Best of
Memoir

2022

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy


Jamie Raskin - 2022
    On December 31, 2020, Tommy Raskin, the only son of Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, tragically took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Seven days later on January 6, Congressman Raskin returned to Congress to help certify the 2020 Presidential election results, when violent insurrectionists led by right wing extremist groups stormed the U.S. Capitol hoping to hand four more years of power to President Donald Trump. As our reeling nation mourned the deaths of numerous people and lamented the injuries of more than 140 police officers hurt in the attack, Congressman Raskin, a Constitutional law professor, was called upon to put aside his overwhelming grief--both personal and professional--and lead the impeachment effort against President Trump for inciting the violence. Together this nine-member team of House impeachment managers riveted a nation still in anguish, putting on an unprecedented Senate trial that produced the most bipartisan Presidential impeachment vote in American history.Now for the first time, Congressman Raskin discusses this unimaginable convergence of personal and public trauma, detailing how the painful loss of his son and the power of Tommy's convictions fueled the Congressman's work in the aftermath of modern democracy's darkest day. Going inside Congress on January 6, he recounts the horror of that day, a day that he and other Democrats had spent months preparing for under the correct assumption that they would encounter an attempted electoral coup--not against a President but for one. And yet, on January 6, he faced the one thing he had failed to anticipate: mass political violence designed to block Biden's election. With an inside account of leading the team prosecuting President Trump in the Senate, Congressman Raskin shares never before told stories of just how close we came to losing our democracy that fateful day and lays out the methodical prosecution that convinced Democrats and Republicans alike of Trump's responsibility for inciting insurrectionary violence against our government.Through it all, he reckons with the loss of his brilliant, remarkable son, a Harvard Law student whose values and memory continually inspired the Congressman to confront the dark impulses unleashed by Donald Trump. At turns, a moving story of a father coping with his pain and a revealing examination of holding President Trump accountable for the violence he fomented, this book is a vital reminder of the ongoing struggle for the soul of American democracy and the perseverance that our Constitution demands from us all.

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma


Stephanie Foo - 2022
    . . . I want to have words for what my bones know."By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD--a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.Both of Foo's parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don't move on from trauma--but you can learn to move with it.Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body--and examines one woman's ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss


Amy BloomAmy Bloom - 2022
    Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer's disease.Forced to confront the truth of the diagnosis and its impact on the future he had envisioned, Brian was determined to die on his feet, not live on his knees. Supporting each other in their last journey together, Brian and Amy made the unimaginably difficult and painful decision to go to Dignitas, an organization based in Switzerland that empowers a person to end their own life with dignity and peace.In this heartbreaking and surprising memoir, Bloom sheds light on a part of life we so often shy away from discussing--its ending. Written in Bloom's captivating, insightful voice and with her trademark wit and candor, In Love is an unforgettable portrait of a beautiful marriage, and a boundary-defying love.

How Do I Un-Remember This?: Unfortunately True Stories


Danny Pellegrino - 2022
    no one openly gay. Luckily, Danny Pellegrino grew up in the 90s, coming of age when the internet opened up a whole new world for a curious kid itching for life outside of Midwest suburbia. Danny escaped the pains of growing up by submerging himself in a sea of pop culture—bingeing The Nanny until he had the confidence of Fran Fine, belting out Brandy songs until his heartaches were healed, or watching every semi-clothed Ryan Phillippe scene known to man.Now, as a successful podcaster interviewing the same iconic personalities that he idolized as a kid, Danny's life has only become more entertaining and delightfully chaotic.Heartfelt and hilarious, How Do I Un-Remember This? is a collection of real-life stories exploring Danny's journey from feeling like the only gay kid in Ohio to becoming a big-time podcaster in Los Angeles, and all the amusing moments life threw at him in between. With remarkable honesty and his trademark humor, Danny discusses his struggles alongside his love for all things pop culture in a way that is equally emotional and uplifting. And of course, it's all sprinkled with a little 90s nostalgia and a whole lot of comedy.

Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today


Valerie Bertinelli - 2022
    She shares personal stories that many women will relate to from her past decade: hitting her fifties, taking care of her dying mother, the evolving relationship with her husband, a career change, her relationship with food, and the battle to believe in herself as she is. Despite her success receiving Emmys for her Food Network show and critical praise for her books and cookbook, Bertinelli still judged herself harshly if she gained a pound or showed too many wrinkles. But after her mother died, she found an old recipe box with notes of the strong women that came before her, reminding her that she has to find out who she is and take care of herself. Saying, “enough already!” Bertinelli set out on a journey to love herself and see that perfection is not the goal; it’s the joy we can find every day in our lives, our loved ones, and the food we share. Recipes and advice will be sprinkled throughout the book.

Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory


Sarah Polley - 2022
    The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven't told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.Sarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a "reciprocal pressure dance."Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger. In this extraordinary book, Polley explores what it is to live in one's body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing.

The Fallen Stones: Chasing Blue Butterflies, Mayan Secrets, and Happily Ever After in Belize


Diana Marcum - 2022
    Before long Diana and her partner, Jack Moody—new to being a couple—have moved into a long-empty jungle house, cohabitating with bats, scorpions, toucans, iguanas, and the vulnerable but resilient butterflies. She comes to be obsessed with the array of iridescent creatures.Just ahead, although they don’t know it, are a hurricane and a global pandemic.This warm, funny tale of finding a way forward when the world seems to be falling apart is filled with the beauty of the natural world and a heartfelt cry to protect it—beginning with butterflies.

Lost & Found: A Memoir


Kathryn Schulz - 2022
    In Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering--a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.

Funny Farm: My Unexpected Life with 600 Rescue Animals


Laurie Zaleski - 2022
    But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. She was planning to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues--horses and goats, dogs and cats, chickens and pigs--when Annie died, just two weeks before moving day. In her heartbreak, Laurie resolved to make her mother's dream her own. In 2001, she established the Funny Farm Animal Rescue outside Mays Landing, New Jersey. Today, she carries on Annie's mission to save abused and neglected animals.Funny Farm is Laurie's story: of promises kept, dreams fulfilled, and animals lost and found. It's the story of Annie McNulty, who fled a nightmarish marriage with few skills, no money and no resources, dragging three kids behind her, and accumulating hundreds of cast-off animals on the way. And lastly, it's the story of the brave, incredible, and adorable animals that were rescued.

Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American


Wajahat Ali - 2022
    Go back where, exactly? Fremont, California, where he grew up, but is now an unaffordable place to live? Or Pakistan, the country his parents left behind a half-century ago?Growing up living the suburban American dream, young Wajahat devoured comic books (devoid of brown superheroes) and fielded well-intentioned advice from uncles and aunties. (“Become a doctor!”) He had turmeric stains under his fingernails, was accident-prone, suffered from OCD, and wore Husky pants, but he was as American as his neighbors, with roots all over the world. Then, while Ali was studying at University of California, Berkeley, 9/11 happened. Muslims replaced communists as America’s enemy #1, and he became an accidental spokesman and ambassador of all ordinary, unthreatening things Muslim-y.Now a middle-aged dad, Ali has become one of the foremost and funniest public intellectuals in America. In Go Back to Where You Came From, he tackles the dangers of Islamophobia, white supremacy, and chocolate hummus, peppering personal stories with astute insights into national security, immigration, and pop culture. In this refreshingly bold, hopeful, and uproarious memoir, Ali offers indispensable lessons for cultivating a more compassionate, inclusive, and delicious America.

Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom


Carl Bernstein - 2022
    Inquisitive, self-taught―and, yes, truant―Bernstein landed a job as a copyboy at the Evening Star, the afternoon paper in Washington. By nineteen, he was a reporter there.In Chasing History, Bernstein recalls the origins of his storied journalistic career as he chronicles the Kennedy era, the swelling civil rights movement, and a slew of grisly crimes. He spins a buoyant, frenetic account of educating himself in what Bob Woodward describes as “the genius of perpetual engagement.”Funny and exhilarating, poignant and frank, Chasing History is an extraordinary memoir of life on the cusp of adulthood for a determined young man with a dogged commitment to the truth.

A Little Closer to Home: How I Found the Calm After the Storm


Ginger Zee - 2022
    When Ginger Zee opened her life to readers in Natural Disaster, the response was enormous. She put a very relatable if surprising face on depression and has helped lessen the stigma surrounding mental health issues. But Ginger tells us, Natural Disaster was "Ginger Lite" and only scratched the surface.In this moving follow-up, Ginger shares her truest self. She spent most of her life shielding her vulnerabilities from the world all while being a professional people pleaser. Her stormy childhood, her ongoing struggles with crippling depression, her suicide attempts, and many other life experiences will resonate with readers who are likely to see themselves along the way. In spite of its serious subject matter, Ginger's positive, life-affirming outlook comes through loud and clear. Written with great heart and quite a bit of humor, Ginger normalizes issues and challenges millions of people face every day. A Little Closer to Home will broaden the conversation around mental health at a time we need it more than ever.

