On My Radar:

Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do

Edited by Meredith Maran
Penguin
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Twenty of America's bestselling authors share tricks, tips, and secrets of the successful writing life. Anyone who's ever sat down to write a novel or even a story knows how exhilarating and heartbreaking writing can be. So what makes writers stick with it? In Why We Write, twenty well-known authors candidly share what keeps them going and what they love most—and least—about their vocation.

On My Radar:

A Nobody in a Somebody World: My Hollywood Life in Beverly Hills
by Lorraine Holnback Brodek
Tate Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

On a morbidly hot August day in the depths of the Grand Canyon, Lorraine Brodek and her friend Erma Bombeck found themselves caught without a smidge of shade or water. The next thing they knew, their knees buckled and they hit the sand. Gasping for air, they groaned and rolled under a crag from which a scorpion skittered. That's when Erma mumbled her obit.

'I can see the headlines now...Famous Humorist, Newspaper Columnist, and TV Celebrity Dies on Trail with Little Unknown Person.'

At that moment, Lorraine promised God that if he let them live, she would write a book. This is her hilarious account of growing up in 90210 in the midst of A-listers. Go behind the scenes of show biz with her husband, who produced two B (bad) movies with Oscar-winning stars, and relive the embarrassment of her loss on the number-one television game show. With humor that jumps off the page, this book shows truth is way funnier than fiction and that a 'little, unknown person' can turn her crazy, bawdy, stories into a wonderful collection about A Nobody in a Somebody World: My Hollywood Life in Beverly Hills.

On My Radar:

The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse

by Sam Sheridan
Penguin Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Sam Sheridan has traveled the world as an amateur boxer and mixed martial arts fighter; he has worked as an EMT, a wilderness firefighter, a sailor, a cowboy at the largest ranch in Montana, and in construction under brutal conditions at the South Pole. If he isn't ready for the Apocalypse and the fractured world that will likely ensue, we are all in a lot of trouble.

Despite an arsenal of skills that puts many to shame, when Sam became a father he was beset with nightmares about being unable to protect his son. With disaster images from movies, books, and the nightly news filling his head, he was slowly being driven to distraction. If a rogue wave hit his beach community, would he be able to get out? If the power grid went down and he was forced outside the city limits, could he survive in the wilderness? And let's not even talk about plagues, zombie hoards, and attacking aliens. Unable to quiet his mind, Sam decides to face his fears head-on and gain as many skills as possible.

The problem is each doomsday situation requires something unique. Trying to navigate the clogged highway out of town? Head to the best stunt driving school in the country. Need to protect your family, but out of ammunition? Learn how to handle a knife. Is your kid hurt or showing signs of mental strain? Better brush upon emergency medicine and the psychological effects of trauma. From training with an Olympic weight lifter to a down and dirty apprenticeship in stealing cars with an ex-gang member, from a gun course in the hundred-degree heat of Alabama to agonizing lessons in arctic wilderness survival, Sam leaves no stone unturned. Will it be enough if a meteor rocks the earth? Who's to say? But as Sam points out, it would be a damn shame to survive the initial impact only to die a few days later because you don’t know how to build a fire.

A rollicking narrative with each chapter framed by a hypothetical catastrophic scenario, The Disaster Diaries is irresistible armchair adventure reading for everyone curious about what it might take to survive a cataclysmic event and those who just want to watch someone else struggling to find out.

In My TBR Stack:

The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures

by Edward Ball
Doubleday
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.

One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Stanford hired Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media.
   
Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity.

On My Radar:

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction - Stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing

by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd
Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Good Prose is an inspiring book about writing—about the creation of good prose—and the record of a warm and productive literary friendship. The story begins in 1973, in the offices of The Atlantic Monthly, in Boston, where a young freelance writer named Tracy Kidder came looking for an assignment. Richard Todd was the editor who encouraged him. From that article grew a lifelong association. Before long, Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the first book the two worked on together, had won the Pulitzer Prize. It was a heady moment, but for Kidder and Todd it was only the beginning of an education in the art of nonfiction.

