In My TBR Stack:

The Entrepreneur's Faces: How Makers, Visionaries, and Outsiders Succeed
by Jonathan Littman and Susanna Camp
Snowball Narrative Press
Trade Paperback

From the book website:

Are entrepreneurs born or made? The answer is both, as we reveal in this book. Nearly anyone can learn to be more entrepreneurial in their lives and work, and really, why wouldn’t you want that extra innovation edge?

Entrepreneurs come in different types, and with that discovery comes power. Knowing which archetype you are can provide the spark that makes the difference between success and failure. There’s an advantage to be gained in self-awareness. By figuring out who you are, you gain clarity about who you are not. Insights to help you think, adapt and act with heightened speed and purpose as you go through this journey.

This engaging book will help you identify the ten essential entrepreneurial types to propel your professional growth.

On My Radar:

Adventure by Chicken Bus: An Unschooling Odyssey through Central America
by Janet LoSole
Wipf and Stock
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Embarking on a homeschooling field trip to Central America is stressful enough, but add in perilous bridge crossings, trips to the hospital, and a lack of women’s underwear, and you have the makings of an Adventure by Chicken Bus…a tale of one family, buckling under a mountain of debt, who sells all worldly possessions and hits the road.

 

Adventure by Chicken Bus demonstrates how to travel sustainably, but more importantly, how to nurture the next generation of environmentalists and social justice activists by exposing them to the conditions faced by those in the developing world.

From a remote monkey sanctuary tucked into an enclave on the Panama-Costa Rica frontier to the overdeveloped beaches of the Mayan Riviera, we endure chaotic border crossings, infections and injuries, learn about the history of the civil war in Nicaragua, visit UNESCO heritage sites, and hike the ancient Mayan temples of Tikal in Guatemala.

For the sake of safety, we plan our route down to the kilometer, navigating the region by chicken bus, an eye-opening mode of public transportation ubiquitous in the developing world. Along the way we re-connect with each other, re-kindle our commitment to the environment, recognize the privilege into which we were born, and become compassionate global citizens.

On My Radar:

This Thing Called Life: Prince's Odyssey, On and Off the Record
by Neal Karlen
St. Martin's Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s vast and private compound, Paisley Park.

According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life.

Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen’s grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can’t be understood without first understanding ‘70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince’s best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them.

Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas.” 

In My TBR Stack:

Family in Six Tones: A Refugee Mother, an American Daughter
by Lan Cao & Harlan Margaret Van Cao
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In 1975, thirteen-year-old Lan Cao boarded an airplane in Saigon and got off in a world where she faced hosts she had not met before, a language she didn’t speak, and food she didn’t recognize, with the faint hope that she would be able to go home soon. Lan fought her way through confusion, and racism, to become a successful lawyer and novelist. Four decades later, she faced the biggest challenge in her life: raising her daughter Harlan–half Vietnamese by birth and 100 percent American teenager by inclination. In their lyrical joint memoir, told in alternating voices, mother and daughter cross ages and ethnicities to tackle the hardest questions about assimilation, aspiration, and family.

Lan wrestles with her identities as not merely an immigrant but a refugee from an unpopular war. She has bigoted teachers who undermine her in the classroom and tormenting inner demons, but she does achieve–either despite or because of the work ethic and tight support of a traditional Vietnamese family struggling to get by in a small American town. Lan has ambitions, for herself, and for her daughter, but even as an adult feels tentative about her place in her adoptive country, and ventures through motherhood as if it is a foreign landscape.

Reflecting and refracting her mother’s narrative, Harlan fiercely describes the rites of passage of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the aftereffects of her family’s history of war, tragedy, and migration. Harlan’s struggle to make friends in high school challenges her mother to step back and let her daughter find her own way.

Family in Six Tones speaks both to the unique struggles of refugees and to the universal tug-of-war between mothers and daughters. The journey of an immigrant–away from war and loss toward peace and a new life–and the journey of a mother raising a child to be secure and happy are both steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks. Through explosive fights and painful setbacks, mother and daughter search for a way to accept the past and face the future together.

In My TBR Stack:

Behind the Red Veil: An American Inside Gorbachev's Russia
by Frank Thoms
Sparkpress

Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Behind the Red Veil recounts Frank’s quest to understand the Russian people. He spent his initial twenty-five years as a teacher, during which time he pursued his understanding of Marxism, Russian history, and Soviet Communism. His first venture to the Soviet Union occurred in October 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev’s first year as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In his following six trips, Frank served twice as a US–Soviet exchange teacher of English in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and on his own taught English in schools in Moscow and Alma-Ata (Almaty), Kazakhstan. His final journey, which was to the new Russia in 1994, three years after Gorbachev’s resignation, took him to Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.

On My Radar:

Bruce Springsteen: All the Songs
by Philippe Margotin & Jean-Michel Guesdon
Cassell
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Spanning nearly 50 years of albums, EPs, B-sides, and more, this is the full story behind every single song that The Boss has ever released. Moving chronologically through Springsteen’s long career, expert authors Margotin and Guesdon explore everything there is to know about every single song. 

No stone is left unturned across 670 pages, from the inspiration behind the lyrics and melody to the recording process and even the musicians and producers who worked on each track.

Uncover the stories behind the music in this truly definitive book – a must-have for every Springsteen fan.

On My Radar:

Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock
by Michael Ray Fitzgerald
University Press of Florida
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd helped usher in a new kind of southern music from Jacksonville, Florida. Together, they and fellow bands like Blackfoot, 38 Special, and Molly Hatchet would reset the course of seventies rock. Yet Jacksonville seemed an unlikely hotbed for a new musical movement.             
 
