On My Radar:

There I Go Again: How I Came to Be Mr. Feeny, John Adams, Dr. Craig, KITT, and Many Others
by William Daniels
Potomac Books (Univ. of Nebraska Press)
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

There I Go Again is a celebrity memoir like no other, revealing the life of a man whose acting career has been so rich that millions of Americans know his face even while they might not recognize his name.

William Daniels is an enigma—a rare chameleon who has enjoyed massive success both in Hollywood and on Broadway and been embraced by fans of successive generations. Few of his peers inspire the fervor with which buffs celebrate his most iconic roles, among them George Feeny in Boy Meets World, KITT in Knight Rider, Dr. Mark Craig in St. Elsewhere, and John Adams in the play and film 1776.

Daniels guides readers through some of Hollywood’s most cherished productions, offering recollections of entertainment legends including Lauren Bacall, Warren Beatty, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Mike Nichols, Jason Robards, Barbra Streisand, and many more.

Looking back on his seventy-five-plus-year career, Daniels realizes that although he never had the courage to say “no” to being an actor, he backed into stardom. With his wife, actress Bonnie Bartlett, by his side, he came to realize that he wound up exactly where he was supposed to be: on the screen and stage.

In My TBR Stack:

Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West
by Tom Clavin
St. Martin's Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Dodge City, Kansas, is a place of legend. The town that started as a small military site exploded with the coming of the railroad, cattle drives, eager miners, settlers, and various entrepreneurs passing through to populate the expanding West. Before long, Dodge City’s streets were lined with saloons and brothels and its populace was thick with gunmen, horse thieves, and desperadoes of every sort. By the 1870s, Dodge City was known as the most violent and turbulent town in the West.

Enter Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Young and largely self-trained men, the lawmen led the effort that established frontier justice and the rule of law in the American West, and did it in the wickedest place in the United States. When they moved on, Wyatt to Tombstone and Bat to Colorado, a tamed Dodge was left in the hands of Jim Masterson. But before long Wyatt and Bat, each having had a lawman brother killed, returned to that threatened western Kansas town to team up to restore order again in what became known as the Dodge City War before riding off into the sunset.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin's Dodge City tells the true story of their friendship, romances, gunfights, and adventures, along with the remarkable cast of characters they encountered along the way (including Wild Bill Hickock, Jesse James, Doc Holliday, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, and Theodore Roosevelt) that has gone largely untold—lost in the haze of Hollywood films and western fiction, until now.

On My Radar:

Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song"
by Jerome Loving
Thomas Dunne Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

This is the story of an author and his apprentice. It is the story of literary influence and tragedy. It is also the story of incarceration in America.

Norman Mailer was writing The Executioner’s Song, his novel about condemned killer Gary Gilmore, when he struck up a correspondence with Jack Henry Abbott, Federal Prisoner 87098-132. Over time, Abbott convinced the famous author that he was a talented writer who deserved another chance at freedom. With letters of support from Mailer and other literary elites of the day, Abbott was released on parole in 1981. 

With Mailer’s help, Abbott quickly became the literary “it boy” of New York City. But in a shocking turn of events, the day before a rave review of Abbott’s book, In the Belly of the Beast, appeared in The New York Times, Abbott murdered a New York City waiter and fled to Mexico. Eerily, like Gary Gilmore in Mailer’s true-life novel, Abbott killed within six weeks of his release from prison. 

Now Jerome Loving explores the history of two of the most infamous books of the past 50 years, a fascinating story that has never before been told.

On My Radar:

High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic
by Glenn Frankel
Bloomsbury USA
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just thirty-two days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favorite film, celebrating moral fortitude.

Yet what has been often overlooked is that High Noon was made during the height of the Hollywood blacklist, a time of political inquisition and personal betrayal. In the middle of the film shoot, screenwriter Carl Foreman was forced to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his former membership in the Communist Party. Refusing to name names, he was eventually blacklisted and fled the United States. (His co-authored screenplay for another classic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, went uncredited in 1957.) Examined in light of Foreman's testimony, High Noon's emphasis on courage and loyalty takes on deeper meaning and importance.

