Biographies & Memoirs
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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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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
5 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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Long Shot
6 critic reviews | 28 user reviews | Published: February 12, 2013
Mike Piazza was selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 62nd round of the 1988 baseball draft as a “courtesy pick.” The Dodgers never expected him to play for them—or anyone else. Mike had other ideas. Overcoming his detractors, he became the National League rookie of the year in 1993, broke the record for season batting average by a catcher, holds the record for career home runs at his position, and was selected as an All Star twelve times. Mike was groomed for baseball success by his ambitious, self-made father in Pennsylvania, a classi...
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Detroit: An American Autopsy
12 critic reviews | Published: February 7, 2013
Back in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches through the ruins for clues to its fate, his family’s, and his own. Detroit is where his mother’s flower shop was firebombed in the pre-Halloween orgy of arson known as Devil’s Night; where his sister lost herself to the west side streets; where his brother, who once sold subprime mortgages with skill and silk, now works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as “May Be Made in United States.” Having led us on the way u...
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