On My Radar:

I Was a Child: A Memoir
by Bruce Eric Kaplan
Blue Rider Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Bruce Eric Kaplan, also known as BEK, is one of the most celebrated and admired cartoonists in America. I Was a Child is the story of his childhood in suburban New Jersey, detailing the small moments we all experience: going to school, playing with friends, family dinners, watching TV on a hot summer night, and so on. It would seem like a conventional childhood, although Kaplan’s anecdotes are accompanied by his signature drawings of family outings and life at home-road trips, milk crates, hamsters, ashtrays, a toupee, a platypus, and much more. Kaplan’s cartoons, although simple, are never straightforward; they encompass an easy irony and dark humor that often cuts straight to the truth of experience. Brilliantly relatable and genuinely moving, I Was a Child is about our attempts to understand the mysteries that are our parents, our families, and ourselves.

On My Radar:

The Good, the Bad, and the Furry: Life with the World's Most Melancholy Cat
by Tom Cox
Thomas Dunne Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Humorous and endearing, The Good, the Bad and the Furry is a heartwarming memoir about a man at the mercy of his unpredictable, demanding and endlessly lovable cats. Meet The Bear--a cat who carries the weight of the world on his furry shoulders, and whose wise, owl-like eyes seem to ask, Can you tell me why I am a cat please? Like many intellectuals, The Bear would prefer a life of quiet solitude with plenty of time to gaze forlornly into space and contemplate society's ills. Unfortunately, he is destined to spend his days surrounded by felines of a significantly lower IQ. There is Janet, a large man cat who often accidentally sets fire to his tail by walking too close to lighted candles; Ralph, a preening tabby who enjoys meowing his own name at 5AM; and Shipley, Ralph's brother, who steals soup but is generally relaxed once you pick him up and turn him upside down. And then there's Tom Cox, writing with wit and charm about the unexpected adventures that go hand-in-hand with a life at the beck and call of four cats.

Road Trip Reading:

The Given World: A Novel
by Marian Palaia
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

I will be leaving on a week-long road trip with my mother on Thursday. This is one of the books I will be taking along. We will also be stopping at any independent book store we see. 

From the publisher's website:

It is 1968. Riley is thirteen, and her brother Mick has gone missing in Vietnam. She struggles to understand and accept, but the world she has always known has fallen apart. At sixteen, she meets a boy from the reservation. He becomes her first love and perhaps her deliverance, except that he, too, is sent to fight, unaware that Riley is carrying his child. Riley sets off then, in search of answers, of clues, of a way to be in the world. She travels from her family’s Montana farm to San Francisco, and from there to Saigon. Along the way she becomes rescued and rescuer, by and for a band of scarred angels. Among them: Primo, a half-blind vet with a story he’s not telling; Lu, a cab driver with an artist’s eye and a habit she can’t kick; Phuong, a Saigon barmaid who is Riley’s conscience and confidante; and Grace, a banjo-playing girl on a train, carrying her dreams and her grandmother’s ashes in a tin box. All are casualties, of the times and of the war, but they carry on, none more tenaciously than Riley herself, a masterpiece of courage and vulnerability, wondering if she’ll ever be brave enough to return to the place she once called home.

On My Radar:

So That Happened: A Memoir
by Jon Cryer
New American Library (NAL)
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In 1986, Jon Cryer won over America as Molly Ringwald’s loyal and lovable best friend, Duckie, in the cult classic Pretty in Pink in a role that set the tone for his three-decade-long career in Hollywood. He went on to establish himself as one of the most talented comedic actors in the business, ultimately culminating in his current turn as Alan Harper on the massively popular sitcom Two and a Half Men.

With the instincts of a natural storyteller, Cryer charts his extraordinary journey in show business, illuminating his many triumphs and some missteps along the way. Filled with exclusive behind-the-scenes anecdotes, Cryer offers his own endearing perspective on Hollywood, the business at large, and the art of acting.

Cryer has worked with some of the biggest and most provocative names in the business, and here, for the first time, he details his experiences with Charlie Sheen, John Hughes, Robert Altman, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, and Christopher Reeve, among many others. He shares the intimate details of his friendships and relationships, pays tribute to his mentors, and explores the peculiar combination of heart, talent, and wisdom it takes to survive not just the bad times in a notoriously fickle industry but even the good times.

In this revealing, humorous, and introspective memoir, Cryer offers readers a front-row seat as he reminisces about his life and experiences in showbiz over the past thirty years.

On My Radar:

Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder
by Amy Butcher
Blue Rider Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In this powerful and unforgettable memoir, award-winning writer Amy Butcher examines the shattering consequences of failing a friend when she felt he needed one most. Four weeks before their college graduation, twenty-one-year-old Kevin Schaeffer walked Amy Butcher to her home in their college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Hours after parting ways with Amy, he fatally stabbed his ex-girlfriend, Emily Silverstein. While he was awaiting trial, psychiatrists concluded that he had suffered an acute psychotic break. Although severely affected by Kevin’s crime, Amy remained devoted to him as a friend, believing that his actions were the direct result of his untreated illness. Over time, she became obsessed—determined to discover the narrative that explained what Kevin had done. The tragedy deeply shook her concept of reality, disrupted her sense of right and wrong, and dismantled every conceivable notion she’d established about herself and her relation to the world. Eventually realizing that she would never have the answers, or find personal peace, unless she went after it herself, Amy returned to Gettysburg—the first time in three years since graduation—to sift through hundreds of pages of public records: mental health evaluations, detectives’ notes, inventories of evidence, search warrants, testimonies, and even Kevin’s own confession.

