On My Radar:

Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion
Cora Daniels and John L. Jackson, Jr.
Atria Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

When was the last time you said everything on your mind without holding back? In this no-holds-barred discussion of America’s top hot-button issues, a journalist and a cultural anthropologist express opinions that are widely held in private—but rarely heard in public.

Everyone edits what they say. It’s a part of growing up. But what if we applied tell-it-like-it-is honesty to grown-up issues? In Impolite Conversations, two respected thinkers and writers openly discuss five “third-rail” topics—from multi-racial identities to celebrity worship to hyper-masculinity among black boys—and open the stage for honest discussions about important and timely concerns.

Organized around five subjects—Race, Politics, Sex, Money, Religion—the dialogue between Cora Daniels and John L. Jackson Jr. may surprise, provoke, affirm, or challenge you. In alternating essays, the writers use reporting, interviews, facts, and figures to back up their arguments, always staying firmly rooted in the real world. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don’t, but they always reach their conclusions with respect for the different backgrounds they come from and the reasons they disagree.

Whether you oppose or sympathize with these two impassioned voices, you’ll end up knowing more than you did before and appreciating the candid, savvy, and often humorous ways in which they each take a stand. 

In My TBR Stack:

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
Simon Winchester
Harper Perennial
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Simon Winchester, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Atlantic and The Professor and the Madman, delivers his first book about America: a fascinating popular history that illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings.

How did America become “one nation, indivisible”? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? To answer these questions, Winchester follows in the footsteps of America’s most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators, such as Lewis and Clark and the leaders of the Great Surveys; the builders of the first transcontinental telegraph and the powerful civil engineer behind the Interstate Highway System. He treks vast swaths of territory, from Pittsburgh to Portland, Rochester to San Francisco, Seattle to Anchorage, introducing the fascinating people who played a pivotal role in creating today’s United States.

Throughout, he ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree. Featuring 32 illustrations throughout the text, The Men Who United the States is a fresh look at the way in which the most powerful nation on earth came together.

In My TBR Stack:

Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America
Edited by Franklin Foer
Harper Perennial
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of The New Republic, an extraordinary anthology of essays culled from the archives of the acclaimed and influential magazine.

Founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann in 1914 to give voice to the growing progressive movement, The New Republic has charted and shaped the state of American liberalism, publishing many of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers.

Insurrections of the Mind is an intellectual biography of this great American political tradition. In seventy essays, organized chronologically by decade, a stunning collection of writers explore the pivotal issues of modern America. Weighing in on the New Deal; America’s role in war; the rise and fall of communism; religion, race, and civil rights; the economy, terrorism, technology; and the women’s movement and gay rights, the essays in this outstanding volume speak to The New Republic’s breathtaking ambition and reach. Introducing each article, editor Franklin Foer provides colorful biographical sketches and amusing anecdotes from the magazine’s history. Bold and brilliant, Insurrections of the Mind is a celebration of a cultural, political, and intellectual institution that has stood the test of time.

Contributors include: Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Pauline Kael, Michael Lewis, Zadie Smith, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, James Wolcott, D. H. Lawrence, John Maynard Keynes, Langston Hughes, John Updike, and Margaret Talbot.

In My TBR Stack:

Derek Jeter: Born to Be a Yankee
by the writers and photographers of the New York Post
edited by R.D. Rosen
Harper Collins
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

In celebration of one of the most widely beloved Yankees on the eve of his retirement, a handsomely designed, lavishly illustrated full-color commemorative keepsake volume that showcases his outstanding nineteen-year career.

In the fourth grade, Derek Jeter told his teacher that he was going to play shortstop for the New York Yankees—a dream would come true less than a decade later. Drafted out of Kalamazoo Central High School in 1992 when he was just eighteen, Jeter became the Yankees’ starting shortstop and the American League’s Rookie of the Year in just four years. One of the few professional athletes to have played his entire career with a single team, he helped the Yankees win five World Series championships, four of them in his first five years.

In his nearly two decades in pinstripes, Jeter became the team’s all-time career leader in hits, games played, stolen bases, and at bats and the all-time leader in hits by a shortstop in major league baseball. A recipient of dozens of awards and accolades, admired by fans, teammates, and opponents alike, Derek Jeter is and will always be the quintessential New York Yankee.

Drawn from the breadth of the archives and photo library of the New York Post, Derek Jeter: Born to be a Yankee charts the future Hall of Famer’s rise and commemorates every significant highlight and milestone in his career. Packed with dozens of color photographs, it pays homage to the man who has personified the modern New York Yankees, and will be a collector’s item for both Yankee fans and baseball aficionados of all ages and generations.

