On My Radar:

As Needed For Pain: A Memoir of Addiction
by Dan Peres
Harper
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Dan Peres wasn’t born to be a media insider. As an awkward, magic-obsessed adolescent, nothing was further from his reality than the catwalks of Paris or the hallways of glossy magazine publishers. A gifted writer and shrewd cultural observer, Peres eventually took the leap—even when it meant he had to fake a sense of belonging in a new world of famed fashion designers, celebrities, and some of media’s biggest names. But he had a secret: opiates.

Peres’s career as an editor at W magazine and Details is well known, but little is known about his private life as a high-functioning drug addict. In As Needed for Pain, Peres lays bare for the first time the extent of his drug use—at one point a 60-pill-a-day habit.

By turns humorous and gripping, Peres’s story is a cautionary coming-of-age tale filled with unforgettable characters and breathtaking brushes with disaster. But the heart of the book is his journey from outsider to insecure insider, what it took to get him there, and how he found his way back from a killing addiction. 

As Needed for Pain offers a rare glimpse into New York media’s past—a time when print magazines mattered—and a rarefied world of wealth, power, and influence. It is also a brilliant, shocking dissection of a life teetering on the edge of destruction, and what it took to pull back from the brink.

On My Radar:

The Caravan Chronicles: 4 Friends, 38 States, 2 Weeks
by Matthew Klem
Magestick Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the author's website:

Ever wanted to take a cross-country road trip? Wondered what you might see or what you’d experience? Thought about taking your friends with you but didn’t know if they’d drive you crazy that whole time? 

The Caravan Chronicles tells the story of how four friends hopped in a van and visited all 48 US states, including Washington D.C., over a two week period. From New England to San Francisco and back, these four adventurers saw more of the United States in two weeks than many see in a lifetime. Whether it was hiking through train tunnels, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or taking selfies in Times Square, they covered 10,000+ miles and walked away with the greatest road trip story ever.

This book walks you through the origins of the trip, the meticulous planning, and how the high tech hobby of geocaching played a huge part in setting this trek in motion.

On My Radar:

Last Train to Texas: My Railroad Odyssey
by Fred W. Frailey
Indiana University Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:


Midnight train rides, head-on freight collisions — there is never a dull moment when it comes to trains. Take a look at America's biggest railroads and meet the thunderous personalities who operate them.

In Last Train to Texas, author Fred W. Frailey examines the workings behind the railroad industry and captures incredible true stories along the way. Discover how men like William "Pisser Bill" F. Thompson swerve from financial ruin, bad merger deals, and cutthroat competition, all while racking up enough notoriety to inspire a poem titled "Ode to a Jerk."  Bold, savvy, and ready for a friendly brawl, the only thing louder and more thrilling than these men are the trains they handle. Come along with Frailey as he travels the world, one railroad at a time. Whether it's riding the Canadian Pacific Railway through a blizzard, witnessing a container train burglary in the Abo Canyon, or commemorating a poem to Limerick Junction in Dublin, Ireland, Frailey's journeys are rife with excitement and the occasional mishap.

Filled with humorous and thoughtful insights into the railroading industry, Last Train to Texas is an adventure in every sense of the word.

On My Radar:

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
by Alexis Coe
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down–even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won. 

After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War cast him as the nation’s hero, he was desperate to retire, but the founders pressured him into the presidency–twice. When he retired years later, no one talked him out of it. He left the highest office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created. 

Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty must confront his greatest hypocrisy–what to do with the men, women, and children he owns–before he succumbs to death.  

With irresistible style and warm humor, You Never Forget Your First combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers – including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads - inhaling every page.

On My Radar:

A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win WWII
by Simon Parkin
Little, Brown and Company
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of ten Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-believe ocean in a manner reminiscent of the childhood game, Battleship. Through play, the designers developed “Operation Raspberry,” a countermaneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II.

Combining vibrant novelistic storytelling with extensive research, interviews, and previously unpublished accounts, Simon Parkin describes for the first time the role that women played in developing the Allied strategy that, in the words of one admiral, “contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany.” Rich with unforgettable cinematic detail and larger-than-life characters, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a heart-wrenching tale of ingenuity, dedication, perseverance, and love, bringing to life the imagination and sacrifice required to defeat the Nazis at sea.

On My Radar:

Why We're Polarized
by Ezra Klein
Avid Reader Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results. 

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.

On My Radar:

Early: An Intimate History of Premature Birth and What It Teaches Us About Being Human
by Sarah DiGregorio
Harper Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The heart of many hospitals is the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It is a place where humanity, ethics, and science collide in dramatic and deeply personal ways as parents, doctors, and nurses grapple with sometimes unanswerable questions: When does life begin? When and how should life end? And what does it mean to be human?

Nearly twenty years ago, Dr. John D. Lantos wrote The Lazarus Case, a seminal work on ethical dilemmas in neonatology. He described the NICU as “a strong, strange, powerful place.” The NICU is a place made of stories—the stories of mothers and babies who spend days, weeks, and even months waiting to go home, and the dedicated clinicians who care for these tiny, developing humans. The book explores the evolution of neonatology and its breakthroughs—how modern medicine can be successful at saving infants at five and a half months gestation who weigh less than a pound, when only a few decades ago, there were essentially no treatments for premature babies.

