In My TBR Stack:

Ghost Hunter: The Groundbreaking Classic of Paranormal Investigation
Hans Holzer
Tarcher Penguin
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

The prestige edition of the classic, trail-blazing work on ghost hunting will intrigue new fans and longtime devotees alike—part of the new Tarcher Supernatural Library.
 
Fifty years before Paranormal State, Ghost Hunters, and Most Haunted, there was Hans Holzer—a man known as the “Father of the Paranormal.” Holzer pioneered ghost-hunting methods still used today, and brought ghosts and ghost hunting into popular culture in the second half of the twentieth century.
Ghost Hunter presented some of the first-ever case studies of haunting investigations, taken from Holzer’s own practice in the New York City area—ranging from Civil War-era spirits to the tormented ghosts of murder victims.

For devoted ghost-hunting aficionados curious about the practice’s history, there is no better place to start than the first book Hans Holzer wrote, Ghost Hunter.This is the 1963 book that launched his publishing career and gained him international fame.

The first three titles released in Tarcher's Supernatural Library are Ghost Hunter (by Hans Holzer), Romance of Sorcery (by Sax Rohmer) and Isis in America (by Henry Steel Olcott).

Fiction Spotlight:

Mr. Tall: A Novella and Stories

Tony Earley

Little, Brown and Company

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Two decades after his debut collection Here We Are in Paradise (LB, 2/94) heralded Tony Earley as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, the rueful, bittersweet, and riotous stories of Mr. Tall reestablish him as a mythmaker and tale spinner of the first rank. These stories introduce us not only to ordinary people seeking to live extraordinary lives, but also to the skunk ape (a southern variant of Bigfoot), the ghost of Jesse James, and a bone-tired Jack the Giant Killer. Whether it's Appalachia, Nashville, the Carolina Coast, or a make-believe land of talking dogs, each world Earley creates is indelible.

Tony Earley -- Photo by Ruthie Earley

In My TBR Stack:

RG3: The Promise
Dave Sheinin
Plume Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

He’s been called many things—Heisman Trophy winner, MVP, the savior of the Washington Redskins—but to his millions of fans, Robert Griffin III is known simply as RG3.

Robert Griffin III was a preternaturally gifted athlete from a young age, but in those early days he played nearly every sport except football. He seemed pointed toward stardom, but would it be in basketball or maybe in track, where he qualified for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials as a hurdler? As for playing football, Griffin first had to overcome his mother’s objections to the violence and danger by making a “Pinkie Promise” with her that no one would catch him. Eventually, he began to realize that all of his remarkable talents—unrivaled speed, pinpoint accuracy, exceptional intelligence, single-minded drive—combined into a potent force that few quarterbacks could rival. What followed seemed almost destined: a football scholarship to Baylor University, three exceptional seasons capped by winning the Heisman Trophy, and the 2012 draft—where Griffin, as the second overall pick, became the franchise quarterback for one of the oldest and most storied football teams in the country.

In RG3: The Promise, award-winning Washington Post reporter Dave Sheinin provides an in-depth, behind-the-scenes account of Griffin’s phenomenal rookie year—and offers a unique and intimate look inside the transformation one of the NFL’s brightest young stars.

In My TBR Stack:

How to Lose Everything: A Mostly True Story
Philip Mattheis
Zest Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Jonathan, Sam, Schulz, and Eric usually spend their summers skateboarding at the park and dreaming about the time when they’ll finally move out of the suburbs. But in the summer of 1994 the four teenagers find a small fortune hidden inside an abandoned house, and that changes everything. The money was a dream come true, but it couldn’t last. Stress, drugs, and dwindling funds raise the stakes and also raise some serious questions about the future. Eighteen years later, Jonathan returns to that life-changing summer to tally up the cost of that discovery and explain how one broken dream led to a totally renewed sense of purpose.

In My TBR Stack:

War of the Whales: A True Story
Joshua Horwitz
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Two men face off against an all-powerful navy—and the fate of the ocean’s most majestic creatures hangs in the balance.

