Smart Summer Reads for Lifelong Learner Reader Types
New Nonfiction, Memoirs & Big-Idea Books Arriving This Summer
If you're always chasing your next big idea, inspired by true stories, or fascinated by how the world works, you're a Lifelong Learner. At Bookfinity, we recommend reads that fuel your curiosity—memoirs, biographies, history, science, and more—designed to keep your mind engaged.
This summer, explore June through August releases that dive deep into personal journeys, global issues, and groundbreaking discoveries. Whether you're reading on the beach or in your favorite thinking chair, these nonfiction picks are sure to satisfy your inner scholar.
August New Releases
Clodia of Rome: Champion of the Republic
by Douglas Boin
One of Rome's most powerful women, Clodia has been maligned over two thousand years as a promiscuous, husband-murdering harlot--thanks to her starring role in one of Cicero's most famous speeches in the Forum. But Cicero was lying, in defense of his own property and interests. Like so many women libeled or erased from history, Clodia had a life that was much more interesting, complex, and nuanced than the corrupted version passed down through generations
Drawing on neglected sources and deep, empathetic study of Roman lives, classicist Douglas Boin reconstructs Clodia's eventful passage through her politically divided and tumultuous times, from her privileged childhood to her picking up a family baton of egalitarian activism. A widow and single mother, Clodia had a charisma and power that rivaled her male contemporaries and struck fear into the heart of Rome's political elite. That is, until a sensational murder trial, rife with corruption and told here in riveting detail, brought about her fall from grace. For generations of women who came after her--including a young Cleopatra, who might have met a disgraced Clodia when she first came to Rome--Clodia's story would loom as a cautionary tale about the hostilities women would face when they challenged the world of men.
Freed from the caricature that Cicero painted of her, Clodia serves as a reminder of countless women whose stories have been erased from the historical record. In a Rome whose citizens were engaged in heated debates on imperialism, immigration, and enfranchisement, amidst rising anxieties about women's role in society, Clodia was an icon--one worth remembering today.
Ghosts of Hiroshima
by Charles Pellegrino
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER JAMES CAMERON
From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Her Name and Titanic, this stunning hardcover edition includes sprayed edges, printed end sheets, and interior illustrations, and arrives on the eightieth anniversary of the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.
GHOSTS OF HIROSHIMA
For all humanity, it was, literally and figuratively, childhood's end.
No one recognized the flashes of bright light that filled the sky. Survivors described colors so new that they couldn't be named. The blast wave that followed seemed to strike with no sound at all. In that silence came the dawn of atomic death for two hundred thousand souls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On August 6, 1945, twenty-nine-year-old naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on the last day of a business trip and looking forward to returning home to his wife and their infant son when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived the atomic blast and got on a train to Nagasaki, only to be bombed and live through the nuclear devastation of that city.
Jacob Beser, a Manhattan Project engineer, looked down from Hiroshima's atomic strike plane and saw the entire ground boiling. Years afterward, he'd refer to what he'd witnessed as "the most bizarre and spectacular two events in the history of man's inhumanity to man."
From that first millionth of a second, people began to die in previously unimaginable ways. Near Hiroshima's hypocenter, teeth were scattered on the ground, speckles of incandescent blood were converted to carbon steel, a child's marbles melted to blobs of molten glass.
A mile away, nature's mysterious shock-cocoon effect spared two young siblings while the world around them was stamped flat. Ship designer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was similarly cocooned. All three fled Hiroshima and arrived in Nagasaki, just in time to face the second atomic bombing.
Another child of Hiroshima, Tomiko Morimoto, had run off to her work detail after yelling at her mother and slamming the door. She would never see her house or her mother again. In regret for the rest of her life, she would tell everyone willing to listen never to leave home with mean words, never to leave without expressing at least some small sign of love.
From the bombs were born radioactive substances that mimicked, among other things, calcium in growing bones and which, ten years after, filled entire hospitals with a shocking lesson: Nuclear weapons, more than anything else invented by human minds, were child-killers.
