Featured Non-Fiction & Biography
TANGLED VINES
by John Glatt
CAVE OF BONES
by Lee Berger and John Hawks
A true-life scientific adventure story, this thrilling book takes the reader deep into South African caves to discover fossil remains that compel a monumental reframing of the human family tree.
In the summer of 2022, Lee Berger lost 50 pounds in order to wriggle though impossibly small openings in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa—spaces where his team has been unearthing the remains of Homo naledi, a proto-human likely to have coexisted with Homo sapiens some 250,000 years ago. The lead researcher on the site, still Berger had never made his way into the dark, cramped, dangerous underground spaces where many of the naledi fossils had been found. Now he was ready to do so.
Once inside the cave, Berger made shocking new discoveries that expand our understanding of this early hominid—discoveries that stand to alter our fundamental understanding of what makes us human. So what does it all mean?
Join Berger on the adventure of a lifetime as he explores the Rising Star cave system and begins the complicated process of explaining these extraordinary finds—finds that force a rethinking of human evolution, and discoveries that Berger calls “the Rosetta stone of the human mind.”
CONGRATULATIONS, THE BEST IS OVER!
by R. Eric Thomas
The beloved bestselling author of Here for It returns with an all-new collection of heartening, deeply relatable, and laugh-out-loud essays about what happens after happily ever after.
“Funny, insightful, and hopeful . . . a profound meditation on what it means to come home, and on finding your way again after the chaos of life takes you off your path.”—John Paul Brammer, author of ¡Hola Papi!
After going viral “reading” the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas finally knew who he was and where he was going. He was living his best life.
But then everything changed.
In this collection of insightful and hilarious essays, Thomas moves back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore (a place he never wanted to return, even to be buried) and behaving completely out of character. They say you can’t go home again, but what if you and home have changed beyond recognition? From attending his twenty-year high school reunion and discovering another person’s face on his name badge, to splattering an urgent care room with blood à la The Shining, to being terrorized by a plague of gay frogs who’ve overtaken his backyard, Thomas provides the nitty, and sometimes the gritty, details of wrestling with the life he thought he’d left behind while trying to establish a new one.
With wit, heart, and hope for the future, Congratulations, The Best Is Over! is the not-so-gentle reminder we all need that even when life doesn’t go according to plan, we can still find our way back home.
PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE,THANKS!
by Julio Vincent Gambuto
Atomic Habits meets The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k in this life-changing guide to freeing yourself from the automated behaviors, values, and relationships that keep you from being happy.
When the pandemic essentially brought the world to a standstill, author Julio Gambuto came to understand a powerful truth: in the pre-pandemic world, Americans were exhausted, lonely, unhappy, wildly overworked and overbooked, drowning in sea of constantly being on the go and needing to buy more, more, more. But when that pressure disappeared, people rediscovered what was important to them. They quit jobs that made them unhappy and moved their families to suburbs. Simple things like outdoor walks replaced gym memberships; home cooking and backyard gardens replaced takeout; less commuting meant more time for family and creative projects; and for perhaps the first time in a long time, people were being honest. Honest about what they wanted, what they believed in. Honest about the problems they were facing within their families, friend groups, workplaces, towns, and society overall.
That honesty, he noticed, had the potential to make the ground shift. It created a capacity for change. But he also knew that it likely wouldn’t last, because the most powerful forces running our world would not allow it to. They wanted control over our clicks, our conversations, our dollars, our work, our votes—our lives. The only way that we could beat those systems, would be to resist the calls to keep moving, and to “go back to normal.” In order to change, we had to unsubscribe.
Now, in Please Unsubscribe, Thanks!, Gambuto gives us a radical blueprint for the ways we can take a deep breath, renew and commit to a life that we really want, individually and collectively, from unsubscribing to emails and automated subscriptions to reevaluating the presence of people and ideas and habits that no longer serve us or make us happy. Infused with the practical advice in James Clear’s Atomic Habits and the humor of Sarah Knight’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k, Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! helps us focus on where we find joy in our lives and encourages us to toss out what doesn’t bring us joy in this modern world.
PLAYING UNDER THE PIANO
by Hugh Bonneville
A The Times (UK) and Sunday Times Best Book of the Year
A moving, laugh-out-loud memoir from one of today’s best-loved British actors, whose credits include Downton Abbey, Notting Hill, and Paddington.
From getting his big break as Third Shepherd in the school nativity play, to mistaking a Hollywood star for a real estate agent, Hugh Bonneville creates a brilliantly vivid picture of a career on stage and screen. What is it like working with Judi Dench and Julia Roberts, or playing Robert De Niro’s right leg, or not being Gary Oldman, twice? A wickedly funny storyteller, Bonneville also writes with poignancy about his father’s dementia and of his mother, whose life in the secret service emerged only after her death.
Whether telling stories of working with divas, Dames, or a bear with a penchant for marmalade, this account of his life as an actor is richly entertaining.
MONEYZEN
by Manisha Thakor
A leading financial expert breaks down the personal, cultural, and societal forces that have led us to falsely believe we can never have, do, or be enough, and shows us a fresh new path toward “MoneyZen”—her joy-based approach to living a life rich in financial health and emotional wealth.