In the Shadow of the Mountain: A Memoir of Courage


Silvia Vasquez-Lavado - 2022
    Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her page-turning, pulse-raising memoir following her journey to Mount Everest.A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. Something about the brute force required for the ascent― the risk and spirit and sheer size of the mountains and death’s close proximity―woke her up. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.“The Mother of the World,” as it’s known in Nepal, allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn’t go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her. It was never easy. At times hair-raising, nerve-racking, and always challenging, Silvia remembers the acute anxiety of leading a group of novice climbers to Everest’s base, all the while coping with her own nerves of summiting. But, there were also moments of peace, joy, and healing with the strength of her fellow survivors and community propelling her forward.In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of heroism, one which awakens in all of us a lust for adventure, an appetite for risk, and faith in our own resilience.

Mala's Cat: A Memoir of Survival in World War II


Mala Kacenberg - 2022
    But at the age of twelve, as the German invasion begins, her beloved village becomes a ghetto and her family and friends reduced to starvation. She takes matters into her own hands and bravely removes her yellow star, risking sneaking out to the surrounding villages to barter for food. It is on her way back that she sees her loved ones rounded up for deportation, and receives a smuggled letter from her sister warning her to stay away. In order to survive, she walks away from everything she holds dear to live by herself in the forest, hiding not just from the Nazis but hostile villagers.  She is followed by a stray cat who stays with her—and seems to come to her rescue time and time again. "Malach" the cat becomes her family and her only respite from painful loneliness, a guide, and areminder to stay hopeful even when faced with unfathomable darkness.  Filled with remarkable spiritual strength that allows readers to see the war through the innocence of a child's eyes, Mala's Cat is a powerful and unique addition to the Holocaust canon.

Miss Me With That: Hot Takes, Helpful Tidbits and a Few Hard Truths


Rachel Lindsay - 2022
    For the first time, Rachel opens up about what it meant to be the first Black lead on ABC’s hit show and reveals everything about her life off-camera, from her childhood growing up in Dallas, Texas, as the daughter of a U.S. District Judge to her disastrous dating life prior to going on The Bachelor, to her career in law, her evolving female friendships, and her decision to become a reality TV contestant. She also brings her sharp wit and keen intellect to weigh in on issues such as the lack of diversity in reality television and the importance of political engagement, protest, voting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Told in the down-to-earth, no-nonsense voice she’s become known for, Lindsay’s collection will provide an intimate look at the life of one of reality TV’s most beloved and outspoken stars, as well as advice and inspiration that will make her a role model for anyone who has ever tried to make sense of love and life and lost their way trying to do so.

I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir


Harvey Fierstein - 2022
    He's received accolades and awards for acting in and/or writing an incredible string of hit plays, films, and TV shows: Hairspray, Fiddler on the Roof, Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day, Cheers, La Cage Aux Folles, Torch Song Trilogy, Newsies, and Kinky Boots. While he has never shied away from the spotlight, Mr. Fierstein says that even those closest to him have never heard most of the tales--of personal struggles and conflict, of sex and romance, of his fabled career--revealed in these wildly entertaining pages.I Was Better Last Night bares the inner life of this eccentric nonconforming child from his roots in 1952 Brooklyn, to the experimental worlds of Andy Warhol and the Theatre of the Ridiculous, to the gay rights movements of the seventies and the tumultuous AIDS crisis of the eighties, through decades of addiction, despair, and ultimate triumph.Mr. Fierstein's candid recollections provide a rich window into downtown New York City life, gay culture, and the evolution of theater (of which he has been a defining figure), as well as a moving account of his family's journey of acceptance. I Was Better Last Night is filled with wisdom gained, mistakes made, and stories that come together to describe an astonishingly colorful and meaningful life. Lucky for us all, his unique and recognizable voice is as engaging, outrageously funny, and vulnerable on the page.

Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American


Laura Gao - 2022
    "Messy Roots is a laugh-out-loud, heartfelt, and deeply engaging story of their journey to find themself--as an American, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as a queer person, and as a Wuhanese American in the middle of a pandemic."--Malaka Gharib, author of I Was Their American DreamAfter spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Mars--at least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name.In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as the girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter.Insightful, original, and hilarious, toggling seamlessly between past and present, China and America, Gao's debut is a tour de force of graphic storytelling.

The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found


Frank Bruni - 2022
    He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye—forever. And he soon learned from doctors that the same disorder could ravage his left eye, too. He could lose his sight altogether. In The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni hauntingly recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions. The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately uplifting examination of the limits that all of us inevitably encounter, the lenses through which we choose to evaluate them and the tools we have for perseverance. Bruni’s world blurred in one sense, as he experienced his first real inklings that the day isn’t forever and that light inexorably fades, but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. There was vision lost. There was also vision found.

Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor's Fight for Fairness


Laura Coates - 2022
    Laura Coates bleeds for justice on the page.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an AntiracistWhen Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Through Coates’s experiences, we see that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just. On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it—for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire. Through these revelatory and captivating scenes from the courtroom, Laura Coates explores the tension between the idealism of the law and the reality of working within the parameters of our flawed legal system, exposing the chasm between what is right and what is lawful.

This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown


Taylor Harris - 2022
    She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same. With every question the doctors answer about Tophs’s increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. She spends countless hours trying to navigate health and education systems that can be hostile to Black mothers and children; at night she googles, prays, and interrogates her every action. Some days, her sweet, charismatic boy seems just fine—others, he struggles to answer simple questions. What is she missing?When Taylor brings Tophs to a long-awaited appointment with a geneticist, she hopes that this time, she’ll leave with answers. The test reveals nothing about what’s causing Tophs’s drops in blood sugar, his processing delays—but it does reveal something unexpected about Taylor’s own health. What if her son’s challenges have saved her life? And how can she choose the best path forward—for herself and for her beautiful, unsolvable boy? This Boy We Made is a stirring and radiantly written examination of the bond between mother and child, full of hard-won ins

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative


Melissa FebosMelissa Febos - 2022
    How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author’s way of writing, or living, to be dismissed as “navel-gazing”—or else hailed as “so brave, so raw”? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong? Drawing on her own path from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor—via addiction and recovery, sex work and Harvard night school—Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas—and occasional notes of caution—to anyone who has ever hoped to see themselves in a story.

High-Risk Homosexual


Edgar Gomez - 2022
    In particular, effeminate queer men represent a simultaneous rejection and embrace of masculinity . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold onto pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others." A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.” With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir


Aileen Weintraub - 2022
    Aileen Weintraub has been running away from commitment her entire life, hopping from one job and one relationship to the next. When her father suddenly dies, she flees her Jewish Brooklyn community for the wilds of the country, where she unexpectedly falls in love with a man who knows a lot about produce, tractors, and how to take a person down in one jiu-jitsu move. Within months of saying “I do” she’s pregnant, life is on track, and then wham! Her doctor slaps a high-risk label on her uterus and sends her to bed for five months.  As her husband’s bucolic (and possibly haunted) farmhouse begins to collapse and her marriage starts to do the same, Weintraub finally confronts her grief for her father while fighting for the survival of her unborn baby. In her precarious situation, will she stay or will she once again run away from it all?  Knocked Down is an emotionally charged, laugh-out-loud roller-coaster ride of survival and growth. It is a story about marriage, motherhood, and the risks we take.

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness


Meghan O'Rourke - 2022
    Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier. Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color. Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease. The Invisible Kingdom offers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.

Bird Brother: A Falconer's Journey and the Healing Power of Wildlife


Rodney Stotts - 2022
    in the late 1980s, young Rodney Stotts would ride the metro to the Smithsonian National Zoo. There, the bald eagles and other birds of prey captured his imagination for the first time. In Bird Brother, Rodney shares his unlikely journey to becoming a conservationist and one of America’s few Black master falconers. Rodney grew up during the crack epidemic, with guns, drugs, and the threat of incarceration an accepted part of daily life for nearly everyone he knew. To rent his own apartment, he needed a paycheck—something the money from dealing drugs didn’t provide. For that, he took a position in 1992 with a new nonprofit, the Earth Conservation Corps. Gradually, Rodney fell in love with the work to restore and conserve the polluted Anacostia River that flows through D.C. As conditions along the river improved, he helped to reintroduce bald eagles to the region and befriended an injured Eurasian Eagle Owl named Mr. Hoots, the first of many birds whose respect he would work hard to earn.Bird Brother is a story about pursuing dreams against all odds, and the importance of second chances. Rodney’s life was nearly upended when he was arrested on drug charges in 2002. The jail sentence sharpened his resolve to get out of the hustling life. With the fierceness of the raptors he had admired for so long, he began to train to become a master falconer and to develop his own raptor education program and sanctuary. Rodney’s son Mike, a D.C. firefighter, has also begun his journey to being a master falconer, with his own kids cheering him along the way. Eye-opening, witty, and moving, Bird Brother is a love letter to the raptors and humans who transformed what Rodney thought his life could be. It is an unflinching look at the uphill battle Black children face in pursuing stable, fulfilling lives, a testament to the healing power of nature, and a reminder that no matter how much heartbreak we’ve endured, we still have the capacity to give back to our communities and follow our wildest dreams.