Based on years of forensic archaeological research combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, during which our modern civilization entered its most challenging phase--a nuclear adolescence that, unless we are very wise and learn from our past, we may not survive.
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
by Susana M Morris
A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.
As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity--our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project--the nation's transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut--made possible by chattel slavery--to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.
In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler's story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women's liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler's personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler's stories.
Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. "Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God's sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn't stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you're afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It's about not being able to stop at all."
The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World
by Peter Guralnick
From the award-winning biographer of Elvis Presley, a groundbreaking dual portrait of the relationship between the iconic artist and his legendary manager--drawing on a wealth of the Colonel's never-before-seen correspondence to reveal that this oft-reviled figure was in fact a confidant, friend, and architect of his client's success
In early 1955, Colonel Tom Parker--manager of the number-one country music star of the day--heard that an unknown teenager from Memphis had just drawn a crowd of more than eight hundred people to a Texas schoolhouse, and headed south to investigate. Within days, Parker was sending out telegrams and letters to promoters and booking agents: "We have a new boy that is absolutely going to be one of the biggest things in the business in a very short time. His name is ELVIS PRESLEY." Later that year, after signing with RCA, the young man sent a telegram of his own: "Dear Colonel, Words can never tell you how my folks and I appreciate what you did for me.... I love you like a father."
The close personal bond between Elvis and the Colonel has never been fully portrayed before. It was a relationship founded on mutual admiration and support. From the outset, the Colonel defended Elvis fiercely and indefatigably against RCA executives, Elvis's own booking agents, and movie moguls. But in their final years together, the story grew darker, as the Colonel found himself unable to protect Elvis from himself or control growing problems of his own.
Featuring troves of previously unpublished correspondence, revelatory for both its insights and emotional depth, The Colonel and the King provides a unique perspective on not one but two American originals. A tale of the birth of the modern-day superstar (an invention almost entirely of Parker's making) by Peter Guralnick, the most acclaimed music writer of his generation, it presents these two misunderstood icons as they've never been seen before: with all of their brilliance, humor, and flaws on full display.
Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs
Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work.
Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer's personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin's last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.
Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships--geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic-- and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer's creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.
The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990
by Jonathan Mahler
A sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in 1980s New York that changed the city forever--and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation--from the bestselling author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning
"A rip-roaring, sweeping, essential work of history . . . a deeply reported and brilliantly observed account of how the modern city was born and why all of us continue to live with the results."--Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life
New York entered 1986 as a city reborn. Record profits on Wall Street sent waves of money splashing across Manhattan, bringing a battered city roaring back to life.
But it also entered 1986 as a city whose foundation was beginning to crack. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illnesses. Nearly one-third of the city's Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.
The events of the next four years would split the city open. Howard Beach. Black Monday. Tawana Brawley. The crack epidemic. The birth of ACT UP. The Central Park jogger. The release of Do the Right Thing. And a cast of outsized characters--Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Kramer--would compete to shape the city's future while building their own mythologies.
The Gods of New York is a kaleidoscopic and deeply immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture--a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker--when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened.
The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers
by Cheryl McKissack Daniel - Nick Chiles
The riveting story of the McKissack family--the founders of the leading Black design and construction firm in the United States, from its beginnings in the mid-1800s to its thriving status today--in a moving celebration of resilience and innovation.
Captured in his native West Africa and enslaved on American shores by a North Carolina plantation owner, Moses McKissack I began to build his way to emancipation right from the start. Becoming an enslaved craftsman, he picked up the trade his family would become famous for in the earliest years of the 19th century, passing his learnings down to his children and seeing them off to freedom after the Civil War.
The family would settle in Tennessee, getting its bearings in the building trades despite rampant discrimination, establishing a foothold that now sees its latest generations working at the absolute peak of its industry.
The family's fingerprints have been left all across the United States, spanning from Reconstruction to contemporary times, through projects like the Morris Memorial Building, Capers C.M.E. Church, John F. Kennedy International Airport, and Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field.
