Book cover of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
Biography & Autobiography

The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

A revelatory biography from a Pulitzer Prize-winner about the most essential Founding Father—the one who stood behind the change in thinking that produced the American Revolution.

Thomas Jefferson asserted that if there was any leader of the Revolution, “Samuel Adams was the man.” With high-minded ideals and bare-knuckle tactics, Adams led what could be called the greatest campaign of civil resistance in American history. […Learn More]

Book cover of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life by Katherine E. Standefer
Biography & Autobiography

Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life

This “utterly spectacular” book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author’s life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises).

What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That’s the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. […Learn More]

Book cover of The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey
Biography & Autobiography

The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect’s leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king. […Learn More]

Book cover of Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard
Biography & Autobiography

Festival Days

When “The Fourth State of Matter,” her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. […Learn More]

Book cover of Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946 by Gary Giddins
Biography & Autobiography

Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years, 1940-1946

Bing Crosby dominated American popular culture in a way that few artists ever have. From the dizzy era of Prohibition through the dark days of the Second World War, he was a desperate nation’s most beloved entertainer. But he was more than just a charismatic crooner: Bing Crosby redefined the very foundations of modern music, from the way it was recorded to the way it was orchestrated and performed. […Learn More]