HITTING THE SHELVES …

THESE JUST IN:

Hardcover   $49.95 -10%   Published by Regan Books

Sammy Davis Jr.—iconic, legendary, in a word, classic. While the world has long known of Davis’s unparalleled abilities to sing, dance, and act, only his closest friends and associates knew of his amazing talent and passion for photography. Now, in this collection of never-before-seen photos, Burt Boyar, Davis’s longtime friend, exposes these memorable images for generations of his fans, portraying a side of Davis that has long remained a secret to the world at large. Here are Davis’s candid shots including his closest friends—Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Sean Connery, and Paul Newman—not to mention scores of the twentieth century’s biggest stars captured at their most casual and revealing moments.
But beneath this public veneer is also a strikingly private side of Davis, one that gives a glimpse into his difficult past and long road to success. Tracing Davis from his humble origins, the moments captured here demonstrate the struggle that he faced as an African-American performer during racially divided times and show the difficulties of being one of the country’s most revered celebrities when his mere presence signaled the changes taking shape across America.
Accompanying these unforgettable images are Boyar’s intimate remembrances of Davis, as he gives a history and a context for many of Davis’s striking photographs. Together with the photos, Boyar’s words offer a side of the performer far removed from his Rat Pack persona—one that is at once touching and fascinating.

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Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

by Pete Dexter

In the 1970s and 1980s, before he earned national acclaim for his award-winning novels, Pete Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, Dexter cut directly to the heart of the American character at a time of national turmoil and crucial change. With haunting urgency, his columns laid bare the violence, hypocrisy, and desperation he saw on the streets of Philadelphia and in the places he visited across the country. But he reveled, too, in the lighter side of his own life, sharing scenes with the indefatigable Mrs. Dexter, their young daughter, and a series of unforgettable creatures who strayed into their lives. No matter what caught Dexter’s eye, it was illuminated by his dark, brilliant humor.
Collected here for the first time are eighty-two of the best of those spellbinding, finely wrought pieces—with a new introduction by the author—assembled by Rob Fleder, editor of the bestselling “Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Book”. “Paper Trails” is searing, heart-breaking, and irresistibly funny, sometimes all at once. As Pete Hamill says in his foreword, these essays “are as good as it ever gets.”

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by J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page 

Hardcover   $26.95 -10%   Published by Collins

Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. In fact, recent research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality.
The field of archaeology has changed dramatically in the past two decades, as women have challenged their male colleagues’ exclusive focus on hard artifacts such as spear points rather than tougher to find evidence of women’s work. J. M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer are two of the world’s leading experts on perishable artifacts such as basketry, cordage, and weaving. In “The Invisible Sex”, the authors present an exciting new look at prehistory, arguing that women invented all kinds of critical materials, including the clothing necessary for life in colder climates, the ropes used to make rafts that enabled long-distance travel by water, and nets used for communal hunting. Even more important, women played a central role in the development of language and social life—in short, in our becoming human. In this eye-opening book, a new story about women in prehistory emerges with provocative implications for our assumptions about gender today.

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by Zbigniew Herbert 

Hardcover   $34.95 -10%   Published by Ecco

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A Worldly Country: New Poems

by John Ashbery

Hardcover   $23.95 -10%   Published by Ecco

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Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer

by James L. Swanson

Paperback   $15.95   Published by Harper Perennial

The Greatest Manhunt in American History  For 12 days after his brazen assassination of Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth was at large, and in “Manhunt”, historian James L. Swanson tells the vivid, fully documented tale of his escape and the wild, massive pursuit. Get a taste of the daily drama from this timeline of the desperate search.
April 14, 1865  Around noon, Booth learns that Lincoln is coming to Ford’s Theatre that night. He has eight hours to prepare his plan.
10:15 pm: Booth shoots the president, leaps to the stage, and escapes on a waiting horse.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton orders the manhunt to begin.  April 15  About 4:00 am: Booth seeks treatment for a broken leg at Dr. Samuel Mudd’s farm near Beantown, Maryland. Cavalry patrol heads south toward Mudd farm.
Confederate operative Thomas Jones hides Booth in a remote pine thicket for five days, frustrating the manhunters.   April 19  Tens of thousands watch the procession to the U.S. Capitol, where President Lincoln lies in state. Wild rumors and stories of false sightings of Booth spread.                 April 20  Stanton offers a $100,000 reward for the assassins, and threatens death to any citizen who helps them.
After hiding Booth in Maryland, Jones puts him in a rowboat on the Potomac River, bound for Virginia. More than a thousand manhunters are still searching in Maryland. In the dark, Booth rows the wrong way and first ends up back in Maryland.   April 20-24 Booth lands in the northern neck of Virginia, and Confederate agents and sympathizers guide him to Port Conway, Virginia.    April 24 Booth befriends three Confederate soldiers who help him cross the Rappahannock River to Port Royal and then guide him further southwest to the Garrett farm.
Union troops in Washington receive a report of a Booth sighting. They board a U.S. Navy tug and steam south, right past Booth’s hideout at the Garrett farm.    April 25 The 16th New York Calvary, realizing their error, turns around and surrounds the Garrett farm after midnight that night.                  April 26 When Booth refuses to surrender, troops set the barn on fire, and Boston Corbett shoots the assassin. Booth dies a few hours later, at sunrise.    April 26-27 Booth’s body is brought back to Washington, where it is autopsied, photographed, and buried in a secret grave.