Visiting Hours is Amy Butcher’s deeply personal, heart-wrenching exploration of how trauma affects memory and the way a friendship changes and often strengthens through seemingly insurmountable challenges. Ultimately, it’s a testament to the bonds we share with others and the profound resilience and strength of the human spirit.

On My Radar:

Saltwater Cowboy: The Rise and Fall of a Marijuana Empire
by Tim McBride with Ralph Berrier, Jr.
St. Martin's Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In 1979, Wisconsin native Tim McBride hopped into his Mustang and headed south. He was twenty-one, and his best friend had offered him a job working as a crab fisherman in Chokoloskee Island, a town of fewer than 500 people on Florida's Gulf Coast. Easy of disposition and eager to experience life at its richest, McBride jumped in with both feet.But this wasn't a typical fishing outfit. McBride had been unwittingly recruited into a band of smugglers--middlemen between a Colombian marijuana cartel and their distributors in Miami. His elaborate team comprised fishermen, drivers, stock houses, security--seemingly all of Chokoloskee Island was in on the operation. As McBride came to accept his new role, tons upon tons of marijuana would pass through his hands.Then the federal government intervened in 1984, leaving the crew without a boss and most of its key players. McBride, now a veteran smuggler, was somehow spared. So when the Colombians came looking for a new middle-man, they turned to him.McBride became the boss of an operation that was ultimately responsible for smuggling 30 million pounds of marijuana. A self-proclaimed "Saltwater Cowboy," he would evade the Coast Guard for years, facing volatile Colombian drug lords and risking betrayal by romantic partners until his luck finally ran out.A tale of crime and excess, Saltwater Cowboy is the gripping memoir of one of the biggest pot smugglers in American history.

On My Radar:

The Story: A Reporter's Journey
by Judith Miller
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Star reporter for the New York Times, the world’s most powerful newspaper; foreign correspondent in some of the most dangerous fields; Pulitzer winner; longest jailed correspondent for protecting her sources, Judith Miller is highly respected and controversial. In this memoir, she turns her reporting skills on herself with the intensity of her professional vocation.

Judy Miller grew up near the Nevada atomic proving ground. She got a job at the New York Times after a suit by women employees about discrimination at the paper and went on to cover national politics, head the paper’s bureau in Cairo, and serve as deputy editor in Paris and then deputy at the powerful Washington bureau. She reported on terrorism and the rise of fanatical Islam in the Middle East and on secret biological weapons plants and programs in Iraq, Iran, and Russia. She covered an administration traumatized by 9/11 and an anthrax attack three weeks later. Miller shared a Pulitzer for her reporting.

She turns her journalistic skills on herself and her controversial reporting which marshaled evidence that led America to invade Iraq. She writes about the mistakes she and others made on the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. She addresses the motives of some of her sources, including the notorious Iraqi Chalabi and the CIA. She describes going to jail to protect her sources in the Scooter Libby investigation of the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame and how the Times subsequently abandoned her after twenty-eight years.

The Story describes the real life of a foreign and investigative reporter. It is an adventure story, told with bluntness and wryness.

On My Radar:

A Fine Romance
by Candice Bergen
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In the follow-up to Knock Wood—her bestselling “engaging, intelligent, and wittily self-deprecating autobiography” (The New York Times)—Candice Bergen shares the big events: her marriage to a famous French director, the birth of her daughter, Murphy Brown, widowhood, falling in love again, and watching her daughter blossom.

A Fine Romance begins with Bergen’s charming first husband, French director Louis Malle, whose huge appetite for life broadened her horizons and whose occasional darkness never diminished their love for each other. But her real romance begins when she discovers overpowering love for her daughter after years of ambivalence about motherhood. As Chloe grows up, Bergen finds her comic genius in the biggest TV role of the 80s, Murphy Brown, and makes unwanted headlines when Dan Quayle pulls her into the 1992 presidential campaign. 

Fifteen years into their marriage, Malle is diagnosed with cancer, and Candice is unflinching in describing her and Chloe’s despair over his death. But after years of widowhood, she feels the sweet shock of finding a different kind of soulmate. Candice takes us through the first years of her new marriage and shares the bittersweetness of watching Chloe leave home and flourish—and the comedy of a losing battle against those damn wrinkles and extra pounds.

A natural writer, Candice is hilarious, brutally honest, down-to-earth, and wise. She may be a beautiful Hollywood actress with a charmed life, but Candice is someone who can talk frankly about extraordinary events. Readers who pull up a chair will feel like they’ve just made a best friend.