"A gripping, brilliantly told tale of the secret and deadly struggle between American national security and the kings of the oceans."—Bob Woodward

War of the Whales is the gripping tale of a crusading attorney who stumbles on one of the US Navy’s best-kept secrets: a submarine detection system that floods entire ocean basins with high-intensity sound—and drives whales onto beaches. As Joel Reynolds launches a legal fight to expose and challenge the Navy program, marine biologist Ken Balcomb witnesses a mysterious mass stranding of whales near his research station in the Bahamas. Investigating this calamity, Balcomb is forced to choose between his conscience and an oath of secrecy he swore to the Navy in his youth.

When Balcomb and Reynolds team up to expose the truth behind an epidemic of mass strandings, the stage is set for an epic battle that pits admirals against activists, rogue submarines against weaponized dolphins, and national security against the need to safeguard the ocean environment. Waged in secret military labs and the nation’s highest court, War of the Whales is a real-life thriller that combines the best of legal drama, natural history, and military intrigue.

In My TBR Stack:

Big Red: Baseball, Fatherhood, and My Life in the Big Red Machine
Ken Griffey and Phil Pepe
Triumph Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Reflecting on an outstanding 19-year major-league career, this autobiography chronicles baseball great Ken Griffey, beginning with his days just out of high school. The account relates Griffey's decision to venture into the baseball business, documenting his time as a scout, coach, and manager along with his accomplishments as a father, raising two other major league ballplayers: Craig, who played briefly for the Seattle Mariners, and future Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. Capturing the subject's time with the Big Red Machine, this record details his days playing alongside Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Pete Rose, highlighting the Reds' two consecutive world championships in 1975 and 1976. Finally, the ultimate thrill of Griffey's career is featured: playing in the same outfield in 1990 with his son, Ken Griffey Jr., during the game where they hit back-to-back home runs—the only father-son combination to do so in the history of Major League Baseball. Filled with amusing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes glimpses of what it's like when baseball really does run in the family, this is a sports memoir unlike any other.

In My TBR Stack:

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life
William Deresiewicz
Free Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

A groundbreaking manifesto for people searching for the kind of insight on leading, thinking, and living that elite schools should be—but aren’t—providing.

As a professor at Yale, Bill Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation’s brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively, and how to find a sense of purpose.

Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale’s admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics and computer science, students are losing the ability to think in innovative ways. Deresiewicz explains how college should be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their own path. He addresses parents, students, educators, and anyone who's interested in the direction of American society, featuring quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and clearly presenting solutions.

In My TBR Stack:

Season of Saturdays: A History of College Football in 14 Games
Michael Weinreb
Scribner
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

From an award-winning writer, journalist, and college football expert: an entertaining cultural history that highlights the key moments, games, personalities, and scandals of the popular and controversial American pastime.

Every Saturday in the fall, countless college students, alumni, and sports fans wake up filled with a particular kind of hope and excitement, ready for their team’s game. Half of them finish the day in joyous celebration, and the other half in abject depression, but all of them are ever ready to do it over again the next weekend.

College football is one of the unifying cornerstones of American culture. Since the first game in 1869, football has grown from a stratified offshoot of rugby to a ubiquitous part of our national identity. Today, as college conferences fracture and grow, amateur athlete status is called into question, and a playoff system threatens to replace big-money bowl games, we’re in the midst of the most dramatic transitional period in the history of the sport.

Michael Weinreb’s Season of Saturdays examines the evolution of college football, from the moral and ethical quandaries that informed its past to the fascinating changes that may affect its future. Since its nascent days on elite Ivy League campuses, college football has inspired both school spirit and controversy. Weinreb explores the game’s inherent violence, its early seeds of big-business greed, and its impact on institutions of higher learning. Filtered through the stories of such iconic coaches as Woody Hayes and Joe Paterno and Steve Spurrier, Season of Saturdays also celebrates some of the greatest games of all time while exploring their larger significance. Part popular history, part memoir—and always uniquely American—Season of Saturdays is both a look back at how the sport became so fraught with problems, and a look ahead at how the sport might survive another century.

