Adult

With three hit television shows and three children at home, the uber-talented Shonda Rhimes had lots of good reasons to say NO when an unexpected invitation arrived. Then Shonda’s sister laid down a challenge: just for one year, try to say YES to the unexpected invitations that come your way. She reluctantly agreed --- and the result was nothing short of transformative. In YEAR OF YES, Shonda chronicles the powerful impact saying YES had on every aspect of her life --- and how we can all change our lives with that one little word.

On August 22, 1485, at Bosworth Field, Richard III fell, the Wars of the Roses ended, and the Tudor dynasty began. The clash is so significant because it marks the break between medieval and modern. Yet how much do we really know about this historical landmark? Michael Jones uses archival discoveries to show that Richard III's defeat was by no means inevitable and was achieved only through extraordinary chance.

This first comprehensive biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1903-1981) --- author of the 1958 national bestseller ONLY IN AMERICA --- illuminates a remarkable life intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, Jewish popular culture, and the sometimes precarious position of Jews in the South and across America during the 1950s.

The Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers has long been tasked with maintaining magic within His Majesty’s lands. Lately, though, the once proper institute has fallen into disgrace. At his wit’s end, Zacharias Wythe, Sorcerer Royal of the Unnatural Philosophers, ventures to the border of Fairyland to discover why England’s magical stocks are drying up. But when his adventure brings him in contact with a most unusual comrade, a woman with immense power and an unfathomable gift, he sets on a path that will alter the nature of sorcery in all of Britain --- and the world at large.

Marinda Peake is a woman with a quiet, perfect life in a small village; she long ago gave up on her dreams and ambitions to take care of her ailing father, an alchemist and an inventor. When he dies, he gives Marinda a mysterious inheritance: a blank book that she must fill with other people’s stories --- and ultimately her own. CLOCKWORK LIVES is a steampunk CANTERBURY TALES, and much more, as Marinda strives to change her life from a mere “sentence or two” to a true epic.

Over the course of his 40-year career, Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In SHOWDOWN, Wil Haygood uses the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, to weave a provocative and moving look at Marshall’s life as well as at the politicians, lawyers, activists and others who shaped --- or desperately tried to stop --- the civil rights movement.

In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was 90 percent white, 10 percent African-American, with a little more than 100 families who were “other.” Currently the African-American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than 50 percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Latin American origin living all over the county. A NATION OF NATIONS follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually “Americanize.”

The years 1913-1923 saw the emergence in Ireland of the Ulster Volunteer Force to resist Irish home rule and in response, the Irish Volunteers, who would later evolve into the IRA. World War One, the rise of Sinn Fein, intense Ulster unionism and conflict with Britain culminated in the Irish war of Independence, which ended with a compromise Treaty with Britain and then the enmities and drama of the Irish Civil War. Drawing on an abundance of newly released archival material, witness statements and testimony from the ordinary Irish people who lived and fought through extraordinary times, A NATION AND NOT A RABBLE explores these revolutions.

No American statesman has been as revered or as reviled as Henry Kissinger. He has also been hounded by conspiracy theorists, scouring his every “telcon” for evidence of Machiavellian malfeasance. Yet as Niall Ferguson shows in this magisterial two-volume biography, drawing not only on Kissinger’s hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, the idea of Kissinger as the ruthless arch-realist is based on a profound misunderstanding.

Jack Kemp’s role in a pivotal period in American history is at last illuminated in this first-ever biography, which also has lessons for the politics of today. Kemp was the congressional champion of supply-side economics --- the idea that lowering taxes would foster growth. Even today, almost no one advocates a return to a top income tax rate of 70 percent. Kemp didn’t just challenge the Democratic establishment. He also encouraged his fellow Republicans to be growth (not austerity) minded, open their tent to minorities and blue-collar workers, battle poverty and discrimination, and once again become "the party of Lincoln."