Baking has become more than a hobby or a means to a delicious end. Now more than ever, it also has become a source of solace, relief and relaxation. COMFORT BAKING focuses on easy-to-follow recipes that make people feel good from the inside out. For anyone who is looking for a moment in the kitchen as a time to create, worship, relax or prepare a recipe for a friend in need, this is your guidebook. In addition to over 100 recipes that exude comfort from beginning to end, baker Stephanie Wise includes plenty of helpful tips along the way to make the process as simple and enjoyable as possible. Whether you're preparing a quiche or whipping up a late-night batch of cookies, the recipes in this book are guaranteed to bring you and the people you share your creations with comfort.

Laurie Notaro has proved everyone wrong: she didn’t end up in rehab, prison or cremated at a tender age. She just went gray. At past 50, every hair’s root is a symbol of knowledge (she knows how to use a landline), experience (she rode in a car with no seat belts) and superpowers (a gray-haired lady can get away with anything). Though navigating midlife is initially upsetting --- the cracking noises coming from her new old body, receiving regular junk mail from mortuaries --- Laurie accepts it. And then some. With unintentional abandon, she shoplifts a bag of russet potatoes, heckles a rude driver from her beat-up Prius, and engages in epic trolling on Nextdoor.com. That, says Laurie, is the brilliance of growing older. With each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear.

What does the life of an Amish woman really look like? Over the course of a decade, author Judy Stavisky, a curious outsider, spent hundreds of hours getting to know the women of Pennsylvania's Lancaster County Amish community to find out the answer to this question. She joined mothers and grandmothers, unmarried women and teens, on their shopping excursions for household items, fabric and groceries. They drove miles between undulating fields and shared hundreds of hours of conversation on everyday topics. As relationships evolved into enduring friendships, she grew to understand firsthand how Amish women bind their families and communities together.

Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar and elusive, Lincoln tends to be seen as the greatest of American presidents --- a remote icon --- or as a politician driven more by calculation than by conviction. This illuminating new portrait gives us a very human Lincoln --- an imperfect man whose moral antislavery commitment began as he grew up in an antislavery Baptist community; who insisted that slavery was a moral evil; and who sought, as he put it, to do right as God gave him to see the right.

The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced --- in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons --- a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own.

Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Muhammad Ali. These three icons changed not only the worlds of music, film and sports, but the world itself. Their faces were known everywhere, in every nation, across every culture. And their stories became larger than life --- until their lives spun out of control at the hands of those they most trusted. In KILLING THE LEGENDS, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard explore the lives, legacies and tragic deaths of three of the most famous people of the 20th century. Each experienced immense success, then failures that forced them to change; each faced the challenge of growing old in fields that privilege youth; and finally, each became isolated, cocooned by wealth but vulnerable to the demands of those in their innermost circles.

Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole first came to England in the 1850s after working in Panama. She wanted to volunteer as a nurse and aide during the Crimean War. When her services were rejected, she financed her own expedition to Balaclava, where her reputation for her nursing --- and for her compassion --- became almost legendary. Popularly known as “Mother Seacole,” she was the most famous Black celebrity of her generation --- an extraordinary achievement in Victorian Britain. However, after her death in 1881, she was largely forgotten. IN SEARCH OF MARY SEACOLE is the fruit of almost 20 years of research and reveals the truth about Seacole's personal life, her "rivalry" with Florence Nightingale and other misconceptions.

Our buildings are making us sick. Our homes, offices, factories and dormitories are, in some sense, fresh parasites on the sacred Earth, Nahasdzáán. In search of a better way, Jim Kristofic journeys across the Southwest to apprentice with architects and builders who know how to make buildings that will take care of us. This is where he meets the House Gods, who are building to the sun so that we can live on Earth. Forever. In HOUSE GODS, Kristofic pursues the techniques of sustainable building and the philosophies of its practitioners. What emerges is a strange and haunting quest through adobe mud and mayhem, encounters with shamans and stray dogs, solar panels, tragedy and true believers. It is a story about doing something meaningful, and about the kinds of things that grow out of deep pain.

In March 1938, German soldiers crossed the border into Austria, and Hitler absorbed the country into the Third Reich. Anticipating these events, many Jews had fled Austria, but the most famous Austrian Jew remained in Vienna, where he had lived since early childhood. Sigmund Freud was 81 years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger. But several prominent people close to Freud thought otherwise, and they began a coordinated effort to persuade Freud to leave his beloved Vienna and emigrate to England. The group included a Welsh physician, Napoleon’s great-grandniece, an American ambassador, Freud’s devoted youngest daughter, Anna, and his personal doctor.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all “negroes and Jews.” Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. In AGENT JOSEPHINE, bestselling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little-known history of the famous singer’s life. During the war years, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers --- a cover for her spying work --- Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities and emerged as a formidable spy. In turn, she was a hero of the three countries in whose name she served --- the US, France and Britain.