Memoirs Books

Book SynopsisA behind-the-scenes look at the meteoric rise and stunning takedown of a nightclub empire, by the man who held the reins. Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA, and Palladium—the cutting-edge, insanely successful, and notoriously decadent clubs that dominated New York City’s entertainment scene, their influences reverberating around the world. Across four decades, a single mysterious figure stood behind them all: Peter Gatien, the leading impresario of global nightlife. His clubs didn’t follow the trends—they created movements. They nurtured vanguard music acts that brought rock, house, grunge, hip-hop, industrial, and techno to the beautiful ones who showed up night after night to tear the roof off every party. But as Peter and his innovative team ramped up the hedonistic highs, Rudolph Giuliani was leading a major shift in the city. Under the guise of improving New York City’s “quality of life,” the club scene was targeted—and Peter Gatien’s empire became a major focus of the administration. In this frank and gritty memoir, Peter Gatien charts the seismic changes in his personal and professional life and the targeted destruction of his nightclub empire. From Peter’s childhood in a Canadian mill town to the freedom of the 1970s, through the excesses of the 1980s and the ensuing crackdown in the 1990s, The Club King chronicles the birth and death of a cultural movement—and the life of the man who was in control of every beat.Trade Review“A giant of the 1970s through 1990s New York City club scene…paints a picture of a simple guy with big dreams who was always vulnerable to outside speculation and conjecture…crisp, vivid prose…a warm tale of a local boy making good on the other side of the border…Sixteen years after his deportation back to Canada, Gatien tells his side of the story. An arresting and provocative narrative.” —Kirkus Reviews “Gatien once dominated the empire that is New York nightlife. Now he’s telling his story—the highs, the hedonism, and all the gritty details.” —Newsweek “Peter Gatien may be the wisest cat in New York…he’s got a tale to tell, one filled with fabulousness and tabloid phantasmagoria…The Club King, his slick new memoir out this month, chronicles Gatien’s rise from a working-class kid in a sulfurous paper mill town in Ontario.” —Rolling Stone “The Limelight and Tunnel are long gone. But the story of their vilified owner is still being written…With his memoir, The Club King published on April 1, he hopes for a degree of catharsis after an epic rise and fall, but also to celebrate a lost New York, when clubs felt mysterious and transgressive, luring the misfits and outcasts from the city’s creative underground, and every night felt like a Mardi Gras on Mars.” —New York Times “[Gatien’s] legacy is—or ought to be—one of dogged entrepreneurism and a creative culture-centered approach to nightlife…If you were in New York and of partying age in the ‘90s, you almost certainly spent time in one or more of Gatien’s spots. But the entrepreneur’s story has many more chapters to it…The Club King covers one of clubland’s darkest chapters but doesn’t dwell on it…a chance to tell his own story.” —Billboard “[A] formidable career as the preeminent swizzle stick in the cocktail of Manhattan nightlife…full of stories.” —The Face “Peter Gatien’s new memoir The Club King: My Rise, Reign, and Fall in New York Nightlife arrives at a time when gathering at nightclubs already seems like a distant memory. Which makes this fast-paced account of his legendary run of clubs in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s seem even more like a fantasy.” —Now Toronto “A mesmerizing memoir chronicling [Gatien’s] unlikely journey from a humble childhood in a Canadian mill town to the apex of a cultural empire that defined the spirit of pre-gentrification New York.” —Another Man Magazine “NYC nightlife impresario Peter Gatien—who was behind legendary ‘90s clubs Limelight, Palladium, Club USA, and Tunnel—has revealed his wildest moments with celebs from Johnny Depp to Mick Jagger in a new memoir.” —Page Six

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Book SynopsisAn emotional, funny, and fabulous memoir by trailblazing and award-winning Trans actor and activist Alexandra Billings. Born in 1962, Alexandra Billings grew up in a decade in which being herself was illegal. When she started transitioning in 1980, the word “Transgender” was not commonly used. With no Trans role models and no path to follow, Alexandra did what her family, teachers, and even friends said was impossible: Alexandra forged ahead. Spanning five decades, from profound lows to exhilarating highs, This Time for Me captures the events of a pioneering life. An award-winning actor and history-making LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS activist, Alexandra shares not only her own ever-evolving story but also the parallel ways in which queer identity has dramatically changed since the Stonewall riots of 1969. She weaves a true coming-of-age story of richly imaginative lies, of friends being swept away by a plague that decimated the community, of her determination to establish a career that would break boundaries, and of the recognition of her own power. A celebration of endless possibilities, Alexandra’s bracing memoir is a fight-to-the-death revolution against all expectations.Trade ReviewOne of Shondaland’s Best Books of April 2022 “Moving…not only a reflection on her success, but also on the way she has put her heart into making this world kinder, better, and more accepting than the one she grew up in.” —Shondaland “Straddling eras, Billings toggles between a time when AIDS meant ‘funeral after funeral’ and [T]rans people lived in the shadows, to a new world in which she made her way to the screen as a boundary-breaking actor. What unfolds alongside a narrative marked by adversity and raunchy humor is a poignant portrait of an artist in search of meaning and personal peace. This begs for an encore.” —Publishers Weekly “This Time for Me shines light both on a remarkable personal journey and a painful time in transgender history…blunt truthfulness is a hallmark of her writing…Though she has been mistreated by society over most of her lifetime, her memoir is a model of grace and compassion, showing the world what it means to be misunderstood, and how we can do better to welcome humans of every stripe.” —Washington Post “Equal parts heart-wrenching and resilient…It’s serving drag, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, a beautiful love story, and some advice from her days of waiting tables. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…and cry, and cry!” —Celebrity Book Club with Chelsea Devantez “Alexandra Billings’s extraordinary memoir moves from nightmarish, traumatic horror to a magical journey toward self-worth and artistic flowering. Alexandra has given us a treasure of a book full of wit, insight, and love.” —Charles Busch, actor, playwright, cabaret entertainer, novelist, and screenwriter “Alexandra’s warmth, humor, perseverance, and compassion shine through on every page of This Time for Me. The arts reflect and shape our world every day, and Alexandra has been at the heart of Hollywood’s long-overdue Trans revolution. Alexandra brings you along for her moving and human journey of hope undeterred by hardship, grace in the face of indignity, and the kind of radical love that fosters real change—both for ourselves and our society.” —Delaware state senator Sarah McBride, author of Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality

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Book SynopsisFrom Venezuelan reporter Paula Ramón comes a powerful memoir about one woman’s complicated relationship with her family as her beloved homeland collapses into ruin. In the span of a generation, oil-rich Venezuela spiraled into a dire state of economic collapse. Reporter Paula Ramón experienced the crisis firsthand as her middle-class family saw their quality of life deteriorate. Public services no longer functioned. Money lost its value. Her mother couldn’t afford to buy food, which was increasingly scarce. The once-prosperous country fell into ruin. Like many others, Ramón’s family struggled to survive each day in their beloved city, Maracaibo—until, one by one, they each made the unbearable choice to leave the home they love. In the end, it was Ramón’s mother, a widow, who stayed behind, loyal to the only home she’d ever known. In this heartbreaking mix of lived experience, family chronicle, and journalistic essay, Paula Ramón explores the anguish of her own relationships set against the staggering collapse of a country. Motherland is a uniquely human account about the ties that bind—and the fragile concept of home.Trade Review“A Venezuelan reporter who left her home country in 2010 chronicles the traumatic fate of her family and her broken nation…Throughout, the author vividly portrays the unfolding tragedy shared by all Venezuelans. The collapse of a nation told through the poignant story of one family.” —Kirkus Reviews “The author writes wrenchingly of her mother’s struggles to provide for her and her siblings while their neighborhood deteriorated around them, and catalogs Venezuela’s political troubles with rigor and concision. It’s a fascinating and devastating account of one family’s fate amid a national crisis.” —Publishers Weekly “Terrific Venezuelan journalist Paula Ramon’s Motherland is a joint study of a nation dying under authoritarianism, and a family pulling away, leaving their aging matriarch alone in “a concrete bunker” of a home, a hotbox when the mismanaged electrical grids fail. Rarely are South American upheavals explained with such intimacy.” —Chicago Tribune “Motherland is a deeply personal account of the writer’s experience of this precipitous descent into insecurity, poverty and despair through that of her own, disintegrating family…an important account of where such experiments go wrong and the lived reality of those who occupy the laboratory.” —Latin American Review of Books

