Nonfiction

For decades one of America's most recognizable stars, the real Sammy Davis, Jr. has long remained hidden behind the persona the performer so vigorously generated--and so fiercely protected. In Black and White vividly recounts this untold story, drawing on painstaking research and more than two hundred and fifty interviews to trace Davis, Jr.'s journey from the vaudeville stage to Broadway, Hollywood, and, of course, Las Vegas. Here Wil Haygood brings Davis's life into full relief against the backdrop of an America in the throes of racial change. He made his living entertaining white people but was often denied service in the very venues he played, and in his broad and varied friendships--not to mention his romances--Davis crossed racial lines in ways few others had. Both an incisive biography and a sweeping cultural history, In Black and White is an important record of a vanished America--and of one of its greatest entertainers.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the comedian, television writer, and host of the Best Show, a revealing and powerful memoir exploring a life of struggle and reinvention

"This book is unflinchingly honest, deeply affecting and just relentlessly funny. If you read it and don't like it, it's 100% your fault."--John Oliver, Emmy Award-winning creator and host of HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Tom Scharpling is good at being funny, which is a miracle, considering what he's survived. Like hitting a deer and narrowly escaping with his life on the night of the 2016 election. But that's nothing compared to the struggles he had earlier in his life.

It Never Ends is his memoir of a life writing comedy amidst a lifelong struggle with mental illness, a story he has never told before. It's the heartbreaking account of his intense coming-of-age, and the lengths he's undertaken to pull away from the brink of self-destruction. Scharpling brought himself back to life first with punk zines and NBA coverage, then through the world of comedy, writing and executive producing Monk, and creating one of the most beloved, longest running comedy radio broadcasts/podcasts, The Best Show. Of course, there are also the tangents into auditioning for The New Monkees, why Billy Joel sucks, the siren call of the Sex and the City slot machines, and how he made a fool of himself in an elevator with Patti Smith.

Tom is the quintessential underdog, and he wears that status on his sleeve as a badge of honor. With this memoir, he lifts the curtain to let the light in on the turmoil that still follows him, even as he racks up accolades and achievements. But most importantly, he reminds us that while many of us carry trauma and shame, we are not alone. It Never Ends is about rising above whatever circumstance you find yourself in and getting the most out of your life, while steamrolling the chumps along the way.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2020

A concise, brilliant, and trenchant examination of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s successful lifelong quest for the presidency by National Book Award winner Evan Osnos.

President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called both the luckiest man and the unluckiest--fortunate to have sustained a fifty-year political career that reached the White House, but also marked by deep personal losses and disappointments that he has suffered.

Yet even as Biden's life has been shaped by drama, it has also been powered by a willingness, rare at the top ranks of politics, to confront his shortcomings, errors, and reversals of fortune. As he says, "Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable." His trials have forged in him a deep empathy for others in hardship--an essential quality as he leads America toward recovery and renewal.

Blending up-close journalism and broader context, Evan Osnos, who won the National Book Award in 2014, draws on nearly a decade of reporting for The New Yorker to capture the characters and meaning of 2020's extraordinary presidential election. It is based on lengthy interviews with Biden and on revealing conversations with more than a hundred others, including President Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and a range of activists, advisers, opponents, and Biden family members.

This portrayal illuminates Biden's long and eventful career in the Senate, his eight years as Obama's vice president, his sojourn in the political wilderness after being passed over for Hillary Clinton in 2016, his decision to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, and his choice of Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Osnos ponders the difficulties Biden faces as his presidency begins and weighs how a changing country, a deep well of experiences, and a rigorous approach to the issues, have altered his positions. In this nuanced portrait, Biden emerges as flawed, yet resolute, and tempered by the flame of tragedy--a man who just may be uncannily suited for his moment in history.

Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel's famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true--yet never provable--continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life.

Stephen Budiansky's Journey to the Edge of Reason is the first biography to fully draw upon Gödel's voluminous letters and writings--including a never-before-transcribed shorthand diary of his most intimate thoughts--to explore Gödel's profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. It also offers an intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna, a haunting account of Gödel's and Jewish intellectuals' flight from Austria and Germany at the start of the Second World War, and a vivid re-creation of the early days of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where Gödel and Einstein both worked.

Eloquent and insightful, Journey to the Edge of Reason is a fully realized portrait of the odd, brilliant, and tormented man who has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, and illuminates the far-reaching implications of Gödel's revolutionary ideas for philosophy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and man's place in the cosmos.

A revelatory biography of the first Black woman to stand for Vice President, charting how the daughter of two immigrants in segregated California became one of this country's most effective power players.

There's very little that's conventional about Kamala Harris, and yet her personal story also represents the best of America. She grew up the eldest daughter of a single mother, a no-nonsense cancer researcher who emigrated from India at the age of nineteen in search of a better education. She and her husband, an accomplished economist from Jamaica, split up when Kamala was only five.

The Kamala Harris the public knows today is tough, smart, quick-witted, and demanding. She's a prosecutor--her one-liners are legendary--but she's more reticent when it comes to sharing much about herself, even in her memoirs. Fortunately, former Los Angeles Times reporter Dan Morain has been there from the start.

In Kamala's Way, he charts her career from its beginnings handling child molestation cases and homicides for the Alameda County District Attorney's office and her relationship as a twenty-nine-year-old with the most powerful man in the state: married Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a relationship that would prove life-changing. Morain takes readers through Harris's years in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, explores her audacious embrace of the little-known Barack Obama, and shows the sharp elbows she deployed to make it to the US Senate. He analyzes her failure as a presidential candidate and the behind-the-scenes campaign she waged to land the Vice President spot. Along the way, he paints a vivid picture of her values and priorities, the kind of people she brings into her orbit, the sorts of problems she's good at solving, and the missteps, risks, and bold moves she's made on her way to the top.

