TOP 5 NONFICTION:
HARDCOVER:
1. THINGS THAT MATTER, by Charles Krauthammer
2. KILLING JESUS, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard
3. GEORGE WASHINGTON'S SECRET SIX, by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger
4. DAVID AND GOLIATH, by Malcolm Gladwell
5. THE BULLY PULPIT, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
SPOTLIGHT:
THE DEATH OF SANTINI
Pat Conroy
In this powerful and intimate memoir, the beloved bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini, find some common ground at long last.
Pat Conroy's father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son's life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, "I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for 'hate.'" As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father's behavior took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg. She was Pat's lifeline to a better world-that of books and culture. But eventually, despite repeated confrontations with his father, Pat managed to claw his way toward a life he could have only imagined as a child.
Pat's great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with the exploration of his family history. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Pat much acclaim, the rift it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family. But as Pat tenderly chronicles here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years of Don Conroy's life, he and his son reached a rapprochement of sorts. Quite unexpectedly, the Santini who had freely doled out physical abuse to his wife and children refocused his ire on those who had turned on Pat over the years. He defended his son's honor.
The Death of Santini is at once a heart-wrenching account of personal and family struggle and a poignant lesson in how the ties of blood can both strangle and offer succor. It is an act of reckoning, an exorcism of demons, but one whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, lending significance to one of the most-often quoted lines from Pat's bestselling novel The Prince of Tides: "In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.”
PAPERBACK:
1. LONE SURVIVOR, by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson
2. LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, by Nelson Mandela
3. PROOF OF HEAVEN, by Eben Alexander
4. OUTLIERS, by Malcolm Gladwell
5. ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, by Piper Kerman
SPOTLIGHT:
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET
Jordan Belfort
Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids waiting at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called . . .
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET
In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess that no one could invent.
Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits—for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.
From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down . . .
Praise for The Wolf of Wall Street
“Raw and frequently hilarious.”—The New York Times
“A rollicking tale of [Jordan Belfort’s] rise to riches as head of the infamous boiler room Stratton Oakmont . . . proof that there are indeed second acts in American lives.”—Forbes
“A cross between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Scorsese’sGoodFellas . . . Belfort has the Midas touch.”—The Sunday Times(London)
E-BOOK:
1. LONE SURVIVOR, by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson
2. TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, by Solomon Northup
3. KILLING JESUS, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard
4. DAVID AND GOLIATH, by Malcolm Gladwell
5. LONG WALK TO FREEDOM, by Nelson Mandela
SPOTLIGHT:
WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin's touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. She re-creates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans.
We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin's early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers' leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.
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