"As an emergency room physician, Dr. Travis Stork regularly sees the effects that poor lifestyle choices—the same decisions we face every day about what to eat and how active to be—have on our bodies over time. But just a few small tweaks to your daily habits can help you live longer and feel stronger. You can also conquer many chronic conditions—such as some of the biggest killers in America: heart disease, type II diabetes, and some cancers—before they happen. … Dr. Stork demystifies nutrition, exposes food fads, explains why you should be ruthlessly skeptical of health advice, and tells you which numbers you should track to keep yourself on the road to optimal wellness."

"The award-winning country music artist—songwriter and singer ("Single White Female," "Shut Up and Drive," and others)—writes movingly and candidly about her life, her career, her extraordinary journey. … She writes about the record contracts and bus tours; the concerts and TV videos; the critical acclaim and industry awards; the #1 hits on the Billboard charts; the fans; the friendships and the working collaborations with Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, and others. We see the vortex of success taking its toll on her life, and then her finding a new voice in her music, with music flowing naturally from her that never came so easily."

"In Francine Howard's stunning debut, Page from a Tennessee Journal, rural Tennessee of 1913 remains an unforgiving place for two couples—one black, the other white—who stumble against the rigid boundaries separating their worlds. When white farmer Alexander McNaughton falters into forbidden love with Annalaura Welles he discovers that he has much more to fear than the wrath of her returning gun-toting husband. Alexander's wife—flinty and pragmatic Eula Mae—wages her own battle against the stoicism demanded of white women of her time and social standing. Former sharecropper John Welles, flush with cash from his year's sojourn working the poker tables in 'the second best colored whorehouse in all of Nashville,' wrestles with his devils as he struggles to assign blame for his wife's relationship with a white man. The convergence of the lives and choices of these fascinating characters—made from fear, pride, determination, spite, nobility and revenge—leads to a heart-pounding and heartbreaking climax that feels at once original, audacious and inevitable."

Gratz builds this novel upon a clever enough conceit—nine stories (or innings), each following the successive generations in a single family, linked by baseball and Brooklyn—and executes it with polish and precision. In the opening stories, there is something Scorsese-like (albeit with the focus on players, not gangsters) in Gratz's treatment of early New York: a fleet-footed German immigrant helps Alexander Cartwright (credited with creating modern baseball) during a massive 1845 factory fire; a young boy meets his hero, the great King Kelly, who by age thirty is a washed-up alcoholic scraping by as a vaudeville act. … [T]aken together they present a sweeping diaspora of Americana, tracking the changes in a family through the generations, in society at large for more than a century and a half, and, not least, in that quintessential American pastime."