New on the Shelves at Albert Wisner Public Library: Non-Fiction & Biography
New adult and children's materials that are in high demand or which have received critical acclaim.
NON-FICTION TITLES OF PARTICULAR INTEREST
- American Negra byISBN: 9780063237100Publication Date: 2024-02-27Award-winning journalist Natasha S. Alford grew up between two worlds as the daughter of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother. In “American Negra,” a narrative that is part memoir, part cultural analysis, Alford reflects on growing up in a working-class family from the city of Syracuse, NY. Alford illustrates the complexity of being multiethnic in Upstate NY and society's flawed teachings about matters of identity. When Alford goes from an underfunded public school system to Harvard University surrounded by privilege and pedigree, she wrestles with more than her own ethnic identity, as she is faced with imposter syndrome, a shocking medical diagnosis, and a struggle to define success on her own terms. A coming-of-age story about what it's like to live at the intersections of race, culture, gender, and class, all while staying true to yourself. As the movement to highlight Afro-Latin identity and overlooked histories of the African diaspora grows, “American Negra” illustrates the diversity of the Black experience in the larger fabric of American society.
- Dear Mom and Dad byISBN: 9781324093480Publication Date: 2024-02-06Written with dignity and grace in the form of a letter to her parents, Ronald and Nancy Reagan; Eager to retell the narrative of her own family and her coming-of-age, Patti Davis casts aside misperceptions that defined her in the past. Far from being the enfant terrible, “Dear Mom and Dad” reveals young Patti as a sensitive child, who was not able to be the public person her family demanded. Just as she re-examines her own role in an increasingly dysfunctional family drama, Davis casts an empathetic yet honest eye on her parents - on her father, the eternal lifeguard, who saved 77 people, yet failed to create a coherent AIDS policy, and her mother, who never escaped her own tortured youth. What comes across are Davis's burnished skills as a writer, something she always dreamed of becoming. Even as she unravels her mother's highly edited persona, and her father's loving but distant personality, Davis remains steadfast in her artistic expression, as she melds irony, comedy, and tragedy with dreamlike memories of an ever-present past. “Dear Mom and Dad,” with its account of her father's Alzheimer's and her mother's end-of-life struggles, becomes an account of forgiveness, reaching levels of redemption rarely found in contemporary memoirs.
- Carson McCullers byISBN: 9780525521013Publication Date: 2024-02-27She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she'd been writing since she was 16 and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she'd been "born a man." At 20, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer. They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting 12 years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” was published in 1940, when she was 23, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. While McCullers's literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time.
- An American Dreamer byISBN: 9780593597064Publication Date: 2024-02-13As this powerful book begins, Brent Cummings finds himself coping with the feeling that the country he loves is fracturing in front of his eyes. An Iraq war veteran, raised to believe in a vision of America that values fairness, honesty, and respect for others, Cummings is increasingly surprised by the behavior and beliefs of others, and engulfed by the fear, anger, and confusion that is sweeping through his beloved country as he tries to hold on to his values and his hope for America's future. David Finkel, known for his unique, in-depth reporting, spent 14 years deep inside Brent Cummings's world to create this intimate and vivid portrait of a man's life, his work, family, community, his thoughts, and his quest for connection, as America becomes ever more divided. “An American Dreamer” illuminates, with the deepest empathy, the feelings and lives of many people in America today, and it is a brilliant chronicle of one person's everyday experiences of frustration, confusion, and hope.
- Cocktails with George and Martha byISBN: 9781635579628Publication Date: 2024-02-13From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee's “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn't be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the “I Love Lucy” 1950’s. Then, Hollywood took a colossal gamble on Albee's sophisticated play - and won. Costarring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the sensational 1966 film minted first-time director Mike Nichols as industry royalty and won five Oscars. How this scorching play became a movie classic - surviving censorship attempts, its director's inexperience and its stars' own tumultuous marriage - is one of the most riveting stories in all of cinema. Now, acclaimed author Philip Gefter tells that story in full for the first time, tracing Woolf from its hushed origins in Greenwich Village's bohemian enclave, through its tormented production process, to its explosion onto screens across America and a permanent place in the canon of cinematic marriages.
- Our Ancient Faith byISBN: 9780593534441Publication Date: 2024-02-06Abraham Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis of democracy that has ever confronted the United States. Allen C. Guelzo, one of America's foremost experts on Lincoln, captures the president's firmly held belief that democracy was the greatest political achievement in human history. He shows how Lincoln's deep commitment to the balance between majority and minority rule enabled him to stand firm against secession while also committing the Union to reconciliation rather than recrimination in the aftermath of war. In bringing his subject to life as a rigorous and visionary thinker, Guelzo assesses Lincoln's actions on civil liberties and his views on race, and explains why his vision for the role of government would have made him a pivotal president even if there had been no Civil War. “Our Ancient Faith” gives us a deeper understanding of this endlessly fascinating man and shows how his ideas are still sharp and relevant more than 150 years later.
