In My TBR Stack:

American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity
by Christian G. Appy
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy, author of the widely praised oral history of the Vietnam War Patriots, now examines the relationship between the war’s realities and myths and its impact on our national identity, conscience, pride, shame, popular culture, and postwar foreign policy.

Drawing on a vast variety of sources from movies, songs, and novels to official documents, media coverage, and contemporary commentary, Appy offers an original interpretation of the war and its far-reaching consequences. Authoritative, insightful, sometimes surprising, and controversial, American Reckoning is a fascinating mix of political and cultural reporting that offers a completely fresh account of the meaning of the Vietnam War.

Author Website

In My TBR Stack:

Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind
by David J. Linden
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Johns Hopkins neuroscientist and bestselling author of The Compass of Pleasure, David J. Linden presents an engaging and fascinating examination of how the interface between our sense of touch and our emotional responses affects our social interactions as well as our general health and development. Accessible in its wit and clarity, Touch explores scientific advances in the understanding of touch that help explain our sense of self and our experience of the world.

From skin to nerves to brain, the organization of the body’s touch circuits powerfully influences our lives—affecting everything from consumer choice to sexual intercourse, tool use to the origins of language, chronic pain to healing. Interpersonal touch is crucial to social bonding and individual development. Linden lucidly explains how sensory and emotional context work together to distinguish between perceptions of what feels good and what feels bad. Linking biology and behavioral science, Linden offers an entertaining and enlightening answer to how we feel in every sense of the word.

In My TBR Stack:

The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity
by Norman Doidge, M.D.
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge described the most important breakthrough in our understanding of the brain in four hundred years: the discovery that the brain can change its own structure and function in response to mental experience—what we call neuroplasticity.

His revolutionary new book shows, for the first time, how the amazing process of neuroplastic healing really works. It describes natural, non-invasive avenues into the brain provided by the forms of energy around us—light, sound, vibration, movement—which pass through our senses and our bodies to awaken the brain’s own healing capacities without producing unpleasant side effects. Doidge explores cases where patients alleviated years of chronic pain or recovered from debilitating strokes or accidents; children on the autistic spectrum or with learning disorders normalizing; symptoms of multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and cerebral palsy radically improved, and other near-miracle recoveries. And we learn how to vastly reduce the risk of dementia with simple approaches anyone can use.

For centuries it was believed that the brain’s complexity prevented recovery from damage or disease. The Brain’s Way of Healing shows that this very sophistication is the source of a unique kind of healing. As he did so lucidly in The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge uses stories to present cutting-edge science with practical real-world applications, and principles that everyone can apply to improve their brain’s performance and health.

In My TBR Stack:

The Angel in My Pocket: A Story of Love, Loss, and Life After Death
Sukey Forbes
Viking
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

When Sukey Forbes lost her six-year-old daughter, Charlotte, to a rare genetic disorder, her life felt as if it were shattered forever. Descended from two distinguished New England families, Forbes was raised in a rarefied—if eccentric—life of privilege. Yet, Forbes’s family history is also rich with spiritual seekers, including her great-great-great-grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson. On the family’s private island enclave off Cape Cod, apparitions have always been as common as the servants who once walked the back halls. But the “afterlife” took on new meaning once Forbes dipped into the world of clairvoyants to reconnect with Charlotte.

With a mission to help others by sharing her own story, Forbes chronicles a world of ghosts that reawakens us to a lost American spiritual tradition. The Angel in My Pocket is a moving and utterly unique tale of one mother’s undying love for her child.

In My TBR Stack:

The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940-1945
Richard Overy
Viking Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The ultimate history of the Allied bombing campaigns in World War II

Technology shapes the nature of all wars, and the Second World War hinged on a most unpredictable weapon: the bomb. Day and night, Britain and the United States unleashed massive fleets of bombers to kill and terrorize occupied Europe, destroying its cities. The grisly consequences call into question how moral a war the Allies fought.

The Bombers and the Bombed radically overhauls our understanding of World War II. It pairs the story of the civilian front line in the Allied air war alongside the political context that shaped their strategic bombing campaigns, examining the responses to bombing and being bombed with renewed clarity.

The first book to examine seriously not only the well-known attacks on Dresden and Hamburg but also the significance of the firebombing on other fronts, including Italy, where the crisis was far more severe than anything experienced in Germany, this is Richard Overys finest work yet. It is a rich reminder of the terrible military, technological, and ethical issues that relentlessly drove all the wars participants into an abyss. 

Fiction Spotlight!

Rules for Becoming a Legend: A Novel
Timothy S. Lane
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Jimmy “Kamikaze” Kirkus is a basketball star, destined for a legendary future in the NBA. At the age of five, he can make nine shots in a row. By high school, he’s got his own Sports Illustrated profile. To the citizens of Columbia City, it seems like he was born for the sport. 

But Jimmy soon confronts the “Kirkus curse” when tragedies begin to emerge. Not even basketball can save him from his family’s sorrow-filled past..

His eventual defeat on the court echoes another disastrous legacy: Jimmy’s father, Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus—who had also dreamed of basketball stardom—was forced to give up his dream for a life defined by the curse of his name. Can Jimmy find a way to end this cycle of tragedy?

Like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Friday Night Lights (the book and cult television show), Timothy Lane’s debut novel uses the lens of basketball to understand family, community, and—ultimately—hope. Populated with complex, compelling characters, Rules for Becoming a Legend is proof that every hero is human, and sometimes triumph is borne from tragedy.