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Book SynopsisIn a powerful true-crime memoir, an Emmy Award–winning journalist seeks closure in a decades-long series of crimes and freedom from her own personal demons. In April 1999, reporter Tamara Leitner woke to an active crime scene outside her Arizona apartment. Her neighbor had been sexually assaulted by a man who would later be identified as Claude Dean Hull II, a serial rapist who escaped justice for decades. New identities. New states. New victims—more than one hundred suspected across the country and thousands more victimized in myriad ways. Tamara’s twenty-year compulsion to follow the investigation began. She needed to question a failed system. She needed to know the women whose lives were irrevocably altered. And she needed to face the root of her obsession with Hull and his crimes. In interviewing, befriending, and profoundly connecting with Hull’s survivors, Tamara crafts a unique true-crime narrative. It not only reveals the struggles of the justice system to help victims of sexual violence but explores how these resilient women—and Tamara herself—strove to reclaim their power in the wake of indelible trauma.Trade Review“This title will satisfy readers who seek out true crime written from a personal angle, like Erika Krouse's Tell Me Everything (2022), and those who appreciate precisely detailed and unflagging police and journalistic work in search of justice, like Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018).” —Booklist

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Book SynopsisFrom the Amazon Charts bestselling author of An American Princess comes the true story of an unconventional family divided by war and prejudice during WWII. When they fell in love in 1928, Rika and Waldemar could not have been more different. She was a thirty-seven-year-old Dutch-born mother, estranged from her husband. He was her immigrant boarder, not yet twenty, and a wealthy Surinamese descendant of slaves. The child they have together, brown skinned and blue eyed, brings the couple great joy yet raises some eyebrows. Until the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands explodes their promising life. What unfolds is more than the astonishing story of a love that prevailed over convention. It’s also the quest of a young boy. Through the cruelty of World War II, he will fight for a connection between his father’s South American birthplace and his mother’s European traditions. Lost and displaced for much of his life, but with a legacy of resilience in his blood, he will struggle to find his place in the world. Moving deftly between personal experience and the devastating machinations of war, The Boy Between Worlds is an unforgettable journey of hope, love, and courage in the face of humanity’s darkest hour.

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Book SynopsisAn unfiltered and outrageously funny commentary on the threats to free speech in America from the legendary comedian, actor, and Emmy-nominated SNL writer. Rob Schneider’s childhood in the San Francisco Bay area with parents of mixed-race backgrounds shaped his view of the world: that America affords the greatest opportunity for peoples from all nations and all faiths. But today, in this world gone mad, free speech is under attack. And Schneider keeps finding himself in controversy for questioning what woke ideology is doing to our great nation.    Still, he refuses to be censored. In his debut book, Schneider will make you laugh out loud as he tells his unique story of a Hollywood-comedian-turned-vocal-advocate for open dialogue. He takes readers along for a ride through his life in show business (where he’s starred in 27 movies with his friend Adam Sandler), shares stories from the glory days of Saturday Night Live,

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Book SynopsisDaniel Ponce de Leon's hard-fought journey to Major League Baseball and recovery from a near-death injury, followed by his astonishing big league debut, will inspire readers to trust God in all circumstances.The path you take to achieving your dreams is not always easy. Daniel Ponce de Leon, an acclaimed pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, overcame many challenges to get to the Major Leagues. Drafted four times, he spent a long four years climbing his way up through the minors before finally reaching AAA, only one step away from the Major Leagues. Then, Daniel's dream was almost shattered when he was struck in the head by a line drive.Spending weeks in the hospital and months recovering from a large epidural hematoma, skull fracture, brain swelling, and hemorrhaging, Daniel held on to his belief that he would one day realize his dream. Fourteen months later, and fully recovered, he made his first Major League start, becoming the fifth pitcher in modern Major League history to throw seven innings of no-hit ball in his first outing. MLB.com referred to it as one of the greatest debuts in Major League Baseball history.In One Line Drive, Daniel retells his remarkable journey, sharing how he never would have made it without his faith in God and the support of family and friends. Full of grit, determination, and faith, Daniel's story is an inspiring reminder to keep pressing on regardless of any setback or disappointment.

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Book SynopsisInterspersing personal memoir with radical notions of self-help and collective recovery, Warrior Princesses Strike Back focuses how Indigenous activist strategies can be a crucial roadmap for contemporary truth and healing. Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is home to the original people of this land, yet it is also one of the poorest communities in America. Through intimate and vulnerable memoir, Lakota twin sisters Sarah Eagle Heart and Emma Eagle Heart-White recount growing up on the reservation and overcoming enormous odds, first as teenage girls in a majority-white high school, and then battling bias in their professional careers. Woven throughout are self-help strategies centering women of color, that combine marginalized histories, psychological research on trauma, and perspectives on decolonial therapy. Through the lens of Indigenous activism, the Eagle Hearts explore the possibility of healing intergenerational and personal trauma by focusing on traditional strategies of reciprocity, acknowledgment, and collectivism.

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Book SynopsisA stirring memoir of a young, single woman's laborious struggle to save her family’s New England apple farm from going under during the Great Depression. The Orchard is an exquisitely beautiful and poignant memoir of a young woman’s single-handed struggle to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression. Discovered by the author’s daughter after the author’s death, it tells the story of Adele “Kitty” Robertson, young and energetic, but unprepared by her Radcliffe education for the rigors of apple farming in those bitter years of the early 1930s. Alone at the end of a country road, with only a Great Dane for company, plagued by debts, broken machinery, and killing frosts, Kitty revives the old orchard after years of neglect. Every day is a struggle, but every day she is also rewarded by the beauty of the world and the unexpected kindness of neighbors and hired workers. Animated by quiet courage and simple goodness, The Orchard is a deeply moving celebration of decency and beauty in the midst of grim prospects and crushing poverty. In addition to a foreword and epilogue by Betsy Robertson Cramer, the author's daughter, this Nonpareil edition includes a new afterword by award-winning author Jane Brox.Trade Review“Brave and beautiful . . . tells us who we are and where we live.” —John Updike “Robertson writes with evocative clarity.” —New York Times “Robertson’s prose is clean and fluid . . . [she is] a keen observer, both of nature and her fellow humans.” —Washington Post “Lusciously vivid . . . emotionally piercing.” —Boston Globe “Robertson manages to convey the sense in which self-knowledge and peculiar joy can flow from hardship.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

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Book Synopsis“What is comfort but a filament between past and present with some sort of future implied? In other words, safety. In other words, care. I know it is possible to find these things without her—I know they are there. But it can be so hard to ask. So much is unknown.”Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister’s suicide. Only after the funeral does shock give way to grief—and to many questions. How could Emily do this to herself? How could she have abandoned all those who loved her? And what could have been done differently to prevent this devastating loss?In the days and weeks that follow, Spiegel embarks on a search for answers. She unpacks family history, documents the last traces of her sister’s life, and questions what more she could have done to prevent her death. What she finds instead is that there is no narrative on the other side of grief like this. There is no answer, no easy re

