On My Radar:

The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing
by Adam Frankel
Harper
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Adam Frankel’s maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in Connecticut. Though they tried to leave the horrors of their past behind, the pain they suffered crossed generational lines—a fact most apparent in the mental health of Adam’s mother. When Adam sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one that unraveled Adam’s entire understanding of who he is. 

In the midst of piecing together a story of inherited familial trauma, Adam discovered he was only half of who he thought he was, knowledge that raised essential questions of identity. Who was he, if not his father’s son? If not part of a rich heritage of writers and public servants? Does it matter? What defines a family’s bonds? What will he pass on to his own children? To rewrite his story in truth and to build a life for his own young family, Adam had to navigate his pain to find answers and a way forward.

Throughout this journey into the past, his family’s psyche, and his own understanding of identity, Adam comes to realize that while the nature of our families’ traumas may vary, each of us is faced with the same choice. We can turn away from what we’ve inherited—or, we can confront it, in the hopes of moving on and stopping that trauma from inflicting pain on future generations. The stories Adam shares with us in The Survivors are about the ways the past can haunt our future, the resilience that can be found on the other side of trauma, and the good that can come from things that are unspeakably bad.

On My Radar:

Tell Me a Story: My Life with Pat Conroy
by Cassandra King Conroy
William Morrow
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Cassandra King was leading a quiet life as a professor, divorced “Sunday wife” of a preacher, and debut novelist when she met Pat Conroy. 

Their friendship bloomed into a tentative, long-distance relationship. Pat and Cassandra ultimately married, ending Pat's long commutes from coastal South Carolina to her native Alabama. It was a union that would last eighteen years, until the beloved literary icon’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2016.

In this poignant, intimate memoir, the woman he called King Ray looks back at her love affair with a natural-born storyteller whose lust for life was fueled by a passion for literature, food, and the Carolina Lowcountry that was his home. As she reflects on their relationship and the eighteen years they spent together, cut short by Pat’s passing at seventy, Cassandra reveals how the marshlands of the South Carolina Lowcountry ultimately cast their spell on her, too, and how she came to understand the convivial, generous, funny, and wounded flesh-and-blood man beneath the legend—her husband, the original Prince of Tides.

On My Radar:

Time is Time: My Life, Note by Note
by Booker T. Jones
Little Brown
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

From Booker T. Jones’s earliest years in segregated Memphis, music was the driving force in his life. While he worked paper routes and played gigs in local nightclubs to pay for lessons and support his family, Jones, on the side, was also recording sessions in what became the famous Stax Studios-all while still in high school. Not long after, he would form the genre-defining group Booker T. and the MGs, whose recordings went on to sell millions of copies, win a place in Rolling Stone’s list of top 500 songs of all time, and help forge collaborations with some of the era’s most influential artists, including Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam & Dave. 

Nearly five decades later, Jones’s influence continues to help define the music industry, but only now is he ready to tell his remarkable life story. Time is Tight is the deeply moving account of how Jones balanced the brutality of the segregationist South with the loving support of his family and community, all while transforming a burgeoning studio into a musical mecca. 

Culminating with a definitive account into the inner workings of the Stax label, as well as a fascinating portrait of working with many of the era’s most legendary performers-Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Tom Jones, among them-this extraordinary memoir promises to become a landmark moment in the history of Southern Soul.

On My Radar:

Blood: A Memoir
by Allison Moorer
Da Capo Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Mobile, Alabama, 1986. A fourteen-year-old girl is awakened by the unmistakable sound of gunfire. On the front lawn, her father has shot and killed her mother before turning the gun on himself. Allison Moorer would grow up to be an award-winning musician, with her songs likened to “a Southern accent: eight miles an hour, deliberate, and very dangerous to underestimate” (Rolling Stone). But that moment, which forever altered her own life and that of her older sister, Shelby, has never been far from her thoughts. Now, in her journey to understand the unthinkable, to parse the unknowable, Allison uses her lyrical storytelling powers to lay bare the memories and impressions that make a family, and that tear a family apart.

Blood delves into the meaning of inheritance and destiny, shame and trauma — and how it is possible to carve out a safe place in the world despite it all. With a foreword by Allison’s sister, Grammy winner Shelby Lynne, Blood reads like an intimate journal: vivid, haunting, and ultimately life-affirming.

On My Radar:

The Beautiful Ones
by Prince
Spiegel and Grau
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of “Uptown” to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of “Paisley Park.” But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era.

