In September of 1990, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett, a poetry lover and member of a church youth group, was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend, when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet from the boy’s home. Who had the capacity for such unchecked violence? What monsters still lurk in the dark? After more than thirty years, questions like these continue to fester among the community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, still deeply scarred by wounds that remain hidden, unspoken, and unhealed.
In this moving story, Tom Brokaw chronicles the values and lessons he absorbed from his parents and other people who worked hard to build lives on the prairie during the first half of the twentieth century. Tom Brokaw is known as one of the most successful people in broadcast journalism. Throughout his legendary career, Brokaw has always asked what we can learn from world events and from our history. Within Never Give Up is one answer, a portrait of the resilience and respect for others at the heart of one American family’s story.
For readers of Rinker Buck, Bill Bryson, and Larry McMurtry, The Last Ride of the Pony Express boldly illuminates America’s mysterious and complex connection to the iconic Pony Express. With two horses, cowboy and journalist Will Grant takes us on an epic and authentic horseback journey into the modern West on an adventure of a lifetime. The Last Ride of the Pony Express is a tale of adventure by a horseman who defies most modern conveniences, and is an unforgettable narrative that will forever change how you see the West, the Pony Express, and America as a whole.
In this immersive, spell-binding memoir, an acclaimed screenwriter tells the story of her childhood growing up with the infamous Lyman Family cult–and the complicated and unexpected pain of leaving the only home she’d ever known. On January 5, 1975, the world was supposed to end. Under strict instructions from her Family Leader, seven-year-old Guinevere Turner put on her best dress, grabbed her favorite toy, and waited for her salvation–a spaceship that would take her and her peers to live on Venus. But the spaceship never came.
Samantha Irby invites us to share in the gory particulars of her real life, all that festers behind the glitter and glam. The success of Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She fields calls with job offers from Hollywood and walks the red carpet with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City. Finally, she has made it. But, behind all that new-found glam, Irby is just trying to keep her life together as she always had. Making light of herself as she takes us on an outrageously funny tour of all the details that make up a true portrait of her life, Irby is once again the relatable, uproarious tonic we all need.
Overturn everything you knew about history’s greatest minds in this raucous and hilarious book, where it turns out there’s a finer line between “genius” and “idiot” than we’ve previously known. “As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius – but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand.
The tragic story of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular hydrogen-fueled fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty’s Airship, historian S.C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong. Gwynne’s chronicle features a cast of remarkable—and often tragically flawed—characters. These historical figures—and the ship they built, flew, and crashed—come together in a grand tale that details the rocky road to commercial aviation written by one of the best popular historians writing today.
A collection of refreshingly honest and hilarious essays from Southern Living columnist Elizabeth Passarella about navigating change–whether emotional or logistical–and staying sane during life’s unexpected twists and turns. After Elizabeth Passarella and her husband finally decided that it was time to sell their two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, she found herself wondering, is there a proper technique for skinning a couch? It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway will make readers laugh, cry, and feel a little less alone as they navigate their own lives that are filled with uncertainty, change, and things beyond their control.
Steve Martin is more candid than he’s ever been about his creative life in this engrossing audio-biography, centered around a series of conversations recorded over many afternoons at home with his friend and neighbor, writer Adam Gopnik. Steve Martin met his good friend Adam Gopnik three decades ago, and in that time, Gopnik has always marveled at Martin’s ability to flourish in a wide variety of art forms: magic, comedy, art collecting, writing, and music. Adam Gopnik creates a new type of profile: a year’s worth of conversations with Martin where Gopnik pulls back the curtain on his friend’s illustrious career.