The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees


Matthieu Aikins - 2022
    He is one of millions of refugees who leave their homes that year.Matthieu Aikins, a journalist living in Kabul, decides to follow his friend. In order to do so, he must leave his own passport and identity behind to go underground on the refugee trail with Omar. Their odyssey across land and sea from Afghanistan to Europe brings them face to face with the people at heart of the migration crisis: smugglers, cops, activists, and the men, women and children fleeing war in search of a better life. As setbacks and dangers mount for the two friends, Matthieu is also drawn into the escape plans of Omar's entire family, including Maryam, the matriarch who has fought ferociously for her children's survival.Harrowing yet hopeful, this exceptional work brings into sharp focus one of the most contentious issues of our times. The Naked Don't Fear the Water is a tale of love and friendship across borders, and an inquiry into our shared journey in a divided world.

Always Remember Your Name: A True Story of Family and Survival in Auschwitz


Andra Bucci - 2022
    Along with their mother, Mira, their aunt, and cousin Sergio, they were deported to Auschwitz. Over 230,000 children were deported to the camp, where Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, performed deadly experiments on them. Only a few dozen children survived, Tati and Andra among them. Tati, Andra, and Sergio were separated from their mothers upon arrival. But Mira was determined to keep track of her girls. After being tattooed with their inmate numbers, she made them memorize her number and told them to “always remember your name.” In keeping this promise to their mother, the sisters were able to be reunited with their parents when WWII ended. An unforgettable narrative of the power of sisterhood in the most extreme circumstances, and of how a mother’s love can overcome the most impossible odds, the Bucci sisters' memoir is a timely reminder that separating families is an inexcusable evil.

Disarmed: The Radical Life and Legacy of Michael "MJ" Sharp


Marshall V. King - 2022
    Michael “MJ” Sharp was a modern Mennonite armed with wit and intellect, but not a gun. The son of a Mennonite pastor, he demonstrated a gift for listening and persuading early in life. His efforts to approach others with acknowledgement rather than judgement gave him the ability to connect on a level very few managed. He also honed a deep commitment to peace, and after college he joined the Mennonite Mission Network and moved to Germany, where he persuaded soldiers to choose peace and free them of their violent systems. At 34 years old, MJ was working for the United Nations Group of Experts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—urging rebels to lay down their weapons—when he was murdered, likely assassinated alongside his colleague Zaida Catalán by those with government ties. This compelling account of MJ’s life, death, and legacy from longtime journalist Marshall V. King explores what compelled Sharp to travel the world working for peace and the ongoing impact of his life and death in the ongoing story of Christian peacemaking in a war-torn world.

Found, Wanting


Natasha Sholl - 2022
    A few hours later, at the age of 27, his heart stopped.Found, Wanting tells the story of Natasha’s attempt to rebuild her life in the wake of Rob’s sudden death, stumbling through the grief landscape and colliding with the cultural assumptions about the ‘right way’ to grieve.It is a memoir about falling in love in the aftermath of loss, and what it means to build a life in the space that death leaves.Furious and passionate, bracingly honest and beautiful, Found, Wanting is above all, a memoir about living and making sense of the multitude of lives within us.

100,000 First Bosses: My Unlikely Path as a 22-Year-Old Lawmaker


Will Haskell - 2022
    If he ran for office and won, he would become the youngest state Senator in Connecticut history. For years, Haskell’s hometown had reelected the same politician who opposed passing paid family leave, fought increases in the minimum wage, and voted down expansions of voting rights. Haskell’s own vision for Connecticut’s future couldn’t be more different, and he couldn’t stand the idea of an uncontested election. In 2018, he would be a college grad looking for his first job. Why not state Senator? When Haskell kicks off his campaign in the spring of his senior year, he’s an unknown college kid facing a popular incumbent who’s been in office for over two decades—as long as Haskell’s been alive. Haskell’s campaign manager is his roommate and his treasurer is his girlfriend’s mom. He doesn’t have any professional experience. But he does have a powerful message: there’s no minimum age to being on the right side of history. Six months later, Haskell’s shocking upset victory gives him a historic seat in the state Senate and the responsibility to serve the 100,000 constituents in his district. Like any first job, his first term as a legislator is filled with trial and error. Creating a program that funds free tuition at Connecticut’s community colleges—nice work. Falling asleep on the senate floor—needs improvement. In the tradition of Pete Buttigieg’s Shortest Way Home and Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, 100,000 First Bosses is the story of how one twentysomething candidate waged the campaign of his young life, fought for change at the state capitol, and proved that his generation is ready to claim a seat at the table.

Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir


Marie Yovanovitch - 2022
    AlbrightAn inspiring and urgent memoir by the ambassador who electrified the nation by speaking truth to power. By the time she became US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch had seen her share of corruption, instability, and tragedy in developing countries. But it came as a shock when, in early 2019, she was recalled from her post after a smear campaign by President Trump’s personal attorney and his associates—men operating outside of normal governmental channels, and apparently motivated by personal gain. Her courageous participation in the subsequent impeachment inquiry earned Yovanovitch the nation’s respect, and her dignified response to the president’s attacks won our hearts. She has reclaimed her own narrative, first with her lauded congressional testimony, and now with this memoir.   A child of parents who survived Soviet and Nazi terror, Yovanovitch’s life and work have taught her the preciousness of democracy as well as the dangers of corruption. Lessons from the Edge follows the arc of her career as she develops into the person we came to know during the impeachment proceedings.

Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties


Suzanne Roberts - 2022
    In landscapes as diverse as Salamanca’s cobbled streets, the Mekong River’s floating markets, Fire Island’s windswept beaches, Nashville’s honky-tonks, and the Sierra Nevada’s snowy slopes, Roberts interrogates her memory and tries to make sense of her own private losses (deaths of people and relationships), as well as more public losses, including a mass shooting in her hometown and environmental devastation in the Amazon rainforest. With lyricism, insight, honesty, and dark humor, these essays illuminate the sometimes terrible beauty of what it means to be human, deepening the conversation on death and grief, sexuality, and the shame that comes from surviving the world in a female body with all of its complexities.

Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk


Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe - 2022
    When she was a child, her family moved around frequently, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for young Sasha. With little more to guide her than a passion for the thriving punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and a desire to live up to the responsibility of being the namesake of her beloved great-grandmother—a linguist who helped preserve her Indigenous language of Lushootseed—Sasha throws herself headlong into the world, determined to build a better future for herself and her people. Set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own. Examining what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art, Sasha offers up an unblinking reckoning with personal traumas amplified by the collective historical traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples. Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience, and, above all, the ability to heal.

On Thin Ice: The Story and Diary of a Male Anorexic


Chris Henrie - 2022
    To his family, however, Chris's physique was merely a part of who he was-nothing more, nothing less. What was thought to be a harmless piece of Chris's identity gradually became a symptom of something entirely new-a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa that was taking control of Chris's life more and more by the day. Trapped by his disorder, Chris struggles to abandon his obsession with food restriction and his quest to maintain the only life he learned to value.A memoir composed primarily of diary entries written in an eating disorder inpatient hospitalization program, On Thin Ice: The Story and Diary of a Male Anorexic narrates the intimate and authentic story of a teenage boy fighting for his life against the tight grip of anorexia. Both a harrowing and perceptive tale of self-discovery, friendship, and the strength of the human spirit, On Thin Ice lends a voice to the millions of individuals around the world who suffer from an eating disorder and grants readers a glimpse into the day-to-day challenges of beginning recovery.

I Love You, Mom!: Cherished Word Gifts from My Heart to Yours


Blythe Daniel - 2022
    Whether they are still on the parenting journey or enjoying the grandmothering phase of life, moms of all ages will be blessed and encouraged by these inspirational thoughts and special affirmations of love. Beautifully designed with cheerful full-color artwork in a unique layered hardcover package, this special all-occasion gift is a thoughtful, meaningful way to celebrate Mom and let her know how much you love, cherish, and appreciate all that she is and does!

Inner Trek: A Reluctant Pilgrim in the Himalayas


Mohan Ranga Rao - 2022
    What starts out as merely a challenging high-altitude trek soon becomes a life-changing adventure. With a blend of humor, honesty and keen insight, Mohan journeys toward a deeper understanding of the world around him.A memoir of a road less traveled and a true story of self-discovery at 18,000 feet.“A modern Canterbury Tales, telling of a fascinating real-life adventure.“ Dr. C Naganna, University of Mysore“A heartwarming read; a spiritual adventure.” Anuradha Goyal, The Mouse CharmersAbout the AuthorMohan Rango Rao is an accomplished businessman, an avid traveler, and a generous philanthropist. He has visited over thirty different countries and is drawn to places of natural beauty and physically challenging trails. He plays tennis daily, takes frequent hikes and reads anything from scotch labels to quantum physics to Vedanta.

