Nonfiction Coming in August

Looking to learn something new? This month, we’re reading books about an influential concert promoter, America’s ongoing overdose crisis, how history can become distorted over time, and many more. These are the nonfiction books coming to the world in August. 

 

The engrossing, insightful, and personal musical odyssey of Peter Shapiro, perhaps the most notable independent concert promoter since Bill Graham. Peter Shapiro is the best known and most influential concert promoter of his generation. He owned the legendary Wetlands in Tribeca and has gone on to much bigger things, including Brooklyn Bowl (NYC, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Nashville), the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, producing U2 3D, and promoting the Grateful Dead’s fiftieth-anniversary tour (“Fare Thee Well”) featuring the Core Four and Trey Anastasio . . . and so much more.

 

 

Former WWE head writer Brian Gewirtz brings readers behind the scenes for an unprecedented look at the chaotic, surreal, unbelievable backstage world of the WWE. With untold stories from a career spanning over 15 years and featuring the biggest names and controversial moments in wrestling history, THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM is an honest, unflinching look on how an introverted life-long fan unexpectedly became one the most powerful men in all of professional wrestling.

 

A “deeply reported, deeply moving” (Patrick Radden Keefe) account of everyday heroes fighting on the front lines of the overdose crisis. A complex story of public health, big pharma, dark money, politics, race, and class that is by turns harrowing and heartening, infuriating and inspiring, Raising Lazarus is a must-read for all Americans.

 

 

Rich with scholarly detective work and personal reflection, Come to This Court and Cry is a fearlessly brave examination of how history can become distorted over time, how easily the innocent are forgotten, and how carelessly the guilty are sometimes reprieved. In 1965, five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, one of his Mossad abductors was sent back to South America to kill another fugitive Nazi, the so-called “butcher of Riga,” Latvian Herberts Cukurs. Cukurs was shot. On his corpse, the assassins left pages from the closing speech of the chief British prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

 

A former Fox News political editor reveals how news organizations have succumbed to the temptation of “rage revenue” through slanted coverage that drives political division and rewards outrageous conduct. In Broken News, Chris Stirewalt, celebrated as one of America’s sharpest political analysts in print and on television, employs his trademark wit and insight to give readers an inside look at these problems. He explains that these companies don’t reward bad journalism because they like it, but because it is easy and profitable.

 

The Cold War meets Mad Men in the form of Karel Koecher, a double agent whose shifting loyalties and over-the-top hedonism reverberated from New York to Moscow. Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes, and extraordinary firsthand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end.

 

A biography of the spectacular rise and fall of Eddie Antar, better known as “Crazy Eddie,” whose home electronics empire changed the world even as it turned out to be one of the biggest business scams of all time. In Retail Gangster, investigative journalist Gary Weiss takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most unbelievable business scam stories of all time, a story spanning continents and generations, reaffirming the old adage that the truth is often stranger than fiction.

 

Find your motivation, prioritize your ideals, and create a flexible work-life lifestyle—no matter how busy or successful you are—with Anti-Time Management. Inspired by great personal loss, Norton shares how he and his family live with no regrets and how attention prioritization and time creation are learnable skills despite hardships. Anti-Time Management will help you be present for the people, projects, plans and priorities that matter most. Like light through a prism, you can purposefully create asymmetrical results by making small, intentional decisions on one side of your life and work to create brilliant strobes of possibilities on the other.

 

 

A bold new history of modern conservatism that finds its origins in the populist right-wing politics of the 1990s. Ronald Reagan has long been lionized for building a conservative coalition sustained by an optimistic vision of American exceptionalism, small government, and free markets. But as historian Nicole Hemmer reveals, the Reagan coalition was short-lived; it fell apart as soon as its charismatic leader left office. 

 

A former U.S. senator joins a legal scholar to examine a hushed effort to radically change our Constitution, offering a warning and a way forward. Over the last two decades, a fringe plan to call a convention under the Constitution’s amendment mechanism—the nation’s first ever—has inched through statehouses. Delegates, like those in Philadelphia two centuries ago, would exercise nearly unlimited authority to draft changes to our fundamental law, potentially altering anything from voting and free speech rights to regulatory and foreign policy powers. Such a watershed moment would present great danger, and for some, great power.

 

Congressman David Cicilline offers his provocative takes on Republicans, Democrats, and the world of politics in the wake of Donald Trump. Beyond sounding an alarm, House on Fire identifies the key threat to our democracy—that the GOP has become a Trumpist authoritarian cult—and outlines how we fight back. A response that must include both citizen opposition and practical reforms, including an end to the Senate filibuster, discarding the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court, and requiring that justices adhere to a code of ethics.

 

One of the country’s most astute legal scholars explains how American political culture disempowers ordinary citizens and makes the case for a reinvigorated democracy. Americans across the political spectrum agree that our democracy is in crisis. We view our political opponents with disdain, if not terror, and an increasing number of us are willing to consider authoritarian alternatives. In Two Cheers for Politics, Jedediah Purdy argues that this heated political culture is a symptom not of too much democracy but too little. 

 

 

A fan’s search for the truth about American history, human nature, and whether Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh will keep his job. The Hot Seat is a chronicle of one of the wildest years in Michigan football history, but also a search for the truth about fandom, from the pages of history books to the wilderness of online forums. Is it embarrassing to care about what happens in a game? Why is Jim Harbaugh like that? Is it somehow Thomas Jefferson’s fault? This book explores all these questions and many more.

 

Discover the unlikely story of the Toledo Troopers, the winningest team in the National Women’s Football League, who won seven league championships in the 1970s—and gain full access to the players and key figures in the organization. Amid a national backdrop of the call to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the National Women’s Football League was founded as something of a gimmick. However, the league’s star team, the Toledo Troopers, emerged to challenge traditional gender roles and amass a win-loss record never before or since achieved in American football. The players were housewives, factory workers, hairdressers, former nuns, high school teachers, bartenders, mail carriers, pilots, and would-be drill sergeants. Black, white, Latina. Mothers and daughters and aunts and sisters. But most of all, they were athletes who had been denied the opportunity to play a game they were born to play.