![Fire and Brimstone]()
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The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Revenant — basis for the award-winning motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio — tells the remarkable story of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history.
A half-hour before midnight on June 8, 1917, a fire broke out in the North Butte Mining Company’s Granite Mountain shaft. Sparked more than two thousand feet below ground, the fire spewed flames, smoke, and poisonous gas through a labyrinth of underground tunnels. Within an hour, more than four hundred men would be locked in a battle to survive. Within three days, one hundred and sixty-four of them would be dead.
Fire and Brimstone recounts the remarkable stories of both the men below ground and their families above, focusing on two groups of miners who made the incredible decision to entomb themselves to escape the gas. While the disaster is compelling in its own right, Fire and Brimstone also tells a far broader story striking in its contemporary relevance. Butte, Montana, on the eve of the North Butte disaster, was a volatile jumble of antiwar protest, an abusive corporate master, seething labor unrest, divisive ethnic tension, and radicalism both left and right. It was a powder keg lacking only a spark, and the mine fire would ignite strikes, murder, ethnic and political witch hunts, occupation by federal troops, and ultimately a battle over presidential power.
![Game Six]()
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Boston, Tuesday, October 21, 1975. The Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds have endured an excruciating three-day rain delay. Tonight, at last, they will play Game Six of the World Series. Leading three games to two, Cincinnati hopes to win it all; Boston is desperate to stay alive. But for all the anticipation, nobody could have predicted what a classic it would turn out to be: an extra-innings thriller, created by one of the Big Red Machine’s patented comebacks and the Red Sox’s improbable late-inning rally; clutch hitting, heart-stopping defensive plays, and more twists and turns than a Grand Prix circuit, climaxed by one of the most famous home runs in baseball history that ended it in the twelfth. Here are all the inside stories of some of that era’s biggest names in sports: Johnny Bench, Luis Tiant, Sparky Anderson, Pete Rose, Carl Yastrzemski–eight Hall of Famers in all–as well as sportscasters and network execs, cameramen, umpires, groundskeepers, politicians, and fans who gathered in Fenway that extraordinary night.
Game Six is an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at what is considered by many to be the greatest baseball game ever played–remarkable also because it was about so much more than just balls and strikes. This World Series marked the end of an era; baseball’s reserve clause was about to be struck down, giving way to the birth of free agency, a watershed moment that changed American sports forever. In bestselling author Mark Frost’s talented hands, the historical significance of Game Six becomes every bit as engrossing as its compelling human drama.
![Hell Is Other Parents]()
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I read No Exit in my early twenties, and I remember thinking hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape?Then I became a parent. From Deborah Copaken Kogan, the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Shutterbabe, comes this edgy, insightful, and sidesplitting memoir about surviving in the trenches of modern parenting. Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray with a dash of Erma-Bombeck-on-a-Vespa: wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales, in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven linked pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke while working full-time and raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world. In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a foul-mouthed teen mother and her partying posse. In another, Kogan manages to crawl her way to her own emergency appendectomy, which inconveniently strikes the same week her infant’s babysitter is away on vacation, her adolescents are off from school, her New York Times editor needs his edit, and the whole family catches the flu. And in the book’s capper essay, she drives twelve hours, solo, with a screaming toddler in a rent-a-car in a futile effort to catch a glimpse of her eldest child in his summer camp play. Yes, Shutterbabe is all grown up and slightly worse for the wear, but her clear-eyed vision while under fire has remained intact: You’ve never read funnier war stories.
![Kidding]()
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Kidding is the new adulting.
Consider this your permission slip to relax, laugh, and finally find happiness. At once hilarious, irreverent, and downright inspiring, Kidding shows you how to connect with your inner child to make your mundane, complicated adult life much simpler (and happier). It’s a book about using your imagination and creativity to find joy, and about being happier by being who you are-which is to say, by being a big kid at heart.
Author Laura Jane Williams argues that you can be an adult but still embrace childlike (not childish) tendencies: you can own your own home and still want to build a pillow fort when the mood strikes; you can pay your bills on time and still snuggle something soft against your face because you’re sad; you can run a business and still take time to play. Divided into 40 short lessons, it’s an accessible, fun introduction to the self-help world that anyone can stomach.
Laura’s experience as a nanny to three young, precocious children has transformed her view on life, and in this book she passes along the lessons she’s learned from them. Because kids live in the present. They lose themselves in what they love, they show off, and they like themselves. Kids are curious by default, and they don’t have limits because they haven’t learned they exist yet. Kids do whatever the f*ck they want, precisely because they want to. To put it simply, kids have the answers, man.
![Living Downstream]()
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Sandra Steingraber, biologist, poet, and survivor of cancer in her twenties, brings all three perspectives to bear on the most important health and human rights issue of our time: the growing body of evidence linking cancer to environmental contaminations. Her scrupulously researched scientific analysis ranges from the alarming worldwide patterns of cancer incidence to the sabotage wrought by cancer-promoting substances on the intricate workings of human cells. In a gripping personal narrative, she travels from hospital waiting rooms to hazardous waste sites and from farmhouse kitchens to incinerator hearings, bringing to life stories of communities in her hometown and around the country as they confront decades of industrial and agricultural recklessness. Living Downstream is the first book to bring together toxics-release data — now finally made available through under the right-to-know laws — and newly released cancer registry data. Sandra Steingraber is also the first to trace with such compelling precision the entire web of connections between our bodies and the ecological world in which we eat, drink, breathe, and work. Her book strikes a hopeful note throughout, for, while we can do little to alter our genetic inheritance, we can do a great deal to eliminate the environmental contributions to cancer, and she shows us where to begin. Living Downstream is for all readers who care about the health of their families and future generations. Sandra Steingraber’s brave, clear, and careful voice is certain to break the paralyzing silence on this subject that persists more than three decades after Rachel Carson’s great early warning.
