Sunday observance in the Christian West was an important religious issue until at least the early 20th century. During the reign of Charles I, disagreements on this question were a factor in the Puritan flight from England. In America the subject engendered the lengthiest national debate in the 19th century, outlasting the ones about temperance and slavery. In a more secular age, many writers have been haunted by the afterlife of Sundays. Wallace Stevens speaks of their “peculiar life”; for Kris Kristofferson “there’s something in a Sunday, makes a body feel alone.” This book explores the history of the Sabbath with particular attention to the lives and words of prominent writers, including observant Christians such as Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Edwards, non-practicing ones such as Robert Lowell, and lapsed ones such as Henry David Thoreau.

In this challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, New Yorker writer David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, OR, or Snowmass, CO, but New York, NY. Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, wastelands of garbage and traffic jams. Yet Owen shows that residents of compact urban centers individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, consume less, discard less trash, and most important, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan, the most densely populated place in North America, rank first in public-transit use and last in per-capita greenhouse-gas production . The most pressing environmental problem we face, Owen proposes, is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan.

In this sequence of personal meditations through the cycle of seasons, storyteller-poet-naturalist Diane Ackerman brings into focus a time of day that many of us literally or figuratively sleep through. Drawing on sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, poetry, organic farming, and beekeeping, she explores the aspects of dawn, from bird and animal behavior to the incomparable morning light that has long inspired artists and the rituals the world observes at dawn. As she migrates like the birds she observes from winter in Florida to spring, summer, and fall in upstate New York, Ackerman revels in that moment when the deepest arcades of life and matter become visible. Ranging from cloud glories to endangered whooping cranes, her observations urge us to live in the moment and wake up to nature.

In the vein of his earlier books The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, Patrick Lencioni here illustrates the complex world of business teams through the fictional story of Kathryn Petersen, the new CEO at a company called DecisionTech. Instead of a cohesive, effective team, Kathryn finds relationships in such disarray that the enterprise is at risk of failing. In telling how Kathryn comes to grips with the situation, Lencioni reveals the dysfunctions that cause even the best teams to struggle, and outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles.

From 1949 to 1964, the New York Yankees had more ballplayers who became legends than any other major-league team and won 14 pennants and 9 world championships, not to mention lasting glory for Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and their iconic teammates. Marvin Newman, a longtime contributor to Sports Illustrated, was one of few photographers working with color film at the time. This book brings together the moments that made Yankee history, captured by Newman in stunning color as well as black-and-white images. His photographs, together with Al Silverman’s inside stories of the players and team, convey the Mantle era in all its glory.

This book is a history of the men and women who fought racial barriers in the North as well as the South, on the street, in the courtroom, and in the halls of Congress. Historian Patricia Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP’s activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. The book then moves to the critical postwar era, when, with a string of legal victories, the NAACP knocked out the underpinnings of the segregation system. Lift Every Voice reminds us of the brutality and terror that dominated race relations for most of the 20th century and what it took to change that.

Senator Jean Carnahan, who took her husband’s seat in Washington after he was posthumously elected, writes about change, family, aging, history, politics, and language with plain-spoken humor. Her two years in the Senate were marked by a disputed presidential election, the 9/11 attack, a decicion to go to war, the anthrax mailings, and the Enron scandal. Carnahan had to learn to balance her political life while mustering courage and a positive attitude during a time of intense personal loss. This is not so much a memoir as a template for living life, embracing the bad as well as the good.