Biography
From her Italian American childhood through singlehood, raising and feeding a growing family, divorce, and a new marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Growing up, she tasted love in her grandmother's tomato sauce and dreamed of her mother's special-occasion Fancy Lady Sandwiches. Later, the kitchen became the heart of Hood's own home. She cooked pork roast to warm her first apartment, used two cups of dried basil for her first attempt at making pesto, taught her children how to make their favorite potatoes, found hope in her daughter's omelet after a divorce, and fell in love again--with both her husband and his foolproof chicken stock.
Hood tracks her lifelong journey in the kitchen with twenty-seven heartfelt essays, each accompanied by a recipe (or a few). In "Carbonara Quest," searching for the perfect spaghetti helped her cope with lonely nights as a flight attendant. In the award-winning essay "The Golden Silver Palate," she recounts the history of her fail-safe dinner party recipe for Chicken Marbella--and how it did fail her when she was falling in love. Hood's simple, comforting recipes also include her mother's famous meatballs, hearty Italian Beef Stew, classic Indiana Fried Chicken, the perfect grilled cheese, and a deliciously summery peach pie.
With Hood's signature humor and tenderness, Kitchen Yarns spills tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.
Jenny: Joe Maddon, former manager of the Cubs, is gone (I miss ya, Joe!), but Joe loved one of my favorite books, Walter Isaacson’sLeonardo Da Vinci. Joe was inspired to choose his 2016 theme “Putting the art back into the game” based on Isaacson’s book.
This pandemic might be just the right time to tackle a tome like this.
Here’s three reasons this book is worth reading now:
1) Da Vinci reminds us that there’s potential in each of us to be successful despite what life throws at us.
Da Vinci was lucky to be born a bastard, otherwise he would have been required to follow in his father’s footsteps as a notary. Instead, he was allowed to be a freethinking, creative, cool cat who followed his own pursuits. Another upside to being born out of wedlock was that he was NOT sent to Latin school so he was mainly self-taught through his insatiable curiosity and experimentation which led him to have an incredible range of experiences culminating in the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Not bad.
2) A meaningful life is derived through curiosity:
His scientific explorations informed his art. As Isaacson writes:
“As he (Da Vinci) aged, he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation. When he groped for a theory of why the sky appears blue, it was not simply to inform his painting. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.”
3) Genius is cultivated and developed, not just something you’re born with:
Da Vinci was a genius.
But as Isaacson reminds us: “We should be wary of that word. Slapping the ‘genius’ label on Leonardo oddly minimizes him by making it seem as if he were touched by lightning.…In fact, Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. (Are you watching the Michael Jordan documentary???? You’ll get a feel for why this point is so important!) It did not come from being the divine recipient…His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.”
This book is a marvel to read. And if there’s a fourth reason to read it it would be that Leo dressed in a fun way, was a great conversationalist, and was kind to animals. Oops, that’s six. I would like to have known him!
Jenny: Joe Maddon, former manager of the Cubs, is gone (I miss ya, Joe!), but Joe loved one of my favorite books, Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci. Joe was inspired to choose his 2016 theme “Putting the art back into the game” based on Isaacson’s book.
This pandemic might be just the right time to tackle a tome like this.
Here’s three reasons this book is worth reading now:
1) Da Vinci reminds us that there’s potential in each of us to be successful despite what life throws at us.
Da Vinci was lucky to be born a bastard, otherwise he would have been required to follow in his father’s footsteps as a notary. Instead, he was allowed to be a freethinking, creative, cool cat who followed his own pursuits. Another upside to being born out of wedlock was that he was NOT sent to Latin school so he was mainly self-taught through his insatiable curiosity and experimentation which led him to have an incredible range of experiences culminating in the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Not bad.
2) A meaningful life is derived through curiosity:
His scientific explorations informed his art. As Isaacson writes:
“As he (Da Vinci) aged, he pursued his scientific inquiries not just to serve his art but out of a joyful instinct to fathom the profound beauties of creation. When he groped for a theory of why the sky appears blue, it was not simply to inform his painting. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.”
3) Genius is cultivated and developed, not just something you’re born with:
Da Vinci was a genius.
But as Isaacson reminds us: “We should be wary of that word. Slapping the ‘genius’ label on Leonardo oddly minimizes him by making it seem as if he were touched by lightning.…In fact, Leonardo’s genius was a human one, wrought by his own will and ambition. (Are you watching the Michael Jordan documentary???? You’ll get a feel for why this point is so important!) It did not come from being the divine recipient…His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.”