In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel tells the story of the making of a great American Western, exploring how Carl Foreman's concept of High Noon evolved from idea to first draft to final script, taking on allegorical weight. Both the classic film and its turbulent political times emerge newly illuminated.\\

On My Radar:

Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir
by Shannon Leone Fowler
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

From grief to reckoning to reflection to solace, a marine biologist shares the solo journey she took—through war-ravaged Eastern Europe, Israel, and beyond—to find peace after her fiancé suffered a fatal attack by a box jellyfish in Thailand.

In the summer of 2002, Shannon Leone Fowler, a twenty-eight-year-old marine biologist, was backpacking with her fiancé and love of her life, Sean. Sean was a tall, blue-eyed, warmhearted Australian, and he and Shannon planned to return to Australia after their excursion to Koh Pha Ngan, Thailand. Their plans, however, were devastatingly derailed when a box jellyfish—the most venomous animal in the world—wrapped around Sean’s leg, stinging and killing him in a matter of minutes as Shannon helplessly watched. Rejecting the Thai authorities attempt to label Sean’s death a “drunk drowning,” Shannon ferried his body home to his stunned family—a family to which she suddenly no longer belonged.

Shattered and untethered, Shannon’s life paused indefinitely so that she could travel around the world to find healing. Travel had forged her relationship with Sean, and she hoped it could also aid in processing his death. Though Sean wasn’t with Shannon, he was everywhere she went—among the places she visited were Oświęcim, Poland (the site of Auschwitz); war-torn Israel; shelled-out Bosnia; poverty-stricken Romania; and finally to Barcelona, where she first met Sean years before. Ultimately, Shannon had to confront the ocean after her life’s first great love took her second great love away.

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild meets Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk in this beautiful, profoundly moving memorial to those we have lost on our journeys and the unexpected ways their presence echoes in all places—and voyages—big and small.

In My TBR Stack:

Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean
by Jonathan White
Trinity University Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In Tides, writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White takes readers across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides. In the Arctic, White shimmies under the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for mussels in the dark cavities left behind at low tide; in China, he races the Silver Dragon, a twenty-five-foot tidal bore that crashes eighty miles up the Qiantang River; in France, he interviews the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont Saint-Michel; in Chile and Scotland, he investigates the growth of tidal power generation; and in Panama and Venice, he delves into how the threat of sea level rise is changing human culture—the very old and very new. Tides combines lyrical prose, colorful adventure travel, and provocative scientific inquiry into the elemental, mysterious paradox that keeps our planet’s waters in constant motion. Photographs, scientific figures, line drawings, and sixteen color photos dramatically illustrate this engaging, expert tour of the tides.

On My Radar:

America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America
by Jim Wallis
Brazos Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin.

"It's time we right this unacceptable wrong," says bestselling author and leading Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo. His participation in the civil rights movement brought him back when he discovered a faith that commands racial justice. Yet as recent tragedies confirm, we continue to suffer from the legacy of racism. The old patterns of white privilege are colliding with the changing demographics of a diverse nation. The church has been slow to respond, and Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week.

In America's Original Sin, Wallis offers a prophetic and deeply personal call to action in overcoming the racism so ingrained in American society. He speaks candidly to Christians--particularly white Christians--urging them to cross a new bridge toward racial justice and healing.

Whenever divided cultures and gridlocked power structures fail to end systemic sin, faith communities can help lead the way to grassroots change. Probing yet positive, biblically rooted yet highly practical, this book shows people of faith how they can work together to overcome the embedded racism in America, galvanizing a movement to cross the bridge to a multiracial church and a new America.