In My TBR Stack:

Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food & Love from an American Midwest Family
Kathleen Flinn
Viking Books
Hardcover

Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good excerpt

From the publisher's website:

In this family history interwoven with recipes, Kathleen Flinn returns readers to the mix of food and memoir beloved by readers of her bestselling The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good explores the very beginnings of her love affair with food and its connection to home. It is the story of her midwestern childhood, its memorable home cooks, and the delicious recipes she grew up with. Flinn shares tales of her parents’ pizza parlor in San Francisco, where they sold Uncle Clarence’s popular oven-fried chicken, as well as recipes for the vats of chili made by her former army cook Grandpa Charles, fluffy Swedish pancakes from Grandma Inez, and cinnamon rolls for birthday breakfasts. Through these dishes, Flinn came to understand how meals can be memories, and how cooking can be a form of communication. Brimming with warmth and wit, this book is sure to appeal to Flinn’s many fans as well as readers of Marcus Samuelsson, Ruth Reichl, and Julie Powell.

In My TBR Stack:

Julian Hawthorne: The Life of a Prodigal Son
Gary Scharnhorst
University of Illinois Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity.

What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's son was nothing if not resourceful. Using his father's name to open doors, his portfolio became a pastiche of potboilers, low-budget magazine pieces, and ad copy, as well as anything else that would help pay the bills.

The younger Hawthorne's name and work ethic gave him influence in spite of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and Collier's Weekly. When he was convicted of stock fraud, his four-month incarceration turned him into an effective advocate for prison reform. And, as a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era's most important events: McKinley's assassination, the Galveston hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.

When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.

In My TBR Stack:

How to Write Anything: A Complete Guide
Laura Brown
W.W. Norton
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A practical guide to everything you’ll ever need to write—at work, at school, and in your personal life.

With more than two hundred how-to entries and easy-to-use models organized into three comprehensive sections on work, school, and personal life, How to Write Anything covers a wide range of topics that make it an essential guide for the whole family. You want your boss to fund a special project. How can you write a persuasive email that will win his approval? It's time to apply to college. How can you write an essay that will stand out? The mother of one of your co-workers has died. What's the best way to express your condolences?

Grounded in a common-sense approach, friendly and supportive, How to Write Anything is Internet-savvy, with advice throughout about choosing the most appropriate medium for your message: e-mail or pen and paper. At once a how-to, a reference book, and a pioneering guide for writing in a changing world, this is the only writing resource you'll ever need.

In My TBR Stack:

Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization
Daniel Patrick Forrester
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

There's an intangible and invisible market place within our lives today where the products traded are four fold: attention, distraction, data and meaning. The stories and examples within Consider demonstrate that the best decisions, insights, ideas and outcomes result when we make sufficient time to think and reflect.  While technology allows us to act and react more quickly than ever before, we are taking increasingly less time to consider our decisions before we make them.  Reflection supplies an arsenal of ideas and solutions to the right problems.  The organizations and leaders who can sustain thought upon the right problems, while they absorb the unknowns that will inevitably arise, will prove the most relevant and lasting in this already turbulent new century.

In My TBR Stack:

My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide to Eating, Drinking & Going With Your Gut
Hannah Hart
It Books (Dey Street Books)
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

One day, sad cubicle dweller and otherwise bored New York transplant Hannah Hart decided, as a joke, to make a fake cooking show for her friend back in California. She turned on the camera, pulled out some bread and cheese, and then, as one does, started drinking. (Doesn't everyone cook with a spoon in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other?) The video went viral and an online sensation was born.

My Drunk Kitchen includes recipes, stories, full color photos, and drawings to inspire your own culinary adventures in tipsy cooking. It is also a showcase for Hannah Hart's great comedic voice. Hannah offers key drink recommendations, cooking tips (like, remember to turn the oven off when you go to bed) and shares never-before-seen recipes such as:

1. The Hartwich (Knowledge is ingenuity! Learn from the past!)
2. Can Bake (Inventing things is hard! You don't have to start from scratch!)
3. Latke Shotkas (Plan ahead to avoid a night of dread!)
4. Tiny Sandwiches (Size doesn't matter! Aim to satisfy.)
5. Saltine Nachos (It's not about resources! It's about being resourceful.

