"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure...

Before John Glenn orbited the earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in...

Mrs. Obama offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress. Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt...

"Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of this career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned "Paris" books-beginning with Tropic of Cancer-were published here and judged by the Supreme Court not to be obscene. Until then he had toiled in relative obscurity and poverty. The Unknown Henry Miller recounts...

"A product of beige California suburbs, Mandel was overlooked and unexceptional. When her father ships her off on a youth group tour of Israel, he inadvertently catapults his seventeen-year-old daughter into a world of angry European backpackers, seize-the-day Israelis, and the fall out of cold war-era politics. Border violence hadn't been on the birthright tour agenda. But then neither had domestic violence, going broke, getting wasted, getting sick,...

The author reveals how, shortly after giving birth to a child she adored, she drank herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide before a spiritual awakening led her to sobriety.

A memoir about aging, family, creativity, tragedy, friendship, and the richness of life. How to accept, appreciate, enjoy? Who are our most trusted, valuable companions and what will we do for them? When you've given up, when you least expect it, there it is.

Includes essays about E.B. White, Harold Ross, Mark Twain, John Hersey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Donald Barthelme, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Pritchett, William Maxwell, William Steig, John Updike, and others. "Long known for his range and supple prose (he is the only writer elected to membership in both the Baseball Hall of Paine and the American Academy of Arts and Letters), Angell won the 2015 American Society of Magazine Editors' Best Essay award for...

How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become the most successful storyteller in the world? On the morning he was born, he nearly died. His dad grew up in the Pogey–the Newburgh, New York, poorhouse. He worked at a mental hospital in Massachusetts, where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell. While he toiled in advertising hell, James wrote the ad jingle line "I'm a Toys 'R' Us Kid." He once watched James Baldwin and...

Discusses the childhood of Frida Kahlo and how it influenced her art.