In My TBR Stack:

The Devil's Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich
by Robert K. Wittman & David Kinney
Harper Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

An influential figure in Adolf Hitler’s early inner circle from the start, Alfred Rosenberg made his name spreading toxic ideas about the Jews throughout Germany. By the dawn of the Third Reich, he had published a bestselling masterwork that was a touchstone of Nazi thinking.

His diary was discovered hidden in a Bavarian castle at war’s end—five hundred pages providing a harrowing glimpse into the mind of a man whose ideas set the stage for the Holocaust. Prosecutors examined it during the Nuremberg war crimes trial, but after Rosenberg was convicted, sentenced, and executed, it mysteriously vanished.

New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Wittman, who as an FBI agent and then a private consultant specialized in recovering artifacts of historic significance, first learned of the diary in 2001, when the chief archivist for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum contacted him to say that someone was trying to sell it for upwards of a million dollars. The phone call sparked a decade-long hunt that took them on a twisting path involving a pair of octogenarian secretaries, an eccentric professor, and an opportunistic trash-picker. From the crusading Nuremberg prosecutor who smuggled the diary out of Germany to the man who finally turned it over, everyone had reasons for hiding the truth.

Drawing on Rosenberg’s entries about his role in the seizure of priceless artwork and the brutal occupation of the Soviet Union, his conversations with Hitler and his endless rivalries with Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler, The Devil’s Diary offers vital historical insight of unprecedented scope and intimacy into the innermost workings of the Nazi regime—and into the psyche of the man whose radical vision mutated into the Final Solution.

In My TBR Stack:

The Books that Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People
by Bethanne Patrick
Regan Arts
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Leading authors, politicians, CEOs, actors, and other notables share the books that changed their life, why they love them, and their passion with readers everywhere. Regan Arts has teamed up with the literary charity 826National, which will receive a portion of the book’s proceeds to provide students ages 6–18 with opportunities to explore their creativity and improve their writing skills.







Contributors include Al Roker, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Eggers, Emma Straub, Eric Idle, Fay Weldon, Fran Lebowitz, Gillian Flynn, Gregory Maguire, Jeff Kinney, Jim Shepard, Laura Lippmann, Lev Grossman, Liev Schreiber, Margaret Atwood, Mayim Bialik, Nelson DeMille, Rosanne Cash, Susan Orlean, Tim Gunn, and Tommy Hilfiger, among others.

BookSpin Review:

Lust & Wonder: A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs
St. Martin's Press
Hardcover



"...Augusten Burroughs is known for his poignant and painfully honest autobiographical commentary..."




The above quote is ripped directly from the author's Facebook page and it states what I love most about his writing: the biting honesty of his willingness to share.


I believe it is human nature to keep many secrets from the world at large, and sometimes even from ourselves.  I don't know about you, but were I to write a memoir, there are dozens of stories  that I would want left out.  I would fight with the editors to keep many, many things from being published.


Burroughs has the opposite approach.  It is said that good writers open a vein and bleed upon the page.  If this is true, Augusten Burroughs' books are saturated red.


I read a lot of memoirs because I am interested in people's stories. I have kept up with Burroughs since his nonfiction debut. In Lust and Wonder, the subject is relationships and we tag along as he examines the differences and similarities of love and lust.


To further illustrate the point of the Facebook quote:  Reading Augusten Burroughs is like being at lunch with just the two of you and you get to listen to him catch you up on everything that's been happening in his life.  You don't care that you don't get a word in at all -- his storytelling is captivating.  There is just the right amount of humor, drama and self-deprecation to keep things real.


I recommend this book for anyone who enjoyed Running with Scissors.  It would do good to have the backstory.


I am eagerly looking forward to the next chapter, so to speak.

Review by BookDude

 

On My Radar:

The Grand Tour: The Life and Music of George Jones
by Rich Kienzle
Dey Street Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In the vein of the classic Johnny Cash: The Life, this groundbreaking work explores the wild life and extraordinary musical career of “the definitive country singer of the last half century” (New York Times), who influenced, among others, Bob Dylan, Buck Owens, Emmylou Harris, John Fogerty, George Strait, Alan Jackson, and Garth Brooks.