- AI Needs You byISBN: 9780691244877Publication Date: 2024-03-12A humanist manifesto for the age of AI: Artificial intelligence may be the most transformative technology of our time. As AI's power grows, so does the need to figure out what - and who - this technology is really for. “AI Needs You” argues that it is critical for society to take the lead in answering this urgent question and ensuring that AI fulfills its promise. Verity Harding draws inspiring lessons from the histories of three 20th century tech revolutions - the space race, in vitro fertilization, and the internet - to empower each of us to join the conversation about AI and its possible futures. Sharing her perspective as a leading insider in technology and politics, she rejects the dominant narrative, which often likens AI's advent to that of the atomic bomb. History points the way to an achievable future in which democratically determined values guide AI to be peaceful in its intent; to embrace limitations; to serve purpose, not profit; and to be firmly rooted in societal trust. AI will permeate our lives in unforeseeable ways, but it is clear that the shape of AI's future - and of our own - cannot be left only to those building it. It is up to us to guide this technology away from our worst fears and toward a future that we can trust and believe in.
- Saving Michelangelo's Dome byISBN: 9781639365869Publication Date: 2024-03-051742: the famous dome atop Saint Peter's Basilica, designed by Michelangelo, is fractured and threatened with collapse. The dome is the pride of Italy and the largest of its kind anywhere in the world. And no one knows how to fix it. This engaging and colorful narrative tells the overlooked story of how Michelangelo's Dome was saved from disaster by three mathematicians and Pope Benedict XIV, who had asked them for help. It is a gripping story of decisive leadership, crisis management, and scientific innovation and the resistance that was faced when sailing into the headwinds of conventional thought. In “Saving Michelangelo's Dome,” Stanford-trained engineer Wayne Kalayjian illustrates how new ideas in science and mathematics established an entirely new way of looking at the world - as well as solving its complex problems. In the end, readers will appreciate that in saving Michelangelo's Dome from collapse, these three mathematicians and one determined pope unknowingly invented the profession of engineering as we practice it today. With it, they transformed the architectural world and ushered in generations of future buildings and structures that, otherwise, would never have been built.
- The Washington Book byISBN: 9781668050736Publication Date: 2024-02-27As a long-time book critic and columnist in Washington, Carlos Lozada dissects all manner of texts: commission reports, political reporting, Supreme Court decisions, and congressional inquiries to understand the controversies animating life in the capital. He also reads copious books by politicians and top officials: tell-all accounts by administration insiders, campaign biographies by candidates longing for high office, revisionist memoirs by those leaving those offices behind. With this provocative essay collection, Lozada argues that no matter how carefully political figures sanitize their experiences, positions, and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the best and safest and most electable light, they almost always let slip the truth. They show us their faults and blind spots, their ambitions and compromises, their underlying motives and insecurities. Whether they mean to or not, they tell us who they really are. “The Washington Book” is the perfect guide to the state of our politics, and then men and women who dominate the terrain. It explores the construction of personal identity, the delusions of leadership, and that mix of subservience and ambition that can define a life in politics. The more we read the stories of Washington, Lozada contends, the clearer our understanding of the competing visions of our country.
- Trash byISBN: 9781506486277Publication Date: 2024-03-05Every day across the US, 66 million poor white people pay the price for failing whiteness. In this sweeping debut, activist and chaplain Cedar Monroe writes indelibly about and for poor white people: about unlearning the American dream, untangling from white supremacy, and working for liberation alongside other poor folks. From visits to jails, flophouses, tent cities, and on trips to hospitals and funeral homes, we see leaders forging connections between their people and the global movement to end poverty. With trenchant insight born of liberation theology, radical politics, and an even more radical hope, Monroe introduces us to people hammering out survival strategies and hope in the abandoned zones of empire. Capitalism and colonialism have stolen land from Indigenous people, forced workers into dangerous jobs, and then left them to die when their labor was no longer needed. But what would happen if poor white folks rejected the empty promises of white supremacy and embraced solidarity with other poor people? What if they joined the resistance to the system that is, slowly or quickly, killing us all? “Trash” asks us to see anew the peril in which poor white people live and the choices we all must make.
