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Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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New York Times Bestseller

Featured in the critically acclaimed documentary RBG

"It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the 'Notorious RBG." -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2019

She was a fierce dissenter with a serious collar game. A legendary, self-described "flaming feminist litigator" who made the world more equal. And an intergenerational icon affectionately known as the Notorious RBG. As the nation mourns the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, discover the story of a remarkable woman and learn how to carry on her legacy.

This runaway bestseller, brought to you by the attorney founder of the Notorious RBG Tumblr and an award-winning feminist journalist, is more than just a love letter. It draws on intimate access to Ginsburg's family members, close friends, colleagues, and clerks, as well as an interview with the Justice herself. An original hybrid of reported narrative, annotated dissents, rare archival photos and documents, and illustrations, the book tells a never-before-told story of an unusual and transformative woman who transcended divides and changed the world forever.

Sandy: I feel real strongly about this one.  Yes, I’m a lawyer, wife of a lawyer and mother of a law student - but my science-y kids have read and loved this too.  OK, I read parts of it aloud to Tom during lacrosse trips to tournaments. It’s not all lawyer-ish, it’s written by a huge RBG fan and lawyer but she asked aboard her writer friend who knew nothing about this Ginsburg person.  It does look at how she changed the law, but in well-highlighted (literally, in the font) accessible language.  The actual way that this tiny person strategically and patiently and brilliantly changed the world we live in is so important now - but as important I think is the story of how she became who she was, and maybe especially the marriage that allowed her to excel on all fronts.  Read it, give it - truly.

 

Who would have thought a bespectacled, elderly jurist would become a pop-culture icon, feted in song and story so widely that she might be likened to a hip-hop star?

 

Though the hip-hop star in question, the late Notorious B.I.G., is an inapposite choice, MSNBC correspondent Carmon and attorney Knizhnik, building on the latter’s popular law-studies blog, serve up something between a biography and a scrapbook. If you want to understand how, through tireless work and endless determination, the scholarly RBG should have overcome discrimination to rise to the top of the judicial pyramid, then this book serves, but so too if you want “only to learn to get buff like an octogenarian who can do twenty push-ups.” Ginsburg starts on the elliptical, then moves on with her trainer to do planks, “where he does his best to knock the tiny justice down.” By this point, readers will understand that nothing can knock Justice Ginsburg down, not cancer or the death of a beloved spouse or having to see Samuel Alito every workday. “RBG had a job to do,” Carmon and Knizhnik cheer, “and she wasn’t done yet.” The book goes beyond admiring, and though it is generally courtly toward the rest of the court, Ginsburg is its unlikely dazzling star. By the end of this celebration, in which the authors make some pertinent, serious legal points, even readers disinclined to think of the justice as a pop icon will find new respect for her—unless, that is, they’re ideologically bound not to, for RBG emerges as an unshakable champion of women’s rights and, horrors, as a classic liberal. Besides, RBG writes a mean dissent—e.g., “This is not the first time this court has ordered a cramped interpretation of Title VII.”

Nowhere Girl: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood

Nowhere Girl: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood

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"An absolutely breathless read. Nowhere Girl is a courageous, heart-breaking, and beautifully written story of a girl doing everything in her power to protect the ones she loves."
--Paul Haggis, Academy Award-winning writer/director of Crash, Million Dollar Baby, and Casino Royale

By the age of nine, I will have lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities. I'll know how a document is forged, how to withstand an interrogation, and most important, how to disappear . . .

Wild, heart-wrenching, and unexpectedly funny, Nowhere Girl is an inspiring coming-of-age memoir about running for freedom against the odds.

To the young Cheryl Diamond, life felt like one big adventure, whether she was hurtling down the Himalayas in a rickety car or mingling with underworld fixers. Her family appeared to be an unbreakable gang of five. One day they were in Australia, the next South Africa, the pattern repeating as they crossed continents, changed identities, and erased their pasts. What Diamond didn't yet know was that she was born into a family of outlaws fleeing from the highest international law enforcement agencies, a family with secrets that would eventually catch up to all of them.