Good Prose explores three major nonfiction forms: narratives, essays, and memoirs. Kidder and Todd draw candidly, sometimes comically, on their own experience—their mistakes as well as accomplishments—to demonstrate the pragmatic ways in which creative problems get solved. They also turn to the works of a wide range of writers, novelists as well as nonfiction writers, for models and instruction. They talk about narrative strategies (and about how to find a story, sometimes in surprising places), about the ethical challenges of nonfiction, and about the realities of making a living as a writer. They offer some tart and emphatic opinions on the current state of language. And they take a clear stand against playing loose with the facts. Their advice is always grounded in the practical world of writing and publishing.

Good Prose—like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style—is a succinct, authoritative, and entertaining arbiter of standards in contemporary writing, offering guidance for the professional writer and the beginner alike. This wise and useful book is the perfect companion for anyone who loves to read good books and longs to write one.

On My Radar:

Do More, Spend Less: The New Secrets of Living the Good Life For Less
by Brad Wilson
John Wiley & Sons
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

Achieve stellar savings with the techniques used on bradsdeals.com
Do More, Spend Less provides tips, advice, real-world examples, and strategies consumers need to know to compete in the consumer world. Author Brad Wilson, founder of BradsDeals.com, explains the techniques and buying strategies that are used on his site, which have saved 19 million consumers more than $200 million on BradsDeals.com in the past year alone. The majority of deals on his site provide free, or nearly free, products and services. This book provides tips, advice, real-world examples, and strategies consumers need to know to compete in the consumer world.

Shares why you should never buy an Apple product from the Apple store

Details how to spend three weeks in a suite at the Park Hyatt Paris for $20

Shares the unknown way to clean up your credit report and add at least 20 points to your score

The entire basis for thinking about how best to shop, spend, travel, bank—essentially all aspects of being a consumer—has fundamentally changed. The power is now in your hands, and Do More, Spend Less shows you how to master your savings.

On My Radar:

Dangerous Convictions: What's Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress
by Tom Allen
Oxford University Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

The rhetoric of the 2012 presidential campaign exposed the deeply rooted sources of political polarization in American. One side celebrated individualism and divided the public into "makers and takers;" the other preached "better together" as the path forward. Both focused their efforts on the "base" not the middle.

In Dangerous Convictions, former Democratic Congressman Tom Allen argues that what's really wrong with Congress is the widening, hardening conflict in worldviews that leaves the two parties unable to understand how the other thinks about what people should do on their own and what we should do together. Members of Congress don't just disagree, they think the other side makes no sense. Why are conservatives preoccupied with cutting taxes, uninterested in expanding health care coverage and in denial about climate change? What will it take for Congress to recover a capacity for pragmatic compromise on these issues?

Allen writes that we should treat self-reliance (the quintessential American virtue) and community (our characteristic instinct to cooperate) as essential balancing components of American culture and politics, instead of setting them at war with each other. Combining his personal insights from 12 years In Congress with recent studies of how human beings form their political and religious views, Allen explains why we must escape the grip of our competing worldviews to enable Congress to work productively on our 21st century challenges.

Features

• Combines a clear and compelling argument about the major source of dysfunction in American politics with the observations and insights of an insider.
• Provides a scholarly, readable, revealing picture of life in Congress in these polarized times, and an inspiring challenge to the public.
• Draws on a variety of intellectual sources including the work of Robert Putnam, George Lakoff, the several authors of Habits of the Heart, Thomas Merton, Isaiah Berlin, Tom Mann, and Norm Ornstein.

On My Radar:

The Most Forbidden Knowledge: 151 Things NO ONE Should Know How to Do

by Michael Powell & Matt Forbeck
Adams Media
Trade Paperback

From the publisher website:

* Stage a coup * Swim with sharks * Beat a breathalyzer *

The Forbidden Knowledge series has taken readers over the edge before, but never like this. The Most Forbidden Knowledge jam-packs the best and baddest how-tos into one car-stealing, keg-kicking, base-jumping-off-a-skyscraper collection. You'll find everything you ever wanted to learn (though probably never should) in this ultimate self-destruction manual.

