On My Radar:

Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion
Cora Daniels and John L. Jackson, Jr.
Atria Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

When was the last time you said everything on your mind without holding back? In this no-holds-barred discussion of America’s top hot-button issues, a journalist and a cultural anthropologist express opinions that are widely held in private—but rarely heard in public.

Everyone edits what they say. It’s a part of growing up. But what if we applied tell-it-like-it-is honesty to grown-up issues? In Impolite Conversations, two respected thinkers and writers openly discuss five “third-rail” topics—from multi-racial identities to celebrity worship to hyper-masculinity among black boys—and open the stage for honest discussions about important and timely concerns.

Organized around five subjects—Race, Politics, Sex, Money, Religion—the dialogue between Cora Daniels and John L. Jackson Jr. may surprise, provoke, affirm, or challenge you. In alternating essays, the writers use reporting, interviews, facts, and figures to back up their arguments, always staying firmly rooted in the real world. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don’t, but they always reach their conclusions with respect for the different backgrounds they come from and the reasons they disagree.

Whether you oppose or sympathize with these two impassioned voices, you’ll end up knowing more than you did before and appreciating the candid, savvy, and often humorous ways in which they each take a stand. 

In My TBR Stack:

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
Simon Winchester
Harper Perennial
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Simon Winchester, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, delivers his first book about America: a fascinating popular history that illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings.

How did America become “one nation, indivisible”? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? To answer these questions, Winchester follows in the footsteps of America’s most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators, such as Lewis and Clark and the leaders of the Great Surveys; the builders of the first transcontinental telegraph and the powerful civil engineer behind the Interstate Highway System. He treks vast swaths of territory, from Pittsburgh to Portland, Rochester to San Francisco, Seattle to Anchorage, introducing the fascinating people who played a pivotal role in creating today’s United States.

Throughout, he ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree. Featuring 32 illustrations throughout the text, The Men Who United the States is a fresh look at the way in which the most powerful nation on earth came together.

In My TBR Stack:

Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America
Edited by Franklin Foer
Harper Perennial
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of The New Republic, an extraordinary anthology of essays culled from the archives of the acclaimed and influential magazine.

Founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann in 1914 to give voice to the growing progressive movement, The New Republic has charted and shaped the state of American liberalism, publishing many of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers.

Insurrections of the Mind is an intellectual biography of this great American political tradition. In seventy essays, organized chronologically by decade, a stunning collection of writers explore the pivotal issues of modern America. Weighing in on the New Deal; America’s role in war; the rise and fall of communism; religion, race, and civil rights; the economy, terrorism, technology; and the women’s movement and gay rights, the essays in this outstanding volume speak to The New Republic’s breathtaking ambition and reach. Introducing each article, editor Franklin Foer provides colorful biographical sketches and amusing anecdotes from the magazine’s history. Bold and brilliant, Insurrections of the Mind is a celebration of a cultural, political, and intellectual institution that has stood the test of time.

Contributors include: Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Pauline Kael, Michael Lewis, Zadie Smith, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, James Wolcott, D. H. Lawrence, John Maynard Keynes, Langston Hughes, John Updike, and Margaret Talbot.

In My TBR Stack:

Derek Jeter: Born to Be a Yankee
by the writers and photographers of the New York Post
edited by R.D. Rosen
Harper Collins
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

In celebration of one of the most widely beloved Yankees on the eve of his retirement, a handsomely designed, lavishly illustrated full-color commemorative keepsake volume that showcases his outstanding nineteen-year career.

In the fourth grade, Derek Jeter told his teacher that he was going to play shortstop for the New York Yankees—a dream would come true less than a decade later. Drafted out of Kalamazoo Central High School in 1992 when he was just eighteen, Jeter became the Yankees’ starting shortstop and the American League’s Rookie of the Year in just four years. One of the few professional athletes to have played his entire career with a single team, he helped the Yankees win five World Series championships, four of them in his first five years.

In his nearly two decades in pinstripes, Jeter became the team’s all-time career leader in hits, games played, stolen bases, and at bats and the all-time leader in hits by a shortstop in major league baseball. A recipient of dozens of awards and accolades, admired by fans, teammates, and opponents alike, Derek Jeter is and will always be the quintessential New York Yankee.