On My Radar:

Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius
by Bill Pennington
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Billy Martin is a story of contrasts. He was the clutch second baseman for the dominant New York Yankees of the 1950s. He then spent sixteen seasons managing in the big leagues, and is considered by anyone who knows baseball to have been a true baseball genius, a field manager without peer. Yet he’s remembered more for his habit of kicking dirt on umpires, for being hired and fired by George Steinbrenner five times, and for his rabble rousing and public brawls. He was combative, fiery, intimidating, and controversial, yet beloved by the everyday fan. He was hard on his players and even harder on himself. He knew how to turn around a losing team like no one else—and how to entertain us every step of the way.

Now, with his definitive biography Billy Martin, Pennington finally erases the caricature of Martin. Drawing on exhaustive interviews with friends, family, teammates, and countless adversaries, Pennington paints an indelible portrait of a man who never backed down for the game he loved. From his shantytown upbringing in a broken home; to his days playing for the Yankees when he almost always helped his team find a way to win; through sixteen years of managing, including his tenure in New York in the crosshairs of Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin made sure no one ever ignored him. And indeed no one could. He was the hero, the antihero, and the alter ego—or some combination of all three—for his short sixty-one years among us.

On My Radar:

Amish Confidential
by "Lebanon" Levi Stoltzfus and Ellis Henican
Gallery Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

“Lebanon” Levi Stoltzfus, star of the hit Discovery Channel reality show Amish Mafia, delivers a sizzling tell-all about Amish life today. From the forbidden joyrides to the senseless shunnings to the colorful family feuds, he shares his frank insider’s view of this fascinating and secretive society.

You’ve seen the pretty postcards and the shiny tourist brochures. Now, Amish Confidential takes readers beyond the buggies, bonnets, and beards—into the hidden heart of back-roads Amish country. The all-night field parties. The prohibited automobiles. The nosy neighbors and prissy tattletales. It’s all here: the many “English temptations.” The stitch-and-bitch quilting bees. The sex, alcohol, and illicit Wi-Fi. And the random acts of kindness and remarkable forgiveness, too.

Interest in the Amish has never been greater. The tourist counts keep breaking new records. Amish Mafia is back for a fourth blockbuster season on TV, joined now by several spinoff shows. Amish Confidential taps right into America’s fresh fascination with the throwback Amish. Stoltzfus weaves his never-before-told personal story through some high-profile Amish episodes that rocked the news in recent years, including the Nickel Mines shooting massacre, the Amish sisters’ farm-stand kidnapping, and the Amish-Pagan drug gang. As America’s most famous Amish tough guy makes clear on every page, there is nothing plain or simple about the plain-and-simple life.

On My Radar:

Corruption Officer: From Jail Guard to Perpetrator Inside Rikers Island
by Gary L. Heyward
Atria Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

In this shocking memoir from a former corrections officer, Gary Heyward shares an eye-opening, gritty, and devastating account of his descent into criminal life, smuggling contraband inside the infamous Rikers Island jails.

Gary Heyward’s life changed forever when he received a letter from the New York City Department of Corrections announcing he was accepted into the academy for new recruits. For the Harlem-born ex-Marine, being an officer of the law was the ticket he’d been waiting for to move up from a low-wage security job and out of the Polo Ground Projects in New York City—and take his mother with him.

Heyward was warned of the temptations he’d encounter as a new officer, but when faced with financial hardship, he suddenly found himself unable to resist the income generated from selling contraband to inmates. In his distinctive voice, Heyward takes you on a journey inside the walls of Rikers Island, showing how he teamed up with various inmates and other officers to develop a system that allowed him to profit from selling drugs inside the jail.

Corruption Officer is a jarring exposé of a man having lived on both sides of the law, a rare insider’s look at a corrupt city jail, and a testament to the lengths we’ll go when our backs are against the wall.

In My TBR Stack:

Ordinary Light: A Memoir
by Tracy K. Smith
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter.

The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. 

In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. 

Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.

On My Radar:

On the Clock: The Story of the NFL Draft
by Barry Wilner and Ken Rappoport
Taylor Trade Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

The NFL draft features no action on the field. No passing, running, tackling, or kicking. Hey, there isn't even a field. Yet the draft has become more popular than many other sporting events, including the NBA and NHL playoff games, against which it goes head-to-head for viewers. In fact, the draft has spawned its own cottage industry in which names such as Gil Brandt, Mel Kiper Jr., and Mike Mayock have become as well known as any of the first-round selections. 

In On the Clock, Barry Wilner and Ken Rappoport chronicle the history of the proceedings. The veteran sportswriters take you from the first grab bag in 1936, when Philadelphia chose Heisman Trophy winner Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago only for him to decline to play in the NFL, to the 2014 draft—considered one of the deepest in talent ever. 

Along the 78-year journey, learn about the competitions for the top overall spot (Peyton Manning vs. Ryan Leaf), the unhappy No. 1s (John Elway and Tom Cousineau), the big flops (JaMarcus Russell), and the late-rounders-turned-superstars (Tom Brady). 

Meet the draft wizards, from Paul Brown to Bill Walsh and Jimmy Johnson, and read about the draft whiffs that cost personnel executives their jobs. 

On the Clock takes you behind the scenes at one of pro football’s most suspenseful annual events.