The Kennedy Men
by Laurence Leamer

Perennial / paperback
original price: $17.95
our price: $8.99

"Laurence Leamer has the virtue of a lucid, compelling narrative style, a feeling for history, and a wonderful eye for the telling detail. In this companion to his vivid portrait of the lives of the Kennedy women, he sees the whole tapestry of the Kennedy men with their magnificent obsessions, and at the start of a new century he reproduces the Kennedy family saga with a mix of compassion, accuracy, intelligence, and great human insight; unputdownable!" Nigel Hamilton, author of JFK: Reckless Youth "Laurence Leamer is a great writer and storyteller, but he is also a careful, balanced, and evenhanded historian. He spent a significant amount of time at the Kennedy Library researching primary sources. For example, in his account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he actually listened to the ExComm tapes rather than depend on published transcripts. This is an honest account of a remarkable, perhaps unique, American political family whose influence will undoubtedly continue well into the twenty-first century." Dr. Sheldon M. Stern, historian

Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism, 1959-1975
by Library of America

Library of America / paperback
original price: $17.95
our price: $6.99

In Reporting Vietnam the work of over 50 remarkable writers captures firsthand the bravery, cruelty, suffering, and sorrow of a tragic conflict. Following events from the first American fatalities in 1959, through the 1968 Tet Offensive, to the fall of Saigon in 1975, and gathering writers as disparate as David Halberstam and Hunter S. Thompson, Malcolm W. Browne and Michael Herr, Tom Wolfe and Gloria Emerson, this unique collection records the shifting course of the war, its impact on a fractured America, and the changing texture of American journalism.

Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams
Lynne Withey

Touchstone Books
original price: $25.00
our price: $7.99

This is the life of Abigail Adams, wife of patriot John Adams, who became the most influential woman in evolutionary America. Rich with excerpts from her personal letters, Dearest Friend captures the public and private sides of this fascinating woman, who was both an advocate of slave emancipation and a burgeoning feminist.

A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and ...
edited with an introduction by Arthur Krystal

Free Press/hardcover
original price: $26.00
our price: $8.99

In 1951, Jacques Barzun, W. H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling joined together to form the editorial board of the Readers' Subscription Book Club. Thus began a venture unique in the annals of American culture. Never before or since have three such eminent intellectuals collaborated to bring books to the attention of the general public.

Now, a half century later, A Company of Readers tells the story of this extraordinary partnership and presents for the first time a selection of essays from the publications of the Readers' Subscription Book Club and its successor, the Mid-Century Book Society.

As they composed their comments to club members, these distinguished editors freely shared with each other their notes and drafts. The result is criticism of the highest order: smart, humane, learned -- in short, stuff that makes for damn good reading. And because these pieces were written for the general public by men who knew that books still mattered, perhaps no other collection of essays gives so natural and vivid a picture of the cultural landscape at midcentury.

Together, Auden, Barzun, and Trilling would plunge into a pile of books and pick out what they liked, what they thought would instruct and delight. What they chose may surprise you. Here is Auden on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, Barzun on Virginia Woolf's Writer's Diary, and Trilling on Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Each book, whether weighty or light, summoned from the editors a spirited appraisal, in language that welcomed any kind of reader.

The Mid-Century club disbanded in 1963, but its legacy lives on in these pages. A Company of Readers is essential to admirers of this illustrious trio, and it offers a window on an America in which books took center stage.

E=mc2: a Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
by David Bodanis

Berkley / paperback
original price: $14.00
our price: $6.99

Bodanis writes the "biography" of one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history, and through his skill as a writer and teacher, he turns a seemingly impenetrable theory into a dramatic and accessible human achievement.

Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are
by Joseph LeDoux

Penguin / paperback
original price: $16.00
our price: $7.99

Following up his 1996 The Emotional Brain, the world-renowned brain expert presents a groundbreaking work that tells a more profound story: how the little spaces between the neurons--the brain's synapses--are the channels through which we think, feel, imagine, act, and remember.