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Hardcover Nonfiction

Week of July 18, 2004

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MY LIFE
Bill Clinton
Cover of MY LIFE

MY LIFE

by Bill Clinton · Knopf

6 wks at #1 · 2 on list

There will only be 1,500 copies available of this edition, and it will be sold by select retailers including most online bookstores. Each book will include: - Bill Clinton's signature - Edition number-1,500 total - Full navy blue cloth case with Bill Clinton gold stamp on spine - Gold Ribbon-marker - Frontispiece photographs - Crimson endpapers - Shrink-wrapping President Bill Clinton's "My Life is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public. It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House--a journey fueled by an impassioned interest in the political process which manifested itself at every stage of his life: in college, working as an intern for Senator William Fulbright; at Oxford, becoming part of the Vietnam War protest movement; at Yale Law School, campaigning on the grassroots level for Democratic candidates; back in Arkansas, running for Congress, attorney general, and governor. We see his career shaped by his resolute determination to improve the life of his fellow citizens, an unfaltering commitment to civil rights, and an exceptional understanding of the practicalities of political life. We come to understand the emotional pressures of his youth--born after his father's death; caught in the dysfunctional relationship between his feisty, nurturing mother and his abusive stepfather, whom he never ceased to love and whose name he took; drawn to the brilliant, compelling HillaryRodham, whom he was determined to marry; passionately devoted, from her infancy, to their daughter, Chelsea, and to the entire experience of fatherhood; slowly and painfully beginning to comprehend how his early denial of pain led him at times into damaging patterns of behavior. President Clinton's book is also the fullest, most concretely detailed, most nuanced account of a presidency ever written--encompassing not only the high points and crises but the way the presidency actually works: the day-to-day bombardment of problems, personalities, conflicts, setbacks, achievements. It is a testament to the positive impact on America and on the world of his work and his ideals. It is the gripping account of a president under concerted and unrelenting assault orchestrated by his enemies on the Far Right, and how he survived and prevailed. It is a treasury of moments caught alive, among them: - The ten-year-old boy watching the national political conventions on his family's new (and first) television set. - The young candidate looking for votes in the Arkansas hills and the local seer who tells him, "Anybody who would campaign at a beer joint in Joiner at midnight on Saturday night deserves to carry one box. . . . You'll win here. But it'll be the only damn place you win in this county." (He was right on both counts.) - The roller-coaster ride of the 1992 campaign. - The extraordinarily frank exchanges with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. - The delicate manipulation needed to convince Rabin and Arafat to shake hands for the camera while keeping Arafat from kissing Rabin. - The cost, both public and private, of the scandal that threatened the presidency. Here is the life of a great national and international figure, revealed with all his talents and contradictions, told openly, directly, in his own completely recognizable voice. A unique book by a unique American.

2
DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM
David Sedaris
Cover of DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM

DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM

by David Sedaris · Little, Brown

5 wks on list

David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother's wedding. He mops his sister's floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn't it? In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives -- a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.

3
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EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES
Lynne Truss
Cover of EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES

EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES

by Lynne Truss · Gotham

13 wks on list

At front and back of book: Punctuation repair kit [stickers].

4
NEW
SHADOW DIVERS
Robert Kurson
Cover of SHADOW DIVERS

SHADOW DIVERS

by Robert Kurson · Random House

1 wks on list

In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery–and make history themselves. For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried under decades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors–former enemies of their country. As the men’s marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew. Author Robert Kurson’s account of this quest is at once thrilling and emotionally complex, and it is written with a vivid sense of what divers actually experience when they meet the dangers of the ocean’s underworld. The story of Shadow Divers often seems too amazing to be true, but it all happened, two hundred thirty feet down, in the deep blue sea. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Robert Kurson's Pirate Hunters.

5
FATHER JOE
Tony Hendra
Cover of FATHER JOE

FATHER JOE

by Tony Hendra · Random House

7 wks on list

A key comic writer of the past three decades has created his most heartfelt and hard-hitting book. Father Joe is Tony Hendra’s inspiring true story of finding faith, friendship, and family through the decades-long influence of a surpassingly wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow. Like everything human, it started with sex. In 1955, fourteen-year-old Tony found himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. In Cold War England, where Catholicism was the subject of news stories and Graham Greene bestsellers, Tony was whisked off by the woman’s husband to see a priest and be saved. Yet what he found was a far cry from the priests he’d known at Catholic school, where boys were beaten with belts or set upon by dogs. Instead, he met Father Joe, a gentle, stammering, ungainly Benedictine who never used the words “wrong” or “guilt,” who believed that God was in everyone and that “the only sin was selfishness.” During the next forty years, as his life and career drastically ebbed and flowed, Tony discovered that his visits to Father Joe remained the one constant in his life—the relationship that, in the most serious sense, saved it. From the fifties and his adolescent desire to join an abbey himself; to the sixties, when attending Cambridge and seeing the satire of Beyond the Fringe convinced him to change the world with laughter, not prayer; to the seventies and successful stints as an original editor of National Lampoon and a writer of Lemmings, the off-Broadway smash that introduced John Belushi and Chevy Chase; to professional disaster after co-creating the legendary English series Spitting Image; from drinking to drugs, from a failed first marriage to a successful second and the miracle of parenthood—the years only deepened Tony’s need for the wisdom of his other and more real father, creating a bond that could not be broken, even by death. A startling departure for this acclaimed satirist, Father Joe is a sincere account of how Tony Hendra learned to love. It’s the story of a whole generation looking for a way back from mockery and irony, looking for its own Father Joe, and a testament to one of the most charismatic mentors in modern literature.