For anyone who has ever felt that they can never measure up, MoneyZen is your cure.
No matter your age, income, or profession, it’s all too easy to fall prey to the false belief that the amount of money you earn, or accomplishments you achieve, or praise you receive is just Never Enough. In MoneyZen, financial industry veteran Manisha Thakor candidly shares how she overcame toxic behaviors around work, money, and prestige that had threatened her relationships, her health, and her career, told alongside the inspiring stories of individuals from all walks of life who reveal their own struggles with “Never Enough.”
Through Thakor’s interviews with a wide range of interdisciplinary experts, you’ll learn how personal traumas, cultural influences, societal pressures, and even our own biology have conspired to make us believe that “more” is the answer to all our problems. And you’ll discover a unique way to reclaim your life using a formula that’s ultimately rooted in less: Financial Health + Emotional Wealth = MoneyZen.
The result is a powerful, research-based framework for getting off the hamster wheel of 24/7 striving so you can start to live a life fueled by authentic joy, connection, and meaning.
THE INJUSTICE OF PLACE
by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, & Timothy J. Nelson
A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
“This book forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.” (Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America and Evicted)
Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.
This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse.
The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.
THE PERFECTION TRAP
by Thomas Curran
In the bestselling tradition of Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection, this illuminating book by an acclaimed professor at the London School of Economics explores how the pursuit of perfection can become a dangerous obsession that leads to burnout and depression—keeping us from achieving our goals.
Today, burnout and depression are at record levels, driven by a combination of intense workplace competition, oppressively ubiquitous social media encouraging comparisons with others, the quest for elite credentials, and helicopter parenting. Society continually broadcasts the need to want more, and to be perfect.
Gathering a wide range of contemporary evidence, Curran calls for both introspection and broader, societal change. He shows what we can do as individuals to resist the modern-day pressure to be perfect, and in so doing, win for ourselves a more purposeful and contented life.
The Perfection Trap is for anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the soul-crushing need to not just compete but compete to a level beyond reason. In place of an ever-moving treadmill, it offers the relief of letting go to focus on what matters most.
SPINOZA, LIFE & LEGACY
by Jonathan I. Israel
A biography of the boldest and most unsettling of the early modern philosophers, Spinoza, which examines the man’s life, relationships, writings, and career, while also forcing us to rethink how we previously understood Spinoza’s reception in his own time and in the years following his death.
The boldest and most unsettling of the major early modern philosophers, Spinoza, had a much greater, if often concealed, impact on the international intellectual scene and on the early Enlightenment than philosophers, historians, and political theorists have conventionally tended to recognize. Europe-wide efforts to prevent the reading public and university students learning about Spinoza, the man and his work, in the years immediately after his death in 1677, dominated much of his early reception owing to the revolutionary implications of his thought for philosophy, religion, practical ethics and lifestyle, Bible criticism, and political theory. Nevertheless, contrary to what has sometimes been maintained, his general impact was immediate, very widespread, and profound. One of the main objectives of the book is to show how early and how deeply Leibniz, Bayle, Arnauld, Henry More, Anne Conway, Richard Baxter, Robert Boyle, Henry Oldenburg, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Richard Simon, and Nicholas Steno, among many others, were affected by and led to wrestle with his principal ideas.
There have been surprisingly few biographies of Spinoza, given his fundamental importance in intellectual history and history of philosophy, Bible criticism, and political thought. Jonathan I. Israel has written a biography which provides more detail and context about Spinoza’s life, family, writings, circle of friends, highly unusual career and networking, and early reception than its predecessors. Weaving the circumstances of his life and thought into a detailed biography has also led to several notable instances of nuancing or revising our notions of how to interpret certain of his assertions and philosophical claims, and how to understand the complex international reaction to his work during his life-time and in the years immediately following his death.
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.
JACKIE: PUBLIC, PRIVATE, SECRET
by 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.
EASY MONEY
by Ben McKenzie with Jacob Silverman
From “one of the crypto industry’s unlikely but most prominent critics” (Washington Post), an entertaining and well-researched account of the rise and fall of cryptocurrency.
At the height of the pandemic, TV star Ben McKenzie was the perfect mark for cryptocurrency: a dad stuck at home with some cash in his pocket, worried about his family, armed with only the vague notion that people were making heaps of money on something he—despite a degree in economics—didn’t entirely understand. Lured in by grandiose, utopian promises, and sure, a little bit of FOMO, McKenzie dove deep into blockchain, Bitcoin, and the various other coins and exchanges on which they are traded. But after scratching the surface, he had to ask, “Am I crazy, or is this all a total scam?”
In Easy Money, McKenzie enlists the help of journalist Jacob Silverman for an investigative adventure into crypto and its remarkable crash. Weaving together stories of average traders and victims, colorful crypto “visionaries,” Hollywood’s biggest true believers, anti-crypto whistleblowers, and government operatives, Easy Money is an on-the-ground look at a perfect storm of irresponsibility and criminal fraud. Based on original reporting across the country and abroad, including interviews with Sam Bankman-Fried, Tether cofounder Brock Pierce, Celsius’s Alex Mashinsky, and more, this is the book on cryptocurrency you’ve been waiting for.
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