Hardcover Nonfiction

by Al Franken · Dutton

Al Franken, one of America's savviest satirists has been studying the rhetoric of the Right. He has listened to their cries of 'slander', 'bias' and even 'treason'. He has examined the Bush administration's policies of squandering our surplus, ravaging the environment, and alienating the rest of the world. He's even watched Fox News. A lot. And in this fair and balanced report, Al bravely exposes them all for what they are: liars. Lying, lying, liars.

by Walter Isaacson · Simon & Schuster

by Jon Krakauer · Doubleday

NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES STARRING ANDREW GARFIELD True crime in the American heartland. Under the Banner of Heaven is a riveting account of Mormon fundamentalism and renegade prophets, from the bestselling author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty insist they were commanded to kill by God. In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's investigation is a meticulously researched, bone-chilling narrative of polygamy, savage violence and unyielding faith. An incisive look inside isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities in America, this gripping work of non-fiction illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behaviour. PRAISE FOR UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN 'A provocative look at the twisted roots of American fundamentalism.' Will Self, Evening Standard 'Books of the Year' 'Excellent . . . a lucid, judicious, even sympathetic account not just of Mormon Fundamentalism but of the seductive power of fanaticism in general.' Daily Telegraph 'Remarkable . . . for anyone interested in the wilder frontiers of spiritual conviction, this book is a must.' Independent 'Powerfully illuminating. . . . Almost every section of the book is fascinating in its own right, and together the chapters make a rich picture. . . . An arresting portrait of depravity.' New York Times Book Review ' Illuminating . . . provocative. . . . Krakauer is an adept chronicler of extremists [and] the tour guide of choice for secular quests.' Los Angeles Times Book Review

by Hillary Rodham Clinton · Simon & Schuster

by Ann Coulter · Crown Forum

“Liberals’ loyalty to the United States is off-limits as a subject of political debate. Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for rational discussion?” In a stunning follow-up to her number one bestseller Slander, leading conservative pundit Ann Coulter contends that liberals have been wrong on every foreign policy issue, from the fight against Communism at home and abroad, the Nixon and the Clinton presidencies, and the struggle with the Soviet empire right up to today’s war on terrorism. “Liberals have a preternatural gift for always striking a position on the side of treason,” says Coulter. “Everyone says liberals love America, too. No, they don’t.” From Truman to Kennedy to Carter to Clinton, America has contained, appeased, and retreated, often sacrificing America’s best interests and security. With the fate of the world in the balance, liberals should leave the defense of the nation to conservatives. Reexamining the sixty-year history of the Cold War and beyond—including the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Whittaker Chambers–Alger Hiss affair, Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” the Gulf War, and our present war on terrorism—Coulter reveals how liberals have been horribly wrong in all their political analyses and policy prescriptions. McCarthy, exonerated by the Venona Papers if not before, was basically right about Soviet agents working for the U.S. government. Hiss turned out to be a high-ranking Soviet spy (who consulted Roosevelt at Yalta). Reagan, ridiculed throughout his presidency, ended up winning the Cold War. And George W. Bush, also an object of ridicule, has performed exceptionally in responding to America’s newest threats at home and abroad. Coulter, who in Slander exposed a liberal bias in today’s media, also examines how history, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century, has been written by liberals and, therefore, distorted by their perspective. Far from being irrelevant today, her clearheaded and piercing view of what we’ve been through informs us perfectly for challenges today and in the future. With Slander, Ann Coulter became the most recognized and talked-about conservative intellectual of the year. Treason, in many ways an even more controversial and prescient book, will ignite impassioned political debate at one of the most crucial moments in our history.

by A. Scott Berg · Putnam

'For more than twenty years, Katharine Hepburn imparted many of the details of her life to me suggesting that I weave them into a book - one that would appear upon her death. Sad to say, the time has come to publish that book. But I find comfort in knowing she lived a very rich 96 years; and I have tried my best to honour her wish of making the book as true to her spirit as possible - as inspiring, as loving and as fun.' Scott Berg KATE REMEMBERED is a loving tribute and a tender farewell that reveals an unusual relationship in a unique life, one fully lived - and largely according to Katharine Hepburn's own rules. More importantly, it sets down many of the stories of that life as she saw them, full of sentiments she felt should not be made public until after her death. Ultimately, this book is not only a story of the poignant final twenty years in which Scott Berg knew Katharine Hepburn, but also a tale of a great theatrical personality and the better part of the century that was the stage for her distinguished life.

by Laura Hillenbrand · Random House

by Joe Conason · Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's

Presents a critical examination of smear tactics utilized by right-wing politicians, challenging such conceptions as Bush's conservative reputation and the detrimental economic impact of Democratic policies.

by Jim Hightower · Viking Press

America listens to Jim Hightower. In this book he takes on the Bushites, the Wobblycrats, and the corporate Kleptocrats, digging up behind-the-scenes dirt that the corporate media overlooks.

by Bill Bryson · Broadway

In this book Bill Bryson attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization.

by Michael Lewis · Norton

"One of the best baseball—and management—books out.... Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard). I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors. What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win... how can we not cheer for David?

by Edward Klein · St. Martin's

In this probing expose, renowned Kennedy biographer Klein unravels one of the great mysteries of our time and explains why the Kennedys have been subjected to such a mind-boggling chain of calamities.