The Beautiful Ones is the story of how Prince became Prince—a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is told in four parts. The first is the memoir Prince was writing before his tragic death, pages that bring us into his childhood world through his own lyrical prose. The second part takes us through Prince’s early years as a musician, before his first album was released, via an evocative scrapbook of writing and photos. The third section shows us Prince’s evolution through candid images that go up to the cusp of his greatest achievement, which we see in the book’s fourth section: his original handwritten treatment for Purple Rain—the final stage in Prince’s self-creation, where he retells the autobiography of the first three parts as a heroic journey.

The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s riveting and moving introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final months—a time when Prince was thinking deeply about how to reveal more of himself and his ideas to the world, while retaining the mystery and mystique he’d so carefully cultivated—and annotations that provide context to the book’s images.

This work is not just a tribute to an icon, but an original and energizing literary work in its own right, full of Prince’s ideas and vision, his voice and image—his undying gift to the world.

In My TBR Stack:

HomoAmerican: The Secret Society
by Michael Dane

HomoAmerican
Hardcover

From the book publicity:

HomoAmerican - The Secret Society: In this current climate of post truth and subjective realities, of grappling for social recognition and change, it is important that we recognize our past and the challenges that ignited the gay rights movement. With the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion just behind us, HomoAmerican - The Secret Society remembers that time through the eyes of a witness who grew up in a world where we were invisible ...not merely the tale of a gay man growing up in America, but a firsthand, disturbing and yet often hilarious portrait of those turbulent and confusing times. In ghettos and in stereotypes there is an underlying thread of a war, not with society at large, but with ourselves ...the cost of acceptance is always denial. We see the past being whitewashed and erased to conform to popular tastes. As a result of conspicuous rebellion, that of simply being and not living in disguise, HomoAmerican presents another society -- a Secret Society - of people who have grown up and survived, despite a world where lies of omission shape our destiny and keep us apart. For those who, despite the dangers, lived defiantly and openly through those dark times, free of convention we wander along dangerous paths in search our own; we confront the confines of society and pursue the promise and myths of sexual liberation at our own peril. As an openly gay man in Iran, as witness to the lavish extravagances and social horror of apartheid South Africa, arrested for murder in Paris and for prostitution in New York, reinvented and reborn in silence he recounts a very personal journey of that man, being pieced together, bit-by-bit, out of shadows.

On My Radar:

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America
by Gene Weingarten
Blue Rider Press
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day—chosen completely at random—turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.
 
That Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, prejudice, selflessness, coincidence, and startling moments of human connection, along with evocative foreshadowing of momentous events yet to come. Lives were lost. Lives were saved. Lives were altered in overwhelming ways. Many of these events never made it into the news; they were private dramas in the lives of private people. They were utterly compelling.  
 
One Day asks and answers the question of whether there is even such a thing as “ordinary” when we are talking about how we all lurch and stumble our way through the daily, daunting challenge of being human.

In My TBR Stack:

Conceiving with Love: A Whole-Body Approach to Creating Intimacy, Reigniting Passion, and Increasing Fertility
by Denise Wiesner, LAc, Faborm with Linda Sparrowe
Shambhala Publications
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Denise Wiesner’s integrative East-meets-West approach, developed over twenty years of practice, has helped thousands of couples relax, reconnect, and conceive. The stress of trying to get pregnant can wreak havoc with a couple’s intimate relationship—right at a time when that connection is most important—and the frustration and shame couples may feel can have a harmful effect and reduce their chances of conceiving. Wiesner gives couples the tools they need to repair their sexual relationship, rebuild their self-confidence, and reclaim their intimacy and desire. She includes advice from leading experts in Western reproductive medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine; offers sensual practices from yoga, qigong, and Tantra; and answers questions couples have about sex, intimacy, and both naturally occurring and medically assisted fertility.

In My TBR Stack:

Becoming Starlight: Surviving Grief and Mending the Wounds of Loss

by Sharon Prentice, PhD

Waterside Press

Trade Paperback

From the author's website:

Becoming Starlight is a memoir about the process of grief and its relationship to the mysteries concerning the afterlife. This book will bring comfort to those who are feeling unrelenting sorrow over the loss of loved ones. This memoir is a story of surviving grief and mending the wounds of loss.

Soon after completing her graduate studies in psychology, Dr. Prentice found the world of secular psychology lacking—her patients needed "something more". So, she set out to investigate and explore alternative methods in the field of mental health that would incorporate that "something special" she believed existed in each and every individual soul. Her journey would take her through the great religions of the world as well as to a discovery of ancient, time proven alternatives to modern therapeutic models of counseling.

