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WCPL updated April 2013
Biography
Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of Church of
Scientology leader David Miscavige, was raised as a Scientologist
but left the controversial religion in 2005. In Beyond Belief,
she shares her true story of life inside the upper ranks of the
sect, details her experiences as a member Sea Org—the church's
highest ministry, speaks of her "disconnection" from family
outside of the organization, and tells the story of her ultimate
escape.
In this tell-all memoir, complete with family photographs from her
time in the Church, Jenna Miscavige Hill, a prominent critic of
Scientology who now helps others leave the organization, offers an
insider's profile of the beliefs, rituals, and secrets of the
religion that has captured the fascination of millions, including
some of Hollywood's brightest stars such as Tom Cruise and John
Travolta.
Amity Shlaes, author of The
Forgotten Man, delivers a brilliant and provocative
reexamination of America’s thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, and
the decade of unparalleled growth that the nation enjoyed under his
leadership. In this riveting biography, Shlaes traces Coolidge’s
improbable rise from a tiny town in New England to a youth so
unpopular he was shut out of college fraternities at Amherst College
up through Massachusetts politics. After a divisive period of
government excess and corruption, Coolidge restored national trust
in Washington and achieved what few other peacetime presidents have:
He left office with a federal budget smaller than the one he
inherited. A man of calm discipline, he lived by example, renting
half of a two-family house for his entire political career rather
than compromise his political work by taking on debt. Renowned as a
throwback, Coolidge was in fact strikingly modern—an advocate of
women’s suffrage and a radio pioneer. At once a revision of man and
economics, Coolidge gestures to the country we once were
and reminds us of qualities we had forgotten and can use today.
Amity Shiaes
Empress of Fashion
Diane von
Furstenberg once called Diana Vreeland a "beacon of fashion for the
twentieth century." Now, in this definitive biography by Amanda Mackenzie
Stuart, is the story of the iconic fashion editor as you've never seen her
before. From her career at the helms of Harper's Bazaar and
Vogue, to her reign as consultant to the Costume Institute at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vreeland had an enormous impact on the fashion
world and left a legacy so enduring that must-have style guides still
quote her often wild and always relevant fashion pronouncements.
With access to Vreeland's personal material and
photographs, critically acclaimed biographer Amanda Mackenzie Stuart has
written the ultimate behind-the-scenes look at Diana Vreeland and her
world—a jet-setting social scene that included Coco Chanel, Elsa
Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta,
Lauren Bacall, Penelope Tree, Lauren Hutton, Andy Warhol, Mick and Bianca
Jagger, and the Kennedys. Filled with gorgeous color photographs of her
work, Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland is an elegant
and fascinating account of one of the most revered tastemakers of the 20th
century.
Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
Sonia Sotomayor
My Beloved World
The first Hispanic and third woman
appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an
instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a
sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the
federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own
extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself.
Here is the story of a precarious childhood, with an alcoholic father (who
would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother, and of
the refuge a little girl took from the turmoil at home with her passionately
spirited paternal grandmother. But it was when she was diagnosed with
juvenile diabetes that the precocious Sonia recognized she must ultimately
depend on herself. She would learn to give herself the insulin shots she
needed to survive and soon imagined a path to a different life. With only
television characters for her professional role models, and little
understanding of what was involved, she determined to become a lawyer, a
dream that would sustain her on an unlikely course, from valedictorian of
her high school class to the highest honors at Princeton, Yale Law School,
the New York County District Attorney’s office, private practice, and
appointment to the Federal District Court before the age of forty. Along the
way we see how she was shaped by her invaluable mentors, a failed marriage,
and the modern version of extended family she has created from cherished
friends and their children. Through her still-astonished eyes, America’s
infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in this warm and honest book,
destined to become a classic of self-invention and self-discovery.
Paula Byrne
Real Jane Austen: A Life in
Small Things
In The Real Jane Austen, acclaimed literary
biographer Paula Byrne provides the most intimate and revealing portrait
yet of a beloved but complex novelist.
Just as
letters and tokens in Jane Austen’s novels often signal key turning points
in the narrative, Byrne explores the small things – a scrap of paper, a
gold chain, an ivory miniature – that held significance in Austen’s
personal and creative life.