- The House of Hidden Meanings byISBN: 9780063263901Publication Date: 2024-03-05From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing and personal work to date - a brutally honest, surprisingly poignant, and deeply intimate memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering the power of performance, found family, and self-acceptance. In this memoir, his most intimate and detailed book yet, RuPaul makes himself truly known, and strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, to forging an identity in the punk and drag scenes of Atlanta and New York, to finding enduring love with his husband Georges LeBar and self-acceptance in sobriety, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.
- No Bullet Got Me Yet byISBN: 9781335006066Publication Date: 2024-03-12The incredible story of the most decorated chaplain in US military history and his path to sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Father Emil Kapaun, a humble priest, went far beyond the call of duty during World War II and the Korean War. Often found with the combat medics on the front lines, unarmed, ministering to the wounded, and known for his intense devotion to the soldiers whom he called "my boys," Kapaun became the most decorated chaplain in US military history, awarded a Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross and the Legion of Merit. But Father Kapaun's leadership, bravery and selflessness don't end there. When the story of human history is over, evil, death, darkness - they don't get the final word. It was Father Kapaun's love for God that gave him the courage to lay down his life for his friends and for his country. Writer John Stansifer has spent years interviewing veterans and ex-POWs. Coupled with other interviews or self-published war experiences, as well as material from the National Archives and rare access to thousands of unseen documents,”No Bullet Got Me Yet” unveils the compelling history of the life of Father Kapaun as related by his friends, family and fellow soldiers, as well as in his own words from the numerous letters he wrote from the 1930’s all the way to the battlefields of the Korean War.
- Private Equity byISBN: 9780593654996Publication Date: 2024-02-13When we meet Carrie Sun, she can't shake the feeling that she's wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at 29, she's left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. When she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds, she pursues it and becomes the sole assistant to the firm's billionaire founder. Eager to impress, she dives headfirst into the firm's culture, which values return on time above all else. A luxury-laden world opens up for her, and Carrie learns that money can solve nearly everything. Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one's life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Carrie's story illuminates the struggle for balance in a world of extremes: efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune. “Private Equity” is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice, daring to ask what we're willing to sacrifice to get to the top - and what it might take to break free and leave it all behind.
- Burn Book byISBN: 9781982163891Publication Date: 2024-02-27While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990’s, Kara Swisher developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites. Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world: Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat - figuratively and, in Zuckerberg's case, literally. Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech's potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again.
- Whiskey Tender byISBN: 9780063288515Publication Date: 2024-02-27“Whiskey Tender” traces how a mixed tribe native girl, born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico, comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent's desires for her to transcend the class and "Indian" status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe's particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Deborah Taffa's childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation. Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present - the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations - she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the "melting pot" of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.
- What Have We Here? byISBN: 9780593318607Publication Date: 2024-02-13Billy Dee Williams was born in Harlem in 1937 and grew up in a household of love and sophistication. As a young boy, he made his stage debut working with Lotte Lenya in an Ira Gershwin/Kurt Weill production where Williams ended up feeding Lenya her lines. He studied painting, first at the High School of Music and Art, with fellow student Diahann Carroll, and then at the National Academy of Fine Art, before setting out to pursue acting with Herbert Berghoff, Stella Adler and Sidney Poitier. He writes of landing the role of a lifetime: co-starring alongside James Caan in “Brian's Song,” the made-for-television movie that was watched by an audience of more than 50 million people. Williams says it was "the kind of interracial love story America needed." And when, as the first Black character in the Star Wars universe, he became a true pop culture icon, playing Lando Calrissian. A legendary actor, in his own words, on all that has sustained and carried him through a lifetime of dreams and adventure.
- Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions byISBN: 9781668046999Publication Date: 2024-02-13Ed Zwick’s heartfelt and wry career memoir and a dishy, behind-the-scenes look at working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. "I'll be dropping a few names," Zwick confesses in the introduction to his book. "Over the years I have worked with self-proclaimed masters-of-the-universe, unheralded geniuses, hacks, sociopaths, savants, and saints." He has encountered these Hollywood types during 4 decades of directing, producing and writing projects that have collectively received 18 Academy Award nominations (7 wins) and 67 Emmy nominations (22 wins). Talents whom he spotted early include Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, Claire Danes, and Jared Leto. Established stars he worked closely with include Leonardo DiCaprio, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Daniel Craig, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore and Jennifer Connelly. He also sued Harvey Weinstein over the production of “Shakespeare in Love” - and won. He shares personal stories about all these people, and more. Fans with an appreciation for the beautiful mysteries - as well as the unsightly, often comic truths - of crafting film and television won't want to miss it.