Cultural Memoir

Into Williams's childhood home-a one-story ranch house-his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. "Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son's pursuits were quite different: "money, hoes, and clothes."

The author of Population: 485 returns, delivering a truckload of humor, heart, and...gardening tips? Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, complete with stock cars, sexy vegetables, and a laugh track. "All I wanted to do was fix my old pickup truck," says Michael Perry. "That, and plant my garden. Then I met this woman...." Truck: A Love Story recounts a year in which Perry struggles to grow his own food, live peaceably with his neighbors, and sort out his love life.

Dreams of a Lost Youth describes the story of the lives of several young passionate students, a playboy; a poet; four students with different ideologies; and a science student, in Tehran, Iran, before and after the revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979. It describes how they joined these various groups that opposed the Shah’s dictatorship and how they suffered after the revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini government.

In the first biography of Billie Holiday in more than two decades, Paul Alexander—author of heralded lives of Sylvia Plath and J. D. Salinger—gives us an unconventional portrait of arguably America’s most eminent jazz singer. He shrewdly focuses on the last year of her life—with relevant flashbacks to provide context—to evoke and examine the persistent magnificence of Holiday’s artistry when it was supposed to have declined, in the wake of her drug abuse, relationships with violent men, and run-ins with the law.

Almost every Latina has heard the phrase calladita te ves más bonita—you look most beautiful when you are silent. It's a message rooted in machismo passed from generation to generation, and one that poet and Latine therapist, Kim Guerra, grew up on. In Badass Bonita, Guerra tells a story of coming into her own power, and guides listeners through the process of finding their own. Rejecting what she was taught as a girl, she learned to use her voice and the more she listened to that inner niña, the more she unearthed her inner guerrera.

In his poetry, Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America, and in so doing, heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.

Whitney Houston (1963-2012) was a superstar. Few in the world of show business reach the career heights that she attained with what seemed such ease. Her megastardom peaked in 1992 with the release of the hit movie The Bodyguard and the international number-one hit "I Will Always Love You". The movie soundtrack still stands as one of the best-selling albums of all time. She won six Grammy Awards, two Emmy Awards, thirty Billboard Music Awards, and twenty-two American Music Awards, and amassed a vast fortune. Her death has shocked the entertainment world and her fans.

In this masterly, deeply personal, and provocative audiobook, the internationally renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes steps back to survey the wellsprings of art and ideology, the events that have shaped our time, and his extraordinary life and fiercest passions. Arranged alphabetically from “Amore” to “Zurich,” This I Believe takes us on a marvelous inner journey with a great writer. Fuentes ranges wide, from contradictions inherent in Latin American culture and politics to his long friendship with director Luis Buuel.

In a tradition that runs from R. M. Williamson’s Bits from an Old Bookshop in 1904 to Jen Campbell’s Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops in 2012 (with George Orwell’s 1936 Bookshop Memories in between), here is the latest and perhaps most complete attempt to classify people who shop in bookstores. It does take all kinds. Employing something like Linnaean taxonomic groups, there’s the Expert (divided into subspecies from the Bore to the Helpful Person), the Young Family (ranging from the Exhausted to the Aspirational), and more.

Empress Wu Zetian (624-705 AD) was the only woman to be the sovereign ruler of imperial China. A teenage concubine of the Tang Emperor Taizong, she seduced his son while the emperor lay dying. Recalled from a nunnery as part of an intricate court power-game, she caused the deaths of two lady rivals, before securing her enthronement as the Emperor Gaozong's consort. She ruled in the name of her husband and two eldest sons, presiding over the pinnacle of the Silk Road, before proclaiming herself the founder of a new dynasty.

Discover the remarkable life of Roberto Clemente - one of the most accomplished - and beloved - baseball heroes of his generation from Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss.

You may never have heard of him, but you've probably heard of the many people civil rights activist Bayard Rustin influenced. He was a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and refused to move to the back of the bus many years before Rosa Parks did. The son of a freed slave, Bayard Rustin grew up during the peak of the Jim Crow laws, which segregated Blacks and Whites.

In 1972, Patty Bear’s father, Robert Bear, was excommunicated from their church and subsequently shunned by members including Gale, his wife. For Amish and Old Order Mennonites, known as “Plain People”, shunning is a biblical practice meant to bring wayward members back into the community’s fold.

Born to an American soldier and a Korean mother in the wake of the Korean War, Dave has spent his life struggling to blend his Korean roots and his very American upbringing. The family joins a conservative church that embraces a strict, rule-based faith, and they try to navigate life as one of the few mixed-raced families in their community. But when tragedy strikes, tearing the family apart, Dave is forced to face long-buried secrets that he can no longer ignore.

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm far from the city. Her only connection, a mean-spirited Chinese auntie, puts Ye Pei to work in a small-town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, a determined Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule.

No singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than jazz legend Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues - and this authentic biography sets the record straight. Donald Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970s with those who knew Lady Day in all stages of her short, tragic life - from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore, through the early days of success in New York and the years of fame, to her tragic decline.

In late December 2008, Ian Halperin told the world that Michael Jackson had only six months to live. His investigation into Jackson`s failing health made headlines around the globe. Six months and a day later, the King of Pop was dead.It was greed that killed Michael Jackson. Friends and associates paint a tragic picture of the last years and days of his life as Jackson made desperate attempts to prepare for a planned concert series at London's 02 Arena in July 2009.

Part memoir, part masterclass, bestselling author Ben Crawford's journey is about breaking free from fear, ineffective communication, and shallow relationships entrenched within religious communities. Excommunicated and starting anew without a community or belief system, he shares lessons from his transition, bidding farewell to old friends, forging new connections, and rebuilding relationships with his wife and children.

In his debut essay collection, award-winning poet Jaswinder Bolina meditates on "how race," as he puts it, "becomes metaphysical": the cumulative toll of the microaggressions and macro-pressures lurking in the academic market, on the literary circuit, in the dating pool, and on the sidewalks of any given US city. Training a keenly thoughtful lens on questions that are never fully abstract, Of Color is a bold, expansive, and finally optimistic diagnosis of present-day America.

At the end of a steep gravel road in one of the remotest corners of Lusikisiki in the old Transkei lies the village of Ithanga. Home to a few hundred villagers, the majority of them unemployed, it is inconceivably poor. In the broader world, most would consider it entirely inconsequential. It is to here that award-winning author Jonny Steinberg travels to explore the lives of a community caught up in a battle to survive the ravages of HIV/AIDS.