In My TBR Stack:

Lola on Fire
by Rio Youers
William Morrow Books
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

Brody Ellis is short on luck and even shorter on cash to buy the medication his sister Molly needs.

Desperate, he robs a convenience store, but on the way out, he bumps into a young woman and loses his wallet. Just when he expects the cops to arrive, the phone rings. It’s Blair Mayo—the woman he bumped into—and she’s got the missing billfold.

Brody will get it back, but only if he does her a favor: steal her late mother’s diamonds from her wicked stepmom. But when he gets to the house, he finds a gruesome crime scene—and a security camera. Brody knows he’s been framed.

Back home, the terrified young man gets another call. The police won’t get the incriminating video footage, Blair says. Instead, her daddy, the notorious mobster Jimmy Latzo, will exact his own kind of revenge. 

Brody and Molly realize that they’ve become pawns in a mysterious game—one that involves a notorious enforcer named Lola Bear who brutally crossed paths with Jimmy Latzo twenty-six years before. . . a ghost from the past who is intimately connected to their lives.

On My Radar:

Cold Moon: On Life, Love, and Responsibility
by Roger Rosenblatt
Turtle Point Press
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

The Cold Moon occurs in late December, auguring the arrival of the winter solstice. Approaching the winter solstice of his own life, Roger Rosenblatt offers a book dedicated to the three most important lessons he has learned over his many years: an appreciation of being alive, a recognition of the gift and power of love, and the necessity of exercising responsibility toward one another. In a rough-and-tumble journey that moves like the sea, Rosenblatt rolls from elegy to comedy, distilling a lifetime of great tales and moments into a tonic for these perilous and fearful times. Cold Moon a book to offer purpose, to focus the attention on life's essentials, and to lift the spirit.​

On My Radar:

Murder at Hotel 1911: An Ivy Nichols Mystery
by Audrey Keown
Crooked Lane Books
Hardcover


From the book publicity:

If you want to spend a night amid the luxury and charm of the early 20th century, book a room at Hotel 1911. You’ll find 28-year-old Ivy Nichols behind the reception desk. The hotel is Ivy’s only link to the family that abandoned her when she was a small child. Now, plagued by panic attacks, she pedals her sea-green Schwinn bicycle to work every evening, hoping desperately to hold on to her job.

When wealthy, imperious Ms. Swain arrives at the hotel and belittles Ivy, the young woman seeks consolation in the welcoming kitchen of George, the hotel’s chef. Despite her tormentor’s barbs, she dutifully informs George that Ms. Swain has a deadly allergy to shellfish. So when Ms. Swain collapses at dinner and dies, the police suspect that the chef made a tragic, inexcusable error. Desperate to save George’s career, Ivy sets out sleuthing. She learns that numerous people in and around the hotel had motives to contaminate Ms. Swain’s plate. Among them are Jeffrey Swain, the victim’s son and heir; painter Rose Jewett; and British expat Hemal Sandeep.

Even after the police find traces of shellfish in George’s kitchen, Ivy is determined to clear her friend’s name. But the stress of the investigation, in a hotel filled with suspects, threatens to precipitate another terrifying panic attack...or something more deadly.

On My Radar:

The Future is Yours: A Novel
by Dan Frey
Del Rey Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

If you had the chance to look one year into the future, would you?  

For Ben Boyce and Adhi Chaudry, the answer is unequivocally yes. And they’re betting everything that you’ll say yes, too. Welcome to The Future: a computer that connects to the internet one year from now, so you can see who you’ll be dating, where you’ll be working, even whether or not you’ll be alive in the year to come. By forming a startup to deliver this revolutionary technology to the world, Ben and Adhi have made their wildest, most impossible dream a reality. Once Silicon Valley outsiders, they’re now its hottest commodity.  

The device can predict everything perfectly—from stock market spikes and sports scores to political scandals and corporate takeovers—allowing them to chase down success and fame while staying one step ahead of the competition. But the future their device foretells is not the bright one they imagined.

Ambition. Greed. Jealousy. And, perhaps, an apocalypse. The question is . . . can they stop it?

Told through emails, texts, transcripts, and blog posts, this bleeding-edge tech thriller chronicles the costs of innovation and asks how far you’d go to protect the ones you love—even from themselves.

Revised and Expanded Second Edition:

The Body is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
by Sonya Renee Taylor
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Trade Paperback


From the publisher's website:

Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.

The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world—for us all.

