Morning Book
Group Recommendations for 2017
We Will Pick
10 Titles
Graphic Novel:
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the
topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told
through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as
rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic
relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When
it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial,
avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate
an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"―with predictable results―the
tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and
into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.While the particulars are
Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies―an anxious father who had relied heavily on
his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant
principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for
decades―the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role;
aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing
with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring
strangers to provide the most personal care.An amazing portrait of two lives at
their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about
Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent
as cartoonist and storyteller.
A NYT Notable Book, A Time Magazine “Best Comix of the Year”, Wise, funny,
and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing
up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic
strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to
fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the
Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The
intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the
great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a
childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country. Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of
daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and
public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned
whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the
history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely
personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a
reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we
carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it
introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall
in love.
In 1603, James VI of
Scotland ascended the English throne, becoming James I of England. London was
alive with an interest in all things Scottish, and Shakespeare turned to Scottish
history for material. He found a spectacle of violence and stories of traitors
advised by witches and wizards, echoing James’s belief in a connection between
treason and witchcraft. In
depicting a man who murders to become king, Macbethteases
us with huge questions. Is Macbeth tempted by fate, or by his or his wife’s
ambition? Why does their success turn to ashes? Like other plays, Macbeth speaks to each generation. Its story
was once seen as that of a hero who commits an evil act and pays an enormous
price. Recently, it has been applied to nations that overreach themselves and
to modern alienation. The line is blurred between Macbeth’s evil and his
opponents’ good, and there are new attitudes toward both witchcraft and gender.
Nonfiction:
A 2015 Stonewall
Honor Book A groundbreaking work of LGBT literature takes an honest look at the
life, love, and struggles of transgender teens. Author and photographer
Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults
and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and
respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender
preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages,
augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken. Each honest
discussion and disclosure, whether joyful or heartbreaking, is completely
different from the other because of family dynamics, living situations, gender,
and the transition these teens make in recognition of their true selves.
You know the
authors' names. You recognize the title. You've probably used this book
yourself. This is The Elements of Style, the classic style manual, now in a
fourth edition. A new Foreword by Roger Angell reminds readers that the advice
of Strunk & White is as valuable today as when it was first offered. This
book's unique tone, wit and charm have conveyed the principles of English style
to millions of readers. Use the fourth edition of "the little book"
to make a big impact with writing. "Buy it, study it,
enjoy it. It's as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility."
From one of Outside magazine’s “Literary All-Stars” comes
the thrilling true tale of the fastest boat ride ever, down the entire length
of the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon, during the legendary flood
of 1983. In
the spring of 1983, massive flooding along the length of the Colorado River
confronted a team of engineers at the Glen Canyon Dam with an unprecedented
emergency that may have resulted in the most catastrophic dam failure in
history. In the midst of this crisis, the decision to launch a small wooden
dory named “The Emerald Mile” at the head of the Grand Canyon, just fifteen
miles downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam, seemed not just odd, but downright
suicidal. The Emerald Mile, at one time
slated to be destroyed, was rescued and brought back to life by Kenton Grua,
the man at the oars, who intended to use this flood as a kind of hydraulic
sling-shot. The goal was to nail the all-time record for the fastest boat ever
propelled—by oar, by motor, or by the grace of God himself—down the entire
length of the Colorado River from Lee’s Ferry to Lake Mead. Did he survive?
Just barely. Now, this remarkable, epic feat unfolds here, in The Emerald Mile.
More than a century after the violence ended,
the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys still evokes images of snaggletoothed
rustics with a gun in one hand and a jug of moonshine whiskey in the other. The
recent dramatized series on the History Channel attempted to present a more
realistic view while regenerating interest in the affair. King, who served as
an advisor on that series, goes much further in this well-written, superbly
researched, but depressingly grim chronicle. The two families lived in relative
harmony for generations astride the Tug River, which forms the current boundary
between Kentucky and West Virginia. The families traded with each other and
even intermarried. The roots of the conflict, according to King, are found in
the political and military tensions generated by the Civil War. After the war,
the tensions quickly escalated into violence, which intensified as economic
factors, family loyalty, and outside interference complicated matters. King
paints an unrelentingly sad portrait of families locked in a tragic struggle
from which even moderating members seemed unable to withdraw. This is an
outstanding reexamination of a mythic but all too real and savage story.
Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes
from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, National
Magazine Award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She
expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about
climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today. But
in the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become
more dire, even as our understanding grows. Now, Kolbert returns to the
defining book of her career. She'll add a chapter bringing things up-to-date on
the existing text, plus she'll add three new chapters--on ocean acidification,
the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral--making it, again,
a must-read for our moment.
Future Shock is a book
written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970.
This book predicted the “electronic frontier” of the internet, Prozac, YouTube,
cloning, home-schooling, the self-induced paralysis of too many choices,
instant celebrities, and the end of the blue-collar manufacturing era.. In the
book, Toffler defines the term "future shock" as a certain
psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest
definition for the term is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of
time". The book, which became an international bestseller and has sold
over 6 million copies and has been widely translated. A documentary film based on
the book was released in 1972 with Orson Welles as on-screen narrator.
When naturalist and falconer Helen Macdonald
lost her beloved father, she “thought [her] world was ending.” Seems apropos,
then, that her journey from crippling grief to something resembling grace is on
the wings of another deadly bird of prey--the notoriously prickly, and
murderous, goshawk. In H Is
for Hawk, you will meet Mabel, not your typical bloodthirsty specimen, as
she is trained to hunt like the goshawks of yore. It is this brash, slightly
mad undertaking that wrenches Macdonald free from despair, and brings her to a
place where she can begin again. Doesn’t sound like your kind of thing? You’d
be surprised. Macdonald’s gorgeously wrought prose holds you in thrall from the
first page, and provides something akin to the escape, and salvation, that
nature provides her. In ‘Hawk’ you will also learn about the famed Arthurian
novelist T.H. White, a kindred soul to Macdonald in certain ways. One of the
things that endeared him to her was his “childish delight” with all things
wild, something you’ll be hard-pressed not to experience as soon as you tap
into this tome.
From two of our most
fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our era’s most
pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the
developing world. With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl
WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet
the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold
into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in
childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience,
Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and,
ultimately, hope. They show how a little help can transform the lives of women
and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and,
with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that
supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time
became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school,
earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS. Through these stories,
Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in
unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to
do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world,
the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the
population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they
emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that
process globally is not only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy
for fighting poverty. Deeply
felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half
the Sky is essential reading
for every global citizen.
In The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers from Smithsonian Books, historian
Thomas Fleming, author of The
Perils of Peace, offers a fresh look at the critical role of women
in the lives of Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison.
Fleming nimbly takes readers through a great deal of early American history, as
our founding fathers struggle to reconcile the private and public–and often
deal with a media every bit as gossip-seeking and inflammatory as ours today.
Imagine being trapped inside a Disney
movie and having to learn about life mostly from animated characters dancing
across a screen of color. A fantasy? A nightmare? This is the real-life story
of Owen Suskind, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind
and his wife, Cornelia. An autistic boy who couldn't speak for years, Owen
memorized dozens of Disney movies, turned them into a language to express love
and loss, kinship, brotherhood.The family was forced to become animated
characters, communicating with him in Disney dialogue and song; until they all
emerge, together, revealing how, in darkness, we all literally need stories to
survive.
Missoula:
Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by John Krakauer
p.416 ISBN: 978-0804170567
(2
Recommendations)
Missoula, Montana, is a typical college town, home to a highly
regarded state university whose beloved football team inspires a passionately
loyal fan base. Between January 2008 and May 2012, hundreds of students
reported sexual assaults to the local police. Few of the cases were properly
handled by either the university or local authorities. In this, Missoula
is also typical.
