Zane Nervous Jonquinette Pierce gets nervous around men. Sexually repressed, she avoids men when she can. Jude, on the other hand, is a highly-sexed woman who can't get enough of men, often in steamy anonymous settings. The hook in bestselling author Zane's novel is that Jonquinette and Jude are the same person.
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Gary Paulsen How Angel Peterson Got His Name For three decades Gary Paulsen has been writing autobiographical fiction for young readers, and has built a large and loyal following for his true-to-life stories. His latest book is better than true-to-life, it's true. Paulsen tells stories from his own 13th year, a time when he and his buddies in Minnesota undertook what we would today call "extreme sports" -- but they were just trying to have fun.
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Janis Ian Society's Child "At Seventeen" may be the song she's best known for, but in real life, at seventeen singer-songwriter Janis Ian was already a rapidly rising star. "Society's Child" put her on the map at age fifteen, and before long, this girl with lingering worries about her hair and her skin was playing at Carnegie Hall and being reviewed in The New York Times. Janis Ian now tells her story in a frank autobiography called "Society's Child."
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Dean King Skeletons on the Zahara There was a time in American history when everyone knew about the 1815 wreck of the American cargo ship "Commerce." It ran aground in northern Africa, where its crew was captured and enslaved. Upon his safe return, Captain James Riley became an early American celebrity. The incredible story is told in Dean King's book.
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Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper A teenage girl who has survived a rare form of leukemia now needs a kidney transplant, in Jodi Picoult's novel. There's no trouble finding a perfect match, though, because the girl's parents conceived a little sister for their daughter specifically to provide a donor match. But there is a problem: the little sister, who's 13 now, has decided she would rather not be forced to donate a kidney. And she's hired a lawyer.
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Warren Getler Shadow of the Sentinel Few Americans know much about the Knights of the Golden Circle, a 19th century secret society that, legend has it, stockpiled gold and weapons to finance phase two of the Civil War. Bob Brewer claims to be descended from K-G-C "sentinels" in charge of the secret caches -- now journalist Warren Getler tells Brewer's story.
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Anthony Arthur Radical Innocent He may be best known today for his muckraking 1906 novel "The Jungle," but Upton Sinclair was also a feminist, a socialist, a celebrity, a politician, and Pulitzer Prizewinner -- but not for "The Jungle." Now Sinclair is the subject of an exhaustive biography by retired American literature professor Anthony Arthur, called "Radical Innocent."
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Evie Rhodes Criss Cross A detective who is tracking a serial killer in Newark, New Jersey finds he has some extraordinary help, in the Evie Rhodes mystery-supernatural thriller Criss Cross. But Detective Micah Jordan-Wells also has a twin brother, and the timeless specter of good versus evil takes on a horrifying new dimension.
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Iman The Beauty of Color For nearly 30 years the African-born supermodel Iman has helped define beauty for women of color, even launching her own line of cosmetics in 1994. Now in a book called The Beauty of Color, Iman speaks to black, Hispanic, Asian and Middle Eastern women of all skin tones.
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Michael Phillips The Gift of Valor One day in the spring of 2004, in a hard-fought-over Iraqi border town, a U.S. Marine corporal displayed a rarely-seen kind of bravery. When a live hand grenade threatened several servicemen, Corporal Jason Dunham, just inches away from the grenade, seconds from death, used his Kevlar combat helmet to absorb the blast, and save the other men's lives. His story is now told by journalist Michael Phillips.