BUTTING HEADS IN SPAIN


Diane Elliott - 2022
    What they got was a Spanish Goatherder named Antonio.When a middle-aged English couple move to rural Spain, they are blissfully unaware that their dreams of running a small pony trekking business would be scuppered within six weeks of arriving. A sun-filled future looks bleak until a neighbour takes charge.As well as embarking on a crash course in goat midwifery and veterinary care, they also learn cliff climbing, bridge building and more than a little kung-fu.Will a goat, a sheep and two dogs rescue the couple as they battle to survive?

Another Appalachia


Neema Avashia - 2022
    

Drive: Stories from Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere


Sharon WheatleySharon Wheatley - 2022
    Along the way, Wheatley thinks back on the humor and grit of her parents and draws strength from those memories in order to confront the challenges of shepherding her family (and pets) through this unprecedented time, while making hilarious memories along the way. Drive is part travelogue, part Little Miss Sunshine, and all Broadway.

Queering the American Dream: The Radical Imagination of Revolutionary Women


Angela M. Yarber - 2022
    Always hoping to “live differently,” my wife and I quit our jobs as professor and pastor, sold our home, and followed the beckoning, traversing the American landscape for eighteen months in a camper named Freya with a toddler in tow. Throughout our travels, sixteen revolutionary women from history and mythology guide the way, providing virtues for subverting the American dream. From Vermont to Hawai’i, family, vocation, grief, and the beauty of the American landscape bear witness to the wanderings of a faithless clergywoman who rediscovers grace in the revolutionary women who paved the way. Their stories will embolden you, too, and if you follow in their wandering footsteps, you just may find your own subversive version of the American dream.ADVANCED PRAISE---In Queering the American Dream, Angela Yarber ferociously reclaims women's and nonbinary people's place in history, legend and myth. With intelligence, warmth and humor, she weaves these stories into her own narrative of leaving her ministry, selling her home, and taking to the road with her wife and toddler. Joys, challenges and grief pervade the journey. The book illuminates a lineage of non-conformists who empower us through their example. And it's a road trip through an America whose dream is ripe for queering.— Kate Evans, author of Call It Wonder and winner of the Bisexual Book AwardWith moments of great beauty, wit, and grief, Yarber delivers a full-hearted affirmation of our common humanity.— Kimerer L LaMothe, PhD. Author of Why We DanceMore than a memoir. More than a travelogue. More than a spiritual pilgrimage. Rev. Dr. Angela Yarber’s latest book, Queering the American Dream, is an interior adventure on an exterior territory leading to permanent, deliberately cultivated, choices meant to change herself, yes, but which also, through the generosity of her evocative prose, change us. The reclamation of her genuine vocation as a mediator for the grace of the world beams off the page with insight, wonder, and the touch of magic that all true transformation harbors. Read this book, and be forewarned—you will be changed for the better.— Rev. Dr. Susan Corso, spiritual director and novelistAn adventurer’s guide to traveling from the heart. Chock-a-block with arresting beauty and facts, Yarber’s work documents a time and place in American history from her own unique perspective. As she travels the U.S., she asks the important questions about gods, the patriarchy, and her own privilege, all against a backdrop of the feminist icons whose stories she tells, and whose images she totes along the way. — Lisa Kirchner, author of Blissful Thinking“Queering the American Dream is a deep look at how powerful the tools of myth, legend and belief are in the crafting of our cultural dreams, and how those have historically been co-opted by the patriarchy. Through one woman's journey, with her beautiful, modern American family, we understand how her story, and all of our unique stories, fit into the greater picture of our national legends and the promises of America. The reader will experience a beautiful promise of what our nation can and will be, if we are brave enough to tell all the stories.” — Daniella Mestyanek Young, Author of UNCULTURED: A Memoir of Cults, War and Belonging“Queering the American Dream manages to be both fun and serious, visionary and achingly down-to-earth all at the same time—one minute you’ll be contemplating deeply about ecofeminism or microaggressions and the next minute you’ll be laughing about the peskiness of mosquitos. With unflinching honesty, Yarber weaves the complexity of life’s grief, injustices, and beauty into a captivating story of personal evolution that remains grounded in global revolution. Bolstered by the legacy of fierce women and goddesses from a myriad of faith traditions, Yarber’s creative courage to forge her own life inspires us all to dream, to adventure, to queer convention and explore.”— Kyndall Rae Rothaus, author of Thy Queendom Come: Breaking Free from the Patriarchy to Save Your Soul“This book is a narrative toolbox for dismantling an American Dream that is nightmarish for all who exist outside the restricting dictates of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal status quo. Yarber’s is a project of ‘queering’ at its best, invoking a pantheon of revolutionary women and provoking radical imagination for a more just and beautiful way of being. She helps us to summon courageous rage in the company of these subversive sister saints who have felt it before us, and, through their wisdom and hers, invites us to cultivate the precarious hope to go on in the revolution of radical imagination.”— Rev. Cody J. Sanders, Ph.D., American Baptist Chaplain to Harvard University and Advisor for LGBTQ+ Affairs in the Office of Religious, Spiritual, & Ethical Life at MIT

Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy


Rachel Krantz - 2022
    Excited and a little trepidatious, Rachel set out to see whether love and a serious partnership with Adam could coexist alongside the freedom to explore relationships with other people. Their relationship was designed to strike an exquisite balance between intimacy and independence, calibrated to fan desire for the long haul.Armed with her instincts from her career as a journalist, Rachel not only put her own heart on the line, she also kept detailed journals, interviewed experts and therapists, immersed herself in the polyamory community, and relentlessly interrogated her own emotions. Now, in her debut memoir, she chronicles her dive into non-monogamy--from debilitating anxiety spirals to heart-opening connections with the men and women she dates--with an unflinching eye, fly-on-the-wall detail, and extraordinary perceptiveness. Through page-turning storytelling, she takes us inside the Brooklyn parties where Rachel first dips her toes in the water of non-monogamy; into the wider swinger and polyamory community where they search for a relationship style that suits them; and into her private moments with Adam and their other lovers. As she and Adam attempt to write a new plot for their love story, she also runs up against miscommunications, ancient power dynamics, and seeming betrayals that threaten the foundation of their love. Rachel breaks new ground in confronting the unique ways coercion and gaslighting manifest in open relationships, and finds herself wondering what liberation really looks like.Casting new light on universal experiences like jealousy, restlessness, and love, Open explores the seemingly endless range of relationships couples have created to answer their desires, and ultimately probes the questions: Can we have both freedom and love? How can we reconcile comfort and lust? Is a relationship ever equal? And is the pleasure worth the pain?

Never Simple


Liz Scheier - 2022
    On an uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room to tell her two important things: one, she had been married for most of Scheier’s life to a man she’d never heard of, and two, the man she’d told Scheier was her father was entirely fictional. She’d made him up. Those two big lies were the start, but not the end; it took dozens of smaller lies to support them, and by the time she was done she had built a farcical, half-true life for the two of them, from fake social security number to fabricated husband. One hot July day twenty years later, Scheier receives a voicemail from Adult Protective Services, reporting that Judith has stopped paying rent and is refusing all offers of assistance. That call is the start of a shocking journey that takes the Scheiers, mother and daughter, deep into the cascading effects of decades of lies and deception.Never Simple is the story of learning to survive—and, finally, trying to save—a complicated parent, as feared as she is loved, and as self-destructive as she is adoring.

The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir


Karen Cheung - 2022
    But in a place that never allowed you to write your own history, even remembrance can be a radical act. Hong Kong has long been known as a city of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that today exists at the margins of an authoritarian, ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests, where residents once rallied against threats to their democracy and freedoms. But it is also misunderstood and often romanticized, its history and politics simplified for Western headlines. Drawing richly from her own experience, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have made Hong Kong their home, journalist Karen Cheung gives us an insider’s view of this remarkable city at a critical moment in history—both for Hong Kong and democracies around the world. Coming of age in the wake of Hong Kong’s reunification with China in 1997, Cheung traverses the multifold identities available to her in childhood and beyond, whether that was her experience at an English-speaking international school where her classmates would grow up to be “global citizens” struggling to fit in with the rest of Hong Kong, or within her deeply traditional, multilingual family. Along the way, Cheung gives a personal account of what it’s like to seek out affordable housing and mental healthcare in one of the world’s most expensive cities. She also takes us deep into Hong Kong’s vibrant indie music and literary scenes–youth-driven spaces of creative resistance. Inevitably, Cheung brings us with her to the protests, where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized. Weaving together memoir, cultural criticism, and reportage, The Impossible City transcends borders to chart the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various, sometimes contradictory, paths of coming into one’s own.

In Sensorium: Notes for My People


Tanaïs - 2022
    Fragrance has long been used to mark who is civilized and who is barbaric, who is pure and who is polluted, who is free and who is damned—Focusing their gaze on our most primordial sense, writer and perfumer Tanaïs weaves a brilliant and expansive memoir, a reckoning that offers a critical, alternate history of South Asia from an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective. From stories of their childhood in the South, Midwest, and New York; to transcendent experiences with lovers, psychedelics, and fragrances; to trips home to their motherland, Tanaïs builds a universe of memories and scent: a sensorium. Alongside their personal history, and at the very heart of this work, is an interrogation of the ancient violence of caste, rape culture, patriarchy, war, and the inherited ancestral trauma of being from a lush land constantly denuded, a land still threatened and disappearing because of colonization, capitalism, and climate change. Structured like a perfume—moving from base to heart to head notes—IN SENSORIUM interlaces eons of South Asian perfume history, erotic and religious texts, survivor testimonies, and material culture with memoir. In Sensorium is archive and art, illuminating the great crises of our time with the language of Liberation.

Life, Death and Biscuits


Anthea Allen - 2022
    Anthea Allen’s writing is raw, honest and full of love for those she cares for.’ Susanna ReidAn extraordinarily powerful memoir based on the diaries of intensive care nurse Anthea Allen, who worked on the front line of one of the largest hospitals in Europe – St. George’s in South London – during the peak of the Covid crisis.Her gripping and incredibly moving recollections have been feted by a great range of people, from Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain to Richard Branson and the Queen’s apothecary, as well as being excerpted in the Daily Mail. What started as a weekend email to friends and family to process the reality of life during Covid quickly won her a growing army of support. Anthea has a rare gift of communicating the unique camaraderie of the NHS, the private tragedies of families, and the struggles which she has faced holding her personal and professional life together. Beyond politics, charts and statistics, Anthea – a natural and truly eloquent diarist – tells the stories of real people, real lives and real hopes and fears in an extraordinary time none of us will ever forget.

Life Is Tough (But So Are You): How to rise to the challenge when things go pear-shaped


Briony Benjamin - 2022
    "This is the book everyone needs to read when life takes an unexpected turn." - Mia Freedman, MamaMia Not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to clear your path. Viral video producer Briony Benjamin was a few months into a new job when she started feeling crappy... All. The. Time. Doctors told her she was just stressed and should rest more and learn to meditate. But it turns out she had cancer all through her body. Turning the camera on herself, Briony started documenting her journey in the short video You Only Get One Life. Its raw portrayal of her experience went viral, touching millions. Here Briony shares some of the important lessons learnt through her illness and recovery - everything from how to assemble your A Team in times of crisis and learning to make friends with the pain, to happy hacks for cutting yourself some slack and some great tips on being a kick-arse support human when a friend is going through the rough stuff. If you want to live the richest version of your life, bring some more joy into your day-to-day existence and have some tools up your sleeve for when things get tricksy, this book is for you. Because - spoiler alert - we all have to deal with our fair share of tough times sooner or later. It's how we handle them and bounce back afterwards that really matters.

You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation


Julissa Arce - 2022
    She interweaves current political events and Latinx history into personal stories, covering topics including racism, cultural identity, money, friendships, and love. Arce's goals are two-fold: by sharing her experiences she wants to encourage other people of color to recognize who they are is more than enough to be American, and she believes more visibility and representation of the Latinx experience will force people to recognize Hispanics as the Americans they are, rather than outsiders.Rejecting Assimilation will address the issue of trying to be American without losing culture, and explore the positive effects and importance of recognizing yourself in the culture that surrounds you.

The Astronaut's Wife: How Launching My Husband into Outer Space Changed the Way I Live on Earth


Stacey Morgan - 2022
    With an overwhelming mix of pride, excitement, and terror, she and her children held hands and watched the rocket ignite and lift off for a nine-month mission aboard the International Space Station.This is the story of the astronaut’s wife—a journey full of unexpected twists and turns. While the love of her life orbited the Earth, Stacey was about to embark on a knock-your-socks-off adventure right here at home. This season would be different from any Stacey had experienced before. The risks were greater, the loneliness was deeper, and the stress was more intense. Filled with as many unique challenges as surreal opportunities, this deeply meaningful season taught her rich lessons aboutpreparing for any mission or adventure life throws at yourediscovering your fun side when you’ve been trapped in survival mode too longtrusting God when you feel weak or alonechoosing hope in the face of fear and uncertaintyContaining behind-the-scenes glimpses into a side of space flight that most of us will never experience, The Astronaut’s Wife is a funny, poignant, and meaningful exploration of living life to the fullest—no matter where you roam.

The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister


Kyleigh Leddy - 2022
    When Kyleigh was born, they were inseparable; Kait would protect her, include her, cuddle and comfort her, and, to Kyleigh, her big sister was her whole world.As they grew, however, and as Kait entered adolescence, her personality began to change. She was lashing out emotionally and physically, and losing touch with reality in certain ways. The family struggled to keep this side of Kait private—at school and in her social life, she was still the gorgeous, effervescent life of the party with a modeling career ahead of her and big dreams. But slowly, things began to shatter, and Kyleigh could only watch in horror as her perfect sibling’s world collapsed around her. Kait was institutionalized with what would eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenia, leaving Kyleigh and their mother to handle the burden, shame, and guilt alone.Then, in January 2014, Kait disappeared. Though they never found her body, security footage showed her making her way onto a big bridge over a river, where it is presumed that she jumped. Kyleigh is left wondering: What could she have done differently? How could this shining light be gone? And how will she find peace without her sister to guide her way there?

I Am Because We Are: An African Mother’s Fight for the Soul of a Nation


Chidiogo Akunyili-Parr - 2022
    She suffered for it, as did her marriage and six children. I Am Because We Are illuminates the role of kinship, family, and the individual’s place in society, while revealing a life of courage, how community shaped it, and the web of humanity that binds us all.

We've Got To Stop Meeting Like This - A Memoir of Missed Connections


Donna Y. Ferris - 2022
    When she signs up for yoga teacher training, her carefully cultivated life begins to crumble. Her husband is having an affair. Dangerous childhood secrets resurface. Her mother dies suddenly. And she doesn't even like yoga . . . yet.As Donna reels and heals, she discovers love, rescues dogs, and confronts yet another crisis of faith when her new fianc� falls ill.A devastating but funny, life-affirming love story, We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This is for anyone who has ever dared to fight for what matters - and believes it's never too late to find love or enlightenment.But not necessarily in that order.PRAISE FOR We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This"Donna Ferris put her heart onto the pages of "We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This." A vulnerable telling of three transformative years of her life told with openness. It's easy to see oneself at any stage of Donna's journey and to appreciate the strength it takes to survive loss in all its forms but most of all, to learn to love again." - Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness"We've Got to Stop Meeting Like This is a balm for any person navigating grief, growth, and unanswerable questions. Donna Ferris guides readers on a compelling journey of love, loss, and discovery. The themes of spirituality, abuse, and human relationships weave strength into this page-turner as her story reminds us to seek deeper truth in every moment. This humorous, touching work brings inspiration and guidance to those facing the unexpected shadows life may cast. Magical."Erin Byron, author Yoga for the Creative Soul"We've Got To Stopping Meeting Like This" is a memoir about meeting truth, grief, and the deepest opportunity to love. This book inspires women to be unstoppable in the face of loss and trust a healing path for true connection and home. We all want to believe we can overcome loss or betrayal and Donna Ferris shows us her way. She did it!" - Jennifer Schelter, MFA YTT 500"In clear, heartfelt language Donna articulates what is true for so many of us: the concussion of losses we are asked to endure, the longing toward understanding and growth, and the eventual recognition of one's clarity and strength as we shift toward a sense of wholeness. In her kind, thoughtful entries, we come to understand that resilience and happiness truly do rest on the small, daily choices we make to heal, even as we stand on unsteady ground, and on our willingness to open to the new, and to what might be possible." Maria Sirois, author of A Short Course in Happiness After Loss.

Entrenched: A Memoir of Holding on and Letting go


Linda Lee Blakemore - 2022
    

Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey


Florence Williams - 2022
    What she doesn’t expect is that she’ll end up in the hospital, examining close-up the way our cells listen to loneliness. She travels to the frontiers of the science of “social pain” to learn why heartbreak hurts so much and why so much of the conventional wisdom about it is wrong.Searching for insight as well as personal strategies to game her way back to health, Williams tests her blood for genetic markers of grief, undergoes electrical shocks in a laboratory while looking at pictures of her ex, and ventures to the wilderness in search of awe as an antidote to loneliness. For readers of Wild and Lab Girl, Heartbreak is a remarkable merging of science and self-discovery that will change the way we think about loneliness, health, and what it means to fall in and out of love.

Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir


Kathryn Davis - 2022
    The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can “try on personae like dresses.” She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions—Woolf, Durrell, Bergman—sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, “climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling.” Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis’s fiction are recognizable here—fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real—but the vehicle itself is utterly new. Aurelia, Aurélia explodes the conventional bounds of memoir. It is an astonishing accomplishment.

