Washington Centerville Public Library: New Nonfiction January 2026

New and Recently Released

Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton
by Martha Ackmann

From her impoverished childhood in the Smoky Mountains to international stardom, Dolly Parton has exceeded everyone's expectations but her own. The day after her high school graduation, she boarded a bus for Nashville, but record executives turned her down. When Dolly finally got her foot in the door, her talent and focus catapulted her to the top of country charts, the pop world, and movie stardom. Shunned by many in Nashville who saw her ambition as a betrayal of her country music roots, Dolly became the target of death threats, lawsuits, and a judge who threatened to throw her in jail, but she came back stronger than ever.

The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy
by Susan Wise Bauer

From alchemy to wellness culture, from antisemitism to disposable plastic, a gripping account of how getting sick has shaped humanity.Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle--the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions? The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade. In the process of writing, historian Susan Wise Bauer reveals just how many of our current fads and causes are rooted in the moment-by-moment experience of sickness--from the search for a balanced lifestyle to plug-in air fresheners and bare hardwood floors. We can't simply shout facts at people who refuse vaccinations, believe that immigrants carry diseases, or insist that God will look out for them during a pandemic. We have to enter with imagination, historical perspective, and empathy into their world. The Great Shadow does just that with page-turning flair.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
by Belle Burden

A gorgeous memoir about the sudden end to a seemingly happy marriage--an aching, love-filled, and transcendent account of surviving betrayal and discovering joy. It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was--someone nicknamed Belle the Good--gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB
by Gorden Corera

The story of how one man--a librarian for the KGB--became a traitor to the intelligence agency, stealing the most prized Soviet-era archives and smuggling them to the West. How do you steal a library? Not just any library but the most secret, heavily guarded archive in the world. The answer is to be a librarian. To be so quiet, that no-one knows what you are up to as you toil undercover and deep amongst the files. The work goes on for decades but remains so low key, that even after your escape, aided by MI6, no one even notices you are gone. The Spy in the Archive tells the remarkable story of how Vasili Mitrokhin--an introverted archivist who loved nothing more than dusty archives--ended up changing the world. As the in-house archivist for the KGB, the secrets he was exposed to inside its walls turned him first into a dissident and then a spy; a traitor to his country but a man determined to expose the truth about the dark forces that had subverted Russia, forces still at work in the country today. Historian and journalist Gordon Corera tells of the operation to extract this prized asset from Russia for the first time. It is an edge-of-the-seat thriller, with vivid flashbacks to Mitrokhin's earlier time as a KGB idealist prepared to do what it took to serve the Soviet Union and his growing realisation that the communist state was imprisoning its own people. It is the story of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union, to raise a family there, and then of one man's journey from the heart of the Soviet state to disillusion, betrayal, and defection. At its heart is Mitrokhin's determination to take on the most powerful institution in the world by revealing its darkest secrets. This is narrative nonfiction at its absolute best.

Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built
by Gayle Feldman

The story of the legendary Random House founder, whose seemingly charmed life at the apogee of the American Century afforded him a front-row seat to literary and cultural history in the making. At midcentury, everyone knew Bennett Cerf: witty, beloved, middle-aged panelist on What's My Line? whom TV brought into America's homes each week. But they didn't know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. By then, he'd signed Eugene O'Neill, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner, and had fought the landmark censorship case that gave Americans the freedom to read James Joyce's Ulysses. With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more. Even before TV, Cerf was a bestselling author and columnist as well as publisher; the show super-charged his celebrity, bringing fame--but also criticism. A brilliant social networker and major influencer before such terms existed, he connected books to Broadway, TV, Hollywood, and politics. A fervent democratizer, he published high, low, and wide, and from the Roaring Twenties to the Swinging Sixties collected an incredible array of friends, from George Gershwin to Frank Sinatra, having a fabulous time along the way. Using interviews with more than two hundred individuals, deeply researched archival material, and letters from private collections not previously available, this book brings Bennett Cerf to vibrant life, drawing book lovers into his world, finally laying open the page on a quintessential American original.

