On My Radar:

Odd Girl Out: My Extraordinary Autistic Life
by Laura James
Seal Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A sensory portrait of an autistic mind

From childhood, Laura James knew she was different. She struggled to cope in a world that often made no sense to her, as though her brain had its own operating system. It wasn’t until she reached her forties that she found out why: Suddenly and surprisingly, she was diagnosed with autism. 

With a touching and searing honesty, Laura challenges everything we think we know about what it means to be autistic. Married with four children and a successful journalist, Laura examines the ways in which autism has shaped her career, her approach to motherhood, and her closest relationships. Laura’s upbeat, witty writing offers new insight into the day-to-day struggles of living with autism, as her extreme attention to sensory detail–a common aspect of her autism–is fascinating to observe through her eyes.

As Laura grapples with defining her own identity, she also looks at the unique benefits neurodiversity can bring. Lyrical and lush, Odd Girl Out shows how being different doesn’t mean being less, and proves that it is never too late for any of us to find our rightful place in the world.

On My Radar:

Tiger Woods
by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Based on years of reporting and interviews with more than 250 people from every corner of Tiger Woods’s life—many of whom have never spoken about him on the record before—a sweeping, revelatory, and defining biography of an American icon.

In 2009, Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet, a transcendent star of almost unfathomable fame and fortune living what appeared to be the perfect life. Married to a Swedish beauty and the father of two young children, he was the winner of fourteen major golf championships and earning more than $100 million annually. But it was all a carefully crafted illusion. As it turned out, Woods had been living a double life for years—one that unraveled in the aftermath of a Thanksgiving-night car crash that exposed his serial infidelity and sent his personal and professional lives over a cliff. Still, the world has always wondered: Who is Tiger Woods, really?

In Tiger Woods, Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, the team behind the New York Times bestseller The System, look deep behind the headlines to produce a richly reported answer to that question. To find out, they conducted hundreds of interviews with people from every facet of Woods’s life—friends, family members, teachers, romantic partners, coaches, business associates, physicians, Tour pros, and members of Woods’s inner circle.

From those interviews, and extensive, carefully sourced research, they have uncovered new, intimate, and surprising details about the man behind the myth. We read an inside account of Tiger’s relationship with his first love, Dina Gravell, and their excruciating breakup at the hands of his parents. We learn that Tiger’s longtime sports agency, International Management Group (IMG), made $50,000 annual payments to Tiger’s father, Earl Woods, as a “talent scout”—years before Tiger was their client. We discover startling new details about Earl, who died in 2006 and to this day lies in an unmarked grave. We come along as Tiger plunges into the Las Vegas and New York nightclub worlds alongside fellow superstars Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. We are whisked behind the scenes during the National Enquirer’s globetrotting hunt to expose Tiger’s infidelity, and we get a rare look inside his subsequent sex-addiction treatment at the Pine Grove facility in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

But the portrait of Woods that emerges in Tiger Woods is far more rewarding than revelations alone. By tracing his life from its origins as the mixed-race son of an attention-seeking father and the original Tiger Mom—who programmed him to be “the chosen one,” tasked with changing not just the game of golf but the world as well—the authors provide a wealth of new insight into the human being trapped inside his parents’ creation. We meet the lonely, introverted child prodigy who has trouble connecting with other kids because of his stutter and unusual lifestyle. We experience the thrill and confusion of his meteoric rise to stardom. And we come to understand the grown man’s obsession with extreme training and deep sea diving—despite their potential for injury—as a rare source of the solitude he craves. Most of all, we are reminded, time and time again, of Woods’s singular greatness and the exhilaration we felt watching an athletic genius dominate his sport for nearly twenty years.

But at what cost? Benedict and Keteyian provide the answers in an extraordinary biography that is destined to become the defining book about an authentic American legend—and to linger in the minds of readers for years to come.

On My Radar:

Notes from a Public Typewriter
Edited by Michael Gustafson
Designed by Oliver Uberti
Grand Central Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A collection of confessional, hilarious, heartbreaking notes written anonymously on a public typewriter for fans of PostSecret and Other People’s Love Letters.

When Michael Gustafson and his wife Hilary opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page? Yes, no, and did they ever.

Every day, people of all ages sit down at the public typewriter. Children perch atop grandparents’ knees, both sets of hands hovering above the metal keys: I LOVE YOU. Others walk in alone on Friday nights and confess their hopes: I will find someone someday. And some leave funny asides for the next person who sits down: I dislike people, misanthropes, irony, and ellipses … and lists too.