In for Life: A Journey Into Murder, Corruption, and Friendship


Elaine Alice Murphy - 2022
    In for Life follows the personal journey of journalist Elaine Alice Murphy as she fights to allow her friend Sean's story to be heard and help him gain his freedom.

Skinful


Robyn Flemming - 2022
    Was her decision to risk everything yet again an act of faith or folly?Skinful is about the questions we ask at life's turning points. Who am I? What life do I want to live?

And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life


Helen Humphreys - 2022
    An artist’s solitude is a sacred space, one to be guarded from the chaos of the world, where the sparks of inspiration can be kindled into fires of creation. But within this quiet also lie loneliness, self-doubt, the danger of collapsing too far inward. An artist needs a familiar, a companion with emotional intelligence, innate curiosity, an enthusiasm for the world beyond, but also the capacity to rest contentedly for many hours. What an artist needs, Helen Humphreys would say, is a dog. And a Dog Called Fig is a memoir of the writing life told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime, including Fig, her new Vizsla puppy. Interspersed are stories of other writers and their own irreplaceable companions: Virginia Woolf and Grizzle, Gertrude Stein and Basket, Thomas Hardy and Wessex—who walked the dining table at dinner parties, taking whatever he liked—and many more. A love song to the dogs who come into our lives and all that they bring—sorrow, mayhem, reflection, joy—this is a book about steadfast friendship and loss, creativity and craft, and the restorative powers of nature. Every work of art is different; so too is every dog, with distinctive needs and lessons. And if we let them guide us, they will show us many worlds we would otherwise miss. Includes Black-and-White Photographs

Broken Crayons Still Color 4: The Finale


David Weaver - 2022
    

Cost of Living: Essays


Emily Maloney - 2022
    A thousand dollars for a broken leg, a few hundred for a nasty cut while cooking dinner. Then there are the greater costs for even greater misfortunes. The car accidents, breast cancers, blood diseases, and dark depressions.When Emily Maloney was nineteen she tried to kill herself. An act that would not only cost a great deal personally, but also financially, sending her down a dark spiral of misdiagnoses, years spent in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices, and tens of thousands owed in medical debt. To work to pay off this crippling burden, Emily becomes an emergency room technician. Doing the grunt work in a hospital, and taking care of patients at their most vulnerable moments, chronicling these interactions in searingly beautiful, surprising ways.Shocking and often slyly humorous, Cost of Living is a brilliant examination of just what exactly our troubled healthcare system asks us to pay, as well as a look at what goes on behind the scenes at our hospitals and in the minds of caregivers.

Fearlessly Different: An Autistic Actor's Journey to Broadway's Biggest Stage


Mickey Rowe - 2022
    I am an actor, a theatre director, a father, and a husband. I am also a man with autism. You think those things don't go together? Let me show you that they do. Growing up, Mickey Rowe was told that he couldn't enter the mainstream world. He was iced out by classmates and colleagues, infantilized by well-meaning theatre directors, barred from even earning a minimum wage. Why? Because he is autistic. Fearlessly Different: An Autistic Actor's Journey to Broadway's Biggest Stage is Mickey Rowe's story of growing up autistic and pushing beyond the restrictions of a special education classroom to shine on Broadway. As an autistic and legally blind person, living in a society designed by and for non-disabled people, it was always made clear to Mickey the many things he was apparently incapable of doing. But Mickey did them all anyway--and he succeeded because of, not in spite of, his autism. He became the first autistic actor to play the lead role in the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, landed the title role in the play Amadeus, co-created the theatre/philanthropy company Arts on the Waterfront, and founded the National Disability Theatre. Mickey faced untold obstacles along the way, but his story ends in triumph. Many people feel they are locked out of the world of autism--that it's impossible to even begin to understand. In Fearlessly Different, Mickey guides readers to that world while also helping those with autism to feel seen and understood. And he shows all people--autistic and non-autistic alike--that the things that make us different are often our biggest strengths.

Just a Dreamer


Diana Estill - 2022
    They are nothing alike, though. She loves to travel, and he’s afraid to leave his house. Fixated on death, Kerry fears highways, airplanes, lightning, doctors, government, and UFOs. Intimacy, though, could be his greatest threat.When Diana asks Kerry to join her on a 400-mile road trip to meet his online honey, she risks being rejected—again. And he stands to lose his virtual romance. Will he leave home to find real love or succumb to his phobias?This midlife memoir explores love, loss, and compassion for kin we don’t understand.

The Running-Shaped Hole


Robert Earl Stewart - 2022
    His own pants, laying freshly laundered across the end of his bed, remind him of a flag draped over a coffin. To deal with the fear and shame, he is compelled to eat himself sick. But one day, following a terrifying doctor’s appointment, he goes for a walk — an act that sets The Running-Shaped Hole in motion. Within a year, he is running long distances, making good on a deathbed promise he failed to make his mother, reversing the disastrous course of his eating, losing 140 pounds, and after several mishaps and jailtime, eventually runs the Detroit Free Press Half-Marathon. At turns philosophical and slapstick, this memoir examines the life-altering effects running has on a man who, left to his own devices, struggles to be a husband, a father, a son, and a writer.

Who Do I Think I Am?: Stories of Chola Wishes and Caviar Dreams


Anjelah Johnson-Reyes - 2022
    Through it all, Anjelah transforms from a suburban-adjacent kid with Aquanet-drenched hair into a devoted Christian who abstains from drinking and premarital sex, into a mall-famous Oakland Raiders cheerleader, and then an actually famous comedian traveling the world and meeting people from all-walks of life, including Oprah. No biggie. (Huge biggie.) As she travels the world, Anjelah has eye-opening experiences, and she morphs from square, rigid Anjelah into “Funjelah,” and learns that she can still ride with Jesus without squashing the other parts of her personality.Anjelah's stories explore subjects such as navigating your racial identity, finding your place in the world, chasing your crazy dreams, embracing the messiness of an evolving faith, and searching for belonging and meaning. Through her journey, Anjelah gets closer to discovering her true identity and encourages readers to have the audacity to dream big.

Rise: My Story


Lindsey Vonn - 2022
    Vonn, who became the first American woman to win a downhill race at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, has led an incredible career on the slopes earning 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, 3 Olympic medals, and 7 World Championship medals.In her new memoir, Vonn will share that her epic journey to success has been anything but downhill. From moving away from her small Minnesota town to pursue her career and navigating her personal life in the public eye, to challenging the skiing norm and raising the profile of women in the sport and the high-speed crashes she endured and the remarkable recoveries she made, Vonn has faced her fair share of obstacles and has unbelievably persevered through them all.Also the founder of the Lindsey Vonn Foundation, Vonn has been an inspiration to fans and athletes—especially young women—everywhere since her Olympic debut. With her new inspiring book, readers will cheer for their favorite sports hero all over again as she recounts her triumphs, shares what her next chapter will entail, and reminds us to never give up on our dreams.

Between the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss, Healing, and Hope


Maggie Doyne - 2022
    During her travels, the trajectory of her life alters when she has a surprise encounter with a Nepali girl breaking rocks in a quarry. Maggie decides to invest her life savings of five thousand dollars to buy a piece of land and open a children’s home in Nepal.That home becomes Kopila Valley Children’s Home, and eventually, the nonprofit Maggie launches, the BlinkNow Foundation, also starts the Kopila Valley School, which provides tuition-free education for more than four hundred students. Maggie and BlinkNow’s work have been recognized around the world for their innovative, sustainable work.However, this book isn’t a how-to for fledging philanthropists or nonprofit founders--it’s a coming-of-age story about a young woman suspended between two worlds, as well as the love, loss, healing, and hope she experiences along the way. And Maggie’s inspiring, intimate tale shows readers an important truth: the power to change the world exists within all of us.

Cronies, A Burlesque: Adventures with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead


Ken Babbs - 2022
    

Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons


Jeremy Denk - 2022
    His life is already a little tough as a precocious, temperamental six-year-old piano prodigy in New Jersey, and then a family meltdown forces a move to New Mexico. There, Denk must please a new taskmaster, an embittered but devoted professor, while navigating junior high school. At sixteen he escapes to college in Ohio, only to encounter a bewildering new cast of music teachers, both kind and cruel. After many humiliations and a few triumphs, he ultimately finds his way as a world-touring pianist, a MacArthur "Genius," and a frequent performer at Carnegie Hall.Many classical music memoirs focus on famous musicians and professional accomplishments, but this book focuses on the everyday: neighborhood teacher, high school orchestra, local conductor. There are few writers capable of so deeply illuminating the trials of artistic practice--hours of daily repetition, mystifying advice, pressure from parents and teachers. But under all this struggle is a love letter to the act of teaching.In lively, endlessly imaginative prose, Denk dives deeply into the pieces and composers that have shaped him--Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, among others--and offers lessons on melody, harmony, and rhythm. How do melodies work? Why is harmony such a mystery to most people? Why are teachers so obsessed with the metronome?In Every Good Boy Does Fine, Denk shares the most meaningful lessons of his life, and tries to repay a debt to his teachers. He also reminds us that we must never stop asking questions about music and its purposes: consolation, an armor against disillusionment, pure pleasure, a diversion, a refuge, and a vehicle for empathy.

