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Branson dropped out of school at 15, but by 16 he had his own magazine, and by 21 he had opened his first business — Virgin Records. Today, he's the head of a global business empire. In Like a Virgin, Branson shares the story of his success.

On an icy night in 1984, a commuter plane crashed in the wilderness. Six passengers died, but four survived: the pilot, a politician, a policeman and a prisoner. Carol Shaben's Into the Abyss describes their fight to make it through that frigid night alive.

After a Senate investigation in 1975, the CIA moved away from assassinations and returned to its original mandate, spying. But as New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti explains in his new book, the Sept. 11 attacks led the CIA back to the business of manhunting.

Comedian Marc Maron just released his newest book, Attempting Normal, and his TV show Maron premiered on IFC this month. He still found time to speak with NPR's Molly Hart about learning from heartbreak, not wanting to be alone, and stealing from Whole Foods.

Mary Louise Kelly used to cover national security for NPR, but lately she's turned her attention to fiction. Her new novel, Anonymous Sources, draws on Kelly's own reporting experiences, including things she couldn't say when she was a journalist.

From food scientists who study the human palate to maximize consumer bliss, to marketing campaigns that target teens to hook them for life on a brand, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss' new book goes inside the world of processed, packaged goods.

Journalist Lawrence Wright's new book, Going Clear, is a penetrating look at Scientology and its famous practitioners. The book centers on Crash and Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, who famously left the church over its support for an anti-gay marriage initiative in California.

Best American Poetry editor David Lehman has spent decades writing, reading, reviewing and anthologizing massive quantities of American poetry. But his latest project, compiling a retrospective collection of his own work, was new for him. He tells NPR that all his editorial experience wasn't terribly useful when it was time for self-curation.

On her Hyperbole and a Half blog, Allie Brosh writes stories about her life illustrated with a "very precise crudeness." Most are lighthearted — about her dog or her favorite grammatical mistake ("a lot" vs. "alot) — but her most popular posts have also been the most upsetting, about her crippling depression.

The Food Network was intended for cooks, but it wasn't run by them. In a new tell-all book, Allen Salkin takes an unsparing look at the channel's progression from struggling cable startup to global powerhouse, and the people who rose and fell along the way.