Great book recommendations for the Cool Dad and Cool Mom this Fall
This fall, we've curated a diverse range of books that cater to the tastes of Cool Dads and Cool Moms. From heartwarming family stories to captivating solo adventures, our selection promises engaging reads for both quality family time and your personal enjoyment.
December new releases
How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older
by Michael Greger
When Dr. Michael Greger, founder of NutritionFacts.org, dove into the top peer-reviewed anti-aging medical research, he realized that diet could regulate every one of the most promising strategies for combating the effects of aging. We don't need Big Pharma to keep us feeling young--we already have the tools. In How Not to Age, the internationally renowned physician and nutritionist breaks down the science of aging and chronic illness and explains how to help avoid the diseases most commonly encountered in our journeys through life.
Physicians have long treated aging as a malady, but getting older does not have to mean getting sicker. There are eleven pathways for aging in our bodies' cells and we can disrupt each of them. Processes like autophagy, the upcycling of unusable junk, can be boosted with spermidine, a compound found in tempeh, mushrooms, and wheat germ. Senescent "zombie" cells that spew inflammation and are linked to many age-related diseases may be cleared in part with quercetin-rich foods like onions, apples, and kale. And we can combat effects of aging without breaking the bank. Why spend a small fortune on vitamin C and nicotinamide facial serums when you can make your own for up to 2,000 times cheaper?
When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown
by Kenan Thompson
When I Was Your Age is a hilarious, heartwarming and surprising ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and luck, life, and learning from the school of hard knocks, from SNL's longest-serving actor, Kenan Thompson
Kenan Thompson is Saturday Night Live's longest-ever-serving cast member and a star of such pioneering sketches as "Black Jeopardy" and is hugely beloved thanks to a tidal wave of nostalgic fans who grew up on early 2000s classics All That, Good Burger, and Kenan & Kel on Nickelodeon.
He's also a dad (to two girls) in his mid-40s living in suburbia, and whose universal, relatable, family-friendly humor has created unbelievable appeal and engagement from fans from middle America to coastal elites. Becoming a dad sucked the cool right out of him -- and he's OK with that!
When I Was Your Age is packed with hilarious yet poignant essays that are aimed to offer any reader valuable advice on parenting, focusing on positivity, and having fun in life. Kids, new parents, fellow fathers, budding comics, and aunties who want to pinch his cheeks, can all learn from his biggest mistakes and most triumphant victories. There's something for everybody here!
Elvis and the Colonel: An Insider's Look at the Most Legendary Partnership in Show Business
by Greg McDonald - Marshall Terrill
Colonel Tom Parker, often reviled in his time, led the strategy from the earliest days of Elvis's career. Together, they built the most legendary partnership in show business. For the first time, Colonel Parker's story is told by an insider, Greg McDonald, who worked under Parker for years. Never-before-heard stories of Parker's collaboration with Elvis reveal the man behind the legend and the strategies that made Elvis a commercial groundbreaker.
Ingrained lore has it that Parker took advantage of "poor country boy" Elvis to sign the singer who became "The King".
Many of the practices Parker established are still deployed today by most major agencies. Parker's experience as a carny and an immigrant shaped his management style when he was at his peak, showing how he adapted big top practices to the big time. The heart of Elvis and the Colonel is the long, strong, warm and complex relationship between two iconic men.
Trash Talk: The Only Book about Destroying Your Rivals That Isn't Total Garbage
by Rafi Kohan
Whether in basketball, football, or MMA, athletes talk trash to each other--and sometimes to fans--like it's their job. And in some ways, it is: sports only matter if we decide to care about them. And insulting your opponent, or playing the heel, is probably the fastest route to making someone care. Talking smack is as old as the bible; it's perhaps the original sport.
But until now, there's never been a book about it.
In this lively, often hilarious history, Rafi Kohan interviews some of the world's top competitors--on the petty rivalries and mind games that fuel them. He talks to point guards and soccer strikers, cricketers and insult comedians, forming a theory along the way about the surprising and influential role that name-calling plays in our world.
Brilliantly original and wide-ranging, Trash Talk is a book for sports fans, culture mavens, or anyone looking to get an edge.