In a masterful biography laden with new revelations, veteran country music journalist/historian Rich Kienzle offers a definitive, full-bodied portrait of legendary country singer George Jones and the music that remains his legacy. Kienzle meticulously sifted through archival material, government records, recollections by colleagues and admirers, interviewing many involved in Jones’s life and career. The result: an evocative portrait of this enormously gifted, tragically tormented icon called “the Keith Richards of country.”

Kienzle chronicles Jones’s impoverished East Texas childhood as the youngest son of a deeply religious mother and alcoholic, often-abusive father. He examines his three troubled marriages including his union with superstar Tammy Wynette and looks unsparingly at Jones’s demons. Alcohol and later cocaine nearly killed him until fourth wife Nancy helped him learn to love himself. Kienzle also details Jones’s remarkable musical journey from singing in violent Texas honky tonks to Grand Ole Opry star, hitmaker and master vocalist whose raw, emotionally powerful delivery remains the Gold Standard for country singers.

The George Jones of this heartfelt biography lived hard before finding contentment until he died at eighty-one—a story filled with whiskey, women and drugs but always the saving grace of music.

Illustrated with eight pages of photos.

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Guest Post

Dave Griffin on Running
 (The Carroll County Times – Sunday, September 14, 201)

I have a lot of readers who are not runners, something I’m grateful for because it expands my audience. 


Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of these readers and in the course of the conversations, I often hear this phrase, “I can’t run because…” 


One of the more common expressions is, “I can’t run because I’m too busy.” I’ll usually empathize with them about how hectic life is, never doubting that they have a busy schedule. Then I’ll point out that their admission may be half false. 


It’s probably more correct to say, “I don’t run because I’m too busy.” 


The word 'can’t' is dangerous. Using it denote helplessness. 


The truth is, with a little self-confidence, people can do a lot of things they may not think they can do,

including run. 


A growing percentage of people need more physical activity. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of American adults, over 78 million, are obese. And it’s likely to get worst in the next generation; 17 percent of our kids are already included in the obesity statistic. The health and cost implications are staggering. 

IN THE DISTANCE - Dave Griffin

I’ve spoken to a number of people about the obesity problem. Usually they want to know about my running program and how people can successfully lead an active lifestyle. We talk about all the health benefits and how physical activity is just as important as diet when it comes to losing weight. 


Then I tell them something most haven’t thought about before. Improved health simply doesn’t offer enough motivation for most people to get active. If it did, obesity rates would already be on the decline. 


Emotional health issues are growing, too. Clinical depression rates are climbing in adults and children. Basically, that means people are less happy than they once were. 


Obese people are more likely to be depressed. And while obesity can lead to unhappiness, the reverse is also true; teenagers with symptoms of depression are more likely to become obese within the next year. 


If weight loss and long-term health won’t provide enough motivation for someone to become active, maybe becoming happier will. 


Personally, I’ve never finished a run feeling emotionally worse than I did when I started. That was true when I was in my best running years, it was true in years when I was running very little and it’s true now. 


There are medical reasons why running promotes emotional health. The brain releases feel-good chemicals when the body’s active. Routine exercise leads to improvement in the immune system and the increase in body temperature during running has a calming effect. 


Running has psychological benefits as well. It leads to an increase in confidence, takes the mind away from wasteful worry and helps people cope in a healthy way. 


None of this means everyone should run. There are good reasons to be a non-runner, not the least of which is a personal distaste for running. 


But everyone should believe this—if you chose to run, you can. You are strong enough, brave enough and you can find the time. 


And if becoming healthy isn’t reason enough, do it because you’ll become happier. 


Isn’t that what we want, regardless of all the things we have and don’t have? What we really want is to enjoy living. 


So go outside, breath fresh air and move often. Then, everything else may take care of itself. 




