Vivid, dramatic portraits of the author’s “misfit” female ancestors and a candid, intimate memoir about family secrets and breaking free from the narrow confines of a “proper Southern woman.” The Beak in the Heart is a memoir of growing up “Southern.” Betina Enzminger shares the poignant tales of women who preceded her—misfit women who defied authority and suffered the consequences in the repressive South Carolina of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Entzminger links several generations of women from pre-Civil War years to the present, including Victoria, a former slave and concubine to her third great uncle, Rosalee, a great aunt committed to the state hospital for forty years, and Louise, an aunt who unwittingly married a gay man at a time when divorce was not legal in South Carolina. She also shares candid details of her rebellious youth and her own struggles with marriage and parenthood. In exploring the lives of her spirited female relatives, Entzminger—their educated, rebellious, and misfit twenty-first-century descendant—restores their voices and finds inspiration in their courage and integrity. The Beak in the Heart speaks to all women, regardless of region of birth, who have felt that society has curbed their freedoms or silenced their voices.

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “It takes a rare individual not only to see that history can live, but also to make it live for others. James Thom has that gift.”—The Indianapolis News Mary Ingles was twenty-three, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit. With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives on—extraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people.

After a tense impasse with the U.S. military, the two men turned the ship over to Prince Sihanouk's government, declared themselves anti-war revolutionaries, and were granted asylum. Two days later, however, a coup put pro-U.S. Lon Nol in power and the two were imprisoned. Sihanouk, now in exile, charged that the CIA had masterminded the mutiny to deliver weapons to Lon Nol, but the mutineers and U.S. officials denied his charges."--BOOK JACKET.

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son's crucifixion and struggling with guilt, anger, and feelings that her son is not the son of God and that His sacrifice was not for a worthy cause.