In these pages, acclaimed journalist Jon Krakauer investigates a
spate of campus rapes that occurred in Missoula over a four-year period. Taking
the town as a case study for a crime that is sadly prevalent throughout the
nation, Krakauer documents the experiences of five victims: their fear and
self-doubt in the aftermath; the skepticism directed at them by police,
prosecutors, and the public; their bravery in pushing forward and what it cost
them. These stories cut through abstract ideological debate about acquaintance
rape to demonstrate that it does not happen because women are sending mixed
signals or seeking attention. They are victims of a terrible crime, deserving
of fairness from our justice system. Rigorously researched, rendered in
incisive prose, Missoula stands as an essential call to
action.
A fascinating,
accessible introduction to Islam from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A
finalist for the GuardianFirst Book Award In No god but God, internationally acclaimed scholar
Reza Aslan explains Islam—the origins and evolution of the faith—in all its
beauty and complexity. This
updated edition addresses the events of the past decade, analyzing how they
have influenced Islam’s position in modern culture. Aslan explores what the
popular demonstrations pushing for democracy in the Middle East mean for the
future of Islam in the region, how the Internet and social media have affected
Islam’s evolution, and how the war on terror has altered the geopolitical
balance of power in the Middle East. He also provides an update on the
contemporary Muslim women’s movement, a discussion of the controversy over
veiling in Europe, an in-depth history of Jihadism, and a look at how Muslims
living in North America and Europe are changing the face of Islam. Timely and
persuasive, No god but God is an elegantly written account that
explains this magnificent yet misunderstood faith.
Starred Review. A fascinating and deeply
personal look at the lives of six defectors from the repressive totalitarian
regime of the Republic of North Korea, in which Demick, an L.A. Times staffer and former Seoul bureau chief,
draws out details of daily life that would not otherwise be known to Western
eyes because of the near-complete media censorship north of the arbitrary
border drawn after Japan's surrender ending WWII. As she reveals, ordinary life
in North Korea by the 1990s became a parade of horrors, where famine killed
millions, manufacturing and trade virtually ceased, salaries went unpaid,
medical care failed, and people became accustomed to stepping over dead bodies
lying in the streets. Her terrifying depiction of North Korea from the night
sky, where the entire area is blacked out from failure of the electrical grid,
contrasts vividly with the propaganda on the ground below urging the country's
worker-citizens to believe that they are the envy of the world. Thorough
interviews recall the tremendous difficulty of daily life under the regime, as
these six characters reveal the emotional and cultural turmoil that finally
caused each to make the dangerous choice to leave. As Demick weaves their
stories together with the hidden history of the country's descent into chaos,
she skillfully re-creates these captivating and moving personal journeys.
In The Quartet, Pulitzer
Prize–winning historian Joseph Ellis tells the unexpected story of America’s
second great founding and of the men most responsible—Alexander Hamilton,
George Washington, John Jay, and James Madison: why the thirteen
colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized
governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. These men, with
the help of Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, shaped the contours of
American history by diagnosing the systemic dysfunctions created by the
Articles of Confederation, manipulating the political process to force the
calling of the Constitutional Convention, conspiring to set the agenda in
Philadelphia, orchestrating the debate in the state ratifying conventions, and,
finally, drafting the Bill of Rights to assure state compliance with the
constitutional settlement, created the new republic. Ellis gives us a
dramatic portrait of one of the most crucial and misconstrued periods in
American history: the years between the end of the Revolution and the formation
of the federal government. The
Quartet unmasks a myth, and in its place presents an even more
compelling truth—one that lies at the heart of understanding the creation of
the United States of America.
Instant New York Times Bestseller “Clear, elegant...a whirlwind
tour of some of the biggest ideas in physics.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A startling and illustrative distillation of centuries of science.”—The
Economist “Lean, lucid and enchanting.”—New Scientist
All the beauty of modern physics in
seven short and enlightening lessons This
playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics briskly
explains Einstein's general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary
particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and
the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world. Carlo Rovelli, a
renowned theoretical physicist, is a delightfully poetic and philosophical
scientific guide. He takes us to the frontiers of our knowledge: to the most
minute reaches of the fabric of space, back to the origins of the cosmos, and
into the workings of our minds. The book celebrates the joy of
discovery. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the
ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli
writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”
In
1692, at the edge of the New England wilderness, an entire village went insane.
Everyone knows the story: The pre-teen daughters of the local minister are
mysteriously overcome by convulsions, their uncontrollable screaming sending
the superstitious community into fear and confusion. Lacking other explanations--adolescent
rebellion, maybe?--Satanic influence is suspected, and accusations of
witchcraft soon fly like enchanted broomsticks. The town is pitted against
itself, and by the time the hysteria fades, 19 men and women are hanged,
another pressed to death. But what actually happened? Pulitzer Prize-winner
Stacy Schiff's The
Witches: Salem, 1692 steps
back from more than three centuries of hyperbole and supposition, giving us our
most complete account yet. It can't have been easy: As Schiff points out early
in the book, the Puritans of Salem village were often assiduous diarists and
record-keepers, but first-hand accounts of the months of the hysteria are
mysteriously rare-and those that exist are mainly unreliable. To construct her
history, Schiff went through the looking glass, compiling seemingly every fact
available to create a histoically accurate narrative of events while placing it
within the cultural context of 17th century New England. The results are
obvious: this book is dense with facts and a large cast of characters, and
readers must commit. But Schiff keeps the proceedings rolling with wry humor
and an eye for the peculiar-yet-illuminating detail. This isn't The Crucible or Blair Witch;
it's light on sensationalism, but rife with real-life toil-and-trouble. The
truth, as always, is strange enough.
One of the most important and influential books written in the
past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a powerful, moving, and penetrating
examination of how we live . . . and a breathtaking meditation on how to live
better. Here is the book that transformed a generation: an unforgettable
narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by
a father and his young son. A story of love and fear -- of growth, discovery,
and acceptance -- that becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey
into life's fundamental questions, this uniquely exhilarating modern classic is
both touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of
existence . . . and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward.
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane
Ackerman p.384 ISBN:9780393333060 (Evening
Book Group read this book in 2009)
The New York Times bestseller:
a true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people
from Nazi hands. After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers
Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the
Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages. With animal names for these
"guests," and human names for the animals, it's no wonder that the
zoo's code name became "The House Under a Crazy Star." Best-selling
naturalist and acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines extensive research
and an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life
story―sharing Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," while
examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism. Winner of the 2008
Orion Award.
Biography/Memoir:
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America by William
Least Heat-Moon and William Least Heat Moon p.448 ISBN:
978-0316353298
First published in 1982, William Least
Heat-Moon's account of his journey along the back roads of the United States
(marked with the color blue on old highway maps) has become something of a
classic. When he loses his job and his wife on the same cold February day, he
is struck by inspiration: "A man who couldn't make things go right could
at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine.
Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity." Driving cross-country in a van named Ghost Dancing,
Heat-Moon (the name the Sioux give to the moon of midsummer nights) meets up
with all manner of folk, from a man in Grayville, Illinois, "whose cap
told me what fertilizer he used" to Scott Chisholm, "a Canadian
citizen ... [who] had lived in this country longer than in Canada and liked the
United States but wouldn't admit it for fear of having to pay off bets he made
years earlier when he first 'came over' that the U.S. is a place no Canadian
could ever love." Accompanied by his photographs, Heat-Moon's literary
portraits of ordinary Americans should not be merely read, but savored.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An unlikely
political star tells the inspiring story of the two-decade journey that taught
her how Washington really works—and really doesn't.
As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to
go to college and then become an elementary school teacher—an ambitious goal,
given her family's modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put
even that dream out of reach, but fifteen years later she was a distinguished
law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the
phone call that changed her life: Could she come to Washington, D.C. to help
advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws?
Thus began an impolite education into the bare-knuckled, often
dysfunctional ways of Washington. She fought for better bankruptcy laws for ten
years and lost. She tried to hold the federal government accountable during the
financial crisis but became a target of the big banks. She came up with the
idea for a new agency designed to protect consumers from predatory bankers and
was denied the opportunity to run it. Finally, at age 62, she decided to run
for elective office and won the most competitive—and watched—Senate race in the
country. In this passionate,
funny, rabble-rousing book, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and
nail for the middle class—and why she has become a hero to all those who
believe that America's government can and must do better for working families.
A gorgeous, moving
memoir of how one of America's most innovative and respected journalists found
his voice by coming to terms with a painful past New York Times columnist
Charles M. Blow mines the compelling poetry of the out-of-time African-American
Louisiana town where he grew up -- a place where slavery's legacy
felt astonishingly close, reverberating in the elders' stories and in the near-constant
wash of violence. Blow's
attachment to his mother -- a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass
knuckles in her glove box, a job plucking poultry at a nearby factory, a
soon-to-be-ex husband, and a love of newspapers and learning -- cannot protect
him from secret abuse at the hands of an older cousin. It's damage that
triggers years of anger and searing self-questioning. Finally,
Blow escapes to a nearby state university, where he joins a black fraternity
after a passage of brutal hazing, and then enters a world of racial and sexual
privilege that feels like everything he's ever needed and wanted, until he's
called upon, himself, to become the one perpetuating the shocking abuse.
A powerfully redemptive memoir that both fits
the tradition of African-American storytelling from the South, and gives it an
indelible new slant.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST
BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The New York Times, Washington Post, The
San Francisco, Chronicle, Vogue, NPR, Publishers
Weekly, BookPage A revealing and beautifully
written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann.
In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's
preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the
American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into
her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of
family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for:
"deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen,
clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial
complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal
son, and maybe even bloody murder." In lyrical prose and startlingly
revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history
that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the
fertile soil of her own life.
The
first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court,
Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and
intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a
Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring
testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in
oneself. Here is the story of a precarious childhood, with an alcoholic father
(who would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother, and of
the refuge a little girl took from the turmoil at home with her passionately
spirited paternal grandmother. But it was when she was diagnosed with juvenile
diabetes that the precocious Sonia recognized she must ultimately depend on
herself. She would learn to give herself the insulin shots she needed to
survive and soon imagined a path to a different life. With only television
characters for her professional role models, and little understanding of what
was involved, she determined to become a lawyer, a dream that would sustain her
on an unlikely course, from valedictorian of her high school class to the
highest honors at Princeton, Yale Law School, the New York County District
Attorney’s office, private practice, and appointment to the Federal District
Court before the age of forty. Along the way we see how she was shaped by her
invaluable mentors, a failed marriage, and the modern version of extended
family she has created from cherished friends and their children. Through her
still-astonished eyes, America’s infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in
this warm and honest book, destined to become a classic of self-invention and
self-discovery.
"I'm hardly the first person to notice
that there is only the present, constantly," writes Barton in this
extraordinary memoir. "The present moment is lived, and relieved; written,
and rewritten. Every previous version still inhabits it." What gives this
insight and the many others that follow uncommon power is the ever present fact
that Barton, a pioneering entrepreneur in the cable television industry, was
dying of stomach cancer as he wrote them. Alternating chapters with mystery
writer Shames (The Naked Detective), Barton, who died in September, 2002, at
51, offers us-and his wife and three children-his final rewrite of a life
filled with the optimism and idealism of his generation. Barton tells us how it
feels to die while the party is still raging, offering us glimpses of a life
that packed in everything from being a professional ski bum to working as an
aide to New York State governor Hugh Carey to huge success as a visionary
businessman (Barton helped found MTV, among other achievements). Readers will
be knocked out by his honesty and his utter lack of self-pity or
sentimentality. The "gift" of terminal cancer, according to Barton,
is that "it doesn't kill you all at once. It gives you time to set your
house in order.... It gives you time to think, to sum things up." Setting
his house in order included taking his family for a balloon ride at dawn.
Summing up what matters, he reminds us that it is the large and small moments
of pleasure and love, those very present moments, that redeem us in the end.
This is a very beautiful book about how to live.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The
New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The
Seattle Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Bloomberg Businessweek In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of American
Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an
extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas
Jefferson: The Art of Power gives
us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being
forever engaged in the wars of his era. Philosophers think; politicians maneuver.
Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often
simultaneously. Such is the art of power. Thomas
Jefferson hated confrontation, and yet his understanding of power and of human
nature enabled him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his
mistakes, and to prevail. Passionate about many things—women, his family,
books, science, architecture, gardens, friends, Monticello, and Paris—Jefferson
loved America most, and he strove over and over again, despite fierce
opposition, to realize his vision: the creation, survival, and success of
popular government in America. Jon Meacham lets us see Jefferson’s world as
Jefferson himself saw it, and to appreciate how Jefferson found the means to
endure and win in the face of rife partisan division, economic uncertainty, and
external threat. Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France,
as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents
Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and
perhaps in all of American history. The
father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the
Lewis and Clark expedition, and of the settling of the West, Jefferson
recognized that the genius of humanity—and the genius of the new nation—lay in
the possibility of progress, of discovering the undiscovered and seeking the
unknown. From the writing of the Declaration of Independence to elegant dinners
in Paris and in the President’s House; from political maneuverings in the boardinghouses
and legislative halls of Philadelphia and New York to the infant capital on the
Potomac; from his complicated life at Monticello, his breathtaking house and
plantation in Virginia, to the creation of the University of Virginia,
Jefferson was central to the age. Here too is the personal Jefferson, a man of
appetite, sensuality, and passion. The
Jefferson story resonates today not least because he led his nation through
ferocious partisanship and cultural warfare amid economic change and external
threats, and also because he embodies an eternal drama, the struggle of the
leadership of a nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding
world.
Classics:
A masterpiece of
Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors In his journal, Nobel
Prize winner John Steinbeck called East
of Eden "the first
book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set
in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often
brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and
the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and
the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The
masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East
of Eden is a work in which
Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring
themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous
consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia
Kazan introducing James Dean and read by thousands as the book that brought
Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American
culture for over half a century.
The
Old Man and the Sea,
an apparently simple fable, represents the mature Hemingway at his best. He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature soon after its publication, and half a century
later it is still one of his most read books.
One of the most
controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and
most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and
miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound
jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth,
transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the
initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the
imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.
Milkman Dead was
born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a
vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to
fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the
coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As
she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s
origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars
and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
‘Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And
if not, is he a devil?’Set on the bleak moors of Yorkshire, Lockwood is forced
to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights, the home of his new landlord, Heathcliff.
The intense and wildly passionate Heathcliff tells the story of his life, his
all-consuming love for Catherine Earnshaw and the doomed outcome of that
relationship, leading to his revenge. Poetic, complex and grand in its scope,
Emily Brontë's masterpiece is considered one of the most unique gothic novels
of its time.
Science
Fiction:
Six days ago,
astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.
Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die
there. After a dust storm nearly kills
him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself
stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s
alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before
a rescue could arrive. Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to
death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human
error" are much more likely to kill him first. But
Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering
skills—and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one
seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be
enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?
Fiction:
Hayat Shah is a
young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball,
and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani
heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things
he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes. Mina is Hayat's mother's
oldest friend from Pakistan. She is independent, beautiful and intelligent, and
arrives on the Shah's doorstep when her disastrous marriage in Pakistan
disintegrates. Even Hayat's skeptical father can't deny the liveliness and
happiness that accompanies Mina into their home. Her deep spirituality brings
the family's Muslim faith to life in a way that resonates with Hayat as nothing
has before. Studying the Quran by Mina's side and basking in the glow of her
attention, he feels an entirely new purpose mingled with a growing infatuation
for his teacher. When Mina meets and
begins dating a man, Hayat is confused by his feelings of betrayal. His growing
passions, both spiritual and romantic, force him to question all that he has
come to believe is true. Just as Mina finds happiness, Hayat is compelled to
act -- with devastating consequences for all those he loves most. American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally
forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life. Ayad Akhtar was
raised in the Midwest himself, and through Hayat Shah he shows readers vividly
the powerful forces at work on young men and women growing up Muslim in
America. This is an intimate, personal first novel that will stay with readers
long after they turn the last page.
