Carefully Selected Book Recommendations for Lifelong Learners this Fall
For the Lifelong Learner reader type, we've got you covered with books that are perfect for fall! Whether you're looking to delve into the depths of history, explore the frontiers of science, or uncover the secrets of personal growth, our collection of great new books has you covered.
December new releases
The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder
by Douglas Preston - David Grann
From the jungles of Honduras to macabre archaeological sites in the American Southwest, Douglas Preston's journalistic explorations have taken him across the globe. He broke the story of an extraordinary mass grave of animals killed by the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, he explored what lay hidden in the booby-trapped Money Pit on Oak Island, and he roamed the haunted hills of Italy in search of the Monster of Florence. When he hasn't been co-authoring bestselling thrillers featuring FBI Agent Pendergast, Preston has been writing about some of the world's strangest and most dramatic mysteries.
The Lost Tomb brings together an astonishing and compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present.
The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story
by Sam Wasson
Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American dreamers, and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success, when he was only thirty. Through Zoetrope's experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than fifty years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker's dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades in the making film and the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis.
Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola's archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait. Here is Coppola, charming, brilliant, given to seeing life and art in terms of family and community, but also plagued by restlessness, recklessness and a desire to operate perpetually at the extremes.
As Wasson makes clear, the story of Zoetrope is also the story of Coppola's wife, Eleanor Coppola, and their children, and of personal lives inseparable from artistic passion. It is a story that charts the divergent paths of Coppola and his co-founder and onetime apprentice, George Lucas, and of their very different visions of art and commerce. And it is a story inextricably bound up in the making of one of the greatest, quixotic masterpieces ever attempted, Apocalypse Now, and of what Coppola found in the jungles of the Philippines when he walked the razor's edge. That story, already the stuff of legend, has never been fully told, until this extraordinary book.
What Really Happens in Vegas: True Stories of the People Who Make Vegas, Vegas
by James Patterson - Mark Seal
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas--until now. James Patterson shows the real Vegas in a dazzling journey through "lively tales of those who labor and dream in Sin City" (Kirkus).
In What Really Happens in Vegas, full of surprises for both newcomers and Las Vegas regulars, James Patterson and Vanity Fair contributing editor Mark Seal transport readers from the thrill of adrenaline-fueled vice to the glitter of A-list celebrity and entertainment.
When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown
by Kenan Thompson
When I Was Your Age is a hilarious, heartwarming and surprising ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and luck, life, and learning from the school of hard knocks, from SNL's longest-serving actor, Kenan Thompson
Kenan Thompson is Saturday Night Live's longest-ever-serving cast member and a star of such pioneering sketches as "Black Jeopardy" and is hugely beloved thanks to a tidal wave of nostalgic fans who grew up on early 2000s classics All That, Good Burger, and Kenan & Kel on Nickelodeon.
He's also a dad (to two girls) in his mid-40s living in suburbia, and whose universal, relatable, family-friendly humor has created unbelievable appeal and engagement from fans from middle America to coastal elites. Becoming a dad sucked the cool right out of him -- and he's OK with that!
When I Was Your Age is packed with hilarious yet poignant essays that are aimed to offer any reader valuable advice on parenting, focusing on positivity, and having fun in life. Kids, new parents, fellow fathers, budding comics, and aunties who want to pinch his cheeks, can all learn from his biggest mistakes and most triumphant victories. There's something for everybody here!
Elvis and the Colonel: An Insider's Look at the Most Legendary Partnership in Show Business
by Greg McDonald - Marshall Terrill
A fresh biography of legendary entertainment manager Colonel Tom Parker, with a contrarian and corrective point of view.
Colonel Tom Parker, often reviled in his time, led the strategy from the earliest days of Elvis's career. Together, they built the most legendary partnership in show business. For the first time, Colonel Parker's story is told by an insider, Greg McDonald, who worked under Parker for years. Never-before-heard stories of Parker's collaboration with Elvis reveal the man behind the legend and the strategies that made Elvis a commercial groundbreaker.
Ingrained lore has it that Parker took advantage of "poor country boy" Elvis to sign the singer who became "The King". But Elvis and the Colonel shows that Elvis was not foolish when it came to business arrangements.
Many of the practices Parker established are still deployed today by most major agencies. Parker's experience as a carny and an immigrant shaped his management style when he was at his peak, showing how he adapted big top practices to the big time. The heart of Elvis and the Colonel is the long, strong, warm and complex relationship between two iconic men.
November NEW RELEASES
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith - Zach Weinersmith
Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away--no climate change, no war, no Twitter--beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren't so sure it's a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn't spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won't create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you've ever wondered about, and many you've never considered:
World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
by Jeff Tweedy
What makes us fall in love with a song? What makes us want to write our own songs? Do songs help? Do songs help us live better lives? And do the lives we live help us write better songs?
After two New York Times bestsellers that cemented and expanded his legacy as one of America's best-loved performers and songwriters, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) and How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy is back with another disarming, beautiful, and inspirational book about why we listen to music, why we love songs, and how music can connect us to each other and to ourselves. Featuring fifty songs that have both changed Jeff's life and influenced his music--including songs by the Replacements, Mavis Staples, the Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton, and Billie Eilish--as well as Jeff's "Rememories," dream-like short pieces that related key moments from Jeff's life, this book is a mix of the musical, the emotional, and the inspirational in the best possible way.
Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
by H W Brands
To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.
The Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food--Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes
by Mark Kurlansky
As Julia Child once said, "It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions."
Historically, she's been right-and not just in the kitchen. Flourishing in just about every climate and culture around the world, onions have provided the essential basis not only for sautés, stews, and sauces, but for medicines, metaphors, and folklore. Now they're Kurlansky's most flavorful infatuation yet as he sets out to explore how and why the crop reigns from Italy to India and everywhere in between.
The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
by Rob Copeland
Ray Dalio does not want you to read this book.
Late last year, when the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet, announced that he was stepping down from the company he started out of his apartment nearly 50 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio cultivated an aura of international admiration and fame thanks to his company's eye-popping success, coupled with a mystique he encouraged with frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles. In The Fund, award-winning New York Times journalist Rob Copeland punctures this carefully-constructed narrative of the benevolent business titan, exposing his much-promoted "principles" as one of the great feats of hubris in modern memory--in practice, they encouraged a toxic culture of paranoia and backstabbing.
The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI
by Li Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei
Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li "one of a tiny group of scientists--a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table--who are responsible for AI's recent remarkable advances."
Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China's middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.
Around the World in Eighty Games: From Tarot to Tic-Tac-Toe, Catan to Chutes and Ladders, a Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the World's Greatest
by Marcus Du Sautoy
Where should you move first in Connect 4? What is the best property in Monopoly? And how can pi help you win rock paper scissors?
Spanning millennia, oceans and continents, countries and cultures, Around the World in Eighty Games gleefully explores how mathematics and games have always been deeply intertwined. Renowned mathematician Marcus du Sautoy investigates how games provided the first opportunities for deep mathematical insight into the world, how understanding math can help us play games better, and how both math and games are integral to human psychology and culture.
Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting
by Lisa Genova
Have you ever felt a crushing wave of panic when you can't for the life of you remember the name of that actor in the movie you saw last week, or you walk into a room only to forget why you went there in the first place? If you're over forty, you're probably not laughing. You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or dementia. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make, or day we experience. Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn't mean it's broken or succumbing to disease. Forgetting is actually part of being human.
In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day).
October NEW RELEASES
Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World
by Mary Beard
In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome, from its slightly shabby Iron Age origins to its reign as the undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean. Now, drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and writing about Roman history, Beard turns to the emperors who ruled the Roman Empire, beginning with Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) and taking us through the nearly three centuries--and some thirty emperors--that separate him from the boy-king Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE).
Yet Emperor of Rome is not your typical chronological account of Roman rulers, one emperor after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Instead, Beard asks different, often larger and more probing questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? What kind of jokes did Augustus tell? And for that matter, what really happened, for example, between the emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard tracks the emperor down at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven.
The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
by Stuart A Reid
It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium--one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo's new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling "the Congo crisis." Dag Hammarskjöld, the tidy Swede serving as UN secretary-general, quickly arranged the organization's biggest peacekeeping mission in history. But chaos was still spreading. Frustrated with the fecklessness of the UN and spurned by the United States, Lumumba then approached the Soviets for help--an appeal that set off alarm bells at the CIA. To forestall the spread of Communism in Africa, the CIA sent word to its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin: Lumumba had to go.
Within a year, everything would unravel. The CIA plot to murder Lumumba would fizzle out, but he would be deposed in a CIA-backed coup, transferred to enemy territory in a CIA-approved operation, and shot dead by Congolese assassins. Hammarskjöld, too, would die, in a mysterious plane crash en route to negotiate a cease-fire with the Congo's rebellious southeast. And a young, ambitious military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who had once sworn fealty to Lumumba, would seize power with U.S. help and misrule the country for more than three decades. For the Congolese people, the events of 1960-61 represented the opening chapter of a long horror story. For the U.S. government, however, they provided a playbook for future interventions.
Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America
by Steve Inskeep
A compelling and nuanced exploration of Abraham Lincoln's political acumen, illuminating a great politician's strategy in a country divided--and lessons for our own disorderly present
In Differ We Must, Inskeep illuminates Lincoln's life through sixteen encounters, some well-known, some obscure, but all imbued with new significance here. Each interaction was with a person who differed from Lincoln, and in each someone wanted something from the other. While Lincoln didn't always change his critics' beliefs--many went to war against him--he did learn how to make his beliefs actionable. He told jokes, relied on sarcasm, and often made fun of himself--but behind the banter was a distinguished storyteller who carefully chose what to say and what to withhold. He knew his limitations and, as history came to prove, he knew how to prioritize. Many of his greatest acts came about through his engagement with people who disagreed with him--meaning that in these meetings, Lincoln became the Lincoln we know.
The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA
by Liza Mundy
Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency's secrets. Despite discrimination--even because of it--women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA's shrewdest operatives.
They were unlikely spies--and that's exactly what made them perfect for the role. Because women were seen as unimportant, pioneering female intelligence officers moved unnoticed around Bonn, Geneva, and Moscow, stealing secrets from under the noses of their KGB adversaries. Back at headquarters, women built the CIA's critical archives--first by hand, then by computer. And they noticed things that the men at the top didn't see. As the CIA faced an identity crisis after the Cold War, it was a close-knit network of female analysts who spotted the rising threat of al-Qaeda--though their warnings were repeatedly brushed aside.