Byrne transports us to different worlds, from the East
Indies to revolutionary Paris, and to different events, from a high
society scandal to a case of petty shoplifting. In this ground-breaking
biography, Austen is set on a wider stage than ever before, revealing a
well-traveled and politically aware writer – important aspects of her
artistic development that have long been overlooked.
The Real Jane Austen is a
fresh, compelling, and surprising biography of the author of some of our
most enduring classic books – from Pride and Prejudice to
Sense and Sensibility, Emma to Persuasion – and a vivid
evocation of the world that shaped her.
Jeanne Theoharis
The Rebellious Life of Mrs.
Rosa Parks
The definitive political biography of Rosa Parks
examines her six decades of activism, challenging perceptions of her
as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement
Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa
Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the
modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window
into Parks’s politics and years of activism. She shows readers how
this civil rights movement radical sought—for more than a half a
century—to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in
jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.
Katherine Bouton
Shouting Won't Help: Why I-And
50 Million Other Ameicans-Can't Hear You
For twenty-two
years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An
editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she
couldn’t hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf
in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was
“the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth
century.”
Audiologists agree that we’re experiencing a national epidemic of hearing
impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing
loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a
product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and
forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown.
Shouting Won’t Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a
widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and
Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the
problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with
doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people
afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to
illuminate the startling effects of the condition.
The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it’s like to live with
an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation’s
increasing problem with deafness
Domenica Ruta
With or Without You: A Memoir
A haunting, unforgettable
mother-daughter story for a new generation—the debut of a blazing new
lyrical voice
Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving town
north of Boston, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a
river and a salt marsh. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a
drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and
riches, and whose highbrow taste was at odds with her hardscrabble life. And
yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in her daughter a
love of stories. Kathi frequently kept Domenica home from school to watch
such classics as the Godfather movies and everything by Martin
Scorsese and Woody Allen, telling her, “This is more important. I promise.
You’ll thank me later.” And despite the fact that there was not a book to be
found in her household, Domenica developed a love of reading, which helped
her believe that she could transcend this life of undying grudges,
self-inflicted misfortune, and the crooked moral code that Kathi and her
cohorts lived by.
With or Without You is the story of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional
coming of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a misfit ’90s youth and the
necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own
addictions and demons in the process. In a brilliant stylistic feat, Ruta
has written a powerful, inspiring, compulsively readable, and finally
redemptive story about loving and leaving.
Non Fiction
Kathryn Miles
All Standing
The Remarkable Story of the
Jeanie Johnston, the Legendary Irish Famine Ship recounts the
journeys of this famous ship, her heroic crew, and the immigrants who were
ferried between Ireland and North America. Spurred by a complex web of
motivations—shame, familial obligation, and sometimes even greed—more than a
million people attempted to flee the Irish famine. More than one hundred
thousand of them would die aboard one of the five thousand aptly named
“coffin ships.” But in the face of horrific losses, a small ship named the
Jeanie Johnston never lost a passenger. Shipwright John Munn,
community leader Nicholas Donovan, Captain James Attridge, Dr. Richard
Blennerhassett, and the efforts of a remarkable crew allowed thousands of
people to find safety and fortune throughout the United States and Canada.
James R Andrews M.D.
Any Given Monday: Sports Injuries and How to Prevent Them for Athletes,
Parents and Coaches-Based on My Life in Sports Medicine
From tennis elbow to severe trauma, Dr. James Andrews has
treated countless sports injuries during his unparalleled medical career. An
orthopedic surgeon, well known for performing Tommy John surgeries, and a
consultant to some of the fiercest teams in college and professional sports,
Dr. Andrews is the father of modern sports medicine and one of the most
influential figures in the world of athletics. In Any Given Monday,
he distills his practical wisdom and professional advice to combat a growing
epidemic of injury among sports’ most vulnerable population: its young
athletes.
Elizaneth Wayland Barber
Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and
the Origins of European Dance
A fascinating exploration of an
ancient system of beliefs and its links to the evolution of dance.
