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.

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.

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.

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.

On December 9, 1938, the state of Georgia executed six black men in 81 minutes in Tattnall Prison’s electric chair. While they were arrested, convicted, sentenced and executed in as little as six weeks, E. D. Rivers, the governor of the state, oversaw a pardon racket for white killers and criminals, allowed the Ku Klux Klan to infiltrate his administration, and bankrupted the state. David Beasley’s WITHOUT MERCY is the story of the stunning injustice of these executions.

These days, high SAT scores are seen as the ticket to a good college, merit aid, and ultimately a successful life. Yet for parents, the torment of cajoling kids into studying is made worse by the tangle of conflicting advice about how best to prepare. Debbie Stier made it her mission to cut through that tangle and ace the SAT. As part of her quest, Debbie took the SAT seven times, sampled test-prep methods, and bonded with her test-taking teenage son.

THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY THOREAU --- chronicling the 10 years in his life beginning with Harvard in 1837 and ending as he walked away from Walden Pond after living in his long dreamed-of cabin for only two years --- tells the dramatic (and at times heartbreaking) story of how a troubled young man found a meaningful life in a tempestuous era.

Abraham Lincoln’s official secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone outside of the president’s immediate family. As Joshua Zeitz shows, the image of a humble man with uncommon intellect who rose from obscurity to become a storied wartime leader and emancipator is very much their creation.

CUT ME LOOSE tells the story of one woman's harrowing struggle to define herself as an individual. Through Leah Vincent's eyes, we confront not only the oppressive world of religious fundamentalism, but also the broader issues that face even the most secular young women as they grapple with sexuality and identity.

When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.” After college, Kelly took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting. But soon her savings dwindled, and she realized she needed a job. That’s how Kelly met John Tanner, a newly widowed father of two looking for a live-in nanny. And there, in that house in a suburb north of Sydney, she suddenly heard her mother’s voice everywhere.