EDDA L. FIELDS-BLACK’s Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War is the story of the Combahee River raid, during which Tubman ventured into South Carolina slave territory to live, work, and gather intelligence for an attack on major Confederate plantations – an extraordinary accomplishment that helped to define […]
For her podcast Family Secrets, author DANI SHAPIRO interviews actor, director, producer, and writer GRIFFIN DUNNE about his dazzling new book, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir – an exploration of what it means to be from a family of storytellers, justice-seekers, and secret-keepers in Hollywood. The fame at this illustrious family’s core has […]
In I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, neuroscientist and composer DANIEL J. LEVITIN explores the deep connections between music and healing. He presents numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how the former can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and […]
SHALOM AUSLANDER was raised in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father, guilt-wielding mother, and a violent, overbearing God. But he began to suspect that what plagued him was something worse: a story called “Feh.” Feh: A Memoir is his midlife journey to rewrite […]
In LAURA VAN DEN BERG’s State of Paradise: A Novel, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author is living in her mother’s small-town Florida home, tracking ominous and eerie changes. Contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and her suddenly missing sister, she begins to […]
MAX BOOT brings America’s 40th president to three-dimensional life in Reagan: His Life and Legend. Drawing on more than 100 new interviews and thousands of newly available documents – and acknowledging Ronald Reagan’s inscrutability and profound contradictions – this is an epic story of the Depression-era poor boy, former movie star, and mesmerizing politician who […]
I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love is CHARLES BOCK’s frank, tender memoir of parenting his young daughter while dealing with immense grief in the wake of his wife’s untimely death. In Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones: A Memoir, PRIYANKA MATTOO chronicles her search for home across 40 years and […]
JOSEPH KANON’s Shanghai: A Novel chronicles one man’s escape to Shanghai during a time when European Jews were desperate to emigrate after the violence of Kristallnacht. Daniel arrives penniless in the tumultuous, nearly lawless city and becomes trapped in Shanghai’s maze of politics and crime, trying to stay one step ahead of murder while outrunning […]
EDDIE GLAUDE JR.’s We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For argues that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how we have the power to be the heroes that […]
BEN MEZRICH's Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History examines the darkly comic battle between one of the most intriguing, polarizing, influential men of our time and the company that represents our culture’s dearest hope for a shared global conversation. BEN SMITH’s Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar […]
Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age is a history of the senior experience in modern America, revealing how security exists only for some. Historian JAMES CHAPPEL shows how old age first emerged as a distinct stage of life and then evolved, urging us to look to the past to better understand old […]
Former U.S. Poet Laureate ROBERT PINSKY reads from his latest book and discusses the role of poetry in the community. In Proverbs of Limbo, he mines and maps limbal regions both demographic and personal – clashing ways of understanding, personal history and world history, health and illness, freedom and compulsion, intimacy and community, personality and […]