If you're looking for a parenting book, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother.This is a book about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an adrift twenty-something who drops out of college to pursue her dream of making cheesecake on a stick a successful business franchise (ah, the ideals of youth) . Alone in a new city, she summons her inner strength as she holds the hand of a dying stranger. Davies is a woman who finds humor in difficult pregnancies and post-partum depression (after reading "Pie" you might never eat Thanksgiving dessert the same way) . She is a divorcee who unexpectedly finds second love. She is a happily married suburban wife who nevertheless makes a mental list of all the men she would have slept with. And she is a parent who finds herself tested in ways she could never imagine. In stories that cut to the quick, Davies explores passion, loss, illness, pain, and joy, told from her singular, gimlet-eyed, hilarious perspective.Mothers of Sparta is not a blow-by-blow of Davies' life but rather an examination of the exquisite and often painful moments of a life, the moments we look back on and say, That one, that one mattered. Straddling the fence between humor and, well ... not humor, Davies has written a book about what it's like to try to carve a place for oneself in the world, no matter how unyielding the rock can be.
Flatiron Books
|
9781250133700
|
Hardcover
Jill
By Pace, Julie
The inspiring and surprising life of Dr. Jill BidenWife, mother and educator, Dr. Jill Biden has been described as President Biden's greatest political asset. Like many women of her generation, Jill Biden worked hard to balance family and career, always placing her commitments to her husband, sons and daughter at the center of her life.From Jill's earliest days dating Senator Biden, to her embrace of Beau and Hunter Biden, the birth of her daughter Ashley, her role by Joe Biden's side through Senate re-election race after Senate re-election race, and what would eventually be three attempts to secure the Democratic nomination for president, Jill Biden has lived in the public eye. And now that she is First Lady, there is more curiosity than ever about her character, her personality and the ways she will shape the country.
Little, Brown and Company
|
9780316377508
|
Hardcover
This Will Be Funny Later
By Pentland, Jenny
A funny, biting, and entertaining memoir of coming of age in the shadow of celebrity and finding your own way in the face of absolute chaos that is both a moving portrait of a complicated family and an exploration of the cost of fame.Growing up, Jenny Pentland's life was a literal sitcom. Many of the storylines for her mother's smash hit series, Roseanne, were drawn from Pentland's early family life in working-class Denver. But that was only the beginning of the drama. Roseanne Barr's success as a comedian catapulted the family from the Rockies to star-studded Hollywood - with its toxic culture of money, celebrity, and prying tabloids that was destabilizing for a child in grade school. By adolescence, Jenny struggled with anxiety and eating issues. Her parents and new stepfather, struggling to help, responded by sending Jenny and her siblings on a grand tour of the self-help movement of the '80s - from fat camps to brat camps, wilderness survival programs to drug rehab clinics (even though Jenny didn't take drugs) .
Harper
|
9780062962928
|
Hardcover
The Joy Plan
By Roman, Kaia
As a mother, a wife, and a businesswoman, Kaia Roman always had a plan. But when her biggest plan, the business she cofounded, collapsed, Kaia found herself crushed by depression. And what felt even worse was that, with a husband and two kids relying on her to get out of bed, she didn't have a plan to move forward. Determined to turn her life around and put her ingrained habits of stress and anxiety behind her, Kaia decided to put everything else on hold and dedicate thirty days to the singular pursuit of joy. The results were astonishing-and lasted much longer than the initial monthlong project.In this uplifting and eye-opening memoir, Kaia uses her business savvy to create a concrete Joy Plan to get back on her feet fast. Using scientific research on hormones, neurotransmitters, and mindfulness, along with the daily dedication to creating a more joyful existence, Kaia teaches readers how to move past temporary happiness and succeed in creating joy that lasts.
