On My Radar:

Real News:  An Investigative Reporter Uncovers the Foundations of the Trump-Russia Conspiracy
by Scott Stedman
Skyhorse Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Investigative reporter Scott Stedman has made waves worldwide with his hard-hitting investigative journalism, going as far as anyone has to uncover the deep roots of the Trump-Russia Conspiracy. His research has been cited by the Washington Post, BBC, Reuters, CNN, McClatchy, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and Vice, and has even helped guide Congress’s investigations.

Real News collects, for the first time in print, Stedman’s eye-opening research into and evidence of every level of the Trump-Russia Conspiracy, from the 2016 Trump Tower Meetings to the dirty-money deal for Trump Tower Moscow, from the “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos and his mysterious wife to Russian infiltration of the National Rifle Association, from Cambridge Analytica’s sketchy business deals and influence operations to the battle for true journalism that will combat cries of “Fake News!”

Full of real, exclusive evidence including ownership records, flight logs, banking information and statements, meeting transcripts, maps, quotes, stats and figures, cease and desist letters, and more, Real News not only enables readers to see and evaluate the arguments for the existence of the Trump-Russia Conspiracy for themselves, it also fully explains how Stedman went about his investigations to discover the truth.

Anyone who is interested in the evidence—the real news about the Trump-Russia Conspiracy—needs to read this book.

In My TBR Stack:

T is for Transformation: Unleash the 7 Superpowers to Help You Dig Deeper, Feel Stronger & Live Your Best Life
by Shaun T

Rodale Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

As a fitness icon and motivational mastermind, Shaun T has helped millions of people transform their bodies and their lives through his Hip Hop Abs, INSANITY, and CIZE workouts. But people who think of Shaun T as just a workout force are missing something. He has always focused on building inner strength first, then moving to the exterior. And that inner focus started in his own life. He became the man and motivator he is today after escaping from the abuse he suffered as a child, and fighting his way back from a 50-pound weight gain in his early 20s. He knows firsthand that you can’t drop weight or enjoy better health until you overcome the mental obstacles that cause bad choices in the first place.

In T is for Transformation, Shaun T unveils the 7 transformational principles that guided his progress through life and that are at the core of his incredibly successful workouts. T is for Transformation is a motivational master class as Shaun shows you how to become more flexible and resourceful, give everything you’ve got, and, most importantly, trust and believe in your path to success. The only real obstacles in life are the mental ones, and T is for Transformation can train you to achieve astonishing results in your own life, just as Shaun T has in his.

On My Radar:

American Conspiracies and Cover-ups: JFK, 9/11, the Fed, Rigged Elections, Suppressed Cancer Cures, and the Greatest Conspiracies of Our Time
by Douglas Cirignano
Skyhorse Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Griffin, and Others​

“Those intrepid souls seeking to peer deeper into America’s greatest conspiracies should start with Douglas Cirignano’s voluminous book. Pick your favorite conspiracy—Cirignano has them all, with incisive interviews with knowledgeable experts. Don’t miss this tour de force of conspiracy facts."
—Jim Marrs, journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Rule by Secrecy; The Rise of the Fourth Reich; The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy; and Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us. 

American Conspiracies and Cover-ups brings together interviews with the bestselling and brightest minds in the alternative history world to create the definitive guide to our country’s biggest secrets. Interviews include:

• Jim Marrs on the New World Order
• Noam Chomsky on mainstream media
• The JFK assassination with LBJ’s lawyer
• Veteran and author Robert B. Stinnet on Pearl Harbor
• G. Edward Griffin on the Federal Reserve Bank
• Dr. William F. Pepper on MLK's assassination
• Professor David Ray Griffin on 9/11
• and more!

Author Douglas Cirignano brings together the foremost experts in the field to answer these questions once and for all, and proves that mainstream histories don’t tell the real story.

BookSpin Excerpt:

Unwritten: Bat Flips, the Fun Police, and Baseball's New Future
by Danny Knobler
Triumph Books
Hardcover

Excerpt:

 The problems begin when a team thinks someone is having fun at their expense, or if what one team or player thinks of as a legitimate celebration offends the group on the other side. It can start with something as seemingly inoffensive as a bat flip.

 Bat flips have been part of baseball for a while. With the help of GIFs on Twitter and YouTube videos, they're more acceptable than ever and more celebrated than ever. Many fans love them. Many players do, too.

 And many pitchers have come to accept them.

 So why did Jose Bautista end up getting punched in the face? It's a legit question. Bautista's bat flip in the 2015 playoffs was epic, but it came after a huge home run. Bautista's Toronto Blue Jays were tied 3-3 with the Texas Rangers in the winner-take-all Game 5 of their American League Division Series. Bautista's three-run home run off Sam Dyson changed the game and the series.

 "I think that was a pretty big moment for the team and the franchise," Bautista said in 2018. "I'm not trying to justify anything, but if we want to talk about the moment, it's certainly an important one."

 Bautista has never believed he did anything wrong that day, and I'm not sure he did. He definitely stood and watched the ball, which was clearly going out of the park. He dramatically flung the bat in the air. He may have turned his head a bit, but he didn't stare into the Rangers dugout, as some have charged.

