| When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of... by Graydon CarterWhen Graydon Carter received the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, he knew he faced a challenge on how to make the esteemed and long-established magazine his own. With curiosity, fearlessness, and a love of recent history and glamour, Carter succeeded in endearing himself to his editors, contributors, readers, and those who would grace the pages of Vanity Fair for the next twenty-five years.
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| The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward by Melinda French GatesTransitions are moments in which we step out of our familiar surroundings and into a new landscape, often requiring decisions filled with confusion, fear, and indecision. “The Next Day” offers guidance on how to make the most of the time between an ending and a new beginning and how to move forward into the next day when the ground beneath you is shifting.
In this book, Melinda will reflect, on some of the most significant transitions in her own life, including becoming a parent, the death of a dear friend, and her departure from the Gates Foundation. The stories she tells illuminate universal lessons about loosening the bonds of perfectionism, helping friends navigate times of crisis, embracing uncertainty, and more.
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The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball
by John W. Miller
“The Last Manager,” chronicles the life and career of the innovative and fiery Baltimore Orioles manager who revolutionized baseball with data-driven strategies, colorful theatrics and groundbreaking decisions that shaped the modern game while navigating the sport's transition into the free agency era.
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Ida Lupino, Forgotten Auteur: From Film Noir to the Director's Chair
by Alexandra Seros
Though her acting career is well known, Ida Lupino was, until very recently, either unknown or overlooked as an influential director. One of the few female directors in Classical Hollywood, Lupino was the only woman with membership in the Directors Guild of America between 1948 and 1971. Her films were about women without power in society and engaged with highly controversial topics despite Hollywood's strict production code. Working in a male-dominated field, Lupino had to manage her public persona carefully, resisting attempts by the press to paint her solely as a dutiful wife and mother so that she could continue directing.
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Focus on: Asian Heritage Month |
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Landbridge: Life in Fragments
by Y-Dang Troeung
"In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that Canada agreed to admit. Their arrival was in the newspapers, with photographs of the Prime Minister shaking Troeung's father's hand and patting baby Y-Dang's head. Troeung became a literal poster child for the benevolence of the Canadian refugee project. She returns to this moment forty years later in her arresting memoir Landbridge, where she explores the tension between that public narrative of happy "arrival," and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to her family. In precise, beautiful prose, Troeung moves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son's illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Throughout this brilliant and astonishing book, Troeung looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence and dares to imagine a better future, with love
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Biting the hand : growing up Asian in Black and White America
by Julia Lee
An enthusiastic, memoir about the Asian American experience in a nation defined by racial stratification When Julia Lee was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a Black neighborhood, Julia’s parents taught her to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So, who was she? This question would follow Julia for years to come, resurfacing as she traded in her tumultuous childhood for the white upper echelon of elite academia. It was only when she began a PhD in English that she found answers, not in the Brontës or Austen, as Julia had planned, but rather in the brilliant prose of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Their works gave Julia the vocabulary and, more important, the permission to critically examine her own tortured position as an Asian American, setting off a powerful journey of racial reckoning, atonement, and self-discovery that has shaped her adult life.
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All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey
by Teresa Wong
Beginning with her mother's stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories, Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions, "Where did I come from?" and "Where are we going?" At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.
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| Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit in by Phuc TranAfter the fall of Saigon in 1975, author Phuc Tran and his family immigrated to America, winding up in a predominantly white community in Pennsylvania. An outsider among his classmates, Tran found solace in punk music, classic literature, and skateboarding. Equal parts funny and affecting, Tran's coming-of-age memoir will resonate with fans of The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere by James Spooner, and anyone who has ever struggled to fit in.
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