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One of our nation’s most prominent writers finds the truth about how to live a long and happy life in the centenarian next door.
When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship—and a profound lesson in the meaning of life. Charlie White was no ordinary neighbor. Born before radio, Charlie lived long enough to use a smartphone. When a shocking tragedy interrupted his idyllic boyhood, Charlie mastered survival strategies that reflect thousands of years of human wisdom. Thus armored, Charlie’s sense of adventure carried him on an epic journey across the continent, and later found him swinging across bandstands of the Jazz Age, racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars, improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery, and cruising the Amazon as a guest of Peru’s president.
David Von Drehle came to understand that Charlie’s resilience and willingness to grow made this remarkable neighbor a master in the art of thriving through times of dramatic change. As a gift to his children, he set out to tell Charlie’s secrets. The Book of Charlie is a gospel of grit—the inspiring story of one man’s journey through a century of upheaval. The history that unfolds through Charlie’s story reminds you that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation, an inventive nation—a nation of Charlies in the rollercoaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.
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Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy – Carl Anthony
An illuminating new biography of the young Jackie Bouvier Kennedy that covers her formative adventures abroad in Paris; her life as a writer and photographer at a Washington, DC, newspaper; and her romance with a dashing, charismatic Massachusetts congressman who shared her intellectual passion.
Camera Girl brings to cinematic life Jackie’s years as a young, single woman trying to figure out who she wanted to become. Chafing at the expectations of her family and the societal limitations placed on women in that era, Jackie pursued her dream career as a writer. Set primarily during the years of 1949 to 1953, when Jackie was in her early twenties, the book recounts in heretofore unrevealed detail the story of her late college years and her early adulthood as a working woman.
Before she met Jack Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier was the Washington Times-Herald ’s “Inquiring Camera Girl,” posing compelling questions to members of the public on the streets of DC and snapping their photos with her unwieldy Graflex camera. She then fashioned the results into a daily column, of which six hundred were published.
Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a historian and leading expert on First Ladies, draws on these columns and previously unseen archives of Jackie’s writings from this time, along with insights gleaned from interviews he conducted with the former First Lady’s friends, colleagues, and family members. Camera Girl offers a fresh perspective on the woman later known as Jacqueline Kennedy and Jackie O, introducing us to the headstrong, self-assured young woman who went on to be one of the world’s most famous people. It’s a glamorous and surprisingly hard-charging story of a person determined to define herself, told with admiration, empathy, and journalistic rigor.
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Created to Dream: The 6 Phases God Uses to Grow Your Faith – Rick Warren
God has a dream for your life–and in this concise yet powerful volume, beloved pastor and trusted teacher Rick Warren explains the process God uses to fulfill the dream he gives you. The Bible is full of stories of people whose God-given dreams became reality–but not without first going through the six phases of faith. In Created to Dream, Pastor Rick will help you understand how God uses these phases to grow people to spiritual maturity while fulfilling the dreams he gives them. Each phase is a test of your faith. The process God uses to grow your Knowing these biblical six phases of faith will allow you to stop wondering, “Why is this happening to me?” and begin cooperating with God’s process of growing you and your faith. You’ll find yourself thinking, “So that’s why that happened!” and you’ll be prepared for all that God has dreamed up for your future. This one book can lead to big changes in your life. Read it, then share it with a friend.
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Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast – John Vaillant
From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Golden Spruce and The Tiger comes a stunning account of a colossal wildfire, and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s petroleum industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.
For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.
With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
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The Girl Who Saw Heaven: A Fateful Tornado and a Journey of Faith – Lisa Reburn
A remarkable true story of one child’s journey into the afterlife after surviving a super tornado.
When Ari Hallmark was in kindergarten, her family was caught in a powerful tornado in their hometown of Arab, Alabama. On April 27, 2011, Ari and her parents, Shane and Jennifer Hallmark, were putting the finishing touches on their new home, which Shane had built from scratch. Shane’s last-second decision to drive to his parents’ house put the Hallmarks directly in the path of a devastating EF4 tornado.
