As a chronicle of female adolescence with all its longings, fantasies, cruelties, and fears, Karr's memoir goes darker and deeper than any book in which the protagonist doesn't end up dead. She turns a savage eye on her own hypocrisies and failings, and we like her all the more for them. We even end up fond of Leechfield, easily the toughest, smelliest, nastiest little burg ever to appear between the covers of a book-"a town too ugly not to love," her father called it in The Liar's Club. Growing up in such a place is necessarily about getting the hell out, but it's also about inventing a new identity with which to make your escape. That's the blessing Karr's wise friend Meredith bestows after a particularly harrowing (and harrowingly funny) acid trip: "I see big adventures for Mary. Big adventures, long roads, great oceans: same self. " Cherry is the story of how Karr begins to acquire that self, however fumblingly-a big adventure for Mary, as it is for all of us, and one we never finish as long as we live. Perhaps that's the book's greatest pleasure of all: it hints there's more to come. -Mary Park From Mary Karr comes this gorgeously written, often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr assembles a self from the smokiest beginnings, delivering a long- awaited sequel that is both "bawdy and wise" (San Francisco Chronicle).

It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.

For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics-he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement-and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world. Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught. ") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D. C. , in 1860. There he might have remained-bogged down in "the same rude colony. camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"-had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process-a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience. He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest. " There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism. " (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball. ) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. -James Marcus 'I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams,' said Gore Vidal. 'He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors. 'His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors-great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams-Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War. Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author&'s death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams is a brilliant, idiosyncratic blend of autobiography and history that charts the great transformation in American life during the so-called Gilded Age. With an introduction by renowned historian Edmund Morris. A story of education - seventy years of it - the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of the universe has never been stated in dollars. Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

He interweaves anecdotes from his own life with excerpts from speeches and interviews he’s given and with evocative photos taken by his son Matthew. Reeve teaches us that for able-bodied people, paralysis is a choice—a choice to live with self-doubt and a fear of taking risks—and that it is not an acceptable one. Reeve knows from experience that the work of conquering inner space is hard and that it requires some suffering—after all, nothing worth having is easy to get. He asks challenging questions about why it seems so difficult—if not impossible—for us to work together as a society. He steers the reader gently, offering his reflections and guidance but not the pat answers that often characterize inspirational works. Published on the eve of both his fiftieth birthday and the seventh anniversary of his spinal cord injury, Christopher Reeve’s Nothing Is Impossible reminds us that life is not to be taken for granted but to be lived fully with zeal, curiosity, and gratitude. That is a powerful message in itself, but it is the messenger who gives it its full resonance. From the Hardcover edition. "So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. If we can conquer outer space, we can conquer inner space, too. " Christopher Reeve has mastered the art of turning the impossible into the inevitable. In Nothing Is Impossible, the author of the bestselling autobiography Still Me shows that we are all capable of overcoming seemingly insurmountable hardships. He interweaves anecdotes from his own life with excerpts from speeches and interviews he's given and with evocative photos taken by his son Matthew. Reeve teaches us that for able-bodied people, paralysis is a choice - a choice to live with self-doubt and a fear of taking risks - and that it is not an acceptable one. Reeve knows from experience that the work of conquering inner space is hard and that it requires some suffering - after all, nothing worth having is easy to get. He asks challenging questions about why it seems so difficult - if not impossible - for us to work together as a society. He steers the reader gently, offering his reflections and guidance but not the pat answers that often characterize inspirational works. Published on the eve of both his fiftieth birthday and the seventh anniversary of his spinal cord injury, Christopher Reeve's Nothing Is Impossible reminds us that life is not to be taken for granted but to be lived fully with zeal, curiosity, and gratitude. That is a powerful message in itself, but it is the messenger who gives it its full resonance.