Physical

A wild ride through the dark heart of American health and health care, plus sex, drugs, and stem-cell wars.

Physical is the story of a hard-living, happily married, middle-aged American (the author) who gets a three-day “executive checkup” at the Mayo Clinic and is thereby forced to confront his mortality, not to mention glove-wearing doctors and the pair of dominatrix-esque technicians who supervise his stress test quite strictly. James McManus must understand his revised actuarial odds in the light of his not-so-long-lived forebears and the fact that his youngest children are only six- and five-years-old.

Mennonite in a litlle black dress - A Memoir of Going Home

Janzen, the author of a poetry collection called “Babel’s Stair,” teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Michigan. Those aren’t promising details, I know — readers may suspect that an academic poet’s memoir about failed marriage, debilitating pain and a strict religious upbringing would be dry, self- pitying and overly earnest. But “Mennonite in a Little Black Dress” is snort-up-your-coffee funny, breezy yet profound, and poetic without trying. In fact, the whole book reads as if Janzen had dictated it to her best non-Menno friend, in her bathrobe, over cups of tea.

Hitch 22 - A Memoir

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political.

Riding in Cars with Boys - Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good

"Trouble began in 1963 . . . the age-old trouble." Unable to attend college, Beverly Ann Donofrio lost interest in everything but riding around in cars, drinking, smoking, and rebelling against authority. After her teenage marriage failed, Donofrio found herself at an elite New England university, books in one arm, child on the other. Then, furnished with ambition, dreams, and five hundred dollars, she took herself and her son to New York City to begin a career and a life. An outrageous and touching memoir, Riding in Cars with Boys is about becoming middle-class and the compromises made between being your own person and fitting into society.

Stormy Weather

Carl Hiaasen, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, has earned a reputation for perceptive, sharp-edged suspense that also cuts to the bone of environmental issues. His novels have been translated into many languages and are touted worldwide for their quirky characters and surreal adventures set in the ravaged cultural wasteland of southern Florida.