About the Author:
Michael Powell has always been interested in doing things he shouldn't. His hobbies include looking gift horses in the mouth, staring directly at solar eclipses, and blowing past speed traps up and down Route 66.

Matt Forbeck is the award-winning creator of countless books, novels, stories, tabletop games, computer games, comics, and toys, proving his inability to focus. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife and five kids.

On My Radar:

Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road
by William Least Heat-Moon

Little, Brown & Company / Hachette Book Group
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

HERE, THERE, ELSEWHERE draws together for the first time William Least Heat-Moon's greatest short-form travel writing. Taking us from Japan, England, Italy, and Mexico to Long Island, Oregon, Arizona, and more, HERE, THERE, ELSEWHERE is a sharply observed, funny, and touching series of uncommon adventures narrated by America's keenest writer of place, people, and sublime connection.

For decades, William Least Heat-Moon's readers have been clamoring for him to gather his shorter pieces; now, that wait is over. A perfect treasury of prose and wry provocation for readers old and new, HERE, THERE, ELSEWHERE is further confirmation of Least Heat-Moon's status as an American master.

On My Radar:

Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong
by Raymond Bonner

Vintage / Knopf Doubleday / Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.
In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

In My TBR Stack:

Jungleland: A Mysterious Lost City, a WWII Spy, and a True Story of Deadly Adventure
by Christopher S. Stewart
Harper Collins
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

"I began to daydream about the jungle...."

On April 6, 1940, explorer and future World War II spy Theodore Morde (who would one day attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler), anxious about the perilous journey that lay ahead of him, struggled to fall asleep at the Paris Hotel in La Ceiba, Honduras.

Nearly seventy years later, in the same hotel, acclaimed journalist Christopher S. Stewart wonders what he's gotten himself into. Stewart and Morde seek the same answer on their quests: the solution to the riddle of the whereabouts of Ciudad Blanca, buried somewhere deep in the rain forest on the Mosquito Coast. Imagining an immense and immaculate El Dorado–like city made entirely of gold, explorers as far back as the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés have tried to find the fabled White City. Others have gone looking for tall white cliffs and gigantic stone temples—no one found a trace.
Legends, like the jungle, are dense and captivating. Many have sought their fortune or fame down the Río Patuca—from Christopher Columbus to present-day college professors—and many have died or disappeared. What begins as a passing interest slowly turns into an obsession as Stewart pieces together the whirlwind life and mysterious death of Morde, a man who had sailed around the world five times before he was thirty and claimed to have discovered what he called the Lost City of the Monkey God.

Armed with Morde's personal notebooks and the enigmatic coordinates etched on his well-worn walking stick, Stewart sets out to test the jungle himself—and to test himself in the jungle. As we follow the parallel journeys of Morde and Stewart, the ultimate destination morphs with their every twist and turn. Are they walking in circles? Or are they running from their own shadows? Jungleland is part detective story, part classic tale of man versus wild in the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Lost in Shangri-La. A story of young fatherhood as well as the timeless call of adventure, this is an epic search for answers in a place where nothing is guaranteed, least of all survival.

On My Radar:

E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
by Clinton Heylin
Viking Adult / Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Before he was the swaggering, stadium-packing megastar, Bruce Springsteen was a brooding introvert, desperate to strike a balance between his nuanced songwriting and the heft of his backing band. Clinton Heylin’s revelatory biography, E Street Shuffle, chronicles the evolution and influence of Springsteen’s E Street Band as they rose from blue-collar New Jersey to the heights of rock stardom. The band’s players—most notably saxophonist Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, guitarist “Little” Stevie Van Zandt, and drummer Max Weinberg—became Springsteen’s comrades in concert, helping him find the elusive sound and sonic punch that highlighted The Boss’s most creative period, including Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run, and Born in the USA. Fans will also learn another side of Springsteen, one punctuated with his clashes with studio executives seeking a commercially viable, radio-friendly album, and his temporary disbanding of the E Street Band to pursue projects like the eerie acoustic of Nebraska. Coinciding with the forteith anniversary of Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, drawing on interviews and access to new recordings and shows, Heylin paints a bold picture of The Boss.