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Margaret Sanger
A Life of Passion
A portrait of a forefront leader in the birth control movement by the author of Sisters seeks to restore her position in feminist history in an account that includes coverage of such topics as the nursing experiences that inspired her beliefs, her pioneering of a first family-planning clinic and her relationships with such figures as John Reed, Mabel Dodge and H. G. Wells.
News and Reviews
Drop Dead Healthy
One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection
In Drop Dead Healthy, author A.J. Jacobs attempts to become the healthiest man in the world. Structuring his life around a deluge of diets and fitness regimens that often contradict each other, he experiences the logical conclusion of our culture's health obsessions. NPR Bestseller
News and Reviews
A Man of Misconceptions
The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change
Athanasius Kircher, the legendary 17th-century priest-scientist, was either a genius or a raving lunatic. This fascinating portrait traces his rise, success and eventual fall.
News and Reviews
Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die
Musings from the Road
In 1971 Nashville, after a life-changing experience, Willie Nelson decides to do things his own way, reinventing himself and resurrecting his career. In this holiday tale, Nelson recounts his colorful adventures.
News and Reviews
Elsewhere
A Memoir
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls presents an upbeat personal account of his youth, his parents and the 1950s upstate New York town they struggled to escape. He recounts the encroaching poverty and illness that challenged everyday life and the dreams his mother instilled that inspired his career.NPR Bestseller
News and Reviews
Brain On Fire
My Month of Madness
An account of the author's struggle with a rare brain-attacking autoimmune disease traces how she woke up in a hospital with no memory of her baffling psychotic symptoms, and describes the last-minute intervention by a doctor who identified the source of her illness.
News and Reviews
The Passage Of Power
The Years Of Lyndon Johnson
Robert Caro has spent decades researching Lyndon Johnson's life; previous books in his massive biography of Johnson told the story of Johnson's rise to national prominence. In this fourth volume, Caro takes up Johnson's dismal years as vice president and his sudden presidency, which he used to shepherd the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress.
NPR Bestseller
News and Reviews
The Boy Kings of Texas
Presents a memoir of growing up in 1980s Brownsville, Texas, describing intense relationships in a family surrounded by violence and poverty and caught between the conflicting values of two cultures.
News and Reviews
House Of Stone
A Memoir Of Home, Family, And A Lost Middle East
After reporter Anthony Shadid was seized and beaten in Libya during the country's revolution, he returned to his great-grandfather's estate in Lebanon and began rebuilding. His memoir documents the shifting landscape of the Middle East and reflects on war, exile, rebirth and the universal yearning for home.NPR Bestseller
News and Reviews
Heaven's Coast
A Memoir
A poet who won the National Book Critic's Circle Award shares the story of his relationship with lover Wally Roberts, who died of AIDS in 1993, recounting the effect the disease had on their lives and the aftermath of Wally's death
News and Reviews
Dog Years
A Memoir
Offers a memoir of the author's relationship with a pair of beloved canine companions, their life-changing impact on him and his family, and their role in how he came to understand loss and grief.
News and Reviews
How to Live
Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
More than 400 years after his death, the words of writer and philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne still ring true. In this engaging biography, Sarah Blakewell profiles the man known to many as the "first truly modern individual."NPR Bestseller
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Mrs. Nixon
A Novelist Imagines a Life
A literary assessment of the former First Lady from the perspective of a short story master draws on a wealth of sources to reconstruct her worldview, covering her early experiences as a community theater actress and her marriage to the 37th president.
News and Reviews
Marbles
Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me
An artist describes her bipolar disorder diagnosis and her struggles with mental stability while discussing other artists and creative people throughout history who were also labeled as "crazy" — including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe and Sylvia Plath.
News and Reviews
Who I Am
A Memoir
The rock 'n' roll legend and founding member of The Who presents a candid biography that reveals his struggles with drugs, sex and the ghosts of his troubled past, while detailing the band's meteoric rise to international fame and fortune.NPR Bestseller
News and Reviews
The Entertainer
Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century
Margaret Talbot's new book traces the rise of popular entertainment over the past 100 years as reflected by the career of her father, actor Lyle Talbot, who worked as a traveling performer before advancing to regular roles in film and television.
News and Reviews
Fiction Ruined My Family
A deeply funny and bittersweet memoir of having grown up in an eccentric family of faded wealth and gentility in which the father's failed dreams of being a writer put the family in the poor-house, drove the mother to weepy alcoholism and provided author Jeanne Darst with a highly unusual approach to life — and a wicked sense of humor.
News and Reviews
Da Vinci's Ghost
Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image
Da Vinci's Ghost recounts the intellectual journey behind the creation of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and how the drawing represents the momentous period in Western history when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance.
News and Reviews
Oddly Normal
One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms With His Sexuality
Sharing his family's own struggles within a culture that is quickly changing, a national correspondent for The New York Times and father of a gay teen offers crucial lessons about helping gay kids and how to cope in a potentially hostile world.