On My Radar:

You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman
Mike Thomas
St. Thomas Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Beloved TV comedic actor Phil Hartman is best known for his eight brilliant seasons on Saturday Night Live, where his versatility and comedic timing resulted in some of the funniest and most famous sketches in the television show’s history. Besides his hilarious impersonations of Phil Donahue, Frank Sinatra and Bill Clinton, Hartman’s other indelible characters included Cirroc the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, Eugene the Anal Retentive Chef and, of course, Frankenstein. He also starred as pompous radio broadcaster Bill McNeal in the NBC sitcom NewsRadio and voiced numerous classic roles — most memorably washed-up actor and commercial pitchman Troy McClure — on Fox’s long-running animated hit The Simpsons.

But Hartman’s seemingly charmed life was cut tragically short when he was fatally shot by his troubled third wife, Brynn, who turned a gun on herself several hours later. The shocking and headline-generating turn of events stunned those closest to the couple as well as countless fans who knew Phil only from afar.

Now, for the first time ever, the years and moments leading up to his untimely end are described in illuminating detail through information gleaned from exclusive interviews with scores of famous cast mates, close friends and family members as well as private letters, audio/video recordings, extensive police records, and more.

Both joyous tribute and serious biography, Mike Thomas' You Might Remember Me is a celebration of Phil Hartman’s multi-faceted career and an exhaustively reported, warts-and-all examination of his often intriguing and sometimes complicated life—a powerful, humor-filled and disquieting portrait of a man who was loved by many, admired by millions and taken from them far too early.

New Release:

A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention
Matt Richtel
William Morrow
Hardcover

  I read and finished this deeply compelling book in the space of a few days.  I love when authors give us the "story within a story" in their nonfiction.  Pulitzer Prize winner Matt Richtel does this in spades in A Deadly Wandering.

 Two men died at the hands of a texting teenage driver.  Richtel uses his narrative gift to show how technology can hinder the human mind.  At the time of the accident, 2006, there were essentially no laws on the books limiting texting while driving.  This book actually shows the intersection between emerging technology and neuroscience.

From the publisher's website:

From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Matt Richtel, a brilliant, narrative-driven exploration of technology’s vast influence on the human mind and society, dramatically-told through the lens of a tragic “texting-while-driving” car crash that claimed the lives of two rocket scientists in 2006.

In this ambitious, compelling, and beautifully written book, Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, examines the impact of technology on our lives through the story of Utah college student Reggie Shaw, who killed two scientists while texting and driving. Richtel follows Reggie through the tragedy, the police investigation, his prosecution, and ultimately, his redemption.

In the wake of his experience, Reggie has become a leading advocate against “distracted driving.” Richtel interweaves Reggie’s story with cutting-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains, proposing solid, practical, and actionable solutions to help manage this crisis individually and as a society.

A propulsive read filled with fascinating, accessible detail, riveting narrative tension, and emotional depth, A Deadly Wandering explores one of the biggest questions of our time—what is all of our technology doing to us?—and provides unsettling and important answers and information we all need.

In My TBR Stack:

Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World - 16 Graphic Biographies
Monte Beauchamp
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In a first-of-its-kind collection, award-winning illustrators celebrate the lives of the visionary artists who created the world of comic art and altered pop culture forever.

Sixteen Graphic Novel Biographies of:

• Walt Disney • Dr. Seuss • Charles Schulz • The Creators of Superman • R. Crumb • Jack Kirby • Winsor McCay • Hergé • Osamu Tezuka • MAD creator, Harvey Kurtzman • Al Hirschfeld • Edward Gorey • Chas Addams • Rodolphe Töpffer • Lynd Ward • Hugh Hefner

The story of cartoons—the multibillion-dollar industry that has affected all corners of our culture, from high to low—is ultimately the story of the visionary icons who pioneered the form. 

But no one has told the story of comic art in its own medium—until now. 

In Masterful Marks, top illustrators—including Drew Friedman, Nora Krug, Denis Kitchen, and Peter Kuper—reveal how sixteen visionary cartoonists overcame massive financial, political, and personal challenges to create a new form of art that now defines our world.

In My TBR Stack:

A World Elsewhere: An American Woman in Wartime Germany
Sigrid MacRae
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Sigrid MacRae never knew her father, until a trove of letters revealed not only him, but also the singular story of her parents’ intercontinental love affair. While visiting Paris

in 1927, her American mother, Aimée, raised in a wealthy Connecticut family, falls in love with a charming, sophisticated Baltic German baron, a penniless exile of the Russian revolution. They marry. But the harsh reality of post–World War I Germany is inescapable: a bleak economy and the rise of Hitler quash Heinrich’s diplomatic

ambitions, and their struggling family farm north of Berlin drains Aimée’s modest fortune. In 1941, Heinrich volunteers for the Russian front and is killed by a sniper. Widowed, living in a country soon at war with her own, Aimée must fend for herself. With home and family in jeopardy, she and her six young children flee the advancing Russian army in an epic journey, back to the country she thought she’d left behind.

A World Elsewhere is a stirring narrative of two hostages to history and a mother’s courageous fight to save her family.