This book is a marvel to read. And if there’s a fourth reason to read it it would be that Leo dressed in a fun way, was a great conversationalist, and was kind to animals. Oops, that’s six. I would like to have known him!
Randa Jarrar is a fearless voice of dissent who has been called politically incorrect (Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times). As an American raised for a time in Egypt, and finding herself captivated by the story of a celebrated Egyptian belly dancer's journey across the United States in the 1940s, she sets off from her home in California to her parents' in Connecticut. Coloring this road trip are journeys abroad and recollections of a life lived with daring. Reclaiming her autonomy after a life of survival--domestic assault as a child, and later, as a wife; threats and doxxing after her viral tweet about Barbara Bush--Jarrar offers a bold look at domestic violence, single motherhood, and sexuality through the lens of the punished-yet-triumphant body. On the way, she schools a rest-stop racist, destroys Confederate flags in the desert, and visits the Chicago neighborhood where her immigrant parents first lived. Hailed as one of the finest writers of her generation (Laila Lalami), Jarrar delivers a euphoric and critical, funny and profound memoir that will speak to anyone who has felt erased, asserting: I am here. I am joyful.
An engrossing biography of President Lyndon Johnson from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Team of Rivals
Hailed by the New York Times as "the most penetrating, fascinating political biography I have ever read," Doris Kearns Goodwin's extraordinary and insightful book draws from meticulous research in addition to the author's time spent working at the White House from 1967 to 1969. After Lyndon Johnson's term ended, Goodwin remained his confidante and assisted in the preparation of his memoir. In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, she traces the 36th president's life from childhood to his early days in politics, and from his leadership of the Senate to his presidency, analyzing his dramatic years in the White House, including both his historic domestic triumphs and his failures in Vietnam. Drawn from personal anecdotes and candid conversations with Johnson, Goodwin paints a rich and complicated portrait of one of our nation's most compelling politicians.Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work.
Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'an to New York, Made in China is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered--an icon and idol--alongside your own? Jenn Shapland's celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America's most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers's life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others' narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers's life--her history, her secrets, her legacy--reveal to Shapland about herself?
In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation's greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
A new translation from the French by Marion Wiesel. Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.
This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
"Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth."--Glennon Doyle, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Untamed It's hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely? Kate Bowler believed that life was a series of unlimited choices, until she discovered, at age thirty-five, that her body was wracked with cancer. In No Cure for Being Human, she searches for a way forward as she mines the wisdom (and absurdity) of today's "best life now" advice industry, which insists on exhausting positivity and on trying to convince us that we can out-eat, out-learn, and out-perform our humanness. We are, she finds, as fragile as the day we were born. With dry wit and unflinching honesty, Kate Bowler grapples with her diagnosis, her ambition, and her faith as she tries to come to terms with her limitations in a culture that says anything is possible. She finds that we need one another if we're going to tell the truth: Life is beautiful and terrible, full of hope and despair and everything in between--and there's no cure for being human.
Featuring an all-new cover, New York Times bestseller Bill Bryson's irrevent and hilarious journey through the beloved island nation he called home for two decades. From Downing Street to Loch Ness, this is a delightful look at the United Kingdom.
Before New York Times bestselling author Bill Bryson wrote The Road to Little Dribbling, he took this delightfully irreverent jaunt around the unparalleled floating nation of Great Britain, which has produced zebra crossings, Shakespeare, Twiggie Winkie's Farm, and places with names like Farleigh Wallop and Titsey.
A tribute to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that does more than catalog her achievements; it conveys her spirit, one that will leave readers in awe.*
This New York Times bestselling version of the acclaimed biography Notorious RBG is an excellent way to share with middle grade readers just why Justice Ginsburg was such a powerful role model. This entertaining and insightful full-color 200-page young readers' edition mixes pop culture, humor, and expert analysis for a remarkable account of the indomitable Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Heroine. Trailblazer. Pioneer.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an icon to millions. Her tireless fight for equality and women's rights inspired not only great strides in the workforce but impacted the law of the land. This accessible biography of this fierce woman, detailing her searing dissents and powerful jurisprudence, is a keeper. As School Library Journal* noted, This version shares the same knockout formatting as the adult edition: a plethora of photographs and images leaving nary a page unadorned.
Hand your middle grade reader this powerful and highly readable biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Includes a timeline, glossary, source list, index, and even a section that puts legal terms in plain English.