Drawn from the breadth of the archives and photo library of the New York Post, Derek Jeter: Born to be a Yankee charts the future Hall of Famer’s rise and commemorates every significant highlight and milestone in his career. Packed with dozens of color photographs, it pays homage to the man who has personified the modern New York Yankees, and will be a collector’s item for both Yankee fans and baseball aficionados of all ages and generations.

On My Radar:

You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman
Mike Thomas
St. Thomas Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Beloved TV comedic actor Phil Hartman is best known for his eight brilliant seasons on Saturday Night Live, where his versatility and comedic timing resulted in some of the funniest and most famous sketches in the television show’s history. Besides his hilarious impersonations of Phil Donahue, Frank Sinatra and Bill Clinton, Hartman’s other indelible characters included Cirroc the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, Eugene the Anal Retentive Chef and, of course, Frankenstein. He also starred as pompous radio broadcaster Bill McNeal in the NBC sitcom NewsRadio and voiced numerous classic roles — most memorably washed-up actor and commercial pitchman Troy McClure — on Fox’s long-running animated hit The Simpsons.

But Hartman’s seemingly charmed life was cut tragically short when he was fatally shot by his troubled third wife, Brynn, who turned a gun on herself several hours later. The shocking and headline-generating turn of events stunned those closest to the couple as well as countless fans who knew Phil only from afar.

Now, for the first time ever, the years and moments leading up to his untimely end are described in illuminating detail through information gleaned from exclusive interviews with scores of famous cast mates, close friends and family members as well as private letters, audio/video recordings, extensive police records, and more.

Both joyous tribute and serious biography, Mike Thomas' You Might Remember Me is a celebration of Phil Hartman’s multi-faceted career and an exhaustively reported, warts-and-all examination of his often intriguing and sometimes complicated life—a powerful, humor-filled and disquieting portrait of a man who was loved by many, admired by millions and taken from them far too early.

New Release:

A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention
Matt Richtel
William Morrow
Hardcover

  I read and finished this deeply compelling book in the space of a few days.  I love when authors give us the "story within a story" in their nonfiction.  Pulitzer Prize winner Matt Richtel does this in spades in A Deadly Wandering.

 Two men died at the hands of a texting teenage driver.  Richtel uses his narrative gift to show how technology can hinder the human mind.  At the time of the accident, 2006, there were essentially no laws on the books limiting texting while driving.  This book actually shows the intersection between emerging technology and neuroscience.

From the publisher's website:

From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Matt Richtel, a brilliant, narrative-driven exploration of technology’s vast influence on the human mind and society, dramatically-told through the lens of a tragic “texting-while-driving” car crash that claimed the lives of two rocket scientists in 2006.

In this ambitious, compelling, and beautifully written book, Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, examines the impact of technology on our lives through the story of Utah college student Reggie Shaw, who killed two scientists while texting and driving. Richtel follows Reggie through the tragedy, the police investigation, his prosecution, and ultimately, his redemption.

In the wake of his experience, Reggie has become a leading advocate against “distracted driving.” Richtel interweaves Reggie’s story with cutting-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains, proposing solid, practical, and actionable solutions to help manage this crisis individually and as a society.

A propulsive read filled with fascinating, accessible detail, riveting narrative tension, and emotional depth, A Deadly Wandering explores one of the biggest questions of our time—what is all of our technology doing to us?—and provides unsettling and important answers and information we all need.

In My TBR Stack:

Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World - 16 Graphic Biographies
Monte Beauchamp
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In a first-of-its-kind collection, award-winning illustrators celebrate the lives of the visionary artists who created the world of comic art and altered pop culture forever.

Sixteen Graphic Novel Biographies of:

• Walt Disney • Dr. Seuss • Charles Schulz • The Creators of Superman • R. Crumb • Jack Kirby • Winsor McCay • Hergé • Osamu Tezuka • MAD creator, Harvey Kurtzman • Al Hirschfeld • Edward Gorey • Chas Addams • Rodolphe Töpffer • Lynd Ward • Hugh Hefner

The story of cartoons—the multibillion-dollar industry that has affected all corners of our culture, from high to low—is ultimately the story of the visionary icons who pioneered the form. 

But no one has told the story of comic art in its own medium—until now. 

In Masterful Marks, top illustrators—including Drew Friedman, Nora Krug, Denis Kitchen, and Peter Kuper—reveal how sixteen visionary cartoonists overcame massive financial, political, and personal challenges to create a new form of art that now defines our world.

In My TBR Stack:

A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany
Sigrid MacRae
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Sigrid MacRae never knew her father, until a trove of letters revealed not only him, but also the singular story of her parents’ intercontinental love affair. While visiting Paris

in 1927, her American mother, Aimée, raised in a wealthy Connecticut family, falls in love with a charming, sophisticated Baltic German baron, a penniless exile of the Russian revolution. They marry. But the harsh reality of post–World War I Germany is inescapable: a bleak economy and the rise of Hitler quash Heinrich’s diplomatic

ambitions, and their struggling family farm north of Berlin drains Aimée’s modest fortune. In 1941, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front and is killed by a sniper. Widowed, living in a country soon at war with her own, Aimée must fend for herself. With home and family in jeopardy, she and her six young children flee the advancing Russian army in an epic journey, back to the country she thought she’d left behind.

A World Elsewhere is a stirring narrative of two hostages to history and a mother’s courageous fight to save her family.

On My Radar:

Twitter: The Comic (The Book) - Comics Based on the Greatest Tweets of Our Generation
Mike Rosenthal
Chronicle Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

From a simple, brilliant premise—to create comics from the weirdest and funniest tweets around—artist Mike Rosenthal (@VectorBelly) has crafted a hilariously surreal world that has attracted over a million followers to his blog Twitter: The Comic. Each carefully curated tweet delivers concentrated humor in the language of the Internet, reproduced in the comics with typos and all. As envisioned by Rosenthal, each comes to life through a bizarrely recognizable cast of bassoon-playing cops, sarcastic teens, bear MDs, clueless dads, potential insect overlords, and more. Featuring more than 120 of these comics, including dozens unique to this book, Twitter: The Comic (The Book) is a dementedly funny vision of our strange online age.

On My Radar:

Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations
Jeffrey D. Clements
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

• STILL ESSENTIAL: The Citizens United decision continues to distort the electoral process and expand the power of corporations
• UPDATED THROUGHOUT: This second edition details both the ruling’s expanding damage to democracy and, in an all-new chapter, how citizens can lead the battle against it

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that corporations are people eliminated campaign finance restrictions and dramatically increased corporate power –but attorney Jeff Clements shows how you can fight back.

Clements explains the strange history of how the Supreme Court came to embrace a concept that flies in the face of not only all common sense but most of American legal history as well. He shows how unfettered corporate rights will impact public health, energy policy, the environment, and the justice system.

In this new edition Clements details Citizens United’s ongoing destructive effects—for example, Chevron was able to spend $1.2 million to influence a single local election in a city of 100,000 people.  But he also describes the growing movement to reverse the ruling—since the first edition 16 states, 160 members of Congress, and 500 cities and towns have called for a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. And in a new chapter, Do Something!, Clements shows how—state by state and community by community—Americans are using new strategies and tools to renew democracy and curb unbalanced corporate power.

In My TBR Stack:

Kentucky Traveler: My Life in Music
Ricky Skaggs with Eddie Dean
It Books (now Dey Street Books)
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

In Kentucky Traveler, Ricky Skaggs, the music legend who revived modern bluegrass music, gives a warm, honest, one-of-a-kind memoir of forty years in music—along with the Ten Commandments of Bluegrass, as handed down by Ricky’s mentor Bill Monroe; the Essential Guide to Bedrock Country Songs, a lovingly compiled walk through the songs that have moved Skaggs the most throughout his life; Songs the Lord Taught Us, a primer on Skaggs’s most essential gospel songs; and a bevy of personal snapshots of his musical heroes.

For readers of Johnny Cash’s autobiography, lovers of O Brother Where Art Thou, and fans of country music and bluegrass, Kentucky Traveler is a priceless look at America’s most cherished and vibrant musical tradition through the eyes of someone who has lived it.

Now in Paperback:

Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America
Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman
Touchstone
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists take an unbridled look into one of the most sensitive post-9/11 national security investigations—a breathtaking race to stop a second devastating terrorist attack on American soil.

In Enemies Within, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman “reveal how New York really works” (James Risen, author of State of War) and lay bare the complex and often contradictory state of counterterrorism and intelligence in America through the pursuit of Najibullah Zazi, a terrorist bomber who trained under one of bin Laden’s most trusted deputies. Zazi and his co-conspirators represented America’s greatest fear: a terrorist cell operating inside America.

