Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the world's greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonius Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and Dyer brings it to life in luminescent and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician’s style.

    As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for "Vanity Fair," he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this account of his affliction, he describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of mortality.

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    All his life Don had been too shy, too deeply pained to ask his father or grandparents to tell him the story of the lovely girl named Peggy Snyder--what delighted or troubled her, who her friends were, how she fell in love, what cut short her brief life.But then, nearing his fiftieth birthday and compelled by his father's failing health, Snyder embarked on a quest to find his mother. He traveled many times from his home in Maine down to his mother's small Pennsylvania town to trace her childhood and adolescence. He tracked down Peggy's high school friends, spent time with her teachers, probed the memories of the girls--now elderly women-- who had been her bridesmaids. Detail by detail, Don pieced together the harrowing story of Peggy's final year--her passionate love affair with her husband, the unexpected pregnancy, the sudden illness that consumed her, and the impossible choice she was forced to make.A heartbreaking, overwhelmingly beautiful book, Of Time and Memory is a story of remembering--and reclaiming--the fragile mystery of a beloved life.

    Playful, wry, and conversational, One More for the People chronicles three generations in the life of the Grover family. As these idiosyncratic characters reluctantly confront adulthood, one Grover is always there to take notes. But after she’s diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal disease (whose 81 symptoms include dramatic changes to her appearance, not to mention the dreaded possibility of having to move back home), One More for the People becomes something unexpected: a survival guide. In the spirit of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Grover transforms her own misfortune into a tale as unsettling as it is entertaining.

    With wit and candor, Patchett tells her own story of attending college, graduating, and struggling with the inevitable question, What now?From student to line cook to teacher to waitress and eventually to award-winning author, Patchett's own life has taken many twists and turns that make her exploration genuine and resonant. As Patchett writes, "'What now?' represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life." She highlights the possibilities the unknown offers and reminds us that there is as much joy in the journey as there is in reaching the destination.

    "-Washington Post Book WorldIn 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert.  But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive.     In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. "Exceptional. . . .  A beautifully told historical meditation. "--Time"Championship prose. . . .  In fifty years don't be surprised if Bad Land is a landmark."--Los Angeles Times

    Fish and Wildlife Service. In August 1992, she accepted an assignment that forever changed--and endangered--her life. She posed as a big-game hunter in Alaska in order to infiltrate an international ring of poachers out to kill the biggest and best of that state's wildlife.A Hunt for Justice recounts her dramatic story--a story she was not legally permitted to write about until her retirement in 2004.

    A lone woman searching for the lost, she exposes us to a world where truth is ephemeral, and where compassion, though frail, still bleeds through the grit and dust. In "Detour" she investigates the apparent suicide of a beloved coffee plantation owner in Kenya. In "Gorillas and Banana Beer," James ventures into the jungles of Rwanda to catch a glimpse of the nearly extinct mountain gorillas, only to struggle for survival against merciless poachers in a village of forgotten children. In "Beira," at the edge of Mozambique and anarchy's ground-zero, James searches for a lost woman and her daughter. "Witchdoctor" takes James deep into Turkanaland, otherwise known as "hell on earth," to find a woman doctor who has disappeared. James's sanity and life hang in the balance in a surreal and ferocious closing to this compelling debut work."Dancing with the Witchdoctor is a testimony to the strength of women, one that reveals how even in a land where flesh withers in the sun, there is no better proof of humanity than when it is on the brink.

     2.  Fascinating Memoir:  This book has it all: high stakes gambling, drugs, jail, psychotic episodes and debilitating depression and mental illness, plus the depths of despair and heights of victory.  3.  Very High Profile:  Mike Matusow is one of the most recognizable and followed players in poker today.  Yahoo's online search engine identifies over 1.1 million websites that provide content about Mike Matusow.  His weekly online video show "The Mouthpiece" at CardPlayer.com, averages over 2,000 viewers per day. 4.  Super Popular Subject: Poker is the third most watched sport on cable television, behind auto racing and football. 5.  Secondary Market Possibilities: The National Institute of Mental Health estimates there are 5.7 million people in the U.S. that have bipolar disorder and the CDC estimates 1.6 million elementary school children have been diagnosed ADHD.Get Ready for a Wild Ride… Hang on tight as Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, poker player extraordinaire, takes you with him on a breathtaking, true-life roller coaster ride from his humble beginnings in a trailer park to a rock and roll lifestyle full of hot women, sex, wild drug-filled parties and million-dollar wins and losses. Yet behind the glamour and glory of his high-stakes poker career lurked the flip side: a person torn between two debilitating mental illnesses?—?bipolar disorder and ADHD. To dig himself out of depression and suicidal despair, Matusow turned to dangerous street drugs to self-medicate a problem he didn’t understand, and spiraled deeper into the darker world of addiction, police narcotic stings, and jail time. In this revealing and tumultuous autobiography, the combustible Matusow holds nothing back. You’ll get a mouthful of the man behind the infamous Matusow Meltdowns seen on national TV. Riveting, exhilarating, sexy, sometimes shocking and always fascinating, this voyeur’s look into the world of high-stakes poker, mental illness, and ultimately, Matusow’s inspiring redemption, will keep you glued to your seat until the very last page!

    One hundred and eighty voices - male and female, young and old, from all walks of life and all over the country - talk intimately to the reader. Combining great humor and pathos this remarkable selection of stories from the thousands submitted to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered National Story Project gives the reader a glimpse of America's soul in all its diversity.

    Nothing she invented, however, could rival the facts surrounding her own family.In a singular voice–intimate, fierce, hilarious–Gallagher takes you into the heart of her Russian Jewish heritage with stories as elegant and stylish as fiction. From the wrenching last stages of her parents’ lives, Gallagher moves back through time: to her parents’ beginnings, the adventures of her extended family, and the communist ideology to which they cling. Her aunt Lily sells lingerie to prostitutes; a family friend is found murdered in a bathtub; her cousin Meyer returns to the Ukraine to find his village near death from starvation; and a young Gallagher endures sessions in self-criticism at a Workers’ Children’s camp. Together these episodes tell the larger story of a generation living through tumultuous history, and record the acts of loving defiance of a daughter on her path to independence. From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions–on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and “compassionate conservatism,” among others–show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.

    Michelle Browning is 33, drunk and a former beauty queen who nears death after six years of homelessness. Judith Glynn is divorced with grown children and struggles to support herself in her adopted city. After their first hello, neither woman is the same as they embark on a remarkable journey for two years. This memoir is a raw yet enlightening read that graphically depicts the homeless subculture. But as Judith sets out all alone to rescue Michelle is her fixation worth the sacrifice? At stake is whether Michelle will choose possible death in a gutter over Judith's guiding light back into society. Enrolled in Kindle Book Lending that allows users to lend their book after purchasing to their friends and family for a duration of 14 days. For full details, review the Kindle Book Lending Program.

    But when a neighbor invited him to lend a hand at the annual buffalo roundup, O'Brien was inspired to convert his own ranch, the Broken Heart, to buffalo. Starting with thirteen calves, "short-necked, golden balls of wool," O'Brien embarked on a journey that returned buffalo to his land for the first time in more than a century and a half.Buffalo for the Broken Heart is at once a tender account of the buffaloes' first seasons on the ranch and an engaging lesson in wildlife ecology. Whether he's describing the grazing pattern of the buffalo, the thrill of watching a falcon home in on its prey, or the comical spectacle of a buffalo bull wallowing in the mud, O'Brien combines a novelist's eye for detail with a naturalist's understanding to create an enriching, entertaining narrative.