Minutes before then-teenager Brian Walsh was called to help put out another fire, he was on top of the world. An hour later, he had suffered such profound burns to his face that he was unidentifiable to his fellow firefighters. Nearly everyone expected him to die that night. He did not. Boldly forging a path forward with courage, grace and determination, Brian silenced his doubters and defied all expectations. Decades later, Brian is an extraordinarily successful and renowned financial planner, family man, community fixture, philanthropist, motivational speaker and industry leader. In BEYOND THE MASK, he tells his incredible story, sharing the lessons that only tragedy could teach and how they helped him --- and can help anyone --- achieve greater success, inside and out.

A mother’s love and persistence are put to the test when her teen daughter is stricken with a mysterious, debilitating illness. As time goes on, Dana’s condition drives everyone away --- everyone, that is, except for her mother, Anna. Finally, desperate to improve Dana’s health, the two hit the road in search of a cure. Dana’s chronic symptoms require endless supplements, pharmaceuticals and dietary restrictions, evoking a heroine’s journey. Full of humor, blind hope and alternative medicine, DANCING IN THE NARROWS is a poignant chronicle of Anna and Dana’s multiyear odyssey toward healing from trauma.

Is the human race conclusively set for self-annihilation? As futurists prophesize, are we only decades away from extinguishing the planet? Or are we capable of changing this trajectory because of what YOU start today? Renewal is about how each one of us can: Renew ourselves at a body-mind-spirit level. Renew our society and our environment. Renew the systems we operate with. Written to serve as a practical guide for everyone's day-to-day “karma,” RENEWAL is strung together by the charismatic Guru Pranachandra, whose discourse drives home the vital message: that the world is a mere 30 habits away from Renewal.

Natasha Gregson Wagner’s mother, Natalie Wood, was a child actress who became a legendary movie star. She and Natasha’s stepfather, the actor Robert Wagner, were a Hollywood it-couple twice over --- first in the 1950s, and then again when they remarried in the '70s. But Natalie’s sudden death by drowning off Catalina Island at the age of 43 devastated her family, turned Robert Wagner into a person of interest, and transformed a vibrant wife, mother and actress into a figure of tragedy. The weekend has long been shrouded in rumors and scandalous tabloid speculation, but until now there has never been an account of how the events and their aftermath were experienced by Natalie’s beloved eldest daughter. Here, for the first time, Natasha addresses the questions surrounding that night to clear her beloved stepfather’s name.

To this day, mention the name “Andy Warhol” to almost anyone, and you’ll hear about his famous images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. But though Pop Art became synonymous with Warhol’s name, his life and work are infinitely more complex and multi-faceted than that. In WARHOL, esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. “The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was,” as Gopnik writes. “That’s why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure,” from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing as the child of immigrants to his early career in commercial art to his total immersion in the “performance” of being an artist, accompanied by global fame and stardom --- and his attempted assassination. 

Marisa Meltzer began her first diet at the age of five. Growing up an indoors-loving child in Northern California, she learned from an early age that weight was the one part of her life she could neither change nor even really understand. Fast forward nearly four decades. Marisa comes across an obituary for Jean Nidetch, the Queens, New York housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963. Weaving Jean's incredible story as weight loss maven and pathbreaking entrepreneur with Marisa's own journey through Weight Watchers, she chronicles the deep parallels, and enduring frustrations, in each woman's decades-long efforts to lose weight and keep it off.

The Kennedys have always been a family of charismatic adventurers, raised to take risks and excel, living by the dual family mottos: "To whom much is given, much is expected" and "Win at all costs." And they do --- but at a price. Across decades and generations, the Kennedys have occupied a unique place in the American imagination: charmed, cursed, at once familiar and unknowable. THE HOUSE OF KENNEDY is a revealing, fascinating account of America's most storied family, as told by America's most trusted storyteller.

In SHELTER FROM THE MACHINE, Jason Strange shows where homesteaders fit, and don't fit, within contemporary America. Blending history with personal stories, Strange visits pig roasts and bohemian work parties to find people engaged in a lifestyle that offers challenge and fulfillment for those in search of virtues like self-employment, frugality, contact with nature, and escape from the mainstream. He also lays bare the vast differences in education and opportunity that leave some homesteaders dispossessed, while charting the tensions that arise when people seek refuge from the ills of modern society --- only to find themselves indelibly marked by the system they dreamed of escaping.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the booming popularity of country music threw a spotlight on a new generation of innovative female artists. These individuals blazed trails as singers, musicians and performers even as the industry hemmed in their potential popularity with labels like woman hillbilly, singing cowgirl and honky-tonk angel. Stephanie Vander Wel looks at the careers of artists like Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox and Kitty Wells against the backdrop of country music's golden age. Analyzing recordings and appearances on radio, film and television, she connects performances to real and imagined places and examines how the music sparked new ways for women listeners to imagine the open range, the honky-tonk and the home.

As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, three unlikely heroes --- a driver banned from the best European teams because of his Jewish heritage, the owner of a faltering automaker company, and the adventurous daughter of an American multimillionaire --- banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the Grand Prix, the apex of motorsport. Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, FASTER chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during history’s darkest hour.