October Sky

Written by Homer Hickam

Format: Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Dell
On Sale: February 16, 1999
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-440-23550-7 (0-440-23550-2)

A uniquely American memoir, October Sky (formerly titled Rocket Boys) is at once an inspiring chronicle of triumph and a luminous story of a mother's love, a father's fears, and a young man's coming of age. Looking back after a distinguished NASA career that fulfilled his boyhood ambition, Homer Hickam shares... Read more >

Seabiscuit
An American Legend
Written by Laura Hillenbrand

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: March 26, 2002
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-449-00561-3 (0-449-00561-5)

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad... Read more >

Compass Points
How I Lived
Written by Edward Hoagland

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 26, 2002
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70240-2 (0-375-70240-7)

Award—winning nature writer Edward Hoagland explores the people, places, events, and themes that have shaped him and work in this luminous memoir of a life richly lived.

From his childhood in rural Connecticut to some of the earth’s last remaining wilderness, from New York parties to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s... Read more >

Notes from The Century Before
A Journal from British Columbia
Written by Edward Hoagland
Edited by Jon Krakauer
Introduction by David Quammen

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: February 12, 2002
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75943-7 (0-375-75943-3)

In 1966, Edward Hoagland made a three-month excursion into the wild country of British Columbia and encountered a way of life that was disappearing even as he chronicled it. Showcasing Hoagland’s extraordinary gifts for portraiture—his cast runs from salty prospector to trader, explorer, missionary, and indigenous guide—Notes from the Century Before... Read more >

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time
My Adventures in Life and Food
Written by Moira Hodgson

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: March 9, 2010
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1271-6 (0-7679-1271-3)

The daughter of a British Foreign Service officer, Moira Hodgson spent her childhood in many a strange and exotic land. She discovered American food in Saigon, ate wild boar in Berlin, and learned how to prepare potatoes from her eccentric Irish grandmother. Today, Hodgson has a well-deserved reputation as a discerning... Read more >

Prairie Silence
A Memoir
Written by Melanie Hoffert

Format: Hardcover, 248 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: January 8, 2013
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4473-5 (0-8070-4473-3)

A rural expatriate’s struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people

Melanie Hoffert longs for her rural North Dakota home with its grain trucks and empty main streets. But like many, she followed the out-migration pattern to a more urban life... Read more >

Lady Sings the Blues the 50th Anniversary Edition

Written by Billie Holiday and William Dufty
Foreword by David Ritz

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: July 25, 2006
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2386-6 (0-7679-2386-3)

LADY SINGS THE BLUES is the fiercely honest, no-holds-barred autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz, swing, and standards singing sensation. Taking the reader on a fast-moving journey from Holiday’s rough-and-tumble Baltimore childhood (where she ran errands at a whorehouse in exchange for the chance to listen to Louis Armstrong and... Read more >

Footsteps
Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
Written by Richard Holmes

Format: Trade Paperback, 292 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 30, 1996
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77004-6 (0-679-77004-6)

Richard Holmes knew he had become a true biographer the day his bank bounced a check that he had inadvertently dated 1772. Because for the acclaimed chronicler of Shelley and Coleridge, biography is a physical pursuit, an ardent and arduous retracing of footsteps that may have vanished centuries before.

In this gripping... Read more >

Volcano
A Memoir of Hawai'i
Written by Garrett Hongo

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 28, 1996
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-76748-0 (0-679-76748-7)

Part memoir, part Japanese American family chronicle, part luminous work of natural history, Volcano tells what happened when Hongo returned to his birthplace in Hawai’i, as a young man, to reclaim its dreamlike landscape and his own elusive past. A magnificant evocation of heritage and place.

“My favorite kind of book is... Read more >

Unraveled
One Woman's Story of Moving Out, Moving On, and Becoming a Better Mother
Written by Maria Housden

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: May 23, 2006
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5417-6 (1-4000-5417-6)

As a twelve-year-old girl, Maria Housden’s vision of a happy future included everything that society expects girls to yearn for: a home, a husband, and, of course, children. Life had other plans.

Unraveled is Housden’s riveting and thoughtful story of how, after the death of her young daughter, she found the courage... Read more >

Things I Didn't Know

Written by Robert Hughes

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 4, 2007
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38598-7 (0-307-38598-1)

Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects, from the city of Barcelona to the history of his native Australia. Now he turns that eye inward, onto himself and the world that formed him. Hughes analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a... Read more >

Touching the Rock
An Experience of Blindness
Written by John Hull

Format: Trade Paperback, 248 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 2, 1992
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-73547-2 (0-679-73547-X)

Shortly after John Hull went blind, after years of struggling with failing vision, he had a dream in which he was trapped on a sinking ship, submerging into another, unimaginable world. The power of this calmly eloquent, intensely perceptive memoir lies in its thorough navigation of the world of blindness—a world... Read more >

Eight Lives Down
The Most Dangerous Job in the World in the Most Dangerous Place in the World
Written by Chris Hunter

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Delta
On Sale: May 19, 2009
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-553-38528-1 (0-553-38528-3)

Visceral and compelling, Eight Lives Down is the most exciting and nerve-jangling work of military non-fiction since Bravo Two Zero.