Sourcebooks
|
9781492648765
|
Paperback
A Marvelous Life
By Fingeroth, Danny
The definitive biography of the beloved -- often controversial -- co-creator of many legendary superheroes, A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee presents the origin of "Stan the Man," who spun a storytelling web of comic book heroic adventures into a pop culture phenomenon: the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee was the most famous American comic book creator who ever lived.Thanks, especially, to his many cameos in Marvel movies and TV shows, Lee was -- and even after his 2018 death, still is -- the voice and face of comics and popular culture in general, and Marvel Comics in particular. How he got to that place is a story that has never been fully told -- until now.With creative partners including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko -- with whom he had tempestuous relationships that rivaled any superhero battle -- Lee created world-famous characters including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Hulk! But Lee's career was haunted by conflict and controversy. Was he the most innovative creator to ever do comics? Was he a lucky no-talent whose only skill was taking credit for others' work? Or was he something else altogether? Danny Fingeroth's A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee attempts to answer some of those questions. It is the first comprehensive biography of this powerhouse of ideas who, with his invention of Marvel Comics, changed the world's ideas of what a hero is and how a story should be told. With exclusive interviews with Lee himself, as well as with colleagues, relatives, friends -- and detractors -- Fingeroth makes a doubly remarkable case for Lee's achievements, while not ignoring the controversies that dogged him his entire life -- and even past his death. With unique access to Lee's personal archives at the University of Wyoming, Fingeroth explores never-before-examined aspects of Lee's life and career, and digs under the surface of what people thought they knew about him.Fingeroth, himself a longtime writer and editor at Marvel Comics, and now a lauded pop culture critic and historian, knew and worked with Stan Lee for over four decades. With his unique insights as a comics world insider, Fingeroth is able to put Lee's life and work in a unique context that makes events and actions come to life as no other writer could. Despite F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous warning that "There are no second acts in American lives," Stan Lee created a second act for himself that changed everything for him, his family, his industry, and ultimately for all of popular culture. How he did it -- and what it cost him -- is a larger-than-life tale of a man who helped create the modern superhero mythology that has become a part of all our lives.
St. Martin's Press
|
9781250133908
|
Hardcover
Face It
By Harry, Debbie
A MULTILAYERED MEMOIR FROM A MULTIFACETED ARTISTAs a musician, an actor, a muse, an icon, the breadth of Debbie Harry's impact on our culture has been matched by her almost Sphinx-like reticence about her inner life. Through it all - while being acclaimed as one of the most beautiful women in the world, prized by a galaxy of leading photographers and fashion designers, beloved by legions of fans for her relentless, high-octane performances, selling 50 million albums or being painted by Andy Warhol - Debbie Harry has infused her perennial Blondie persona with a heady mix of raw sexuality and sophisticated punk cool. In Face It, Debbie Harry invites us into the complexity of who she is and how her life and career have played out over the last seven decades. Upending the standard music memoir, with a cutting-edge style keeping with the distinctive qualities of her multi-disciplined artistry, Face It includes a thoughtful introduction by Chris Stein, rare personal photos, original illustrations, fan artwork installations and more.Peppered with colorful characters, Face It features everyone from bands Blondie came up with on the 1970s music scene - The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and David Bowie - to artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marina Abramovi and H.R. Giger of Alien fame. It explores her successful acting career (she has starred in over 30 film roles including David Cronenberg's Videodrome and John Waters' Hairspray) , her weekends with William S. Burroughs and her attempted abduction by serial killer Ted Bundy. Ranging from the hardscrabble grit and grime of the early New York City years to times of glorious commercial success, interrupted by a plunge into heroin addiction, the near-death of partner Chris Stein, a heart-wrenching bankruptcy and Blondie's break up as a band, an amazing solo career and then a stunning return with Blondie, this is a cinematic story of an artist who has always set her own path. Inspirational, entertaining, shocking, humorous and eye-opening, Face It is a memoir as dynamic as its subject.
Dey Street Books
|
9780060749583
|
Hardcover
American Heiress
By Toobin, Jeffrey
From New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Nine and The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre "Tania." The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing - the Hearst family trying to secure Patty's release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing "Tania" wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty's year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term "Stockholm syndrome" entered the lexicon. The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s) . Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors' crusade. Or did she?
