Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New Hampshire

True Stories from Los Angeles to the End of the World

Steve Hely, writer for The Office and American Dad!, and recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, presents a travel book about his journey through Central and South America. Part travel book, part pop history, part comic memoir, Hely's writing will make readers want to reach for their backpack and hiking boots.
 
The Wonder Trail is the story of a trip from Los Angeles to the bottom of South America, presented in 102 short chapters. From Mexico City to Oaxaca; into ancient Mayan ruins; the jungles, coffee plantations, and remote beaches of Central America; across the Panama Canal; by sea to Colombia; to the wild Easter celebration of Popayán; to the Amazon rainforest; the Inca sites of Cuzco and Machu Picchu; to the Galápagos Islands; the Atacama Desert of Chi≤ and down to wind-worn Patagonia at the bottom of the Western Hemisphere; Steve traveled collecting stories, adventures, oddities, marvels, bits of history and biography, tales of weirdos, fun facts, and anything else interesting or illuminating.

Steve's plan was to discover the unusual, wonderful, and absurd in Central and South America, to seek and find the incredible, delightful people and experiences that came his way. And the book that resulted is just as fun. A blend of travel writing, history, and comic memoir, The Wonder Trail will inspire, inform, and delight.

The Wonder Trail

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Howell Raines

sequel to Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis finds a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times executive editor evaluating the unpredictable natures of love, luck, aging, life, and mortality while discovering the ways in which fly fishing can be a metaphorical lesson about the empowerment of letting go

Texas

A Memoir

"Lost fish," writes Howell Raines, "chasten us to the knowledge that we are all, in each and every moment, dwindling. Imagine my surprise when I discovered well into my sixth decade that losing fish can prepare us for a blessing as well as for pain."Confronting loss -- of an elusive fish or something larger -- is at the heart ofThe One That Got Away,the graceful sequel to Raines's much-loved, bestselling memoirFly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis,published to great acclaim in 1993. With the same winning combination of reminiscences, anecdotes, philosophy and fishing lore, his bold new memoir covers the eventful years in this latest passage of his life, and the realization that in relinquishing his former identity as a newspaperman he has actually gotten what he wanted, just in the most unlikely way.In wry and witty prose, Raines shifts between fishing vignettes and personal reflections on his childhood, his second marriage, his relationships with his two sons, the trajectory of his career atThe New York Timesand his move toward old age. At the center of his narrative is his most thrilling fishing adventure -- an epic battle with a marlin he hooked and fought for more than seven hours in the South Pacific -- which comes to symbolize his growing understanding and acceptance of the unpredictability of luck, love, lies and life, and how the unexpected can, in fact, be an opportunity to make life more interesting.Raines's wonderful descriptions of streams, people and fish; his passion for angling and writing; and his wise and perceptive commentary on the vagaries of his own life combine to create a profound book -- one of undeniable appeal and uncommon heart.

The One That Got Away

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Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Iowa

The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

For so many people, reading isn't just a hobby or a way to pass the time--it's a lifestyle. Our books shape us, define us, enchant us, and even sometimes infuriate us. Our books are a part of who we are as people, and we can't imagine life without them. I'd Rather Be Reading is the perfect literary companion for everyone who feels that way. In this collection of charming and relatable reflections on the reading life, beloved blogger and author Anne Bogel leads readers to remember the book that first hooked them, the place where they first fell in love with reading, and all of the moments afterward that helped make them the reader they are today. Known as a reading tastemaker through her popular podcast What Should I Read Next?, Bogel invites book lovers into a community of like-minded people to discover new ways to approach literature, learn fascinating new things about books and publishing, and reflect on the role reading plays in their lives. The perfect gift for the bibliophile in everyone's life, I'd Rather Be Reading will command an honored place on the overstuffed bookshelves of any book lover.

I'd Rather Be Reading

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Benjamin Busch

California

Dust to Dust

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Amy Butcher

A Memoir of Friendship and Murder

"With echoes of Darin Strauss's Half a Life and Cheryl Strayed's Wild comes a beautifully written, riveting memoir that examines the complexities of friendship in the aftermath of a tragedy"--

Visiting Hours

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Massachusetts

The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

CNN anchor and New York Times bestselling author Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty--his mother's family, the Vanderbilts. Few names are as synonymous with wealth and glamour as "Vanderbilt." When Cornelius Vanderbilt, the teenaged son of a ferryman in New York Harbor who was born at the end of the eighteenth century, decided to go into business on his own, few would have believed that within six decades he would epitomize American wealth, magnate of a shipping and railroad empire that made him the richest man in the country. In the wake of his death in 1877, Cornelius's heirs bitterly fought over his estate, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. The generations of Vanderbilts who followed lived lives of unimaginable excess, steeped in tides of success and failure. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt left the Breakers--the summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, his grandson and namesake Cornelius Vanderbilt II built--the family would have been unrecognizable to the Commodore. Now, the Commodore's great-great-great-grandson, Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their remarkable influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family's empire, basked in the Commodore's wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of Staten Island to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts Europe, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American family unlike any other. Drawing on never-before-seen documents and told from a unique insider's viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.