Here, Cheryl McKissack Daniel, CEO and president of McKissack & McKissack, reveals the full fascinating story of her family. So much more than an exploration of architectural achievements, The Black Family Who Built America is also a compelling illustration of how history rhymes and reverberates, and a celebration of the human spirit's ability to overcome adversity and drive change. From Moses's humble beginnings to Cheryl's current role as a trailblazer and champion of diversity, the family's journey underscores the importance of perseverance, innovation, and strategic vision in shaping a legacy that continues to inspire and impact the construction industry.
This Happened to Me: A Reckoning
by Kate Price
"Price not only rises above the hurt and hate, she uses her hard-won insights to shine a light for others." --Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author
For readers of Educated, The Glass Castle, and Know My Name comes a powerful new memoir that is a remarkable testament of survival and resilience. At once harrowing and exquisite, haunting and inspiring, Kate Price's story will leave readers with a profound assurance in the power to heal.
Kate Price grew up in a small mill town in central Pennsylvania with her sister and parents in northern Appalachia. At the insistence of her mother, and through her academic accomplishments, Price escaped the unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse that had plagued her family for generations. She started a new life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in pursuit of her master's and PhD. But despite having left this dark world behind, it still kept a firm grip on her.
Overcome with unexplainable grief and sadness and having sustained a series of hazy flashbacks accompanied by a "chilling of her blood and uncomfortable feeling in her bones," Price sought out Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist to help heal her constant emotional pain through EMDR therapy. He went on to write the bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, which features Price's story, as the two worked together to find out about her past. When Price, whose brain had been protecting her by shutting out these horrific memories, felt safe enough, she along with van der Kolk as her guide, discovered what that darkness that lay within her was. Her father had abused and trafficked her as a child.
Price grappled with what had been revealed. Did this really happen to her? How could a parent do this to a child? A dedicated researcher and academic, she knew she needed confirmation, proof that what she had remembered had happened. And so began a 10-year quest alongside a journalist, to prove what Price knew to be her truth. With many trips back to the hometown she thought she had left forever, the two eventually found the hard-earned evidence Price had been searching for.
In this exquisitely rendered, transformative memoir, Price describes how she broke free of that which had defined her childhood and went on to create a purpose-driven life and family, on her own terms. Eventually returning to the same Appalachian community to use her education and advocacy to help ensure children are given the attention, protection, and services that she never received.
From victim to advocate, from fearful child to empowered adult, and from despair to triumph, This Happened to Me is a story of astonishing resilience and breathtaking determination.
The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb
by Garrett M Graff
On the eightieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Pulitzer Prize finalist whose work is "oral history at its finest" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) delivers an epic narrative of the atomic bomb's creation and deployment, woven from the voices of hundreds of scientists, generals, soldiers, and civilians.
The building of the atomic bomb is the most audacious undertaking in human history: a rush by a small group of scientists and engineers in complete secrecy to unlock the most fundamental power of the universe. Even today, eighty years later, the Manhattan Project evokes boldness, daring, and the grandest of dreams: bringing an end to World War II in the Pacific, a conflict that already had stretched from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal to Leyte Gulf to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. As Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen fight those battles, men and women strive to discover the atom's secrets at laboratories and plants in places like Chicago, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos. On August 6, 1945, the world discovers what the end of the war--and the new global age--will look like. Science and politics will never be the same again.
The road to the first atomic bomb ends in Hiroshima, Japan, but it begins in Hitler's Europe, where brilliant physicists following the path that Einstein blazed are forced to flee fascism and antisemitism--bringing to America their determination to harness atomic power before it falls into the Führer's arsenal. The Devil Reached Toward the Sky traces the breakthroughs and the breakneck pace of atomic development in the years leading up to 1945, then takes us inside the B-29 bombers carrying Little Boy and Fat Man and finally to ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky is the panoramic narrative of how ordinary people grapple with extraordinary wartime risks, sacrifices, and choices that will transform the course of history. Theorists and engineers dare to experiment with forces of terrifying power for the purpose of creating an atomic bomb, knowing each passing day costs soldiers' lives--but fearing too the consequences of their creation. Hundreds of thousands of workers toil around the clock to produce uranium and plutonium in an endeavor so classified that most people involved learn the reality of their effort only when it is announced on the radio by President Truman. The 509th Composite Group trains for a mission whose details are kept a mystery until shortly before takeoff, when the Enola Gay and Bockscar are loaded with bombs the crew has never seen. And the civilians of two Japanese cities that have been spared American attacks--preserved for the sake of judging the power of the bomb on an intact city--escape their pulverized homes into a greater hellscape.
Drawing from dozens of oral history archives and hundreds of books, reports, letters, diaries, and transcripts from across the US, Japan, and Europe, Graff masterfully blends the memories and perspectives from the known and unknown--key figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves, and President Truman; the crews of the B-29 bombers; and the haunting stories of the Hibakusha--the "bomb-affected people." Both a testament to human ingenuity and resilience and a compelling drama told by the participants who lived it, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky is a singular, profound, and searing book about the inception of our most powerful weapon and its haunting legacy.
july new releases
Nice Girls Don't Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power
by Parvati Shallow
"A bible for badass women."--SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR
"Gripping and liberating."--ADAM GRANT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again
"Survivor legend and gay icon, Parvati Shallow has won my heart all over again."--BOWEN YANG
A bold, eye-opening memoir about survival, trauma, and healing, from one of reality television's most talked-about stars
At twenty-five years old, Parvati Shallow was plunged into fame and fortune after becoming the million-dollar winner of the reality television series Survivor. But despite her success, the ghosts of her traumatic past, coupled with the harsh glare of the public eye, kept her locked in a survival cycle of fear and shame that sabotaged her self-confidence and eroded her self-trust. It wasn't until a series of painful life events, including the death of her younger brother and a challenging divorce, that she found herself on a path of healing that would awaken her true power and reset the course of her life.
Jfk: Public, Private, Secret
by J Randy Taraborrelli
From the New York Times bestselling Kennedy historian and author of Jackie: Public, Private, Secret comes the other side of the story--her husband's: JFK: Public, Private, Secret.
In this definitive portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy--one of America's most consequential and enigmatic presidents--J. Randy Taraborrelli delivers a deeply researched and authoritative biography. More than the story of a presidency, this is an intimate study of a man whose public triumphs were shaped--and at times overshadowed--by the complex realities of his private life, from his legendary family to his marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted over twenty-five years--as well as candid, first-hand oral histories from the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, rare internal reports from the Secret Service, detailed files from the National Archives, and intelligence documents from both the CIA and FBI. This is JFK as never before captured by history: brilliant yet fallible, revered yet human--a figure whose legacy continues to shape America and the world.
Clint: The Man and the Movies
by Shawn Levy
A Los Angeles Times “Must Read Book for Summer”
From the acclaimed film critic and New York Times bestselling biographer of Paul Newman, a revelatory portrait of Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood, the most prolific and versatile actor-director in movie history and an imposing icon of American culture for six decades.
C-L-I-N-T. That single short, sharp syllable has stood as an emblem of American manhood and morality and sheer bloody-minded will, on-screen and off-screen, for more than sixty years. Whether he's facing down bad guys on a Western street (Old West or new, no matter), staring through the lens of a camera, or accepting one of his movies' thirteen Oscars (including two for Best Picture), he is as blunt, curt, and solid as his name, a star of the old-school stripe and one of the most accomplished directors of his time, a man of rock and iron and brute force: Clint.
To read the story of Clint Eastwood is to understand nearly a century of American culture. No Hollywood figure has so completely and complexly stood inside the changing climates of post-World War II America. At age ninety-five, he has lived a tumultuous century and embodied much of his time and many of its contradictions.
The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon
by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
CBS Sunday Morning Summer Book Report Pick - New York Times "Books to Read in July" - A Barnes & Noble Best Book of July - A BookBub Beach Read Pick
The riveting and cinematic story of a partnership that would change the world forever
In 1928, a young social worker and hobby pilot named Amelia Earhart arrived in the office of George Putnam, heir to the Putnam & Sons throne and hitmaker, on the hunt for the right woman for a secret flying mission across the Atlantic. A partnership--professional and soon otherwise--was born.
