American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot by Craig Ferguson December 8, 2011 In American on purpose, Craig Ferguson delivers a moving and achingly funny memoir of living the American dream as he journeys from the mean streets of Glasgow, Scotland, to the comedic promised land of Hollywood.  Along the way he stumbles through several attempts to make his mark - as a punk rock musician, a construction worker, a bouncer, and tragically,  a modern dancer.  By far Ferguson's greatest triumph was his decision to become a U.S. Citizen, a milestone he achieved in early 2008
	Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life by Eleanor Dwight January 12, 2012 Dwight's work demonstrates the centrality of architecture, travel and gardening to Wharton's live and work.  The greatest strength of the book is the lavish illustrations, which show clearly that Wharton was an architect of space as much as an architect of character.  Indeed, after Dwight's biography one can never again read The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth without inhabiting the grand spaces that Wharton describes.
	Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout February 9, 2012 Louis Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century and a giant of modern American culture.  He knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts, wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies - without a collaborator - and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden.  The ranks of his admirers included Johnny Cash, Jackson Polo Orson Welles.  Offstage he was witty, introspective and unexpectedly complex,a beloved colleague with an explosive temper whose larger-than-life personality was tougher and more sharp-edged that his worshipping fans ever knew.
	Will in the World :   How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt March 8, 20121 This much-awaited biography the elusive Bard is brilliant in conception, often superb in execution, but sometimes-perhaps inevitably-disappointing in its degree of speculativeness.  Greenblatt succeed impressively in locating the man in both his greatest works and the turbulent world in which he lived.  With a blend of biography, literary interpretation and history, Greenblatt persuasively analzes William's father's rise and fall as a public figure in Stratford, which pulled him in both Protestant and Catholic directions and made his eldest son "master of double consciousness."  This wonderful study, built on a lifetime's scholarship and a profound ability to perceive the life within the texts, creates as vivid and full portrait of Shakespeare as we are likely ever to have.
	Unbroken:   A World War II Airman's Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand April 12, 2012 On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline and blood.  Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared.  It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane's bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard.  So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.
	The Last Tsar:   The Life and Death of Nicholas II by Edvard Radzinskii May 10, 2012 A prominent Russian playwright has turned his talents to historical investigation and produced an account containing intriguing new details for the Western reader and revelations for the previously uninformed citizenry of the former Soviet Union  Long fascinated by the death of Nicholas II, his wife and his children, Radzinsky gained access to long-closed national archives containing state documents, diaries of the tsar and his family, and eyewitness accounts.
	Ayn Rand and the World she Made   by Anne Conover Heller June 14, 2012 A passionate advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and individual rights, Rand remains  powerful force in the political perceptions of Americans today.  Yet twenty-five years after her death, her readers know little about her life.  In this seminal biography, Anne C. Heller trace the controversial author's life from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publications of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the late 1950s and 1960s.  This is a comprehensive and eye-opening portrait of one of the most significant and improbable figures of the twentieth century.