| True Crime by Patricia CornwellKay Scarpetta series author Patricia Cornwell’s autobiography reads like a gritty, dramatic backstory for one of her characters. She talks plainly but captivatingly about her dysfunctional childhood, the multiple incidents of sexual violence she endured, her early journalism career, and the real-life female medical examiner who served as inspiration for Scarpetta. |
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Seventy-Two Seasons: A Memoir about Noticing
by M. a. C. Farrant
Finding profound moments in the natural world, M.A.C. Farrant offers an antidote to the distractions and pressures of modern life. Inspired by the Japanese practice of celebrating one feature in nature every five days, creating seventy-two seasons instead of four, Farrant embarks on a year-long mission to focus her attention on the small spellbinding changes around her. With her signature humour, she skilfully blends observations, meditations, literary references, memoir, essay-ettes and arcane facts as she explores the natural world. From homely weeds to majestic trees and the animals that cross her path, Farrant shares her deep noticing of the changes of the seasons and along the way we learn with her how to slow down and experience the world with awe and wonder.
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| Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America by Lauren HoughMemoirist Lauren Hough hits the road with her dog, Woody, in an American travelogue inspired by John Steinbeck’s "Travels with Charley." As she traverses the states, Hough alternates road anecdotes with scenes from her life -- pondering friendship cut short by death and taking stock of modern life’s compromises and indignities; yet she somehow mines hopeful conclusions in a book that’s “as much of a journey inward as it is outward” |
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Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss, and a Really Long Walk
by Lauren Kessler
A resonant and timely story about love, loss, and forging a path forward in the aftermath of grief. After tragedy upended the contours of her life, Lauren Kessler, an unflinching immersion journalist, felt compelled to move--to do something, to be somewhere else. So she set out alone on the famed Camino de Santiago, walking across Spain to create space between the life she'd lived and the life she hadn't chosen but now inhabited. Raw and luminous, Everything Changes Everything is a story about facing what we'd rather avoid, about the wounds we carry, hide, and sometimes heal. It's about the privilege of choosing hardship, the grace of temporary friendship, the solace of kindred spirits, and the power of movement to unstick what's stuck. It's also about unfounded optimism, unlikely laughter, and the way grief and beauty can coexist in a single step.
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Muv: The Story of the Mitford Girls' Mother
by Rachel Trethewey
The story of the seventh Mitford woman, a long-overlooked figure in the Mitford family. Everyone knows about the six flamboyant Mitford girls but in fact there were seven remarkable women in the famous family, the seventh was Muv, Lady Sydney Redesdale, the mother of the notorious sisters. Too often portrayed as different from them and outside the girl gang, she was really the original and much of her daughters' strong will, self-confidence, and extremism came from her.
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North of Ordinary: How One Woman Left It All Behind for Wilderness and Wonder in Alaska's Frozen Frontier
by Sue Aikens
When the wild strips everything away, what's left is who you are.In the raw, untamed wilds of Alaska, where the wind howls, predators hunt, and the sun disappears for months. Only a rare few figure out how to survive. Sue Aikens, the breakout star of National Geographic's long-running TV show Life Below Zero, is one of them. At her remote outpost 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, she weathers more than just brutal winters and hungry bears. Sue battles isolation, injury, and the ghosts of a turbulent past, forging a life in a place most people wouldn't last a day. Left to fend for herself as a child, Sue's fight to survive began long before she ever set foot in Alaska. In North of Ordinary, she tells the unforgettable story of abandonment, grit, and fierce independence, from navigating deadly storms and surviving a horrific bear attack to learning how to build a life, a home, and a sense of self where most would see only desolation. With her trademark wit, fearless honesty, and an indomitable spirit, Sue proves that the toughest terrain isn't always on the map. It's the one we conquer inside. Unflinching and inspiring, North of Ordinary is a memoir of resilience, reinvention, and the extraordinary power of choosing your own way through the world.
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Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World
by Paul Rosolie
Most people assume that the world has been explored and true adventure is dead: This book is one man's rebuttal. Explorer and conservationist Paul Rosolie, shares his incredible life in the Amazon rainforest and what we can learn from the people fighting to protect it. This book is about the profound power of saying yes: yes to one's calling, yes to sticking with your dream when it comes at a high cost, and yes to taking a stand to save what might otherwise be gone in a generation. It's a story of calling, connectedness, and hope.
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The Land and Its People: Essays
by David Sedaris
In "The Land and Its People", Sedaris investigates what it means to be a traveler, a brother, a lifelong friend. Trying on the role of caretaker after his boyfriend Hugh's hip-replacement surgery, he both succeeds and fails. He covers ground with his friend Dawn and challenges her to eat a truck tire. A ambivalent Duolingo bot becomes his unlikely confidante as he attempts to describe his family in a foreign language. Throughout these essays, at once acerbic and tender, playful and profound, Sedaris shows how much there is to marvel at when you keep your head up and your eyes open, observing with warmth and curiosity our fascinating human species and the lands we inhabit.
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Homeschooled: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir
by Stefan Merrill Block
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were 'stifling his creativity.' Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects, and when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan re-entered the public school system in Plano as a first-year student, he was in for a jarring awakening.
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This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark
by Craig Fehrman
A major revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition: For the first time in a generation, "This Vast Enterprise" offers a fresh and more accurate account of one of the most important episodes in American history, humanizing forgotten figures and shattering long-held myths. In the end, the captains are men who needed help from Sacajawea, from the Corps, and from each other. Mile after mile, the expedition pushes on through hailstorms and flash floods, frostbite and infections, rattlesnakes and rabid wolves, with the Spanish cavalry in fierce pursuit. Fehrman balances the story's adventure with the humanity of its protagonists. The result is a thrilling reminder that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us.
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