Dave Griffin is the Times’ running writer and coordinator of the Flying Feet Running Programs. His column appears every other Sunday. Email him at dpgflyingfeet@aol.com

 His latest book, pictured above, is IN THE DISTANCE, published by Flying Feet Running Programs. I would like to thank Rachel Taylor from Smith Publicity for her help organizing this guest post.

On My Radar:

Dimestore
by Lee Smith
Algonquin Books

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story.

Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy’s dimestore. It was in that dimestore — listening to customers and inventing adventures for the store’s dolls — that she became a storyteller. Even when she was sent off to college to earn some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she might ever know was the one she was driving away from — and it’s a place that she never left behind.

Dimestore’s fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Smith has created both a moving personal portrait and a testament to embracing one’s heritage. It’s also an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished.

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New Fiction:

No One Knows
by J.T. Ellison
Gallery Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In an obsessive mystery as thrilling as The Girl on the Train and The Husband’s Secret, New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison will make you question every twist in her page-turning novel—and wonder which of her vividly drawn characters you should trust.

The day Aubrey Hamilton’s husband is declared dead by the state of Tennessee should bring closure so she can move on with her life. But Aubrey doesn’t want to move on; she wants Josh back. It’s been five years since he disappeared, since their blissfully happy marriage—they were happy, weren’t they?—screeched to a halt and Aubrey became the prime suspect in his disappearance. Five years of emptiness, solitude, loneliness, questions. Why didn’t Josh show up at his friend’s bachelor party? Was he murdered? Did he run away? And now, all this time later, who is the mysterious yet strangely familiar figure suddenly haunting her new life?
In No One Knows, the New York Times bestselling coauthor of the Nicholas Drummond series expertly peels back the layers of a complex woman who is hiding dark secrets beneath her unassuming exterior. This masterful thriller for fans of Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, and Paula Hawkins will pull readers into a you’ll-never-guess merry-go-round of danger and deception. Round and round and round it goes, where it stops…no one knows.

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On My Radar:

The Imitation Game: Alan  Turing Decoded (graphic novel)
by Jim Ottaviani 
Illustrator: Leland Purvis
Abrams Books

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

English mathematician and scientist Alan Turing (1912–1954) is credited with many of the foundational principles of contemporary computer science. The Imitation Game presents a historically accurate graphic novel biography of Turing’s life, including his groundbreaking work on the fundamentals of cryptography and artificial intelligence. His code breaking efforts led to the cracking of the German Enigma during World War II, work that saved countless lives and accelerated the Allied defeat of the Nazis. While Turing’s achievements remain relevant decades after his death, the story of his life in post-war Europe continues to fascinate audiences today. 

Award-winning duo Jim Ottaviani (the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Feynman and Primates) and artist Leland Purvis (an Eisner and Ignatz Award nominee and occasional reviewer for the Comics Journal) present a factually detailed account of Turing’s life and groundbreaking research—as an unconventional genius who was arrested, tried, convicted, and punished for being openly gay, and whose innovative work still fuels the computing and communication systems that define our modern world. Computer science buffs, comics fans, and history aficionados will be captivated by this riveting and tragic story of one of the 20th century’s most unsung heroes.

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In My TBR Stack:

The Mindfulness Edge: How to Rewire Your Brain for Leadership and Personal Excellence Without Adding to Your Schedule
by Matt Tenney and Tim Gard
John Wiley & Sons
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

There is a simple practice that can improve nearly every component of leadership excellence and it doesn't require adding anything to your busy schedule. In The Mindfulness Edge, you'll discover how a subtle inner shift, called mindfulness, can transform things that you already do every day into opportunities to become a better leader. Author Matt Tenney has trained leaders around the world in the practice of mindfulness. In this book, he partners with neuroscientist Tim Gard, PhD, to offer step-by-step, practical guidance for quickly and seamlessly integrating mindfulness training into your daily life—rewiring your brain in ways that improve both the ‘hard' and ‘soft' skills of leadership.