Doubleday
|
9780385536714
|
Print book
Generation Oxy
By Dodd, Douglas
The unforgettable story of Florida teenagers turned oxycodone traffickersGeneration Oxy is the story of a group of friends -- clean cut, all-American high school kids -- who stumbled into the Sunshine State's murky underworld of illegal pill mills and corrupt doctors. This teenage criminal enterprise ultimately shipped hundreds of thousands of OxyContins and other prescription painkillers throughout the country, making millions in the process.This true crime memoir details the three-year-long rise and collapse of the Barabas Criminal Enterprise, an opiod-pill trafficking ring founded by Douglas Dodd and his best friend on the wrestling team, Lance Barabas. Raised by an alcoholic mother and surrounded by drug-abusing relatives, Dodd got involved in narcotics at an early age.
Skyhorse Publishing
|
9781510723573
|
Hardcover
Writing My Wrongs
By Senghor, Shaka
In 1991, Shaka Senghor was sent to prison for second-degree murder. Today, he is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, a leading voice on criminal justice reform, and an inspiration to thousands.In life, it's not how you start that matters. It's how you finish. Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle class neighborhood on Detroit's east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor--but at age 11, his parents' marriage began to unravel and the beatings from his mother worsened, sending him on a downward spiral that saw him run away from home, turn to drug dealing to survive, and end up in prison for murder at the age of 19, fuming with anger and despair. Writing My Wrongs is the story of what came next.
Convergent, 2016.
|
9781101907290
|
Print book
Pappyland
By Thompson, Wright
An instant New York Times bestseller. From the bestselling author of The Cost of These Dreams. The story of how Julian Van Winkle III, the caretaker of the most coveted cult Kentucky Bourbon whiskey in the world, fought to protect his familys heritage and preserve the taste of his forebears, in a world where authenticity, like his product, is in very short supply.. As a journalist said of Pappy Van Winkle, "You could call it bourbon, or you could call it a $5,000 bottle of liquified, barrel-aged unobtanium." Julian Van Winkle, the third-generation head of his familys business, is now thought of as something like the Buddha of Bourbon - Booze Yoda, as Wright Thompson calls him. He is swarmed wherever he goes, and people stand in long lines to get him to sign their bottles of Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve, the whiskey he created to honor his grandfather, the founder of the family concern. A bottle of the 23-year-old Pappy starts at $3000 on the internet. As Julian is the first to say, things have gone completely nuts.. Forty years ago, Julian would have laughed in astonishment if youd told him what lay ahead. Hed just stepped in to try to save the business after his father had died, partly of heartbreak, having been forced to sell the old distillery in a brutal downturn in the market for whiskey. Julians grandfather had presided over a magical kingdom of craft and connoisseurship, a genteel outfit whose family ethos generated good will throughout Kentucky and far beyond. Theres always a certain amount of romance to the marketing of spirits, but Pappys mission statement captured something real: "We make fine bourbon - at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon." But now the business had hit the wilderness years, and Julian could only hang on for dear life, stubbornly committed to preserving his namesakes legacy or going down with the ship. . Then something like a miracle happened: it turned out that hundreds of very special barrels of whiskey from the Van Winkle family distillery had been saved by the multinational conglomerate that bought it. With no idea what they had, they offered to sell it to Julian, who scrambled to beg and borrow the funds. Now he could bottle a whiskey whose taste captured his familys legacy. The result would immediately be hailed as the greatest whiskey in the world - and would soon be the hardest to find.. But now, those old barrels were used up, and Julian Van Winkle faced the challenge of his lifetime: how to preserve the taste of Pappy, the taste of his familys heritage, in a new age? The amazing Wright Thompson was invited to be his wingman as he set about to try. The result is an extraordinary testimony to the challenge of living up to your legacy and the rewards that come from knowing and honoring your people and your craft. Wright learned those lessons from Julian as they applied to the honest work of making a great bourbon whiskey in Kentucky, but he couldnt help applying them to his own craft, writing, and his upbringing in Mississippi, as he and his wife contemplated the birth of their first child. May we all be lucky enough to find some of ourselves, as Wright Thompson did, in Julian Van Winkle, and in Pappyland.