Vanderbilt

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#hardcover #kevinstarr #biography #memoir #nonfiction 


Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Illinois

California on the Edge, 1990-2003

In this extraordinary book, Kevin Starr--widely acknowledged as the premier historian of California--probes the possible collapse of the California dream and the beginning of another in the years 1990-2003.

Coast of Dreams

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Katharine Hepburn

Georgia

Stories of My Life

Photographs from Hepburn's personal collection highlight the candid memoirs of the life, long career, friendships, and loves of the legendary Hollywood actress

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#nonfiction #hardcover #memoir #obama #michelleobama #becoming #popular 

Virginia

Becoming

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Glennon Doyle

Minnesota

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Over two million copies sold! “Packed with incredible insight about what it means to be a woman today.”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick) In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, bestselling author, and “patron saint of female empowerment” (People) explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • Cosmopolitan • Marie Claire • Bloomberg • Parade • “Untamed will liberate women—emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It is phenomenal.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat Pray Love This is how you find yourself. There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves. For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living. Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is. Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

Untamed

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Brand new hardcover #hardcover #laurachinn #nonfic #nonfiction #acne #memoir 

From the creator and star of Florida Girls comes a hilarious and profound memoir about family, happiness, and really aggressive acne.

Despite having dirty-blonde hair and fair skin, Laura Chinn is mixed-race: the daughter of a Black father and a white mother, which on its own makes for some funny and insightful looks at identity. Laura's parents were both Scientologists and nonconformists in myriad ways. They divorced early in Laura's childhood, and she spent her teen years ping-ponging back and forth between Clearwater, Florida, and Los Angeles (with an extended stint in Tijuana for good measure).



Laura lived alone and raised herself for long periods of time, but don't worry! Her mom's alcoholic boyfriend was always nearby to supervise. She also lost family members to horrific tragedies, started drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes when she was eleven years old, and dropped out of school when she was fifteen, all the while completely obsessed with and scarred by her severe acne condition. 



This is not a sad story. There is Jell-O wrestling. There is an abnormal amount of dancing. There is information about whether you can drink gallons of sangria while taking unregulated Accutane acquired in Mexico. But mostly there is love, and ultimately there is redemption. Laura explores her trauma through anecdotes riddled with grit and humor, proving that in the face of unspeakable tragedy, it is possible to find success, love, and self-acceptance, zits and all.

Acne

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Wisconsin

#hardcover  #nonfiction #lacipeterson #memoir #scottpeterson #truecrime 

Pennsylvania

A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Justice

The mother of homicide victim Laci Peterson discusses Laci's life, the crime that took the lives of her daughter and her unborn grandson, the trial and conviction of Laci's husband Scott, and the impact of the tragedy on her family.

For Laci

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Donald Hall

Ex-library copy, has usual internal stamps/markings

New Jersey

A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

Donald Hall’s remarkable life in poetry -- a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 -- comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.

Hall’s invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious,” and ends with what he calls "the planet of antiquity,” a time of life dramatically punctuated by his appointment as poet laureate of the United States.
Hall writes eloquently of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing -- an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful formative days at Exeter, where he was sent like a naive lamb to a high WASP academic slaughter, are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard. Here he rubs elbows with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Edward Gorey, and begins lifelong friendships with Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and George Plimpton. After Harvard, Hall is off to Oxford, where the high spirits and rampant poetry careerism of the postwar university scene are brilliantly captured.
At eighty, Hall is as painstakingly honest about his failures and low points as a poet, writer, lover, and father as he is about his successes, making Unpacking the Boxes -- his first book since being named poet laureate -- both revelatory and tremendously poignant.