One of The New
York Times's Ten Best Books of the Year, Winner of the National Book
Critics Circle Award for Fiction, An NPR "Great Reads" Book, a Chicago
Tribune Best Book, a Washington Post Notable, Book,
a Seattle TimesBest Book, an Entertainment Weekly Top
Fiction Book, aNewsday Top 10 Book, and a Goodreads Best
of the Year pick. A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled
Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where
despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be
black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but
with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous,
undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly
democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their
homeland.
From internationally bestselling author Tracy
Chevalier, a riveting drama of a pioneer family on the American frontier 1838: James
and Sadie Goodenough have settled where their wagon got stuck – in the muddy,
stagnant swamps of northwest Ohio. They and their five children work
relentlessly to tame their patch of land, buying saplings from a local tree man
known as John Appleseed so they can cultivate the fifty apple trees required to
stake their claim on the property. But the orchard they plant sows the seeds of
a long battle. James loves the apples, reminders of an easier life back in
Connecticut; while Sadie prefers the applejack they make, an alcoholic refuge
from brutal frontier life. 1853: Their youngest child Robert is wandering
through Gold Rush California. Restless and haunted by the broken family he left
behind, he has made his way alone across the country. In the redwood and giant
sequoia groves he finds some solace, collecting seeds for a naturalist who
sells plants from the new world to the gardeners of England. But you can run
only so far, even in America, and when Robert’s past makes an unexpected
appearance he must decide whether to strike out again or stake his own claim to
a home at last. Chevalier tells a fierce, beautifully crafted story in At
the Edge of the Orchard, her most graceful and richly imagined work yet.
"As Simon, a lonely research librarian, searches
frantically for the key to a curse that might be killing the women in his
family, he learns strange and fascinating secrets about their past. A tale full
of magic and family mystery, The
Book of Speculationwill keep you up all night
reading."―Isaac Fitzgerald, BuzzFeed Simon Watson, a young librarian,
lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound.
His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who made her living by
holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger
sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot cards for a traveling
carnival. One June day, an old book arrives on Simon's doorstep, sent by an
antiquarian bookseller who purchased it on speculation. Fragile and water
damaged, the book is a log from the owner of a traveling carnival in the 1700s,
who reports strange and magical things, including the drowning death of a
circus mermaid. Since then, generations of "mermaids" in Simon's
family have drowned--always on July 24, which is only weeks away. As his friend
Alice looks on with alarm, Simon becomes increasingly worried about his sister.
Could there be a curse on Simon's family? What does it have to do with the
book, and can he get to the heart of the mystery in time to save Enola? In the
tradition of Sara Gruen's Water
for Elephants, Erin
Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, The Book of Speculation--with two-color illustrations by the author--is Erika
Swyler's moving debut novel about the power of books, family, and magic.
In captivating
prose, Diane Les Becquets tells the story of one woman missing in the Colorado
wilderness and another bent on discovering the missing woman’s whereabouts, in
an unforgettably moving and thrilling literary debut. It is the last weekend of
the season for Amy Raye Latour to get away. Driven to spend days alone in the
wilderness, Amy Raye, mother of two, is compelled by the quiet and the rush of
nature. But this time, her venture into a remote area presents a different set
of dangers than Amy Raye has planned for and she finds herself on the verge of
the precarious edge that she’s flirted with her entire life. When Amy Raye doesn’t return to camp, ranger Pru
Hathaway and her dog respond to the missing person’s call. After an unexpected
snowfall and few leads, the operation turns into a search and recovery. Pru,
though, is not resigned to that. The more she learns about the woman for whom
she is searching, and about Amy Raye’s past, the more she suspects that Amy
Raye might yet be alive. Pru’s own search becomes an obsession for a woman
whose life is just as mysterious as the clues she has left behind. As the novel follows Amy Raye and Pru in alternating
threads,Breaking Wild assumes
the white-knuckled pace of a thriller laying bare Amy Raye’s ultimate reckoning
with the secrets of her life, and Pru’s dogged pursuit of the woman who,
against all odds, she believes she can find.
In the spring of 1776, Isabel, a teenage slave,
and her sister, Ruth, are sold to ruthless, wealthy loyalists in Manhattan.
While running errands, Isabel is approached by rebels, who promise her freedom
(and help finding Ruth, who has been sent away) if she agrees to spy. Using the
invisibility her slave status brings, Isabel lurks and listens as Master
Lockton and his fellow Tories plot to crush the rebel uprisings, but the
incendiary proof that she carries to the rebel camp doesn’t bring the desired
rewards. Like the central character in M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing duet,
Isabel finds that both patriots and loyalists support slavery. The specifics of
Isabel’s daily drudgery may slow some readers, but the catalogue of chores
communicates the brutal rhythms of unrelenting toil, helping readers to imagine
vividly the realities of Isabel’s life. The story’s perspective creates
effective contrasts. Overwhelmed with domestic concerns, Isabel and indeed all
the women in the household learn about the war from their marginalized
position: they listen at doors to rooms where they are excluded, and they
collect gossip from the streets. Anderson explores elemental themes of power
(“She can do anything. I can do nothing,” Isabel realizes about her sadistic
owner), freedom, and the sources of human strength in this searing, fascinating
story. The extensive back matter includes a documented section that addresses
many questions about history that readers will want to discuss.
Descent: A Novel by Tim Johnston p.400 ISBN:978-1616204778
The
Rocky Mountains have cast their
spell over the Courtlands, who are taking a family vacation before their
daughter leaves for college. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go
out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as
terrifying as they are majestic. Written with a precision that captures every
emotion, every moment of fear, as each member of the family searches for
answers, Descent races like an avalanche toward its heart-pounding conclusion.
“Read this astonishing novel . . . The magic of his prose equals the horror of
Johnston’s story.” —The Washington Post “A compelling thriller that is both
creepy and literary . . . Descent is not just a mystery. It is an emotional
story of evil, fear, acceptance and irony.”—The Denver Post “What makes the
novel unforgettable is its sense of character, its deliberate, unadorned prose
and Johnston’s unflinching exploration of human endurance, physical and
psychological.” —Miami Herald “A super-charged, addictive read.” —The
Missourian “An original and psychologically deep thriller.” —Outside magazine
“Outstanding . . . The days when you had to choose between a great story and a
great piece of writing? Gone.” —Esquire “[A] dazzling debut . . . Exquisitely
crafted.” —The Dallas Morning News “Incredibly powerful, richly atmospheric.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune “ [An] engulfing thriller-cum-western.” —The New York
Times Book Review “Brilliant . . . As gripping as any Everest expedition.”
—Peter Heller
When Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her
Philadelphia home to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, she
doesn’t believe him. Her grandson and her daughter, Yuko, perished nearly forty
years ago during the bombing of Nagasaki. But the man carries with him a
collection of sealed private letters that open a Pandora’s Box of family
secrets Ama had sworn to leave behind when she fled Japan. She is forced to
confront her memories of the years before the war: of the daughter she tried
too hard to protect and the love affair that would drive them apart, and even
further back, to the long, sake-pouring nights at a hostess bar where Ama first
learned that a soft heart was a dangerous thing. Will Ama allow herself to
believe in a miracle?