On My Radar:

Nearly Normal: Surviving the Wilderness, My Family and Myself
by Cea Sunrise Person
Harper Collins
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

In her bestselling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace and candour about her unconventional childhood—her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family; the numerous misadventures she survived with her mother and her mother’s boyfriends; and the bold escape Cea made from her family at the age of thirteen through a modelling career. After putting such a unique life on paper, one would expect Cea’s tale to be all told—but that’s far from the case.

At the age of thirty-seven, Cea has built a life that looks like the normal one she craved as a child—husband, young son, beautiful house, enviable career. But her carefully art-directed world is about to crumble around her. As she confronts the death of her still-young mother, the disintegration of her second marriage and the demise of her business, all within just a few months, she finally faces the need to look at her past to make sense of her present. But even as she bares her soul through writing a memoir, stories too difficult to reveal fail to make it to the page.

Nearly Normal chronicles the many stories Cea left untold. Settled into a new and much happier life after the release of her first book, she is nonetheless compelled to continue searching for answers about her enigmatic family. Drawing connections between her early experiences and later life mistakes, Cea identifies how her family’s extreme and often selfish behaviour contributed to her downfall. But more importantly, she discovers the value in the lessons they taught her, and the power of taking responsibility for her own choices in the face of great challenge.

Fiction Friday:

Helen: A Novel
by Anita Mishook
Berwick Court Publishing Co.
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

When Helen left New York on a train bound for California in 1936, she was looking for a change of scene, planning to stay with her sister in Glendale and babysit her niece and nephew. But when she arrived, she found herself steeped in a world of bookies, mobsters, and a Nazi underworld that she must infiltrate on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League.

Anita Mishook's well-researched and brilliantly written debut novel transports you to 1936 and the under-told history of the American Bund, the pro-Nazi Silver Shirts, and their efforts to build a summer retreat for Hitler near the Los Angeles coast.

On My Radar:

Schadenfreude, A Love Story - Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For
by Rebecca Schuman
Flatiron Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

You know that feeling you get watching the elevator doors slam shut just before your toxic coworker can step in? Or seeing a parking ticket on a Hummer? There’s a word for this mix of malice and joy, and the Germans (of course) invented it. It’s Schadenfreude, deriving pleasure from others’ misfortune. Misfortune happens to be a specialty of Slate columnist Rebecca Schuman—and this is great news for the Germans. For Rebecca adores the Vaterland with the kind of single-minded passion its Volk usually reserve for beer, soccer, and being right all the time.

Let’s just say the affection isn’t mutual.

Schadenfreude is the story of a teenage Jewish intellectual who falls in love – in love with a boy (who breaks her heart), a language (that’s nearly impossible to master), a culture (that’s nihilistic, but punctual), and a landscape (that’s breathtaking when there’s not a wall in the way). Rebecca is an everyday, misunderstood 90’s teenager with a passion for Pearl Jam and Ethan Hawke circa Reality Bites, until two men walk into her high school Civics class: Dylan Gellner, with deep brown eyes and an even deeper soul, and Franz Kafka, hitching a ride in Dylan’s backpack. These two men are the axe to the frozen sea that is Rebecca’s spirit, and what flows forth is a passion for all things German. First love might be fleeting, but Kafka is forever, and in pursuit of this elusive passion Rebecca will spend two decades stuttering and stumbling through German sentences, trying to win over a people who can’t be bothered.

At once a snapshot of a young woman finding herself, and a country slowly starting to stitch itself back together after nearly a century of war (both hot and cold), Schadenfreude, A Love Story is an exhilarating, hilarious, and yes, maybe even heartfelt memoir proving that sometimes the truest loves play hard to get.

On My Radar:

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
by Sheelah Kolhatkar
Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The story of the billionaire trader Steven A. Cohen, the rise and fall of his hedge fund, SAC Capital, and the largest insider trading investigation in history—for readers of The Big Short, Den of Thieves, and Dark Money.