Mothers of Sparta
By Davies, Dawn
If you're looking for a parenting book, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother.This is a book about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an adrift twenty-something who drops out of college to pursue her dream of making cheesecake on a stick a successful business franchise (ah, the ideals of youth) . Alone in a new city, she summons her inner strength as she holds the hand of a dying stranger. Davies is a woman who finds humor in difficult pregnancies and post-partum depression (after reading "Pie" you might never eat Thanksgiving dessert the same way) . She is a divorcee who unexpectedly finds second love. She is a happily married suburban wife who nevertheless makes a mental list of all the men she would have slept with. And she is a parent who finds herself tested in ways she could never imagine. In stories that cut to the quick, Davies explores passion, loss, illness, pain, and joy, told from her singular, gimlet-eyed, hilarious perspective.Mothers of Sparta is not a blow-by-blow of Davies' life but rather an examination of the exquisite and often painful moments of a life, the moments we look back on and say, That one, that one mattered. Straddling the fence between humor and, well ... not humor, Davies has written a book about what it's like to try to carve a place for oneself in the world, no matter how unyielding the rock can be.
Jill
By Pace, Julie
The inspiring and surprising life of Dr. Jill BidenWife, mother and educator, Dr. Jill Biden has been described as President Biden's greatest political asset. Like many women of her generation, Jill Biden worked hard to balance family and career, always placing her commitments to her husband, sons and daughter at the center of her life.From Jill's earliest days dating Senator Biden, to her embrace of Beau and Hunter Biden, the birth of her daughter Ashley, her role by Joe Biden's side through Senate re-election race after Senate re-election race, and what would eventually be three attempts to secure the Democratic nomination for president, Jill Biden has lived in the public eye. And now that she is First Lady, there is more curiosity than ever about her character, her personality and the ways she will shape the country.
This Will Be Funny Later
By Pentland, Jenny
A funny, biting, and entertaining memoir of coming of age in the shadow of celebrity and finding your own way in the face of absolute chaos that is both a moving portrait of a complicated family and an exploration of the cost of fame.Growing up, Jenny Pentland's life was a literal sitcom. Many of the storylines for her mother's smash hit series, Roseanne, were drawn from Pentland's early family life in working-class Denver. But that was only the beginning of the drama. Roseanne Barr's success as a comedian catapulted the family from the Rockies to star-studded Hollywood - with its toxic culture of money, celebrity, and prying tabloids that was destabilizing for a child in grade school. By adolescence, Jenny struggled with anxiety and eating issues. Her parents and new stepfather, struggling to help, responded by sending Jenny and her siblings on a grand tour of the self-help movement of the '80s - from fat camps to brat camps, wilderness survival programs to drug rehab clinics (even though Jenny didn't take drugs) .
The Joy Plan
By Roman, Kaia
As a mother, a wife, and a businesswoman, Kaia Roman always had a plan. But when her biggest plan, the business she cofounded, collapsed, Kaia found herself crushed by depression. And what felt even worse was that, with a husband and two kids relying on her to get out of bed, she didn't have a plan to move forward. Determined to turn her life around and put her ingrained habits of stress and anxiety behind her, Kaia decided to put everything else on hold and dedicate thirty days to the singular pursuit of joy. The results were astonishing-and lasted much longer than the initial monthlong project.In this uplifting and eye-opening memoir, Kaia uses her business savvy to create a concrete Joy Plan to get back on her feet fast. Using scientific research on hormones, neurotransmitters, and mindfulness, along with the daily dedication to creating a more joyful existence, Kaia teaches readers how to move past temporary happiness and succeed in creating joy that lasts.