This is a book for anyone who believes they have what it takes to make a soufflé for the holiday party and show up the person who apparently has nothing better to do than bake things from scratch. It also recommends the drink you'll need to accompany any endeavor of this magnitude. In the end, My Drunk Kitchen may not be your go-to guide for your next dinner party . . . but it will make you laugh and drink . . . I mean think . . . about life.

On My Radar:

Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty
Jerry Oppenheimer
St. Martin's Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

From the founders of the international health-care behemoth Johnson & Johnson in the late 1800s to the contemporary Johnsons of today, such as billionaire New York Jets owner Robert Wood "Woody" Johnson IV, all is revealed in this scrupulously researched, unauthorized biography by New York Times bestselling author Jerry Oppenheimer. Often compared to the Kennedy clan because of the tragedies and scandals that had befallen both wealthy and powerful families, Crazy Rich, based on scores of exclusive, candid, on-the-record interviews, reveals how the  dynasty's vast fortune was both intoxicating and toxic through the generations of a family that gave the world Band-Aids and Baby Oil. At the same time, they've been termed perhaps the most dysfunctional family in the fortune 500. Oppenheimer is the author of biographies of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Hiltons and Martha Stewart, among other American icons.

In My TBR Stack:

Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner
Judy Melinek, M.D. and T.J. Mitchell
Scribner
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The fearless memoir of a young forensic pathologist’s “rookie season” as a NYC medical examiner, and the cases—hair-raising and heartbreaking and impossibly complex—that shaped her as both a physician and a mother.

Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband T.J. and their toddler Daniel holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation—performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy’s two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines flight 587.

Lively, action-packed, and loaded with mordant wit, Working Stiff offers a firsthand account of daily life in one of America’s most arduous professions, and the unexpected challenges of shuttling between the domains of the living and the dead. The body never lies—and through the murders, accidents, and suicides that land on her table, Dr. Melinek lays bare the truth behind the glamorized depictions of autopsy work on shows like CSI and Law & Order to reveal the secret story of the real morgue. 

In My TBR Stack:

The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way
Amanda Ripley
Simon & Schuster
Trade Paperback


BookSpin Excerpt


From the publisher's website:

In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy. 

What is it like to be a child in the world’s new education superpowers? 

In a global quest to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embed­ded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, exchanges a high-achieving Minnesota suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, seventeen, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for Poland. 

Through these young informants, Ripley meets battle-scarred reformers, sleep-deprived zombie students, and a teacher who earns $4 million a year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had many “smart” kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education. 

A journalistic tour de force, The Smartest Kids in the World is a book about building resilience in a new world—as told by the young Americans who have the most at stake.

In My TBR Stack:

Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness
Joel Gold and Ian Gold
Free Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

What if you woke up with the alarming suspicion that you were being watched?

One day in 2003, a patient unlike any other that Dr. Joel Gold had seen before was admitted to his unit at Bellevue Hospital. This man claimed he was being filmed constantly and that his life was being broadcast around the world like The Truman Show—the 1998 film depicting a man who is unknowingly living out his life as the star of a popular soap opera. Over the next few years, Dr. Gold saw a number of patients suffering from what he and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, began calling the “Truman Show delusion,” launching them on a quest to understand the nature of this particular phenomenon, of delusions more generally, and of madness itself.

The current view of delusions is that they are the result of biology gone awry, of neurons in the brain misfiring. In contrast, the Golds argue that delusions are the result of the interaction between the brain and the social world. By exploring the major categories of delusion through fascinating case studies and marshaling the latest research in schizophrenia, the brothers reveal the role of culture and the social world in the development of psychosis—delusions in particular. Suspicious Minds presents a groundbreaking new vision of just how dramatically our surroundings can influence our brains.

BookSpin Giveaway

Jay & Silent Bob's Blueprints for Destroying Everything
Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith
Gallery Books
Trade Paperback

Gallery Books has graciously allocated several copies of this book for giveaway on BookSpin. To enter to win simply retweet my tweets about the giveaway.  My twitter name is @Book_Dude.  U.S. entries only, please. 

From the publisher's website:

Just in time for the twentieth anniversary of Clerks! Destroy anything and everything with the help of this illustrated collection of blueprints concocted by the legendary characters Jay and Silent Bob.

