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.

Impelled by runaway spending and rampant corruption, America’s much-beloved games of college basketball and football have not been so threatened since the widespread cheating scandals in the early 1950s. The specter of billion-dollar sums being showered on imperial coaches, voracious athletic directors, hordes of support staff, and lavish comforts for fat-cat fans has led to a near-deafening roar to pay the players. The injustice of such sums being amassed, in the main, from the labor of young men of color --- many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds --- cannot be justified. But MARCHING TOWARD MADNESS cites 21 reasons why the pro-pay position is wrong, while presenting comprehensive reforms to end cheating and corruption in college sports, put academics first, and end the peonage of non-white athletes once and for all.

In 1979, a fiery preacher named Jane Whaley attracted a small group of followers with a promise that she could turn their lives around. In the years since, Whaley’s following has expanded to include thousands of congregants across three continents. In their eyes she’s a prophet. And to disobey her means eternal damnation. The control Whaley exerts is absolute: she decides what her followers study, where they work, whom they can marry --- even when they can have sex. Based on hundreds of interviews, secretly recorded conversations and thousands of pages of documents, BROKEN FAITH is a terrifying portrait of life inside the Word of Faith Fellowship, and the harrowing account of one family who escaped after two decades.