In this book, you'll learn how mindfulness training helps you:

• Quickly improve business acumen and your impact on the bottom line
• Become more innovative and attract/retain innovative team members
• Develop the emotional intelligence essential for creating and sustaining a winning culture
• Realize the extraordinary leadership presence that inspires greatness in others

The authors make a compelling case for why mindfulness training may be the 'ultimate success habit.' In addition to helping you improve the most essential elements of highly effective leadership, mindfulness training can help you discover unconditional happiness and realize incredible meaning—professionally and personally.

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On My Radar:

Heart of Glass: A Memoir
by Wendy Lawless
Gallery Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In this edgy and romantic follow-up to her New York Times bestselling debut memoir, Chanel Bonfire, Wendy Lawless chronicles her misguided twenties—a darkly funny story of a girl without a roadmap for life who flees her disastrous past to find herself in the gritty heart of 1980s New York City.

Before downtown Manhattan was scrubbed clean, gentrified and overrun with designer boutiques and trendy eateries and bars, it was the center of a burgeoning art scene—both exciting and dangerous. Running from the shipwreck of her glamorous and unstable childhood with a volatile mother, Wendy Lawless landed in the center of it all. With an open heart and a thrift store wardrobe, Wendy navigated this demi-monde of jaded punk rockers, desperate actors, pulsing parties, and unexpected run-ins with her own past as she made every mistake of youth, looked for love in all the wrong places, and eventually learned how to grow up on her own.


With the same “biting humor” (People) that made her “powerful” (USA TODAY) and “illuminating and inspiring” (Reader’s Digest) New York Times bestseller Chanel Bonfire so captivating, Wendy turns her brutally honest and often hilarious spotlight on herself, recounting her tumultuous and giddy twenties trying to make it in the creative underbelly of New York City, all the while searching for love, a paying job, and occasionally, a free meal.

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On My Radar:

Alligator Candy: A Memoir
by David Kushner
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

From award-winning journalist David Kushner, a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other premier magazines, Alligator Candy is a reported memoir about family, survival, and the unwavering power of love.

David Kushner grew up in the early 1970s in the Florida suburbs. It was when kids still ran free, riding bikes and disappearing into the nearby woods for hours at a time. One morning in 1973, however, everything changed. David’s older brother Jon biked through the forest to the convenience store for candy, and never returned.








Every life has a defining moment, a single act that charts the course we take and determines who we become. For Kushner, it was Jon’s disappearance—a tragedy that shocked his family and the community at large. Decades later, now a grown man with kids of his own, Kushner found himself unsatisfied with his own memories and decided to revisit the episode a different way: through the eyes of a reporter. His investigation brought him back to the places and people he once knew and slowly made him realize just how much his past had affected his present. After sifting through hundreds of documents and reports, conducting dozens of interviews, and poring over numerous firsthand accounts, he has produced a powerful and inspiring story of loss, perseverance, and memory. Alligator Candy is searing and unforgettable.

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On My Radar:

I Swear I'll Make It Up to You: A Life on the Low Road
by Mishka Shubaly
Public Affairs Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

An odyssey of family, heartbreak, violence, punk rock, brokenness, broke-ness, sex, love, loss, drinking, drinking, drinking, and an unlikely savior: distance running.

A misfit kid at the best of times, Mishka Shubaly had his world shattered when, in a twenty-four-hour span in 1992, he survived a mass shooting on his school’s campus, then learned that his parents were getting divorced. His father, a prominent rocket scientist, abandoned the family and their home was lost to foreclosure. Shubaly swore to avenge the wrongs against his mother, but instead plunged into a magnificently toxic love affair with alcohol.

 Almost two decades later, Shubaly’s life changed again when a fateful five-mile run after a bar fight inspired him to clean up his life. And when he finally reconnected with his estranged father, he discovered the story of his childhood was radically different from what he thought he knew.