When Ibby Bell’s
father dies unexpectedly in the summer of 1964, her mother unceremoniously
deposits Ibby with her eccentric grandmother Fannie and throws in her father’s
urn for good measure. Fannie’s New Orleans house is like no place Ibby has ever
been—and Fannie, who has a tendency to end up in the local asylum—is like no
one she has ever met. Fortunately, Fannie’s black cook, Queenie, and her
smart-mouthed daughter, Dollbaby, take it upon themselves to initiate Ibby into
the ways of the South, both its grand traditions and its darkest secrets. For Fannie’s own family
history is fraught with tragedy, hidden behind the closed rooms in her ornate
Uptown mansion. It will take Ibby’s arrival to begin to unlock the mysteries
there. And it will take Queenie and Dollbaby’s hard-won wisdom to show Ibby
that family can sometimes be found in the least expected places. For fans of Saving
CeeCee Honeycutt and The Help, Dollbabybrings to life the
charm and unrest of 1960s New Orleans through the eyes of a young girl learning
to understand race for the first time. By
turns uplifting and funny, poignant and full of verve, Dollbabyis a novel readers will
take to their hearts.
The day war is
declared, Mary North leaves finishing school unfinished, goes straight to the
War Office, and signs up. Tom
Shaw decides to ignore the war—until he learns his roommate Alistair Heath has unexpectedly
enlisted. Then the conflict can no longer be avoided. Young, bright, and brave, Mary is certain she’d be a
marvelous spy. When she is—bewilderingly—made a teacher, she finds herself
defying prejudice to protect the children her country would rather forget.
Tom, meanwhile, finds that he will do anything
for Mary. And when Mary and Alistair
meet, it is love, as well as war, that will test them in ways they could not
have imagined, entangling three lives in violence and passion, friendship and
deception, inexorably shaping their hopes and dreams. Set in London during the years of 1939–1942, when
citizens had slim hope of survival, much less victory; and on the strategic
island of Malta, which was daily devastated by the Axis barrage, Everyone Brave is Forgiven features little-known history and
a perfect wartime love story inspired by the real-life love letters between
Chris Cleave’s grandparents. This dazzling novel dares us to understand that,
against the great theater of world events, it is the intimate losses, the small
battles, the daily human triumphs that change us most.
The opening scene of Anderson's ambitious novel
about the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged Philadelphia in the late 18th
century shows a hint of the gallows humor and insight of her previous novel,
Speak. Sixteen-year-old Matilda "Mattie" Cook awakens in the
sweltering summer heat on August 16th, 1793, to her mother's command to rouse
and with a mosquito buzzing in her ear. She shoos her cat from her mother's
favorite quilt and thinks to herself, "I had just saved her precious quilt
from disaster, but would she appreciate it? Of course not." Mattie's wit
again shines through several chapters later during a visit to her wealthy
neighbors' house, the Ogilvies. Having refused to let their serving girl,
Eliza, coif her for the occasion, Mattie regrets it as soon as she lays eyes on
the Ogilvie sisters, who wear matching bombazine gowns, curly hair piled high
on their heads ("I should have let Eliza curl my hair. Dash it all").
But thereafter, Mattie's character development, as well as those of her
grandfather and widowed mother, takes a back seat to the historical details of
Philadelphia and environs. Extremely well researched, Anderson's novel paints a
vivid picture of the seedy waterfront, the devastation the disease wreaks on a
once thriving city, and the bitterness of neighbor toward neighbor as those
suspected of infection are physically cast aside. However, these larger scale
views take precedence over the kind of intimate scenes that Anderson crafted so
masterfully in Speak. Scenes of historical significance, such as George
Washington returning to Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, to signify the
end of the epidemic are delivered with more impact than scenes of great
personal significance to Mattie.
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael
Chabon p.131 ISBN:9780060777104 (read by Evening Book Group
in 2010)
Retired to the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year-old man,
rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping
than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old
and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African
gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers
the bird spews out -- a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank
accounts? Or do they hold a significance both more prosaic and far more
sinister? Though the solution may be beyond even the reach of the once-famous
sleuth, the true story of the boy and his parrot is subtly revealed in a
wrenching resolution.
In the opening pages
of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel,Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,
Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the
gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the
new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese
families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during
World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol. This simple act takes old
Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world
is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed
with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While
“scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids
ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid
the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of
friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of
their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the
evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope
that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.Forty
years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the
hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s
belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure.
Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain
the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap
between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him
confront the choices he made many years ago. Set
during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of
commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an
unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the
human heart.
For the past five
years, Hayley Kincaid and her father, Andy, have been on the road, never
staying long in one place as he struggles to escape the demons that have
tortured him since his return from Iraq. Now they are back in the town where he
grew up so Hayley can attend school. Perhaps, for the first time, Hayley can
have a normal life, put aside her own painful memories, even have a
relationship with Finn, the hot guy who obviously likes her but is hiding
secrets of his own. Will being back home help Andy’s PTSD, or will his terrible
memories drag him to the edge of hell, and drugs push him over?The
Impossible Knife of Memory is
Laurie Halse Anderson at her finest: compelling, surprising, and impossible to
put down.
From
a land famous for storytelling comes an "absolute masterpiece"* -- an
epic novel of Ireland that captures the intimate, passionate texture of the
Irish spirit. One wintry evening in 1951, an itinerant storyteller -- a
Seanchai, the very last practitioner of a fabled tradition extending back
hundreds of years -- arrives unannounced at a house in the Irish countryside.
In exchange for a bed and a warm meal, he invites his hosts and some of their
neighbors to join him by the fireside, and begins to tell formative stories of
Ireland's history. One of his listeners, a nine-year-old boy, grows so
entranced by the story-telling that, when the old man leaves abruptly under
mysterious circumstances, the boy devotes himself to finding him again. Ronan's
search for the Storyteller becomes both a journey of self-discovery and an
immersion into the sometimes-conflicting histories of his native land. As the
long-unspoken secrets of his own family begin to reveal themselves, he becomes
increasingly single-minded in pursuit of the old man, who he fears may already
be dead. But Ronan's personal path also leads him deeper and deeper into the
history and mythology of Ireland itself, in all its drama, intrigue, and
heroic. Ireland travels through the centuries, interweaving Ronan's
quest for the Storyteller with a richly evocative unfolding of the great
moments in Irish history, ranging from the savage grip of the Ice Age to the
green andtroubled land of tourist brochures and political unrest. Along the
way, we meet foolish kings and innocent monks, fabled saints and great works of
art, shrewd Normanraiders, strong tribal leaders, poets, politicians, and
lovers. Each illuminates the magic of Ireland and the eternal connection of its
people to the land.A sweeping novel of huge ambition, Ireland is the
beautifully told story of a remarkable nation. From the epic sweep of its
telling to the precision of its characters -- great and small, tragic and comic
-- it rings with the truth of a writer passionate about his country and in full
command of his craft.
When Craig Gilner
gets into Manhattan's exclusive Executive Pre-Professional High School, it's
the culmination of a year of intense focus and grinding hard work. Now he has
to actually attend the school with other equally high-performing students.
Oops. And so the unraveling begins, with a depressed Craig spending more time
smoking dope and throwing up than studying. Although medication helps his
depression, he decides to stop taking it. Soon after, he makes another
decision: to commit suicide. A call to a suicide hotline gets him into a
psychiatric hospital, where he is finally able to face his demons. Readers must
suspend their disbelief big time for this to work. Because the teen psych ward
is undergoing renovations, Craig is put in with adults, which provides the
narrative with an eccentric cast of characters rather than just similarly
screwed-up teens. And in his five days in the hospital, Craig manages to cure
his eating disorder, find a girlfriend, realize he wants to be an artist, and
solve many of his co-residents' problems, including locating Egyptian music for
his roommate, who won't get out of bed. What could he do if he wasn't
depressed! But what's terrific about the book is Craig's voice--intimate, real,
funny, ironic, and one kids will come closer to hear. Many readers will be
familiar with the drugs, the sexual experimentation, the language, and, yes,
the depression--or they'll know someone who is. This book offers hope in a
package that readers will find enticing, and that's the gift it offers.
