Adult

For more than 40 years, Katie Couric has been an iconic presence in the media world. In her brutally honest, hilarious and heartbreaking memoir, she reveals what was going on behind the scenes of her sometimes tumultuous personal and professional life --- a story she’s never shared, until now. Of the medium she loves, the one that made her a household name, she says, “Television can put you in a box; the flat-screen can flatten. On TV, you are larger than life but smaller, too. It is not the whole story, and it is not the whole me. This book is.”

In this love letter to the art of dance and the sport that has been her livelihood, the New York City Ballet’s first Asian American female soloist, Georgina Pazcoguin, lays bare her unfiltered story of leaving small-town Pennsylvania for New York City and training amid the unique demands of being a hybrid professional athlete/artist, all before finishing high school. She pitches us into the fascinating, whirling shoes of dancers in one of the most revered ballet companies in the world with an unapologetic sense of humor about the cutthroat, survival-of-the-fittest mentality at NYCB. Some swan dives are literal: even in the ballet, there are plenty of face-plants, backstage fights, late-night parties and raucous company bonding sessions.

NASA is about to launch Apollo 18. While the mission has been billed as a scientific one, flight controller Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis knows there is a darker objective. Intelligence has discovered a secret Soviet space station spying on America, and Apollo 18 may be the only chance to stop it. But even as Kaz races to keep the NASA crew one step ahead of their Russian rivals, a deadly accident reveals that not everyone involved is quite who they were thought to be. With political stakes stretched to the breaking point, the White House and the Kremlin can only watch as their astronauts collide on the lunar surface, far beyond the reach of law or rescue.

James Patterson and Matt Eversmann powerfully present the medical frontline heroes who work to save our lives every day: E.R. nurses. Around the clock, across the country, these highly skilled and compassionate men and women sacrifice and struggle for us and our families. You have never heard their true stories. Not like this. From big-city and small-town hospitals. From behind the scenes. From the heart. This book will make you laugh, make you cry, make you understand. When we’re at our worst, E.R. nurses are at their best.

There’s no right way to keep a diary, but if there’s an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mas­tered it. If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party. Lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.

Mitch Rapp has worked for a number of presidents over his career, but Anthony Cook is unlike any he’s encountered before. Cunning and autocratic, he feels no loyalty to America’s institutions and is distrustful of the influence Rapp and CIA director Irene Kennedy have in Washington. Meanwhile, when Kennedy discovers evidence of a mole scouring the Agency’s database for sensitive information on Nicholas Ward, the world’s first trillionaire, she convinces Rapp to take a job protecting him. In doing so, he finds himself walking an impossible tightrope: Keep the man alive, but also use him as bait to uncover a traitor who has seemingly unlimited access to government secrets.

On August 27, 2010, three CIA officers ask for a private meeting with CIA Director Leon Panetta. During that secret session, they tell Panetta that agents have tracked a courier with deep Al Qaeda ties to a three-story house at the end of a dead-end street in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But they say it’s more than a house --- it’s a heavily protected fortress. Everyone understands that finally, after nearly a decade, maybe, just maybe, they’ve found the world’s most wanted man. In COUNTDOWN BIN LADEN, Chris Wallace delivers a thrilling new account of the final eight months of intelligence gathering, national security strategizing and meticulous military planning that leads to the climactic mission when SEAL Team Six closes in on its target.

Siblings Dawn and Kim, and their best friend Debra, were three Black girls who bonded as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, and for a brief, wondrous moment, they are all giggles and dreams and promises of “friends forever.” But then fate intervenes, sending them careening in wildly different directions. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why?

Alexander Woodroe has it all, including a starring role as Cupid on TV’s biggest show, “Gods of the Gates.” But the showrunners have wrecked his character, he's dogged by old demons, and his post-show future remains uncertain. When all that reckless emotion explodes into a bar fight, former ER therapist Lauren Clegg is hired to keep him in line. However, the more time they spend together, the harder it gets to keep her professional remove and her heart intact, especially when she discovers the reasons behind his recklessness. When another scandal lands Alex in major hot water and costs Lauren her job, she’ll have to choose between protecting him and offering him what he really wants --- her.

When Sonny Dunes, a SoCal meteorologist, is replaced by a virtual meteorologist that will never age, gain weight or renegotiate its contract, the only station willing to give the 50-year-old another shot is the very place she has been avoiding since the day she left for college --- her northern Michigan hometown. Sonny grudgingly returns and finds her past blindsiding her everywhere. She throws herself headfirst into covering every small-town winter event to woo a new audience, made more bearable by a handsome widower with optimism to spare. But with someone trying to undermine her efforts to rebuild her career, Sonny must make peace with who she used to be and allow her heart to thaw if she’s ever going to find a place she can truly call home.