New Memoirs

A four-year-old girl looks back on her life when she was a "little" girl of two and a half. Jamie Lee Curtis perfectly captures a little girl's simple, childlike celebration of herself. This spirited view of growing up is perfect for the youngest readers.

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.

With the thoroughness of a newspaper of the era, Smith retells the old familiar stories and legends surrounding our nation’s first president during the years preceding and during his terms in office. Patriarch brings George Washington to life as few historical accounts have before - showing our country’s most celebrated father occupied with the business of the day, and carrying the weight of a nation.

When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s 35-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter - one that raises the possibility of new materials with never-before-seen properties but that violates laws set in stone for centuries.

Lawrence Weschler sets Oliver Sacks' brilliant table talk and extravagant personality in vivid relief, casting himself as a beanpole Sancho to Sacks' capacious Quixote. We see Sacks rowing and ranting and caring deeply; composing the essays that would form The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; recalling his turbulent drug-fueled younger days; helping his patients and exhausting his friends; and waging intellectual war against a medical and scientific establishment that failed to address his greatest concern: the spontaneous specificity of the individual human soul.

Elaine's was a world-famous New York restaurant that became home to writers and celebrities. Owner Elaine Kaufman was known to be "New York feisty", controversial, often rude, always blunt, with the flare of Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker. Elaine was highly respected and frequently feared, and Elaine's the restaurant received the public's love and praise time and time again. Woody Allen held a regular table there, and Elaine's was even featured in Allen's Manhattan and Billy Joel's song "Big Shot".

In 1976, following years of harsh cutbacks to salaries and benefits at the New Yorker, editorial workers - the fact-checkers, copy editors, and other paraliteraries - finally took a stand and began a drive to unionize the storied magazine. But strong-willed longtime editor William Shawn's fierce resistance to unionization kicked off a stalemate between management and their subordinates.

Cystic fibrosis was once a mysterious disease that killed infants and children. Now it could be the key to healing millions with genetic diseases of every type - from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to diabetes and sickle cell anemia. Told from the perspectives of the patients, families, physicians, scientists, and philanthropists fighting on the front lines, Breath from Salt is a remarkable story of unlikely scientific and medical firsts, of setbacks and successes, and of people who refused to give up hope....

The long agony of the “sick man of Europe”, an expression used by the tsar of Russia to depict the falling Ottoman Empire, could almost blind people to its incredible power and history. Preserving its mixed heritage - coming from both its geographic position, rising above the ashes of the Byzantine Empire, and the tradition inherited from the Muslim conquests - the Ottoman Empire lasted more than six centuries.

From the former secretary of defense and author of the acclaimed number one best-selling memoir, Duty, a candid, sweeping examination of power, and how it has been exercised, for good and bad, by American presidents in the post-Cold War world.

Amber Tamblyn, Jessica Valenti, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jia Tolentino, Samantha Irby, Meredith Talusan, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Amy Poehler, America Ferrera, Ada Limón, and Huma Abedin are among the impressive list of authors contributing to this powerful collection of essays that takes a fresh and powerful look at our relationship to intuition and how we can harness it to change our everyday lives and the world.

In this gripping new work, Meghan examines our country’s most intractable problems with clear-eyed honesty instead of exaggerated outrage. With passion, humor, and most importantly, nuance, she tries to make sense of the current landscape - from Donald Trump’s presidency to the #MeToo movement and beyond. In the process, she wades into the waters of identity politics and intersectionality, thinks deeply about the gender wage gap, and tests a theory about the divide between Gen Xers and millennials.

The end of the Cold War was the greatest shock to international affairs since World War II. In that perilous moment, Saddam Hussein chose to invade Kuwait, China cracked down on its own pro-democracy protesters, and regimes throughout Eastern Europe teetered between democratic change and new authoritarians. Not since FDR in 1945 had a US president faced such opportunities and challenges. As the presidential historian Jeffrey Engel reveals in this hard-to-pause history, behind closed doors, George H. W. Bush rose to the occasion brilliantly.

The cruising tale is full of the sights and sounds, the fragrances and native customs of foreign lands, especially Central American and the Caribbean. It is a story of a leisurely sail through the Gulf of Cortez and on through Panama Canal to the Azores and England. Cruising in Seraffyn is also a carefully thought out guide to living aboard a small boat, with fun and economy as the guiding principles. Four appendices provide data that is vital for anyone comtemplating long-distance cruising.

In this powerful, passionate chronicle, Noah Adams, the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered, takes us on a river journey through the heart of Appalachia - a journey shared by pioneers and preachers, white-water daredevils, bluegrass musicians, and an unforgettable cast of vivid historical characters.

Peter Mandelson is one of the most influential politicians of modern times. The Third Man is his story – of a life played out in the backroom and then on the frontline of the Labour Party during its unprecedented three terms in government. Much of the book is devoted to the defining political relationships of Peter Mandelson’s life – with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Charting what he terms the ‘soap-opera’ years of the Labour government, his book is certain to ruffle many feathers.

The youngest of her parents’ combined 21 children, Sarah Frey grew up on a struggling farm in southern Illinois, often having to grow, catch, or hunt her own dinner alongside her brothers. She spent much of her early childhood dreaming of running away to the big city - or really anywhere with central heating. At 15, she moved out of her family home and started her own fresh produce delivery business with nothing more than an old pickup truck. Two years later, when the family farm faced inevitable foreclosure, Frey gave up on her dreams of escape and took over the farm.

The Revolution of ’28 explores the career of New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Alfred E. Smith. Robert Chiles peers into Smith’s work and uncovers a distinctive strain of American progressivism that resonated among urban, ethnic, working-class Americans in the early 20th century. The book charts the rise of that idiomatic progressivism during Smith’s early years as a state legislator through his time as governor of the Empire State in the 1920s, before proceeding to a revisionist narrative of the 1928 presidential campaign.

12 is the propulsive story of this gritty comeback. It's a drama that unfolds in the locker room, the court room, and under the brightest lights in all of sports - the Super Bowl. Now for the first time, listeners will have an exclusive look into Tom Brady's experience and the NFL's shocking strangle-hold on their players. With unprecedented access to Brady himself, his teammates, and his lawyers, we will see just how a football legend went up against one of the largest corporations in the world to stage the greatest comeback in NFL history and emerge a god of the gridiron.

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really look like? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: Neither.) And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne’s death more than her life.