November new releases
Snoop Dogg Presents Goon with the Spoon
by Snoop Dogg - Stevens Stevens - Antonis Achilleos
Following the breakout success of his first cookbook, From Crook to Cook: Platinum Recipes from Tha Boss Dogg's Kitchen (more than 1 million copies sold), Snoop Dogg returns with this new collection of recipes in collaboration with his friend and iconic Bay Area rapper E-40.
Drawing inspiration from both rappers' musical catalogs, their favorite meals to cook and eat together, and E-40's Filipino food business, Lumpia, here are 65+ crowd-pleasing dishes that range from drinks to main courses to desserts. Seriously entertaining, this soulful cookbook is the follow-up fans are hungry for.
Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education
by Stephanie Land
When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir Maid, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, it was called "an eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor" (People). Later it was adapted into the hit Netflix series Maid, which was viewed by 67 million households and was Netflix's fourth most-watched show in 2021, garnering three Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Stephanie's escape out of poverty and abuse in search of a better life inspired millions.
Maid was a story about a housecleaner, but it was also a story about a woman with a dream. In Class, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn including a byzantine loan system, not having enough money for food, navigating the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn't understand the demands of attending college while under the poverty line--Land finds a way to survive once again, finally graduating in her mid-thirties.
My Name Is Barbra
by Barbra Streisand
Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. She is among the handful of EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) and has one of the greatest and most recognizable voices in the history of popular music. She has been nominated for a Grammy 46 times, and with Yentl she became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major motion picture. In My Name Is Barbra, she tells her own story about her life and extraordinary career, from growing up in Brooklyn to her first star-making appearances in New York nightclubs to her breakout performance in Funny Girl on stage and winning the Oscar for that performance on film. Then came a long string of successes in every medium in the years that followed. The book is, like Barbra herself, frank, funny, opinionated, and charming. She recounts her early struggles to become an actress, eventually turning to singing to earn a living; the recording of some of her acclaimed albums; the years of effort involved in making Yentl; her direction of The Prince of Tides; her friendships with figures ranging from Marlon Brando to Madeleine Albright; her political advocacy; and the fulfillment she's found in her marriage to James Brolin.
No entertainer's memoir has been more anticipated than Barbra Streisand's, and this engrossing and delightful book will be eagerly welcomed by her millions of fans.
World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
by Jeff Tweedy
What makes us fall in love with a song? What makes us want to write our own songs? Do songs help? Do songs help us live better lives? And do the lives we live help us write better songs?
After two New York Times bestsellers that cemented and expanded his legacy as one of America's best-loved performers and songwriters, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) and How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy is back with another disarming, beautiful, and inspirational book about why we listen to music, why we love songs, and how music can connect us to each other and to ourselves. Featuring fifty songs that have both changed Jeff's life and influenced his music--including songs by the Replacements, Mavis Staples, the Velvet Underground, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Dolly Parton, and Billie Eilish--as well as Jeff's "Rememories," dream-like short pieces that related key moments from Jeff's life, this book is a mix of the musical, the emotional, and the inspirational in the best possible way.
the Core of an Onion: Peeling the Rarest Common Food--Featuring More Than 100 Historical Recipes
by Mark Kurlansky
As Julia Child once said, "It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions."
Historically, she's been right-and not just in the kitchen. Flourishing in just about every climate and culture around the world, onions have provided the essential basis not only for sautés, stews, and sauces, but for medicines, metaphors, and folklore. Now they're Kurlansky's most flavorful infatuation yet as he sets out to explore how and why the crop reigns from Italy to India and everywhere in between.
Featuring historical images and his own pen-and-ink drawings, Kurlansky begins with the science and history of the only sulfuric acid-spewing plant, then digs through its twenty varieties and the cultures built around them. Entering the kitchen, Kurlansky celebrates the raw, roasted, creamed, marinated, and pickled. Including a recipe section featuring more than one hundred dishes from around the world, The Core of an Onion shares the secrets to celebrated Parisian chef Alain Senderens's onion soup eaten to cure late-night drunkenness; Hemingway's raw onion and peanut butter sandwich; and the Gibson, a debonair gin martini garnished with a pickled onion.
October NEW RELEASES
Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
by Arnold Schwarzenegger
The world's greatest bodybuilder. The world's highest-paid movie star. The leader of the world's sixth-largest economy. That these are the same person sounds like the setup to a joke, but this is no joke. This is Arnold Schwarzenegger. And this did not happen by accident.