Moments after the Hallmarks arrived at the home, the mile-wide tornado ripped the house off its foundation and flung it in the air. When Ari regained consciousness, she began sharing the extraordinary story of what happened to her during the she met her guardian angel and followed her family to heaven. The full story of what Ari went through—the six months of reoccurring dreams that foretold the tragedy, and the unexpected challenges she faced from the legal system after the storm—delivers a powerful message to the you will see your late loved ones again.
Ari Hallmark is now a high school senior determined to share her hopeful message with the world. The Girl Who Saw Heaven is a uniquely poignant addition to near-death experience and heavenly encounter classics. Ari’s story will leave you with a different perspective of death and more hopeful of what lies beyond.
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From #1 internationally bestselling author of Glucose Revolution , a four-week, four-step program for living a healthier, happier life with balanced blood sugar including over 100 recipes, an interactive workbook, and the guidance to make the “new science of nutrition…practical for everyone” (Robert H. Lustig, MD, MSL, New York Times bestselling author of Fat Chance).
Do you suffer from cravings, chronic fatigue, or sugar addiction? Do you sometimes wake up in the morning feeling unable to face the day? Most of the population is stuck on a glucose roller coaster.
In her first book, the instant #1 internationally bestselling Glucose Revolution , Jessie Inchauspé offered a revolutionary framework for healing through science-backed nutrition hacks. Now, in The Glucose Goddess Method , she shares the “best practical guide for managing glucose to maximize health and longevity” (David Sinclair, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Lifespan) with this four-week program to incorporating the principles of how to avoid glucose spikes into your everyday life.
Complete with 100 recipes and an interactive workbook, you are guided through four simple, science-proven ways to steady your blood sugar, gaining boundless energy, curbing your cravings, clearing your skin, slowing your ageing process, and sleeping better than you ever have before. You will create positive new habits for life. The best part? You won’t be counting calories and can still eat all the foods you love.
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His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine – S.C. Gwynne
From the bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of the Summer Moon comes a stunning historical tale of the rise and fall of the world’s largest airship—and the doomed love story between an ambitious British officer and a married Romanian Princess at its heart.
The tragic story of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular hydrogen-fueled fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty’s Airship , historian S.C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.
Airships, those airborne leviathans that occupied center stage in the world in the first half of the twentieth century, were a symbol of the future. R101 was not just the largest aircraft ever to have flown and the product of the world’s most advanced engineering—she was also the lynchpin of an imperial British scheme to link by air the far-flung areas of its empire from Australia to India, South Africa, Canada, Egypt, and Singapore. No one had ever conceived of anything like this. R101 captivated the world. There was just one beyond the hype and technological wonders, these big, steel-framed, hydrogen-filled airships were a dangerously bad idea.
Gwynne’s chronicle features a cast of remarkable—and often tragically flawed—characters, including Lord Christopher Thomson, the man who dreamed up the Imperial Airship Scheme and then relentlessly pushed R101 to her destruction; Princess Marthe Bibesco, the celebrated writer and glamorous socialite with whom he had a long affair; and Herbert Scott, a national hero who had made the first double crossing of the Atlantic in any aircraft in 1919—eight years before Lindbergh’s famous flight—but who devolved into drink and ruin. These historical figures—and the ship they built, flew, and crashed—come together in a grand tale that details the rocky road to commercial aviation written by one of the best popular historians writing today.
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Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism – Jeffrey Toobin
The definitive account of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the enduring legacy of Timothy McVeigh, leading to the January 6 insurrection—from acclaimed journalist Jeffrey Toobin.
Timothy McVeigh wanted to start a movement.
Speaking to his lawyers days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War veteran expressed no killing 168 people was his patriotic duty. He cited the Declaration of Independence from “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” He had obsessively followed the siege of Waco and seethed at the imposition of President Bill Clinton’s assault weapons ban. A self-proclaimed white separatist, he abhorred immigration and wanted women to return to traditional roles. As he watched the industrial decline of his native Buffalo, McVeigh longed for when America was great.