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Book Synopsis"In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist and professor of ecology J. Drew Lanham.Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else"—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity.”By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.Trade ReviewForeword Reviews Best Book of 2016 and Nautilus Silver Award Winner Praise for The Home Place “A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature, selfhood, and the nature of home. It is thoughtful, sincere, wise, and beautiful. I want everyone to read it.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk “Consider The Home Place required reading—it’s a thoughtful and relevant-as-ever look at race and identity in the great outdoors.”—Outside “A lyrical story about the power of the wild, The Home Place synthesizes J. Drew Lanham’s own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic "By surrendering the world to imperial and industrial standards, we chop away at the very surroundings that allow us to live. Yet the dominant common sense asks us to divide our loyalties: Either we support racial justice or we support the environment. There can be no more important task in the world today than to upend this rotten dichotomy, to heal the manufactured rift between environmentalism and the fight for social justice. Lanham's memoir—'a colored man's love affair with nature'—offers us one way to begin." —Chronicle of Higher Education, "Best Scholarly Books of the Decade" “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous. You might find yourself hoping for a world where every family has a J. Drew Lanham in it.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “A beautifully rendered and deeply personal story of the complex geographies of home, and displacement . . . The Home Place is a deft examination of how we come to define ourselves in a world that, in turn, is relentlessly trying to define who we are—and how we can take those definitions over and make our own.”—Sierra “There are no fireworks here—simply the musings of an African-American naturalist who, throughout his lifetime, has trained himself to marvel at the minor. Trust me, that is enough. . . . Of the many powerful lessons J. Drew Lanham bestows upon readers, perhaps this last one is his best: proof that human nature, like Mother nature herself, can still surprise us with its grace.”—Los Angeles Review of Books "J. Drew Lanham's The Home Place is a stunning read, a masterpiece, a soft rebellion that touches the deepest of our instincts." —Marine Ornithology “An extraordinary and trailblazing perspective on nature and race, told by a southern black man who became a natural scientist and a bird watcher. J. Drew Lanham’s colorful and long-awaited memoir deeply enriches our understanding of American culture and the environmental movement, rising as it does from the silence of an entire people. This is a captivating and crucial biology and a volume that I'll proudly add to my bookshelf.”—Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood “Wisdom and generosity fill the pages of The Home Place. This memoir and story of a familial ecosystem is anchored firmly in the Piedmont clay of South Carolina that J. Drew Lanham's enslaved ancestors worked and would later come to own—and love. A man ‘born of forests and fields,’ Lanham thinks deeply about the land writ large and our connections to it as well as to each other. His honest and insistent words encourage us to cultivate a broader, deeper perspective that recognizes ties between race and environment in deliberate ways.”—Lauret Savoy, author of Trace “The Home Place teems with life—notably the author’s own remarkable one. This wise and deeply felt memoir of a black naturalist’s improbable journey travels the hallways of academia, the fields and forests of ornithological study, and the dusty clay roads of the rural south where it all began with grace, humility, and an abiding appreciation for this exquisite world.”—William Souder, author of Under a Wild Sky “Your world will change while reading this beautiful, deep, and generous book. A book by a scientist that goes far beyond science, a book by a black man that looks issues of race in the eye but then transcends them, a book by a loving son who, in the end, finds a new identity, The Home Place is really about what it means to be human, and in particular what it means to be human in relationship to the land. It is a love song to family, soil, trees, birds, and wildness itself. Read it and be enlarged.”—David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains “Rapturous and illuminating . . . A shrewd meditation on home, family, nature, and the author’s native South.”—Kirkus “Insightful . . . Encouraging readers to pay closer attention to nature, J. Drew Lanham gathers the disparate elements that have shaped him into a nostalgic and fervent examination of home, family, nature, and community.”—Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisWhy would an American girl-child, born into a good, Irish-Catholic family in the thick of the McCarthy era – a girl who, when she came of age, entered a convent – morph into an atheist, feminist, and Marxist? The answer is in Helena Sheehan’s fascinating account of her journey from her 1940s and 1950s beginnings, into the turbulent 1960s, when the Vietnam War, black power, and women’s liberation rocked her bedrock assumptions and prompted a volley of life-upending questions – questions shared by millions of young people of her generation. But, for Helena Sheehan, the increasingly radicalized answers deepened through the following decades. Beginning by overturning such certainties as America-is-the-world’s-greatest-country and the-Church-is-infallible, Sheehan went on to embrace existentialism, philosophical pragmatism, the new left, and eventually Marxism. Migrating from the United States to Ireland, she became involved with Irish republicanism and international communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Sheehan’s narrative vividly captures the global sweep and contradictions of second-wave feminism, anti-war activism, national liberation movements, and international communism in Eastern and Western Europe – as well as the quieter intellectual ferment of individuals living through these times. Navigating the Zeitgeist is an eloquently articulated voyage from faith to enlightenment to historical materialism that informs as well as entertains. This is the story of a well-lived political and philosophical life, told by a woman who continues to interrogate her times.Trade Review“An uncompromisingly honest and utterly fascinating memoir from the drowned continent that was once western communism.” —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums

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Book SynopsisAn eloquent, heartfelt account of a young boy s fight with cancer and of a mother s determination and resilience to see the family through to recovery.

