Beth Harpaz recounts her search for her mother's true identity, hoping to uncover the reason behind her mother's relentless sorrow and understand why the family's yearly trips to Maine helped soothe her mother's spirit and mind.

This is a fictional tale but based on the true rags-to-riches story of a young Irish girl escaping the poverty of post–Potato Famine Ireland. Annie Elizabeth Maher ends up in the service of one of the wealthiest and well-connected families in New York. She mixes with artists, politicians, and wealthy business people and travels the world with her mistress, Georgiana. After Georgiana dies young, Annie retreats to make a new life in Long Branch, New Jersey. A successful and philanthropic woman with a portfolio of seven properties in 1900 is a rare event, let alone one who has emerged from poverty in Ireland. Nonetheless, she makes her mark on this seaside town and lives happily. However, she is arrested in 1924 and is committed to Trenton Asylum as a lunatic—was this a conspiracy to bring her down or an intolerance of female success? Of her time in Trenton under the now infamous Dr. Henry Cotton, how will this megalomania in medicine impact on her life?

Hillary is up in the polls! Hillary is down in the polls! She’s a feminist and women love her; she’s an enabler and women hate her. She’s brilliant and hardworking; she’s entitled and untrustworthy. Sounds like Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 or even 2008 presidential campaign, right? Well, go back even farther to the year 2000 to discover how every one of those phrases was uttered during Hillary’s very first campaign when she made history as the only first lady to ever run for office. That groundbreaking bid for U.S. Senate in New York made headlines around the world, coming as it did on the heels of her husband’s scandalous affair with a White House intern. Reporter Beth J. Harpaz was there, covering this political whirlwind for The Associated Press, and her book, "Candidate Hillary," previously published as "The Girls in the Van," revisits every key moment of the race. This funny, fascinating account puts you in the press van that followed Hillary from Buffalo to Brooklyn as she fought a cast of familiar characters, including New York’s pugnacious Mayor Rudy Giuliani. It’s filled with all the successes and missteps, the kind that plagued the assumed front-runner’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, which instead went to a young Senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. Now, updated with new perspectives from the author and an introduction by National Politics Reporter Lisa Lerer, "Candidate Hillary" offers a window into Hillary’s vulnerabilities, strengths and the inner workings of the Clinton machine, all told with authority, humor and the benefit of hindsight.

"And I thought I knew this crazy-brave black boy who bolted out of a Harlem ghetto into a white prep school and bobbed and weaved his way across the treacherous divide between black and white America. But Dennis Watlington's life story is even more astonishing than I knew. He emerges a no-jive black integrationist who is proud of the slave ancestry that makes him a solid American foreperson." -Gail Sheehy, bestselling author of Passages and Understanding Men's Passages Chasing America is a rollercoaster ride through promise and poverty, affirmative action and addiction, and a powerful story that captures a life and an era that is seminally American. Born in Harlem in 1952, Dennis developed a heroin habit at the age of 14, kicked it, and received a scholarship to the Hotchkiss School where he was elected president of his class. He went on to NYU, became involved in film and theater (he had a small role in The Deerhunter and gave Bruce Willis his start in a play called Bullpen), got addicted to crack, kicked that, and became an Emmy winning television writer. Chasing America shows us the best and worst that America offers to a Black man--from the Jim Crow South to boarding school life in New England to backstage at the Fillmore East to a holding cell in Bellevue Hospital. Part Ellison, part Exley, Chasing America is an amazing story.