In this fiercely honest, emotional, and self-laceratingly witty book, Shubaly relives his mistakes, misfortunes, and infrequent good decisions: the disastrous events that fractured his life; his incendiary romances; his hot-and-cold career as a rock musician; meeting his newborn nephew while out of his gourd on cough syrup. I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You is an apology for choices Shubaly never thought he’d live long enough to regret, a journey so far down the low road that it took him years of running to claw his way back.

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Now in Paperback:

The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During World War II
by Jan Jarboe Russell
Scribner
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

The New York Times bestselling dramatic and never-before-told story of a secret FDR-approved American internment camp in Texas during World War II: “A must-read….The Train to Crystal City is compelling, thought-provoking, and impossible to put down” (Star-Tribune, Minneapolis).

During World War II, trains delivered thousands of civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and their American-born children. The only family internment camp during the war, Crystal City was the center of a government prisoner exchange program called “quiet passage.” Hundreds of prisoners in Crystal City were exchanged for other more ostensibly important Americans—diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, and missionaries—behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
“In this quietly moving book” (The Boston Globe), Jan Jarboe Russell focuses on two American-born teenage girls, uncovering the details of their years spent in the camp; the struggles of their fathers; their families’ subsequent journeys to war-devastated Germany and Japan; and their years-long attempt to survive and return to the United States, transformed from incarcerated enemies to American loyalists. Their stories of day-to-day life at the camp, from the ten-foot high security fence to the armed guards, daily roll call, and censored mail, have never been told.
Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history, The Train to Crystal City reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR’s tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and above all, “is about identity, allegiance, and home, and the difficulty of determining the loyalties that lie in individual human hearts” (Texas Observer).

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The President's Book of Secrets

The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents from Kennedy to Obama
by David Priess
Public Affairs Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Every president has had a unique and complicated relationship with the intelligence community. While some have been coolly distant, even adversarial, others have found their intelligence agencies to be among the most valuable instruments of policy and power.

Since John F. Kennedy’s presidency, this relationship has been distilled into a personalized daily report: a short summary of what the intelligence apparatus considers the most crucial information for the president to know that day about global threats and opportunities. This top–secret document is known as the President’s Daily Brief, or, within national security circles, simply “the Book.” Presidents have spent anywhere from a few moments (Richard Nixon) to a healthy part of their day (George W. Bush) consumed by its contents; some (Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush) consumed by its contents; some (Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush) consider it far and away the most important document they saw on a regular basis while commander in chief.

The details of most PDBs are highly classified, and will remain so for many years. But the process by which the intelligence community develops and presents the Book is a fascinating look into the operation of power at the highest levels. David Priess, a former intelligence officer and daily briefer, has interviewed every living president and vice president as well as more than one hundred others intimately involved with the production and delivery of the president's book of secrets. He offers an unprecedented window into the decision making of every president from Kennedy to Obama, with many character–rich stories revealed here for the first time. 

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Guest Review

Diary of a Madman: The Geto Boys, Life, Death, and the Roots of Southern Rap
by Brad "Scarface" Jordan with Benjamin Meadows-Ingram
Dey Street Books
Trade Paperback


Reviewed by Brent Sanders

Autobiographies are dicey, at best. They tend to lapse into fevered, self-serving apologia, or bonehead “and then I...” recitation.

The best turn into salient meditations on life choices and paths. Such books are rare.

Brad Jordan, better known as “Scarface”, a pivotal member of the pioneering hip-hop group the Geto Boys, and later a successful solo artist, has written an autobiography that asks no favors, and makes no apologies. It’s a fascinating account of his evolution as an artist, a businessman, and a human being.

Lyrically, the Geto Boys were known for their violent imagery. But Jordan, with his tendency to introspection and his easy, matter-of-fact delivery, gave them a dimension other hip-hop groups did not possess. The braggadocio was thickly applied, but there was an element of unpredictability, even self-doubt, that gave it a depth that transcended the standard “ho/glock/bitch” mentality that the genre too often passes off as “real”.

