A bad best man’s speech can ruin a wedding. Why do we plan every detail of a perfect day and then give the groom’s idiot best friend five minutes of total power? Enter Nate (Glen Powell), a speechwriter-for-hire who helps people write incredible best man speeches. To keep the best man from embarrassing himself (and the newlyweds), Nate uses his list of don’ts: Don’t mention the exes, don’t be rated R, and don’t bum everyone out. Nate’s system never fails. That is, until he meets Dan (Nicholas Braun).

In this award-winning Audible Studios production, Trevor Noah tells his wild coming-of-age tale during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa. It’s a story that begins with his mother throwing him from a moving van to save him from a potentially fatal dispute with gangsters, then follows the budding comedian’s path to self-discovery through episodes both poignant and comical.

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

Alice's journey begins as all good journeys do: hitting on the sales guy at REI. After a tumultuous breakup, a quick career transition, family upheaval, and a sobriety journey that didn't fix her life quite as much as she expected it to, Alice decides that the only way to solve all her problems is to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But as she begins preparing for the months-long quest, she realizes the answers she's seeking might not be on top of a snow-covered mountain. Especially since she just learned there was snow in California.

Superstar comedian and Hollywood box-office star Kevin Hart turns his immense talent to the written word by writing some words. Some of those words include: the, a, for, above, and even even. Put them together and you have the funniest, most heartfelt, and most inspirational memoir on survival, success, and the importance of believing in yourself since Old Yeller.

We may think of "globalism" as a recent development but its origins date back to the fifteenth century and beyond, when seafarers pioneered routes across the oceans with the objectives of exploration, trade, and profit. These voyages only became possible after certain technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping—enabled navigation across unprecedented distances.

The religious wars of the crusades are renowned for their military engagements. But the period was witness to brutality beyond the battlefield. More so than any other medieval war zone, the Holy Land was rife with unprecedented levels of criminality and violence. In the first history of its kind, Steve Tibble explores the criminal underbelly of the crusades. From gangsters and bandits to muggers and pirates, Tibble presents extraordinary evidence of an illicit underworld. He shows how the real problem in the region stemmed not from religion but from young men.

In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations.

Thanks to his expert knowledge of the whole alphabet, Dominic Knight is uniquely qualified to write an A to Z of the things that deeply irritate him, and should irritate everybody. Bullfighting, unicorns, homeopathy, fluffy dice chillout music, vapes and multilevel marketing are among the entries in this delightful and definitive list of atrocities, which proves beyond a doubt that alongside the magnificent march of progress, there has been a much funnier race to the bottom.

Acclaimed World War II historian James Holland vividly relates the dramatic last months of the Italian Campaign in a masterful volume that brings new awareness to this vital hinge point of the war.

Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office. Johnson faced a nearly impossible task—to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of America's leading historians of slavery, shows how ill-suited Johnson was for this daunting task.

Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, cousins born just three months apart, were ten years old when Richard became king of England. They were thirty-two when Henry deposed him and became king in his place. Now, the story behind one of the strangest and most fateful events in English history (and the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated history plays) is brought to vivid life by the acclaimed author of Blood and Roses, Helen Castor.

Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, was an eyewitness to America's founding, and helped guide the new nation through her observations and advice to her famously prickly husband, who cherished her. In The Unexpected Abigail Adams: A Woman "Not Apt to Be Intimidated," writer and researcher John L. Smith, Jr. draws on more than two thousand letters of Abigail's spanning from the 1760s to her death in 1818, interweaving Abigail's colorful correspondence with a contextual narrative.

Formaldehyde, borax, salicylic acid. Today these chemicals are used in embalming fluids, cleaning supplies, and acne medications. But just over a hundred years ago, they were routinely added to all kinds of food by unregulated and unethical companies. Noted science and history writer Gail Jarrow introduces listeners to the relentless work of U.S. government chemist Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who mounted a thirty-year campaign to protect consumers from harmful food and drugs. As part of his research, he tested food additives by serving them to a squad of volunteers—the poison eaters.

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives.

When Glasgow law student David Hunter survives a mysterious attack, he discovers he's a descendant of a long line of witches known as Dream Dancers. Thrust into a hidden world of magic, government conspiracies, and perilous quests, David must master his newfound abilities to protect the mystical Akashic Records—the key to humanity's past, present, and future. Alongside the fiery Jessica Campbell, wise Aunt Gen, and the underworld creature Terence, they face malevolent forces aiming to manipulate reality.

Bull chronicles the story of Iraq from the exploits of Gilgamesh to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy that ushered in its modern era. The land between the rivers has been the melting pot and battleground of countless outsiders. Here, Judaism was born and the Sunni-Shia schism took its bloody shape.

Before she mastered the art of French cooking in midlife, Julia Child found herself working in the secrets trade in Asia during World War II. Single, six foot two, and thirty years old, Julia McWilliams took a job working for America's first espionage agency, years before cooking or Paris entered the picture. The Secret War of Julia Child traces Julia's transformation from ambitious Pasadena blue blood to Washington, DC file clerk, to head of General "Wild Bill" Donovan's secret File Registry as part of the Office of Strategic Services.

Drawing on his twenty years as a teacher, hundreds of interviews and his experience on the UK Government's Social Mobility Commission, Sammy Wright shows that schools are - and should be - so much more than this. Filled with funny, tender encounters and an unflinching focus on the profound challenges of daily life for both teachers and pupils, his book argues that we need urgently to think of school differently: as something more like a home than a factory, a community hub rather than a boot-camp or testing ground.

Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy. Encompassing the captivating personalities of the era, it untangles the struggles between the increasingly isolated Nicholas and Alexandra and the factions of scheming nobles, ruthless legislators, and pragmatic generals who sought to stabilize the restive Russian empire either with the Tsar or without him. By rejecting compromise, Nicholas undermined his supporters at crucial moments.