Michael FitzGerald blends eyewitness detail with in-depth history to tell the story of how the River City bred this generation of legendary musicians. As he profiles essential bands alongside forerunners like Gram Parsons and Cowboy, FitzGerald reveals how the powerful local AM radio station worked with newspapers and television stations to nurture talent. Media attention in turn created a public hungry for live performances by area bands. What became the southern rock elite welded relentless determination to a ferocious work ethic, honing their gifts on a testing ground that brooked no weakness and took no prisoners.   
 
FitzGerald looks at the music as the diverse soundtrack to a neo-southern lifestyle that reconciled different segments of society in Jacksonville, and across the nation, in the late sixties and early seventies. A vivid journey into a crucible of American music, Jacksonville and the Roots of Southern Rock shines a light on the artists and songs that powered a phenomenon.   

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:

Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon: Game of Thrones and the Official Untold Story of the Epic Series
by James Hibberd
Dutton Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

It was supposed to be impossible. George R.R. Martin was a frustrated television writer who created his bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels to be an unfilmable saga bound only by the limits of his vast imagination. Then a pair of first-time TV writers teamed with HBO to try and adapt Martin’s epic. We’ve all seen the eight seasons of the Emmy-winning fantasy series that came next. But there is one Game of Thrones tale that has yet to be told: the 13-year behind-the-scenes struggle to pull off this extraordinary phenomenon. 
 
In Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, award-winning Entertainment Weekly writer James Hibberd chronicles the untold and uncensored story of Game of Thrones, from the creative team’s first meetings to staging the series finale and all the on-camera battles and off-camera struggles in between. The book draws from more than 50 revealing new interviews, rare and stunning photos, and unprecedented access to the producers, cast, and crew who took an impossible idea and made it into the biggest show in the world.

On My Radar:

The Reacher Guy: A Biography of Lee Child
by Heather Martin
Pegasus Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Lee Child has a great public persona: he is gracious and generous with readers and fans. But Jim Grant is a reticent and very private man. 

This rags-to-riches literary and social biography is based principally on disarmingly frank personal conversations and correspondence with the author since 2016 and privileged access to archival materials. It consists almost entirely of original material, and is the nearest thing the world is likely to get to the autobiography he does not intend to write. 

There are a handful of great Lee Child/Reacher stories that have been recycled over and over again. They are so good that no one has bothered to look beyond them. This book revisits (and sometimes revises) those irresistible stories, but goes back further and digs deeper. The emphasis on chronology, accuracy and specificity is unprecedented.  

The Lee Child origin myth is much loved. But mostly it sees him springing fully formed from the brow of Granada Television. There are glancing references to Aston Villa and the schoolyard, but no one has examined the social and historical detail or looked closely at where Lee really came from: the people, places and period.

This is the first time someone has described the Lee Child arc: from peaceful obscurity in the Yorkshire Dales and Upstate New York to cult figure, no. 1 in America, rock star, celebrity and publishing institution through to backlash, the changing zeitgeist, and intimations of retirement. The analysis of the emotional power and significance of Lee’s work in the final chapters—the themes of happiness, addiction, dependency, loneliness, and existential absurdity—and the first-hand retrospective accounts of his life and second-act career are all exclusive to this definitive biography.

On My Radar:

Is This Anything?
by Jerry Seinfeld
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Since his first performance at the legendary New York nightclub “Catch a Rising Star” as a twenty-one-year-old college student in fall of 1975, Jerry Seinfeld has written his own material and saved everything. “Whenever I came up with a funny bit, whether it happened on a stage, in a conversation, or working it out on my preferred canvas, the big yellow legal pad, I kept it in one of those old school accordion folders,” Seinfeld writes. “So I have everything I thought was worth saving from forty-five years of hacking away at this for all I was worth.” 

For this book, Jerry Seinfeld has selected his favorite material, organized decade by decade. In page after hilarious page, one brilliantly crafted observation after another, readers will witness the evolution of one of the great comedians of our time and gain new insights into the thrilling but unforgiving art of writing stand-up comedy.

In My TBR Stack:

Connect: What Everyone Wants, What Few of Us Find...and the Kicker is That it's Right There in Front of You
by Mark Ebinger
Mark Ebinger Books
Trade Paperback

From the book publicity:

Connection.

More than social status, more than the latest car, the swankest house, the most prestigious career, or the most “likes” on social media, deep down what we all really want is to connect fully and authentically with the other people in our lives. Trouble is, most of us have spent a lifetime cultivating habits and behaviors that keep us disconnected from others, and even from ourselves.

Enter Connect—and just in time. This book offers a road map to reconnection at a time when loneliness in our culture is at an all-time high. Here is the antidote, a step-by-step guide to a more satisfying and meaningful life. Author Mark Ebinger shares personal stories of his own journey to reconnection and shines a light on the truths about human nature that make isolation and disconnection all too easy. And each chapter includes practical exercises you can do to set you on your own path to greater connection, and to keep you on it.

Do you crave deeper connection in your life? Connect will show you the way.

In My TBR Stack:

Collapse 2020: Vol. 1 - Fall of the First Global Civilization
by Bruce Nappi
Book Patch
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Collapse 2020 Vol. 1 digs into the major chaos of Today’s world: climate change, liberal-conservative polarization, gridlock in governments and massive social injustice. It provides NEW understanding for what has and is going wrong. The book presents major new discoveries from over 30 years of unpublished research. It doesn’t just rehash conventional ideas. It explores an entirely new logical foundation for society to understand today’s fundamental problems. Unfortunately, humanity has already gone over the tipping point. Civilization will collapse.

This book presents many breakthroughs: A suppressed report shows climate collapse is just a start. A new theory of the human brain describes “human consciousness” and how the brain produces it. A new interpretation of the “singularity” explains why humanity missed it. A new theory of human language explains the polarization of society and gridlock in governments.

Are you ready to take the next step? This book will take you there!