Digging into his chaotic childhood, where music and writing provided an outlet for a restless mind, Jordan takes us into his adolescence, and his graduation from low-level drug dealer to hip-hop artist, signed to James Prince’s Rap-A-Lot Records. He thought he was going in with his own group, but Prince connected him with a couple of other local rappers, Willie Dee and Bushwick Bill, to form the seminal band.

He recounts the years in chronological order, always using his music as a touchstone. He touches on his relationships with other rappers and producers, including Ice Cube, Chuck D, and even a young Kanye West, one of the producers on “The Fix”, his 2002 album, considered a high water mark of the genre.

We learn that he’s a recalcitrant music junkie, with Pink Floyd being a particular favorite, and that he once paid a club DJ to play nothing but Van Morrison all night. He recounts honestly his business dealings, including his stint as the President of Def Jam South records, and the twisted loyalties that come with independent rap labels and street level entrepreneurs like Prince, with whom he has a complicated history.

Humorous anecdotes, some darkly so, are liberally applied, often with the jarring and poignant remembrances of friends passed away. But his calm acceptance and willingness to confront the confusion of his life are what lifts this book above the standard, salacious tell-all hustle of most musical biographies.

Like his vocal approach, the writing here is smooth and efficient, with a rapper’s propensity for cramming a lot of information into a few sentences. And rather than try to reconcile the contradictions in his life, Jordan embraces them.

Recommended Reading Soundtrack:

1. Mind of a Lunatic (Geto Boys)

2. Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me (Geto Boys)

3. Diary of a Madman

4.. A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die

5. I’m Dead 6. Six Feet Deep (Geto Boys)

7. No Tears

8. I Seen a Man Die 9. Hand of the Dead Body 1

10. The World is a Ghetto (Geto Boys)

11. Mary Jane

12. Last of a Dying Breed

That’s a good start. There's a lot more where that came from.

 

 

If At Birth You Don't Succeed

My Adventures with Disaster and Destiny
by Zach Anner
Henry Holt and Co.
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

“Zach Anner is way more than an inspirational figure for anyone who has ever felt impossibly different: he’s also a great f**king writer. Wise and funny, with unfailing insight into the booby trap known as the human mind, you will hang on every word as you watch him turn his considerable intellectual gifts into a life worth envying. I like that this book has no genre, and neither does this special man.”—Lena Dunham

Comedian Zach Anner opens his frank and devilishly funny book, If at Birth You Don't Succeed, with an admission: he botched his own birth. Two months early, underweight and under-prepared for life, he entered the world with cerebral palsy and an uncertain future. So how did this hairless mole-rat of a boy blossom into a viral internet sensation who's hosted two travel shows, impressed Oprah, driven the Mars Rover, and inspired a John Mayer song? (It wasn't "Your Body is a Wonderland.")

Zach lives by the mantra: when life gives you wheelchair, make lemonade. Whether recounting a valiant childhood attempt to woo Cindy Crawford, encounters with zealous faith healers, or the time he crapped his pants mere feet from Dr. Phil, Zach shares his fumbles with unflinching honesty and characteristic charm. By his thirtieth birthday, Zach had grown into an adult with a career in entertainment, millions of fans, a loving family, and friends who would literally carry him up mountains.

If at Birth You Don't Succeed is a hilariously irreverent and heartfelt memoir about finding your passion and your path even when it's paved with epic misadventure. This is the unlikely but not unlucky story of a man who couldn't safely open a bag of Skittles, but still became a fitness guru with fans around the world. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll fall in love with the Olive Garden all over again, and learn why cerebral palsy is, definitively, "the sexiest of the palsies."