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In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

Paperback    $13.95     Published by Random House

My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment. Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant’s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east-west trade: rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid.

A story of desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship, In the Company of the Courtesan paints a portrait of one of the world’s greatest cities at its most potent moment in history: It is a picture that remains vivid long after the final page.

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by Stephen Kinzer 

Paperback    $15.00   Published by Henry Holt

Regime change did not begin with the administration of George W. Bush, but has been an integral part of U.S. foreign policy for more than one hundred years. Starting with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and continuing through the Spanish-American War and the Cold War and into our own time, the United States has not hesitated to overthrow governments that stood in the way of its political and economic goals. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 is the latest, though perhaps not the last, example of the dangers inherent in these operations. In Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer tells the stories of the audacious politicians, spies, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers. He also shows that the U.S. government has often pursued these operations without understanding the countries involved; as a result, many of them have had disastrous long-term consequences. In a compelling and provocative history that takes readers to fourteen countries, including Cuba, Iran, South Vietnam, Chile, and Iraq, Kinzer surveys modern American history from a new and often surprising perspective.

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Averno: Poems

by Louise Gluck

Hardcover   $22.00 -10%   Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück’s eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. “Averno” is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What “Averno” provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence.

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McSweeney’s Issue 22

edited by Dave Eggers 

Hardcover   $24.00 -10%   Published by McSweeney’s

“McSweeney’s Issue 22″ is a three-part exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form. In section one, poets (yes — poets!) including Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C. D. Wright, and D. C. Berman initiate poet-chains, picking a poem of their own and one by another poet. The next poet will then do the same, and then again, and again, and so on. In section two, Fitzgerald (yes — F. Scott Fitzgerald!) provides a list of unused story premises first cataloged in “The Crack-Up”; his mission is completed by writers like Diane Williams and Nick Flynn. In section three, finally, the president of France’s (yes — France!) legendary Oulipians offers a rare glimpse into his group’s current experiments with linguistic constraint. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

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The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics

by C. S. Lewis 

Paperback   $24.95   Published by Harper Collins

Seven Spiritual Masterworks by C. S. Lewis!

This classic collection includes C. S. Lewis’s most important spiritual works:

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A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900

by Andre Roberts

Hardcover   $35.00 -10%    Published by Harper Collins

In 1900, where Churchill ended the fourth volume of his “History of the English-Speaking Peoples”, the United States had not yet emerged onto the world scene as a great power. Meanwhile, the British Empire was in decline but did not yet know it. Any number of other powers might have won primacy in the twentieth century and beyond, including Germany, Russia, possibly even France. Yet the coming century was to belong to the English-speaking peoples, who successively and successfully fought the Kaiser’s Germany, Axis aggression and Soviet Communism, and who are now struggling against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Andrew Roberts brilliantly reveals what made the English-speaking people the preeminent political culture since 1900, and how they have defended their primacy from the many assaults upon them. What connects those countries where the majority of the population speaks English as a first language—the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and Ireland—is far greater than what separates them, and the development of their history since 1900 has been a phenomenal success story.
Authoritative and engrossing, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900″ is an enthralling account of the century in which the political culture of one linguistic world-grouping comprehensively triumphed over all others. Roberts’s “History” proves especially invaluable as the United States today looks to other parts of the English-speaking world as its best, closest and most dependable allies.