On My Radar:

The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone
by Robin Green
Little Brown
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In 1971, Robin Green had an interview with Jann Wenner at the offices Rolling Stone magazine. She had just moved to Berkeley, California, a city that promised “Good Vibes All-a Time.” Those days, job applications asked just one question, “What are your sun, moon and rising signs?” Green thought she was interviewing for a clerical job like the other girls in the office, a “real job.” Instead, she was hired as a journalist. 

With irreverent humor and remarkable nerve, Green spills stories of sparring with Dennis Hopper on a film junket in the desert, scandalizing fans of David Cassidy and spending a legendary evening on a water bed in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s dorm room. In the seventies, Green was there as Hunter S. Thompson crafted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and now, with a distinctly gonzo female voice, she reveals her side of that tumultuous time in America.

Brutally honest and bold, Green reveals what it was like to be the first woman granted entry into an iconic boys’ club. Pulling back the curtain on Rolling Stonemagazine in its prime, The Only Girl is a stunning tribute to a bygone era and a publication that defined a generation.

In My TBR Stack:

In the Name of the Children: An FBI Agent's Relentless Pursuit of the Nation's Worst Predators
by Jeffrey L. Rinek and Marilee Strong
BenBella Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

FBI Special Agent Jeff Rinek had a gift for getting confessions from criminals—bank robbers, serial killers, terrorists, and those he dedicated most of his 30-year career with the Bureau to hunting down: child predators. 

Rinek worked hundreds of investigations involving crimes against children: from stranger abduction to serial homicide to ritualized sexual abuse. There is no more important—or more brutal—job in law enforcement, and few have been more successful than Rinek at solving these sort of cases.

One of the most surprising confessions he managed to obtain was from a budding serial killer named Cary Stayner to four horrific slayings known as the Yosemite Park Murders, an accomplishment made more extraordinary by the fact that the FBI nearly pinned the crimes on the wrong suspects. Rinek’s recounting of that confession and what he learned about Stayner provides perhaps the most revelatory look ever inside the psyche of a serial killer and a privileged glimpse into the art of interrogation.

In the Name of the Children takes readers into the trenches of real-time investigations where every second counts and any wrong decision or overlooked fact can have tragic repercussions. Rinek offers an insider’s perspective of the actual case agents and street detectives who are the boots on the ground in this war at home. By placing us inside the heart and mind of an unflinchingly honest and remarkably self-reflective investigator, we will see with our own eyes what it takes—and what it costs—to try to keep our children safe and to bring to justice those who prey on them.

On My Radar:

The Kill Jar: Obsession, Descent, and a Hunt for Detroit's Most Notorious Serial Killer
by J. Reuben Appelman
Gallery Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Enthralling. Gripping. Cinematic. Raw. A cold case murder investigation paced like a podcast, as visually stunning as a film, and as brave and personal as our darkest memoirs. J. Reuben Appelman cracks open one of America’s most notorious murder sprees while simultaneously banging the gavel on his own history with violence. A deftly-crafted true crime story with grit, set amid the decaying sprawl of Detroit and its outliers.

With a foreword by Catherine Broad, sister of victim Timothy King.

Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters of 1976 and 1977, their bodies eventually dumped in snow banks around the city. J. Reuben Appelman was six years old at the time the murders began and had evaded an abduction attempt during that same period, fueling a lifelong obsession with what became known as the Oakland County Child Killings.

Autopsies showed the victims to have been fed while in captivity, reportedly held with care. And yet, with equal care, their bodies had allegedly been groomed post-mortem, scrubbed-free of evidence that might link to a killer. There were few credible leads, and equally few credible suspects. That’s what the cops had passed down to the press, and that’s what the city of Detroit, and J. Reuben Appelman, had come to believe.

When the abductions mysteriously stopped, a task force operating on one of the largest manhunt budgets in history shut down without an arrest. Although no more murders occurred, Detroit and its environs remained haunted. The killer had, presumably, not been caught.

Eerily overlaid upon the author’s own decades-old history with violence, The Kill Jar tells the gripping story of J. Reuben Appelman’s ten-year investigation into buried leads, apparent police cover-ups of evidence, con-men, child pornography rings, and high-level corruption saturating Detroit’s most notorious serial killer case.

In My TBR Stack:

128 Days and Counting: A 28-Year Caregiver's Memoir
by Honore Nolting
Trade Paperback

From the book's website:


128 Days is a vivid and detailed account of a young couple during a cancer diagnosis and their relationship during the most difficult time of their lives.  Honore and her husband, Tom, who went through chemo, an operation, and a difficult adjustment period, come alive in these pages as a loving and upbeat couple who are as familiar as your best friends. They are strong and scared, normal and quirky, determined and silly. Excerpts from the blog written during Tom's cancer answer many questions about what it's like to get cancer, and be a caregiver, as young adults. Honore's raw and emotional account about every aspect of the experience, and their relationship, brings the reader fully into the magnitude of the diagnosis but what lingers is the joy, resilience, and effervescence of love.

In My TBR Stack:

The Geometry of Wealth: How to Shape a Life of Money and Meaning
by Brian Portnoy
Harriman House
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

How does money figure into a happy life?

In The Geometry of Wealth, behavioral finance expert Brian Portnoy delivers an inspired answer, building on the critical distinction between being rich and being wealthy. While one is an unsatisfying treadmill, the other is the ability to underwrite a meaningful life, however one chooses to define that. Truly viewed, wealth is funded contentment.

At the heart of this groundbreaking perspective, Portnoy takes readers on a journey toward wealth, informed by disciplines ranging from ancient history to modern neuroscience. He contends that tackling the big questions about a joyful life and tending to financial decisions are complementary, not separate, tasks. 