by Mike Stanton · Random House

COP: “Buddy, I think this is a whorehouse.” BUDDY CIANCI: “Now I know why they made you a detective.” Welcome to Providence, Rhode Island, where corruption is entertainment and Mayor Buddy Cianci presided over the longest-running lounge act in American politics. In The Prince of Providence, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mike Stanton tells a classic story of wiseguys, feds, and politicians on a carousel of crime and redemption. Buddy Cianci was part urban visionary, part Tony Soprano—a flawed political genius in the mold of Huey Long and James Michael Curley. His lust for power cost him his marriage, his family, and close friendships. Yet he also revitalized the city of Providence, where ethnic factions jostle with old-moneyed New Englanders and black-clad artists from the Rhode Island School of Design rub shoulders with scam artists from City Hall. For nearly a quarter of a century, Cianci dominated this uneasy melting pot. During his first administration, twenty-two political insiders were convicted of corruption. In 1984, Cianci resigned after pleading guilty to felony assault, for torturing a man he suspected of sleeping with his estranged wife. In 1990, in a remarkable comeback, Cianci was elected mayor once again; he went on to win national acclaim for transforming a dying industrial city into a trendy arts and tourism mecca. But in 2001, a federal corruption probe dubbed Operation Plunder Dome threatened to bring the curtain down on Cianci once and for all. Mike Stanton takes readers on a remarkable journey through the underside of city life, into the bizarre world of the mayor and his supporting cast, including: • “Buckles” Melise, the city official in charge of vermin control, who bought Providence twice as much rat poison as the city of Cleveland, which was at the time four times as large, and wound up increasing Providence’s rat population. During a garbage strike, Buckles sledgehammered one city employee and stuck his thumb in another’s eye. Cianci would later describe this as “great public policy.” • Anthony “the Saint” St. Laurent, a major Rhode Island bookmaker and loan shark, who tried to avoid prison by citing his medical need for forty bowel irrigations a day, thus earning himself the nickname “Public Enema Number One.” • Dennis Aiken, a celebrated FBI agent and public corruption expert, who asked to be sent to “the Louisiana of the North,” where he enlisted an undercover businessman to expose the corrupt secrets of Cianci’s City Hall. The Prince of Providence is a colorful and engrossing account of one of the most tragicomic figures in modern American life—and the city he transformed.

by Stefan Kanfer · Knopf

'Easily the year's best Hollywood biog.' Independent on Sunday ' Ball Of Fire reveals all about house- wife superstar Lucille Ball. She made the top-rated TV show in America before her husband's serial adulteries practically sunk it.' Sunday Herald To viewers all over the world, Lucille Ball remains the ultimate screwball housewife, getting in and out of outlandish scrapes with hilarous finesse. But Stefan Kanfer's biography looks behind the image, tracing Ball's comedic genius to its beginnings in a lonely childhood in upstate New York. She yearned to make people laugh, to attain stardom and love. Then a Cuban bandleader called Desi came into her life to make her wealthy and famous -- and nearly destroyed her in the process. Kanfer chronicles the runaway success of I Love Lucy, the fiery marriage and eventual split from Desi, and Ball's struggle to manage both a business empire and her own rebellious children. 'A wonderful and poignant book . . . Kanfer portays Lucille Ball as insatiably anxious and insecure, a woman whose search for a father-figure would only ever find the unlikely and unholdable Desi . . . Kanfer pulls no punches over Lucy the pain in the neck but he gives a superb picture of how she and Desi changed television.' David Thomson

by Michael Moore · ReganBooks/ HarperCollins

Rember when everything was looking up? When the government was running at a surplus pollution was disappearing peace was breaking out in the middle East and Northern Ireland and the Bridge to the Twenty-First century was strung with Internet cable and paved with 401 (k) gold? Well, so much for the future. Michael Moore the award winning povocateur behind Roger & Me and the best seller Downsize This! now returns to size up the new century and that big, ugly special interest group that's laying waste to the world as we know it: stupid white men. Among the targets of Mike's Manifesto on Malfeasance and mediocrity are the Bush family Junta, Bll Clinton the Idiot Nation and Corporate American.

by David Lipsky · Houghton Mifflin

Lipsky, a Rolling Stone writer and an award-winning novelist, chronicles daily life at the U.S. Military Academy during the most tumultuous period in its history. In 1998, West Point made David Lipsky an unprecedented offer: stay at the Academy as long as you like, go wherever you wish, talk to whomever you want, to discover why some of America's most promising young people sacrifice so much to become cadets. Lipsky followed one cadet class into mess halls, barracks, classrooms, bars, and training exercises, from arrival through graduation. By telling their stories, he also examines the Academy as a reflection of our society: Are its principles of equality, patriotism, and honor quaint anachronisms or is it still, as Theodore Roosevelt called it, the most "absolutely American" institution? During arguably the most eventful four years in West Point's history, Lipsky witnesses the arrival of TVs and phones in dorm rooms, the end of hazing, and innumerable other shifts in policy and practice known collectively as The Changes. He uncovers previously unreported scandals and poignantly evokes the aftermath of September 11, when cadets must prepare to become officers in wartime. Absolutely American spotlights a remarkable ensemble of characters: a former Eagle Scout who struggles with every facet of the program, from classwork to marching; a foul-mouthed party animal who hates the military and came to West Point to play football; a farm-raised kid who seems to be the perfect soldier, despite his affection for the early work of Georgia O’Keeffe; and an exquisitely turned-out female cadet who aspires to "a career in hair and nails" after the Army. These cadets and their classmates are transformed in fascinating, sometimes astonishing, ways by one of America's most mythologized and least understood challenges. Many of them thrive under the rigorous regimen; others battle endlessly just to survive it. A few give up the fight altogether. Lipsky's extensive experience covering college students for Rolling Stone helped him gain an exceptional degree of trust and candor from both cadets and administrators. They offer frank insights on drug use, cheating, romance, loyalty, duty, patriotism, and the Army's tortuous search for meaning as new threats loom.