New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin traces the dramatic history and profound legacy of Timothy McVeigh, who once declared, “I believe there is an army out there, ready to rise up, even though I never found it.” But that doesn’t mean his army wasn’t there. With news-breaking reportage, Toobin details how McVeigh’s principles and tactics have flourished in the decades since his death in 2001, reaching an apotheosis on January 6 when hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol. Based on nearly a million previously unreleased tapes, photographs, and documents, including detailed communications between McVeigh and his lawyers, as well as interviews with such key figures as Bill Clinton, Homegrown reveals how the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is not only a powerful retelling of one of the great outrages of our time, but a warning for our future.
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In March 2022, Michael Palin travelled the length of the River Tigris through Iraq to get a sense of what life is like in a region of the world that once formed the cradle of civilisation, but that in recent times has witnessed turmoil and appalling bloodshed. In the journal he kept during his trip he describes the war-ravaged city of Mosul and the children he encounters growing up amid its ruins. He contemplates the graffiti-strewn ruins of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, and he notes the constant presence of armed guards. But there are patches of light amid the dark: boisterous New Year celebrations in Akre, the friendliness of generals and colonels at ‘Checkpoint Cheerful’, and public poetry readings in Baghdad. People getting on with their lives. At the same time, Michael charts the course of one of the great rivers of the world, showing how the water that gave life to such ancient settlements as Babylon and Ur is now becoming a scarce and hotly contested resource. And he considers the role that Iraq’s other great natural resource – oil – plays in both providing wealth and threatening political stability.
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and permeated with his warmth and humour, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.
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The Joy of Well-Being: A Practical Guide to a Happy, Healthy, and Long Life – Jason & Colleen Wachob
On your journey toward a more health-conscious life, you’ve likely been bombarded by an overwhelming amount of information-from the Kardashian-like wellness influencers who (unrealistically) insist upon sustainably sourced Epsom salt baths every night, to the elite longevity optimizers who measure their lactate levels after a workout. The echo chamber of the internet, and social media algorithms that favor polarizing opinions to drive views and engagement, have hijacked our understanding of health. No matter which corner of the wellness world you inhabit, our social feeds are filled with advice that presumes we all have the same amount of time, money, and resources. In this saturated landscape, how can you avoid the potential scams and dodge the doctors-turned-celebrities to find what really works for you?
Over the past decade, Colleen and Jason Wachob, co-founders of mindbodygreen, have cultivated a leading wellness lifestyle media brand for everyone seeking to cut through this noise, and live a happier, healthier, and greener lifestyle. The Joy of Well-Being is a distillation of almost fifteen years of this experience on the forefront of the well-being they’ve done the legwork so you don’t have to. The Wachobs are a product of their mentors and years of working with hundreds of the world’s most brilliant well-being minds, PhDs, MDs, therapists, movement specialists, spiritual leaders, and journalists. They’ve developed ways to discern meaningful points of information amidst the chaos, an act they consider both a science and an art. The Joy of Well-Being is more than a book, it’s a reawakening, marking a crucial shift away from the do-this-then-do-that paradigm, to cultivating a joyful lifestyle that centers each individual, and their own health and happiness. True well-being isn’t something you chase, it is something you weave together, as each new day presents an opportunity to make choices that support feeling good in your body, in your relationships, and in your life.
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” King is a major achievement. With eloquence, compassion, and grace, Jonathan Eig offers a stirringly contemporary and complex portrait of a fully human―and humane―King . . . A resounding triumph.” ―Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield
“Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle. Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know. Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being―not with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!” ―Ken Burns
Named a most anticipated book of 2023 by The Washington Post , The Millions , and Literary Hub
The first full biography in decades, King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times.
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.
In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.
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Party of One: The Rise of XI Jinping and China’s Superpower Future – Chun Han Wong
From one of the most admired reporters covering China today, a vital new account of the life and political vision of Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader of the People’s Republic whose hard-edged tactics have set the rising superpower on a collision with Western liberal democracies.