In NOTES FROM A PUBLIC TYPEWRITER Michael and designer Oliver Uberti have combined their favorite notes with essays and photos to create an ode to community and the written word that will surprise, delight, and inspire.

On My Radar:

My Dead Parents: A Memoir
by Anya Yurchsyshyn 
Crown Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A haunting, unforgettable family story about hidden secrets and a daughter’s journey to understand her parents 
Anya Yurchyshyn grew up in a narrow townhouse in Boston, every corner filled with the souvenirs of her parents’ adventurous international travels. On their trips to Egypt, Italy, and Saudi Arabia, her mother, Anita, and her father, George, lived an entirely separate life from the one they led as the parents of Anya and her sister – one that Anya never saw. The parents she knew were a brittle, manipulative alcoholic and a short-tempered disciplinarian: people she imagined had never been in love.
 
When she was sixteen, Anya’s father was killed in a car accident in Ukraine. At thirty-two, she became an orphan when her mother drank herself to death. As she was cleaning out her childhood home, she suddenly discovered a trove of old letters, photographs, and journals hidden in the debris of her mother’s life. These lost documents told a very different story than the one she’d believed to be true – of a forbidden romance; of a loving marriage, and the loss of a child. With these revelations in hand, Anya undertook an investigation, interviewing relatives and family friends, traveling to Wales and Ukraine, and delving deeply into her own difficult history in search of the truth, even uncovering the real circumstances of her father’s death – not an accident, perhaps, but something more sinister.
 
In this inspiring and unflinchingly honest debut memoir, Anya interrogates her memories of her family and examines what it means to be our parents’ children. What do we inherit, and what can we choose to leave behind? How do we escape the ghosts of someone else’s past? And can we learn to love our parents not as our parents, but simply as people? Universal and personal; heartbreaking and redemptive, My Dead Parents helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most.

On My Radar:

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Public Affairs Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The historic quest to rekindle the human exploration and colonization of space led by two rivals and their vast fortunes, egos, and visions of space as the next entrepreneurial frontier

The Space Barons is the story of a group of billionaire entrepreneurs who are pouring their fortunes into the epic resurrection of the American space program. Nearly a half-century after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, these Space Barons-most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with Richard Branson and Paul Allen-are using Silicon Valley-style innovation to dramatically lower the cost of space travel, and send humans even further than NASA has gone. These entrepreneurs have founded some of the biggest brands in the world-Amazon, Microsoft, Virgin, Tesla, PayPal-and upended industry after industry. Now they are pursuing the biggest disruption of all: space.

Based on years of reporting and exclusive interviews with all four billionaires, this authoritative account is a dramatic tale of risk and high adventure, the birth of a new Space Age, fueled by some of the world’s richest men as they struggle to end governments’ monopoly on the cosmos. The Space Barons is also a story of rivalry-hard-charging startups warring with established contractors, and the personal clashes of the leaders of this new space movement, particularly Musk and Bezos, as they aim for the moon and Mars and beyond.

On My Radar:

In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History
by Mitch Landrieu
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The New Orleans mayor who removed the Confederate statues confronts the racism that shapes us and argues for white America to reckon with its past. A passionate, personal, urgent book from the man who sparked a national debate.

“There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it.” When Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of New Orleans in May 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve nationally, and his speech has now been heard or seen by millions across the country. In his first book, Mayor Landrieu discusses his personal journey on race as well as the path he took to making the decision to remove the monuments, tackles the broader history of slavery, race and institutional inequities that still bedevil America, and traces his personal relationship to this history. His father, as state legislator and mayor, was a huge force in the integration of New Orleans in the 1960s and 19070s. Landrieu grew up with a progressive education in one of the nation’s most racially divided cities, but even he had to relearn Southern history as it really happened. 

Equal parts unblinking memoir, history, and prescription for finally confronting America’s most painful legacy, In the Shadow of Statues will contribute strongly to the national conversation about race in the age of Donald Trump, at a time when racism is resurgent with seemingly tacit approval from the highest levels of government and when too many Americans have a misplaced nostalgia for a time and place that never existed.

On My Radar:

From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire
by Bill Press
Thomas Dunne Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The name Bill Press is synonymous with honest journalism, intelligent commentary, and progressive politics.

