"I have great faith in a seed ... convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." - Henry David Thoreau

A summer road trip in 2006 led Richard Horan and his family to Springfield, Illinois to tour Abraham Lincoln's home. While perusing the home's archives, Horan was captivated by a photograph of the 16^th President standing next to a young basswood tree. Amazed to discover that the tree still stands in front of Lincoln's house, Horan, overtaken by a sense of urgency, gathered a few seeds and took them home to grow.

Finding a strange sense of purpose from this simple act, Horan made more pilgrimages to the homes of celebrated American figures, with harvesting trips to the West Coast, New England, and Deep South. Along the way, his compulsive seed-collecting morphs from a hobby into a clearly defined mission - to uncover the stories behind the trees that served as silent observers to American history. His journey to the homes of his idols gleans revelations related not only to their individual merit and contributions, but also the influence their life and work has had over his own development as a writer and educator.

This journey is recounted in Seeds: One Man's Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees that Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Keouac, Welty to Wharton. His quest includes a stop in Concord, where he walked in Thoreau's steps at Walden Pond, collected Red Oak acorns and White Pine cones from Emerson's land, and wondered about the origins of the apple tree in front of the Concord Museum.

In addition to Concord, Richard Horan's itinerary in Seed sincludes visits to the homes of Jack Kerouac, Willa Cather, John Muir, Shirley Jackson, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Harper Lee, and many others, as well as emotional visits to Gettysburg and Mount Vernon. The book includes a drawing of a seed from each visit. The seeds collected by Mr. Horan on his literary excursions are being cultivated by an arborist in Upstate New York.

Dick Van Dyke, indisputably one of the greats of the golden age of television, is admired and beloved by audiences the world over for his beaming smile, his physical dexterity, his impeccable comic timing, his ridiculous stunts, and his unforgettable screen roles. 
            
His trailblazing television program, The Dick Van Dyke Show (produced by Carl Reiner, who has written the foreword to this memoir), was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1960s and introduced another major television star, Mary Tyler Moore. But Dick Van Dyke was also an enormously engaging movie star whose films, including Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, have been discovered by a new generation of fans and are as beloved today as they were when they first appeared. Who doesn't know the wordsupercalifragilisticexpialidocious? 
            
A colorful, loving, richly detailed look at the decades of a multilayered life, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, will enthrall every generation of reader, from baby-boomers who recall when Rob Petrie became a household name, to all those still enchanted by Bert's "Chim Chim Cher-ee." This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a "simple song-and-dance man," but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer. 

The acclaimed author of Troublesome Young Men reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how the US forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, the handsome, chain-smoking head of CBS News in Europe; Averell Harriman, the hard-driving millionaire who ran FDR's Lend-Lease program in London; and John Gilbert Winant, the shy, idealistic U.S. ambassador to Britain. Each man formed close ties with Winston Churchill-so much so that all became romantically involved with members of the prime minister's family. 

Drawing from a variety of primary sources, Lynne Olson skillfully depicts the dramatic personal journeys of these men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and reluctant American public to back the British at a critical time. Deeply human, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written, Citizens of London is a new triumph from an author swiftly becoming one of the finest in her field.