A beautiful, rich
and sensuous historical novel, John
Saturnall’s Feast tells the
story of a young orphan who becomes a kitchen boy at a manor house, and rises
through the ranks to become the greatest Cook of his generation. It is a story
of food, star-crossed lovers, ancient myths and one boy’s rise from outcast to
hero. Orphaned
when his mother dies of starvation, having been cast out of her village as a
witch, John is taken in at the kitchens at Buckland Manor, where he quickly
rises from kitchen-boy to Cook, and is known for his uniquely keen palate and
natural cooking ability. However, he quickly gets on the wrong side of Lady
Lucretia, the aristocratic daughter of the Lord of the Manor. In order to
inherit the estate, Lucretia must wed, but her fiancé is an arrogant buffoon.
When Lucretia takes on a vow of hunger until her father calls off her
engagement to her insipid husband-to-be, it falls to John to try to cook her
delicious foods that might tempt her to break her fast. Reminiscent of Wolf
Hall and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,John
Saturnall’s Feast is a
brilliant work and a delight for all the senses.
One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, The
Known World is a daring and ambitious work by Pulitzer Prize winner
Edward P. Jones.The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend,
a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William
Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain
he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline.
But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the
estate's order, and chaos ensues. Jones has woven a footnote of history into an
epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all its moral complexities.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR, The New York Times • The Washington
Post • The Wall Street
Journal • NPR • Vanity Fair • Vogue • Minneapolis
Star Tribune • St. Louis
Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • O, The Oprah
Magazine • Slate • Newsday • Buzzfeed • The Economist • Newsweek • People • Kansas City Star • Shelf
Awareness • Time Out New York • Huffington Post • Book Riot •
Refinery29 • Bookpage • Publishers
Weekly • Kirkus, WINNER OF THE
KIRKUS PRIZE, A MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST, A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke,
adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New
York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged
by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held
together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by
an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful
depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning
novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for
ourselves.
An unflinching,
darkly funny, and deeply moving story of a boy, his seriously ill mother, and
an unexpected monstrous visitor.
At seven minutes past midnight, thirteen-year-old
Conor wakes to find a monster outside his bedroom window. But it isn't the
monster Conor's been expecting-- he's been expecting the one from his
nightmare, the nightmare he's had nearly every night since his mother started
her treatments. The monster in his backyard is different. It's ancient. And
wild. And it wants something from Conor. Something terrible and dangerous. It
wants the truth. From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd--
whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself--
Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and
monsters both real and imagined. A masterpiece about life
and loss that will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned. There's no denying it: this is one profoundly sad
story. But it's also wise, darkly funny and brave, told in spare sentences,
punctuated with fantastic images and stirring silences. Past his sorrow, fright
and rage, Conor ultimately lands in a place - an imperfect one, of course -
where healing can begin. A MONSTER CALLS is a gift from a generous storyteller
and a potent piece of art. —The New York
Times. A nuanced tale that draws on
elements of classic horror stories to delve into the terrifying terrain of
loss. . . . Ness brilliantly captures Conor's horrifying emotional ride as his
mother's inevitable death approaches. In an ideal pairing of text and
illustration, the novel is liberally laced with Kay's evocatively textured
pen-and-ink artwork, which surrounds the text, softly caressing it in quiet
moments and in others rushing toward the viewer with a nightmarish intensity.A
poignant tribute to the life and talent of Siobhan Dowd and an astonishing
exploration of fear. —Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
Marie Bostwick
weaves the unforgettable story of four very different women whose paths cross,
changing their lives forever . . . It's a long way from Fort Worth, Texas, to
New Bern, Connecticut, yet it only takes a day in the charming Yankee town to
make Evelyn Dixon realize she's found her new home. The abrupt end of her
marriage was Evelyn's wake-up call to get busy chasing her dream of opening a
quilt shop. Finding a storefront is easy enough; starting a new life isn't.
Little does Evelyn imagine it will bring a trio like Abigail Burgess, her niece
Liza, and Margot Matthews through her door . . . Troubled and angry after her
mother's death, Liza threatens to embarrass her Aunt Abigail all over town
unless she joins her for quilting classes. A victim of downsizing at the peak
of her career, Margot hopes an event hosted by the quilt shop could be a great
chance to network-and keep from dying of boredom . . . As they stitch their
unique creations, Evelyn, Abigail, Liza, and Margot form a sisterhood they
never sought-but one that they'll be grateful for when the unexpected provides
a poignant reminder of the single thread that binds us all . . . Praise for the
Novels of Marie Bostwick Fields of Gold "A touching story"-Patricia
Gaffney "Gripping, heartwarming"-Dorothy Garlock On Wings of the Morning
"Will set your heart to soaring" -Debbie Macomber
"Speak up for yourself--we want to know what you have to
say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High,
Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She
is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling
the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time
passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking
altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on
an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that
terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends
Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun
when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights
back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In
Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a
bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school.
She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the
importance of speaking up for oneself.Speak was a 1999 National
Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A superb love story from Anna
Quindlen, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Rise and Shine, Blessings,and A Short Guide to a Happy Life Still Life with Bread
Crumbs begins with an
imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and
knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an
unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance
shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she
discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees
through a camera lens is not all there is to life. Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very
funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life
of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a
story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever
imagined. “There comes a moment in every novelist’s career when she . .
. ventures into new territory, breaking free into a marriage of tone and style,
of plot and characterization, that’s utterly her own. Anna Quindlen’s marvelous
romantic comedy of manners is just such a book. . . . Taken as a whole,
Quindlen’s writings represent a generous and moving interrogation of women’s
experience across the lines of class and race. [Still Life with Bread Crumbs]
proves all the more moving because of its light, sophisticated humor.
Quindlen’s least overtly political novel, it packs perhaps the most serious
punch. . . . Quindlen has delivered a novel that will have staying power all its own.”—The
New York Times Book Review
The bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand returns
with a breathtaking novel of love on the eve of World War I that reaches far
beyond the small English town in which it is set. East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s
brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so
beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt
Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye.
Agatha’s husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure
that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won’t come to anything. And
Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built
reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin
master. When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of
books, it is clear she is significantly more freethinking—and attractive—than
anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of
her beloved father, who has left her penniless, Beatrice simply wants to be
left alone to pursue her teaching and writing. But just as Beatrice comes alive
to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the colorful characters who populate
Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For despite Agatha’s reassurances, the
unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of progress, and the old ways, will be
tested as this small Sussex town and its inhabitants go to war.
An irresistible,
deftly observed novel from the New
York Times-bestselling author of Modern
Lovers— about the secrets, joys, and jealousies that rise to
the surface over the course of an American family’s two-week stay in Mallorca. For the Posts, a two-week
trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends
is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary,
and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island,
its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape
from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according
to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new
humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds
are exacerbated. This is a story of the
sides of ourselves that we choose to show and those we try to conceal, of the
ways we tear each other down and build each other up again, and the bonds that
ultimately hold us together. With wry humor and tremendous heart, Emma Straub
delivers a richly satisfying story of a family in the midst of a maelstrom of
change, emerging irrevocably altered yet whole.
A New York Times Notable Book • An Entertainment Weekly “Must List” Pick • “Prepare to be
dazzled.”—Paula McLain • “Quite simply astonishing.”—Sarah Blake What if
Virginia Woolf’s sister had kept a diary? For fans of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank comes a spellbinding new story of the
inseparable bond between Virginia and her sister, the gifted painter Vanessa
Bell, and the real-life betrayal that threatened to destroy their family.
Hailed byThe New York Times Book Review as “an uncanny success” and based on
meticulous research, this stunning novel illuminates a little-known episode in
the celebrated sisters’ glittering bohemian youth among the legendary
Bloomsbury Group. Find your next book
club pick, read special features, and more. Join the Random House Reader’s
Circle. London,
1905: The city is alight with change, and the Stephen siblings are at the
forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian are leaving behind their
childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury.
There they bring together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous artistic
friends who will grow into legend and come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group.
And at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa,
the painter, and Virginia, the writer. Each
member of the group will go on to earn fame and success, but so far Vanessa
Bell has never sold a painting. Virginia Woolf’s book review has just been
turned down by TheTimes.
