Compiled by Jamie H. Vaught
--Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning by Alan Maimon (Melville House, $27.99) reveals a powerful story of how a perfect storm of events has had a devastating impact on life in small town Appalachia. In his 294-page hardcover, the author gives us a profound understanding of the rural Eastern Kentucky from his years of careful reporting for the Louisville Courier-Journal. The new volume is both a chronicle of a young reporter’s immersion in a place, and of his return years later—this time as the husband of a Harlan County coal miner’s daughter—to find the area struggling with its identity and in the thrall of Trumpism as a political ideology. As a reporter for the Louisville newspaper, the author was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a series about gaping holes in Kentucky's justice system. He began his professional writing career as a news assistant and sportswriter in the Berlin bureau of the New York Times.
--The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership: Embracing the Conflicting Demands of Today’s Workplace by Tim Elmore (Harper Collins Leadership, $27.99) offers the fresh strategies and new mindset required today from a next generation leader, helping him or her to inspire team members in a way a paycheck never could. The author is founder and CEO of Growing Leaders, an Atlanta-based non-profit organization created to develop emerging leaders.
--By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream by Dan Grunfeld (Triumph Books, $28) shares an extraordinary story about the author’s Jewish family where his grandparents had survived the holocaust during World War II. In addition, the book features basketball stories, including his famous father, Ernie Grunfeld, who starred at the University of Tennessee and in the NBA. A two-time Academic All-American as a member of Stanford University’s men’s basketball team and a former pro basketball player in Europe, the author is a successful writer who received his MBA from Stanford.
--The President's Man: The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aide by Dwight Chapin (William Morrow, $29.99) takes readers on an historic journey, presenting an insider's view of President Nixon. The author also discussed his memorable experiences with the people who shaped the future -- Henry Kissinger, close friend Bob Haldeman, Pat Nixon, Spiro Agnew, J. Edgar Hoover, among others. An advisor who knew the president longer and more intimately than almost any other person outside of Nixon's family, the author was with Nixon in his private and public moments. Chapin served as Personal Aide and then Deputy Assistant to President Nixon with responsibility for the planning and execution of Nixon's schedule and appearances. The hardcover is published just in time for the 50th anniversary of Watergate.
--The Leaders’ Mind: How Great Leaders Prepare, Perform, and Prevail by Jim Afremow with Phil White (Harper Collins Leadership, $19.99) is a 209-page paperback that provides clear and concise steps to develop the confidence and mental edge that sets you apart as a leader – the same approach thousands of professional athletes have used to become champions. Dr. Afremow is a much sought-after mental game coach, licensed professional counselor and the author of popular sports psychology books.
--Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin (Harper, $27.99) is an extraordinary story of a Congressman coping with his emotional pain of losing his son and a revealing examination of holding President Trump accountable for inciting the political violence at our nation's Capitol. A former professor of constitutional law at American University's Washington College of Law for more than 25 years, the author has represented Maryland's 8th Congressional District in the U.S House of Representatives since 2017.
--Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, $35) is a narrative history about the political scandal of the early 1970s which led to President Nixon's resignation. Recent revelations like the release of more Nixon tapes and the identity of "Deep Throat" mean that the full scope of the scandal has never been told from start to finish. As the author points out, the Watergate is a much bigger and much weirder story than America remembers. A journalist and bestselling historian, Graff has spent many years covering politics, technology, and national security, and writing for national publications.
--Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention -- and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari (Crown, $28) is a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening and how to get our attention back. In the U.S., teenagers can focus on one task for only a minute or so at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, the author discovered that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. So Hari eventually went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention—and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. The author points out our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit, and he states there are 12 deep causes of this crisis. Hari is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, and other newspapers.
--One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General by William P. Barr (William Morrow, $35) reveals a candid account of his stints serving two vastly different presidents, George H.W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. The author's first tenure as attorney general under Bush was largely the result of chance, while his second tenure under Trump a deliberate and difficult choice. Barr takes readers behind the scenes during historic moments of the 1990s, from the LA riots to Pan Am 103 and Iran Contra. Thirty years later, Barr faced an unrelenting barrage of issues, such as Russiagate, the COVID outbreak, civil unrest, the impeachments, and the 2020 election.
