Hardcover Nonfiction

by Thomas L. Friedman · Farrar, Straus & Giroux

by David McCullough · Simon & Schuster

America's most acclaimed historian presents the intricate story of the year of the birth of the United States of America. 1776 tells two gripping stories: how a group of squabbling, disparate colonies became the United States, and how the British Empire tried to stop them. This book destroys many popular myths about the wars of independence and reveals in fact how many Americans wished to remain British, and how many British had profound doubts about a military solution to the revolt. It shows that many of those fighting knew those on the other side well, and as the great decisions and battles of 1776 unfolded and attitudes hardened, the truly fratricidal nature of the conflict became clear. A must read. This exhilarating book is one of the great peices of historical narrative.

by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner · Morrow

The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first. Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary? SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as: How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa? Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands? How much good do car seats do? What's the best way to catch a terrorist? Did TV cause a rise in crime? What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common? Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness? Can eating kangaroo save the planet? Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor? Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is – good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky. Freakonomics has been imitated many times over – but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.

by Malcolm Gladwell · Little, Brown

Kennen Sie die kurzen Momente, in denen wir blitzartige Entscheidungen treffen - Momente, in denen wir denken, ohne zu denken?

by J. R. Moehringer · Hyperion

A moving, vividly told memoir full of heart, drama, and exquisite comic timing, about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a barJ .R. Moehringer grew up listening for a voice: It was the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. As a boy, J.R. would press his ear to a clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of masculinity, and the keys to his own identity. J.R.+s mother was his world, his anchor, but he needed something else, something more, something he couldn+t name. So he turned to the bar on the corner, a grand old New York saloon that was a sanctuary for all types of men-cops and poets, actors and lawyers, gamblers and stumblebums. The flamboyant characters along the bar-including J.R.+s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; Joey D, a soft-hearted brawler; and Cager, a war hero who raised handicapping horses to an art-taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee. When the time came for J.R. to leave home, the bar became a way station-from his entrance to Yale, where he floundered as a scholarship student way out of his element; to his introduction to tragic romance with a woman way out of his league; to his stint as a copy boy at the New York Times, where he was a faulty cog in a vast machine way out of his control. Through it all, the bar offered shelter from failure, from rejection, and eventually from reality-until at last the bar turned J.R. away.Riveting, moving, and achingly funny, The Tender Bar is at once an evocative portrait of one boy+s struggle to become a man, and a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys.

by Kurt Vonnegut · Seven Stories

by Alan Alda · Random House

One of America's most recognizable and acclaimed actors, the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing, Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances. The son of a popular actor and a loving but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on, after early struggles, to achieve extraordinary success in his profession. Yet this is not a memoir of show-business ups and downs. It is a story of a boy growing into a man who then realizes he has only just begun to grow. Alda learns the hard way that change, uncertainty, and transformation are what life is made of, and true happiness is found in embracing them.--From publisher description.

by Bernard Goldberg · HarperCollins

by Bruce Feiler · Morrow

"At a time when America debates its values and the world braces for religious war, Feiler travels ten thousand miles through the heart of the Middle East and examines the question: Is religion tearing us apart, or can it bring us together? Taking readers to sites not seen by Westerners for decades, Feiler's journey uncovers little-known details about the common roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and affirms the importance of the Bible in today's world. In Israel, he treks through secret underground tunnels and locates the spot where David toppled Goliath. In Iraq, he visits the Garden of Eden and the birthplace of Abraham, and makes a life-threatening trip to the rivers of Babylon. In Iran, he explores the home of the Bible's first messiah and uncovers the secret burial place of Queen Esther. Feiler's bold realization is that the Bible argues for interfaith harmony.--From publisher description.

by Barbara Ehrenreich · Metropolitan/Holt

Ehrenreich enters the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a job--undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and--again and again--rejected. This book highlights the people who've done everything right, yet have become vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding "surplus" employees--plunging them into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers--and little security even for those who have jobs. --From publisher description.

by Neal Boortz and John Linder · ReganBooks/ HarperCollins

by Bill Maher · Rodale

by Robert Santelli · Simon & Shuster

This illustrated biography of the American singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, covers the 1950s and 60s and includes rare photographs, facsimiles of handwritten lyrics and rare memorabilia as well as interviews with the man himself.

by Karrine Steffans · Amistad/ HarperCollins

Part tell-all, part cautionary tale, this emotionally charged memoir from a former video vixen nicknamed 'Superhead' goes beyond the glamour of celebrity to reveal the inner workings of the hip-hop dancer industry—from the physical and emotional abuse that's rampant in the industry, and which marked her own life—to the excessive use of drugs, sex and bling. Once the sought-after video girl, this sexy siren has helped multi-platinum artists, such as Jay-Z, R. Kelly and LL Cool J, sell millions of albums with her sensual dancing. In a word, Karrine was H-O-T. So hot that she made as much as $2500 a day in videos and was selected by well-known film director F. Gary Gray to co-star in his film, A Man Apart, starring Vin Diesel. But the film and music video sets, swanky Hollywood and New York restaurants and trysts with the celebrities featured in the pages of People and In Touch magazines only touches the surface of Karrine Steffans' life. Her journey is filled with physical abuse, rape, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness and single motherhood—all by the age of 26. By sharing her story, Steffans hopes to shed light on an otherwise romanticised industry and help young women avoid the same pitfalls she encountered. If they're already in danger, she hopes to inspire them to find a way to dig themselves out of what she knows first-hand to be a cycle of hopelessness and despair.

by Raymond Arroyo · Doubleday

In a moving, dramatic conclusion to his four New York Times bestselling Mother Angelica books, Raymond Arroyo completes the saga of this singular nun with his most intimate book yet. For more than a decade, the beloved, wise cracking nun who founded EWTN, the world’s largest religious media empire, was confined to her cell at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Hanceville, Alabama. Though Mother Angelica is still seen and heard by millions each week in reruns on seven continents, the private drama within her monastery, her personal supernatural encounters, and the prolonged suffering she endured has remained hidden. Until now. Revealed for the first time is the personal request Mother made of God—which sheds light on her long silence. Here are Mother Angelica’s spiritual battles in her cell—including encounters with the devil—and the unrevealed episodes of hilarity and inspiration. From playing possum (to avoid undesirable visitors to her room), to undertaking a secret trip to the far East, to blessing her nuns as they leave her care to create new monasteries, Mother Angelica’s spunky spirit shines through the narrative. Mother Angelica Her Grand Silence, the touching, climactic coda to the Mother Angelica canon also offers readers the personal testimonies of people around the world who were spiritually transformed by Mother during her long public absence. And for the first time, the author writes movingly of his personal relationship with Mother—the highs and the lows.