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Book SynopsisLooking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments—ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness.Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home—Montana and southern Georgia—the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitat, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change. In an age of increasingly virtual, urban life, Ray embraces the intentionality of trying to be a better person balanced with seeking out natural spectacle, abundance, and less trammeled environments. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change.Wild Spectacle explores our first home, the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.Trade ReviewPraise for Wild SpectacleGeorgia Center for the Book “Books All Georgians Should Read” for 2022Atlanta Journal Constitution Top 10 Southern Books of 2021Gun & Garden’s Favorite Books of 2021 “A lover takes nothing for granted. A lover explores, wanders, takes delight in nuance. Says, viva la difference. A lover listens, savors, is patient. Janisse Ray is a writer in love with place and places.” — Orion “With its combination of lyrical sentences, heartfelt truths, and profound observations, this book is a gem and a worthy sequel to Cracker Childhood.” — Southern Literary Review “Ray is more than a knowledgeable observer. Her relationship with the natural world is passionate and spiritual.” — Alabama Public Radio “The essays in Wild Spectacle span 20 years…they show that no matter where or when we are, there’s wonders to bear witness to.” — Savannah Morning News “Just a small town girl traveling the whole world, Janisse Ray’s new collection Wild Spectacle showcases her choice to take on heart-pounding adventure while discovering herself and nature.” — Connect Savannah“Naturalist Janisse Ray’s clear, nimble, sensitive writing about wildness and self-discovery is so arresting that it has informed my own writing.” — Latria Graham, Garden & Gun “Wild Spectacle is prayer to Mother Earth, and like prayers Ray both exalts and grieves Her. This book will surely mark your soul.” — Dawn Major"An enthralling immersion into the splendor of our natural world told in language that is equal parts rapturous and down to earth." — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution"An enchanting essay collection about the wonders and lessons that nature provides." — Foreword Reviews“Wild Spectacle is prayer to Mother Earth, and like prayers Ray both exalts and grieves Her. This book will surely mark your soul.” — Dawn Major“Think about epiphany. Think about change. Think about the moments that make your face burn, your fingers tingle. Wild Spectacle is about those shocks, encounters that shift the way we see the world and ourselves in it. Ray is the vortex around which everything spins.” — Joni Tevis, author of The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse“Wonderful. Janisse Ray has a heart the size of a manatee and the tenacity (and laugh) of a pileated woodpecker. She is incapable of not loving this world and all that is in it. If you don’t yet know her work, today is your lucky day.” — Rick Bass, author of For a Little While: New and Selected Stories”Curious, humble, bright, and compelling. Whenever I read Janisse Ray, I come away feeling both moved and fortunate. She is one of America’s best chroniclers of spiritual and physical wilderness. Her prose is as gorgeous as her mind is wise, and lands a necessary punch: how should a human enter a wild place?” — Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women“These seductive and diverse essays evoke wildness themselves, weaving narratives of community, love, and heroism. Ray writes with the heart of a poet and warrior, casting a spell that leaves us wanting to love and protect all that is wild. She urges us to remember what beauty there is in the world, and how much that world needs us.” — Sheryl St. Germain, author of Fifty Miles“Ray’s richness of observation, clarity of expression, and moral purpose are in such balance that this book hums like a gyroscope in your hands. Read and reread it again to savor the scenes and sentences.” — Melissa Fay Greene, author of No Biking in the House without a Helmet: 9 Kids, 3 Continents, 2 Parents, 1 Family“An urgent love letter to our wild places. Part poet, naturalist, and tour guide, Ray is a gifted observer. We finish this remarkable book brimming with gratitude and alive to the wild spectacles around us.” — Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs“Here is Janisse Ray at her best—fully immersed in wilderness, immersed in friendship, immersed in parenthood. She engages with the world in a way that few can manage in this screened-off age. If there’s a more open, honest, and appealing writer today, I’ve not met her.” — Bill McKibben, author Wandering Home: A Long Walk across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape“Wild Spectacle is a stirring book. To experience the truth of Thoreau’s claim that wildness preserves the world, take these journeys with Janisse Ray. She is an exhilarating observer who explores untamed places where that shaping, animating energy is on vivid display.” — Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination“Janisse Ray’s sense of wonder in the presence of the natural world permeates this collection of essays on how to love the Earth and measure the value of a life surrounded by the mother we all share. These essays help us measure the value of life.” — Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country"Seriously great. In its brilliantly detailed celebrations of geography, Janisse Ray's writing suggests Walt Whitman. Hers is a literary ambition that makes no pretenses to modesty." — Franklin Burroughs, author of Billy Watson’s Croker Sack"Janisse Ray doesn’t explore nature so much as remind us of what we have forgotten... She is our Rachel Carson and our Walt Whitman, both fierce prophet and loving courage teacher." — Mark Powell, author LionessPraise for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood"Painfully and powerfully told.... Ray's passion for preserving and restoring this unsung landscape is heartfelt and refreshing." — Tony Horowitz, New York Times"The forests of the southeast find their Rachel Carson . . . . In Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, part memoir, part clarion call to save the longleaf pine, she casts a loving but unflinching eye on growing up poor and fundamentalist in southeast Georgia.” — Anne Raver, New York Times"A gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty...Ray’s redemptive story of an impoverished childhood brings to mind the novels of Dorothy Allison and the nature writing of Amy Blackmarr, but the stunning voice and vision are hers alone." — Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)"Ray's writing is at its best when she recalls her most harrowing memories, such as when her father gave her and her two brothers a whipping after they stood by and watched a friend kill a turtle. These scenes resonate during the interpolated naturalist chapters, which evoke the calm of the landscape and give readers a respite from the anger and pain that drive much of the family narrative. In a final chapter (in which she includes appendixes on the specific endangered species of the South), Ray laments the 'daily erosion of unique folkways as our native ecosystems and all their inhabitants disappear.' What remains most memorable are the sections where Ray describes, and attempts to prevent, her own disconnection from the Georgia landscape." — Publishers Weekly"Ray’s paean to the filth, rot, shit, and rust of her childhood on a Georgia junkyard. Half memoir, half polemic, Cracker Childhood is both a recollection of how Ray came to understand the natural world’s value and beauty, and an impassioned explanation of why the longleaf pine ecosystems of southeast Georgia, Alabama, and Florida must be defended against any further assault by humanity." — GristPraise for Wild Card Quilt"Ray celebrates the richness of the natural world and the comforts of family. — Publishers WeeklyPraise for Pinhook"Her moving book is a tribute to a small but crucial wild place and a call for readers to help preserve it and others like it." — Publishers WeeklyPraise for The Seed Underground"An enchanting narrative...Even couch potatoes will be enthralled by Ray’s intimate, poetically conversational stories of her encounters with the 'lovely, whimsical, and soulful things [that] happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy.'"— Publishers Weekly

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Book Synopsis2019 Washington State Book Awards Finalist in Biography & Memoir On the morning before Halloween in 2007, Sarah receives a phone call from her husband’s arborist colleague: Matt, her spouse of seven years and father of their two small children, has been severely injured by a falling tree branch while working in a neighborhood east of Seattle. Visions of their future go dark as she learns to care for the man she depended on for support. Faced with choices about how to behave through this unexpected journey, she takes as many steps back as she does forward and begins a rite of passage she never imagined.Trade Review"With Losing, Cannon is rejecting that kind of superimposition. She’s trying to do justice to the reality of the situation while still building a narrative she can live with around it. She’s trying to be true to her husband while breaking her vows. She’s sharing her story with you while still keeping the integrity of her story intact. Every human contract has a flaw built into it. Cannon is trying to find a way to embrace that flaw, to turn it into a strength, and to find the honesty embedded within the lie. The drama of Losing is in watching her come to terms with that gap and to incorporate it into her story as best she can." —Paul Constant, Seattle Review of Books “Sarah Cannon’s memoir navigates trauma’s juggernaut in a way so compelling the reader witnesses the opening catastrophe first hand through the lens of her experience. This sense of attunement to her journey continues throughout the aftermath of the initial crisis. Over time Sarah comes to know herself within the context of her profoundly altered life. With fierce unflinching grist she faces the unrelenting learning her struggle demands and emerges with discerning hard won clarity. Her courage is palpable and inspires.”—Joan Fiset, author of Namesake “In The Shame of Losing, Sarah Cannon captures the roller coaster from heartbreak to hope; from despondence to renewal, that she and her family have been riding since that instant when everything changed. This is a book about the brutal realities of a traumatic brain injury; but it is also about a young mother trying to save her own life. Honest, poetic; stark and stunning: a debut memoir that you will never forget.”—Ann Hedreen, author of Her Beautiful Brain “This is an unforgettable story of a “full-time witness” to trauma and its aftershocks. With refreshing candor and a brilliant sense of humor, Sarah takes us through the maze of caring for a loved one who has suffered a traumatic brain injury and reckons deeply with what her own recovery should look like. This book will stay with me for a long time. ‘—Leigh Stein, author of Land of Enchantment Review in Punctuate https://www.pifmagazine.com/2019/02/letting-go-of-the-shame-of-losing-an-interview-with-the-writer-sarah-cannon/

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Book SynopsisA “wildly entertaining” and “masterly” memoir (Times Literary Supplement) now in paperback In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically…of ‘an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people.’” This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade—ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death. Led by Wade and Wade’s partner Michael Stoneman, Foucault experimented with psychotropic drugs for the first time; by morning he was crying and proclaiming that he knew Truth. Foucault in California is Wade’s firsthand account of that long weekend. Felicitous and often humorous prose vaults readers headlong into the erudite and subversive circles of the Claremont intelligentsia: parties in Wade’s bungalow, intensive dialogues between Foucault and his disciples at a Taoist utopia in the Angeles Forest (whose denizens call Foucault “Country Joe”); and, of course, the fabled synesthetic acid trip on the multihued slopes of the Artist’s Palette at Death Valley, set to the strains of Bach and Stockhausen. Part search for higher consciousness, part bacchanal, this book chronicles a young man’s burgeoning friendship with one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.Trade Review“A wildly entertaining memoir written by someone who helped curate, witness and then document a mind-altering experience in the life of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. The act of witnessing, in fact, is what makes Wade’s account so masterly.”—Eric Bulson, Times Literary Supplement“Excellent and surprising.”—Scott Bradfield, Los Angeles Times“At times a gay, psychedelic Divine Comedy and at others a Plato's Symposium for the 1970s.”—Andrew Marzoni, The Baffler“Wade's poetic rendering of Foucault's LSD trip...manages to capture the philosopher's hesitations and fears but also conveys the spectacle of a towering intellect leveled by the visceral power of the drug experience.”—James Penner, Los Angeles Review of Books“Engagingly offbeat.”—Helmut Mayer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung“Foucault once declared that he had written nothing but fictions, and here we have a stylised account of a short moment in his life, written with the verve of a novel.”—Stuart Elden, author of Foucault's Last Decade“Very funny and endearing.”—Reviews by Amos Lassen