--The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni (Simon & Schuster, $30) explores PayPal’s unsettled early days. With hundreds of interviews and access to thousands of pages of internal material, the award-winning author shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. The 475-page hardcover also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. And today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network.
--The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure by Dan Werb (Crown, $28.99) is a moving testament to the unprecedented scientific movement to stop COVID-19—and a powerful look at the infuriating factors that threaten to derail discovery and leave the world vulnerable to the inevitable coronaviruses to come. The story of this pandemic extends far further back than many realize. The author, who is an epidemiologist and an award-winning writer, traces the rising threat of the coronavirus family and the attempts by a small group of scientists who worked for decades to stop a looming viral pandemic.
--The MacArthur Study Bible, 2nd Edition, ESV (Thomas Nelson, $79.99) is an updated version that draws on more than 50 years of dedicated pastoral and scholarly work by Dr. John MacArthur, who includes verse-by-verse study notes, book introductions and articles to help make God known to you through the study of His Word.
--Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic--and Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos (Little, Brown and Company, $30) draws on extensive interviews to detail the tense meetings, late night phone calls, and crucial video conferences behind the largest, swiftest U.S. economic policy response since World War II. The volume goes inside the Federal Reserve, one of the country’s most important and least understood institutions, to chronicle how its plainspoken chairman, Jay Powell, unleashed an unprecedented monetary barrage to keep the economy on life support. With the bleeding stemmed, the Fed faced a new challenge: How to nurture a recovery without unleashing an inflation-fueling, bubble-blowing money bomb? The author is the Wall Street Journal's chief economics correspondent.
--Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival by Walter Stahr (Simon & Schuster, $35) is a story about a complex and fascinating political figure as well as the pivotal events of the Civil War and its aftermath. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Abraham Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860 before becoming the Secretary of the Treasury and then a Supreme Court justice during the Civil War. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes, and he furthered his reputation as an outspoken federal senator and progressive governor of Ohio.
--The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953 by Jeffrey Frank (Simon & Schuster, $32.50) is the first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly 30 years, writing how so ordinary a man met the extraordinary challenge of guiding U.S. through the pivotal years of the mid-20th century. The Truman presidency of nearly eight years were marked by victory in the wars against Germany and Japan, the first use of an atomic weapon; the beginning of the Cold War, creation of the NATO alliance, among others. The author also wrote bestselling Ike and Dick.
--The Presidency of Donald J. Trump by editor Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton University Press, $27.95 paperback) presents a first draft of history by offering needed perspective on one of the nation’s most divisive presidencies. Acclaimed political historian Julian Zelizer brings together many of today’s top scholars to provide balanced and strikingly original assessments of the major issues that shaped the Trump presidency.
--Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others by Stephen M. R. Covey (Simon & Schuster, $30) discusses a new leadership style of "trust and inspire," pointing out that we should be moving away from the "command and control" model. The volume offers a new way of leading that starts with the belief that people are creative, collaborative, and full of potential. People with this kind of leader are inspired to become the best version of themselves and to produce their best work. Trust and Inspire is the solution to the future of work: where a dispersed workforce will be the norm, necessitating trust and collaboration across time zones, cultures, personalities, generations, and technology.
--Jill: A Biography of the First Lady by Julie Pace and Darlene Superville (Little, Brown and Company, $29) is a personal and political biography about President Joe Biden's greatest political asset. Like many women of her generation, she holds her commitments as wife, mother and grandmother at the center of her life. She is a professor, earned a doctorate in educational leadership, and taught at Northern Virginia Community College. She broke barriers as First Lady as the first to hold a paying job outside the White House. The authors work for the Associated Press with Pace serving as executive editor and Superville as a White House reporter.
Jamie H. Vaught, a longtime sports columnist in Kentucky, is the author of five books about UK basketball, including recently-published “Chasing the Cats: A Kentucky Basketball Journey.” He is the editor and founder of KySportsStyle.com Magazine, and a professor at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Middlesboro. You can follow him on Twitter @KySportsStyle or reach him via email at KySportsStyle@gmail.com.
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