But based on where he came from, it's a wonder he didn't end up a Trump voter. He grew up in a blue-collar family in a small town in Delaware south of the Mason-Dixon line, where segregation was the rule. As a Catholic, he was taught that abortion, divorce, sex outside of marriage, and homosexuality were morally wrong: beliefs later reinforced in ten years of seminary studies for the priesthood. He was on his way to be a rock-ribbed conservative.

So what went right for him that he swerved so far to the left? 

In From the Left, Press shows this gradual transformation, starting with two years of studies in Europe and a providential escape to California. From Sacramento he made his way to Southern California television and talk radio as a political commentator and liberal talk show host. Jumping to Washington and national cable TV, Press hosted Crossfire and The Spin Room on CNN, and Buchanan and Press on MSNBC. A member of the White House Press Corps and columnist for Tribune Media Services and The Hill, Press was an early supporter of Bernie Sanders and hosted two of the Senator's first presidential strategy sessions in his living room.

If you're already on the left, you'll cheer a fellow traveler. If not yet there, you soon will be.

On My Radar:

Just the Funny Parts...And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking into the Hollywood Boys' Club
by Nell Scovell
Dey Street Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

You've almost certainly laughed at Scovell's jokes—you just didn't know it until now.

Just the Funny Parts is a juicy and scathingly funny insider look at how pop culture gets made. For more than thirty years, writer, producer and director Nell Scovell worked behind the scenes of iconic TV shows, including The Simpsons, Late Night with David Letterman, Murphy Brown, NCIS, The Muppets, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, which she created and executive produced.

In 2009, Scovell gave up her behind-the-scenes status when the David Letterman sex scandal broke. Only the second woman ever to write for his show, Scovell used the moment to publicly call out the lack of gender diversity in late-night TV writers' rooms. “One of the boys" came out hard for “all of the girls." Her criticisms fueled a cultural debate. Two years later, Scovell was collaborating with Sheryl Sandberg on speeches and later on Lean In, which resulted in a worldwide movement.

Now Scovell is opening up with this fun, honest, and often shocking account. Scovell knows what it's like to put words in the mouths of President Barack Obama, Mark Harmon, Candice Bergen, Bob Newhart, Conan O'Brien, Alyssa Milano, and Kermit the Frog, among many others. Through her eyes, you'll sit in the Simpson writers' room… stand on the Oscar red carpet… pin a tail on Miss Piggy…bond with Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy… and experience a Stephen King-like encounter with Stephen King.

Just the Funny Parts is a fast-paced account of a nerdy girl from New England who fought her way to the top of the highly-competitive, male-dominated entertainment field. The book delivers invaluable insights into the creative process and tricks for navigating a difficult workplace. It's part memoir, part how-to, and part survival story. Or, as Scovell puts it, “It's like Unbroken, but funnier and with slightly less torture."

In My TBR Stack:

Stop Selling & Start Leading: How to Make Extraordinary Sales Happen
by James Kouzes, Barry Posner and Deb Calvert
Wiley Business
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Make extraordinary sales happen! 

In the Age of the Customer, sales effectiveness depends mightily on the buyer experience. Despite nearly-universal agreement on the need for creating value in every step of the buyer’s journey, sellers continue to struggle with how to create that value and connect meaningfully with buyers. New research bridges the gap and reveals the behavioral blueprint for sellers that makes buyers more likely to meet with them — and more likely to buy from them.

In Stop Selling & Start Leading, you’ll discover that the very same behaviors that make leaders more effective also work to make sellers more effective, too. This critical shift in the selling mindset, and in the sales role itself, is the key to boosting your overall sales effectiveness.

•          Inspire, challenge, and enable buyers
•          Change your behavior to build trust and increase sales
•          Step into your leadership potential 
•          See yourself the way your buyers do
•          Feel good about selling again

When you’re aiming for quota attainment and real connections with buyers, this book gives you the confidence and skills you need.

On My Radar:

Apocalypse Child: A Life in End Times
by Flor Edwards
Turner Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

For the first thirteen years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be 12 years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her. Apocalypse Child is a cathartic journey through Flor's memories of growing up within a group with unconventional views on education, religion, and sex. Whimsically referring to herself as a real life Kimmy Schmidt, Edwards's clear-eyed memoir is a story of survival in a childhood lived on the fringes.