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Book SynopsisNow in paperback: a gripping, witty travel memoir that offers "a fascinating look at voluntourism from an Indigenous perspective" (Book Riot)"Ursula Pike''s memoir is unlike any other I''ve read, with her perceptive, always-seeking, and lovely narrative voice." —Susan Straight, author of Mecca"This book is alive with a spirit that welcomed mine to meet it." —Elissa Washuta, author of White MagicWhen she was twenty-five, Ursula Pike boarded a plane to Bolivia and began her term of service in the Peace Corps. A member of the Karuk Tribe, Pike sought to make meaningful connections with Indigenous people halfway around the world. But she arrived in La Paz with trepidation as well as excitement, "knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help." In the following two years, as a series of dramatic episodes brought that tension to a boiling point, she began to ask: What does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn? An Indian Among los Indígenas, Pike''s memoir of this experience, upends a canon of travel memoirs that has historically been dominated by white writers. It is a sharp, honest, and unnerving examination of the shadows that colonial history casts over even the most well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural aid. With masterful deadpan wit, it signals a shift in travel writing that is long overdue.

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Book SynopsisZhu Xiao-Mei was born to middle-class parents in post-war China, and her musical proficiency became clear at an early age. Taught to play the piano by her mother, she developed quickly into a prodigy, immersing herself in the work of classical masters like Bach and Brahms. She was just eleven years old when she began a rigorous course of study at the Beijing Conservatory, laying the groundwork for what was sure to be an extraordinary career. But in 1966, when Xiao-Mei was seventeen, the Cultural Revolution began, and life as she knew it changed forever. One by one, her family members were scattered, sentenced to prison or labor camps. By 1969, the art schools had closed, and Xiao-Mei was on her way to a work camp in Inner Mongolia, where she would spend the next five years. Life in the camp was nearly unbearable due to horrific living conditions and intensive brainwashing campaigns. Yet through it all Xiao-Mei clung to her passion for music. And when the Revolution ended, it was the piano that helped her to heal. Heartbreaking and heartwarming, The Secret Piano is the incredible true story of one woman’s survival in the face of unbelievable odds—and in pursuit of a powerful dream.

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Book SynopsisThe stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents’ lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family’s Jewish Arab identityWinner of the 2020 Arab American Book Award for nonfiction and one of NPR’s best books of 2019, When We Were Arabs is a gorgeous family memoir and “a powerful exploration of Arab Jewish identity” (The New Arab) that brings the world of Jewish Arab writer and artist Massoud Hayoun’s parents and grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab and what makes a Jew. There was a time when being an “Arab” didn’t mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, and Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. That was before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and left unemployed on the margins of society. In this moving book, Oscar’s son, Massoud, raised in Los Angeles, finds his own voice by telling his family’s story. Named one of the most inspiring Arab writers of 2020, Hayoun seeks to reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity as part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. “An intriguing read for anyone interested in furthering their understanding of complex identities and mixed cultural heritage” (Jewish News), When We Were Arabs is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world, an age that is now nearly lost.

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Book SynopsisThe harrowing tale of a teenage opium addict hawking useless tonics from town to town.

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Book SynopsisInfertility Saved My Life: Healing PCOS From The Inside Out exposes the raw teaching moments of Sarah Willoughby’s journey to self-love through Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and secondary infertility.Within Infertility Saved My Life, Sarah Willoughby addresses the challenges and heartbreak she experienced while becoming a mum to three amazing children. She writes about her multiple miscarriages, as well as the trauma she endured, so that anyone still on their journey to parenthood can feel less alone in their loss and grief. Sarah’s story peaks in 2009, when she ended up in intensive care after a disastrous IVF cycle. Lying in her hospital bed, she promised herself that if she survived, she would embrace her fears and empower others to do the same. Seven months later, Sarah Willoughby left the corporate world, emigrated to Australia and fell pregnant naturally twice with her daughters. Infertility Saved My Life shares the wisdom and insight that enabled Sarah to complete her family and begin a heart-centered life and business. She includes practical exercises and tools to help balance the reader’s mind, body and spirit and improve their chances of having a baby.

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Book SynopsisIn this sequel to the classic work of Holocaust literature When Memory Comes, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian returns to memoir to recount this tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents.

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Book SynopsisA Publishers Weekly Top 10 Memoir of the SeasonThe work of a lifetime from the Tony Award-winning, bestselling author of The Vagina Monologues-political, personal, profound, and more than forty years in the making.The newest book from V (formerly Eve Ensler), Reckoning invites you to travel the journey of a writer''s and activist''s life and process over forty years, representing both the core of ideas that have become global movements and the methods through which V survived abuse and self-hatred. Seamlessly moving from the internal to the external, the personal to the political, Reckoning is a moving and inspiring work of prose, poetry, dreams, letters, and essays drawn from V''s lifelong journals that takes readers from Berlin to Oklahoma to the Congo, from climate disaster, homelessness, and activism to family.Unflinching, intimate, introspective, courageous, Reckoning explores ways to create an unstoppable force for change, to love and survive love, to hold people and states accountable, to reckon with demons and honor the dead, to reclaim the body, and to see oneself as connected to a greater purpose. It reimagines what seems fixed and intractable, providing a path to understand one''s unique experience as deeply rooted in the world, to break through one''s own boundaries, and to write oneself into freedom.

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Book SynopsisI discover a "lost" aunt, separated from our family due to racism and discrimination against the disabled. She had a mental disability due to childhood meningitis. She was taken away in 1942 when all Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and imprisoned. She then became a "ward" of the state. We believed she had died, but 70 years later found her alive and living a few miles from our family farm. How did she survive? Why was she kept hidden? How did both shame and resilience empower my family to forge forward in a land that did not want them? I am haunted and driven to explore my identity and the meaning of family—especially as farmers tied to the land. I uncover family secrets that bind us to a sense of history buried in the earth that we work and a sense of place that defines us.Trade Review"A simultaneously elegant and sharp-edged exploration of the hidden past."—Kirkus Reviews (starred)"Masumoto has shared his experiences as an organic farmer in central California in books and as a columnist for the Sacramento Bee. Here, he details his family's remarkable discovery in 2012 of an aunt—his mother’s sister Shizuko (Sugi)—whose childhood case of meningitis rendered her mentally disabled, and who was thus forcibly separated from her siblings and parents during the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII...Masumoto thoughtfully ruminates on the swirl of emotions the war wrought on his family... and their shame in realizing that institutionalized care for Sugi might have been better than what they could have given her. Ultimately, there is pride in Sugi's resilience..." —Booklist

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Book SynopsisEverything you know about alcohol is a lie. Dustin Dunbar had it all. A beautiful wife, two sweet baby girls, a degree in psychology, and properties around the world—the building blocks of a nascent real estate empire. All the while, he happily believed every lie alcohol told him: “Real men drink.” “One drink won’t kill you.” “You’re the life of the party.” “You can’t stop.” He believed these lies and many others until it was too late. Because of his addiction, he risked everything he valued most and nearly lost everyone he cared for—until he started to figure out that most of what we experience with alcohol is completely fabricated, a big lie packaged with bright lights and big names to distract us from the truth. Dunbar calls this non-reality “the alcohol matrix,” and it took him years to break out of it and finally st

