The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Friday Night Lights follows baseball's 2004 National League Champion St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa through a three-game series with the arch-rival Chicago Cubs. Learn More

From the 1950s through 1997, Louis “Studs” Terkel, bestselling author of Hard Times, Working, The Great War, Coming of Age, and eight other books, hosted a daily one-hour show on WFMT Radio in Chicago. This nationally syndicated, Peabody Award-winning program was an ideal showcase for his curmudgeonly wit, his maverick opinions, and his genius as an interviewer.

The 48 interviews in this collection, span Terkel’s five decades on radio and encompass a wide range of entertainers, scientists, writers and thinkers, including Dorothy Parker, Pete Seeger, Bob Woodward, Simone de Beauvoir, and many more. Learn More

Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations, and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel's straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds her. Learn More

This powerful and moving work is Didion's “attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity about life itself.” With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss. Learn More

Picking up where A Girl Named Zippy left off, Haven Kimmel crafts a tender portrait of her mother, a modestly heroic woman who took the odds that life gave her and somehow managed to win. Learn More

Presented as a series of essays, it follows the natural course of women’s lives. Learn More

The best-selling biography of Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, written by the woman who knows him best: his wife. Learn More

An astonishing first-hand account of life in 17th-century London, read with wit and style by actor Kenneth Branaugh. Learn More

Acclaimed travel writer Jonathan Raban invites us aboard his boat, a floating cottage cluttered with books, curling manuscripts, and dead ballpoint pens. Learn More

Seventeen-year-old long distance swimmer Lynne Cox was out training in the cold Pacific one morning when she became aware that an 18-foot baby gray whale was following her, apparently lost and separated from its mother, without whom it would surely die. Something so enormous as a mother whale 50 feet long suddenly seemed very small in the vast Pacific. . . . Learn More

Daring, honest, and written with the comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that marks Franzen's fiction, The Discomfort Zone tells of the formation of one young mind in the crucible of an everyday American family. Learn More

The National Book award finalist puts a human face on the AIDS crisis in Africa. Learn More

By turns elegant and exultant, jubilant and poignant, Through the Children's Gate is a loving portrait of a family and their city. Learn More

There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant To Say is self-awareness and honesty at its most hilarious. Learn More

A gripping true account of courage and survival at sea against impossible odds—and one of the finest untold World War II sagas of our time. Learn More

In Somehow Form a Family, Earley writes about finding a place in a world without losing sight of where you came from. Learn More

As chronicled in the bestselling book My Old Man and the Sea, the thirst for living an unconventional life led Daniel Hays to sail around Cape Horn with his father in a boat they built themselves. Learn More

The Next Better Place explores the thin line between wanderlust and compulsion, between running away and arriving, and leaves us with the understanding that the journey is often more powerful than the destination. Learn More

John Edward is a renowned psychic medium whose talents are matched by only a handful of people in the world. One Last Time is his remarkable story. Learn More