What I'm Reading Now:

Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief
Tom Zoellner
Viking
Hardcover (in stores now)

From the publisher's website:

Tom Zoellner loves trains with a ferocious passion. In his new book he chronicles the innovation and sociological impact of the railway technology that changed the world, and could very well change it again.

From the frigid trans-Siberian railroad to the antiquated Indian Railways to the futuristic MagLev trains, Zoellner offers a stirring story of man’s relationship with trains. Zoellner examines both the mechanics of the rails and their engines and how they helped societies evolve. Not only do trains transport people and goods in an efficient manner, but they also reduce pollution and dependency upon oil. Zoellner also considers America’s culture of ambivalence to mass transit, using the perpetually stalled line between Los Angeles and San Francisco as a case study in bureaucracy and public indifference.

Train presents both an entertaining history of railway travel around the world while offering a serious and impassioned case for the future of train travel.

On My Radar:

Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image
by Joshua Zeitz
Viking
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Lincoln’s official secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone outside of the president’s immediate family. Hay and Nicolay were the gatekeepers of the Lincoln legacy. They read poetry and attended the theater with the president, commiserated with him over Union army setbacks, and plotted electoral strategy. They were present at every seminal event, from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address—and they wrote about it after his death.

In their biography of Lincoln, Hay and Nicolay fought to establish Lincoln’s heroic legacy and to preserve a narrative that saw slavery—not states’ rights—as the sole cause of the Civil War. As Joshua Zeitz shows, the image of a humble man with uncommon intellect who rose from obscurity to become a storied wartime leader and emancipator is very much their creation.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Lincoln’s Boys is part political drama and part coming-of-age tale—a fascinating story of friendship, politics, war, and the contest over history and remembrance.

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The Tooth Fairy: A Memoir

by Clifford Chase

The Overlook Press

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In shimmering prose that weaves among intimate confessions, deadpan asides, and piercing observations on the fear and turmoil that defined the long decade after 9/11, Clifford Chase tells the stories that have shaped his adulthood.

There are his aging parents, whose disagreements sharpen as their health declines; and his beloved brother, lost tragically to AIDS; and his long-term boyfriend—always present, but always kept at a distance.

There is also the revelatory, joyful music of the B-52s, Chase’s sexual confusion in his twenties, and more recently, the mysterious appearance in his luggage of weird objects from Iran the year his mother died.

In the midst of all this is Chase’s singular voice—incisive, wry, confiding, by turns cool or emotional, always engaging.

The way this book is written—in pitch-perfect fragments—is crucial to Chase’s deeper message: that we experience and remember in short bursts of insight, terror, comedy, and love. As ambitious in its form as it is in its radical candor, The Tooth Fairy is the rare memoir that can truly claim to rethink the genre.

In My TBR Stack:

Flyover Lives: A Memoir
by Diane Johnson
Viking
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi and off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her: “Indifference to history—that’s why you Americans seem so naïve and don’t really know where you’re from.”

The j’accuse stayed with Johnson. Were Americans indifferent to history? Her own family seemed always to have been in the Midwest. Surely they had got there from somewhere? In digging around, she discovers letters and memoirs written by generations of stalwart pioneer ancestors that testify to more complex times than the derisive nickname “The Flyover” gives the region credit for.

With the acuity and sympathy that her novels are known for, she captures the magnetic pull of home against our lust for escape and self-invention. This spellbinding memoir will appeal to fans of Bill Bryson, Patricia Hampl, and Annie Dillard.

Currently Reading:

Churchill and the King: The Wartime Alliance of Winston Churchill and George VI
by Kenneth Weisbrode
Viking
Hardcover

I am on page 161 of this fantastic book....


Kenneth Weisbrode has written an insightful book about the important friendship between two very different people.  Two men thrown together by world events who had to learn to work together with their contrasting personalities.

King George VI, a low-key and his famous stutter against the loud, overbearing prime minister could have been disastrous for England as they stood alone at the beginning of World War II.   They started out at uneasy teammates and end up as unlikely friends.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys world history or character studies.  I have new respect for King George VI, beyond what I've learned in the movies.  I have long been a Churchill fan, and Weisbrode has succeeded in showing me an interesting side to the great man.


An excerpt from Churchill and the King can be found here.

On My Radar:

E Street Shuffle: The Glory Days of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
by Clinton Heylin
Viking Adult / Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

Before he was the swaggering, stadium-packing megastar, Bruce Springsteen was a brooding introvert, desperate to strike a balance between his nuanced songwriting and the heft of his backing band. Clinton Heylin’s revelatory biography, E Street Shuffle, chronicles the evolution and influence of Springsteen’s E Street Band as they rose from blue-collar New Jersey to the heights of rock stardom. The band’s players—most notably saxophonist Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, guitarist “Little” Stevie Van Zandt, and drummer Max Weinberg—became Springsteen’s comrades in concert, helping him find the elusive sound and sonic punch that highlighted The Boss’s most creative period, including Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run, and Born in the USA. Fans will also learn another side of Springsteen, one punctuated with his clashes with studio executives seeking a commercially viable, radio-friendly album, and his temporary disbanding of the E Street Band to pursue projects like the eerie acoustic of Nebraska. Coinciding with the forteith anniversary of Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, drawing on interviews and access to new recordings and shows, Heylin paints a bold picture of The Boss.