Unpacking the Boxes

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New York

#hardcover #memoir #paperback #autobiography #fashionbook 

Tennessee

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller! The book that has outraged the social elite! “Eye-popping.” —People “Amusing, perceptive and…deliciously evil.” —The New York Times Book Review “Juicy, sexy, bawdy stuff.” —New York Daily News “Think Gossip Girl, but with a sociological study of the parents.” —InStyle.com Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers’ snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected. Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday’s memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want—safety, happiness, and success—and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday’s life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are. Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world—the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood.

Primates of Park Avenue

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J. D. Vance

Indiana

A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy

987b31e1-c6e7-4c61-9189-b310865f7e9c-1

Deborah Feldman

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

My Unorthodox Journey to Berlin

The definitive follow-up to Unorthodox (the basis for the award-winning Netflix series)—now updated with more than 50 percent new material—the unforgettable story of what happened in the years after Deborah Feldman left a religious sect in Williamsburg in order to forge her own path in the world. In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman packed up her young son and their few possessions and walked away from her insular Hasidic roots. She was determined to find a better life for herself, away from the oppression and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And in Exodus, Revisited she delves into what happened next—taking the reader on a journey that starts with her beginning life anew as a single mother, a religious refugee, and an independent woman in search of a place and a community where she can belong. Originally published in 2014, Deborah has now revisited and significantly expanded her story, and the result is greater insight into her quest to discover herself and the true meaning of home. Travels that start with making her way in New York expand into an exploration of America and eventually lead to trips across Europe to retrace her grandmother’s life during the Holocaust, before she finds a landing place in the unlikeliest of cities. Exodus, Revisited is a deeply moving examination of the nature of memory and generational trauma, and of reconciliation with both yourself and the world.

Exodus, Revisited

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#paperback #nonfiction #essays #NYTbestsellingauthor #relationships #lauralippman #memoir #motherhood 

Essays

New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman, a journalist for many years, collects here her recent essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her relationships with her parents, friendship, and other topics that will resonate with a large audience. Her voice is wry and relatable, her takes often surprising. Meet the Woman Behind the Books... In this collection of brand new, never before seen and previously published nonfiction essays, New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman offers readers an introspective look into various facets of her life. Her childhood and school years, her successful career as a newspaper reporter, the challenge of balance, her life as a novelist and a reader--Lippman's takes on these universal subjects offer as many twists as her award-winning crime fiction. Essays include: · Men Explain The Wire to Me · Game of Crones · My Life as a Villainess · My Father's Bar · The 31st Stocking Fans of Laura Lippman will gain a better understanding in these candid essays of who she is and of the life choices that influenced her writing and helped her to become the successful author she is today.

My Life As a Villainess

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#hardcover #nonfiction #gates #biography #melinda #memoir

Hawaii

How Empowering Women Changes the World

A timely call to action for women's empowerment by the influential co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation identifies the link between women's equality and societal health, sharing uplifting insights by international advocates in the fight against gender bias. --Publisher

The Moment of Lift

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#hardcover #nonfiction #memoir #family #fiction #inspirational #love #lifelessons 

Utah

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

The Last Lecture

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The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After

Harpham recounts her story of fear and ultimate gratitude when--while separated from her polar-opposite husband--she gives birth of a girl with a serious illness.

Happiness: a Memoir

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A true story of passion, family, and forgiveness in Southern Italy.

Missouri

Murder in Matera

Colorado

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book “Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.” —The New York Times Book Review “An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.” —Ellen Pompeo As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and more An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself. Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn’t move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper’s journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: How to tell the truth when it’s simpler to overlook it. How to understand that compassion isn’t the same as justice. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present. In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician.

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Steve Hely

The Wonder Trail

Howell Raines

The One That Got Away

Anne Bogel

I'd Rather Be Reading

Benjamin Busch

Dust to Dust

Amy Butcher

Visiting Hours

Anderson Cooper; Katherine Howe

Vanderbilt

Kevin Starr

Coast of Dreams

Katharine Hepburn

Me

Michelle Obama

Becoming

Glennon Doyle

Untamed

Laura Chinn

Acne

Glennon Doyle

Untamed

Sharon Rocha

For Laci

Donald Hall

Unpacking the Boxes

Glennon Doyle

Untamed

Wednesday Martin

Primates of Park Avenue

J. D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy

Deborah Feldman

Exodus, Revisited

Laura Lippman

My Life As a Villainess

Melinda Gates

The Moment of Lift

Randy Pausch; Jeffrey Zaslow (As told to)

The Last Lecture

Heather Harpham

Happiness: a Memoir

Helene Stapinski

Murder in Matera

Michele Harper

The Beauty in Breaking