For author Renee Carter Tench, April 17, 2008, was the first day of the rest of her life. It was the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Tench spent more and more time reflecting on her past experiences and examining her life. In Memoirs of a Bootleggers Daughter, she tries to understand the reason and purpose behind all of the chaos in growing up the child of alcoholic parents. The lone survivor of the Carter family who lived at the end of the dirt road in Hickory, North Carolina, Tench shares the stories of her tumultuous childhood. She tells how, by the grace of God and taking advantage of the opportunities He provided, she broke the cycle of alcoholism in her family, a cycle that began even before her grandfather and father became bootleggers. She often felt looked down on because of the spectacle she and her family often made. Memoirs of a Bootleggers Daughter narrates how Tench started out at the end of one dirt road and ended up at the end of another and the wild journey in between, a journey she would be happy to take again.

South Dakota has always had an intermittent relationship with prohibition. Constantly changing legislation kept citizens, saloonkeepers, bootleggers and other scofflaws on tenterhooks, wondering what might come next. The scandalous indiscretions of the lethal Verne Miller and the contributions of "agents of change" like Senators Norbeck and Senn kept ne'er-do-wells on edge. In 1927, the double murder of prohibition officers near Redfield dominated headlines. From the Black Hills stills of Bert Miller to the Sioux Falls moonshine outfit buried under Lon Vaught's chicken house, uncork these oft-overlooked and tumultuous eighteen years in state history. In the first book of its kind, award-winning journalist Chuck Cecil delivers the boisterous details of an intoxicating era.

A startling rise and retreat In the 1920s, a reborn Ku Klux Klan slithered into South Dakota. Bold at times, the group intimidated citizens in every county. KKK anti-Catholicism sentiment resulted in the murder of Father Arthur Belknap of Lead. Idealized Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mount Rushmore, operated as a white supremacist and KKK leader. In 1925, animosity between the KKK and Fort Meade soldiers came to a clash one night in Sturgis. The clatter of two borrowed .30 caliber Browning cooled machine guns split the air over the heads of a Klan gathering across the valley. Author Arley Fadness follows the Klan's trail throughout the Rushmore state.

My mother, Ruth Blumenfeld, née Korn, was born on January 15, 1915; and died on August 18, 2015, aged one hundred years, seven months, and three days. My father, Max David Blumenfeld, was born on February 25, 1911 and died on December 26, 1994, about two months shy of his eighty-fourth birthday... I love my parents so much and I don’t want them to be forgotten, which is why I am writing this book. And I am writing this memoir for myself as much as for anyone else, because in doing so I bring my parents back to life in my memory. I do the same when it comes to my grandparents and aunts and uncles. I write also for my family members, who may wish to know more about our background. And I am writing for the general public, who may find this memoir of interest as being the embodiment in specific people of the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States... When my father was born, World War One was several years away, and when my mother was born, World War One was raging. They lived through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War Two, and the subsequent wars... They lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The technological changes in their lifetime were the greatest in human history, from the evolution and ubiquity of the telephone, and of electricity and electric lighting, to airplane travel and the proliferation of the automobile, the invention and spread of radio and television, and the invention of such conveniences as frozen orange juice, the electric clothes drier, and the electric dishwasher, and, later on, of the internet, the computer and the smartphone, and of so much more... The world was a better place because Mom and Dad were in it. They did much political and social good in their time because they cared, and they wanted to help create a kinder, better, more loving world for everyone, a world where the ideals of equality and justice for all would at least begin to be fulfilled. When people like them disappear from the earth, the world is a poorer place.

As a fitting epilogue to a life intimately linked to Washington, D.C., Pulitzer Prize winner Katharine Graham, the woman who transformed The Washington Post into a paper of record, left behind this lovingly collected anthology of writings about the city she knew and loved, a moving tribute to the nation’s capital. To Russell Banks, it is a place where “no one is in charge and no one, therefore, can be held responsible for the mess.” To John Dos Passos, it is “essentially a town of lonely people.” Whatever your impressions of Washington, D.C., you will likely find them challenged here. Experience Christmas with the Roosevelts, as seen through the eyes of a White House housekeeper. Learn why David McCullough is happy to declare “I love Washington,” while The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn wonders, “Why Do They Hate Washington?” Glimpse David Brinkley’s depiction of the capital during World War II, then experience Henry Kissinger’s thoughts on “Peace at Last,” post-Vietnam. Written by a who’s who of journalists, historians, First Ladies, politicians, and more, these varied works offer a wonderful overview of Katharine Graham’s beloved city.

“A marvelous new biography.” -The New York Times On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashing across four lanes of traffic, then scurrying through a narrow underpass as cars whizzed by within inches. The man was William “Holly” Whyte, a pioneer of people-centered urban design. Decades before this perilous trek to a meeting in the suburbs, he had urged planners to look beyond their desks and drawings: “You have to get out and walk.” American Urbanist shares the life and wisdom of a man whose advocacy reshaped many of the places we know and love today—from New York’s bustling Bryant Park to preserved forests and farmlands around the country. Holly’s experiences as a WWII intelligence officer and leader of the genre-defining reporters at Fortune Magazine in the 1950s shaped his razor-sharp assessments of how the world actually worked—not how it was assumed to work. His 1956 bestseller, The Organization Man, catapulted the dangers of “groupthink” and conformity into the national consciousness. Over his five decades of research and writing, Holly’s wide-ranging work changed how people thought about careers and companies, cities and suburbs, urban planning, open space preservation, and more. He was part of the rising environmental movement, helped spur change at the planning office of New York City, and narrated two films about urban life, in addition to writing six books. No matter the topic, Holly advocated for the decisionmakers to be people, not just experts. “We need the kind of curiosity that blows the lid off everything,” Holly once said. His life offers encouragement to be thoughtful and bold in asking questions and making space for differing viewpoints. This revealing biography offers a rare glimpse into the mind of an iconoclast whose healthy skepticism of the status quo can help guide our efforts to create the kinds of places we want to live in today.

In rural Georgia of the 1950s, Haley, a bootleggers daughter, begins her journey. Raised by two uneducated parents and working in cotton fields, Haley endures abuse, alcoholism, ridicule, and most glaringly, an environment where little love is ever shown. She is introduced to a former slave, Aunt Matilda, a woman with no children of her own, who raises Haley to love the Lord in spite of their present circumstances. In the 1960s, as a seventeen-year-old with two children out of wedlock, Haley attempts to escape the harsh realities of her past, only to have them follow her to New Hampshire. Drinking and partying to ease the pain becomes a way of life for her. Haley is finally forced to begin facing her inner demons and perceiving the call of God on her life. Witness the extraordinary journey of the girl from Rat Row in this harrowing tale of overcoming the worst of ones past to get to the best of ones future.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • Twenty-eight “heart-stopping [and] utterly beautiful” (Newsday) stories that locate moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro “Her stories are like few others. One must go back to Tolstoy and Chekhov . . . for comparable largeness.”—John Updike, The New York Times Book Review A traveling salesperson during the Depression takes his children with him on an impromptu visit to a former girlfriend. A poor girl steels herself to marry a rich fiancé she can’t quite manage to love. An abandoned woman tries to choose between opposing pleasures of seduction and solitude. To read these stories is to succumb to the spell of a true narrative sorcerer, a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.