Football
by Chuck Klosterman

A hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most. For two kinds of readers--those who know it's football and those who are about to find out. Chuck Klosterman--New York Times bestselling critic, journalist, and, yes, football psychotic--did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of the game. He's not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past, and never in a way any normal person would expect. Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects--phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the country's most popular sport; it is engrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention. Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it. He takes us to a metaphorical projection of Texas, where the religion of six-man football merges with America's Team [sic] and makes an inexplicable impact on a boy in North Dakota. He dissects the question of natural greatness, the paradox of gambling and war, and the timeless caricature of the uncompromising head coach. He interrogates the perfection of football's marriage with television and the morality of acceptable risk. He even conjures an extinction-level event. If Zizek liked the SEC more than he liked cinema, if Stephen Jay Gould cared about linebackers more than he cared about dinosaurs, if Steve Martin played quarterback instead of the banjo . . . it would still be nothing like this. A century ago, Yale's legendary coach Walter Camp wrote his unified theory of the game. He called it Football. Chuck Klosterman has given us a new Camp for the new age, rooted in a personal history he cannot escape.

When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacy
by Beronda L. Montgomery

How the Word Is Passed meets Braiding Sweetgrass in a cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery, shared through the stories of long-lived trees. The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely. In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees--as well as the cotton shrub--are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace
by Robert Polito

Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since 1991--since that rainy February night in New York City when Dylan, then forty-nine, accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, signaling in effect that his extraordinary vocation as a vital and indispensable creative force had ended, was over--After the Flood reveals Dylan's creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.

Drawing on thousands of pages from Dylan's newly opened archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and anatomizing hundreds of published and unpublished lyrics, liner notes, and more, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito demonstrates how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has equally embodied and resisted its era, interweaving folk process and American and world history, and transforming spectral cultural memory into devastating inspiration. Polito thus establishes Dylan as an intensely literary songwriter whose recent writings, especially, are dynamic, intricate, and far-reaching collages.

Blending biography and archival history, After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?

Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire
by Julian Sancton

The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk off the coast of Colombia with over $1 billion in gold and silver--and one man's obsessive quest to find it--from the New York Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth. Roger Dooley wasn't looking for the San José. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive led him to the story of a lifetime, the tale of a great eighteenth-century treasure ship loaded with riches from the New World and destined for Spain. But that ship, the galleon San José, met a darker fate. It was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena, and when the smoke cleared, the San José and its bounty had disappeared into the ocean, its coordinates lost to time. Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San José. He had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding and excavating the ship powered him across four decades, even as he became a man in exile from the country of his birth. As Dooley jousted with famous treasure hunters and well-funded competitors, he slowly homed in on a patch of sea that might contain a three-hundred-year-old shipwreck--or nothing at all. Neptune's Fortune is a thrilling adventure, taking readers from great naval battles on the high seas to the sun-soaked shores that nurtured history's most notorious treasure hunters, to the archives that held the secret keys to lost fortune on the ocean floor.

The Lucky Egg: Understanding Your Fertility and How to Get Pregnant Now
by Lucky Sekhon

Imagine if your best friend also happened to be a top reproductive endocrinologist—the kind who could break down the complexities of conception with warmth, humor, and real-world insight. In The Lucky Egg, Dr. Lucky Sekhon is that brilliant friend, ready to guide you through every stage of the fertility journey, whether it’s straightforward or deeply complex.

From understanding what your AMH level really means to navigating egg freezing, IVF, or embryo genetic testing, Dr. Lucky blends expert medical knowledge with relatable patient stories to demystify the process. Her guidance meets you exactly where you are—whether you're just starting to track ovulation, facing a diagnosis of diminished ovarian reserve, exploring the use of donor eggs or sperm, or have been through multiple rounds of treatment with no clear path forward.

One in six people struggle with infertility, yet open, informed conversations are still rare. For many, the journey to parenthood is isolating, overwhelming, and full of medical jargon. For LGBTQ+ individuals, the barriers can be even greater—layered with legal and political hurdles that make an already emotional process feel even more fraught.

The Lucky Egg is here to change that. With evidence-based, accessible explanations and a voice that feels like a trusted ally, Dr. Lucky empowers readers with the knowledge they need to make confident decisions. Her goal is simple but profound: to replace confusion and fear with clarity, comfort, and hope.

With unwavering optimism and the bedside manner you've been longing for, The Lucky Egg is your compassionate guide to planning for and building the family of your dreams.

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