It’s a new month — which means a new crop of PBC titles, selected with the indispensable help of our illustrious editorial board. We’ll be posting about each book throughout the month, so stay tuned for features, quizzes, author interviews, reviews, and much more. For now, click on the covers to learn more. Enjoy!

Zeitoun
(*Main “PBC Pick” for September)

by Dave Eggers

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a New Orleans family is cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water.

“It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction.”
—New York Times Book Review

50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America

by Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman

Want to join the work of remaking America? This is the inspiring, practical guide for you.

“A practical handbook on how every American can do something for our country.”
- The late Senator Edward M. Kennedy

The Living Shore: Rediscovering a Lost World

by Rowan Jacobsen

A beautiful volume containing a good-news environmental story about how an oyster could help restore our oceans.

“[A] slim and superb reminder of these simple creatures’ vital importance to the grand scheme of life on land and sea.” - Publishers Weekly

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party

by Max Blumenthal

How a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, complete with dysfunction, scandal, and crime.

“An irresistible combination of anthropology and psychopathology that exerts the queasy fascination of (let’s face it) something very like pornography.”
—Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker

“What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?”: Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country

by Kevin Mattson

“Incisive, fast-paced and fun to read.”
—Matt Bai, New York Times Book Review

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

Introduction by Michael Pollan

One of the most beloved and acclaimed writers of our time urges us to take the time to understand what we eat.

“Mr. Berry’s sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world.”
- New York Times Book Review

A Dangerous Liaison: A Revelatory New Biography of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

by Carole Seymour-Jones

The intense, passionate, and sometimes painful story of how two brilliant freethinkers, lovers, and rivals came to share a relationship that lasted more than fifty years.

“[The story of a] spiraling double-helix of a relationship whose sordid beauty fascinates even as it repels.”
—Kirkus Reviews