For the first time, Sarah DiGregorio tells the complete story of this science—and the many people it has touched. Weaving her own story, those of other parents, and NICU clinicians with deeply researched reporting, Early delves deep into the history and future of neonatology, one of the most boundary pushing medical disciplines: how it came to be, how it is evolving, and the political, cultural, and ethical issues that continue to arise in the face of dramatic scientific developments. 

Eye-opening and vital, Early uses premature birth as a lens to view our own humanity, and the humanity of those around us.

In My TBR Stack:

More Than Just Weather & Music: 200 Ways to Use Alexa
by Bradley Metrock
Score Publishing
Trade Paperback

From the book publicity:

Everyone's got an Alexa-enabled device, whether an Echo in the living room, an Echo Show in the kitchen, or an Echo Auto in the car. But not everyone knows there's a whole lot more you can do with Alexa than just ask for the weather, or to play your favorite music. More Than Just Weather And Music: 200 Ways To Use Alexa, the new book by Bradley Metrock, host of #1 tech podcast This Week In Voiceand regular speaker on the impact voice technology is having in our world, will share many of these best-in-class Alexa skills and use cases that will change the way you view Alexa completely.

In My TBR Stack:

Quotas! Design Thinking to Solve Your Biggest Sales Challenge
by Mark Donnolo
atd Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Sales quotas aren’t all about the numbers.

Quotas! Design Thinking to Solve Your Biggest Sales Challenge sheds new light on quota challenges, the story behind them, and the methods to solve them. Many organizations struggle to reach effective, market-driven sales quotas, with more than half reporting quota setting as one of their top sales dilemmas. Instead of wrestling over the number, author Mark Donnolo contends that organizations can better achieve effective sales quotas by applying a problem-solving approach. With decades of experience working with major organizations on successful sales strategies, he offers engaging stories embedded with business problems and poses challenge questions to prompt a creative, five-step design-thinking process. 

Chapters feature quota design frameworks and a range of applicable, scalable methods. You’ll also find rare, expert guidance through the candid perspectives and advice of CEOs and other senior leaders. This book is a must-read for those who help set quotas as well as those who fulfill them.

On My Radar:

Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office
by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The extraordinary authority of the U.S. presidency has no parallel in the democratic world. Today that authority resides in the hands of one man, Donald J. Trump. But rarely if ever has the nature of a president clashed more profoundly with the nature of the office. Unmaking the Presidency tells the story of the confrontation between a person and the institution he almost wholly embodies.

From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations, where did they come from, and how great is the damage? As editors of the “invaluable” (The New York Times) Lawfare website, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes have attracted a large audience to their hard-hitting and highly informed commentary on the controversies surrounding the Trump administration. In this book, they situate Trump-era scandals and outrages in the deeper context of the presidency itself. How should we understand the oath of office when it is taken by a man who may not know what it means to preserve, protect, and defend something other than himself? What aspects of Trump are radically different from past presidents and what aspects have historical antecedents? When has he simply built on his predecessors’ misdeeds, and when has he invented categories of misrule entirely his own? 

By setting Trump in the light of history, Hennessey and Wittes provide a crucial and durable account of a presidency like no other.

In My TBR Stack:

Coming Out as Mentally Ill
by Jason Blake
Laki Press
Trade Paperback

From the author's website:

This is the first book you should read about mental illness.

 In the United States, nearly half of all adults will experience a mental illness during their lifetime.

And yet we rarely talk about it!

Coming Out As Mentally Ill is the touching and relatable story of one person's coming to terms with mental illness and how it led to a more successful, productive, and fulfilling life.

The book also a primer on the basics of mental illness, designed to demystify the stigma around mental health, with supportive guidance on how to get help.

Just know that while the statistics are sobering, we can all play an important role in being there for our partners, our children, our friends, our coworkers, and most importantly – ourselves.

Start here, take that first step, and be an important part of the changing conversation around mental health. 

On My Radar:

Gender: A Graphic Guide
by Meg-John Barker & Jules Scheele
Icon Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Is masculinity ‘toxic’? Why are public toilets such a political issue? How has feminism changed the available gender roles – and for whom? Why might we all benefit from challenging binary thinking about sex/gender?

In this unique illustrated guide, Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele travel through our shifting understandings of gender across time and space – from ideas about masculinity and femininity, to non-binary and trans genders, to intersecting experiences of gender, race, sexuality, class, disability and more.

Tackling current debates and tensions, which can divide communities and even cost lives, Barker and Scheele look to the past and the future to explore how we might all approach gender in more caring and celebratory ways.

On My Radar:

An Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Fremont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War
by Steve Inskeep
Penguin Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

John C. Frémont, one of the United States’s leading explorers of the nineteenth century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he was one of the most acclaimed people of the age – known as a wilderness explorer, bestselling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States’s takeover of California from Mexico. He was not even 40 years old when Americans began naming mountains and towns after him. He had perfect timing, exploring the West just as it captured the nation’s attention. But the most important factor in his fame may have been the person who made it all possible: his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont. 
 
Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator who was deeply involved in the West, provided her husband with entrée to the highest levels of government and media, and his career reached new heights only a few months after their elopement. During a time when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, Jessie – who herself aspired to roles in exploration and politics – threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. She worked to carefully edit and publicize his accounts of his travels, attracted talented young men to his circle, and lashed out at his enemies. She became her husband’s political adviser, as well as a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party. 

With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time—westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America. Theirs is a surprisingly modern tale of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of social and technological disruption and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. In Imperfect Union, as Inskeep navigates these deeply transformative years through Jessie and John’s own union, he reveals how the Frémonts’ adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.