This Is The Author

"This book is actually my memoir. Being a chef, a restaurateur, and a cooking show host—I'm known for that. But the more I cooked, the more I wrote cookbooks...the more people wanted to know about me, my personal life. Because my trek, my coming to America, my being an immigrant, has an interesting story. And in today’s time I felt I wanted to share my story, my experience as an immigrant coming to America—the difficulties in doing so and the joys and the rewards that I reaped in coming to America." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/549475/my-american-dream/

"I wrote the book and get to be in it. It’s very exciting. I casted myself as Christopher because I felt like it was a really fun departure for me as an actor. I love that Christopher is the kind of guy a piece of us wanted to be a little bit growing up, and kind of, still now. No worries in the world, and exudes this confidence that comes from, probably a six-pack, of both beer and the one on his stomach." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554754/folded-notes-from-high-school/

"My book is about being a young—well, relatively young—disgusting idiot who makes terrible choices, and wants to get revenge on anyone who ever dumped me." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/555854/meaty/

"I’ve worked in education for a long time, and I’ve written quite a few books addressed to people as individuals and also to educators, but I’ve also had lots of conversation with parents. I am a parent. And I’m constantly being asked by parents about what’s going on in education, and what the right thing is to do for their children." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/315396/you-your-child-and-school/

"Our book is about so many wonderful things. It’s really about being raw, and real, and not being ashamed to speak the truth, and I get that from my mom. Growing up I could ask her any and everything, whether it be about sex, drugs, dating, relationships—it did not matter! She would answer me honestly." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/561936/perfect-is-boring/

"My book is about three young people: Freya, Harun, and Nathaniel. They are complete strangers who have seemingly nothing in common except for this one key thing, which is that each of them, in their own way, is lost. They collide, literally, in New York's Central Park, and that kicks off a day together where they form this intense friendship and a little bit of romance as they kind of come to understand that maybe the way out of their own loss lies is inhabiting one another’s." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554278/i-have-lost-my-way/

"I wrote MY DEAD PARENTS because after my mother died I was cleaning out her house and found love letters that my parents had exchanged long before my sister and I were born. The letters were so fascinating and totally confusing because the people that my parents were in those letters were so different form the people I knew." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/247514/my-dead-parents/

"My book is about taking down Confederate monuments in New Orleans, but it’s really about race in America, and particularly in the Deep South. I wrote this book because it was time for the people in the South and the people of America to face the issue of race and be truthful about it." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/575468/in-the-shadow-of-statues/

"This story is the story of the first human beings to go to the Moon. Now we often think of Apollo 11 as the first lunar mission, and of course that was the first mission that landed people on the Moon, but Apollo 8 was the first time human beings broke out of earthly orbit, went into orbit around another world, and, to my way of thinking, effectively became a species of two worlds." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/557389/to-the-moon/

"The whole series was about Frank Einstein, 10-year-old kid genius, who invents the most amazing things. And this last one was the most fun of all because he invented a zipper that could connect different parts of space time. I mean, not easy to do but Frank Einstein, genius, has a way to do it" Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/588767/frank-einstein-and-the-space-time-zipper/

"My book is about women throughout computing and internet history. It’s really a story of the 20th and 21st century told through anecdotes of women’s experiences interfacing with technology." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/545427/broad-band/

"My book is about a man named Alexander Mackenzie and a journey he took in 1789. He was looking for the Northwest Passage and what he actually found was the Arctic Ocean. Alexander Mackenzie has been lost a bit to history, at least in the United States, and I started writing this book when I discovered that Mackenzie was the first European to cross North America, or the first recorded crossing of North America." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/543135/disappointment-river/

"My book is a memoir of my coming out and entering into my first relationship. It’s sort of a follow-up to my first memoir, which came out four years ago, which was about how I had never had a boyfriend and couldn’t figure out why. And this book is about the years that followed and kind of figuring that all out." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554715/would-you-rather/

"My book is about my own journey as a transgender person, as an advocate, and as someone who’s working for equality for LGBTQ people across the country. The story really is about my relationship with my late husband, Andy, who was a transgender man, and it was really through my relationship with Andy that I learned some of my most important lessons in this fight for equality." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/557681/tomorrow-will-be-different/

"My book is called SECOND WIND and it's a memoir of the comeback I tried to do in the Sunfish Class back in 1992-93. And it’s a very personal book because it’s not just about trying to become a Sunfish North American Champion again, it’s about my life on Nantucket as a stay-at-home dad and how I had alienated myself from the sport of sailing that had once meant everything to me." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/558410/second-wind/

"ISLANDBORN is about a little girl named Lola who is an immigrant, but she left the island when she was very, very little so she didn’t grow up with any memories of the island. And what happens is she’s one of those girls who’s surrounded by her immigrant community and everybody talks about the island, and everybody reminisces about this place that they left, and she has no memories of it. And she really wants some sort of connection, she wants to remember." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/553899/islandborn/

"It’s about 13 remarkable women who have positively changed the course of history for the better through their contributions in science, in advancing women’s rights, in helping push the boundaries of what we understand about medicine, in giving more beauty to the world and helping more people understand why conservation is all of our responsibilities, and so much more. All 13 of these women deeply inspire me, and I hope that they inspire the girls and boys who will read the book when it comes out in March." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/573478/she-persisted-around-the-world/

"My book is about my experience of living in Japan as a young man, as a student at a film school in Tokyo in the 1970s. It was a very extraordinary time to be there as a young Westerner who was interested in Japanese film and theater." Learn more about A Tokyo Romance: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/534126/a-tokyo-romance/

"My book is called HOW LUCK HAPPENS and it is about how you make luck happen in your life. I started thinking about the topic after I wrote THE GRATITUDE DIARIES and I was inspired to look at other big topics that affect our lives and happiness. It occurred to me that we think of luck as something that just falls from the sky, but as I researched the topic with my co-author, Barnaby Marsh, I realized that we have so much more control over events than we sometimes realize." Learn more about How Luck Happens: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/552926/how-luck-happens/

"The story of my book is that I’ve been writing these “I’ve Been Thinking” columns for some time now in my Sunday paper and lots of friends and readers encouraged me to put them together into a book because they seem to help people with their day-to-day life. I’m a big believer in inspiration books that I have by the side of my bed that have helped me in my own life and I know how important books like this are to people if they’re going through rough patches or they’re dealing with something for the first time." Learn more about I've Been Thinking...