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Book SynopsisHow do you spark genius? How do you earn a profit from fun? And how do you overcome unthinkable challenges? The developer of Simon, Fashion Polly Pocket, UNO Attack!, My Size Barbie, and Operation explains it all in this fascinating story of toys, transformation, and murder.In his captivating memoir, Jeffrey Breslow tells how: • Creating a game is a mix of Rube Goldberg, Santa’s elves, mass production, and the bottom line. • He oversaw two multi-million dollar businesses that earned profits for more than four decades. Even while the industry transformed itself from using cardboard and plastics into electronics, his companies never acquired debt and never borrowed money from a bank! • He overcame the terrible misfortune of a deadly workplace shooting and led his shaken employees through the tragedy and back to running a thriving business. Millions of people around the world have played with games and toys Breslow and his partners invented—perhaps you have, too! Now, read Breslow’s remarkable story and see how a flash of inspiration, followed by hard work and ingenuity, brought these wonderful games to life.

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Book Synopsis“We are matter and long to be received by an Earth that conceived us, which accepts and reconstitutes us, its children, each of us, without exception, every one. The journey is long, and then we start homeward, fathomless as to what home might make of us.” —from The River You TouchWhen Chris Dombrowski burst onto the literary scene with Body of Water, the book was acclaimed as “a classic” (Jim Harrison) and its author compared with John McPhee. Dombrowski begins the highly anticipated The River You Touch with a question as timely as it is profound: “What does a meaningful, mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the anthropocene?”He answers this fundamental question of our time initially by listening lovingly to rivers and the land they pulse through in his adopted home of Montana. Transplants from the post-industrial Midwest, he and his partner, Mary, assemble a life based precariously on her income as a schoolteacher, his as a poet and fly-fishing guide. Before long, their first child arrives, followed soon after by two more, all “free beings in whom flourishes an essential kind of knowing […], whose capacity for wonder may be the beacon by which we see ourselves through this dark epoch.” And around the young family circles a community of friends—river-rafting guides and conservationists, climbers and wildlife biologists—who seek to cultivate a way of living in place that moves beyond the mythologized West of appropriation and extraction.Moving seamlessly from the quotidian—diapers, the mortgage, a threadbare bank account—to the metaphysical—time, memory, how to live a life of integrity—Dombrowski illuminates the experience of fatherhood with intimacy and grace. Spending time in wild places with their children, he learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way—wisdom that is essential for the possibility of transformation.Trade ReviewPraise for The River You Touch“A poignant rumination on marriage, parenthood, friendship and what it means to connect with nature.”—USA Today“Montana-based poet and fly-fishing guide Chris Dombrowski tells a deeply personal story about his life on rivers, raising a family in a wild place with wild yearnings to live on the edge. A lyrical memoir and ode to trout and riparian ecosystems, every sentence of this book sings.”—Nicholas Triolo, Outside Magazine“There’s enjoying nature, and then there’s the ability to write well about it. The River You Touch is a love song that readers with the same musical taste are sure to admire.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune“The River You Touch is an excellent memoir about family, fatherhood and fishing from the wordsmith, Chris Dombrowski.”—Monte Burke, Forbes“A sparkling, passionate ode . . . Dombrowski opens doors to his work and life. Pass through any and it’s unlikely you’ll emerge unchanged.”—Shelf Awareness, starred review“A heartfelt memoir of life and fatherhood in Big Sky country . . . Through a collection of vignettes, the author shares his concerns for the environment, the effects of the appropriation of land from Native inhabitants, and the emotions the landscape stirs in him. ‘The angler standing in the river is not so much absolved of time as disburdened of it, able to shirk its weight’ . . . Nature lovers will be captivated by Dombrowski’s lyrical descriptions of the land and its wildlife, while parents are sure to relate to his familial challenges and sacrifice. A beautifully and poignantly written tribute to a beloved landscape and its spirit.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review"The River You Touch, Chris Dombrowski's second nonfiction book, will change the way people see the world . . . Equally weighted in this admirably woven memoir by a poet, teacher, river and fly-fishing guide, is the quotidian struggle of staying afloat in fast moving streams of financial hardship, environmental concern and creative ambition . . . Dombrowski raises the bar for all of us by casting light on maternal-male instincts. He torches the narrative of the single solitary man, gritting it out by himself, conquering the mountain, killing prey or whatever. He rightfully acknowledges the vital power of community that makes a great man toughened by his own vulnerability."—BOMB Magazine“This treasure of a memoir is a poignant exploration of fatherhood and friendship, fly fishing and hunting, and how to mindfully make one’s way in a noisy, sometimes messy world, navigating births and deaths, almost always within a shady walk of a refreshing river pool or the solace grasped on a stretch of trout water.”—Bill Bryant, Inlander"Dombrowski writes with fresh sensitivity about his life...The River You Touch chronicles the possibilities for an artistic, healthy, balanced, family-integrated existence…recognizing that 'there is nothing as wild and vital' as their company."—Henry Hughes, Harvard Review“The River You Touch is a personal guide like no other . . . a lyrical, visually rich, once-in-a-lifetime river trip. . . . Packed with thought-provoking narrative that may guide you to being a better human.”—Montana Quarterly“Buy this book for yourself. And another for any friend who seeks to live a mindful and creative life in the throes of responsibility to family, self, community and a little plot of land on the planet.”—Contemplify“Eloquent . . . [Dombrowski] captures the seasons of this singular, wild country—netting the first fish of early spring, gathering morels, harvesting pheasant and elk for holiday meals with friends—around the frame of raising three children . . . All of this entails ‘a combination of the chaotic and the monastic,’ as he explains, from sleepless nights to endless diaper changes, bedtime reading, making meals and washing dishes. ‘Hold fast to their wonder,’ a voice inside him utters as encouragement, which could also be a reminder that there is nothing as ‘wild and vital’ as our children.”—Taos News"An intimate collection of related vignettes that ruminate on an outdoor life along Montana's stunning rivers and [Dombrowski's] challenging interior struggle over providing a dependable living for his growing family . . . Populated by a panoply of gorgeous images—'I was nineteen—the Yellowstone flowing around my hips swept quicksilver-streaked beneath the vast moonlit snowfields of the Crazy Mountains'—this is a complex, candid meditation on parenting, fishing, writing, and living in a manner that will stir the blood and fire the intellect."—Booklist“Nature writer Dombrowski evokes both wilderness splendor and the hardscrabble effort of living paycheck to paycheck in this exquisite work. In lyrical language replete with vivid imagery, Dombrowski reflects on his 25 years as a fly-fishing guide, his uncertainty over writing and poetry, his impending fatherhood and ‘fear of ushering children into a periled world’ . . . he renders his love of the natural world in incandescent prose: ‘the land itself . . . a blessing, yes, but also a kind of passage, a shaft of fall light shone down on a trace path that leads out of a previously impenetrable wood.’ Punctuated by the frank candor of a writer weighing sacrifice and art, this introspective memoir will hook fans of A River Runs Through It.”—Publishers Weekly“A lyrical exploration of a beloved place and lifestyle steeped in the natural world, by a writer for whom quality of life supersedes the need for financial security. Will appeal to readers who relish memoirs that skillfully intertwine nature, the American West, and fishing.”—Library Journal“In slow, eddying prose, [The River You Touch] mines an ordinary life for evocative reflections on family, friendship, and the meaning found in a rugged landscape . . . Suggesting that, like a river, a life well lived includes ‘headlong shots through roaring box canyons’ in addition to ‘the hypnotic, elliptical movement of water running back on itself,’ The River You Touch is a profound, moving memoir that contemplates the earth, family, and community in its tributes to the intimate beauty of western Montana.”