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- February 2nd, 2005
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones
In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, 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. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities. A 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner.
[ Show Detail ] - March 2nd, 2005
- Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
In this landmark work of history, the National Book Award—winning author of American Sphinx explores how a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals–Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison–confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation. The United States was more a fragile hope than a reality in 1790. During the decade that followed, the Founding Fathers — re-examined here as Founding Brothers — combined the ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the content of the Constitution to create the practical workings of our government. Through an analysis of six fascinating episodes — Hamilton and Burr’s deadly duel, Washington’s precedent-setting Farewell Address, Adams’ administration and political partnership with his wife, the debate about where to place the capital, Franklin’s attempt to force Congress to confront the issue of slavery and Madison’s attempts to block him, and Jefferson and Adams’ famous correspondence — Founding Brothers brings to life the vital issues and personalities from the most important decade in our nation’s history.
[ Show Detail ] - April 6th, 2005
- Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery — personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents’ remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America’s western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he’s willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
[ Show Detail ] - May 4th, 2005
- Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America’s greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. Written with Horwitz’s signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones, classrooms, courts, and country bars’, where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1998).
[ Show Detail ] - June 1st, 2005
- Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man’s Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.
[ Show Detail ] - July 6th, 2005
- Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller’s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time. A Book Sense Book of the Year (2003).
[ Show Detail ] - August 3rd, 2005
- Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story by Timothy B. Tyson
In this outstanding personal history, Tyson unflinchingly examines the civil rights struggle in the South. The book focuses on the murder of a young black man, Henry Marrow, in 1970, a tragedy that dramatically widened the racial gap in the author’s hometown of Oxford, N.C. Tyson portrays the killing and its aftermath from multiple perspectives, including that of his contemporary, 10-year-old self; his progressive Methodist pastor father, who strove to lead his parishioners to overcome their prejudices; members of the disempowered black community; one of the killers; and his older self, who comes to Oxford with a historian’s eye. He also artfully interweaves the history of race relations in the South and celebrates a number of inspirational unsung heroes. His avoidance of stereotypes and simple answers brings a shameful recent era in our country’s history to vivid life. Tyson teaches Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is currently also a visiting professor of American Christianity and Southern culture at the Duke Divinity School as well as a senior scholar of documentary studies at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
[ Show Detail ] - September 7th, 2005
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in the (perhaps near) future when “firemen” burn books forbidden by a totalitarian “brave new world” regime. The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is “a book burner who suddenly discovers that books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out silently when put to the torch. Today, when libraries and schools in this country and all over the world are still “burning” certain books, Fahrenheit 451 remains a brilliantly readable and suspenseful work of even greater impact and timeliness.
[ Show Detail ] - October 5th, 2005
- The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
With The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad has given readers a first-hand look at Afghani life as few outsiders have seen it. Invited to live with Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, and his family for months, this account of her experience allows the Khans to speak for themselves, giving us a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and of a country of great cultural riches and extreme contradictions. For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities—whether Communist or Taliban—to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world’s darkest places. This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family—two wives, five children, and many relatives sharing a small four-room house in this war ravaged city. But more than that, it is a rare look at contemporary life under Islam, where even after the Taliban’s collapse, the women must submit to arranged marriages, polygamous husbands, and crippling limitations on their ability to travel, learn and communicate with others.
[ Show Detail ] - November 2nd, 2005
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner In The Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, Faulkner created his “heart’s darling,” the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers—the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.
[ Show Detail ] - December 7th, 2005
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson’s spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men—the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World’s Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative that pairs the wonder of newly discovered history with the thrill of the best fiction.
[ Show Detail ] - January 4th, 2006
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening — until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.
[ Show Detail ] - February 1st, 2006
- The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry
In his powerful new book, award-winning historian John M. Barry unfolds a tale that is magisterial in its breadth and in the depth of its research, and spellbinding as he weaves multiple narrative strands together. In this first great collision between science and epidemic disease, even as society approached collapse, a handful of heroic researchers stepped forward, risking their lives to confront this strange disease. Titans like William Welch at the newly formed Johns Hopkins Medical School and colleagues at Rockefeller University and others from around the country revolutionized American science and public health, and their work in this crisis led to crucial discoveries that we are still using and learning from today.
[ Show Detail ] - March 1st, 2006
- Interpreter of Maladies [stories] by Jhumpa Lahiri
Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice.
[ Show Detail ] - April 5th, 2006
- Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg
Few American icons provoke more enduring fascination than Charles Lindbergh — renowned for his one-man transatlantic flight in 1927, remembered for the sorrow surrounding the kidnapping and death of his firstborn son in 1932, and reviled by many for his opposition to America’s entry into World War II. Lindbergh’s is “a dramatic and disturbing American story,” says the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and this biography — the first to be written with unrestricted access to the Lindbergh archives and extensive interviews of his friends, colleagues, and close family members — is “the definitive account.”
