Chris Kyle’s widow, Taya Kyle, is writing a memoir entitled American Wife: A Memoir of Love, War, Faith and Renewal (HarperCollins/Morrow; Blackstone Audio). Co-written by Jim DeFelice who also co-wrote American Sniper, it will be released on May 4, 2015.

Publicity has already begun. ABC announced yesterday that Robin Roberts will interview Kyle on both Good Morning America and 20/20 on May 1, days before the book’s release.

The LA Times’ “Jacket Copy” reported the news as well, tying the book to Chris Kyle’s own bestselling memoir, which continues to dominate best seller lists after the release of Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster film version of American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper. Taya Kyle worked with the screenwriter and consulted on the film.

She was in the news last month when she testified at the  trial of her husband’s killer and has been featured in stories in People, US Weekly, and NPR.

Check your orders; some libraries have not ordered it yet and most have ordered it modestly. You can expect to be seeing more of the media savvy Taya Kyle.

Robert Putnam one of the co-authors of the influential book on American culture, Bowling Alone, was interviewed on  NPR’s Weekend Edition. about his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,  (S&S). He explains his term the “savvy gap,” saying that widening inequality in the U.S. is partially a result of poor people lacking knowledge of “the opportunities and challenges around them. They lack savvy. They don’t lack IQ, they lack savvy.”

The book is also being reviewed widely, in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker and moved up Amazon’s sales rankings over the weekend as a result. It’s now at #107.

Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (RH/Crown; RH and BOT Audio; RH Large Print) has received heavy advance media attention. It got even more on Saturday with an interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

The account of the sinking is currently #1 on Amazon’s sales rankings. Library holds are also growing.

One of the most-anticipated books of the season, Erik Larson’s Dead Wake, (RH/Crown; RH and BOT Audio; RH Large Print) arrives next week. Known for his skill in spinning a great narrative from dimly-remembered bits of history, Larson tackles the story of the German sinking of the luxury liner the Lusitania, an act that eventually brought the US into WW I.

It gets triple advance coverage including the cover of Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, an early review from Janet Maslin in the daily New York Times and the main review in Entertainment Weekly’s Book Section (not online yet).

Surprisingly, both the Book Review and Entertainment Weekly find most fascinating the villain of the piece, the German U-boat commander who gave the order to torpedo the luxury liner, sinking it in 18 minutes and killing 1,200.

It will hardly matter that both Maslin and the Book Review report that this is a lesser book than the author’s previous titles. As Maslin says, “Larson is one of the modern masters of popular narrative nonfiction. In book after book, he’s proved adept at rescuing weird and wonderful gothic tales from the shadows of history.” Check your holds.

NPR also offers an “Exclusive First Read” and and interview with Larson is scheduled for the upcoming Weekend Edition Saturday.

Larson’s video, below, includes archival film of the Lusitania.

The sudden attention to Helen Macdonald’s memoir H is for Hawk (Grove Press; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) has resulted in the book being out of stock at many wholesalers.

We’ve checked with the publisher who says a new printing is coming by the end of the week and yet another next week.

Those copies are sure to be snapped up as the media continues its blitz. The New Yorker has a piece on it in this week’s issue (with a headline that puts to shame all our attempts at hawkish puns, “Rapt“), the author was interviewed on NPR’s midday news program Here and Now yesterday and several other sources including Time magazine have stories in the works.

Also keep your eyes open for requests another book. The New Yorker describes H is for Hawk as “one part grief memoir, one part guide to raptors, and one part biography of T. H. White, who chronicled his maiden effort at falconry in
The Goshawk, written just before he began work
on The Once and Future King.”

The Goshawk is available from the New York Review of Books Classics.

Jennifer Lawrence (Hunger Games, Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook) is set to star as a combat photojournalist in an adaptation of Lynsey Addario’s just released memoir,  It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War (Penguin, Feb. 10; OverDrive Sample). Steven Spielberg is attached to direct.

Warner Bros. won what Deadline characterizes as a “whirlwind auction” for the film rights, adding”The memoir has been the hot title since it was excerpted by The New York Times Magazine, and there were no shortage of bidders for the life of a woman who goes into the most dangerous places in the world in search of truth.”

The book has also been featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Time, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and it debuted at #11 on the 3/8 NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list.

Below, Addario appears on The Daily Show:

When Warren Buffett speaks, investors listen. His fiftieth annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders published Saturday, is called a “must read” by the financial news site TheStreet and is getting even more attention than usual because in it, the 84-year-old announces he has found a successor (but doesn’t say who that is).

He also mentions two books. MarketWatch  picked up on the story and both titles raced into the top 100 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Of Fred Schwed’s Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?: Or A Good Hard Look At Wall Street (Wiley, 2006), first published in the 1940s, Buffet says, “If you haven’t read Schwed’s book, buy a copy at our annual meeting. Its wisdom and humor are truly priceless.”

He counsels against financial advisors, warning that most of them “are far better at generating high fees than they are at generating high returns. In truth, their core competence is salesmanship” and says investors would be better off reading Jack Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (Wiley, 2007; OverDrive Sample).

He also quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but that mention did not have a perceptible effect on sales.

Girl in the Dark (Random House/Doubleday, 3/3/15; BOT), a memoir written by a woman calling herself Anna Lyndsey (to protect her privacy), recounts a rare and mysterious reaction to light – sunlight and fluorescent – so severe she was forced to quit her job and live in a dark room, sustained by midnight walks, the radio, and audiobooks.