—Foreword Reviews“Dombrowski’s prose is familiar and inviting… it’s a subtle craft, this translation of outdoor commitment onto the page, extending leaves of solidarity to audiences unknown.”—Christopher Schaberg, Flyfish Journal“Lyrical and complex, The River You Touch keeps you grounded in the wonder of nature and place as the author navigates through life as a parent, writer, and partner. Dombrowski, a poet, writer, and fishing guide, seamlessly weaves together new and interesting perspectives on fatherhood while painting moving scenes of the American West and allowing glimpses into the many challenges of parenthood and the writing life.”—Aurora Bonner, Hippocampus Magazine"A touching and moving story about a family that chooses to live in the ‘wild’ and call a river home. I absolutely love this memoir and I think you will, to especially if you’re a fan of water.”—Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA"A naturalist memoir with rich language and reflections on parenting, economic survival, and mental health. Striving to achieve a more sustainable lifestyle with his family, the author becomes anchored to his home ground in Montana. He focuses on his wife and children, the lure of wild game, fishing, and his love of writing. His interactions with authors Jim Harrison and Debra Magpie Eraling provide an added and unique perspective. It may often be the artist’s curse to live economically disadvantaged, but Dombrowski turns the experience into blissful prose.”—Todd Miller, Arcadia Books, Spring Green, WI“This is a touching tribute to nature and fatherhood. A poet and fly-fishing guide in love with the wilds of Montana, Detroit transplant Chris Dombrowski’s sensitive treatise on the birth and raising of his three children and being a good citizen to the planet is a lesson on paying attention to the natural world in which we reside.”—Vicki Honeyman, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI“Heartfelt, moving, and gorgeously written, The River You Touch is a love song to the rivers of Montana, a love song to a way of life. Dombrowski writes with tenderness and insight and with a deep, personal gratitude to the rivers that have taught him who he is—a husband, a father, a fisherman, a poet, a person who loves the earth as well as mourns it. What a tremendous achievement.”—Emily Ruskovitch, author of Idaho “Midway through The River You Touch, poet and naturalist Chris Dombrowski tells us, ‘To truly fathom a river, is to know it from its headwaters to its mouth…’ To truly fathom a life—one’s place, community, family, history, purpose on earth—is the sacred pursuit of this moving and beautifully written memoir. Here is the story of a man attempting to reckon with his cultural inheritance, his vocation, his past, and his responsibilities to family, land, and history. Along the route, he continuously encounters reminders of his own mortal smallness and, simultaneously, the numinous interconnection of all beings. Like the river, Dombrowski’s story is complicated and enlivened by all it touches, ‘an extension of everything upstream and down’—from the joys, doubts, and terrors of parenthood; to the precarity of making a life in art; to the rivers and mountains that are both his source of sustenance and place of worship; and the fraught layers of histories that map over it all. By the end, I’d fallen hopelessly in love with Dombrowski’s Montana, not just its rivers and mountains, but the unforgettable cast of characters that populate his world—from children who speak in beguiling riddles to crusty old hunters whose colloquial panache rivals the naughtiest Shakespeare. Dombrowski brings a near-religious attentiveness to the details of his world, both our wise guide and awe-struck fellow-passenger.” —Lisa Wells, author of Believers“You won’t soon read a more beautiful book, nor one so earthy, wise, delicious, and alive. This is not a book about fish or rivers or Montana or parenting. This is a book, to paraphrase another poet, plain and simple, to break open the frozen sea within.”—Rick Bass“In the way a fable points us toward rightness, so The River You Touch leads us to a necessary truth: that deep knowledge and love of a place shapes us in all the ways we will need to survive. With poetry, vulnerability, and crisp storytelling, Dombrowski takes us into a wild, river-thrummed Montana, and into the stormswept territory of marriage and family. It’s a journey with a guide who knows the country at a cellular level, and whose bafflement and wonder renews our own. The magic of the book is that I came away convinced that learning to love a trout, or an autumn snowfall, or a wolf crossing a river, would teach me to love a friend or a partner in pain—and so to love and be connected to all beings. Damn.”--Peter Heller, bestselling author of The Dog Stars, The River, and The Guide“With The River You Touch, Chris Dombrowski has established himself at the forefront of American writers of place. This beautiful, clear-eyed, tender memoir is as intimate as a love letter, brimming with wise observations on family, parenthood, home, duty, and passion. The Montana within these pages is wild and rugged, yes. But it is also as gentle as a cold stream running through your fingers or a child sleeping in your arms. I loved this book.”—Nickolas Butler, bestselling author of Godspeed and Shotgun Lovesongs Praise for Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World's Most Elusive Fish“Dombrowski’s writing exhibits a poetic sense of economy. There’s a tremendous amount of information here on the geological, botanical, biological and human history of the region, but the author uses only what’s necessary to the story and relates it in evocative, concise language that reminded me of Gary Snyder one minute and John McPhee the next. […] Dombrowski’s exacting descriptions of the sport make me long to try it again--and to wish that more fishing books were written by poets.”—John Gierach, Wall Street Journal “Body of Water is about bonefishing, but it is also about ecosystem exploitation, class conflict, wealth inequity, race relations, Bahamian history, mentor-mentee relationships, nature as the catalyst for self-awareness, and more. […] The lyrical narrative strikes a delicate balance between reflective memoir and reportage.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune“Body of Water is wonderful, an evocation of the why and not the how in angling. Dombrowski has a way of describing that which may have become prosaic for the seasoned angler--the terminal tackle, the fly cast--in new and illuminating ways.”—Forbes“Dombrowski elevates the fly-fishing-as-meditation narrative by the sheer fact that he’s so damn good at writing about it.”—Outside“Rarely do cautionary tales dazzle like this. It’s a credit to Dombrowski’s prose, which torques and twists and glistens into view much like the bonefish itself. […] By book’s end, Dombrowski leaves readers with many lessons, thought this one most of all: whether on a skiff or in a book, the guide matters. And Dombrowski is the one you want.”—Los Angeles Times“Uncanny and moving. This book will not only make you change your vacation plans, it might make you change your life. A reverent, almost holy, book of angling lore.”—Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red “At its core, Body of Water is about our increasingly tenuous connection to nature, from a poet who understands the source of that strange and melancholic joy that we are blessed with only when we stand in wild places.”—Steve Rinella, author of Meat Eater“A lyrical, genre-defying tribute. […] Drawing on Caribbean history and the evolution of fly-fishing, Dombrowski’s foray into nonfiction proves thematically complex, finely wrought, and profoundly life-affirming.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)“A metaphor-laced meditation on the art and practice of fly-fishing, the social and economic history of the Bahamas, the evolution of archipelago geology and the chronicle of Dombrowski’s personal struggle to juggle his fishing and poetry obsessions against the financial needs of his own family. […] Fly-fishing mysticism at its best.”—Shelf AwarenessTable of ContentsPreface ∙ 1 I. YOUNG MOUNTAINSHeadwaters ∙ 11Thunderbird Motel ∙ 18Dostoyevsky’s Koan ∙ 28Visitors ∙ 45Seeds ∙ 61Emissaries ∙ 73Begin, O Small Boy, To Be Born ∙ 83Windfall ∙ 92Neighbors ∙ 109First Fall ∙ 122The River of Real Time ∙ 135 II. LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF RIVERSBed Rest ∙ 145The Creaturehood ∙ 156Road to the Buffalo ∙ 171Heathen ∙ 183Black River, Bright Stars ∙194 Nine Months, Three Years Later ∙ 203Three ∙ 215 III. THE NATURE OF WONDERHigh Water Rising ∙ 229The Deadstream ∙ 241Old Mission ∙ 256Good Harbor ∙ 265Parr Marks ∙ 273Great-Grandmother ∙ 294Home Psalm ∙ 299A Thimbleful ∙ 306 Notes ∙ 315Acknowledgments ∙ 319