Need to destroy self-doubt? How about the glass ceiling? Or maybe your aims are less lofty, and your ex-girlfriend just really has to go.

In all cases, the iconic Jay and Silent Bob offer practical and entertaining advice for wreaking havoc at every turn in the most hilarious ways possible. Written by the beloved duo from Clerks, and many other films and productions in the View Askewniverse, these blueprints will save your day...by destroying everyone else’s.

In My TBR Stack:

The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC
Jesse Fink
St. Martin's Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC is unlike any AC/DC book you’ve read before. Less a biography, more a critical appreciation, it tells the story of the trio through 11 classic rock songs and reveals some of the personal and creative secrets that went into their making.

Important figures from AC/DC’s long way to the top open up for the very first time, while unsung heroes behind the band’s success are given the credit they are due. Accepted accounts of events are challenged while sensational new details emerge to cast a whole new light on the band’s history—especially their early years with Atlantic Records in the United States. Former AC/DC members and musicians from bands such as Guns N’ Roses, Dropkick Murphys, Airbourne and Rose Tattoo also give their take on the Youngs’ brand of magic.

Their music has never pulled its punches. Neither does The Youngs. After 40 years, AC/DC might just have gotten the serious book it deserves.

In My TBR Stack:

Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath
Paul Ham
Thomas Dunne Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War. More than 100,000 people were killed instantly by the atomic bombs, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Many hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries later, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness.

Yet American leaders claimed the bombs were “our least abhorrent choice”—and still today most people believe they ended the Pacific War and saved millions of American and Japanese lives. In this gripping narrative, Ham demonstrates convincingly that misunderstandings and nationalist fury on both sides led to the use of the bombs. Ham also gives powerful witness to its destruction through the eyes of eighty survivors, from twelve-year-olds forced to work in war factories to wives and children who faced the holocaust alone.

Hiroshima Nagasaki presents the grizzly unadorned truth about the bombings, blurred for so long by postwar propaganda, and transforms our understanding of one of the defining events of the twentieth century. 

On My Radar:

Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways
David A. Davis and Tara Powell
University Press of Mississippi
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Scarlett O'Hara munched on a radish and vowed never to go hungry again. Vardaman Bundren ate bananas in Faulkner's Jefferson, and the Invisible Man dined on a sweet potato in Harlem. Although food and stories may be two of the most prominent cultural products associated with the South, the connections between them have not been thoroughly explored until now.

Southern food has become the subject of increasingly self-conscious intellectual consideration. The Southern Foodways Alliance, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, food-themed issues of Oxford American and Southern Cultures, and a spate of new scholarly and popular books demonstrate this interest. Writing in the Kitchen explores the relationship between food and literature and makes a major contribution to the study of both southern literature and of southern foodways and culture more widely.

This collection examines food writing in a range of literary expressions, including cookbooks, agricultural journals, novels, stories, and poems. Contributors interpret how authors use food to explore the changing South, considering the ways race, ethnicity, class, gender, and region affect how and what people eat. They describe foods from specific southern places such as New Orleans and Appalachia, engage both the historical and contemporary South, and study the food traditions of ethnicities as they manifest through the written word.

Contributions by David A. Davis, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Lisa Hinrichsen, Erica Abrams Locklear, Tara Powell, Ann Romines, Ruth Salvaggio, David S. Shields, Melanie Benson Taylor, Sarah W. Walden, Psyche Williams-Forson.

On My Radar:

What We See When We Read
Peter Mendelsund
Vintage Original
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading—how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. 

What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like? The collection of fragmented images on a page—a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so—and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved—or reviled—literary figures. In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature—he considers himself first and foremost as a reader—into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.

In My TBR Stack:

Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered
Dianne Hales
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Everybody knows her smile, but no one knows her story: Meet the flesh-and-blood woman who became one of the most famous artistic subjects of all time—Mona Lisa.