From southern Greece to northern Russia, people have long
believed in female spirits, bringers of fertility, who spend their nights
and days dancing in the fields and forests. So appealing were these
spirit-maidens that they also took up residence in nineteenth-century
Romantic literature.
Archaeologist and linguist by profession, folk dancer by avocation,
Elizabeth Wayland Barber has sleuthed through ethnographic lore and
archaeological reports of east and southeast Europe, translating enchanting
folktales about these “dancing goddesses” as well as eyewitness accounts of
traditional rituals—texts that offer new perspectives on dance in agrarian
society. She then traces these goddesses and their dances back through the
Romans and Greeks to the first farmers of Europe. Along the way, she locates
the origins of many customs, including coloring Easter eggs and throwing
rice at the bride. The result is a detective story like no other and a
joyful reminder of the human need to dance. 150 illustrations and 9 maps
Matthew Goodman
Eighty Days: Nelli Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around
the World
On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the
crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World
newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record
for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that
day—and heading in the opposite direction by train—was a young journalist
from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland. Each woman was
determined to outdo Jules Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg and circle the
globe in less than eighty days. The dramatic race that ensued would span
twenty-eight thousand miles, captivate the nation, and change both
competitors’ lives forever.
The two women were a study in contrasts. Nellie Bly was a scrappy,
hard-driving, ambitious reporter from Pennsylvania coal country who sought
out the most sensational news stories, often going undercover to expose
social injustice. Genteel and elegant, Elizabeth Bisland had been born into
an aristocratic Southern family, preferred novels and poetry to newspapers,
and was widely referred to as the most beautiful woman in metropolitan
journalism. Both women, though, were talented writers who had carved out
successful careers in the hypercompetitive, male-dominated world of big-city
newspapers. Eighty Days brings these trailblazing women to life as
they race against time and each other, unaided and alone, ever aware that
the slightest delay could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
A vivid real-life re-creation of the race and its aftermath, from its
frenzied start to the nail-biting dash at its finish, Eighty Days is
history with the heart of a great adventure novel. Here’s the journey that
takes us behind the walls of Jules Verne’s Amiens estate, into the back
alleys of Hong Kong, onto the grounds of a Ceylon tea plantation, through
storm-tossed ocean crossings and mountains blocked by snowdrifts twenty feet
deep, and to many more unexpected and exotic locales from London to
Yokohama. Along the way, we are treated to fascinating glimpses of everyday
life in the late nineteenth century—an era of unprecedented technological
advances, newly remade in the image of the steamship, the railroad, and the
telegraph. For Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland—two women ahead of their
time in every sense of the word—were not only racing around the world. They
were also racing through the very heart of the Victorian age.
Bruce Levine
Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social
Revolution That Transformed the South
In
this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the
riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic,
political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying
the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended.
Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall
of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken
to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution
whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of
our first.
In 1860 the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region
where a small minority had amassed great political power and
enormous fortunes through a system of forced labor. The South’s
large population of slaveless whites almost universally
supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite the
huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these
structures of wealth and power had been shattered.
Armen Bacon
Griefland: An Intimate Portrait of Love, Loss, and Unlikely Friendship
It's the tragedy no one wants to imagine: the death of a
child. Two women meet in the darkest hours of their lives and forge an
extraordinary friendship that becomes the catalyst for exploring, enduring,
and surviving the treacherous terrain of a place they call Griefland. From
the most shattering of losses, they give readers the gift of hope
Adam Makos
A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the
War-Torn Skies of World War II
Four days before
Christmas 1943, a badly damaged American bomber struggled to fly over
wartime Germany. At its controls was a 21-year-old pilot. Half his crew
lay wounded or dead. It was their first mission. Suddenly, a sleek, dark
shape pulled up on the bomber’s tail—a German Messerschmitt fighter.
Worse, the German pilot was an ace, a man able to destroy the American
bomber in the squeeze of a trigger. What happened next would defy
imagination and later be called the most
incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.
This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives
collided in the skies that day—the American—2nd Lieutenant Charlie Brown,
a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17—and the
German—2nd Lieutenant Franz Stigler, a former airline pilot from Bavaria
who sought to avoid fighting in World War II.