Clothes… and other things that matter: A beguiling and revealing memoir from the former Editor of British Vogue


Alexandra Shulman - 2022
    We don't know many people who can write about bras, Donald Tusk and Madeleine Albright all in the same sentence.' - A Little Bird'Scintillating reading.' - The Spectator'Alexandra Shulman's style is unaffected, immediate and hilariously dry. She's brilliant at observing everyday feelings in a joy-sparking turn of phrase.' - Helena Bonham Carter-'Clothes... and other things that matter is a book not only about clothes but about the way we live our lives. From childhood onwards, the way we dress is a result of our personal history. In a mix of memoir, fashion history and social observation I am writing about the person our clothes allows us to be and sometimes the person they turn us into.' - Alexandra ShulmanIn Clothes... and other things that matter, Alexandra Shulman delves into her own life to look at the emotions, ambitions, expectations and meanings behind the way we dress.From the bra to the bikini, the trench coat to trainers, the slip dress to the suit, she explores their meaning in women's lives and how our wardrobes intersect with the larger world - the career ladder, motherhood, romance, sexual identity, ambition, failure, body image and celebrity.By turns funny, refreshingly self-deprecating and often very moving, this startlingly honest memoir from the ex-Editor of British Vogue will encourage women of all ages to consider what their own clothes mean to them, the life they live in them and the stories they tell.

Bacon in Moscow


James Birch - 2022
    fascinating and true' Grayson PerryThis funny and personal memoir is the account of an audacious attempt by James Birch, a young British curator, to mount the ground-breaking retrospective of Francis Bacon's work at the newly refurbished Central House of Artists, Moscow in 1988.Side-lined by the British establishment, Birch found himself at the heart of a honey-trap and the focus for a picaresque cast of Soviet officials, attach�s and politicians under the forbidding eye of the KGB as he attempted to bring an unseen western cultural icon to Russia during the time of 'Glasnost', just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.Bacon in Moscow is the story of the evolution of an exhibition that was at the artistic and political heart of a sea of change that culminated with the fall of the USSR.'A rollicking cultural adventure before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the meteoric rise of contemporary art in the nineties' Grayson Perry

The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple


Ben Aitken - 2022
    Someone to help with the weekly food shop and offer tips on the crossword. Ben, 34, was looking for a new housemate.As the UK was locked down in 2020, Ben and Winnie's lives interwove, forming an unlikely friendship, where lessons were learnt (heat the red wine in the oven with the plates; preserve or pickle whatever you can; never throw anything away) and grief, both personal and that of a nation, was explored.Charting both their time together, and the details of Winnie's life that are shared with Ben in fragments, The Marmalade Diaries, from the author of The Gran Tour, is a very human exploration of home, of the passage time, of the growing relationship between an odd couple, told with warmth, wit and candour.

The Cure for Sleep


Tanya Shadrick - 2022
    Fast and without warning.On return from near-death, Tanya Shadrick vows to stop sleepwalking through life. To take more risks, like the characters in the fairy tales she loved as a small girl, before loss and fear had her retreat into routine and daydreams.Around the care of young children, she starts to play with the shape and scale of her days: to stray from the path, get lost in the woods, make bargains with strangers.As she moves beyond her respectable roles as worker, wife and mother in a small town, Tanya learns what it takes - and costs - to break the spell of longing for love, approval, safety, rescue.

The Letters Project: A Daughter's Journey


Eleanor Reissa - 2022
    In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a large wad of folded papers. They were letters. Fifty-six of them. In German. Written in 1949. Letters from her father to her mother, when they were courting. Just four years earlier, he had fought to stay alive in Auschwitz and on the Death March while she had spent the war years suffering in Uzbekistan. Thirty years later, Eleanor—a theatre artist who has been on the forefront of keeping Yiddish alive—finally had the letters translated. The particulars of those letters send her off on an unimaginable adventure into the past, forever changing her and anyone who reads this book. “‘The Holocaust,’ Eleanor Reissa writes in this unforgettable and courageous book, ‘is attached to me like my skin and I would be formless without it.’ A very personal story that is also a fundamental one of a woman trying to make sense of her life and family and of the shadows that go back before she was born. There is plenty of feeling and sentiment but it never feels sentimental. Her inimitable wit leavens the sadder scenes. This journey of discovery is riveting, told with tender insight, at times heartbreaking and at times heartwarming just like the Yiddish songs that have delighted Ms. Reissa’s audiences.” —Joseph Berger is a New York Times reporter and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust “Among the great number of personal takes on the Holocaust, Eleanor Reissa’s book really stands out, both for its intelligence and courage and for the unique way she braids the inter-generational stories together. In this brutal, poignant, and searingly honest book, Reissa simultaneously pieces together the unfathomable story of her Holocaust survivor father, reckons with the guilt she came to feel as his uncomprehending American daughter, and manages somehow to find insight and purpose in the ashes. This extraordinary account of two parallel journeys will stick with anyone privileged enough to read it.” —David Margolick, a former reporter for The New York Times, author of several books, including, most recently, The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. And Robert F. Kennedy “The Letters Project is a wonderful book—funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately transcendent. Eleanor Reissa’s journey back into her family’s past makes for a gripping—and very human—international mystery. I highly recommend it.” —Tony Phelan, TV Showrunner for: Grey’s Anatomy, Doubt, and Council of Dads “Eleanor Reissa has written a gritty, fearless yet funny memoir about herself, her family, and the Holocaust. Once I began reading it, I was completely swept away until the journey ended. I was moved by the power of this uniquely personal yet universal story.” —Julian Schlossberg is an American motion pictures, theatre, and television producer

What I Wish I Knew: Surviving and Thriving After an Abusive Relationship


Kendall Ann Combs - 2022
    

Warpath: One Vietnam Veteran's Journey through War, Disillusionment, Guilt and Recovery


AJ Moore - 2022
    

Chasing Lions


Amanda Marks - 2022
    

Midnight Calling: A Memoir of a Drug Smuggler's Daughter


Lynn WalkerLynn Walker - 2022
    By the time she was in high school, her dad was in prison for smuggling 12,000 pounds of marijuana. There, John made a connection with a powerful Colombian drug lord. Within months of being paroled, John waltzed back into his kids' lives, dishing out pure, Colombian cocaine to Lynn and launching her brother's coke-dealing career. After a few years of abusing coke together, Lynn lost everything and was forced to choose between her life and her father.Jaw-dropping, emotionally raw and heart-breaking, Midnight Calling: A Memoir of a Drug Smuggler’s Daughter is a story about family bonds, the sometimes high price of clinging to them and the anguish of trying to sever them.

With or Without Me: A Memoir of Losing and Finding


Esther Maria Magnis - 2022
    Yet Esther Maria Magnis’s frustration is merely the beginning of a tortuous journey toward faith—one punctuated by personal losses retold with bluntness and intense immediacy. “Maybe God is a sadist,” she writes, “a big baby who had a terrible upbringing. If, as Christians claim, God is love, then it’s a kind of love I do not understand.” She dares to believe anyway, although her questioning won’t let up. She fiercely dismantles both the clichés she’s heard in church and the endless philosophizing of her parents’ generation.Esther Maria Magnis knows believing in God is anything but easy. Because he allows people to suffer. Because he’s invisible. And silent. “I think we miss God,” she writes, “I would never want to persuade anyone or put myself above atheists. I know there are good reasons not to believe. But sometimes I think most people are just sad that he’s not there.”With or Without Me is a book for everyone—believer or unbeliever, Christian or atheist—who refuses to surrender to the idea that, just because there can be beauty and truth, there must also be clear answers to the big questions in life.

Any Girl: A Memoir of Sexual Exploitation and Recovery


Mia Döring - 2022
    I had to follow the persistent, uncomfortable pull of truth, wherever it would lead me."From the outside looking in, the young life of Mia Döring seemed unremarkable, as she pursued her studies at a prominent Dublin art college, immersed in a vibrant social scene.Unbeknownst to those around her, however, Mia's life was anything but ordinary. At age sixteen, she had been sexually exploited by an older man, which carved a direct path into the Irish sex trade, where she remained for several years until finally leaving it behind over a decade ago, at age twenty-four.In her literary memoir Mia, a psychotherapist specialising in sexual trauma, excavates her difficult history as she sets about integrating her past with her present-day life. Along the way, she presents an ardent and intelligent refutation of a culture that affirms and applauds the industrialised sexual violation of women and girls, ultimately offering something more precious - a way forward for society bedded in true understanding and compassion.Any Girl is a ferociously honest, intensely tender and utterly unforgettable book that is as thought-provoking as it is timely.//

Might Bite


Patrick Foster - 2022
    Turning 31, a popular and sociable young teacher and former professional cricketer, he had a lovely girlfriend and a supportive family. But he was hiding a secret and debilitating gambling addiction from even those closest to him.Huge bets had led to huge debts, thousands of lies and mental health issues that pushed him to the edge of the platform at Slough station, where he was moments from taking his own life in March 2018. That month he had turned a £30 bet into £28,000, then lost £58,000 on a single horse, Might Bite, in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, watching the race ina silent classroom as his students undertook a mock exam in front of him.Gambling addiction affects more than 1.4 million people per year in the UK alone. It is a growing and pervasive issue: gamblers are getting younger, more women are betting every day, and the industry is worth more than £14 billion.This book explores the reasons behind gambling addiction and its terrible consequences, through the eyes of one man – who almost didn't survive.