 Even so, the Rangers didn't like it. They didn't like losing, and they didn't like having to watch Bautista celebrate in a way they saw as shoving it in their face.

Author Danny Knobler

We know that because of what they said in the aftermath — "Jose needs to calm that down, just kind of respect the game a little more," Dyson told reporters after the game — but also because of what happened seven months later in Arlington, Texas.

 It was the final game of a three-game series between the Jays and Rangers, the final game the two teams would play in the regular season in 2016 (although they would again meet in the Division Series, with the Jays winning in a much less dramatic three-game sweep). Bautista came to the plate leading off the eighth inning in that May 15 game, and Rangers reliever Matt Bush threw at him.

 It was a first-pitch 95.7 mph fastball, according to MLB.com's Statcast, and it hit Bautista squarely on the left side. Bautista took his base with little delay, but the umpires quickly warned both teams that no further such pitches would be tolerated.

 But that wasn't the end of it. Far from it.

 When Blue Jays first baseman Justin Smoak hit a ground ball to third with one out in the inning, Bautista did more than just break up the double play. He went in late and hard on Rangers second baseman Rougned Odor in a clear response to getting hit by the pitch from Bush. Odor responded with a fist to Bautista’s jaw, an image that was quickly shared around the baseball world. 

 The Rangers, it was said, finally had their revenge for the bat flip.

 But why was revenge even needed? Did Bautista violate any of baseball’s unwritten rules, the way those rules are accepted in the modern game?

 The Rangers obviously thought so. They weren’t alone.

“I know Odor gained a ton of respect in baseball [by punching Bautista],” said Ian Kinsler, the former Rangers second baseman, who was already gone from the team before both the flip and the fight. “He stood up for his team. In their eyes, [Bautista] was disrespectful.” 

 Bautista will always maintain there was no disrespect, and he bristles at the suggestion that his celebration was in anyway premeditated. 

 “I don’t think you plan that,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a script, and I don’t think you have time to figure out what you’re going to do. It just kind of happens, and that’s it. Would somebody apologize for making a diving play? It’s an instinctual moment.” 

 In contrast, the Rangers’ response did seem planned, at least the part with him getting hit by the Matt Bush pitch. They chose to wait until his final at-bat in their final regular-season meeting, with a hard-throwing reliever on the mound. 

This excerpt from Unwritten: Bat Flips, the Fun Police, and Baseball's New Future published with permission of Triumph Books. 

Copyright 2019 by Danny Knobler

On My Radar:

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On My Radar:

All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir
by Erin Lee Carr
Ballantine Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Dad: What will set you apart is not talent but will and a certain kind of humility. A willingness to let the world show you things that you play back as you grow as an artist. Talent is cheap. 
Me: OK I will ponder these things. I am a Carr.
Dad: That should matter quite a bit, actually not the name but the guts of what that name means.

A celebrated journalist, bestselling author (The Night of the Gun), and recovering addict, David Carr was in the prime of his career when he suffered a fatal collapse in the newsroom of The New York Times in 2015. Shattered by his death, his daughter Erin Lee Carr, at age twenty-seven an up-and-coming documentary filmmaker, began combing through the entirety of their shared correspondence—1,936 items in total—in search of comfort and support.

What started as an exercise in grief quickly grew into an active investigation: Did her father’s writings contain the answers to the question of how to move forward in life and work without her biggest champion by her side? How could she fill the space left behind by a man who had come to embody journalistic integrity, rigor, and hard reporting, whose mentorship meant everything not just to her but to the many who served alongside him?

All That You Leave Behind is a poignant coming-of-age story that offers a raw and honest glimpse into the multilayered relationship between a daughter and a father. Through this lens, Erin comes to understand her own workplace missteps, existential crises, and relationship fails. While daughter and father bond over their mutual addictions and challenges with sobriety, it is their powerful sense of work and family that comes to ultimately define them.

This unique combination of Erin Lee Carr’s earnest prose and her father’s meaningful words offers a compelling read that shows us what it means to be vulnerable and lost, supported and found. It is a window into love, with all of its fierceness and frustrations.

On My Radar:

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing
by Robert A. Caro
Knopf
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

For the first time in book form, Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written, personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses; what it felt like to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses’ Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ’s mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of working in solitude, he found a writers’ community at the New York Public Library, and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books. 

     Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences–some previously published, some written expressly for this book–bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.

On My Radar:

The Last Stone
by Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

On March 29, 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyon, age 10 and 12, vanished from a shopping mall in suburban Washington, D.C. As shock spread, then grief, a massive police effort found nothing. The investigation was shelved, and mystery endured. Then, in 2013, a cold case squad detective found something he and a generation of detectives had missed. It pointed them toward a man named Lloyd Welch, then serving time for child molestation in Delaware.