A Higher Call follows both
Charlie and Franz’s harrowing missions. Charlie would face takeoffs in
English fog over the flaming wreckage of his buddies’ planes, flak bursts
so close they would light his cockpit, and packs of enemy fighters that
would circle his plane like sharks. Franz would face sandstorms in the
desert, a crash alone at sea, and the spectacle of 1,000 bombers each with
eleven guns, waiting for his attack.
Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen
skies at one another. What happened between them, the American 8th Air
Force would later classify as “top secret.” It was an act that Franz could
never mention or else face a firing squad. It was the encounter that would
haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would
search for one another, a last mission that could change their lives
forever.
Daniel Stashower
Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder
Lincoln Before the Civil War
Daniel Stashower, the
two-time Edgar award–winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl,
uncovers the riveting true story of the “Baltimore Plot,” an audacious
conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War in THE
HOUR OF PERIL.
In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham
Lincoln faced a “clear and fully-matured” threat of assassination as he
traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over
a period of thirteen days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked
feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young
widow named Kate Warne, America’s first female private eye.
As Lincoln’s train rolled inexorably toward “the seat of danger,” Pinkerton
struggled to unravel the ever-changing details of the murder plot, even as
he contended with the intractability of Lincoln and his advisors, who
refused to believe that the danger was real. With time running out Pinkerton
took a desperate gamble, staking Lincoln’s life—and the future of the
nation—on a “perilous feint” that seemed to offer the only chance that
Lincoln would survive to become president. Shrouded in secrecy—and, later,
mired in controversy—the story of the “Baltimore Plot” is one of the great
untold tales of the Civil War era, and Stashower has crafted this
spellbinding historical narrative with the pace and urgency of a
race-against-the-clock thriller.
Matt Kepnes
How to Travel the World on $50
a Day: Travel Cheaper, Longer, Smarter
For more than
half a decade, Matt Kepnes (aka Nomadic Matt) has been showing readers
of his enormously popular travel blog that traveling isn't expensive and
that it's affordable to all. He proves that as long as you think out of
the box and travel like locals, your trip doesn't have to break your
bank, nor do you need to give up luxury.
How to Travel the World on $50 a Day reveals Nomadic Matt's tips,
tricks, and secrets to comfortable budget travel based on his experience
traveling the world without giving up the sushi meals and comfortable
beds he enjoys. Offering a blend of advice ranging from travel hacking
to smart banking, you'll learn how to:
Make your money work for you and never pay overseas
bank fees again.
Use travel credit cards to gain hundreds of
thousands of free frequent flier and hotel points.
Master the ways to get FREE airline tickets and
save thousands - yes, free!
Learn the ins and outs of round the world tickets
(and whether or not you need one).
Discover what to look for in a backpack so you get
one that lasts forever (and is always comfy).
Find out where to find travel discount cards that
can save you 40% or more on your trip.
Learn where to send your mail and what to do with
your stuff before you set off on your adventure.
Get demystified about what travel insurance is, why
you need it, and how to pick the right coverage provider.
Get the secrets to eating cheaply in any city in
the world.
Learn why tourism cards are the best kept travel
secret and how to use them to save hundreds in any city you are in.
Discover all the ways you can get free
accommodation - from someone's couch to luxurious mansions - when you
travel.
Find out how I manage to cut my transportation
costs by 50% and how you can too.
Get a comprehensive list of all the best companies
to use from around the world.
Ted Kerasote
Pukka's Promise: The Quest for Longer-lived
Dogs
From the best-selling author who offers “the
most utterly compelling translation of dog to human I have ever seen”
(Jeffrey Masson), a joyful chronicle of a dog that is also a groundbreaking
answer to the question: How can we give our dogs the happiest, healthiest
lives?
When Ted Kerasote was ready for a new dog after losing his beloved Merle —
who died too soon, as all our dogs do — he knew that he would want to give
his puppy Pukka the longest life possible. But how to do that? So much has
changed in the way we feed, vaccinate, train, and live with our dogs from
even a decade ago.
