"In late 2021, Diane Foley sat at a table across from her son's killer, Alexanda Kotey, a member of the ISIS group known as "The Beatles" who plead guilty to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of her son seven years before. Kotey was about to go serve life imprisonment and this was Diane's chance to talk to the man who had been involved with brutally taking her son's last breath. What would she say to his killer? What would he reveal to her? Might...

"Fannie Farmer, America’s most famous cooking teacher, discovers that precise measurements are a recipe for cooking success in this STEAM picture book that includes two of her classic recipes. When Fannie Farmer learned to cook in the late 1800s, recipes could be pretty silly. They might call for “a goodly amount of salt” or “a lump of butter” or “a suspicion of nutmeg.” Girls were supposed to use their “feminine instincts” in the...

"The first definitive exploration of the role of the twenty-first century First Lady, painting a comprehensive portrait of Jill Biden and the evolution of the First Lady's role from ceremonial figurehead to political operative-from a White House correspondent for The New York Times. Since the Clinton era, tectonic shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have at...

"The story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. "They're not going to catch us," Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. "We're on a mission from God." So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theaters on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local...

"A lyrical culinary journey that explores the hidden stories of Black Appalachians through powerful essays and forty comforting recipes from the Poet Laureate of Kentucky. Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother's presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; There were an abundance of ancestors stirring, measuring, and braising with her. These...

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly...

"As a founding member and vocalist in the award-winning pop-soul group The 5th Dimension, LaMonte McLemore enjoyed enormous critical and commercial acclaim in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But arguably just as impactful, if not more so, was his career as a photographer cementing Black women and models in American media and cultural history. McLemore freelanced for JET magazine for more than four decades, principally shooting for its "Beauty of the...

"Though it took some time to settle into his new life in Gravigna, Italy, following the death of his wife, Nico Doyle has figured a thing or two out. The locals have not only welcomed him, but are giving him rave reviews on his contributions to the menu at Sotto il Fico, and his budding relationship with Nelli is healing old wounds. When Nico receives a phone call late at night, he tries to ignore it. A phone call at that time could only mean trouble....