So, of course, it is also available as an audiobook.

Spotting it early, NPR highlighted the book in a “First Read” feature a few weeks ago, calling it “a gorgeously written, occasionally snarky chronicle” and T: The New York Times Style Magazine ran a profile of the author, describing her book as “funny, sharp, mostly devastating.”

More attention is on the way. Reviews are scheduled by People and the NYT Book Review, making this a good time to order additional copies.

Last week, Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (Grove Press, March 3, 2015; OverDrive Sample) got rare double raves from sister but quite separate publications, the book section of the daily NYT and the cover of the Sunday NYT Book Review.

This week, it gets the same treatment from another pair of sister publications, People magazine and Entertainment Weekly.

It’s People‘s “Book of the Week,” with this stellar review (not available online),

Obsessed with falconry since childhood, British naturalist MacDonald decides to adopt and train a goshawk as a way to handle the frief that overwhelms her after her father’s death. Her evolving relationship with th feral bird, whom she christens Mabel, is the subject of this unusual memoir. Captivating and beautifully writtten, it’s a meditation on the bond between beasts and humans and the pain and beauty of being alive.

Entertainmenet Weekly begins their review (also not yet online) by declaring that this “memoir about an out-of-work English professor grieving over her father who comes to find solace and purpose by killing bunnies for her hawk will be one of the loveliest things you’re read this year …”

For R.A. purposes, you may want to cut the “killing bunnies” section when quoting the review.

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (Grove Press, March 3, 2015; OverDrive Sample), a memoir about how she dealt with the painful loss of her beloved father by training a goshawk, is gaining attention on this side of the ocean after receiving both high praise and strong sales in Britain. Macdonald won both the Costa Book Award for Biography (scroll to page 3 to see the announcement) and the Costa Book of the Year in January as well as The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (the UK’s highest award for nonfiction) last November.

In the daily NYT this week, Dwight Garner raves:

Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, H Is for Hawk, her first published in the United States, reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.

This Sunday’s NYT Book Review features it on the cover (a rare occurrence for a book that hasn’t yet been released; we can’t remember the last time the NYT BR gave such prominence to an upcoming book):

In her breathtaking new book … Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.

Some libraries are showing heavy holds and rising on modest orders while a few have yet to order. Now’s the time to buy it ahead of the stampede.

In an opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times titled simply, “My Own Life,” author Oliver Sacks announces that he has terminal cancer.

True to the life-affirming spirit he has always demonstrated, he looks at this as an opportunity, he says, “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me” and, “I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.”

He also notes that he has completed an autobiography that will be published in late April On the Move: A Life, (RH/Knopf; RH Audio, 4/28/15), which features a photo on the cover of Sachs as a young man. Few libraries have ordered it yet.

The story brought an outpouring of emotions on Twitter. Both the upcoming book and Sack’s classic, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, (S&S/Summit, 1985; now available from S&S/Touchstone) are rising on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Girl In a Band by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon (HarperCollins/Dey Street, 2/24), gets a succinct review from Bustle, “If you just feel like getting inspired by some prose written by a kickass, feminist rock star, Gordon’s book delivers.”

Arriving next week, it also gets attention via a profile of the author in the New York Times. Even though Gordon warns the book contains “No sex, drugs or rock ’n’ roll,”  and is “the most conventional thing I’ve done,” more attention is undoubtly on its way.

Mark Zuckerberg is being credited by the Guardian with having “tapped into an area of growing social anxiety with his fourth book club choice.”

Announced yesterday, the title is On Immunity: An Inoculation, (Graywolf Press; HighBridge Audio) by Eula Biss, a book that looks into the fears about vaccination. It was picked as a best book of 2014 by several sources, including the New York Times Book Review‘s top ten. (our downloadable spreadsheet of all the 2014 nonfiction picks is here).

Holds are rising in libraries for David Carr’s memoir, The Night of the Gun (S&S, 2008), causing several to order more copies in trade paperback.

Sadly, people are being brought to the book by the author’s recent death at 58, with news stories and obits noting his searing memoir of the days when he was, as he himself describes it, a “violent drug-snorting thug.”

Beloved among fellow journalists, his “fond and tearful” wake on Tuesday was covered in many publications, from the New York Times, where he was the media reporter,  to The Economist and the New York Post.

An excerpt from the book was the cover story of the NYT Magazine when it was published in 2008. In the book, he took a journalists’ approach to his own life, reporting on it by interviewing the people who witnessed it.

Thanks to Barrie Olmstead, Adult Materials Selector, Sacramento Public Library, for the tip.

Heading in to Valentine’s Day weekend, which morphs this year into Fifty Shades of Grey weekend as the R-rated movie opens to major box office expectations, the book it is based on is #3 on Amazon’s best seller list, followed closely by the boxed set of the entire trilogy. At #13, is a title that sounds similar, Fifty Shades of They (Creative Pastors) by the founding pastor of the Fellowship Church, a Dallas megachurch, Ed Young.

Although the title may seem to pay homage to E.L. James’s famous novel, Young calls that book a “perverted attempt to trap readers and leads them to a misunderstanding of what intimacy and connection are all about.” As a protest, he plans to “baptize” copies of it this weekend. His book, published by Creative Pastors, an imprint of the Fellowship Church, is about forming relationships with the “right ‘they'” and claims to offer “fifty simple, yet profound insights that will help any relationship thrive.”