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Book SynopsisCuriosity led Edward Epstein to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, such as the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome, and the diamond cartel in South Africa. Seeking more information, he often found himself a fly on the wall at the highest reaches of the establishment, observing how presidents, tycoons, bankers, and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. This memoir recounts his life as a pursuer of lost truths. Some accuse Epstein of being a conspiracist, but that is incorrect. He is a puzzle solver. Instead of accepting the received wisdom, he searches for the missing pieces of the picture, such as the autopsy photographs of President John F. Kennedy that were kept from the investigation conducted by the Warren Commission. Finding suppressed or overlooked evidence may result in overturning an established narrative, as happened with the publication of Inquest, Epstein’s book about the official probe into the JFK assassination. But that is very different from looking for a conspiracy. Sometimes, Epstein’s work has in fact uncovered a deep conspiracy, as with the world diamond cartel. Other times, it has discredited belief in a conspiracy, as when he delved into the murders of numerous Black Panthers. After his findings were published in the New Yorker, newspapers including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times issued editorial apologies for their own reporting on the murders, which had suggested that an FBI conspiracy was behind them.Epstein’s primary interest has never been to advance an agenda, but rather to spot gaps in the conventional narrative and fill them in. Assume Nothing is the story of a lifelong quest for missing puzzle pieces, and also a story of self-actualization. Trade Review“What’s seriously amazing is to get into the mind of one of the world’s best investigative journalists. The Warren Commission chapters are utterly riveting, and one marvels at the way Epstein insinuates his way into getting so many important scoops. Assume Nothing should be taught in every journalism school.” —Tina Brown, former editor of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Newsweek "Edward Jay Epstein’s autobiography Assume Nothing serves up one engaging chapter after another on the personalities he has met, befriended, dated, or investigated over the course of his career as academic, author, and reporter. The cast of characters that moved through Epstein’s life is head-spinning—Vladimir Nabokov, Barbara Streisand, James Angleton, Allan Bloom, Pat Moynihan, Earl Warren, Hannah Arendt, and Donald Trump, to name a few. Assume Nothing is not only an entertaining tale of the writer’s life but also a personal chronicle of an era." —James Piereson, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America's Postwar Political Order “With seamless access to some of the key players of our time, Edward Jay Epstein helped define the great age of journalism. His memoir Assume Nothing puts to shame the all-too-frequent practice of deferring to a standard narrative. Ever since he exploded the illusion that the Warren Commission had done a thorough investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination—which he accomplished while still a senior at Cornell in 1960—Epstein has brilliantly challenged some of the most wrong-headed and tenacious myths of our credulous era. Epstein is a national treasure.” —Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury “Assume Nothing is an astonishing, delightful, and unique memoir by investigative icon Edward Jay Epstein. His unmatched investigations have taken him into the worlds of espionage, diamonds, cartels, and Hollywood, and he now reveals his own secrets of how he got his jaw-dropping scoops.”—Shelby Coffey, former editor of the Los Angeles Times “Edward Jay Epstein is the man who knew everybody—from Vladimir Nabokov to Richard Nixon. His extraordinary memoir is the cavalcade of our era.”—Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Bill Clinton

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisChristopher Zyda confronts the long-buried and painful memories of his harrowing fifteen-year journey in The Storm: One Voice from the AIDS Generation, a heart-wrenching love story and coming-of-age tale during the early years of the AIDS crisis in Los Angeles.It all begins in early 1984, when Chris, a twenty-one year old UCLA English Literature major, risks ostracism when he comes out of the closet to his fraternity brothers just as the AIDS pandemic is beginning to explode in gay communities across the United States. Soon afterward, Chris meets and falls in love with Stephen, a graduate of Yale University and Law School, and the two of them build a life together as their friends start to fall sick and die from the spreading storm of AIDS.Stephen begins showing symptoms of AIDS in early 1986, and Chris faces a difficult choice as he is certain that he, too, eventually will be stricken by the disease. He abandons his writing career and attends the UCLA business school so that he can earn enough money to pay for healthcare during Stephen's illness.The Storm is filled with heart, optimism, and love, interspersed with Los Angeles history, gay and lesbian history, AIDS history, and the backdrop of the 1980s and 1990s. It is an unflinching and, at times, raw memoir of perseverance, integrity, forgiveness, the power of love, spiritual growth, Carpe Diem, dreams, and, most of all: survival and ultimate triumph.Trade Review"The Storm achieves something remarkable, managing to tell a painfully disturbing story that ultimately offers an inspiring message of hope. With storytelling bravado, Christopher Zyda demonstrates the virtue of English majors becoming great financial executives, as he takes us on a very dark journey that illuminates the worst and best of the human condition. We witness homophobia on full, vicious display, and we also meet people who stepped up to do the right thing, as I was very pleased to learn was the case with so many of Chris’ colleagues at Disney. This memoir is as important as it is riveting, since it delivers a powerful firsthand perspective on what it was like to be gay in America before and during the storm of AIDS, as well as the devastating toll the epidemic took not just on those who were struck down, but on those who survived."—Michael D. Eisner, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company"Christopher Zyda has the soul of an artist and the razor-sharp mind of a senior corporate executive. He brings these two qualities together to make The Storm a singular, exciting, and very intimate memoir. This is a look at the AIDS crisis and prejudice through a unique point of view—that of a senior executive at one of America’s largest and most important corporations, The Walt Disney Company. At the same time, it is a deeply personal, human, and revelatory look at coming of age in a very different America. Chris has written a book that is both devastating and harrowing, but at the same time joyous, optimistic and hopeful. This is the essence of great literature, and The Storm is an important and very moving memoir."—Peter Chernin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Chernin Group, and former President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation"In my career, I’ve been involved with a number of action movies. Well, you might say that The Storm is an action memoir! Christopher Zyda’s epic account of the AIDS crisis is not only incredibly moving, but it moves! This page-turner is emotional, suspenseful, dramatic, and has as many surprising plot twists as the best blockbusters. Because it is a memoir, it is intensely personal and affecting. At the same time, Zyda tells his tale on a vast canvas that encompasses all that was going on in America during that era, giving the book a remarkably epic feel. Most of all, I was deeply touched by this riveting story of suffering and loss, redemption, and ultimate triumph."—Lawrence Gordon, producer of numerous blockbuster films including Die Hard, 48 Hours, and Field of Dreams, and former President and Chief Operating Officer of 20th Century Fox"Christopher Zyda’s compelling memoir is a passion play. He courageously reveals with wit and pathos, the enormous struggle he endured to evolve, against all odds, into a fully formed exceptional human being. Chris’ “coming of age” in the period of AIDS hysteria brings to light a remarkable triumph of the human spirit. He suffered the agony of self-doubt, the loss of a great love, the pain of abandonment, and the cruelty of ignorant and mean-spirited people. Instead of giving into cynicism, he fought for his life and plumbed his natural gifts of intellect, compassion, toughness, and morality to prevent the dark side from winning. Victorious in many of his principled battles, it was ultimately through Chris’ practice of forgiveness that he transformed himself and countless others. He proclaims that we must “accept responsibility to save ourselves.” In seizing a carpe diem mindset—he does just that. He is one of the better angels of our nature."—Elaine P. Wynn, co-founder of Wynn Resorts and Mirage Resorts

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