On My Radar:

Twitter: The Comic (The Book) - Comics Based on the Greatest Tweets of Our Generation
Mike Rosenthal
Chronicle Books
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

From a simple, brilliant premise—to create comics from the weirdest and funniest tweets around—artist Mike Rosenthal (@VectorBelly) has crafted a hilariously surreal world that has attracted over a million followers to his blog Twitter: The Comic. Each carefully curated tweet delivers concentrated humor in the language of the Internet, reproduced in the comics with typos and all. As envisioned by Rosenthal, each comes to life through a bizarrely recognizable cast of bassoon-playing cops, sarcastic teens, bear MDs, clueless dads, potential insect overlords, and more. Featuring more than 120 of these comics, including dozens unique to this book, Twitter: The Comic (The Book) is a dementedly funny vision of our strange online age.

On My Radar:

Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations
Jeffrey D. Clements
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

• STILL ESSENTIAL: The Citizens United decision continues to distort the electoral process and expand the power of corporations
• UPDATED THROUGHOUT: This second edition details both the ruling’s expanding damage to democracy and, in an all-new chapter, how citizens can lead the battle against it

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that corporations are people eliminated campaign finance restrictions and dramatically increased corporate power –but attorney Jeff Clements shows how you can fight back.

Clements explains the strange history of how the Supreme Court came to embrace a concept that flies in the face of not only all common sense but most of American legal history as well. He shows how unfettered corporate rights will impact public health, energy policy, the environment, and the justice system.

In this new edition Clements details Citizens United’s ongoing destructive effects—for example, Chevron was able to spend $1.2 million to influence a single local election in a city of 100,000 people.  But he also describes the growing movement to reverse the ruling—since the first edition 16 states, 160 members of Congress, and 500 cities and towns have called for a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. And in a new chapter, Do Something!, Clements shows how—state by state and community by community—Americans are using new strategies and tools to renew democracy and curb unbalanced corporate power.

In My TBR Stack:

Kentucky Traveler: My Life in Music
Ricky Skaggs with Eddie Dean
It Books (now Dey Street Books)
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

In Kentucky Traveler, Ricky Skaggs, the music legend who revived modern bluegrass music, gives a warm, honest, one-of-a-kind memoir of forty years in music—along with the Ten Commandments of Bluegrass, as handed down by Ricky’s mentor Bill Monroe; the Essential Guide to Bedrock Country Songs, a lovingly compiled walk through the songs that have moved Skaggs the most throughout his life; Songs the Lord Taught Us, a primer on Skaggs’s most essential gospel songs; and a bevy of personal snapshots of his musical heroes.

For readers of Johnny Cash’s autobiography, lovers of O Brother Where Art Thou, and fans of country music and bluegrass, Kentucky Traveler is a priceless look at America’s most cherished and vibrant musical tradition through the eyes of someone who has lived it.

Now in Paperback:

Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America
Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman
Touchstone
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists take an unbridled look into one of the most sensitive post-9/11 national security investigations—a breathtaking race to stop a second devastating terrorist attack on American soil.

In Enemies Within, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman “reveal how New York really works” (James Risen, author of State of War) and lay bare the complex and often contradictory state of counterterrorism and intelligence in America through the pursuit of Najibullah Zazi, a terrorist bomber who trained under one of bin Laden’s most trusted deputies. Zazi and his co-conspirators represented America’s greatest fear: a terrorist cell operating inside America.

This real-life spy story—uncovered in previously unpublished secret NYPD documents and interviews with intelligence sources—shows that while many of our counterterrorism programs are more invasive than ever, they are often counterproductive at best.

After 9/11, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly initiated an audacious plan for the Big Apple: dispatch a vast network of plainclothes officers and paid informants—called “rakers” and “mosque crawlers”—into Muslim neighborhoods to infiltrate religious communities and eavesdrop on college campuses. Police amassed data on innocent people, often for their religious and political beliefs. But when it mattered most, these strategies failed to identify the most imminent threats.

In Enemies Within, Appuzo and Goldman tackle the tough questions about the measures that we take to protect ourselves from real and perceived threats. They take you inside America’s sprawling counterterrorism machine while it operates at full throttle. They reveal what works, what doesn’t, and what Americans have unknowingly given up. “Did the Snowden leaks trouble you? You ain’t seen nothing yet” (Dan Bigman, Forbes editor).

In My TBR Stack:

After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace
A.J. Langguth
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A brilliant evocation of the post-Civil War era by the acclaimed author of Patriots and Union 1812. After Lincoln tells the story of the Reconstruction, which set back black Americans and isolated the South for a century.

With Lincoln’s assassination, his “team of rivals,” in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s phrase, was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson’s policies placated the rebels at the expense of the black freed men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson was saved from removal by one vote in the Senate trial, presided over by Salmon Chase. Even William Seward, Lincoln’s closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver.

By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. The night of his victory, Grant lamented to his wife, “I’m afraid I’m elected.” His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by post-war greed and corruption during his two terms.

Reconstruction died unofficially in 1887 when Republican Rutherford Hayes joined with the Democrats in a deal that removed the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill with protections first proposed in 1872 by the Radical Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.