These big questions include:

• How is the human brain wired for two distinct experiences of happiness? And why can money “buy” one but not the other?
• What are the touchstones of a meaningful life, and are they affordable?
• Why is market savvy among the least important sources of wealth but self-awareness is among the most?
• How does one strike a balance between striving for more while being content with enough?

This journey memorably contours along three basic shapes: A circle, triangle and square help us to visualize how we adapt to evolving circumstances, set clear priorities, and find empowerment in simplicity. In this accessible and entertaining book, Portnoy reveals that true wealth is achievable for many - including those who despair it is out of reach - but only in the context of a life in which purpose and practice are thoughtfully calibrated.

In My TBR Stack:

You Lucky Dog
by Debra Finerman
Stewart's Grove Press
Trade Paperback

From the author's website:

What do you do when you’re attending your own funeral but can’t tell the love of your life that you’re there, perfectly alive? Your wife doesn’t recognize you because you look slightly different. Well, more than slightly. You’re now a dog.

You Lucky Dog is the unlikely love story of Jake and Emma, a young couple thrown into a very unusual situation.

Jake and Emma appear to have everything going for them. A young married couple, they live with their dog in the leafy suburbs of Los Angeles. But after a horrible accident changes the course of their lives forever, Jake finds himself alive but living outside his body, and in the body of his dog.

What follows is a hilarious and heartwarming tale of misplaced identity. You Lucky Dog explores the mysteries of life and death, and the enduring power of love, in a heartwarming story for animal lovers and all lovers.

In My TBR Stack:

Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
by Maryanne Wolf
Harper Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.

A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium.

Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including:

• Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain?
• Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves?
• With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know?
• Will all these influences, in turn, change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives?
• Will the chain of digital influences ultimately influence the use of the critical analytical and empathic capacities necessary for a democratic society?
• How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain?
• Who are the "good readers" of every epoch?

Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become, inevitably, increasingly dependent on screens.

Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

On My Radar:

The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America's Law Enforcement
by Matthew Horace and Ron Harris
Hachette Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Matthew Horace was an officer at the federal, state, and local level for 28 years working in every state in the country. Yet it was after seven years of service when Horace found himself face-down on the ground with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer, that he fully understood the racism seething within America’s police departments. 

Using gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts garnered by interviews with police and government officials around the country, Horace presents an insider’s examination of police tactics, which he concludes is an “archaic system” built on “toxic brotherhood.” Horace dissects some of the nation’s most highly publicized police shootings and communities highlighted in the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond to explain how these systems and tactics have had detrimental outcomes to the people they serve. Horace provides fresh analysis on communities experiencing the high killing and imprisonment rates due to racist policing such as Ferguson, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago from a law enforcement point of view and uncovers what has sown the seeds of violence.

Timely and provocative, The Black and The Blue sheds light on what truly goes on behind the blue line.

In My TBR Stack:

Alligators and Me: My Life in Alabama 1968
by Molly Milner
Shoe Button Press
Trade Paperback

From the book publicity:

Thrust into a cauldron of death threats, intimidation and fear, forced to move out of our home in the middle of the night, my husband and I were by great good fortune taken in and protected by a courageous and generous black community after his arrest in a protest march. A narrative of three years spent in Mobile, Alabama in the late 1960's, Alligators and Me Alabama 1966-1969 is the story of a woman's triumph that came by slogging through calamity after calamity. At the end of the road, I surprisingly found I had become an accidental activist formed in the crucible of the red hot fires of the Civil Rights Movement. Always believing my husband to be the hero, by retelling the tale for the memoir I finally gained an understanding that allows me to celebrate choices I made in navigating my own way through the alligators.

       

My childhood spent in Northern Ohio had left me clueless to the stark realities of racial divisions in the Deep South. After arriving in Mobile, my husband soon went from respected Pastor of a white Lutheran church to social pariah after being arrested in a march protesting lack of job opportunites for black people. His arrest impacted my life with more intensitiy than I had bargained for coming in the form of Ku Klux Klan retribution threats. Alligator-like intimidations pressured me into leaving my job as a social worker. I became a special education teacher in Bayou La Batre where I was the only white face in the segregated high school. My teaching strategies came to include excursions into semi-swampy areas around the school where my students and I scouted out actual alligator populations.

       

The account is filled with anger at my husband for what I perceived as his bombastic behavior related to the arrest, fear over our tenuous and terrifying life, and finally redemptive love growing out of extraordinary circumstances during the height of the 1960's civil rights era.

       

The year 2018 is the 50th anniversary of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy. The recollection of my husband's arrest in 1968 puts this momentous year into deep personal focus. A catalyst in bringing back indelible memories for those who lived through these turbulent times, the book also might well be inspiration to the resistence movement today.

In My TBR Stack:

When Their World Stops: The Essential Guide to TRULY Helping Anyone in Grief (Second Edition)
by Anne-Marie Lockmyer
Joseph Allen Press
Trade Paperback

Have a grieving friend and don't know what to say or do? No more fear, embarrassment or walking on eggshells. This 8-time award-winning book increases your understanding of what the grieving one is experiencing and feeling. It equips you to say the right things and avoid saying the wrong things, be supportive with appropriate actions and gifts, offer encouragement during the holidays, write a lovely message in a sympathy card and so much more. Included is an exclusive reminder list for the first year of grief as well as a cheat-sheet. This easy to read practical guidebook is packed with all you need to increase your confidence and take the awkwardness out of responding to someone devastated by grief.