of her “witty and brilliant” (Blyth Roberson, author of America the Beautiful?) first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet.
“Magical thinking” can be broadly defined as the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world: Think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven.
In a series of razor sharp, deeply funny chapters, Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, from how the “Halo effect” cultivates worship (and hatred) of larger than life celebrities, to how the “Sunk Cost Fallacy” can keep us in detrimental relationships long after we’ve realized they’re not serving us. As she illuminates these concepts with her signature brilliance and wit, Montell’s prevailing message is one of hope, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while, or even hear a melody in it.
MY BLACK COUNTRY
by Alice Randall
Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a “lively, engaging, and often wise” (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music.
Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood’s “XXX’s and OOO’s”. Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and sometimes profound eccentricity.
What emerges in My Black Country is a celebration of the most American of music genres and the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture. As country music goes through a fresh renaissance today, with a new wave of Black artists enjoying success, My Black Country is the perfect gift for longtime country fans and a vibrant introduction to a new generation of listeners who previously were not invited to give the genre a chance.
TRIPPED
by Norman Ohler
The author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed returns with a provocative new history of drugs and postwar America, examining the untold story of how Nazi experiments into psychedelics covertly influenced CIA research and secretly shaped the War on Drugs.
Berlin 1945. Following the fall of the Third Reich, drug use—long kept under control by the Nazis’ strict anti-drug laws—is rampant throughout the city. Split into four sectors, Berlin’s drug policies are being enforced under the individual jurisdictions of each allied power—the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and the US. In the American zone, Arthur J. Giuliani of the nascent Federal Bureau of Narcotics is tasked with learning about the Nazis’ anti-drug laws and bringing home anything that might prove “useful” to the United States.
Five years later, Harvard professor Dr. Henry Beecher began work with the US government to uncover the research behind the Nazis psychedelics program. Begun as an attempt to find a “truth serum” and experiment with mind control, the Nazi study initially involved mescaline, but quickly expanded to include LSD. Originally created for medical purposes by Swiss pharmaceutical Sandoz, the Nazis coopted the drug for their mind control military research—research that, following the war, the US was desperate to acquire. This research birthed MKUltra, the CIA’s notorious brainwashing and psychological torture program during the 1950s and 1960s, and ultimately shaped US drug policy regarding psychedelics for over half a century.
Based on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Tripped is a wild, unconventional postwar history, a spiritual sequel to Norman Ohler’s New York Times bestseller Blitzed. Revealing the close relationship and hidden connections between the Nazis and the early days of drugs in America, Ohler shares how this secret history held back therapeutic research of psychedelic drugs for decades and eventually became part of the foundation of America’s War on Drugs.
DANCING ON THE EDGE
by Russ Tamblyn
“Russ Tamblyn’s story is an insightful and entertaining self-examination by a gifted actor whose on- and off-screen experiences offer us an honest look at what it meant to grow up at the end of the Hollywood studio system.” –Steven Spielberg
Actor. Artist. Cultural Icon.
Dancing on the Edge
A bold memoir of an extraordinary, singular life lived by one of the world’s most beloved and acclaimed figures: Russ Tamblyn.
With more than eighty years as a celebrated artist and actor under his belt, Russ Tamblyn has earned a cherished name among cinephiles and pop culture fans alike, working with such legendary directors as Robert Wise, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino. He tumbled through his acclaimed starring role in the original West Side Story as an actor and acrobatic dancer, taught Elvis Presley some signature dance moves, and became an unlikely visionary in the counterculture movement of the ’60s alongside peers and friends Ed Ruscha and Dennis Hopper.
Russ deftly guides readers through his star-studded life and his search for a deeper, more connected existence: attending school with Elizabeth Taylor, earning an Academy Award nomination for Peyton Place, dropping out of Hollywood at the height of his career to become a fine artist in Topanga Canyon, and forging a lifelong friendship with Neil Young. He shares the painful breakup of a twenty-year marriage and the joy of finding true love and inspiration as a husband, father, and mentor in his own right.
Perfect for old and new fans alike, Dancing on the Edge is an intimate and powerful story about the singular life of one of our most gifted storytellers, artists, and stars of the silver screen.
Still Hot in Non-Fiction & Biography
BURN BOOK
by Kara Swisher
Instant New York Times Bestseller
From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.
“Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley…takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world…Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles” (Booklist, starred review).
Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.
When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”
While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.
Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.
Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.
GHOST TOWN LIVING
by Brent Underwood
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A long-abandoned silver mine for sale sounded like an adventure too great to pass up, but it turned into much more—a calling, a community of millions, and hard-earned lessons about chasing impractical dreams.
“Inspiring and meditative—the story of man vs nature and man vs himself.”—Ryan Holiday, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Obstacle is the Way
The siren song of Cerro Gordo, a desolate ghost town perched high above Death Valley, has seduced thousands since the 1800s, but few fell harder for it than Brent Underwood, who moved there in March of 2020, only to be immediately snowed in and trapped for weeks.
It had once been the largest silver mine in California. Over $500 million worth of ore was pulled from the miles of tunnels below the town. Butch Cassidy, Mark Twain, and other infamous characters of the American West were rumored to have stayed there. Newspapers reported a murder a week. But that was over 150 years ago.
Underwood bet his life savings—and his life—on this majestic, hardscrabble town that had broken its fair share of ambitious men and women. What followed were fires, floods, earthquakes, and perhaps strangest, fame. Ghost Town Living tells the story of a man against the elements, a forgotten historic place against the modern world, and a dream against all odds—one that has captured millions of followers around the world.
BARBIE: THE WORLD TOUR
by Margot Robbie & Andrew Mukamal
For the press tour following the record-breaking release of Greta Gerwig’s award-winning, acclaimed Barbie movie, producer and star Margot Robbie and her stylist Andrew Mukamal immersed themselves in some of Barbie’s most iconic outfits and curated vintage pieces, then approached designers, from Giorgio Armani to Donatella Versace, to create looks inspired by the doll-size originals. Many of these looks were not seen as the official Barbie press tour was cut short—so Margot and Andrew worked with renowned fashion photographer Craig McDean to shoot her in the looks exactly as they were curated: Schiaparelli in Los Angeles, Vivienne Westwood in London, vintage Chanel with matching Steamline luggage at the airport, and beyond.
Accompanying McDean’s sumptuous photography are original Barbie dolls from the period, a treasure trove of rare materials from Mattel’s Barbie fashion archives, and the designers’ sketches and Polaroids from fittings, layered into evocative collages by Fabien Baron, who conceived and produced the shoots and art-directed the book. With text by Margot Robbie and Andrew Mukamal, as well as handwritten contributions from the designers behind the looks (from Olivier Rousteing and Michelle Ochs to Manolo Blahnik and Jeremy Scott), this unique book blends the serious chic of high fashion with the serious fun of Barbie world—the dolls, the history, and the style that have captured imaginations for 65 years.
BARBIE™ and associated trademarks and trade dress are owned by, and used under license from, Mattel. ©2024 Mattel.
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