Party of One shatters the many myths and caricatures that shroud one of the world’s most secretive political organizations and its leader. Many observers misread Xi during his early years in power, projecting their own hopes that he would steer China toward more political openness, rule of law, and pro-market economics. Having masked his beliefs while climbing the party hierarchy, Xi has centralized decision-making powers, encouraged a cult of personality around himself, and moved toward indefinite rule by scrapping presidential term limits—stirring fears of a return to a Mao-style dictatorship. Today, the party of Xi favors political zeal over technical expertise, trumpets its faith in Marxism, and proclaims its reach into every corner of Chinese society with Xi portraits and hammer-and-sickle logos. Under Xi, China has challenged Western preeminence in global affairs and cast its authoritarian system as a model of governance worthy of international emulation.
As a China reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Chun Han Wong has chronicled Xi Jinping’s hard-line strategy for crushing dissent against his strongman rule, his political repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and his increasingly coercive efforts to reel in the island democracy of Taiwan, as well as the domestic and diplomatic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. When the Chinese government refused to renew Wong’s press credentials and forced him to leave mainland China in 2019, he moved to Hong Kong to continue covering Chinese politics and its autocratic turn under Xi. Now, Wong has drawn on his years of firsthand reporting across China—including conversations with party insiders, insights from scholars and diplomats, and analyses of official speeches and documents—to create a lucid and historically rooted account of China’s leader and how he inspires fear and fervor in his party, his nation, and beyond.
Timely, revelatory, and important, Party of One explains how the future Xi imagines for China will reshape the future of the entire world.
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Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything – Michio Kaku
An exhilarating tour of humanity’s next great technological achievement—quantum computing—which may eventually illuminate the deepest mysteries of science and solve some of humanity’s biggest problems, like global warming, world hunger, and incurable disease, by the bestselling author of The God Equation.
The runaway success of the microchip processor may be reaching its end. Running up against the physical constraints of smaller and smaller sizes, traditional silicon chips are not likely to prove useful in solving humanity’s greatest challenges, from climate change, to global starvation, to incurable diseases. But the quantum computer, which harnesses the power and complexity of the atomic realm, already promises to be every bit as revolutionary as the transistor and microchip once were. Its unprecedented gains in computing power herald advancements that could change every aspect of our daily lives.
Automotive companies, medical researchers, and consulting firms are betting on quantum computing, hoping to exploit its power to design more efficient vehicles, create life-saving new drugs, and streamline industries to revolutionize the economy. But this is only the beginning. Quantum computers could allow us to finally create nuclear fusion reactors that create clean, renewable energy without radioactive waste or threats of meltdown. They could help us crack the biological processes that generate natural, cheap fertilizer and enable us to feed the world’s growing populations. And they could unravel the fiendishly difficult protein folding that lies at the heart of previously incurable diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS, and Parkinson’s, helping us to live longer, healthier lives. There is not a single problem humanity faces that couldn’t be addressed by quantum computing. Told with Kaku’s signature clarity and enthusiasm, Quantum Supremacy is the story of this exciting frontier and the race to claim humanity’s future.
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Tell Me Everything: A Memoir – Minka Kelly
“A timely, urgent portrait of working-class American women.”
—Gabrielle Union
Minka Kelly takes readers behind the shiny silver-screen facade and reveals just how good an actress she really is.
Fans know her as the spoiled, rich cheerleader Lyla Garrity on Friday Night Lights or as the affluent, mysterious Samantha on the HBO megahit Euphoria. But as revealed for the first time in these pages, Minka Kelly’s life has been anything but easy.
Raised by a single mother who worked as a stripper and struggled with addiction, Minka spent years waking up in strange apartments as she and her mom bounced around the country, relying on friends and relatives to take them in. At times they even lived in storage units. She reconnected with her father, Aerosmith’s Rick Dufay, and eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she landed the role of a lifetime on Friday Night Lights.
Now an established actress and philanthropist, Minka takes this next step in her career as a writer. She has poured her soul into the pages of this book, which ultimately tells a story of triumph over adversity, and how resilience and love are all we have in the end.
