Titles starting with L from halsbooks.com

Through her memories of her mentors, Edelman tells the story of her ascent from a segregated South Carolina, though Yale Law School, and to her presidency of the Children's Defense Fund. She recalls her years under the tutelage of Martin Luther King Jr., Charles Merrill Jr. of the Merrill Lynch family, Robert F. Kennedy, and Howard Zinn, a Spelman professor who participated in lunch-counter sit-ins.

This close examination of the 1948 presidential campaign provides historical and political context but focuses mostly on strategy and master strokes--including Truman's "whistle-stop" tour. Four strong candidates battled for their party's candidacy, with Dewey and Truman eventually facing off against each other, and newspapers and radio played a central role, perhaps for the last time before the advent of television.

Acclaimed author Carolyn G. Heilbrun (known in mystery circles as Amanda Cross) wasn't planning on living past 70, but since she did she went ahead and wrote a combination memoir and collection of satirical essays about the experience. Her unapologetically frank, scathingly witty prose should serve as an eye-opening antithesis to anyone expecting nostalgic girlhood reveries and sun-dappled family picnics. Her refusals to meet the expectations of how a fine old lady of literature should act make her a truly inspiring model for anyone enslaved to popular opinion. As she philosophizes about her impending end, Heilbrun never turns her back on the joys of the current moment, finding wellsprings of delight in the ideas of youth, e-mail, and friends still unmet. Younger readers in the thrall of satirists such as David Sedaris may find this an especially rewarding discovery.

In her fifth novel, set in 1984, Joan Didion writes about a wealthy Washington reporter named Elena McMahon who impulsively travels to Florida to see her father, an arms dealer, who is ill. There she faces a complex, shady, and dangerous world when she allows herself to get involved in a scheme to run American arms to Central America--a situation reminiscent of the Iran-Contra scandal. Narrated from the standpoint of many years later, THE LAST THING HE WANTED is a fragmented, elliptical look at innocence and corruption, and at--always an interest of Didion's, in both her fiction and her essays--the intricacies of American geopolitical interests.

In this memoir, Summer explores her childhood with her mother, experienced in a series of shelters, motels, and temporary homes. Despite the instability of her upbringing, upon finally moving into an apartment in Boston with her mother, Summer's academic interest blossomed. Eventually, against all odds, Summer became a student at Harvard. This memoir describes how this happened, thanks partly to an inspiring high school teacher.