The rise over the last two decades of a powerful new class of billionaire financiers marks a singular shift in the American economic and political landscape. Their vast reserves of concentrated wealth have allowed a small group of big winners to write their own rules of capitalism and public policy. How did we get here? Through meticulous reporting and powerful storytelling, New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar shows how Steve Cohen became one of the richest and most influential figures in finance—and what happened when the Justice Department put him in its crosshairs.

Cohen and his fellow pioneers of the hedge fund industry didn’t lay railroads, build factories, or invent new technologies. Rather, they made their billions through speculation, by placing bets in the market that turned out to be right more often than wrong—and for this they have gained not only extreme personal wealth but formidable influence throughout society. Hedge funds now manage nearly $3 trillion in assets, and competition between them is so fierce that traders will do whatever they can to get an edge.

Cohen was one of the industry’s greatest success stories. He mastered poker in high school, went off to Wharton, and in 1992 launched SAC Capital, which he built into a $15 billion empire, almost entirely on the basis of his wizardlike stock trading. He cultivated an air of mystery, reclusiveness, and extreme excess, building a 35,000 square foot mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and amassing one of the largest private art collections in the world. On Wall Street, Cohen was revered as a genius.

That image was shattered when SAC became the target of a sprawling, seven-year government investigation. Labeled by prosecutors as a “magnet for market cheaters” whose culture encouraged the relentless hunt for “edge”—and even “black edge,” or inside information—SAC was ultimately indicted in connection with a vast insider trading scheme, even as Cohen himself was never charged.

Black Edge offers a revelatory look at the gray zone in which so much of Wall Street functions, and a window into the transformation of the U.S. economy. It’s a riveting, true-life legal thriller that takes readers inside the government’s pursuit of Cohen and his employees, and raises urgent questions about the power and wealth of those who sit at the pinnacle of modern Wall Street.

On My Radar:

Pretend I'm Not Here: How I Worked With Three Newspaper Icons, One Powerful First Lady, and Still Managed to Dig Myself Out of the Washington Swamp
by Barbara Feinman Todd
William Morrow Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

An accomplished former ghostwriter and book researcher who worked with Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and Hillary Clinton goes behind-the-scenes of the national’s capital to tell the story of how she survived the exciting, but self-important and self-promoting world of the Beltway.

Barbara Feinman Todd has spent a lifetime helping other people tell their stories. In the early 1980s, she worked for Bob Woodward, first as his research assistant in the paper’s investigative unit and, later, as his personal researcher for Veil, his bestselling book about the CIA. Next she helped Carl Bernstein, who was struggling to finish his memoir, Loyalties. She then assisted legendary editor Ben Bradlee on his acclaimed autobiography A Good Life, and she worked with Hillary Clinton on her bestselling It Takes a Village. Feinman Todd’s involvement with Mrs. Clinton made headlines when the First Lady neglected to acknowledge her role in the book’s creation, and later, when a disclosure to Woodward about the Clinton White House appeared in one of his books. These events haunted Feinman Todd for the next two decades until she confronted her past and discovered something startling.

Revealing what it’s like to get into the heads and hearts of some of Washington’s most compelling and powerful figures, Feinman Todd offers authentic portraits that go beyond the carefully polished public personas that are the standard fare of the Washington publicity factory. At its heart, Pretend I’m Not Here is a funny and forthcoming story of a young woman in a male-dominated world trying to find her own voice while eloquently speaking for others.

In My TBR Stack:

Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom: A Complete Prescription to Optimize Your Health, Prevent Disease, and Live with Vitality and Joy
by Acharya Shunya
Sounds True Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

An empowering guide to finding balance and restoring health in mind, body, and soul.

Ayurveda teaches us that true health is our birthright, and that by artfully adapting to the rhythms of nature, we can bring ourselves back into balance and experience optimal well-being. Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom is a groundbreaking work within the field of holistic health and traditional yoga, written by internationally renowned Ayurvedic healer, teacher, and scholar Acharya Shunya.