From the Author
My memoir Apocalypse Child is about a girl (me) who grows up in an apocalyptic cult in Southeast Asia. She lives under the control of a dictator-like leader who controls his twelve thousand followers from his top-secret hiding place. Flor never sees the leader and grows up never knowing she will live to see adulthood. Instead, her future is painted with the promise of a lush heaven precluded by a torturous death because she is one of God’s chosen children who will save the world before the Great Apocalypse when she will be twelve years old. Despite the terror Flor faces, she manages to see beauty around her. But her life is once again jolted when the leader dies and Flor is thrust into the throes of mainstream society and left to make sense of it all.

On My Radar:

Rock Monster: My Life with Joe Walsh
by Kristin Casey
Rare Bird Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Far from bitter or self-pitying, Rock Monster is an honest account of one woman's life-changing experience in a relationship with rock legend Joe Walsh. At once envious, glamorous, debauched and disturbing, it's her long and winding journey from life in the fast lane to sobriety and redemption.

Set in the late-eighties and nineties, these are some of Walsh's darkest years, from spiraling addiction to a stunning comeback with the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over tour. Loaded with true stories never before heard, Rock Monster is essential reading for classic rock fans and anyone touched by addiction. Kristin Casey pulls no punches, sharing gritty details with self-awareness, humor, and affection. Sharply written, bold and incisive, it's the worldly-wise tome only an ex-addict, ex-stripper, and ex-rock-chick could give us.

In the tradition of women-in-rock survivor tales―think Marianne Faithful, Crystal Zevon, Jo Wood et al.―Kristin Casey pulls a veil on the enduring myth of the lifestyle's glamorous decadence. Rock Monster is a sexy, crazy, cautionary tale of two addicts in love without a single relationship skill.

Kristin Casey is a writer and recovered alcoholic and addict. Her memoir Rock Monster: My Life with Joe Walsh documents their tumultuous six-year relationship and drug-fueled, train-wreck breakup. She's survived numerous addictions, suicide attempts, clinical depression, the panhandle of Texas, and seventeen years of Catholicism.

Her writing has appeared in the Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, From the Asylum, $pread, and elsewhere. She writes about addiction, dependency, sexuality, and relationships. She resides in Austin, Texas, and works in the field of sex therapy.

In My TBR Stack:

Sometimes I Lie: A Novel
by Alice Feeney
Flatiron Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:
1. I’m in a coma.
2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.
3. Sometimes I lie.

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

On My Radar:

Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman's Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front
by Mary Jennings Hegar
Berkley Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

On July 29, 2009, Air National Guard major Mary Jennings “MJ” Hegar was shot down while on a Medevac mission on her third tour in Afghanistan. Despite being wounded, she fought the enemy and saved the lives of her crew and their patients. But soon she would face a new battle: to give women who serve on the front lines the credit they deserve…
 
After being commissioned into the U.S. Air Force, MJ Hegar was selected for pilot training by the Air National Guard, finished at the top of her class, then served three tours in Afghanistan, flying combat search-and-rescue missions, culminating in a harrowing rescue attempt that would earn MJ the Purple Heart as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor Device.
 
But it was on American soil that Hegar would embark on her greatest challenge—to eliminate the military’s Ground Combat Exclusion Policy, which kept female armed service members from officially serving in combat roles despite their long-standing record of doing so with honor.
 
In Shoot Like a Girl, MJ takes the reader on a dramatic journey through her military career: an inspiring, humorous, and thrilling true story of a brave, high-spirited, and unforgettable woman who has spent much of her life ready to sacrifice everything for her country, her fellow man, and her sense of justice.       

In My TBR Stack:

Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage

by Brian Castner
Doubleday
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In 1789, Alexander Mackenzie traveled 1200 miles on the immense river in Canada that now bears his name, in search of the fabled Northwest Passage that had eluded mariners for hundreds of years. In 2016, the acclaimed memoirist Brian Castner retraced Mackenzie’s route by canoe in a grueling journey — and discovered the Passage he could not find.

Disappointment River is a dual historical narrative and travel memoir that at once transports readers back to the heroic age of North American exploration and places them in a still rugged but increasingly fragile Arctic wilderness in the process of profound alteration by the dual forces of globalization and climate change. Fourteen years before Lewis and Clark, Mackenzie set off to cross the continent of North America with a team of voyageurs and Chipewyan guides, to find a trade route to the riches of the East. What he found was a river that he named “Disappointment.” Mackenzie died thinking he had failed. He was wrong.