By the time she was in her teens, Diamond had lived dozens of lives and lies, but as she grew, love and trust turned to fear and violence, and her family--the only people she had in the world--began to unravel. She started to realize that her life itself might be a big con, and the people she loved, the most dangerous of all. With no way out and her identity burned so often that she had no proof she even existed, all that was left was a girl from nowhere.

Surviving would require her to escape, and to do so Diamond would have to unlearn all the rules she grew up with. Like The Glass Castle meets Catch Me If You Can, Nowhere Girl is an impossible-to-believe true story of self-discovery and triumph.

Nurse, Come You Here!: More True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle (the Country Nurse Series, Book Two)

Nurse, Come You Here!: More True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle (the Country Nurse Series, Book Two)

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From the author of Call the Nurse, come new tales of a London nurse working to help and heal a community on a remote Scottish island. Lively, touching, engaging reading for fans of Call the Midwife and All Creatures Great and Small.

Julia MacLeod shares unique and enchanting experiences as a nurse in rural Scotland. Her stories will ring true with every nurse--or anyone--who has ever cared for a family or a community, whether in Scotland or America. Call the Nurse is a delightful read." --LeAnn Thieman, author Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul

Mary J. Macleod and her husband left the London area for an idyllic place to raise their young children in the late sixties, and they found the island of Papavray in the Scottish Hebrides. There they bought a croft house on a small acre of land, and Mary J. (also known as Julia) became the district nurse. At the age of eighty, she first recounted her family's adventures in her debut, Call the Nurse, where she introduced readers to the austere beauties of the island and the hardy charm and warmth of the islanders.

The anecdotes in this new volume take us to the end of her stay on Papavray, after which the MacLeod family left for California. Once again, we meet the crofters Archie, Mary, and Fergie, and other friends. There are stories of troubles, joy, and tragedy, of children lost and found, the cow that wandered into the kitchen, a distraught young mother who strides into the icy surf with her infant child, the ghostly apparition that returns after death to reveal the will in a sewing box. There are accidents and broken bones, twisters that come in from the sea, and acts of simple courage and uncommon generosity.

Here again, a nurse's compassion meets Gaelic fortitude in these true tales of a bygone era.

Pelosi

Pelosi

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A riveting inside account of the unprecedented rise to power and unmatched political legacy of the first woman Speaker of the House, by award-winning journalist Molly Ball

Nancy Pelosi's opposition to Donald Trump has made her an icon of the Resistance, featured in viral memes clapping sardonically at the president or ripping up his State of the Union address. But the real Nancy Pelosi is neither the shrill partisan featured in thousands of attack ads nor the cautious corporatist reviled by the far left. She's the rare politician who still knows how to get big things done--a master of legislative power whose policy accomplishments have touched millions of American lives, from providing universal access to health care to reforming Wall Street to allowing gay people to serve openly in the military. She's done it all at a time of historic polarization and gridlock, despite being routinely underestimated by allies and opponents alike.

Ball's nuanced, page-turning portrait takes readers inside Pelosi's life and times, from her roots in urban Baltimore to her formative years as a party activist and fundraiser, from the fractious politics of San Francisco to high-stakes congressional negotiations with multiple presidents. The result is a compelling portrait of a barrier-breaking woman that sheds new light on American political history. Based on exclusive interviews with the Speaker and deep background reporting, Ball shows Pelosi through a thoroughly modern lens to explain how this extraordinary woman has met her moment.