Chris Hunter has the most dangerous job in the world — to make safe the British sector in Iraq against some of the most hardened and technically advanced terrorists in the world... Read more >

My Movie Business
A Memoir
Written by John Irving

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: October 10, 2000
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-44130-0 (0-345-44130-3)

A New York Times Notable Book. In this memoir, novelist John Irving's recounts the process of turning his novel The Cider House Rules into a workable screenplay. After two producers, four directors, thirteen years, and countless rewrites, the movie version of Irving's acclaimed novel at last made it to the big... Read more >

Full Body Burden
Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Written by Kristen Iversen

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: June 4, 2013
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-95565-4 (0-307-95565-6)

Chosen one of the Best Books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews and the American Library Association and 2012 Best Book about Justice by The Atlantic
Finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
Selected for Common Reading at:
Virginia Commonwealth University
St. Bonaventure University
Fort Lewis College
California State University... Read more >

The Man Within My Head

Written by Pico Iyer

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 22, 2013
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-38756-1 (0-307-38756-9)

Ever since he first discovered Graham Greene's work, Pico Iyer has felt a haunting closeness with the English writer. In The Man Within My Head, Iyer follows Greene's trail from his first novel, The Man Within, to such later classics as The Quiet American, examining Greene's obsessions, his elusiveness, and his... Read more >

The Man Within My Head

Written by Pico Iyer

Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: January 3, 2012
Price: $25.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-26761-0 (0-307-26761-X)

We all carry people inside our heads—actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know.

In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer... Read more >

Climbing the Mango Trees
A Memoir of a Childhood in India
Written by Madhur Jaffrey

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 9, 2007
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7820-2 (1-4000-7820-2)

Today’s most highly regarded writer on Indian food gives us an enchanting memoir of her childhood in Delhi in an age and a society that has since disappeared.

Madhur (meaning “sweet as honey”) Jaffrey grew up in a large family compound where her grandfather often presided over dinners at which forty or... Read more >

Nothing Was the Same

Written by Kay Redfield Jamison

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 11, 2011
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-27789-3 (0-307-27789-5)

Perhaps no one but Kay Redfield Jamison–who combines the acute perceptions of a psychologist with a writerly elegance and passion–could bring such a delicate touch to the subject of losing a spouse to cancer. In direct, straightforward, and at times strikingly lyrical prose, Jamison looks back at her relationship with her... Read more >

Decoded

Written by Jay-Z

Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
On Sale: November 16, 2010
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6892-0 (1-4000-6892-4)

Decoded is a book like no other: a collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time.

“Hip-hop’s renaissance man drops a classic. . . . Heartfelt, passionate... Read more >

Lost Boy
The True Story of One Man's Exile from a Polygamist Cult and His Brave Journey to Reclaim His Life
Written by Brent W. Jeffs and Maia Szalavitz

Format: Trade Paperback, 264 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: July 13, 2010
Price: $14.99
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3178-6 (0-7679-3178-5)

In the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), girls can become valuable property as plural wives, but boys are expendable, even a liability. In this powerful and heartbreaking account, former FLDS member Brent Jeffs reveals both the terror and the love he experienced growing up on his... Read more >

Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son
A Memoir of Growing Up, Coming Out, and Changing America's Schools
Written by Kevin Jennings

Format: Trade Paperback, 280 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: May 15, 2007
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7147-2 (0-8070-7147-1)

Long before Kevin Jennings began advocating to end anti-GLBT bias in schools, he was a victim of it. In Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, Jennings traces the roots of his activism to his school days in the conservative South, where “faggot” became more familiar to him than his own name. Creating safe... Read more >

Red Dust
A Path Through China
Written by Ma Jian

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: November 12, 2002
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72023-6 (0-385-72023-8)

In 1983, at the age of thirty, dissident artist Ma Jian finds himself divorced by his wife, separated from his daughter, betrayed by his girlfriend, facing arrest for “Spiritual Pollution,” and severely disillusioned with the confines of life in Beijing. So with little more than a change of clothes and two... Read more >

Kelly
More Than My Share of It All
Written by Clarence L. Johnson

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: December 17, 1989
Price: $21.95
ISBN: 978-0-87474-491-0 (0-87474-491-1)

Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson led the design of such crucial aircraft as the P-38 and Constellation, but he will be more remembered for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. His extraordinary leadership of the Lockheed “Skunk Works” cemented his reputation as a legendary figure in American aerospace management.

“Reads like the autobiography... Read more >

Tex Johnston
Jet-Age Test Pilot
Written by A.M. Johnston

Format: Trade Paperback, 274 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: December 17, 2000
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-56098-931-8 (1-56098-931-9)

One of America’s most daring and accomplished test pilots, Tex Johnston flew the first US jet airplanes and, in a career spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, helped create the jet age at such pioneering aerospace companies as Bell Aircraft and Boeing.

“There seem to be two Tex Johnstons: the one who... Read more >