Raised in a distinguished lineage of Vedic mystics and healers, Shunya learned the ancient art of Ayurveda directly from her grandfather, a well-known healer in Northern India. Here, she presents both an engaging narrative of her unique education, as well as a complete encyclopedia of Ayurvedic practices, recipes, and knowledge.

With Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom, Shunya maintains the integrity of Ayurveda’s traditional teachings while showing us how to integrate them into our modern lifestyles. Through her in-depth teachings, we learn to live in a way that supports our greatest health through daily ritual, nourishing food, spiritual practice, and self-care. Highlights include:

• Detailed instructions for a nourishing daily routine, organized by time of day and aligned with seasonal changes
• Clear, accessible guidance in the basic principles of Ayurveda, as transmitted through an uninterrupted lineage of Ayurvedic healers
• Dozens of traditional recipes, along with advice for structuring your meals according to the season, your constitution, and your unique health needs
• A treasury of lifestyle teachings and wellness practices—meditation and pranayama, exercise and yoga, connecting with nature, rituals for self-care and pleasure, daily cleansing routines, and working with the doshas (energetic body types)
• An approach to healing both practical and spiritual—restore your body to health with holistic lifestyle guidance, rather than a list of rigid rules or do’s and don’ts
• Beauty routines and rituals, including recipes for homemade scrubs, oil blends, gargles, and more
• How modern lifestyles contribute to chronic disease, and how to restore vital health through Ayurveda
• Experience greater physical energy, more joy, better sleep, increased sexual pleasure, improved digestion, stronger immunity, and many other benefits in mind, body, and soul

“This book that you are holding in your hand has the potential to change your state of health for the better, permanently,” writes Shunya. “Health is not a probability that you may achieve. It is a reality, an underlying natural state of being.”

Whether you’re looking for help with a specific health concern, or if you’d simply like to improve your overall well-being, in Ayurveda Lifestyle Wisdom you’ll find a treasury of Ayurvedic lifestyle teachings and wellness practices for every part of your day.

In My TBR Stack:

Fearless and Free: How Smart Women Pivot - and Relaunch Their Careers
by Wendy Sachs
AMACOM Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Unapologetic . . . and unstoppable!

We are in the midst of a wild job market. Technology has disrupted nearly every industry, blowing up many careers, but creating millions more. Many women feel forced to pivot to stay relevant, while others choose to pivot to keep engaged. Or we may be struggling to get back into the workforce after taking time off to raise kids.

We hear words like hustle and grit and are told we need to think strategically, cultivate our own brands, and sell ourselves. But how do we do that? How do we pivot or radically relaunch our careers? How do we become unapologetically bold and badass—the boss of our own future?

Getting ahead today requires the action-first, fake-it-'til-you-make-it ethos celebrated in the tech world. It’s the tech industry that’s redefined our culture, and perhaps not surprisingly, it’s those Silicon Valley lessons that can help all women in all stages of their careers succeed.

This mindset is not typically a female one. Women tend to be cautious. We overthink our next moves. We might be safer . . . but we're also stuck. What if women embraced the startup spirit? What if we had the confidence to take chances, even if we knew we may fail first? What if instead of agonizing over which step to take, we leapt forward quickly? Fearless and Free empowers women, showing us how to lean into our strengths, increase our confidence, and follow successful lessons from Silicon Valley that can help us pivot in any career—and unlock a world of possibilities.

Author Wendy Sachs talked to a wide range of women who faced down fears, roadblocks, and failures to reinvent themselves. The book weaves their insights and experiences together with current research and actionable advice. You'll learn how to:

Capitalize on your skills and expand them • Grow comfortable with being uncomfortable • Boost your confidence • Sell your story • Engineer serendipity • Nurture your network • Shake off setbacks • Brand yourself—without bragging • Build momentum • Compete with digital natives • Reposition yourself if you’re reentering the workforce • And more

Whether you want out of a shrinking industry or into a business of your own creation, Fearless and Free helps you dream big—and act now.