The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk by Susan McDougal with Pat Harris (Carroll & Graf)
A New York Times Bestseller and Book Sense 76 pick
When Susan McDougal refused to testify in the Whitewater investigation and was jailed nearly two years as a consequence, she became a household name. In this wry, moving book about her life in politics and prison, McDougal tells the story of how a small-town Arkansas girl became a nationally known felon and a symbol - the face of the ordinary citizen who stands up against bureaucratic power despite suffering a very real personal cost.
This book created a media sensation, with author appearances on Today, The O'Reilly Factor, Larry King, Crossfire, Fox Morning News, and The CBS Early Show; and a controversial review in The New York Times that generated chat all over the Internet, and the newspaper's own printed correction.
Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers by Tom Oliphant (Thomas Dunne Books)
A New York Times Bestseller
Tom Oliphant, longtime Boston Globe columnist and commentator on the Lehr NewsHour, grew up attending the Brooklyn Dodgers games. Part personal, part history, this book will recreate the exciting, nail-biting game that finally brought World Series victory to the Dodgers, bringing alive the colorful cast of players and their Brooklyn fans. But it will also use this close-up story to tell the larger story of race, class, Brooklyn, and the transformative power of sports at this moment in American history.
Being Dead is No Excuse for Store-Bought Mayonnaise:The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeralby Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays (Miramax Books)
A New York Times Bestseller
BookSense Pick
Quill Award 2005 Finalist
In this deliciously entertaining slice of Southern life (and death), Mississippi Delta natives Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays explain everything you need to know to host an authentic Southern funeral, such as: Can you be properly buried without tomato aspic? Who prepares tastier funeral fare, the Episcopal ladies, or the Methodist ladies? And what does one do when a family gets three sheets to the wind and eats the entire funeral feast the night before the funeral? Each chapter includes a delicious, tried-and-true Southern recipe you'll need if you plan to die tastefully.
Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner (The Free Press)
Based on years of research and hundreds of interviews, Vows of Silence is a riveting, character-driven account of the Vatican cover-up of accused pedophile Father Marcial Macial and the cult-like religious order he founded, the Legion of Christ, that began in Mexico and opened prep schools in countries around the globe. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Church whistle-blower Father Doyle and with ex-Legionnaires who filed a canonical suite against Maciel, as well as interviews with Vatican insiders and an array of sources in Ireland, Canada, and Australia, the authors provide a penetrating account of a hierarchy directly in conflict with its followers. Jason Berry is the author of Lead Us Not Into Temptation (Doubleday, 1992); Gerald Renner is the former religion editor for the Hartford-Courant.
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, A Biography (Random House) by Dr. Anthony Arthur Pub date: Spring 2006
Upton Sinclair wrote one of the most famous American novels of the twentieth century, The Jungle, the centennial for which is upcoming in the year 2006. Idealist, entrepreneur, crank, self-proclaimed genius, Sinclair was a prescient critic of big business and corruption, our first modern consumer advocate, and the author of more than 100 books that changed the face of American law and politics. This first new biography in almost 30 years, based on a vast quantity of virtually untapped primary source material, will be the first to focus on Sinclair the writer and man, rather than the activist, setting him within the rich context of his times and the issues he met head-on.
Anthony Arthur is a former Fulbright Scholar and professor of literature at California State University who has authored three trade books on twentieth-century American culture, politics, and history.
Nam-a-rama (A Novel) by Phillip Jennings (Tom Doherty Books)
Written with the savage gusto of Terry Southern, Nam-a-Rama is a bawdy, rollicking look at America’s misadventures in Vietnam. Marines Gearheardt and Jack, promoted to ‘Almost Captains’ by their Commander in Chief, are sent on a mission to stop the war. Their trip to Hanoi, to meet ‘Hoche’ and his war-crazed generals, takes them through combat in South Vietnam and a series of misadventures that propel their story forward in a boisterous satiric rush. Not since Catch-22 has there been such a hilarious anti-epic that captures so brilliantly the absurdity of modern warfare. The author was a decorated Captain in the Marine Corps and Air America, Inc., and an operative in the Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam and Laos for three years.
