By Dr. Sharon Lamb:
Psychologist and expert witness Dr. Sharon Lamb evaluates parents, particularly in high-stakes cases concerning the termination of parental rights. The conclusions she reaches can mean that some children are returned home from foster homes. Others are freed for adoption. Well-trained, Lamb generally can decide what’s in the best interests of the child. But when her son’s struggle with opioid addiction comes to light, she starts to doubt her right to make judgments about other mothers. Join us Thursday, July 11 at 7PM as Lamb shares her personal and professional story and signs copies.
By Russell Gold:
Acclaimed journalist and author of The Boom, “the best all-around book yet on fracking” (San Francisco Chronicle), Russell Gold tells the story of this pioneer whose innovations, struggles, and persistence represent the groundbreaking changes underway in American energy. In Superpower, we meet Skelly’s financial backers, a family that pivoted from oil exploration to renewable energy; the farmers ready to embrace the new “cash crop”; the landowners prepared to go to court to avoid looking at overhead wires; and utility executives who concoct fiendish ways to block renewable energy. Gold also shows how Skelly’s innovative company, Clean Line Energy, conceived the idea for a new power grid that would allow sunlight where abundant to light up homes thousands of miles away in cloudy states, and take wind from the Great Plains to keep air conditioners running in Atlanta. Thrilling, provocative, and important, Superpower is a fascinating look at America’s future. Don’t miss this important discussion with Gold Wednesday, July 10 at 7PM, and grab a signed copy too!
By Linda Holmes:
From the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast comes a heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who’s lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game. “This book kicked off what has been a year of nonstop rom-com love in my life. It combines a smart, witty romance with one of the great loves in my own life: baseball. This book is fun, heartbreaking, emotional, inspiring, hopeful, and just downright fun. I devoured it in an afternoon and can’t recommend it enough. This is a perfect summer read that will stick with you long after the last page.” –Christina
By Emily Nussbaum:
“The New Yorker TV critic has developed a loyal following over the years through her smart, often hilarious, and always relatable pieces on the value and impact of television, tracing its evolution from waste-of-time trash box to high-brow art form (don’t worry, she’s rolling her eyes too). Whether it’s via Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jane the Virgin, or The Sopranos, Nussbaum dives deep into the medium and its history, as well as our role in it. You will laugh alongside her, most likely find your next binge-watch, and probably end up following her on Twitter, rejoicing in your newfound friendship with a total stranger just because you love the same TV shows. A great collection for TV lovers and pop culture history buffs alike.” –Eugenia
By Claire Lombardo:
“As someone from a blended family, I tend to avoid family-centric realistic fiction because I’ve already had to navigate those challenges in real life, you know? However, in The Most Fun We Ever Had, chronicling the life of the Sorenson family, author Claire Lombardo does such a phenomenal job with characterization that I never once felt I was unhealthily projecting onto the characters—they each had their own story, own challenges, and, most importantly, own triumphs. Celebrating with the Sorensons in these triumphs, almost adoptively, was a true joy and opened my heart up to this particular sub-genre.”–Olivia
By Lauren Mechling:
After a devastating break-up with her fiancé, Geraldine is struggling to get her life back on track in Toronto. Her two old friends, Sunny and Rachel, left ages ago for New York, where they’ve landed good jobs, handsome husbands, and unfairly glamorous lives (or at least so it appears to Geraldine). Sick of watching from the sidelines, Geraldine decides to force the universe to give her the big break she knows she deserves, and moves to New York City. An assured and savagely funny novel about three old friends as they navigate careers, husbands, an ex-fiancé, new suitors, and, most importantly, their relationships with one another.
By M. T. Edvardsson:
A legal thriller told in three acts, A Nearly Normal Family follows eighteen-year-old Stella, who stands accused of the brutal murder of a man almost 15 years her senior. Stella is an ordinary teenager from an upstanding local family. What reason could she have to know a shady businessman, let alone to kill him? Chronologically told through three perspectives, readers follow both the story of a crime and the unraveling of a seemingly normal family: the father, a pastor; the daughter, a recent high school graduate; and the mother, a criminal defense attorney. Testing the moral compass of the pastor father and attorney mother, dazzling storyteller M.T. Edvardsson weaves a web in which everyone becomes entangled and nothing is what it seems.