Arnold's stratospheric success happened as part of a process. As the result of clear vision, big thinking, hard work, direct communication, resilient problem-solving, open-minded curiosity, and a commitment to giving back. All of it guided by the one lesson Arnold's father hammered into him above all: be useful. As Arnold conquered every realm he entered, he kept his father's adage close to his heart.
Just Eat: More Than 100 Easy and Delicious Recipes That Taste Just Like Home
by Jessie James Decker
Comfort means everything to Jessie James Decker. It's in the music she makes, the time she spends with her family, and most of all, the food she cooks. In her bestselling cookbook, Just Feed Me, Jessie James Decker brought readers into her kitchen for an exclusive taste of her homey, family-friendly recipes. Now, in Just Eat, Jessie brings comfort food to the table, inviting everyone back over for dinner at the Decker's with her most personal and mouthwatering dishes yet.
With over 100 new recipes from Jessie's comfort food staples, Just Eat is a delicious selection of the classic food that always leaves her family calling for seconds. As a home cook, Jessie knows that cooking yummy food is often easier said than done--especially when the kids are hungry. That's why Just Eat offers easy-to-follow recipes for delicious, family-friendly appetizers, meals, and desserts-- from Louisiana beignets to Eric's Chicken Chili to Fried Chicken Sandwiches. Taking inspiration from her garden and her travels to the Mediterranean coast, Jessie incorporates the cuisine of Italy and Greece into her repertoire, bringing fresh, homegrown ingredients center stage in her take on classic recipes.
The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life
by Clare Carlisle
In her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot--an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes--writer, philosopher, and married father of three. After "eloping" to Berlin in 1854, they lived together for twenty-four years: Eliot asked people to call her "Mrs Lewes" and dedicated each novel to her "Husband." Though they could not legally marry, she felt herself initiated into the "great experience" of marriage--"this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength." The relationship scandalized her contemporaries yet she grew immeasurably within it. Living at once inside and outside marriage, Eliot could experience this form of life--so familiar yet also so perplexing--from both sides.
In The Marriage Question, Clare Carlisle reveals Eliot to be not only a great artist but also a brilliant philosopher who probes the tensions and complexities of a shared life. Through the immense ambition and dark marriage plots of her novels, we see Eliot wrestling--in art and in life--with themes of desire and sacrifice, motherhood and creativity, trust and disillusion, destiny and chance. Carlisle's searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change, and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.
Milk Street Simple
by Christopher Kimball
Milk Street has spent years learning from cooks all around the world and applying those lessons to weeknight cooking here at home. This book takes the best of those great culinary ideas and pares them back to their most basic, essential elements. The result is a set of recipes that are genius in their simplicity.
Each of these 200 recipes works with just a handful of ingredients and short active cooking time; these dishes are done when you need them, or hands-off so you can let them cook while you do something else. The keys are high-impact ingredients, transformative techniques, powerful flavor combinations, and layers of texture. Milk Street Simple recipes help turn a straightforward bowl of pasta or a head of roasted cauliflower into a delightful meal, with no fuss and recipes that are endlessly flexible.
Brilliant Bites: 75 Amazing Small Bites for Any Occasion
by Maegan Brown
Maegan Brown (aka The BakerMama), the best-selling author of Beautiful Boards, continues her quest to share her tips for effortless, stress-free, and foolproof entertaining with 75 small bites with big flavor for easy grazing.
In Brilliant Bites, The BakerMama has created and curated appetizers that are visually exciting and deliciously enticing for family-friendly entertaining, parties and special occasions, breakfast and brunch, snacks and meals, dessert, and her specialty--holiday-themed bites.
Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook: A Cookbook
by Sohla El-Waylly - Samin Nosrat
A practical, information-packed, and transformative guide to becoming a better cook and conquering the kitchen, Start Here is a must-have master class in leveling up your cooking.
Across a dozen technique-themed chapters--from "Temperature Management 101" and "Break it Down & Get Saucy" to "Go to Brown Town," "All About Butter," and "Getting to Know Dough"--Sohla El-Waylly explains the hows and whys of cooking, introducing the fundamental skills that you need to become a more intuitive, inventive cook.