Praise for Zach Anner

“Cerebral palsy couldn't stop Anner from becoming a celeb, traveling the world, and Friending Oprah (for starters).”—Cosmopolitan

“Zach makes you want to be a better person, with his humor and his heart and everything he's had to deal with from the time he was born. I've never met anyone like him, and I've met a lot of people.” —Oprah Winfrey

“Zach Anner is a truly inspiring and hysterical human being with a warped sense of humor (and body). He’s also an exceptional writer and his memoir is an absolute joy.”—Rainn Wilson

“Zach Anner is the living definition of ‘giving better than he’s gotten.’ Life dealt him a difficult hand but he managed to beat the house with humor, heart, and a fearless punk attitude. Required reading.”—Patton Oswalt

“I love Zach Anner and I love his memoir. If everyone were a little more like Zach, the world may not be a better place, but it would be funnier place, which is a great step forward.”—Alexis Ohanian

“He’s a unique, creative kid with a smart, edgy sense of humor.”—Arsenio Hall

“I think I speak for everybody when I say...I want to see more of Zach.” —John Mayer

“Wonderful. . . Anner’s comedy is the peppy, uplifting sort you’d expect from someone who Oprah says ‘makes [her] want to be a better person,’ such as his elaborate Olive Garden metaphors for the nature of life. . . . Anner remarks wryly that being expected to act as an ambassador for the disabled ‘is a tightrope walk, which is hard on four wheels.’ Maybe so, but with this book, he makes it look easy.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Funny, empowering…An inspirational memoir with a seasoned, infectious sense of humor…[Anner’s book chronicles] his three decades of life (so far) with cerebral palsy, a permanent condition that hasn’t prevented him from living his dream as a comic, a media sensation, and a motivational speaker.”—Kirkus Reviews

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Movie Freak

My Life Watching Movies
by Owen Gleiberman
Hachette Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Owen Gleiberman has spent his life watching movies-first at the drive-in, where his parents took him to see wildly inappropriate adult fare like Rosemary's Baby when he was a wide-eyed 9 year old, then as a possessed cinemaniac who became a film critic right out of college. In Movie Freak, his enthrallingly candid, funny, and eye-opening memoir, Gleiberman captures what it's like to live life through the movies, existing in thrall to a virtual reality that becomes, over time, more real than reality itself.

Gleiberman paints a bittersweet portrait of his complicated and ultimately doomed friendship with Pauline Kael, the legendary New Yorker film critic who was his mentor and muse. He also offers an unprecedented inside look at what the experience of being a critic is really all about, detailing his stint at The Boston Phoenix and then, starting in 1990, at EW, where he becomes a voice of obsession battling-to a fault-to cling to his independence.

Gleiberman explores the movies that shaped him, from the films that first made him want to be a critic (Nashville and Carrie), to what he hails as the sublime dark trilogy of the 1980s (Blue Velvet, Sid and Nancy, and Manhunter), to the scruffy humanity of Dazed and Confused, to the brilliant madness of Natural Born Killers, to the transcendence of Breaking the Waves, to the pop rapture of Moulin Rouge! He explores his partnership with Lisa Schwarzbaum and his friendships and encounters with such figures as Oliver Stone, Russell Crowe, Richard Linklater, and Ben Affleck. He also writes with confessional intimacy about his romantic relationships and how they echoed the behavior of his bullying, philandering father. And he talks about what film criticism is becoming in the digital age: a cacophony of voices threatened by an insidious new kind of groupthink.

Ultimately, Movie Freak is about the primal pleasure of film and the enigmatic dynamic between critic and screen. For Gleiberman, the moving image has a talismanic power, but it also represents a kind of sweet sickness, a magnificent obsession that both consumes and propels him.

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How I Shed My Skin

Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood
by Jim Grimsley
Algonquin Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

“. . . Good people taught and still teach racism to their children without a second thought.  This was true in the South of my birth and remains so to the present . . . We teach that God created the races to be separate from one another for a purpose, and we preach that this purpose cannot be to mix, because why then would He have created the separation in the first place? We teach that when people are different from each other, one is better and the other worse . . . We teach that black and white are not simply different but opposite.”

More than sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that America’s schools could no longer be segregated by race.

Critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley was eleven years old in 1966 when federally mandated integration of schools went into effect in the state and the school in his small eastern North Carolina town was first integrated. Until then, blacks and whites didn’t sit next to one another in a public space or eat in the same restaurants, and they certainly didn’t go to school together.

