"Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt...

A successful Hollywood director disguises himself as a bum and sets off to see America from the bottom up. In the midst of the brutality and despair, he makes a valuable discovery--that what the downtrodden need most is laughter.

"In 1981, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company's financial documents to review. "You've got to be shitting me," he later told the company's CEO. "This place is a gold mine." Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans in $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells the...

At nearly 95, Studs Terkel has written about everyone's life, it seems, but his own. Here he offers a memoir which--embodying the spirit of the man himself--is youthful and vivacious. Terkel begins by taking us back to his childhood, describing the hectic life of a family trying to earn a living in Chicago. He then goes on to his experiences--as a poll watcher charged with stealing votes for the Democratic machine, as a young theatergoer, and eventually...

Granted total and unprecedented access to the Academy Award-winning director's archives, the author, drawing on hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, chronicles his attempt to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking though his production company American Zoetrope.

"An illustrated picture book autobiography in which award-winning author Yuyi Morales tells her own immigration story"--

"Katrina Kim may be broke, the black sheep of her family, and slightly unhinged, but she isn't a stalker. Her obsession with her co-worker, Kurt, is just one of many coping mechanisms-like her constant shape and number rituals, or the way scenes from her favorite children's book bleed into her vision whenever she feels anxious or stressed. But when Katrina finds a cryptic message from Kurt that implies he's aware of her surveillance, her tenuous hold...

A forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic comes into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel, site of the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, she meets Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell. With her plainspoken American opinions, she becomes a sounding board for these historic...

"Natasha: I'm a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I'm definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won't be my story. Daniel: I've always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents' high expectations....