A genius immortalized her. A French king paid a fortune for her. An emperor coveted her. Every year more than 9 million visitors trek to view her portrait in the Louvre.Yet while everyone recognizes her smile, hardly anyone knows her story. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, a blend of biography, history, and memoir, truly is a book of discovery—about the world’s most recognized face, most revered artist, and most praised and parodied painting. Who was she, this ordinary woman who rose to such extraordinary fame? Why did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model? What became of her? And why does her smile enchant us still?

Lisa Gherardini (1479-1542) was a quintessential woman of her times, caught in a whirl of political upheavals, family dramas, and public scandals. Her life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the history of Florence—and of the greatest artistic outpouring the world has ever seen. Her story creates an extraordinary tapestry of Renaissance Florence, with larger-than-legend figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli.

Dianne Hales, author of La Bella Lingua, became obsessed with finding the real Mona Lisa on repeated trips to Florence. In Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, she takes readers with her to meet Lisa’s descendants; uncover her family’s long and colorful history; and explore the neighborhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife, and a mother. In the process, we can participate in Lisa’s daily rituals; understand her personal relationships; and see, hear, smell, and taste “her” Florence. Hales brings to life a time poised between the medieval and the modern, a vibrant city bursting into fullest bloom, and a culture that redefined the possibilities of man—and of woman.

In My TBR Stack:

Crash Course: The Life Lessons My Students Taught Me

Kim Bearden

Simon & Schuster

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Crash Course chronicles the life lessons that Kim Bearden has learned during an award-winning career in education that has spanned three decades. Kim has taught more than 2,000 students, and each has shown her something about the world and the abundant capacity for love, resilience, and appreciation that we all possess. By sharing her students’ stories, she teaches their inspiring lessons to us all.

Throughout the ups and downs of her professional and personal life, Kim found that her students were the light that illuminated her path; they were her sanctuary in the storm. From her challenges as a first year teacher, to her triumphs as the cofounder of the highly acclaimed Ron Clark Academy, Kim shares how children can teach each of us the importance of building relationships, abandoning fear, embracing one’s unique gifts, and living with passion.

Full of honesty, humor, heartbreak, and humanity, Kim’s experiences show how children can help any one of us, despite life’s obstacles, find the joy and significance in both our personal and professional lives.

In My TBR Stack:

Boston Mob: The Rise and Fall of the New England Mob and its Most Notorious Killer
Marc Songini
St. Martin's Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The New England Mafia was a hugely powerful organization that survived by using violence to ruthlessly crush anyone that threatened it, or its lucrative gambling, loansharking, bootlegging and other enterprises. Psychopathic strongman Joseph “The Animal” Barboza was one of the most feared mob enforcers of all time, killing as many as thirty people for business and pleasure.

From information based on newly declassified documents and the use of underworld sources, Boston Mob spans the gutters and alleyways of East Boston, Providence and Charlestown to the halls of Congress in Washington D.C. and Boston’s Beacon Hill. Its players include governors and mayors, and the Mafia Commission of New York City. From the tragic legacy of the Kennedy family to the Winter Hill-Charlestown feud, the fall of the New England Mafia and the rise of Whitey Bulger, Mark Songini's Boston Mob is a saga of treachery, murder, greed, and the survival of ruthless men pitted against legal systems and police forces.

In My TBR Stack:

Margarita Wednesdays: A Memoir
Deborah Rodriguez
Gallery Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In answer to the question of what happened following her New York Times bestseller Kabul Beauty School, Deborah Rodriquez is back with a new memoir.

Irreverent, insightful, and blatantly honest, Deborah takes us along on her inspiring journey of self-discovery and renewal after she is forced to flee Afghanistan in 2007. She first lands in California, where she feels like a misfit teetering on the brink of sanity. Where was that fearless redhead who stared danger in the face back in Kabul?

After being advised to commune with glowworms and sit in contemplation for one year, Rodriguez finally packs her life and her cat into her Mini Cooper and moves to a seaside town in Mexico. Despite having no plan, no friends, and no Spanish, a determined Rodriguez soon finds herself swept up in a world where the music never stops and a new life can begin. Her adventures and misadventures among the expats and locals help lead the way to new love, new family, and a new sense of herself.

In the magic of Mexico, she finds the hairdresser within, and builds the life she never knew was possible—a life on her own terms.