The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian by Nina Burleigh (Morrow/HarperCollins)
In this fascinating book, Burleigh explores the mystery of why a wealthy English naturalist named James Smithson, who had never even met an American, left his entire fortune to "the United States of America, to found ... an establishment for the increase and diffusion of Knowledge.” In this tale of illicit sex, madness, greed, generosity, science, and politics, she reveals how Smithson’s bequest was nearly lost due to fierce battles among clashing Americans and how, thanks to the unsung efforts of president John Quincy Adams, Smithson’s legacy was finally realized to become one of our most important educational, cultural, and scientific establishments. Nina Burleigh is a journalist and the author of a A Very Private Woman (Bantam). Her articles have appeared in Time, People, US Weekly, The Washington Post, Elle, and New York Magazine.
Four Corners, A Novel (McAdam/Cage and Harcourt, Inc.) by Diane Freund, Winner of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize and NY Times Notable New Paperback
“I was ten the summer we drove my mother crazy.” So starts this captivating debut novel, narrated by ten-year-old Rainey Dougherty. It’s August of 1953 in Four Corners, New York, when Rainey’s mother is hospitalized for mental instability. Thus begins a summer of enlightment for Rainey, a season without her mother, when she learns about the realities of life through the eyes of innocence.
“Elegiac….A lush tangle of…memorable images [and] homegrown clarity…Vivid…Affecting.” –The New York Times Book Review
“Joyful, doleful, artfully nuanced, and virtually flawless in voice and detail: this is as good as it gets.” (Starred review) –Kirkus Reviews
Diane Freund is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona South.
Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through the Events that Shaped the Modern South by Curtis Wilkie (Scribner)
Endeavoring to make sense of the enormous changes that have typified the South for more than four decades, Wilkie recounts the political and social history of the South during the second half of the twentieth century from the perspective of a white man intimately transformed by enormous racial and political upheavals. As a journalist, Wilkie covered many of the South’s seminal events, including 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, Jimmy Carter’s campaign for the White House, the shift from the Democratic Party to the GOP, and the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evans. Wilkie tells this story of redemption—for both a region and a writer– with compassion, humor, and pathos.
Curtis Wilkie is a native Mississippian and was a national and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe for 26 years.
Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist by Alston Chase (W.W. Norton)
On the basis of exhaustive research and much previously unpublished material, Alston Chase presents a radically new interpretation of the infamous Unabomber, projecting Kaczynski’s life against the backdrop of the Cold War and his educaton at Harvard, where Kaczynski absorbed the ideas that would eventually surface in his famous Unabomber Manifesto. In this cautionary tale of modern evil, Chase argues convincingly that the conditions that provoked Kaczynski’s alienation remain in place, and indeed, may be about to get worse as the war on terrorism replaces the cold War in American policy and imagination. Chase is the author of Playing God in Yellowstone (1986) and In a Dark Wood (1995).
Elvis and Nixon, A Novel by Jonathan Lowy (Crown Publishers)
The weekend before Christmas 1970, Elvis Presley stormed out of Graceland in a drug-addled rage, escaping his handlers for two days before landing in Washington, D.C., where he arranged a meeting with President Nixon. In the Oval Office, Nixon awarded Elvis with an FBI Special Narcotics Agent badge. Against the backdrop of that surreal historical moment, Lowy weaves a vivid web of stories—some real, some fiction--about the eccentric cast of characters whose lives were touched by the encounter. It’s a darkly funny, almost hallucinogenic trip through the ‘70s with Tricky Dick and the King riding shotgun. Jonathan Lowy is the author of the forthcoming Temple of Music (Crown). He is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Virginia School of Law.
"Pop culture and recent history are hogtied and transmogrified to smashing effect in Lowy's imaginative and often hilarious first novel. He moves among several storylines effortlessly, concocting a darkly comic melodrama the likes of which we haven't seen since The Manchurian Candidate." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A "high flying first novel," "darkly funny," with a "cumulative power" -- New York Times Book Review
"A snappy mixture of fact and fiction."--Time Magazine
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