Personal History

Personal History

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An extraordinarily frank, honest, and generous book by one of America's most famous and admired women -- a book that is, as its title suggests, both personal and history. It is the story of Graham's parents: the multi-millionaire father who left private business and government service to buy and restore the down-and-out "Washington Post"; the aggressive, formidable, self-absorbed mother, known in her time for her political and welfare work, and her passionate friendships with men such as Thomas Mann and Adlai Stevenson. It is the story of how "The Washington Post" struggled to succeed -- a fascinating and instructive business history told from the inside (the paper has been run by Graham herself, her father, her husband, and now her son). It is the story of Phil Graham -- Kay's brilliant, charismatic husband (he clerked for two Supreme Court justices), whose plunge into manic-depression and eventual suicide are movingly and charitably recounted. And, best of all, it is Kay Graham herself -- brought up in great wealth, yet understanding nothing of money; half Jewish, yet -- incredibly -- unaware of it; naive, awkward, yet intelligent and energetic, and married to a man she adored. How he fascinated and educated her, and then in his illness turned from her and abused her, destroying her confidence and her happiness, is a drama in itself, followed by the rarer drama of her new life as the head of a great newspaper and a great company -- a woman famous (and feared) in her own right. In other words, here is a life that came into its own with a vengeance -- a success story on every level.
Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

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A fresh, energetic voice with a brilliant mind to power it, brings readers an endlessly inventive, intimate, and provocative memoir-in-essays that celebrates the strange and exquisite state of falling in love--whether with a painting or a person--and interweaves incisive commentary on modern life, feminism, art and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and past trauma (Esmé Weijun Wang, New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias).

Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love--with a place, or a painting, or a person--and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss--from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde--Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed.

Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year

The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls--the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser--the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series--masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder's biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.

The Little House books, for all the hardships they describe, are paeans to the pioneer spirit, portraying it as triumphant against all odds. But Wilder's real life was harder and grittier than that, a story of relentless struggle, rootlessness, and poverty. It was only in her sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, that she turned to children's books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a celebratory vision of homesteading--and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches episodes in American letters.

Spanning nearly a century of epochal change, from the Indian Wars to the Dust Bowl, Wilder's dramatic life provides a unique perspective on American history and our national mythology of self-reliance. With fresh insights and new discoveries, Prairie Fires reveals the complex woman whose classic stories grip us to this day.

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Rough House: A Memoir

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Tina Ontiveros was born into timber on both sides of the family. Her mother spent summers driving logging trucks for her family's operation, and her father was the son of an itinerant logger, raised in a variety of lumber towns, as Tina herself would be.

A story of growing up in turmoil, rough house recounts a childhood divided between a charming, mercurial, abusive father in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and a mother struggling with small-town poverty. It is also a story of generational trauma, especially for the women--a story of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen and frequently raised alone.

Ontiveros's father, Loyd, looms large. Reflecting on his death and long absence from her life, she writes, "I had this ridiculous hope that I would get to enjoy a functional relationship with my father, on my own terms, now that I was an adult." In searingly honest, straightforward prose, rough house is her attempt to carve out this relationship, to understand her father and her family from an adult perspective.

While some elements of Ontiveros's story are universal, others are indelibly grounded in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the twentieth century, as the lumber industry shifted and contracted. Tracing her childhood through the working-class towns and forests of Washington and Oregon, Ontiveros explores themes of love and loss, parents and children, and her own journey to a different kind of adulthood.

Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

Seed to Dust: Life, Nature, and a Country Garden

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For the gardener in your life, or for anyone who loved Late Migrations and H is for Hawk

A stunning meditation on gardening and the wisdom of plants, "that rare book that will appeal to nonfiction readers everywhere ... Candid, tender, thoughtful and absorbing." --Shelf Awareness (STARRED Review)

With "chapters... [that] shimmer like lantern slides, lit with luminous imagery ... Seed to Dust is an invitation to read this world as Mr. Hamer does--with a close eye to what changes, and what does not."--The Wall Street Journal

Marc Hamer has nurtured the same 12-acre garden in the Welsh countryside for over two decades. The garden is vast and intricate. It's rarely visited, and only Hamer knows of its secrets. But it's not his garden. It belongs to his wealthy and elegant employer, Miss Cashmere. But the garden does not really belong to her, either. As Hamer writes, "Like a book, a garden belongs to everyone who sees it."