A Marvelous Life
By Fingeroth, Danny
The definitive biography of the beloved -- often controversial -- co-creator of many legendary superheroes, A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee presents the origin of "Stan the Man," who spun a storytelling web of comic book heroic adventures into a pop culture phenomenon: the Marvel Universe. Stan Lee was the most famous American comic book creator who ever lived.Thanks, especially, to his many cameos in Marvel movies and TV shows, Lee was -- and even after his 2018 death, still is -- the voice and face of comics and popular culture in general, and Marvel Comics in particular. How he got to that place is a story that has never been fully told -- until now.With creative partners including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko -- with whom he had tempestuous relationships that rivaled any superhero battle -- Lee created world-famous characters including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Hulk! But Lee's career was haunted by conflict and controversy. Was he the most innovative creator to ever do comics? Was he a lucky no-talent whose only skill was taking credit for others' work? Or was he something else altogether? Danny Fingeroth's A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee attempts to answer some of those questions. It is the first comprehensive biography of this powerhouse of ideas who, with his invention of Marvel Comics, changed the world's ideas of what a hero is and how a story should be told. With exclusive interviews with Lee himself, as well as with colleagues, relatives, friends -- and detractors -- Fingeroth makes a doubly remarkable case for Lee's achievements, while not ignoring the controversies that dogged him his entire life -- and even past his death. With unique access to Lee's personal archives at the University of Wyoming, Fingeroth explores never-before-examined aspects of Lee's life and career, and digs under the surface of what people thought they knew about him.Fingeroth, himself a longtime writer and editor at Marvel Comics, and now a lauded pop culture critic and historian, knew and worked with Stan Lee for over four decades. With his unique insights as a comics world insider, Fingeroth is able to put Lee's life and work in a unique context that makes events and actions come to life as no other writer could. Despite F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous warning that "There are no second acts in American lives," Stan Lee created a second act for himself that changed everything for him, his family, his industry, and ultimately for all of popular culture. How he did it -- and what it cost him -- is a larger-than-life tale of a man who helped create the modern superhero mythology that has become a part of all our lives.
Face It
By Harry, Debbie
A MULTILAYERED MEMOIR FROM A MULTIFACETED ARTISTAs a musician, an actor, a muse, an icon, the breadth of Debbie Harry's impact on our culture has been matched by her almost Sphinx-like reticence about her inner life. Through it all - while being acclaimed as one of the most beautiful women in the world, prized by a galaxy of leading photographers and fashion designers, beloved by legions of fans for her relentless, high-octane performances, selling 50 million albums or being painted by Andy Warhol - Debbie Harry has infused her perennial Blondie persona with a heady mix of raw sexuality and sophisticated punk cool. In Face It, Debbie Harry invites us into the complexity of who she is and how her life and career have played out over the last seven decades. Upending the standard music memoir, with a cutting-edge style keeping with the distinctive qualities of her multi-disciplined artistry, Face It includes a thoughtful introduction by Chris Stein, rare personal photos, original illustrations, fan artwork installations and more.Peppered with colorful characters, Face It features everyone from bands Blondie came up with on the 1970s music scene - The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and David Bowie - to artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marina Abramovi and H.R. Giger of Alien fame. It explores her successful acting career (she has starred in over 30 film roles including David Cronenberg's Videodrome and John Waters' Hairspray) , her weekends with William S. Burroughs and her attempted abduction by serial killer Ted Bundy. Ranging from the hardscrabble grit and grime of the early New York City years to times of glorious commercial success, interrupted by a plunge into heroin addiction, the near-death of partner Chris Stein, a heart-wrenching bankruptcy and Blondie's break up as a band, an amazing solo career and then a stunning return with Blondie, this is a cinematic story of an artist who has always set her own path. Inspirational, entertaining, shocking, humorous and eye-opening, Face It is a memoir as dynamic as its subject.
American Heiress
By Toobin, Jeffrey
From New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Nine and The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre "Tania." The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing - the Hearst family trying to secure Patty's release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing "Tania" wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty's year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circuslike trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term "Stockholm syndrome" entered the lexicon. The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, American Heiress thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s) . Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. American Heiress examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors' crusade. Or did she?