This second edition includes stories from Taylor's travels around the world combating body terrorism and shines a light on the path toward liberation guided by love. In a brand new final chapter, she offers specific tools, actions, and resources for confronting racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. And she provides a case study showing how radical self-love not only dismantles shame and self-loathing in us but has the power to dismantle entire systems of injustice. Together with the accompanying workbook, Your Body Is Not an Apology, Taylor brings the practice of radical self-love to life.

On My Radar:

Touring with Legends: A Comic's Tale of Opening for Rodney Dangerfield, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Tom Jones and many more....
by Dennis Blair
BearManor Media
Trade Paperback


From the publisher's website:

When he was in his mid-twenties, singer/songwriter/guitar player Dennis Blair parlayed a dreary, dead-end rut performing for inattentive bar patrons into a standup comedy career. He took his newly-developed song parodies and comic banter to a late-night audition at Dangerfield’s in New York City, hooked up with Rodney, and for the ensuing years became both a headliner in his own right as well as the opening act for such luminaries as Rodney, Joan Rivers, Garry Shandling, Norm MacDonald, Tom Jones, the Beach Boys, Gloria Estefan, the Four Tops, and many more, including an 18-year stint with the late, great George Carlin which lasted until his death in 2008. This book recounts in detail many of the not-seen-by-the-public “backstage” stories; the funny, the triumphant, the tragic, the weird, the close encounters, the nightmare gigs, the friendships forged, the good times and the bad times that Dennis experienced as a co-worker and a friend to many of the biggest names in show business during those years. It’s a testament to how you can never really plan how things will turn out. Enjoy the journey.

On My Radar:

Russians Among Us: Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories, and the Hunt for Putin's Spies
by Gordon Corera
William Morrow
Hardcover



From the publisher's website:

Spies have long been a source of great fascination in the world of fiction, but sometimes the best spy stories happen in real life. Russians Among Us tells the full story of Putin’s escalating espionage campaign in the West, the Russian ‘deep cover’ spies who penetrated the US and the years-long FBI hunt to capture them. This book also details the recruitment, running, and escape of one of the most important spies of modern times, a man who worked inside the heart of Russian intelligence. In this thrilling account Corera tracks not only the history, but the astonishing evolution of Russian espionage, including the use of ‘cyber illegals’ who continue to manipulate us today and pose a significant threat to the 2020 election.

Like a scene from the TV drama The Americans, in the summer of 2010 a group of Russian deep cover sleeper agents were arrested. It was the culmination of a decade-long investigation, and ten people, including Anna Chapman, were swapped for four people held in Russia. At the time it was seen simply as a throwback to the Cold War. But that would prove to be a costly mistake. It was a sign that the Russian threat had never gone away and more importantly, it was shifting into a much more disruptive new phase. Today, the danger is clearer than ever following the poisoning in the UK of one of the spies who was swapped, Sergei Skripal, and the growing evidence of Russian interference in American life.

  

Russians Among Us describes for the first time the story of deep cover spies in America and the FBI agents who tracked them. In intimate and riveting detail, it reveals new information about today’s spies—as well as those trying to catch them and those trying to kill them.

On My Radar:

Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob
by Russell Shorto
W.W. Norton and Company
Hardcover



From the publisher's website:

Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer—what are you gonna do about the story?

Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town.

Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life—and wife—in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family.

But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father—Tony, the mobster’s son—as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony’s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.

In My TBR Stack:

Hit Hard: One Family's Journey of Letting Go of What Was — and Learning to Live Well with What Is
by Pat & Tammy McLeod with Cynthia Ruchti
Tyndale Momentum
Trade Paperback


From the authors' website:

Life hit Pat and Tammy McLeod hard when their son Zach collapsed on a high school football field—he had sustained a severe brain injury. Two emergency brain surgeries later, Zach began waking up. Slowly the entire family woke up to the reality that life would never again be the same. The fallout of his injury would reshape their marriage, their family, their future and their faith in ways they never saw coming.

What would it take for them to navigate the endless fallout of their son’s life-transforming brain injury? How could they reconcile their grief over the life Zach lost, with gratitude for the life that remained? And how does a couple move forward together in their search for hope, rather than letting indefinable loss drive them apart? Hit Hard is the true story of the McLeods’ journey through ambiguous loss—both having and not having their son. It’s the story of a family who faced unexpected heartbreak, a story that offers us all glimpses of how we can pick up the pieces, redefine expectations, and find hope in the midst of unresolved pain.

On My Radar:

Fake Accounts: A Novel
by Lauren Oyler
Catapult Books
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

On the eve of Donald Trump's inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend's phone and makes a startling discovery: he's an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony, and outrage, she's not exactly shocked by the revelation. Actually, she's relieved--he was always a little distant--and she plots to end their floundering relationship while on a trip to the Women's March in DC. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies.

Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York and increasingly alienated from her friends and colleagues, our unnamed narrator flees to Berlin, embarking on her own cycles of manipulation in the deceptive spaces of her daily life, from dating apps to expat meetups, open-plan offices to bureaucratic waiting rooms. She begins to think she can't trust anyone--shouldn't the feeling be mutual?

Narrated with seductive confidence and subversive wit, Fake Accounts challenges the way current conversations about the self and community, delusions and gaslighting, and fiction and reality play out in the internet age.

On My Radar:

Call Me Commander: A Former Intelligence Officer and the Journalists Who Uncovered His Scheme to Fleece America
by Jeff Testerman and Daniel M. Freed
Potomac Books
Hardcover



From the publisher's website:

When Lt. Commander Bobby Thompson surfaced in Tampa in 1998, it was as if he had fallen from the sky, providing no hint of his past life. Eleven years later, St. Petersburg Times investigative reporter Jeff Testerman visited the rundown duplex Thompson used as his home and the epicenter of his sixty-thousand-member charity, the U.S. Navy Veterans Association. But something was amiss. Thompson’s charity’s addresses were just maildrops, his members nonexistent, and his past a black hole. Yet, somehow, the Commander had stood for photos with President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain, and other political luminaries. The USNVA, it turned out, was a phony charity where Thompson used pricey telemarketers, savvy lawyers, and political allies to swindle tens of millions from well-meaning donors.

After Testerman’s story revealed that the nonprofit was a sham, the Commander went on the run. U.S. Marshals took up the hunt in 2011 and found themselves searching for an unnamed identity thief who they likened to a real-life Jason Bourne. When finally captured in 2012, Thompson was carrying multiple IDs and a key to a locker that held nearly $1 million in cash. But, who was he? Eventually, investigators discovered he was John Donald Cody, a Harvard Law School graduate and former U.S. Army intelligence officer who had been wanted since the 1980s on theft charges and for questioning in an espionage probe.

As Cody’s decades as a fugitive came to an end, he claimed his charity was run at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. After reporting on the story for CNBC’s American Greed in 2014, Daniel M. Freed dug into Cody’s backstory—uncovering new information about his intelligence background and the evolution of his con. 

Watch a book trailer at callmecommander.net.

In My TBR Stack:

The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class
by Thom Hartmann
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Trade Paperback



From the publisher's website:

Billionaire oligarchs want to own our republic, and they're nearly there thanks to legislation and Supreme Court decisions that they have essentially bought. They put Trump and his political allies into office and support a vast network of think tanks, publications, and social media that every day push our nation closer and closer to police-state tyranny. 

The United States was born in a struggle against the oligarchs of the British aristocracy, and ever since then the history of America has been one of dynamic tension between democracy and oligarchy. And much like the shock of the 1929 crash woke America up to glaring inequality and the ongoing theft of democracy by that generation's oligarchs, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has laid bare how extensively oligarchs have looted our nation's economic system, gutted governmental institutions, and stolen the wealth of the former middle class.

Thom Hartmann traces the history of this struggle against oligarchy from America's founding to the United States' war with the feudal Confederacy to President Franklin Roosevelt's struggle against “economic royalists,” who wanted to block the New Deal. In each of those cases, the oligarchs lost the battle. But with increasing right-wing control of the media, unlimited campaign contributions, and a conservative takeover of the judicial system, we're at a crisis point. 

Now is the time for action, before we flip into tyranny. We've beaten the oligarchs before, and we can do it again. Hartmann lays out practical measures we can take to break up media monopolies, limit the influence of money in politics, reclaim the wealth stolen over decades by the oligarchy, and build a movement that will return control of America to We the People. 

On My Radar:

Leave Out the Tragic Parts: A Grandfather's Search for a Boy Lost to Addiction
by Dave Kindred
Public Affairs Books
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

Jared Kindred left his home and family at the age of eighteen, choosing to wander across America on freight train cars and live on the street. Addicted to alcohol most of his short life, and withholding the truth from many who loved him, he never found a way to survive.

Through this ordeal, Dave Kindred’s love for his grandson has never wavered.

Leave Out the Tragic Parts is not merely a reflection on love and addiction and loss. It is a hard-won work of reportage, meticulously reconstructing the life Jared chose for himself–a life that rejected the comforts of civilization in favor of a chance to roam free.

Kindred asks painful but important questions about the lies we tell to get along, and what binds families together or allows them to fracture. Jared’s story ended in tragedy, but the act of telling it is an act of healing and redemption. This is an important book on how to love your family, from a great writer who has lived its lessons.