In Seed to Dust, Marc Hamer paints a beautiful portrait of the garden that "belongs to everyone." He describes a year in his life as a country gardener, with each chapter named for the month he's in. As he works, he muses on the unusual folklores of his beloved plants. He observes the creatures who scurry and hide from his blade or rake. And he reflects on his own life: living homeless as a young man, his loving relationship with his wife and children, and--now--feeling the effects of old age on body and mind.

As the seasons change, Hamer also reflects on the changes he has observed in Miss Cashmere's life from afar: the death of her husband and the departure of her children from the stately home where she now lives alone. At the book's end, Hamer's connection to Miss Cashmere changes shape, and new insights into relationships and the beauty and brutality of nature emerge.

Just like all good books and gardens, Seed to Dust is filled with equal parts life and death, beauty and decay, and every reader will find something different to admire.

Silver Lining

Silver Lining

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Elizabeth Beisel, a three-time Olympic swimmer, two-time Olympic medalist, and Olympic Team captain for the United States, shares a raw and honest account of her journey towards becoming one of the best athletes in the world, and the successes and failures that came along the way.

When Elizabeth Beisel watched the Olympics on television for the first time, she was seven years old in her parents' living room. She decided right then and there she would compete at the Olympic Games one day. Eight years later, she made her first of three Olympic Teams as a fifteen-year-old.

Despite her huge success in the sport, Elizabeth struggled with doubts, failures, and injuries throughout her entire swimming career. In Silver Lining, she gives a compelling look inside the pressures that come with being an Olympian, and how she mentally conquered the stress of competing at the highest level for over a decade.

From a small-town girl with a dream to winning Olympic medals, Elizabeth gives you a glimpse inside her life as you've never seen it before. She is relatable, open, and honest, and her storytelling in Silver Lining will leave you feeling emotional and inspired to pursue your own dreams, no matter who you are.

Reviews
"Silver Lining is a story of amazing perseverance of one of the greatest leaders in our sports history." - Rowdy Gaines

"You will be inspired, and also discover why Elizabeth is one of the most respected athletes to grace a pool deck for Team USA." - Katie Ledecky

"Elizabeth wonderfully captures what it means to be an elite athlete.Silver Lining shows how perseverance, dedication, and a support team can help one overcome life's biggest obstacles."
- Caeleb Dressel

About the Author
Elizabeth Beisel is a three-time Olympic swimmer and two-time Olympic medalist for the United States of America. Visit her at www.elizabethbeisel.com.

Smile: The Story of a Face

Smile: The Story of a Face

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2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence Longlist Selection

A Best Book of 2021 by Chicago Tribune, People, Real Simple, The Washington Post, and Time

The extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year medical and metaphysical odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing, by a MacArthur genius and two-time Pulitzer finalist.

With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients see spontaneous improvement and experience a full recovery. Like Ruhl's own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face--one that, while recognizably her own--is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions.

In a series of piercing, witty, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, wife, mother, and artist. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mom to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness.

Brimming with insight, humility, and levity, Smile is a triumph by one of America's leading playwrights. It is an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.

Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir

Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"This is a book people will be talking about forever."

--Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

"Ford's wrenchingly brilliant memoir is truly a classic in the making. The writing is so richly observed and so suffused with love and yearning that I kept forgetting to breathe while reading it." --John Green, #1 New York Times bestselling author

One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the looming absence of her incarcerated father.

Through poverty, adolescence, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley C. Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. There are just a few problems: he's in prison, and she doesn't know what he did to end up there. She doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley desperately searches for meaning in the chaos. Then, her grandmother reveals the truth about her father's incarceration . . . and Ashley's entire world is turned upside down.

Somebody's Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the threads between who she is and what she was born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.