Generation Oxy
By Dodd, Douglas
The unforgettable story of Florida teenagers turned oxycodone traffickersGeneration Oxy is the story of a group of friends -- clean cut, all-American high school kids -- who stumbled into the Sunshine State's murky underworld of illegal pill mills and corrupt doctors. This teenage criminal enterprise ultimately shipped hundreds of thousands of OxyContins and other prescription painkillers throughout the country, making millions in the process.This true crime memoir details the three-year-long rise and collapse of the Barabas Criminal Enterprise, an opiod-pill trafficking ring founded by Douglas Dodd and his best friend on the wrestling team, Lance Barabas. Raised by an alcoholic mother and surrounded by drug-abusing relatives, Dodd got involved in narcotics at an early age.
Writing My Wrongs
By Senghor, Shaka
In 1991, Shaka Senghor was sent to prison for second-degree murder. Today, he is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, a leading voice on criminal justice reform, and an inspiration to thousands.In life, it's not how you start that matters. It's how you finish. Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle class neighborhood on Detroit's east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor--but at age 11, his parents' marriage began to unravel and the beatings from his mother worsened, sending him on a downward spiral that saw him run away from home, turn to drug dealing to survive, and end up in prison for murder at the age of 19, fuming with anger and despair. Writing My Wrongs is the story of what came next.
Pappyland
By Thompson, Wright
An instant New York Times bestseller. From the bestselling author of The Cost of These Dreams. The story of how Julian Van Winkle III, the caretaker of the most coveted cult Kentucky Bourbon whiskey in the world, fought to protect his familys heritage and preserve the taste of his forebears, in a world where authenticity, like his product, is in very short supply.. As a journalist said of Pappy Van Winkle, "You could call it bourbon, or you could call it a $5,000 bottle of liquified, barrel-aged unobtanium." Julian Van Winkle, the third-generation head of his familys business, is now thought of as something like the Buddha of Bourbon - Booze Yoda, as Wright Thompson calls him. He is swarmed wherever he goes, and people stand in long lines to get him to sign their bottles of Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve, the whiskey he created to honor his grandfather, the founder of the family concern. A bottle of the 23-year-old Pappy starts at $3000 on the internet. As Julian is the first to say, things have gone completely nuts.. Forty years ago, Julian would have laughed in astonishment if youd told him what lay ahead. Hed just stepped in to try to save the business after his father had died, partly of heartbreak, having been forced to sell the old distillery in a brutal downturn in the market for whiskey. Julians grandfather had presided over a magical kingdom of craft and connoisseurship, a genteel outfit whose family ethos generated good will throughout Kentucky and far beyond. Theres always a certain amount of romance to the marketing of spirits, but Pappys mission statement captured something real: "We make fine bourbon - at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon." But now the business had hit the wilderness years, and Julian could only hang on for dear life, stubbornly committed to preserving his namesakes legacy or going down with the ship. . Then something like a miracle happened: it turned out that hundreds of very special barrels of whiskey from the Van Winkle family distillery had been saved by the multinational conglomerate that bought it. With no idea what they had, they offered to sell it to Julian, who scrambled to beg and borrow the funds. Now he could bottle a whiskey whose taste captured his familys legacy. The result would immediately be hailed as the greatest whiskey in the world - and would soon be the hardest to find.. But now, those old barrels were used up, and Julian Van Winkle faced the challenge of his lifetime: how to preserve the taste of Pappy, the taste of his familys heritage, in a new age? The amazing Wright Thompson was invited to be his wingman as he set about to try. The result is an extraordinary testimony to the challenge of living up to your legacy and the rewards that come from knowing and honoring your people and your craft. Wright learned those lessons from Julian as they applied to the honest work of making a great bourbon whiskey in Kentucky, but he couldnt help applying them to his own craft, writing, and his upbringing in Mississippi, as he and his wife contemplated the birth of their first child. May we all be lucky enough to find some of ourselves, as Wright Thompson did, in Julian Van Winkle, and in Pappyland.