In this funny, honest, and poignant book for readers of Jessi Klein, Allie Brosh and Roxane Gay, the former child actress who starred in Matilda and Mrs. Doubtfire shares stories from her unique coming of age
Mara Wilson has always felt a little young and out of place: as the only kid on a film set full of adults, the first daughter in a house full of boys, a Valley girl in New York and a neurotic in California, and a grown-up the world still remembers as a little girl. Tackling everything from what she learned about sex on the set of Melrose Place,
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When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood—she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life.
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Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Atul Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they can eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.
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New York Times Bestseller
Hailed by critics as “one of the best true-crime books . . . and also one of the best memoirs” (Seattle Times) in recent memory, Walter’s unbelievable “Hitchcockian psychological thriller” (Amy Tan) of his fifteen-year friendship with grifter-turned-murderer “Clark Rockefeller” is a one-of-a-kind study in criminal psychology, credulity, and the relationship between a writer and his subject. Both a memoir of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley and an investigation into the crimes of a true psychopath, Blood Will Out exposes the dance between con and mark that beats at the heart of the American dream.
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Full Body Burden is Kristen Iversen’s story of growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant. It’s also a book about the destructive power of secrets—both family secrets and government secrets. Her father’s hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what they made at Rocky Flats—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions and discovered some disturbing realities.
As this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism—a shocking account of the government’s sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats,
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The author of the bestselling Ghost Soldiers returns with the epic chronicle of the real American West. Blood and Thunder brings the history of the American conquest of the West to vivid life through the interactions of the three main forces of the territory—American Indians, Mexicans, and Americans—and through the exploits of the legendary Kit Carson. An illiterate mountain man who mastered seven Indian dialects, Carson had more respect for the tribes than did any other American; yet he was also a cold-blooded killer who willingly followed orders tantamount to massacre. Grand in scope, immediate in detail,
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