New December Book Releases

since 2010

New December Releases

Why Privacy Matters by Neil Richards

Everywhere we look, companies and governments are spying on us--seeking information about us and everyone we know. Ad networks monitor our web-surfing to send us more relevant ads. The NSA screens our communications for signs of radicalism. Schools track students' emails to stop school shootings. Cameras guard every street corner and traffic light, and drones fly in our skies. Databases of human information are assembled for purposes of training artificial intelligence programs designed to predict everything from traffic patterns to the location of undocumented migrants. We're even tracking ourselves, using personal electronics like Apple watches, Fitbits, and other gadgets that have made the quantified self a realistic possibility. As Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg once put it, the Age of Privacy is over. But Zuckerberg and others who say privacy is dead are wrong. In Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards explains that privacy isn't dead, but rather up for grabs.

The Women I Love: A Novel

by Francesco Pacifico, Elizabeth Harris

Marcello, an editor and poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he's writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains. So Marcello cannot write plainly about love. Instead, he tries to write into the complexities of his many relationships: Eleonora, the junior editor, his former protege� and sometime lover; Barbara, his claustrophobic girlfriend; his estranged gay sister; his elegant mother.

The Sleep Fix: Practical, Proven, and Surprising Solutions for Insomnia, Snoring, Shift Work, and More by Diane Macedo

Roughly thirty percent of the population is estimated to be living with insomnia, while many more suffer from other sleep disorders. ABC anchor/correspondent Diane Macedo—a former insomniac herself—understands the struggle. Now, in The Sleep Fix, Macedo presents perspective-shifting research and easy-toimplement solutions to help millions of people finally get the shut-eye they need. Macedo's mission is crucial to our health and well-being. Everything from our heart health to our mental acuity to our blood pressure is influenced by how much—or little—we sleep. As an early morning reporter and an overnight news anchor, Macedo learned this the hard way, struggling for years to get the sleep she so desperately needed, and watching her health deteriorate along the way. But Macedo found the more she embraced typical sleep tips, the worse she slept. So she decided to attack the problem from the ground up, interviewing sleep experts from all over the world to get to the bottom of what really keeps us from sleeping—and the various ways to fix it.

Mothe A Killer by Design: Murderers,

Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind by Ann Wolbert Burgess, Steven Constantine

Lurking beneath the progressive activism and sex positivity in the 1970-80s, a dark undercurrent of violence rippled across the American landscape. With reported cases of sexual assault and homicide on the rise, the FBI created a specialized team— the “Mindhunters” better known as the Behavioral Science Unit—to track down the country's most dangerous criminals. And yet narrowing down a seemingly infinite list of potential suspects seemed daunting at best and impossible at worst— until Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess stepped on the scene. In A Killer By Design, Burgess reveals how her pioneering research on sexual assault and trauma caught the attention of the FBI, and steered her right into the middle of a chilling serial murder investigation in Nebraska.

Agent Sniper: The Cold War Superagent and the Ruthless Head of the CIA by Tim Tate

Michal Goleniewski, cover name Sniper, was one of the most important spies of the early Cold War. For almost three years, as a Lieutenant Colonel at the top of Poland’s espionage service, he smuggled thousands of top-secret Soviet bloc intelligence and military documents, as well as 160 rolls of microfilm, from behind the Iron Curtain. Then, in January 1961, he abandoned his wife and children to make a dramatic defection across divided Berlin with his East German mistress to the safety of American territory. There, he exposed more than 1,600 Soviet bloc agents operating undercover in the West—more than any single spy in history. The CIA called Goleniewski “one of the West’s most valuable counterintelligence sources,” but in late 1963, he was abandoned by the US government because of a split inside the agency, and over questions about his mental stability and his trustworthiness. Goleniewski bears some of the blame for his troubled legacy: He made baseless assertions about his record, notably that he was the first to expose Kim Philby. He also bizarrely claimed to be Tsarevich Aleksei Romanoff, heir to the Russian Throne who had miraculously survived the 1918 massacre of his family.

The Death of My Father the Pope:

A Memoir by Obed Silva

Weaving between the preparations for his father's funeral and memories of life on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Obed Silva chronicles his father's lifelong battle with alcoholism and the havoc it wreaked on his family. Silva and his mother had come north across the border to escape his father's violent, drunken rages. His father had followed and danced dangerously in and out of the family's life until he was arrested and deported back to Mexico, where he drank himself to death, one Carta Blanca at a time, at the age of forty-eight. Told with a wry cynicism, a profane, profound anger, an antic, brutally honest voice, and a hard-won classical frame of reference, Silva channels the heartbreak of mourning while wrestling with the resentment and frustration caused by addiction. The Death of My Father the Pope is a fluid and dynamic combination of memoir and an examination of the power of language--and the introduction of a unique and powerful literary voice.

Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

by Charlie Warzel, Anne Helen Petersen

A future-looking, game-changing book from two leading culture reporters about the radical and transformational potential of working from home, offering a path toward a new kind of work-life balance that can improve our lives and strengthen our communities If you think you've been working from home during the pandemic, Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen are here to tell you otherwise. What we've been doing is something else entirely, a jury-rigged compromise made under the duress of a national crisis that's satisfactory for neither the worker nor the employer. For Warzel and Petersen, the past year has revealed that there may be another path forward for work, one that doesn't involve hellish daily commutes and the demands of jam-packed work schedules that no longer make sense.

The Churchill Sisters: The Extraordinary

Lives of Winston and Clementine's Daughters by Rachel Trethewey

Bright, attractive and well-connected, in any other family the Churchill girls – Diana, Sarah, Marigold and Mary – would have shone. But they were not in another family, they were Churchills, and neither they nor anyone else could ever forget it. From their father – ‘the greatest Englishman’ – to their brother, golden boy Randolph, to their eccentric and exciting cousins, the Mitford Girls, they were surrounded by a clan of largerthan-life characters which often saw them overlooked. While Marigold died too young to achieve her potential, the other daughters lived lives full of passion, drama and tragedy. Diana, intense and diffident; Sarah, glamorous and stubborn; Mary, dependable yet determined – each so different but each imbued with a sense of responsibility toward each other and their country. Far from being cosseted debutantes, these women were eyewitnesses at some of the most important events in world history, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. Yet this is not a story set on the battlefields or in Parliament; it is an intimate saga that sheds light on the complex dynamics of family set against the backdrop of a tumultuous century.