Adult

Michael “Zig” Danziger projects a certain devil-may-care persona. But don’t let the larger-than-life, hail-fellow-well-met routine fool you --- there is far more to his story than being born on third base. Zig’s intense experience as a Yale oarsman is a case study on the journey itself being the reward. He was never going to make the first varsity boat, or the second. Not even the third boat. But he worked his butt off to earn a seat in the fourth boat --- and became a Yale Crew legend. SMALL PUDDLES tells the story of those years at Yale and the people who shaped Zig’s one-of-a-kind view of the world.

December 7, 1941: One of those rare days in world history that people remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, and how they felt when they heard the news. In SEVEN DAYS OF INFAMY, historian Nicholas Best uses fascinating individual perspectives to relate the story of Japan’s momentous attack on Pearl Harbor and its global repercussions in tense, dramatic style. But he also takes readers on an unprecedented journey through the days surrounding the attack, providing a snapshot of figures around the world --- from Ernest Hemingway on the road in Texas to Jack Kennedy playing touch football in Washington.

In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow’s deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a portrait of the artist as a young idealist emerges. Their recollections reveal Mayakovsky as a passionate, complex, sexually obsessed creature trapped in the epicenter of history, struggling to hold onto his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed.

At 8:10am on December 7, 1941, Seaman First Class Donald Stratton was consumed by an inferno. A million pounds of explosives had detonated beneath his battle station aboard the USS Arizona, barely 15 minutes into Japan’s surprise attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. Near death and burned across two thirds of his body, Don summoned the will to haul himself hand over hand across a rope tethered to a neighboring vessel. In this extraordinary, never-before-told eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack --- the only memoir ever written by a survivor of the USS Arizona --- the 94-year-old veteran finally shares his unforgettable personal tale of bravery and survival, his harrowing recovery, and his inspiring determination to return to the fight.

All her life Vera has felt like a stranger in the old and drafty half-timbered farmhouse she arrived at as a five-year-old refugee from East Prussia in 1945, and yet she can’t seem to let it go. Sixty years later, her niece Anne suddenly shows up at her door with her small son. Anne has fled the trendy Hamburg neighborhood she never fit into after her relationship imploded. Vera and Anne are strangers to each other but have much more in common than they think. As the two strong-willed and very different women share the great old house, they find what they have never thought to search for: a family.

In the two and half years since her show “The Kelly File” premiered on the Fox News Channel, Megyn Kelly has cemented her reputation as one of the most respected and hardest hitting journalists in America. Now in her debut book, Kelly goes behind the scenes of the stories and the storms that have made her one of the most talked-about public figures in America. From growing up in a tough love family where she had to earn her praise, to her father’s sudden, tragic death while she was still in high school, to the news stories that launched her journalism career, Kelly traces the values and experiences --- both good and bad --- that landed her in the anchor chair.

Joan Rivers was an icon and a role model to millions, a fearless pioneer who left a legacy of expanded opportunity when she died in 2014. Her life was a dramatic roller-coaster of triumphant highs and devastating lows: the suicide of her husband, her feud with Johnny Carson, her estrangement from her daughter, her many plastic surgeries, her ferocious ambition and her massive insecurities. But Rivers' career was also hugely significant in American cultural history, breaking down barriers for her gender and pushing the boundaries of truth-telling for women in public life. LAST GIRL BEFORE FREEWAY delves into the inner workings of a woman who both reflected and redefined the world around her.

Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe --- or groundbreaking scientific advance --- that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and, in so doing, also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution.

Haruki Murakami's passion for music runs deep. Before turning his hand to writing, he ran a jazz club in Tokyo, and the aesthetic and emotional power of music permeates every one of his much-loved books. Now, in ABSOLUTELY ON MUSIC, Murakami fulfills a personal dream, sitting down with his friend, acclaimed conductor Seiji Ozawa, to talk, over a period of two years, about their shared interest. Transcribed from lengthy conversations about the nature of music and writing, here they discuss everything from Brahms to Beethoven, from Leonard Bernstein to Glenn Gould, from record collecting to pop-up orchestras, and much more.

Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, WHEN MEMORY COMES, Saul Friedländer returns with WHERE MEMORY LEADS, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics. Most importantly, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote 16 years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.