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BIG RUSS AND ME
Tim Russert
Cover of BIG RUSS AND ME

BIG RUSS AND ME

by Tim Russert · Miramax

8 wks on list

The author offers a memoir of life with his father, a proud World War II veteran, describing growing up in 1950s Buffalo, the influence of his Catholic upbringing, and the importance of hard work, responsibility, and patriotism.

7
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OBLIVIOUSLY ON HE SAILS
Calvin Trillin
Cover of OBLIVIOUSLY ON HE SAILS

OBLIVIOUSLY ON HE SAILS

by Calvin Trillin · Random House

1 wks on list

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Calvin Trillin's Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin. Does the Bush Administration sound any better in rhyme? In this biting array of verse, it at least sounds funnier. Calvin Trillin employs everything from a Gilbert and Sullivan style, for describing George Bush’s rescue in the South Carolina primary by the Christian Right (“I am, when all is said and done, a Robertson Republican”), to a bilingual approach, when commenting on the President’s casual acknowledgment, after months of trying to persuade the nation otherwise, that there was never any evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11: “The Web may say, or maybe Lexis-Nexis / If chutzpa is a word they use in Texas.” Trillin deals not only with George W. Bush but with the people around him—Supreme Commander Karl Rove and Condoleezza (Mushroom Cloud) Rice and Nanny Dick Cheney (“One mystery I’ve tried to disentangle: / Why Cheney’s head is always at an angle . . .”) The armchair warriors Trillin refers to as the Sissy Hawk Brigade are celebrated in such poems as “Richard Perle: Whose Fault Is He?” and “A Sissy Hawk Cheer” (“All-out war is still our druthers— / Fiercely fought, and fought by others.”). Trillin may never be poet laureate—certainly not while George W. Bush is in office—but his wit and his political insight produce what has been called “doggerel for the ages.”

9
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MICHAEL MOORE IS A BIG FAT STUPID WHITE MAN
David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke

MICHAEL MOORE IS A BIG FAT STUPID WHITE MAN

by David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke · ReganBooks/HarperCollins

1 wks on list

Watching Michael Moore in action -- passing off manipulating facts in Bowling for Columbine, spinning statistics in Stupid White Men and Dude, Where's My Country?, shamelessly grandstanding at the Academy Awards, and epitomizing the hypocrisy he's made a king's fortune railing against -- has spurred authors David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke to take action into their own hands. In Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, Hardy and Clarke dish it back hard to the fervent prophet of the far left, turning a careful eye on Moore's use of camera tricks and publicity ploys to present his own version of the truth. Postwar documentarians gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary, and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary. How, they ask, does Moore pull off a proletarian, "man-of-the-people" image so at odds with his lifestyle as a fabulously wealthy Manhattanite? And how large of an impact do his incendiary, ill-founded polemics have on the growing community that follows him with near-religious devotion? Loaded with well-researched, solidly reasoned arguments, and laced with irreverent wit, Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man fires back at one of the left's biggest targets -- politically and literally.

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1
ON THE DOWN LOW
J. L. King with Karen Hunter
Cover of ON THE DOWN LOW

ON THE DOWN LOW

by J. L. King with Karen Hunter · Broadway

11 wks on list

A bold exposé of the controversial secret that has potentially dire consequences in many African American communities. Delivering the first frank and thorough investigation of life “on the down low” (the DL), J. L. King exposes a closeted culture of sex between black men who lead “straight” lives. King explores his own past as a DL man, and the path that led him to let go of the lies and bring forth a message that can promote emotional healing and open discussions about relationships, sex, sexuality, and health in the black community. Providing a long-overdue wake-up call, J. L. King bravely puts the spotlight on a topic that has until now remained dangerously taboo. Drawn from hundreds of interviews, statistics, and the author’s firsthand knowledge of DL behavior, On the Down Low reveals the warning signs African American women need to know. King also discusses the potential health consequences of having unprotected sex, as African American women represent an alarming 64 percent of new HIV infections. Volatile yet vital, On the Down Low is sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year. “A survey by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta found that nearly a quarter of black HIV-positive men who had sex with men consider themselves heterosexual.” —Essence

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AGAINST ALL ENEMIES
Richard A. Clarke
Cover of AGAINST ALL ENEMIES

AGAINST ALL ENEMIES

by Richard A. Clarke · Free Press

14 wks on list

The disturbing truth about the war on terror and a withering critique of the Bush Administration's neglect of the threat, by the man who served for eleven years as the White House Counter-terrorism Czar.

Historical bestseller data sourced from the New York Times Book Review, archived by Hawes Publications.