By Chanelle Benz:
From the author of The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead comes her debut novel. Billie James’s inheritance isn’t much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day—and she hasn’t been back to the South since. Thirty years later, Billie returns, but her father’s home is unnervingly secluded; her only neighbors are the McGees, the family whose history has been entangled with hers since the days of slavery. As Billie encounters the locals, she hears a strange rumor: that she herself went missing on the day her father died. As the mystery intensifies, she finds out that this forgotten piece of her past could put her in danger.
By Carl Hulse:
The Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times presents a richly detailed, news-breaking, and conversation-changing look at the unprecedented political fight to fill the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death—using it to explain the paralyzing and all but irreversible dysfunction across all three branches in the nation’s capital. Richly textured and deeply informative, Confirmation Bias provides much-needed context, revisiting the judicial wars of the past two decades to show how those conflicts have led to our current polarization. He examines the politicization of the federal bench and the implications for public confidence in the courts, and takes us behind the scenes to explore how many long-held democratic norms and entrenched, bipartisan procedures have been erased across all three branches of government.
By Stephen K. Rose & Jessica N. Rose:
When Stephen and Jessica Rose settled in Nashville, they fell in love with their new city. Their only reservation: Where were the luscious peaches that Stephen remembered from his childhood in Georgia? Amid Nashville’s burgeoning food scene, the couple partnered with his hometown peach orchard to bring just-off-the-tree Georgia peaches to their adopted city, selling them out of the back of their 1964 Jeep Gladiator in Nashville’s farmer’s markets. Since starting their company in 2012, Stephen and Jessica have attracted a quarter of a million followers on social media and have delivered more than 4.5 million peaches to tens of thousands of customers in 48 states. With The Peach Truck Cookbook, the couple brings the lusciousness of the Georgia peach and the savory and sweet charms of Southern cooking, as well as the story behind their success and an insider’s guide to the Nashville food scene, to readers everywhere.
By Andrew Blum:
The weather is the foundation of our daily lives. It’s a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind all these humble interactions is the largest and most elaborate piece of infrastructure human beings have ever constructed—a triumph of both science and global cooperation. But what is the weather machine, and who created it? In The Weather Machine, Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey through the people, places, and tools of forecasting, exploring how the weather went from something we simply observed to something we could actually predict. As he travels across the planet, he visits some of the oldest and most important weather stations and watches the newest satellites blast off. He explores the dogged efforts of forecasters to create a supercomputer model of the atmosphere, while trying to grasp the ongoing relevance of TV weather forecasters.
By Jack Fairweather:
To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a young Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: intentionally get captured and transported to the new camp to report back on what was going on there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz. Completely erased from the historical record by Poland’s Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather reveals Witold’s exploits with vivid, cinematic bravura. He also uncovers the tragic outcome of Pilecki’s mission, in which the ultimate betrayal came not on the Continent, but England.
By Season Butler:
Seventeen-year-old Kid doesn’t know where her parents are. They left her with her grandmother Lolly, promising to return soon. That was months ago. Now, Lolly is dead and Kid is alone, stranded ten miles off the coast of New Hampshire on tiny Swan Island. Unable to reach her parents, and with no other relatives to turn to, Kid works for a neighbor, airbrushing the past—digitally retouching family photos and movies—to earn enough money to survive. Surrounded by the vast ocean, Kid’s temporary home is no ordinary vacation retreat. The island is populated by an idiosyncratic group of elderly separatists who left behind the youth-obsessed mainland—”the Bad Place”—to create their own alternative community. These residents call themselves the Swans. Kid calls them the Wrinklies. Even as Kid tries to be good and quiet and patient, the adolescent’s presence unnerves the Swans, turning some downright hostile. They don’t care if she has nowhere to go, they just want her gone. She is a reminder of all they’ve left behind and are determined to forget. But Kid isn’t the only problem threatening the insular community. Swan Island is eroding into the rising sea, threatening the Swans’ very existence there. To find a way forward, the Kid must come to terms with the realities of her life and an unknown future that is hers alone to embrace.
BookPeople 