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Reviews

Reviews

by Piers Dudgeon - Biography, Nonfiction

Maeve Binchy's heartwarming tales of love, life and loss made her one of America’s best-loved storytellers. Her novels, which sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, captured imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic in a way that most authors only dream of. In this extraordinary biography, Piers Dudgeon reveals that the inspiration for many of her stories came from Maeve’s own hard-won experience growing up in Ireland.

by Marja Mills - Memoir, Nonfiction

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is one of the best loved novels of the 20th century. But for the last 50 years, the book’s celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where she has lived with her sister, Alice, for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door to journalist Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation --- and a great friendship.

by David Reynolds - History, Nonfiction

One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In THE LONG SHADOW, historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the 20th century.

by Lawrence Goldstone - History, Nonfiction

Wilbur and Orville Wright are two of the greatest innovators in history, and together they solved the centuries-old riddle of powered, heavier-than-air flight. Glenn Hammond Curtiss was the most talented machinist of his day --- tackling first the motorcycle and later turning his eyes toward the skies to become the fastest man aloft. But between the Wrights and Curtiss bloomed a poisonous rivalry and patent war so powerful that it shaped aviation in its early years and drove one of the three men to his grave.

by Maria Mutch - Nonfiction

Maria Mutch explores the miraculous power that care and communication have in the face of the deep, personal isolation that often comes with disability. A chronicle of the witching hours between midnight and 6am, this meditative book takes place during the two-year period in which Mutch’s son Gabriel, who is autistic and also has Down syndrome, rarely slept through the night. We see both Gabriel’s difficult childhood and Maria’s introduction to the world of multiple disability parenting.

by Sheryl Sandberg - Business, Nonfiction, Self-Help

Expanded and updated exclusively for graduates just entering the workforce, this edition of LEAN IN includes a letter to graduates from Sheryl Sandberg and six additional chapters from experts offering advice on finding and getting the most out of a first job; résumé writing; best interviewing practices; negotiating your salary; listening to your inner voice; owning who you are; and leaning in for millennial men.

by Barbara Ehrenreich - Memoir, Nonfiction

In middle age, Barbara Ehrenreich came across the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence and set out to reconstruct that quest, which had taken her to the study of science and through a cataclysmic series of uncanny --- or, as she later learned to call them, "mystical" --- experiences. A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search.

by Boyd Varty - Nature, Nonfiction

Boyd Varty grew up on Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa. But it wasn’t just a sanctuary for animals; it was also a place for ravaged land to flourish again and for the human spirit to be restored. When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years of imprisonment, he came to the reserve to recover. CATHEDRAL OF THE WILD is Varty’s memoir of his life in this exquisite and vast refuge.

by Joan Barthel - Biography, Nonfiction

In this riveting biography of Elizabeth Seton, critically acclaimed and bestselling author Joan Barthel tells the mesmerizing story of a woman whose life featured wealth and poverty, passion and sorrow, love and loss. Elizabeth resisted male clerical control of her religious order, as nuns are doing today, and the publication of her story could not be more timely.

by Julene Bair - Memoir, Nonfiction

Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas’s beautiful Smoky Valley. Part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family pumps over 200 million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family’s role in its depletion haunts her.