The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century
by Tim Weiner
One of Foreign Policy's "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"
At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn't being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA's officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.
Then came September 11th, 2001.
Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America
by Scott Ellsworth
From the author of The Ground Breaking, longlisted for the National Book Award, comes a riveting saga of the last year of the Civil War--and a revealing new account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln
Told with a page-turning pace, New York Times bestselling author and historian Scott Ellsworth has written the most compelling new book about the Civil War in years. Focusing on the last, desperate months of the war, when the outcome was far from certain, Midnight on the Potomac is a story of titanic battles, political upheaval, and the long-forgotten Confederate terror war against the loyal citizens of the North. Taking us behind the scenes in the White House, along the battlefronts in Virginia, and into the conspiracies of spies and secret agents, Lincoln walks these pages, as do Grant and Sherman.
June New Releases
So Gay for You: Friendship, Found Family, and the Show That Started It All
by Kate Moennig - Leisha Hailey
An intimate, hilarious memoir of art, friendship, queerness, and found family by Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey, stars of The L Word--including never-before-shared stories and photos from behind the scenes of the show and their personal lives.
"Are you comfortable with nudity?" my manager asked.
In the early 2000s, Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey--both young artists trying to figure it all out--met at auditions for an unknown little TV show. Given that it was a show about lesbians living in Los Angeles, with the first ever ensemble cast of openly queer female characters, Kate and Leisha knew the project was going to be unlike anything else out there--that is, if it even got picked up.
Then, one million people watched the premiere. The show, which came to be called The L Word, turned into a trailblazing phenomenon. Its influence on pop culture, in the political arena, and in the lives of viewers has been lasting, impactful, even life-saving. And in addition to changing the course of television history, The L Word changed Kate and Leisha's lives forever. Suddenly, they were the faces of lesbian culture in a society still hostile to queerness. And one of them wasn't even out yet.
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir
by Molly Jong-Fast
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn't with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly's husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
It's Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground
by David Litt
A former Obama speechwriter moves to the Jersey Shore and learns to surf with the help of his brother-in-law: a tattooed, truck-driving Joe Rogan superfan.
David, the Yale-educated writer with a fear of sharks, and Matt, the daredevil electrician with a shed full of surfboards, had never been close. But as America's crises piled up and David spiraled into existential dread, he noticed that his brother-in-law was thriving. He began to suspect Matt's favorite hobby had something to do with it.
David started taking surf lessons.
The Story of Abba: Melancholy Undercover
by Jan Gradvall
Through exclusive interviews and over a decade of deep research, renowned music journalist Jan Gradvall explores the secrets to ABBA's success.
There has never been a group like ABBA. More than half a century after their songs were recorded, ABBA still make people the world over dance and sing their hearts out. In 2013, when the band had not been interviewed for over thirty years, Jan Gradvall was granted unique access to them for the next decade and the result is The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover. Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad all share their personal stories, their thoughts and their opinions about ABBA's music more openly than ever before.
Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil
by Harry Freedman
From the day that Bobby Zimmerman first turned on the radio in his parents' home in Hibbing, he'd had a pretty good idea that big things were happening.
When Bob Dylan arrived in New York one winter morning in 1961 he was a complete unknown. His music and spirit would go on to capture the hearts and minds of a generation, but what no one knew then was that, like so many before him, Dylan was concealing his Jewish origins.
Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection
by Brian Anderson
The first book to tell the full story of the Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound," an unprecedented and since unparalleled speaker system.
Loud and Clear is the first book to tell the full story of the Grateful Dead's "Wall of Sound," an unprecedented and since unparalleled speaker system that was as tall as a school bus is long and more than a hundred feet wide. The band's quest for roaring yet crystal clear sound began after their formation in 1965, colliding with the '60s progressive social climate.