New Nonfiction
Big weather: chasing tornadoes in the heart of America by Mark Svenvold.
With his guide Matt Biddle, an Ahab-like veteran storm chaser, Mark Svenvold draws a portrait of a culture enamored by extremes during a 6,000-mile journey through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. Along the way, the author encounters an assortment of characters out of a Fellini film: A duo named The Twister Sisters, from St. Cloud, Minnesota; a crowd-pleasing trio from CUPP (California University of Pennsylvania-at Pittsburgh); a team of chaser-scientists who have partnered with an IMAX film-maker from Los Angeles with an armor-plated truck; and a stock car racer from North Carolina whose goal is to drive through a tornado.
At the heart of the excitement are the awe-inspiring events themselves-a tornado that levels a small Nebraska town and the look back at the central Oklahoma tornado outbreak that included the single-most destructive tornado in US history. Similar weather disasters occur each spring in a kind of reverse lottery that has spawned a subculture of catastrophilia. Want to know what a tornado actually sounds like as it blows over or through your house? Big Weather answers this while also tracing the ways the sublime, in the classic sense, still has a profound claim upon our imagination. Big Weather is a wryly observed meditation upon the weather as block-buster event that explores, with an ironic touch, our paradoxical relationship to the biggest story of our age-global warming-and the fate of the earth.
The colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and the beginnings of superstardom in America by Larry McMurtry.
In this sweeping dual briography, Larry McMurtry explores the lives, the elgends, and above all the truth about two larger-than-life American figures. With his Wild West show, Buffalo Bill helped invent the image of the West that still exists today -- cowboys and Indians, rodeo, rough rides, sheriffs and outlaws, trick shooting, Stetsons, and buck-skin. The short, slight Annie Oakley -- born Pheobe Ann Moses -- spent sixteen years with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, where she entertained Queen Victoria, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, among others. Beloved by all who knew her, including Junkpapa leader, Sitting Bull, Oakley becam a legend in her own right and after her death, achieved a new lease of fame in Irving Berlin's musical Annie, Get Your Gun.
To each other, they were always "Missie" and "Colonel". To the rest of the world, they were cultural icons, setting the path for all that followed. Larry McMurtry -- a writer who understands the West better than any other -- recreates their astonihing careers and curious friendship in a fascinating history that reads like the very best of his fiction.
Dr. Peter Scardino's prostate book: the complete guide to overcoming prostate cancer, prostatitis and BPH by Peter T. Scardino.
Although most men couldn't tell you what the prostate does, an overwhelming majority will be affected by prostate problems at some time in their lives. In his discussion of prostatitis and prostate enlargement (BPH), as well as prostate cancer, Dr. Peter Scardino carefully and clearly explains what can go wrong, how to prevent prostate trouble, and what to do if problems develop. Dr. Scardino has treated thousands of patients at one of the world's best research hospitals. He developed the innovative erectile-nervegrafting procedure that makes it possible for men with serious cancer to recover sexual function and mathematical tools (nomograms) patients and physicians can use to improve medical decision-making. Now men everywhere can access his years of expertise.
The friend who got away: 20 women's true life tales of friendships that blew up, burned out or faded away by Jenny Offill.
Written especially for this anthology and touched with humor, sadness, and sometimes anger, these extraordinary pieces simultaneously evoke the uniqueness of each situation and illuminate the universal emotions evoked by the loss of a friend.