On My Radar:

Rachael Ray 50: Memories and Meals from a Sweet and Savory Life
by Rachael Ray
Ballantine Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

No matter the recipe, each of us changes a dish by our own preparation of it. It’s the same with stories—once you put them out there, readers get to interpret them and be affected by them as they will. Ultimately, it’s my hope that this book leaves the reader with that quiet smile we all get after we eat a favorite comfort food. Basically, I’m going for the afterglow of a big bowl of spaghetti.”—from the Introduction

As her fiftieth birthday approached, the woman who taught America how to get dinner on the table, fast, started thinking not just about what to cook that night, but how her passion for food and feeding people had developed over her first fifty years. 

Filled with twenty-five thoughtful essays and 125 delicious recipes, Rachael Ray 50 reads like a memoir and a cookbook at once. Captured here are the moments and dishes Rachael finds most special, the ones she makes in her own home and that you won’t find on her television shows or in her magazine. Here are the memories that made her laugh out loud, or made her teary. The result is a collection that offers the perfect blend of kitchen and life wisdom, including thoughts on how we can all better serve the world and one another. 

Also featured within these pages are gorgeous food photography, personal photos, and Rachael’s own hand-drawn illustrations, offering a revealing and intimate glimpse into her world and her every day inspiration.

In My TBR Stack:

My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation
by Donald M. Rattner
Skyhorse Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

A great deal of psychological and productivity research has gone into discovering how the design of the physical environment can improve creative performance, yet nearly all of it has focused on the workplace, commercial spaces, and schools. What has been largely overlooked is the one place we spend more time in than anywhere else and where more people than ever are now working: the home. My Creative Space shows how readers can boost their creative output by applying science-backed techniques to the design and decoration of their home regardless of size, type, style, or location.

With over 200 stunning color photographs of creative spaces, including many designed by top architects and interior decorators, this lavishly produced book will inspire readers while offering practical and specific ways to transform your own home into a creative haven. Readers will: 

• Learn practical techniques to shape a home for peak idea generation
• Acquire insights into how everyday activities at home can boost creative performance at work, play, and school
• Discover hands-on household products designed to foster creative skills
• Gain a new understanding of the meaning and psychology of creativity

Read about the best lighting to foster a creative environment, how to use walls to capture ideas, why round shapes spur greater creativity than straight lines, the benefits of incorporating nature into your surroundings, and more. 

Whether you're an artist, design professional, writer, entrepreneur, work in a creative industry, or pursue a personal passion for pleasure, this book is an invaluable guide for turning living space into creative space.

On My Radar:

Me
by Elton John
Henry Holt
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt, and boots with wings. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same again.

His life has been full of drama, from the early rejection of his work with song-writing partner Bernie Taupin to spinning out of control as a chart-topping superstar; from half-heartedly trying to drown himself in his LA swimming pool to disco-dancing with Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth; from friendships with John Lennon, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael to setting up his AIDS Foundation to conquering Broadway with Aida, The Lion King, and Billy Elliot the Musical. All the while Elton was hiding a drug addiction that would grip him for over a decade.

In Me, Elton also writes powerfully about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father. In a voice that is warm, humble, and open, this is Elton on his music and his relationships, his passions and his mistakes. This is a story that will stay with you by a living legend.

On My Radar:

Janis: Her Life and Music
by Holly George-Warren
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Janis Joplin’s first transgressive act was to be a white girl who gained an early sense of the power of the blues, music you could only find on obscure records and in roadhouses along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. But even before that, she stood out in her conservative oil town. She was a tomboy who was also intellectually curious and artistic. By the time she reached high school, she had drawn the scorn of her peers for her embrace of the Beats and her racially progressive views. Her parents doted on her in many ways, but were ultimately put off by her repeated acts of defiance.

Janis Joplin has passed into legend as a brash, impassioned soul doomed by the pain that produced one of the most extraordinary voices in rock history. But in these pages, Holly George-Warren provides a revelatory and deeply satisfying portrait of a woman who wasn’t all about suffering. Janis was a perfectionist: a passionate, erudite musician who was born with talent but also worked exceptionally hard to develop it. She was a woman who pushed the boundaries of gender and sexuality long before it was socially acceptable. She was a sensitive seeker who wanted to marry and settle down—but couldn’t, or wouldn’t. She was a Texan who yearned to flee Texas but could never quite get away—even after becoming a countercultural icon in San Francisco.

Written by one of the most highly regarded chroniclers of American music history, and based on unprecedented access to Janis Joplin’s family, friends, band mates, archives, and long-lost interviews, Janis is a complex, rewarding portrait of a remarkable artist finally getting her due.