Adult

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, HOW TO LIVE, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind.

In November 1596, a woman signed a document that would nearly destroy the career of William Shakespeare. Who was this woman who played such an instrumental, yet little known, role in Shakespeare's life? Never far from controversy when she was alive, Lady Elizabeth Russell, the self-styled Dowager Countess of Bedford, has been edited out of public memory, yet the chain of events she set in motion would make Shakespeare the legendary figure we all know today.

David Leadbetter is the most recognized golf instructor in the history of the game. His new book, THE A SWING, is his first in a decade and is an evolution of his swing theories that have successfully helped thousands of golfers globally. His tour players, whom he has coached over the years, have amassed 19 major golf championships. David has been prolific during his 30+ year career in producing books, videos and teaching aids that have inspired golfers of every level to reach their potential.

Ben Hogan’s accomplishments on the golf course are the stuff of legends, but his life off it was exceedingly private. In this biography, author Tim Scott demonstrates why such public perception was not representative of Hogan’s personality, offering a firsthand glimpse into the famous golfer’s humor and sensitivity. Hogan wasn’t perfect, and many of his fine qualities were never made public until now, as Tim Scott shares his personal experience with Hogan, as well as Hogan’s friends, family and acquaintances.

His father didn’t want him playing golf, he was stricken with tuberculosis at 33, and he used a golf swing pros would never teach today. Yet he is renowned for being the world’s first superstar golfer and greatest of his time. He was America’s first golf hero, yet most American golfers know very little about him. At 19 he won the U.S. National Open and did it again the following year. However, he was ruthlessly maligned by Golf Magazine and the film The Greatest Game Ever Played.

Michael Bamberger, who has covered golf for 20 years at Sports Illustrated, shows us the big names as we’ve never seen them before: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Curtis Strange, Fred Couples --- and the late Ken Venturi. But he also chronicles the legendary figures known only to insiders, who nevertheless have left an indelible mark on the sport. All these figures, from the marquee names to the unknowns, have changed the game. What they all share is a game that courses through their collective veins like a drug.

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was 15, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Judy Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men, and how was it that they achieved what they did? David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book --- until now. In ROMANTIC OUTLAWS, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN and the Romantic visionary who gave the world FRANKENSTEIN --- two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy.