Bookshelf

(New York: Mulholland, 2016)
This sequel to 2015’s action/thriller The Killing Kind finds antihero Michael Hendricks continuing to hunt down bad guys — this time to protect a federal witness about to testify against a criminal governing body known as “the Council.” (Our readers will be particularly dismayed to learn that the lawless organization is headquartered in Clinton, N.Y.!)

(University of Chicago Press, 2016)
By analyzing their lectures, letters, journals and reading notes, Leinwand explores how seven writers — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg and Ted Hughes — “wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work.” The author is a professor of English at the University of Maryland.

(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016)
This companion workbook to the bestselling Teach Like a Champion 2.0 features over 75 video clips and 100 activities designed to give teachers the tools they need to “make champion teaching a reality in their classroom.” The author is a managing director of Uncommon Schools.

(Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2016)
Twists and turns abound in this novel about an international kidnapping and daring rescue involving a U.S. immigrant foundation executive and a Guatemalan revolutionary. One reviewer described it as “both a gripping adventure story and a profound inquiry into the best means to achieve social justice in both the U.S. and in Latin America.”

(New York: Routledge, 2017)
This book explores how moralistic concerns influenced cultural politics, especially within German-language opera, or Singspiel, in late 18th-century Vienna. The author is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Kansas.

(Utah State University Press, 2016)
The author explores the life of Jane Elizabeth Manning James, an early African-American convert to Mormonism. Newell discusses how James became “a way for Latter-Day Saints to talk about both gender and race in ways that create a usable past for the 21st century.”

(New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2017)
Described as a “stylish, eight-step guidebook for moms who want to re-enter the workforce and amp up their professional mojo,” this book helps women confront and overcome the intimidating hurdles of going back to work. The author is a freelance film and television producer with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2016)
In the early 1990s, West Virginia’s First National Bank of Keystone began buying sub-prime mortgages, quickly growing into one of the most profitable large community banks. But it was all fraud. The author, an attorney and consultant handling bank regulatory matters and anti-money laundering cases, dissects the events and players behind one of the largest bank failures of all time.

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016)
Focusing on the media’s coverage of four disasters — the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings and the 2008 financial crisis — the author explores how “media attention directs our concern for the suffering of others toward efforts to soothe our own emotional turmoil.”