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Learning to Listen
A Life Caring for Children
The pediatrician shares the life-shaping experiences that inspired his career, from the Texas childhood during which he routinely cared for younger cousins to his revolutionary observations of newborn behavior.
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The Faraway Nearby
This companion to A Field Guide for Getting Lost explores the ways that people construct lives from stories and connect to each other through empathy, narrative and imagination, sharing illustrative anecdotes about historical figures and members of the author's own family.
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Run, Brother, Run
A Memoir of a Murder in My Family
Run, Brother, Run is a memoir of a wild boyhood in Texas that led to the murder of the author's brother, Alan, in 1968. The book explores the author's striving Jewish family and the miscarriage of justice when Alan's murderer went unpunished.
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Wild
From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington state — and she would do it alone.NPR Bestseller
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Lots Of Candles, Plenty Of Cake
A Memoir of a Woman's Life
A candid and whimsical memoir that explores what matters to middle-aged women.NPR Bestseller
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The Black Count
Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, And The Real Count Of Monte Cristo
Gen. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was one of the heroes of the French Revolution, leading armies of thousands in triumph through the snows of the Alps and the sands of Egypt. Today, he is almost forgotten, though he lives on in his son's stories. The son of a Haitian slave and a French nobleman, this mixed-race swordsman was the father of novelist Alexandre Dumas, and his adventures helped inspire The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. Tom Reiss' biography of the elder Dumas explores the real-life adventures behind these classic novels.NPR Bestseller
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The Astronaut Wives Club
A True Story
Describes what life was like for a group of military wives, including Annie Glenn, Rene Carpenter, Betty Grissom, and Louise Shepherd, who were thrust into the spotlight when their husbands became Mercury Seven astronauts.
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Monkey Mind
A Memoir of Anxiety
Daniel Smith documents his experiences with a kind of anxiety that results in panic attacks, bouts of insomnia and thoughts of "existential ruin." He shares insights into anxiety in today's world, and stories of sufferers to illustrate anxiety's intellectual history and influence.NPR Bestseller
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Blue Plate Special
An Autobiography of My Appetites
The PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of The Great Man builds on her popular food-centric blog to recount her unconventional upbringing and her unusually happy and occasionally sorrowful life of literary and culinary sensuality.
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The Telling Room
A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese
The author of the best-selling Driving Mr. Albert recounts his visit to the medieval Castilian village of Guzman as part of a decade-long effort to taste the world's finest cheese, an encounter that involved him in long-held regional secrets and the story of a heartbroken genius cheesemaker.
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Shocked
My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me
The author shares the lessons about womanhood and personal style she learned from both her mother, an upper-middle-class New Yorker who was the polished hostess at her family's garment district restaurant, and Elsa Schiaparelli, the outrageous, iconoclastic Italian fashion designer.
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The Joker
An award-winning poet and compulsive joke teller shares a personal account that remembers the jokes that educated him about history, religion and family, from revelatory sex jokes that informed his adolescence and racial jokes that estranged his relatives to the jokes he has used to court and romance his wife.
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Lizz Free Or Die
Essays
In a collection of autobiographical essays, The Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead vividly recounts how she fought to find her own voice, both as a comedian and as a woman, and how humor became her most powerful weapon in confronting life's challenges.
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The Long Walk
A Story of War and the Life That Follows
A memoir by a bomb-disposal veteran of the Iraq War traces his three tours of duty in the Middle East and his team's daily life-threatening efforts to stop roadside bombers, sharing additional coverage of the challenges he faced while reacclimating to civilian life. 75,000 first printing.
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Permanent Present Tense
The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M.
Recounts the extraordinary story of a brain-damaged patient known as H. M, who, after a psychosurgical procedure in 1952 to alleviate his epilepsy stole his ability to form new memories, helped scientists to make considerable advances in the study of memory. 40,000 first printing.
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Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted
And All the Brilliant Minds Who Made the Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic
The story of the making of The Mary Tyler Moore Show offers insight into how the show reflected changing American perspectives and was the first situation comedy to employ numerous women as writers and producers.
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Queen of the Air
A True Story of Love and Tragedy at the Circus
Dean Jensen traces the story of world-famous trapeze artist Leitzel and her star-crossed love affair with Alfredo Codona of the famous Flying Codona Brothers. From a disadvantaged youth, Leitzel went on to have impressive achievements with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
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The Book of My Lives
Aleksander Hemon pays tribute to the two cities of his youth: Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he spent his time poking at the pretensions of the city's elders, and Chicago, where he and his family started a new life after Sarajevo came under siege.
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Overweight Sensation
The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman
Mark Cohen argues for Allan Sherman's legacy as a touchstone of postwar humor and a turning point in Jewish American cultural history.
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Fairyland
A Memoir of My Father
Describes the author's life being raised by her widowed, bi-sexual father in the liberating cultural mecca of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s and how AIDS began claiming the lives of their friends and eventually her father.
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Imperfect Harmony
Finding Happiness Singing With Others
The author of Unbelievable describes the feeling of community and transcendence she experiences while participating in a choir, tracing the history of group singing and the dramatic stories of conductors and composers while drawing on scientific findings to reveal the physical benefits of song. Original. 20,000 first printing.
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The World Is a Carpet
Four Seasons in an Afghan Village
In a portrait of a remote Afghan village where heroin is cheaper than rice and American fighter planes fly overhead, Anna Badkhen documents the community's annual tradition of recording the year's experiences through intricately woven rugs.
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Nine Years Under
Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home
A darkly comic coming-of-age memoir of the author's teen experiences in an urban Baltimore funeral home describes how a beloved relative's death prompted a summer job that turned into a nine-year immersion in a business marked by regional gang violence, AIDS and other intimate tragedies.
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Doc
A Memoir
One of the bad boys of the 1986 World Series-winning New York Mets discusses his life, from his Atlanta childhood with his alcoholic, womanizing father, through his baseball career, self-destructive drug binges, and experience on "Celebrity Rehab."