In this book, Brian Castner not only retells the story of Mackenzie’s epic voyages in vivid prose, he personally retraces his travels, battling exhaustion, exposure, mosquitoes, white water rapids and the threat of bears. He transports readers to a world rarely glimpsed in the media, of tar sands, thawing permafrost, remote indigenous villages and, at the end, a wide open Arctic Ocean that could become a far-northern Mississippi of barges and pipelines and oil money.

On My Radar:

My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroy
as told to Katherine Clark
University of South Carolina Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Pat Conroy’s memoirs and autobiographical novels contain a great deal about his life, but there is much he hasn’t revealed with readers until now. My Exaggerated Life is the product of a special collaboration between this great American author and oral biographer Katherine Clark, who recorded two hundred hours of conversations with Conroy before he passed away in 2016. In the spring and summer of 2014, the two spoke for an hour or more on the phone every day. No subject was off limits, including aspects of his tumultuous life he had never before revealed. 

This oral biography presents Conroy the man, as if speaking in person, in the colloquial voice familiar to family and friends. This voice is quite different from the authorial style found in his books, which are famous for their lyricism and poetic descriptions. Here Conroy is blunt, plainspoken, and uncommonly candid. While his novels are known for their tragic elements, this volume is suffused with Conroy’s sense of humor, which he credits with saving his life.

The story Conroy offers here is about surviving and overcoming the childhood abuse and trauma that marked his life. He is frank about his emotional damage—the depression, the alcoholism, the divorces, and, above all, the crippling lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. He also sheds light on the forces that saved his life from ruin. The act of writing compelled Conroy to confront the painful truths about his past, while years of therapy with a clinical psychologist helped him achieve the necessary self-awareness and understanding.

As Conroy recounts his time in Atlanta, Rome, and San Francisco, along with his many years in Beaufort, South Carolina, he portrays a journey full of struggles and suffering that culminated ultimately in redemption and triumph. Although he gained worldwide recognition for his writing, Conroy believed his greatest achievement was in successfully carving out a life filled with family and friends, as well as love and happiness. In the end he arrived at himself and found it was a good place to be.

On My Radar:

Permanent Marker: A Memoir
by Aimee Ross
KiCam Projects, LLC
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Aimee Ross was living a perfectly normal life raising three kids, married to her high school sweetheart, and teaching at her high school alma mater.

Life was perfect—right until it wasn’t.

Unhappy in her marriage, Aimee asked for a divorce. Three days later, she suffered a heart attack at age forty-one. Five months after that, she survived a near-fatal car crash caused by an intoxicated driver.

Her physical recovery took months and left her body marked by scars. The emotional recovery, though, would take longer, as Aimee sought to forgive the man who almost killed her—and to forgive herself for tearing apart her family.

Aimee Ross writes with candor, wit, and humor as she finds the power in her story and chronicles her transformation into the woman she was always meant to be.

Permanent Marker takes readers on a journey of healing, proving that from darkness can come new light, new love, and a renewed purpose for life.

In My TBR Stack:

Servant Leadership in Action: How You Can Achieve Great Relationships and Results
Edited by Ken Blanchard & Renee Broadwell
Berrett-Koehler
Hardcover
From the publisher's website:

We've all seen the negative impact of self-serving leaders in every sector of our society. Not infrequently, they end up bringing down their entire organization. But there is another way: servant leadership. 

Servant leaders lead by serving their people, not by exalting themselves. This collection features forty-four renowned servant leadership experts and practitioners—prominent business executives, bestselling authors, and respected spiritual leaders—who offer advice and tools for implementing this proven, but for some still radical, leadership model. 

Edited by legendary business author and lifelong servant leader Ken Blanchard and his longtime editor Renee Broadwell, this is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging guide ever published for what is, in every sense, a better way to lead.

On My Radar:

The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

by Helen Arney and Steve Mould

Cassell Books / Octopus Publishing

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Let the brains behind the hugely successful Festival of the Spoken Nerd take you on a rib-tickling, experiment-fuelled adventure to explain the everyday science staring you in the face.

Let the brains behind the hugely successful Festival of the Spoken Nerd take you on a rib-tickling, experiment-fuelled adventure to explain the everyday science staring you in the face.

'Made me go Hydrogen Argon, Hydrogen Argon, Hydrogen Argon.' Rufus Hound

As featured in Best stocking-filler books of 2017 - The Guardian

'Witty and clever writing, every topic is engaging, fun and in some cases laugh-out-loud funny...there are too many highlights to mention' - How it Works

• Why is it impossible to spin your right foot clockwise while you draw a 6 with your right hand? 