As a cub reporter for a Baltimore newspaper, Mark Bowden covered the frantic first weeks of the story. In The Last Stone, he returns to write its ending. Over months of intense questioning and extensive investigation of Welch’s sprawling, sinister Appalachian clan, five skilled detectives learned to sift truth from determined lies. How do you get a compulsive liar with every reason in the world to lie to tell the truth? The Last Stone recounts a masterpiece of criminal interrogation, and delivers a chilling and unprecedented look inside a disturbing criminal mind.

On My Radar:

Apocalypse Any Day Now: Deep Underground with America's Doomsday Preppers 
by Tea Krulos
Chicago Review Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Everyone always seems to be talking about the end of the world -- Y2K, the Mayan apocalypse, blood moon prophecies, nuclear war, killer robots, you name it.  In Apocalypse Any Day Now, journalist Tea Krulos travels the country to try to puzzle out America's obsession with the end of days.  Along the way he meets doomsday preppers -- people who stockpile supplies and learn survival skills -- as well as religious prognosticators and climate scientists.  He camps out with the Zombie Squad (who use a zombie apocalypse as a survival metaphor); tours the Survival Condos, a luxurious bunker built in an old Atlas missile silo; and attends Wasteland Weekend, where people party like the world has already ended.  Frightening and funny, the ideas Kurlos explores range from ridiculously outlandish to alarmingly near and present dangers.

On My Radar:

Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain
by Danny Goldberg
Ecco Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In early 1991, top music manager Danny Goldberg agreed to take on Nirvana, a critically acclaimed new band from the underground music scene in Seattle. He had no idea that the band’s leader, Kurt Cobain, would become a pop-culture icon with a legacy arguably at the level of that of John Lennon, Michael Jackson, or Elvis Presley. Danny worked with Kurt from 1990 to 1994, the most impactful period of Kurt’s life. This key time saw the stratospheric success of Nevermind, which turned Nirvana into the most successful rock band in the world and made punk and grunge household terms; Kurt’s meeting and marriage to the brilliant but mercurial Courtney Love and their relationship that became a lightning rod for critics; the birth of their daughter, Frances Bean; and, finally, Kurt’s public struggles with addiction, which ended in a devastating suicide that would alter the course of rock history. Throughout, Danny stood by Kurt’s side as manager, and close friend. 

Drawing on Goldberg’s own memories of Kurt, files that previously have not been made public, and interviews with, among others, Kurt’s close family, friends, and former bandmates, Serving the Servants sheds an entirely new light on these critical years. Casting aside the common obsession with the angst and depression that seemingly drove Kurt, Serving the Servants is an exploration of his brilliance in every aspect of rock and roll, his compassion, his ambition, and the legacy he wrought—one that has lasted decades longer than his career did. Danny Goldberg explores what it is about Kurt Cobain that still resonates today, even with a generation who wasn’t alive until after Kurt’s death. In the process, he provides a portrait of an icon unlike any that has come before.

In My TBR Stack:

So You're Going Bald!
by Julius Sharpe
Harper Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Educational, uplifting, and thoroughly hilarious, this rollicking “bald memoir” is a one-stop guide to appreciating life as you lose your hair, and offers dating, grooming, marriage, sex, and even toupee advice for bald men and the people who claim to love them.

Humorist and comedy television writer Julius Sharpe woke up on 9/11 to his own personal disaster: his hair was falling out. So You’re Going Bald is his hilarious odyssey—a tale filled with despair, horror, acceptance, and humor that everyone can relate to, whether you’re nineteen or approaching ninety—or are simply bald-curious.

As Julius tells it, going bald is for-real traumatic. Losing his hair preoccupied his days and kept him up Googling every night for five straight years. He suffered in private, but now he’s making it his mission that no cue ball will live alone with the agony of hair loss ever again. Sharpe examines what it means to be hairless up top, and walks you through how to look at yourself in the mirror and not want to die. He outlines the three stages of baldness (anger, more anger, even more anger), and volunteers himself as a guinea pig, testing laser helmets, plugs, and toupees. So You’re Going Bald is one-part tough love and one-part inspiration . . . the same way that Fran Drescher’s Cancer Schmancer inspired a cure for schmancer.

We all know someone who is bald, or going bald, or got their hair cut way too short. In So You’re Going Bald, Sharper provides an emotional roadmap for living life in the bald lane, giving voice to what it feels like to know that “grass doesn’t grow on a busy street.”

On My Radar:

I Miss You When I Blink: Essays
by Mary Laura Philpott
Atria Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. 

But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right,” but she felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options?

In this memoir-in-essays full of spot-on observations about home, work, and creative life, Philpott takes on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood with wit and heart. She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife; reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary; and advises that if you’re going to faint, you should get low to the ground first. Most of all, Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down and set off on a transcontinental hike (unless you want to, of course). You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that?

Like a pep talk from a sister, I Miss You When I Blink is the funny, poignant, and deeply affecting book you’ll want to share with all your friends, as you learn what Philpott has figured out along the way: that multiple things can be true of us at once—and that sometimes doing things wrong is the way to do life right.

On My Radar:

Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir
by Ruth Reichl
Random House
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America’s oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone’s boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?

This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl’s leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media—the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down.

Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams—even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be.