Biographies & Memoirs
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The Book of My Lives
5 critic reviews | 5 user reviews | Published: March 19, 2013
Aleksandar Hemon’s lives begin in Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy’s life is consumed with street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his younger sister, and trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a young man’s life is about poking at the pretensions of the city’s elders with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then, his life in Chicago: watching from afar as war breaks out in Sarajevo and the city comes under siege, no way to return home; his parents and sister f...
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The Beatles Were Fab (and They Were Funny)
4 critic reviews | Published: March 19, 2013
Who knew the Beatles were funny? The acclaimed authors and illustrator of Lincoln Tells a Joke team up in this rollicking account of how the Fab Four's sense of humor and musical talent sparked Beatlemania.
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Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
8 critic reviews | 1 user reviews | Published: March 12, 2013
Sheryl Sandberg--Facebook COO, ranked eighth on Fortune's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business--has become one of America's most galvanizing leaders, and an icon for millions of women juggling work and family. In her Lean In, she urges women to take risks and seek new challenges, to find work that they love, and to remain passionately engaged with it at the highest levels throughout their lives. Lean In--Sheryl Sandberg's provocative, inspiring book about women and power--grew out of an electrifying TED talk Sandberg gave in 2010, ...
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To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
10 critic reviews | 3 user reviews | Published: March 5, 2013
In the very near future, smart” technologies and big data” will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such solutionism” affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are recast as uncontroversial and easily manageable matters of technological efficiency? What if some such problems are simply vice...
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Wave
4 critic reviews | 2 user reviews | Published: March 5, 2013
On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny; and then, over the ensuing ye...
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The Great Northern Express : A Writer's Journey Home
4 critic reviews | 49 user reviews | Published: March 5, 2013
From bestselling, nationally celebrated author Howard Frank Mosher, a wildly funny and deeply personal account of his three-month, 20,000-mile sojourn to discover "what he loved enough to live for." Several months before novelist Howard Frank Mosher turned sixty-five, he learned that he had prostate cancer. Following forty-six intensive radiation treatments, Mosher set out alone in his 20-year-old Chevy Celebrity on a monumental road trip and book tour across 21st-century America. From a chance meeting with an angry moose in northern New Eng...
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With or Without You: A Memoir
7 critic reviews | 10 user reviews | Published: February 26, 2013
A haunting, unforgettable mother-daughter story for a new generation—the debut of a blazing new lyrical voice Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving town north of Boston, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a river and a salt marsh. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, and whose highbrow taste was at odds with her hardscrabble life. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in her daughter a lov...
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After Visiting Friends
8 critic reviews | 2 user reviews | Published: February 19, 2013
A decade in the writing, the haunting story of a son’s quest to understand the mystery of his father’s death—a universal memoir about the secrets families keep and the role they play in making us who we are. Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family’s back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael’s father, was found alone near his car on Chicago’s North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright an...
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The Soundtrack of My Life
6 critic reviews | 22 user reviews | Published: February 19, 2013
In this star-studded autobiography, Clive Davis shares a personal, candid look into his remarkable life and the last fifty years of popular music as only a true insider can. In the history of popular music, no one looms as large as Clive Davis. His career has spanned more than forty years, and he has discovered, signed, or worked with a staggering array of artists: Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, Barry Manilow, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Dionne Warwick, Carlos Santana, The Grateful Dead, Alicia Keyes, Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer...
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Coolidge
13 critic reviews | 32 user reviews | Published: February 12, 2013
Calvin Coolidge, who served as president from 1923 to 1929, never rated highly in polls. The shy Vermonter, nicknamed "Silent Cal," has long been dismissed as quiet and passive. History has remembered the decade in which he served as a frivolous, extravagant period predating the Great Depression. Now Amity Shlaes, the author known for her riveting, unexpected portrait of the 1930s, provides a similarly fresh look at the 1920s and its elusive president. Shlaes shows that the mid-1920s was, in fact, a triumphant period that established our mod...
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