Going to one of the private schools that almost immediately sprang up was not an option for Jim: his family was too poor to pay tuition, and while they shared the community’s dismay over the mixing of the races, they had no choice but to be on the front lines of his school’s desegregation.
What he did not realize until he began to meet these new students was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any black people.

Now, more than forty years later, Grimsley looks back at that school and those times—remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture. The result is a narrative both true and deeply moving. Jim takes readers into those classrooms and onto the playing fields as, ever so tentatively, alliances were forged and friendships established. And looking back from today’s perspective, he examines how far we have really come.

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Anger Is an Energy

My Life Uncensored
by John Lydon
Dey Street Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:


From the legendary frontman of the Sex Pistols, comes the complete, unvarnished story of his life in his own words.

John Lydon is an icon—one of the most recognizable and influential cultural figures of the last forty years. As Johnny Rotten, he was the lead singer of the Sex Pistols-the world’s most notorious band. The Pistols shot to fame in the mid-1970s with songs such as “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen.” So incendiary was their impact at the time that in their native England, the Houses of Parliament questioned whether they violated the Traitors and Treasons Act, a crime that carries the death penalty to this day. The Pistols would inspire the formation of numerous other groundbreaking groups and Lydon would become the unlikely champion of a generation clamoring for change.

Following on the heels of the Pistols, Lydon formed Public Image Ltd (PiL), expressing an equally urgent impulse in his character: the constant need to reinvent himself, to keep moving. From their beginnings in 1978 PiL set the groundbreaking template for a band that continues to challenge and thrive to this day, while also recording one of the eighties most powerful anthems, “Rise.” Lydon also found time for making innovative dance records with the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Leftfield. By the nineties he’d broadened his reach into other media while always maintaining his trademark invective and wit, most memorably hosting Rotten TV on VH1.

John Lydon remains a captivating and dynamic figure to this day—both as a musician, and, thanks to his outspoken, controversial, and from-the-hip opinions, as a cultural commentator. In Anger is an Energy, he looks back on a life full of incident, from his beginnings as a sickly child of immigrant Irish parents growing up in post-war London to his present status as a vibrant, alternative hero.

The book includes 70 black-and-white and color photos, many which are rare or never-before-seen.

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Buck 'Em!

The Autobiography of Buck Owens
by Buck Owens with Randy Poe
Backbeat Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Born in Texas and raised in Arizona, Buck Owens eventually found his way to Bakersfield, California. Unlike the vast majority of country singers, songwriters, and musicians who made their fortunes working and living in Nashville, the often rebellious and always independent Owens chose to create his own brand of country music some 2,000 miles away from Music City – racking up a remarkable 21 number-one hits along the way. In the process he helped give birth to a new country sound and did more than any other individual to establish Bakersfield as a country music center.

In the latter half of the 1990s, Buck began working on his autobiography. Over the next few years, he talked into the microphone of a cassette tape machine for nearly one hundred hours, recording the story of his life. With his near-photographic memory, Buck recalled everything from his early days wearing hand-me-down clothes in Texas to his glory years as the biggest country star of the 1960s; from his legendary Carnegie Hall concert to his multiple failed marriages; from his hilarious exploits on the road to the tragic loss of his musical partner and best friend, Don Rich; from his days as the host of a local TV show in Tacoma, Washington, to his co-hosting the network television show Hee Haw; and from his comeback hit, “Streets of Bakersfield,” to his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

In these pages, Buck also shows his astute business acumen, having been among the first country artists to create his own music publishing company. He also tells of negotiating the return of all of his Capitol master recordings, his acquisition of numerous radio stations, and of his conceiving and building the Crystal Palace, one of the most venerated musical venues in the country.

“The stream of stories throughout this book captures, with an uncanny accuracy, the way I heard Buck speak whenever he told a story to someone.” – Dwight Yoakam

“An immersive and informative look at one of country's most influential and surprisingly humble musicians. Poe personalizes the narrator and gives readers a true sense of the voice of the hardworking musician who helped define the Bakersfield Sound.” – Publishers Weekly

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