The Book of Malcolm: My Son's Life with Schizophrenia


Fraser Sutherland - 2022
    On the morning of Boxing Day 2009, the poet Fraser Sutherland and his wife found their son, Malcolm, dead in his bedroom in their house. He was twenty-six and had died from a seizure of unknown cause. Malcolm had been living with schizophrenia since the age of seventeen.Fraser’s respectful narration of Malcolm’s life — his happiness as well as his sufferings, his heroic efforts to calm his troubled mind, his readings, his writings, his experiments with religious thought — is a master writer’s attempt to give shape and dignity to his son’s life, to memorialize it as more than an illness. And in writing about his son’s life, Fraser creates his own self-effacing memoir — the memoir of a parent’s resilience through years of stressful care.Fraser Sutherland, one of Canada’s finest poetry critics and essayists, died shortly after completing this book.A RARE MACHINES BOOK

Balancing Acts: Unleashing the Power of Creativity in Your Life and Work


DANIEL LAMARRE - 2022
     Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre shares his experiences leading the awe-inspiring organization, and teaches readers what it takes for anyone, regardless of position or industry, to embrace the value of creative leadership.Without creativity, there is no business. At the core of Cirque du Soleil’s lavish, multi-million-dollar productions is Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre, who has mastered the ability to bring business and creativity together across multiple languages and cultures in a way that has never been seen before. The secrets he shares in Balancing Acts are rooted in tremendous faith in your own creative skills, even if you are convinced you have none, and those of the sharpest minds within your organization.In this book, Daniel shares the untold stories behind Cirques biggest shows, including Beatles Love, Michael Jackson One, the aquatic marvel, O, and many more. Through these tales of triumph and trials, he will teach you:How to shatter the perceived limitations standing in the way of your ability to think creatively and innovatively;When to step up and when to step back so that your team can create a masterpiece that doesn’t break the bank;How in using the methods Daniel has uncovered, modern companies with entrenched bureaucracies can bring creativity and business together to foster innovation; andHow to use creative thinking to lead your organization to new heights.Whether you work for one of the most creative organizations on the planet like Cirque du Soleil, in a stuffy corporate job, or somewhere in between—Balancing Acts is filled with principles that can strengthen and accelerate any business on the planet.

Woodsqueer


Gretchen Legler - 2022
    Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences intentionally focusing on not just making a living but making a life―in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine.Building a home with her partner, Ruth, on their farm means learning to live with solitude, endless trees, and the wild animals the couple come to welcome as family. Whether trying to outsmart their goats, calculating how much firewood they need for the winter, or bartering with neighbors for goods and services, they hone life skills brought with them (carpentry, tracking and hunting wild game) and other skills they learn along the way (animal husbandry, vegetable gardening, woodcutting).Legler’s story is at times humbling and grueling, but it is also amusing. A homage to agrarian American life echoing the back-to-the-land movement popularized in the mid-twentieth century, Woodsqueer reminds us of the benefits of living close to the land. Legler unapologetically considers what we have lost in America, in less than a century―individually and collectively―as a result of our urban, mass-produced, technology-driven lifestyles.Illustrated with rustic pen-and-ink illustrations, Woodsqueer shows the value of a solitary sojourn and both the pathway to and possibilities for making a sustainable, meaningful life on the land. The result, for Legler and her partner, is an evolution of their humanity as they become more physically, emotionally, and even spiritually connected to their land and each other in a complex ecosystem ruled by the changing seasons.

Cabbagehead: How Could I Have Married a Serial Rapist?


Helen LaRoe - 2022
    Her eyes fixated on every detail of his familiar face. Under her breath she whispered, "Oh, what have you done?"Over forty years ago a mad man roamed the streets. He was known first as the East Area Rapist, then the Original Night Stalker, and later the Golden State Killer. He held much of Northern and Southern California in the palm of his hand, frozen with fear, in the 1970s and 80s. He was thought to have committed over 120 burglaries, raped 50 women, and murdered 13 people. Then, he was still.In 2016, the FBI launched a nationwide campaign to catch this predator. They shared three composite images on every news station and all over the internet. In 2018, Joseph DeAngelo was identified through the DNA he left at crime scenes in Southern California. In 2020, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first-degree murder and was required to admit to all of the rapes and other uncharged crimes as part of his plea deal to avoid the death penalty.But the investigators were only half right. There was another blue-eyed monster who roamed the Sacramento area as the East Area Rapist. Yes, there were two. They captured one, but the other one slipped away.How does an innocent child's life evolve into a life with a serial rapist? Easier than one might imagine. Meet Cabbagehead."Cabbagehead falls under the description of a 'page turner.'Helen LaRoe tells a story the mythologist, Joseph Campbell, would recognize: the classical tale of The Hero's Journey. If ever there was a Heroine's Journey, this is it.Cabbagehead is a compelling life story everyone needs to know. If you have followed the Original Night Stalker/East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer case, you won't want to pass up reading this riveting memoir."- Retired Sacramento County Sheriff's Detective Richard Shelby and author of Hunting a Psychopath

How to Host a Viking Funeral: What I Learned Asking 20,000 People to Share and Burn Their Regrets


Kyle Scheele - 2022
    This is the story of what he learned about letting go of the pain of the past and embracing the future with hope.Turning 30, artist and speaker Kyle Scheele wanted to do something unusual to mark this milestone. Instead of a birthday bash, he decided to hold a funeral to memorialize the decade of his life that was ending. Building a 16-foot Viking ship out of cardboard, he invited friends to help him set it on fire—a symbolic farewell to his 20s and all the grief, regret, and mistakes that accompanied those years. When video of his Viking funeral went viral, it encouraged many others to let go of past hurts as well. Moved by the response he received, Kyle planned a second funeral (this time with a 30-foot cardboard Viking ship) and asked people to share the things they carried—the bad choices, disappointments, heartaches, and negative thinking that they wanted to lay to rest. He received more than 20,000 responses from around the world—stories both heartbreaking and hilarious, painful and inspiring. In this entertaining and wise book, Kyle reflects on what he discovered about freeing ourselves from the pain of the past, interweaving anecdotes from those who participated with the story of his own journey of renewal. “This story involves multiple Viking funerals, thousands of square feet of cardboard, and enough hot glue to supply your mother-in-law's craft night for the rest of time,” he writes. “But it also involves regret, self-doubt, insecurity, and ultimately, redemption. So buckle up. It's about to get bumpy.”How to Host a Viking Funeral is the story of letting go of the people we used to be, but no longer want to be. It’s about renewal; where there was once regret there is now blank space—an opportunity for a fresh start.

What's So Funny?: A Cartoonist's Memoir


David Sipress - 2022
    Sipress, a dreamer and obsessive drawer, goes hazy when it comes to the ceaselessly imparted lessons-on-life from his father, the meticulous, upwardly mobile proprietor of Revere Jewelers, and in the face of the angsty expectations of his migraine-prone mother.  With self-deprecation, wit, and artistry, Sipress paints his hapless place in his indelibly dysfunctional family, from the time he was tricked by his unreliable older sister into rocketing his pet turtle out his twelfth-floor bedroom window, to the moment he walks away from a Harvard PhD program in Russian history to begin his journey as a professional cartoonist. In What’s So Funny?—reminiscent of the masterly, humane recall of Roger Angell and the brainy humor of Roz Chast—Sipress's cartoons appear with spot-on precision, inducing delightful Aha moments in answer to the perennial question aimed at cartoonists: Where do you get your ideas?

Walking on Pins and Needles


Arlene FaulkArlene Faulk - 2022
    And as far as Arlene Faulk—accomplished businesswoman, storyteller, and Tai Chi instructor—knew, multiple sclerosis wasn’t going to get in her way.At the age of 22, in the middle of working the busiest shopping day of the year, Arlene loses all feeling in her body from the waist down. Her mobility returns but she’s given no diagnosis, and one question pervades her thoughts: What is happening to my body?In this moving and illuminating memoir of one woman’s years-long struggle to understand and conceal her debilitating symptoms as she ascends the corporate ladder in a major airline comes a story of perseverance, rediscovery, and hope in light of multiple sclerosis. As she jumps into the unknown, Faulk finds comfort and healing through Chinese medicine and Tai Chi. Her inspiring story demonstrates how a chronic and debilitating health condition lacks the power to control our lives and stop us from moving in the direction of possibility.