Lytton Strachey has not published anything. E. M. Forster has finished his
first novel but does not like the title. Leonard Woolf is still a civil servant
in Ceylon, and John Maynard Keynes is looking for a job. Together, this
sparkling coterie of artists and intellectuals throw away convention and
embrace the wild freedom of being young, single bohemians in London. But the landscape shifts when Vanessa unexpectedly
falls in love and her sister feels dangerously abandoned. Eerily possessive,
charismatic, manipulative, and brilliant, Virginia has always lived in the
shelter of Vanessa’s constant attention and encouragement. Without it, she
careens toward self-destruction and madness. As tragedy and betrayal threaten
to destroy the family, Vanessa must decide if it is finally time to protect her
own happiness above all else. The work of
exciting young newcomer Priya Parmar, Vanessa
and Her Sister exquisitely
captures the champagne-heady days of prewar London and the extraordinary lives
of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.
We Never Asked for Wings: A Novel by Vanessa
Diffenbaugh p. 336 ISBN:978-0553392333
From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Language of Flowers comes her much-anticipated new novel
about young love, hard choices, and hope against all odds. For fourteen years, Letty
Espinosa has worked three jobs around San Francisco to make ends meet while her
mother raised her children—Alex, fifteen, and Luna, just six—in their tiny
apartment on a forgotten spit of wetlands near the bay. But now Letty’s parents
are returning to Mexico, and Letty must step up and become a mother for the
first time in her life. Navigating this
new terrain is challenging for Letty, especially as Luna desperately misses her
grandparents and Alex, who is falling in love with a classmate, is unwilling to
give his mother a chance. Letty comes up with a plan to help the family escape
the dangerous neighborhood and heartbreaking injustice that have marked their
lives, but one wrong move could jeopardize everything she’s worked for and her
family’s fragile hopes for the future. Vanessa
Diffenbaugh blends gorgeous prose with compelling themes of motherhood,
undocumented immigration, and the American Dream in a powerful and prescient
story about family.
Sendker’s follow-up to The Art of Hearing
Heartbeats (2012) picks up the story a decade after Julia Win traveled to
Burma, seeking her missing father. Now a high-powered attorney mourning the end
of her engagement, Julia has started hearing the voice of a bereft, heartbroken
woman in her head. This voice propels Julia back to Burma, where she is
reunited with her half brother, U Ba, who believes the voice belongs to Nu Nu,
a woman who recently dropped dead while out for a walk with her sister. U Ba
and Julia seek out Nu Nu’s sister, who tells them the sad tale of Nu Nu’s life:
her happiness with her husband; the birth of her longed-for first son, Ko Gyi;
and the arrival of her second son, Thar Thar, whom Nu Nu couldn’t bring herself
to love. Tragedy compelled Thar Thar to step up and take care of his mother and
brother, until Nu Nu was forced to make a fateful choice that ripped her family
apart. An absorbing, moving sequel that likely portends a third entry.
Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught
critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens
to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie
Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this
invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal.
Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become
agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara
Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite
literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing
child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no
problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride
to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every
effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic
faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the
former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of
modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing
the comedy of daily existence.
Problem-novel fodder becomes a devastating
portrait of the extremes of self-deception in this brutal and poetic
deconstruction of how one girl stealthily vanishes into the depths of anorexia.
Lia has been down this road before: her competitive relationship with her best
friend, Cassie, once landed them both in the hospital, but now not even
Cassie’s death can eradicate Lia’s disgust of the “fat cows” who scrutinize her
body all day long. Her father (no, “Professor Overbrook”) and her mother (no,
“Dr. Marrigan”) are frighteningly easy to dupe—tinkering and sabotage inflate
her scale readings as her weight secretly plunges: 101.30, 97.00, 89.00.
Anderson illuminates a dark but utterly realistic world where every piece of
food is just a caloric number, inner voices scream “NO!” with each swallow, and
self-worth is too easily gauged: “I am the space between my thighs, daylight
shining through.” Struck-through sentences, incessant repetition, and even
blank pages make Lia’s inner turmoil tactile, and gruesome details of her
decomposition will test sensitive readers. But this is necessary reading for
anyone caught in a feedback loop of weight loss as well as any parent
unfamiliar with the scripts teens recite so easily to escape from such deadly
situations.
Not Enough
Copies in New Hampshire Library System:
A provocative history that reveals how guns―not abortion, race,
or religion―are at the heart of America's cultural divide.Gunfight is
a timely work examining America’s four-centuries-long political battle over gun
control and the right to bear arms. In this definitive and provocative history,
Adam Winkler reveals how guns―not abortion, race, or religion―are at the heart
of America’s cultural divide. Using the landmark 2008 case District of
Columbia v. Heller―which invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation’s
capital―as a springboard, Winkler brilliantly weaves together the dramatic
stories of gun-rights advocates and gun-control lobbyists, providing often
unexpected insights into the venomous debate that now cleaves our nation. 20
illustrations
In this engaging memoir, an American writer
living in Paris recounts his experiences in a piano shop tucked into an
out-of-the way street on the rive gauche. Because the elderly proprietor
refuses to admit strangers to the atelier where he repairs, rebuilds and sells
used pianos to select customers, Carhart does not at first get in. But with an
introduction from another client and the help of the owner's younger assistant
and heir apparent, Luc, Carhart is finally welcomed into a magical space crowded
with pianos of all makes and vintages. Soon he becomes one of the favored
insiders who stop by nearly every day to gossip and talk about pianos with Luc.
Luc's love of pianos is so infectious that Carhart's own childhood passion for
the instrument is rekindled. He starts to take lessons again and buys a piano
for his small apartment, a purchase that takes some time, for Luc, who regards
a piano as a member of a family, prides himself on finding instruments
compatible with his customers. Caught up in Luc's zeal, Carhart immerses
himself in the history and mechanics of the piano, and he includes chapters on
the craft of piano making, the instrument's development over the centuries and
the fine points of tuning. In his renewed fascination, he reflects on piano teachers,
those of his childhood as well as several renowned teachers of today. Carhart
conveys his affection for Luc, the atelier and the piano with such enthusiasm
that readers might be inspired to return to their own childhood instrument. At
the very least, they will enjoy this warmhearted, intelligent insight into a
private Paris.
A five
star–reviewed, unforgettable story that bestselling author Homer Hickam calls
“one of the most eloquent, moving, irresistible true stories” he’s ever read.The
Waiting will touch your heart
and make you believe in love’s enduring legacy, as well as the power of prayer. In 1928, 16-year-old Minka
was on a picnic in the woods when she was assaulted and raped. And suddenly
this innocent farm girl―who still thought the stork brought babies―was
pregnant. The story that follows has been almost a hundred years in the making.
After a lifetime of separation, Minka whispered an impossible prayer for the
first time: Lord, I’d like to
see Betty Jane before I die. What
happened next was a miracle. Written by Cathy LaGrow (Minka’s granddaughter), The Waiting brings three generations of this most
unusual family together over the course of a century in a story of faith that
triumphs, forgiveness that sets us free, and love that never forgets. (As seen
on The Today Show.)
The acclaimed social psychologist offers an insider’s look at
his research and groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity. Claude M. Steele, who has been called “one of the few
great social psychologists,” offers a vivid first-person account of the
research that supports his groundbreaking conclusions on stereotypes and
identity. He sheds new light on American social phenomena from racial and
gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of
black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these “stereotype threats” and
reshaping American identities.
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class
in America
by Nancy Isenberg p.480 ISBN:978-0670785971 (3 recommendations)
Now a New York Times bestseller “This estimable book rides
into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the
truths that matter.”-–Dwight Garner, The New York Times “White Trash will change the way we think about our
past and present.” —T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials In her groundbreaking history of the
class system in America, what the New York Times hails as "formidable and
truth-dealing,” Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality,
uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing––if
occasionally entertaining––poor white trash. “When you turn an election into
a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,”
says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we
recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters boosting Trump have been a
permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the
time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known
as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the
1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,”
known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin,
ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and
policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years,
Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free
society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility.
Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early
nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues
nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white
trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely
popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for
sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great
Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo andDuck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white
trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over
the character of the American identity. We
acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With
Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring,
malevolent nature of class as well.
This insightful exploration of the varieties of
Americans' experience with race and racism in everyday life would be an
excellent starting point for the upcoming national conversations on race that
President Clinton and his appointed commission will be conducting this fall.
Tatum, a developmental psychologist (Mt. Holyoke Coll.) with a special interest
in the emerging field of racial-identity development, is a consultant to school
systems and community groups on teaching and learning in a multicultural context.
Not only has she studied the distinctive social dynamics faced by black youth
educated in predominantly white environments, but since 1980, Tatum has
developed a course on the psychology of racism and taught it in a variety of
university settings. She is also a black woman and a concerned mother of two,
and she draws on all these experiences and bases of knowledge to write a
remarkably jargon-free book that is as rigorously analytical as it is
refreshingly practical and drives its points home with a range of telling
anecdotes. Tatum illuminates ``why talking about racism is so hard'' and what
we can do to make it easier, leaving her readers more confident about facing
the difficult terrain on the road to a genuinely color-blind society.
The British antihero of this moving biography
started with teenage glue-sniffing, petty thievery and gang brawls, then
graduated to heroin and major thievery. He endured prison stints and led a
"medieval existence" on the streets, finally emerging into triumphant
semistability as an "ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath" with only
occasional episodes of violence and suicidal impulses. In Cambridge, England,
Masters, an advocate for the homeless, befriended Stuart—someone for whom
"cause and effect are not connected in the usual way"—and found him
at times obnoxious and repellent, but also funny and honest. Masters notes bad
genes and childhood sexual molestation, and critiques "the System" of
British welfare and criminal justice institutions that help with one hand and
brutalize with the other, but he doesn't reduce Stuart's intractable problems
to simple dysfunction or societal neglect. By eschewing easy answers (the easy
answers—don't drink, don't use, don't steal, don't play with knives—are
precisely the hardest for Stuart), he accords full humanity to Stuart's
stumbling efforts to grapple with his demons. Hilarious and clear-eyed, the
author's superbly drawn portrait of Stuart is an unforgettable literary
evocation and a small masterpiece of moral empathy and imagination.
Told by
nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the
Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of
Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers
take advantage of his absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden
nearby river, they meet a madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he
is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost
mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives
and imaginations of the book's characters and readers. Dazzling and viscerally
powerful, THE FISHERMEN is an essential novel about Africa, seen through the
prism of one family's destiny.
Based on the life of George Eliot, famed author of Middlemarch, this
captivating account of Eliot’s passions and tribulations explores the nature of
love in its many guises Dinitia
Smith’s spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot’s honeymoon in Venice in June
1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior.
When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death
of George Henry Lewes, her beloved companion of twenty-six years. Eliot was
bereft: left at the age of sixty to contemplate profound questions about her
physical decline, her fading appeal, and the prospect of loneliness.In her
youth, Mary Ann Evans—who would later be known as George Eliot—was a country
girl, considered too plain to marry, so she educated herself in order to secure
a livelihood. In an era when female novelists were objects of wonder, she
became the most famous writer of her day—with a male nom de plume. The Honeymoon explores different kinds of love, and
of the possibilities of redemption and happiness even in an imperfect union.
Smith integrates historical truth with her own rich rendition of Eliot’s inner
voice, crafting a page-turner that is as intelligent as it is gripping.
Long-listed for the NBCC's John
Leonard Prize, The gripping story of
a dramatic eighteenth-century voyage of discovery In her wildly
inventive debut novel, Naomi J. Williams reimagines the historical Lapérouse
expedition, a voyage of exploration that left Brest in 1785 with two frigates,
more than two hundred men, and overblown Enlightenment ideals and expectations,
in a brave attempt to circumnavigate the globe for science and the glory of
France. Deeply grounded in historical fact but refracted through a powerful
imagination, Landfalls follows the exploits and heartbreaks
not only of the men on the ships but also of the people affected by the
voyage-indigenous people and other Europeans the explorers encountered, loved
ones left waiting at home, and those who survived and remembered the expedition
later. Each chapter is told from a different point of view and is set in a
different part of the world, ranging from London to Tenerife, from Alaska to
remote South Pacific islands to Siberia, and eventually back to France. The result
is a beautifully written and absorbing tale of the high seas, scientific
exploration, human tragedy, and the world on the cusp of the modern era. By
turns elegiac, profound, and comic, Landfalls reinvents the
maritime adventure novel for the twenty-first century.
A visionary work that combines speculative
fiction with deep philosophical inquiry, The
Sparrow tells the story of a
charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a scientific
mission entrusted with a profound task: to make first contact with intelligent
extraterrestrial life. Father Emilio along with a team of scientists
and explorers go on an expedition to the planet Rakhat, where contact has been
established with two apparently primitive races, the Runa and the Jana'ata. The
narrative shifts back and forth between 2016, when contact is first made, and
2060, to a Vatican inquest interrogating the maimed and broken Sandoz. The mission begins in faith, hope, and
beauty, but a series of small misunderstandings brings it to a
catastrophic end. This strange, ambitious science fiction novel
has already won enough attention for its first-time author to make it a
selection by both the Book of the Month and QPB clubs. A paleoanthropologist,
Russell makes the descriptions of the inhabitants of Rakhat both convincing and
unsettling.
An atmospheric,
transporting tale of adventure, love, and survival from the bestselling author
of The Snow Child, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In the winter of 1885,
decorated war hero Colonel Allen Forrester leads a small band of men on an
expedition that has been deemed impossible: to venture up the Wolverine River
and pierce the vast, untamed Alaska Territory. Leaving behind Sophie, his newly
pregnant wife, Colonel Forrester records his extraordinary experiences in hopes
that his journal will reach her if he doesn't return--once he passes beyond the
edge of the known world, there's no telling what awaits him. The
Wolverine River Valley is not only breathtaking and forbidding but also
terrifying in ways that the colonel and his men never could have imagined. As
they map the territory and gather information on the native tribes, whose
understanding of the natural world is unlike anything they have ever
encountered, Forrester and his men discover the blurred lines between human and
wild animal, the living and the dead. And while the men knew they would face
starvation and danger, they cannot escape the sense that some greater,
mysterious force threatens their lives.
Meanwhile, on her own at Vancouver Barracks,
Sophie chafes under the social restrictions and yearns to travel alongside her
husband. She does not know that the winter will require as much of her as it
does her husband, that both her courage and faith will be tested to the
breaking point. Can her exploration of nature through the new art of
photography help her to rediscover her sense of beauty and wonder? The truths that Allen and Sophie discover over the
course of that fateful year change both of their lives--and the lives of those
who hear their stories long after they're gone--forever.
Playwright Rebeck's second novel, after Three Girls
and Their Brother (2008), offers a supremely entertaining look at a
dysfunctional family squabbling over real estate in New York City. When Tina
Finn, who has been working as a cleaning lady in a trailer park in Delaware,
learns that her mother has left her and her two sisters an $11 million
apartment in Central Park West, she's shocked. Her greedy sisters insist she
move into the sprawling residence, whose architecturally stunning rooms contain
no furniture. They are trying to forestall efforts by their stepfather's sons,
Pete and Doug Drinan, who grew up in the apartment, to contest the will. Tina
soon realizes she will need the support of the building's blue-blooded
residents, including an eccentric botanist who has turned the kitchen into a
mossery, if they are to successfully lay claim to their inheritance. Rebeck
creates some of the sharpest dialogue going, from the backbiting interplay
between the three sisters to the witty repartee between Tina and Pete. And Tina
herself, alternately feisty and funny, proves to be the perfect guide to
inheritance wars among the privileged.