In an adventure that echoes The Omnivore’s Dilemma with a canine
spin, Kerasote tackles all those subjects, questioning our conventional
wisdom and emerging with vital new information that will surprise even the
most knowledgeable dog lovers. Can a purebred be as healthy as a
mixed-breed? How many vaccines are too many? Should we rethink spaying and
neutering? Is raw food really healthier than kibble, and should your dog be
chewing more bones? Traveling the world and interviewing breeders,
veterinarians, and leaders of the animal-welfare movement, Kerasote pulls
together the latest research to help us rethink the everyday choices we make
for our companions. And as he did in Merle's Door, Kerasote
interweaves fascinating science with the charming stories of raising Pukka
among his dog friends in their small Wyoming village.
Mattie Witter
Reading Without Limits: Teaching Strategies
to Build Independent Reading for Life
Imagine a classroom where all students are engaged in
highly rigorous and fun learning every single day. That classroom
can be yours starting tomorrow.
You don’t have to be a reading specialist to pick up this book.
Anyone who wants to dramatically improve reading achievement will
find helpful suggestions. You might be a third grade teacher whose
students have mastered decoding, and you are ready to build their
comprehension. Or you might be a high school science teacher whose
students aren’t yet reading on level with deep critical thinking.
This book is for you. It doesn’t matter whether you are a public,
charter, private, or alternative education teacher: the Reading
Without Limits program works in each one.
Along with hundreds of ready-to-use teaching strategies, Reading
Without Limits comes with a supplemental website where teachers
can download even more resources for free!
Reading Without Limits
is the first book offered in the KIPP Educator Series. KIPP, or the
Knowledge is Power Program, began in 1994. As of Fall 2012, there
are 125 KIPP schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia
serving nearly 40,000 students climbing the mountain to and through
college.
Glenn Frankel
Searchers: The Making of an
American Legend
In 1836
in East Texas, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by
Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and eventually became the
wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her capture, she was
reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to
her white family, to die in misery and obscurity. Cynthia Ann's
story has been told and re-told over generations to become a
foundational American tale. The myth gave rise to operas and
one-act plays, and in the 1950s to a novel by Alan LeMay, which
would be adapted into one of Hollywood's most legendary films,
The Searchers, "The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest... and Most
Beautiful Picture Ever Made!" directed by John Ford and starring
John Wayne.
Glenn Frankel, beginning in Hollywood and then returning to the
origins of the story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a
timeless film and a quintessentially American myth. The dominant
story that has emerged departs dramatically from documented
history: it is of the inevitable triumph of white civilization,
underpinned by anxiety about the sullying of white women by
"savages." What makes John Ford's film so powerful, and so
important, Frankel argues, is that it both upholds that myth and
undermines it, baring the ambiguities surrounding race, sexuality,
and violence in the settling of the West and the making of
America.
Neil Shubin
Universe Within: Discovering the Common
History of Rocks, Planets, and People
From one of our
finest and most popular science writers, and the best-selling author of
Your Inner Fish, comes the answer to a scientific mystery as big as the
world itself: How are the events that formed our solar system billions of
years ago embedded inside each of us?
In Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin delved into the amazing connections
between human bodies—our hands, heads, and jaws—and the structures in fish
and worms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. In The Universe
Within, with his trademark clarity and exuberance, Shubin takes an even
more expansive approach to the question of why we look the way we do.
Starting once again with fossils, he turns his gaze skyward, showing us how
the entirety of the universe’s fourteen-billion-year history can be seen in
our bodies. As he moves from our very molecular composition (a result of
stellar events at the origin of our solar system) through the workings of
our eyes, Shubin makes clear how the evolution of the cosmos has profoundly
marked our own bodies.
Marty Markary
Unaccountable: What Hospitals
Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care
Dr.
Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined
in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy
surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the
nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to
cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that
routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the
wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting.
Over the last ten years, neither error rates nor costs have come
down, despite scientific progress and efforts to curb expenses.
Why? To patients, the healthcare system is a black box. Doctors
and hospitals are unaccountable, and the lack of transparency
leaves both bad doctors and systemic flaws unchecked. Patients
need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can
make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose
dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive
change nationally, using the power of the free market.
Unaccountable is a powerful, no-nonsense, non-partisan diagnosis
for healing our hospitals and reforming our broken healthcare
system.