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Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada – Michelle Good
Abold, provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada.
With authority and insight, Truth Telling examines a wide range of Indigenous issues framed by Michelle Good’s personal experience and knowledge.
From racism, broken treaties, and cultural pillaging, to the value of Indigenous lives and the importance of Indigenous literature, this collection reveals facts about Indigenous life in Canada that are both devastating and enlightening. Truth Telling also demonstrates the myths underlying Canadian history and the human cost of colonialism, showing how it continues to underpin modern social institutions in Canada.
Passionate and uncompromising, Michelle Good affirms that meaningful and substantive reconciliation hinges on recognition of Indigenous self-determination, the return of lands, and a just redistribution of the wealth that has been taken from those lands without regard for Indigenous peoples.
Truth Telling is essential reading for those looking to acknowledge the past and understand the way forward.
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Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls – Angela Sterritt
A remarkable work of memoir and investigative journalism focusing on missing and murdered Indigenous women, written by an award-winning Gitxsan journalist who survived life on the streets against all odds.
As a Gitxsan teenager navigating life on the streets, Angela Sterritt wrote in her journal to help her survive and find her place in the world. Now an acclaimed journalist, she writes for major news outlets to push for justice and to light a path for Indigenous women, girls, and survivors. In her brilliant debut, Sterritt shares her memoir alongside investigative reporting into cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, showing how colonialism and racism led to a society where Sterritt struggled to survive as a young person, and where the lives of Indigenous women and girls are ignored and devalued.
Growing up, Sterritt was steeped in the stories of her ancestors: grandparents who carried bentwood boxes of berries, hunted and trapped, and later fought for rights and title to that land. But as a vulnerable young woman, kicked out of the family home and living on the street, Sterritt inhabited places that, today, are infamous for being communities where women have gone missing or been murdered: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and, later on, Northern BC’s Highway of Tears. Sterritt faced darkness: she experienced violence from partners and strangers and saw friends and community members die or go missing. But she navigated the street, group homes, and SROs to finally find her place in journalism and academic excellence at university, relying entirely on her own strength, resilience, and creativity along with the support of her ancestors and community to find her way.
“She could have been me,” Sterritt acknowledges today, and her empathy for victims, survivors, and families drives her present-day investigations into the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women. In the end, Sterritt steps into a place of power, demanding accountability from the media and the public, exposing racism, and showing that there is much work to do on the path towards understanding the truth. But most importantly, she proves that the strength and brilliance of Indigenous women is unbroken, and that together, they can build lives of joy and abundance.
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A momentous look at the private companies driving a revolutionary new economy in space, from the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk.
With the launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Elon Musk’s SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. And that milestone carried major implications: Silicon Valley, not NASA or nation states, was suddenly cemented as the epicenter of the new Space Age. Start-ups and the wealthy investors behind them began to realize that the universe—ungoverned and infinite—was open for business. Welcome to the Wild West of aerospace engineering.
When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied intergalactic land grab. Through his trademark immersive reporting, Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies—Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab—as they build new space systems and attempt to launch rockets and satellites into orbit by the thousands. While the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, these new companies arrived with a different set of goals: to make rocket and satellite launches fast and cheap, thereby opening Earth’s lower orbit for business—and setting it up as the next playing field for humankind’s technological evolution, where we can connect, analyze, and monitor everything on Earth.
Vance has had a front-row seat and singular access to this peculiar and unprecedented moment in history. When the Heavens Went on Sale travels through private company headquarters, labs, and top-secret launch locations around the world, including California, Texas, Alaska, New Zealand, Ukraine, India, and French Guiana. He chronicles it all in full color: the private jets, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations, and multimillionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear.
With the most detailed and intimate reporting of Vance’s career, When the Heavens Went on Sale reveals the spectacular chaos of the new business of space, and what happens when the idealistic, ambitious minds of Silicon Valley turn their unbridled vision toward the limitless expanse of the stars. This is the most pressing and controversial technology story of our time, a tale of fascinating characters chasing unimaginable stakes as they race to space.
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