This real-life spy story—uncovered in previously unpublished secret NYPD documents and interviews with intelligence sources—shows that while many of our counterterrorism programs are more invasive than ever, they are often counterproductive at best.

After 9/11, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly initiated an audacious plan for the Big Apple: dispatch a vast network of plainclothes officers and paid informants—called “rakers” and “mosque crawlers”—into Muslim neighborhoods to infiltrate religious communities and eavesdrop on college campuses. Police amassed data on innocent people, often for their religious and political beliefs. But when it mattered most, these strategies failed to identify the most imminent threats.

In Enemies Within, Appuzo and Goldman tackle the tough questions about the measures that we take to protect ourselves from real and perceived threats. They take you inside America’s sprawling counterterrorism machine while it operates at full throttle. They reveal what works, what doesn’t, and what Americans have unknowingly given up. “Did the Snowden leaks trouble you? You ain’t seen nothing yet” (Dan Bigman, Forbes editor).

In My TBR Stack:

After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace
A.J. Langguth
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A brilliant evocation of the post-Civil War era by the acclaimed author of Patriots and Union 1812. After Lincoln tells the story of the Reconstruction, which set back black Americans and isolated the South for a century.

With Lincoln’s assassination, his “team of rivals,” in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s phrase, was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson’s policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson was saved from removal by one vote in the Senate trial, presided over by Salmon Chase. Even William Seward, Lincoln’s closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver.

By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, “I’m afraid I’m elected.” His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by post-war greed and corruption during his two terms.

Reconstruction died unofficially in 1887 when Republican Rutherford Hayes joined with the Democrats in a deal that removed the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill with protections first proposed in 1872 by the Radical Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.

Sage's Blog Tour:

When All Balls Drop: The Upside of Losing Everything
Heidi Siefkas
Wheatmark
Trade Paperback

When you reach bottom there is nowhere to go but up.  Heidi Siefkas personifies that lesson in WHEN ALL BALLS DROP.  Not long after discovering that her husband may have cheated on her, Siefkas has her neck broken by a falling tree limb.  

Many people would have just given up at that point, become a victim and dissolve into a puddle of human misery, but Heidi Siefkas took a different road. She attacked her life in all aspects:  mental, physical and spiritual. 

It would have been easy for her to sink into a morass of anger and spitefulness, but the book is full of delightful humor and just enough quirkiness to endear her to the reader.  You really pull for this lady. Empathetic readers will find joy in her triumphs.

Many of us have many balls in the air on a constant basis.  We struggle mightily to keep them aloft so as not to suffer the fate of the fool.  Heidi Siefkas shows us how to handle adversity with humor, candor, and most importantly resilience. 

I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys uplifting and honest memoirs and I look forward to the sequel.

On My Radar:

Happiness: Ten Years of n+1
nplusone
Faber & Faber
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

“Ten years in, I still find the most re-readable writing—Coleridge’s old test was rereading—in n+1. There are only two things wrong with this assemblage. One, it’s not big enough. . . . Two, after ten years, this magazine remains too much of a damn secret.”

—Mary Karr, Introduction

Happiness, released on the occasion of n+1's tenth anniversary, collects the best of the magazine as selected by its editors. Intended to revive the leftist social criticism that was the hallmark of Dissent and Partisan Review, n+1 began as a fierce rejoinder to the consumerism and complacency of the Bush years. It hasn't slowed down since. 

Featuring founding editors Chad Harbach, Keith Gessen, Benjamin Kunkel, Marco Roth, and Mark Greif, as well as the essays that launched some of the most electric young writers working today, such as Elif Batuman, Emily Witt, and Kristen Dombek. 

Selected by the editors of n+1 magazine. 
With an introduction by Mary Karr. 
Published by Faber and Faber, Inc. 

On My Radar:

Collision Low Crossers: Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football
Nicholas Dawidoff
Little, Brown and Company / Back Bay Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

An unrivaled portrait of day-to-day life in the NFL: "Riveting...An instant classic." -- New York Times Book Review

By spending a year with the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff entered a mysterious and private world with its own rituals and language. Equal parts Paper Lion, Moneyball, Friday Night Lights, and The Office, this absorbing, funny, and vivid narrative gets to the heart of a massive and stressful collective endeavor.