• Can you extract DNA from a strawberry daiquiri? 


• Would you make love like a praying mantis? 


• Should you book a holiday on Earth 2.0? 

The Element in the Room will take you on a rib-tickling, experiment-fuelled adventure to explain everyday science that is staring you in the face. If you are sci-curious, pi-curious or just the-end-is-nigh-curious then this is the book for you.

Steve Mould and Helen Arney are two thirds of science comedy phenomenon Festival of the Spoken Nerd. As a trio they have appeared on QI, created their own experimental* comedy show 'Domestic Science' for Radio 4, toured their stand-up science shows to over 50,000 nerds (and non-nerds) and accumulated millions of views on YouTube.

On My Radar:

Survive Like a Spy: Real C.I.A. Operatives Reveal How They Stay Safe in a Dangerous World and How You Can Too
by Jason Hanson
Tarcher Perigee
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Everyone loves a good spy story, but most of the ones we hear are fictional. That’s because the most dangerous and important spycraft is done in secret, often hidden in plain sight.

In this powerful new book, bestselling author and former CIA officer Jason Hanson takes the reader deep inside the world of espionage, revealing true stories and expert tactics from real agents engaged in life-threatening missions around the world.

With breathtaking accounts of spy missions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere, the book reveals how to:

* Achieve mental sharpness to be ready for anything
* Escape if taken hostage
* Set up a perfect safe site
* Assume a fake identity 
* Master the “Weapons of Mass Influence” to recruit others, build rapport, and make allies when you need them most

With real-life spy drama that reads like a novel paired with expert practical techniques, Survive Like a Spy will keep you on the edge of your seat – and help you stay safe when you need it most.

On My Radar:

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Portfolio
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

“This is a radically important, timely work,” says Miranda July, filmmaker and author of The First Bad Man. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers–but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation. 

In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don’t even realize, but they have always been part of the story. 

VICE reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. 

Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. 

Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore.

Welcome to the Broad Band. You're next.

In My TBR Stack:

The ABCs of Love: Learn How Couples Rekindle Desire and Get Happy Again
by Diana Shulman, J.D., Ph.D.
Sharper House Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

The ABCs of Love is a self-help book for couples that covers the basics of sound relationships. Readers will find everything they need—literally, from A to Z—to avoid the landmines, repair wounds (both old and new), rekindle desire, and get happy again. Whether you're young or old, dating or about to celebrate your 50th anniversary, the vignettes, tools, and skill-building exercises in The ABCs of Love will help you create the relationship of your dreams. 

Readers will learn:

• how to de-escalate quickly and turn conflict into closeness
• why understanding each other's attachment style is vital to happiness
• how to neutralize the negative, prize the positive, and respect differences that are here to stay
• how to fight like a champ
• how to protect their relationship from affairs

Using vignettes from her therapy practice and her own life, some stunning research and challenging skill-building exercises, the reader will learn what couples can do to keep growing together. Therapists will recognize the author's credentials as a Gottman and EFT clinician and will welcome this easy-to-read resource for their clients.

The author manages to integrate important ideas from different theoretical perspectives in a way that flows seamlessly from one chapter to the next. The book is full of wisdom acquired from her years of studying relationships both personally and professionally. Readers will feel as though they're having a conversation with a wise friend who cares enough to speak the truth about why their relationship isn't all that it could be. Filled with practical exercises to reinforce the learning and challenge readers to look inward while reaching outward, The ABCs of Love can make a powerful difference for motivated couples.

On My Radar:

Eat the Apple: A Memoir
by Matt Young
Bloomsbury USA
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The Iliad of the Iraq war" (Tim Weiner)--a gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir of the consequences of war on the psyche of a young man. 

Eat the Apple is a daring, twisted, and darkly hilarious story of American youth and masculinity in an age of continuous war. Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen after a drunken night culminating in wrapping his car around a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq, where the testosterone, danger, and stakes for him and his fellow grunts were dialed up a dozen decibels.

With its kaleidoscopic array of literary forms, from interior dialogues to infographics to prose passages that read like poetry, Young's narrative powerfully mirrors the multifaceted nature of his experience. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.

Searing in its honesty, tender in its vulnerability, and brilliantly written, Eat the Apple is a modern war classic in the making and a powerful coming-of-age story that maps the insane geography of our times.