MEANT TO BE, Walter Anderson, HarperCollins. Anderson, the legendary editor and now CEO of Parade, was haunted during his youth and while serving in Vietnam by the question of whether his abusive alcoholic father was his real father. The answer – his German Protestant mother had fallen in love during World War II with a Russian Jew and bore his child – frees him to build an unusually successful and public life. He and his mother keep the secret for 35 years until he meets the brother he never knew he had. This memoir is a love story, a journey of self-discovery and spirituality, and a provocative challenge to common notions of the role of heredity.
THE TRUTH ABOUT CHRONIC PAIN, Arthur Rosenfeld, Basic Books. Examines by means of a narrative series of brief sensitive interviews with sufferers, medical experts, pharmaceutical executives, children, DEA agents, fallen sports heroes, rabbis, priests, Sufis, philosophers (and many others) our societal prejudices, despite a scientific arsenal of resources to conquer pain, that allows huge numbers of people to live and die in agony.
UNDER THE LOVING CARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADER, Bradley K Martin, St. Martin’s.
A sweeping and magisterial history of the Kim dynasty and the people of North Korea, easily the strangest country in the world. Knowing the background and some of the thinking of the leadership enables this award-winning journalist to make some predictions about our future with this country.
METRO STOP DOSTOEVSKY, Ingrid Bengis, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The author of one of the founding texts of feminism, Combat in the Erogenous Zone, had always considered Russia to be her spiritual home. Here we have her intimate and deeply personal account of her move to St. Petersburg and her attachment to a mercurial Russian woman and so gives us a richly realized portrait of the Russian everyday and cultural worlds during the radical transformation of the 90’s.
BEYOND GLORY, Larry Smith, Norton. An unforgettable oral history of living Medal of Honor recipients, recapturing their own firsthand accounts of bravery beyond imagining, and their varied lives afterwards.
THE MIRACLE OF MSM, Ronald Lawrence, MD, and Martin Zucker, Putnam. The definitive and introductory guide to an astonishing natural substance, a derivative of powerful DMSO but without the drawbacks, that provides a huge relief for arthritis and well as many of the other aches and pains of joints and muscles.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE LAST KID PICKED, David Benjamin, Random House. In the Wisconsin of a time not so long ago but now nearly forgotten, a kid could step outdoors and be left entirely on his own (no grownups cared!). Benjamin relives his own adventures in that blissful time. Despite his ineptness at every sport from baseball to marbles, he never once thinks of giving up the games, for each day after all was the dawn of a new comedy.
A TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO MARS, William K Hartmann, Workman. An inventive state-of-the-science Baedeker to the Red Planet by the internationally respected scientist, writer, painter, and winner of the first Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society.
BUSINESS JU-JITSU, Stephen Strauss, Bloomsberg. A managerial and small business empowerment manual showing through plentiful anecdotal examples of how to turn a weakness or a bad happenstance into a winning strategy for success. The author is the small business columnist for USA Today.
ALL TOO HUMAN, Edward Klein, Pocket Books. The bestselling love story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy.
THE COMPLETE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING BUDDHISM, Gary Gach, Alpha Books. The author chose to do a CIG book in the hopes of reaching the widest number of us common folk, but the series titles shouldn’t be a deterrent. Bountifully playful and profound by turns, as well as comprehensive, this is the best and truest introduction to Buddhism available: so saith all who’ve encountered the book from the clueless to the wisest adept.
GROW YOUNG WITH HGH, Dr. Ronald Katz and Carol Kahn, HarperCollins. By the founder of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, this is the book that vastly extended the popular acceptance of the notion of stopping the clock of aging – and the cause of all those spam messages you get hyping the miracles of human growth hormone. Became the gold standard for popular health books.
HOW CULTURE WORKS, Paul Bohannan, The Free Press. A distillation and interpretation of what we know of societal culture, a remarkably successful Principia Mathematica for anthropology by a dean of scientific anthropology.
THE CATHOLIC GIRL’S GUIDE TO SEX, Melinda Anderson and Kathleen Murray, Broadway. A kind of Preppy Handbook for those who are just sure the nuns haven’t told you everything you need to know about the birds and the bees. Witty and sexy, a dirty book that’s not amnesiac about religious belief.
THE COLDEST WAR, James Brady. St. Martin’s. A personal history of the Korean War by a Marine who fought it, it’s become a classic account of that war.
NATURAL HORMONE BALANCE FOR WOMEN, Uzzi Reiss, M.D., and Martin Zucker, Pocket Books. All the information a woman needs to work up an individualized program of natural hormone replacement rather than the artificially manufactured hormones which belatedly have been discovered to be so dangerous.
THE PHYSICIAN WITHIN YOU, Gladys Taylor McGarey, M.D., and Jess Stearn, HCI. Shows how to access your own inner healer – the natural healing process that’s inherent in every human being – by an international pioneer of holistic/integrative medicine and the hugely bestselling author of Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU WON’T EAT IN MY HOME?, Azriela Jaffe, Schocken.
A practical handbook that explains the details of Jewish ritual to the newly-observant, and to less- or non-observant family and friends how they can continue to participate in each others’ lifecycle and family events.
A CRITICAL LIFE OF MALCOLM X, Kofi Natambu, Penguin. A new look at the iconic figure for the hip hop generation, while establishing his long roots in the African American traditional historical background.