Here is football in many faces: the polarizing, brilliant, and hilarious head coach; the general manager, whose job is to support (and suppress) the irrepressible coach; the defensive coaches and their in-house rivals, the offensive coaches; and of course the players. Wise safeties, brooding linebackers, high-strung cornerbacks, enthusiastic rookies, and a well-read nose tackle-they make up a strange and complex family. Dawidoff makes an emblematic NFL season come alive for fans and non-fans alike in a book about football that will forever change the way people watch and think about the sport.

In My TBR Stack:

Angry Optimist: The Life and Times of Jon Stewart
Lisa Rogak
Thomas Dunne Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Since his arrival at The Daily Show in 1999, Jon Stewart has become one of the major players in comedy as well as one of the most significant liberal voices in the media. In Angry Optimist, biographer Lisa Rogak charts his unlikely rise to stardom. She follows him from his early days growing up in New Jersey, through his years as a struggling standup comic in New York, and on to the short-lived but acclaimed The Jon Stewart Show. And she charts his humbling string of near-misses—passed over as a replacement for shows hosted by Conan O’Brien, Tom Snyder, and even the fictional Larry Sanders—before landing at a half-hour comedy show that at the time was still finding its footing amidst roiling internal drama.

Once there, Stewart transformed The Daily Show into one of the most influential news programs on television today. Drawing on interviews with current and former colleagues, Rogak reveals how things work—and sometimes don’t work—behind the scenes at The Daily Show, led by Jon Stewart, a comedian who has come to wield incredible power in American politics.

On My Radar:

People I Want to Punch in the Throat: Competitive Crafters, Drop-Off Despots, and Other Suburban Scourges
Jen Mann
Random House
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

A debut collection of witty, biting essays laced with a surprising warmth, from Jen Mann, the writer behind the popular blog People I Want to Punch in the Throat
 
People I want to punch in the throat:
• anyone who feels the need to bling her washer and dryer
• humblebraggers
• people who treat their pets like children
 
Jen Mann doesn’t have a filter, which sometimes gets her in trouble with her neighbors, her fellow PTA moms, and that one woman who tried to sell her sex toys at a home shopping party. Known for her hilariously acerbic observations on her blog, People I Want to Punch in the Throat, Mann now brings her sharp wit to bear on suburban life, marriage, and motherhood in this laugh-out-loud collection of essays. From the politics of joining a play group, to the thrill of mothers’ night out at the gun range, to the rewards of your most meaningful relationship (the one you have with your cleaning lady), nothing is sacred or off-limits. So the next time you find yourself wearing fuzzy bunny pajamas in the school carpool line or accidentally stuck at a co-worker’s swingers party, just think, What would Jen Mann do? Or better yet, buy her book.

In My TBR Stack:

Lincoln's Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months That Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War
Todd Brewster
Scribner
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A brilliant, authoritative, and riveting account of the most critical six months in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, when he penned the Emancipation Proclamation and changed the course of the Civil War.

On July 12, 1862, Abraham Lincoln spoke for the first time of his intention to free the slaves. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, doing precisely that. In between, however, was perhaps the most tumultuous six months of his presidency, an episode during which the sixteenth president fought bitterly with his generals, disappointed his cabinet, and sank into painful bouts of clinical depression. Most surprising, the man who would be remembered as “The Great Emancipator” did not hold firm to his belief in emancipation. He agonized over the decision and was wracked by private doubts almost to the moment when he inked the decree that would change a nation.

Popular myth would have us believe that Lincoln did not suffer from such indecision, that he did what he did through moral resolve; that he had a commanding belief in equality, in the inevitable victory of right over wrong. He worked on drafts of the document for months, locking it in a drawer in the telegraph room of the War department. Ultimately Lincoln chose to act based on his political instincts and knowledge of the war. It was a great gamble, with the future of the Union, of slavery, and of the presidency itself hanging in the balance.

In this compelling narrative, Todd Brewster focuses on these critical six months to ask: was it through will or by accident, intention or coincidence, personal achievement or historical determinism that he freed the slaves? The clock is always ticking in these pages as Lincoln searches for the right moment to enact his proclamation and simultaneously turn the tide of war. Lincoln’s Gamble portrays the president as an imperfect man with an unshakable determination to save a country he believed in, even as the course of the Civil War remained unknown.

On My Radar:

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