Welcome to the Monday Morning Book Buzz. Every week we take a look at some notable new books being released in the coming days.

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Notable New Releases for the week of August 15th:

• Bargains and Betrayals (13 to Life Series #3) by Shannon Delany — Locked away in a mental asylum, Jessie finds her situation to be even more dangerous than she feared. While she struggles to maintain her sanity and discover answers about the group that seems less and less like any legitimate government agency, Pietr fights to keep their relationship alive.

• Black, White, Other: In Search of Nina Armstrong by Joan Steinau Lester — As a biracial teen, Nina is accustomed to a life of varied hues—mocha-colored skin, ringed brown hair streaked with red, a darker brother, a black father, a white mother. When her parents decide to divorce, the rainbow of Nina’s existence is reduced to a much starker reality.

• Chain Reaction (Perfect Chemistry Series #3) by Simone Elkeles — Luis Fuentes is smart, funny, and has big dreams of becoming an astronaut. But when he falls for the wrong girl, Luis enters a dark world he’s never known, and just when he thinks he’s got life all figured out, learns some disturbing news about his family that destroys his positive outlook on life.

• Clubhouse Confidential: A Yankee Bat Boy’s Insider Tale of Wild Nights, Gambling, and Good Times with Modern Baseball’s Greatest Team by Luis Castillo — The explosive, inside story of Yankees players and managers by a bat boy who saw it all. For the first time ever, Luis “Squeegee” Castillo, bat boy and clubbie for the Yankees from 1998 to 2005, talks about working with Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Joe Girardi, Bernie Williams, Roger Clemens, Joe Torre, and many other modern-day Yankee greats.

• Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick — Mitnick was the most elusive computer break-in artist in history, spending  years skipping through cyberspace, always three steps ahead of the authorities and labeled unstoppable. This is a portrait of a visionary whose creativity, skills, and persistence forced the authorities to rethink the way they pursued him, inspiring ripples that brought permanent changes in the way people and companies protect their most sensitive information.

• Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn by Cathy N. Davidson — Using cutting-edge research on the brain, Davidson shows how “attention blindness” has produced one of our society’s greatest challenges: while we’ve all acknowledged the great changes of the digital age, most of us still toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century. Davidson introduces us to visionaries whose groundbreaking ideas will open the doors to new ways of working and learning.

• The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind — New York Times-bestselling author Goodkind returns to the lives of Richard Rahl and Kahlan Amnell in a compelling tale of a new and sinister threat to their world.

• The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency by Randall Kennedy — Kennedy—a Harvard law professor—offeres a keen and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency.

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place. Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

• The Sacred Acre: The Ed Thomas Story by Mark Tabb — When an F-5 tornado struck the town of Parkersburg, Iowa, killing eight people and destroying 250 homes and businesses, high school football coach Ed Thomas vows to return to the field for the school’s first home game of the season. One hundred days later, the home team scored a victory on the field they dubbed ‘The Sacred Acre,’ serving as a galvanizing point for the town to band together and rebuild.

• What Color Is Your Parachute? 2012: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard N. Bolles — For forty years, job-hunters and career-changers have been turning to the world’s most popular job-hunting book, seeking up-to-date information about the job-market and how to find meaningful work—even in the midst of challenging economic times. The 2012 edition has been vastly rewritten, because job-hunting has increasingly become a survival skill. Career expert Richard N. Bolles describes the five strategies most needed to survive, and explains how to incorporate social media tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter into your job search.