On My Radar:

Fire in the Straw: Notes on Inventing a Life
by Nick Lyons
Arcade Publishing
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

Nick Lyons shape shifts from reluctant student and graduate of the Wharton School, to English Professor, to husband of a fiercely committed painter, to ghost writer, to famous fly fisherman and award-winning author, to father and then grandfather, to Executive Editor at a large book publishing company, and finally to founder and publisher of his own successful independent press..

 
Written with the same warm and earthy voice that has enthralled tens of thousands of fly-fishing readers, Nick weaves the disparate chapters of his life: from the moment his widowed mother drops him off at a grim boarding school at the age of five, where he spends three lonely and confusing years; to his love of basketball and pride playing for Penn; to the tumultuous period, in the army and after, when he found and was transformed by literature; to his marriage to Mari, his great love and anchor of his life.
 
Suddenly, with a PhD in hand and four children, Nick embarks on a complex and thrilling ride, juggling family, fishing, teaching, writing, and publishing, the wolf always at his door. Against all odds, The Lyons Press survives, his children prosper, his wife’s art flourishes, and his books and articles make him a household name.
 
FIRE IN THE STRAW is a love story, a confessional, and a beautiful big-hearted memoir.

On My Radar:

Wounded Titans: American Presidents and the Perils of Power
by Max Lerner
Edited by Robert Schmuhl
Arcade Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Max Lerner taught generations of Americans about their government. For almost half a century, the office of the presidency preoccupied his prodigious energies and unparalleled expertise. Lerner not only wrote about the men who inhabited the Oval Office during that time, he knew them personally, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton—and he knew what made them tick. Here are Lerner’s complete writings on the presidency and American presidents.

Lerner believed that the nature of the office transforms presidents into titans, but wounded titans, bowed and sometimes broken by forces, fate, destiny, or history, that lie beyond their control. Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court; Truman’s efforts to manhandle the steel industry; Eisenhower’s belief that he could control the military-industrial complex; Kennedy’s hyperactive libido and recklessness; Nixon’s conviction he could manipulate political process: every president has had immortal yearnings, and the office that inflated his pride also enlarged his flaws.

With a new foreword, Wounded Titans contains Lerner’s classic essays on the presidency and its development as well as his most famous presidential portraits and the best of his campaign journalism. Learned, wise, illuminating, entertaining, both timely and timeless, Wounded Titans is as large in spirit and scope as the American presidency itself.