Kamala's Way is essential reading for all Americans curious about the woman standing by Joe Biden's side.

From her Italian-American childhood, through raising and feeding a growing family and cooking with her new husband, food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of good food. In Kitchen Yarns, pairing her signature humor and tenderness with simple, comforting recipes, Hood spins tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

A tender and intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable, trailblazing, and tenacious women in music, the two-time Grammy Award-winning "premiere song-stylist and songwriter of her generation" (Hilton Als), Rickie Lee Jones.

This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song.

Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner Rickie Lee Jones in her own words. It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music.

With candor and lyricism, the "Duchess of Coolsville" (Time) takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, to her years as a teenage runaway, through her legendary love affair with Tom Waits and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee's stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs - "Chuck-E's in Love," "Weasel and the White Boys Cool," "Danny's All-Star Joint," and "Easy Money"-- but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, a pimp with a heart of gold and tales of her fabled ancestors.

In this tender and intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable, trailblazing, and tenacious women in music are never-before-told stories of the girl in the raspberry beret, a singer-songwriter whose music defied categorization and inspired American pop culture for decades.

"A rallying cry in the age of climate change." --Robert Redford

An environmental clarion call, told through bestselling author David Gessner's wilderness road trip inspired by America's greatest conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt.

"Leave it as it is," Theodore Roosevelt announced while viewing the Grand Canyon for the first time. "The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it." Roosevelt's rallying cry signaled the beginning of an environmental fight that still wages today. To reconnect with the American wilderness and with the president who courageously protected it, acclaimed nature writer and New York Times bestselling author David Gessner embarks on a great American road trip guided by Roosevelt's crusading environmental legacy.

Gessner travels to the Dakota badlands where Roosevelt awakened as a naturalist; to Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon where Roosevelt escaped during the grind of his reelection tour; and finally, to Bears Ears, Utah, a monument proposed by Native Tribes that is embroiled in a national conservation fight. Along the way, Gessner questions and reimagines Roosevelt's vision for today.

As Gessner journeys through the grandeur of our public lands, he tells the story of Roosevelt's life as a pioneering conservationist, offering an arresting history, a powerful call to arms, and a profound meditation on our environmental future.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A memoir in essays about so many things--growing up in an abusive cult, coming of age as a lesbian in the military, forced out by homophobia, living on the margins as a working class woman and what it's like to grow into the person you are meant to be. Hough's writing will break your heart. --Roxane Gay

Searing and extremely personal essays, shot through with the darkest elements America can manifest, while discovering light and humor in unexpected corners.

As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the U.S. Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. As a child, however, she had none. Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. The cult took her all over the globe--to Germany, Japan, Texas, Chile--but it wasn't until she finally left for good that Lauren understood she could have a life beyond The Family.

Along the way, she's loaded up her car and started over, trading one life for the next. She's taken pilgrimages to the sights of her youth, been kept in solitary confinement, dated a lot of women, dabbled in drugs, and eventually found herself as what she always wanted to be: a writer. Here, as she sweeps through the underbelly of America--relying on friends, family, and strangers alike--she begins to excavate a new identity even as her past continues to trail her and color her world, relationships, and perceptions of self.

At once razor-sharp, profoundly brave, and often very, very funny, the essays in Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning: of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one's past when carving out a future.

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

The gripping account of six young doctors enlisted to fight COVID-19, an engrossing, eye-opening book in the tradition of both Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial and Scott Turow's One L.

In March 2020, soon-to-graduate medical students in New York City were nervously awaiting "match day" when they would learn where they would begin their residencies. Only a week later, these young physicians learned that they would be sent to the front lines of the desperate battle to save lives as the coronavirus plunged the city into crisis.

Taking the Hippocratic Oath via Zoom, these new doctors were sent into iconic New York hospitals including Bellevue and Montefiore, the epicenters of the epicenter. In this powerful book, New York Times journalist Emma Goldberg offers an up-close portrait of six bright yet inexperienced health professionals, each of whom defies a stereotype about who gets to don a doctor's white coat. Goldberg illuminates how the pandemic redefines what it means for them to undergo this trial by fire as caregivers, colleagues, classmates, friends, romantic partners and concerned family members.

Woven together from in-depth interviews with the doctors, their notes, and Goldberg's own extensive reporting, this page-turning narrative is an unforgettable depiction of a crisis unfolding in real time and a timeless and unique chronicle of the rite of passage of young doctors.

"Little Hawk" was born Raymond Kaquatosh in 1924 on Wisconsin's Menominee Reservation. The son of a medicine woman, Ray spent his Depression-era boyhood immersed in the beauty of the natural world and the traditions of his tribe and his family.
After his father's death, eight-year-old Ray was sent to an Indian boarding school in Keshena. There he experienced isolation and despair, but also comfort and kindness. Upon his return home, Ray remained a lonely boy in a full house until he met and befriended a lone timber wolf. The unusual bond they formed would last through both their lifetimes. As Ray grew into a young man, he left the reservation more frequently. Yet whenever he returned--from school and work, from service in the Marines, and finally from postwar Wausau with his future wife--the wolf waited.
In this rare first-person narrative of a Menominee Indian's coming of age, Raymond Kaquatosh shares a story that is wise and irreverent, often funny, and in the end, deeply moving.