[ Show Detail ] - May 3rd, 2006
- Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
Disgrace — set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape — is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love. At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless, except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David’s attempts to relate to Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities, are disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen. In this wry, visceral, yet strangely tender novel, Coetzee once again tells “truths [that] cut to the bone”
[ Show Detail ] - June 7th, 2006
- House by Tracy Kidder
In this now-classic New York Times bestseller, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder leads readers through the grand adventure of building an American dream. In his portrayal, constructing a staircase or applying a coat of paint becomes a riveting tale of conflicting wills, the strength and strain of relationships, and pride in craftsmanship. With drama, sensitivity, and insight, Kidder takes us from blueprints to moving day. In the process, he sheds new light on objects usually taken for granted and creates a vivid cast of characters you will not soon forget.
[ Show Detail ] - July 5th, 2006
- Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Leif Enger’s best-selling debut is at once a heroic quest, a tragedy, and a love story, in which “what could be unbelievable becomes extraordinary” (Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald). Enger brings us eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy in the Midwest who has reason to believe in miracles. Along with his sister and father, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother who has been controversially charged with murder. Their journey unfolds like a revelation, and its conclusion shows how family, love, and faith can stand up to the most terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates.
[ Show Detail ] - August 2nd, 2006
- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake is a finely wrought, deeply moving family drama that illuminates the Pulitzer prize-winning authors signature themes: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, and the tangled ties between generations. The novel takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of an arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ashoke does his best to adapt while his wife pines for home. When their son, Gogol, is born, the task of naming him betrays their hope of respecting old ways in a new world. And we watch as Gogol stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs.
[ Show Detail ] - September 6th, 2006
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
One of the most frequently challenged books of all time, twice banned, Mark Twain’s classic is the story of a young boy who, though innately good, has values that have been formed by the deeply corrupt, slave-ridden society in which he lives. Huck tells the story in his own words — a radical narrative technique when the book was first published in 1884 — and the gulf between what he sees and what he understands produces a richly ironic indictment of slavery in all of its forms.
[ Show Detail ] - October 4th, 2006
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
In this anthropological exploration of the Hmong population in Merced County, California, Fadiman has created a fascinating account of cultural dislocation that has a haunting lesson for healthcare providers. Following the case of Lia, a Hmong child with a progressive and unpredictable form of epilepsy, Fadiman skillfully and thoughtfully maps out the controversies raised by the collision between Western medicine and the holistic healing traditions of Hmong immigrants.
[ Show Detail ] - November 1st, 2006
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
Recently named “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years,” Beloved is a fascinating, grim, relentless story about ex-slaves haunted by violent memories. Before the Civil War, Sethe sent her children away to their grandmother in Ohio, whose freedom had been paid for by their father. Sethe runs too, but when her “owners” come to recapture her, she attempts to murder the children, succeeding with one, named Beloved. This murder will (literally) haunt Sethe for the rest of her life and affect everyone around her.
[ Show Detail ] - December 6th, 2006
- American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Though many recognize Oppenheimer as the father of the atomic bomb, few are familiar with his personal life or his career before and after Los Alamos. Restoring human complexity to a man who has been both elevated and demonized, the authors present a carefully researched account of Oppenheimer’s life from his childhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and his prewar years as a Berkeley physicist to his public humiliation when he was branded a security risk at the height of anticommunist hysteria in 1954.
[ Show Detail ] - January 3rd, 2007
- The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
A beautifully developed, richly textured story that begins in Poland, where a boy falls in love and writes a book. When World War II arrives, both the love and the book are lost. Leo Gursky, now in his eighties and living in New York City, struggles to be noticed each day so that people will know he has not yet died. Meanwhile, 14-year-old Alma Singer, whose father has just died, wants her brother to be normal and her mother to be happy again. In a quest for the story behind her name, Alma and Leo find each other, and Leo learns that the book he wrote so long ago has not been lost.
[ Show Detail ] - February 7th, 2007
- A Crack in the Edge of the World : America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester
In this page-turner, Winchester has crafted a magnificent testament to the power of planet Earth and the efforts of humankind to understand her. A master storyteller and Oxford trained geologist, Winchester effortlessly weaves together countless threads of interest and produces a powerfully compelling narrative about one of the most devastating of all time. With fabulous style, wit and grace, Winchester casts doubt on the very notion of solid ground and invites his readers to ponder the planet they live on, from both inside and out.
[ Show Detail ] - March 7th, 2007
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
One of the most widely read novels from Nigeria’s most famous novelist, Things Fall Apart is a gripping study of European colonialism in Africa. The story relates the cultural collision that occurs when Christian English missionaries arrive among the Ibos of Nigeria, bringing along their European ways of life and religion. In the novel, the Nigerian Okonkwo recognizes the cultural imperialism of the white men and tries to show his own people how their society will fall apart if they exchange their own cultural core for that of the English.
[ Show Detail ] - April 4th, 2007
- The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery
Over the past decade, the world has seen the most powerful El Nino ever recorded, the most devastating hurricane in two hundred years, the hottest European summer on record, and one of the worst storm seasons ever experienced in Florida. Flannery’s book is “an authoritative yet accessible presentation of the scientific evidence that climate change is happening; a clear delineation of what global warming has done and could do to life on our planet; and an urgent call for action.”
[ Show Detail ] - May 2nd, 2007
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
An unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant. The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country — Afghanistan — that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption.
[ Show Detail ] - June 6th, 2007
- The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Elegantly combining literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific references with engaging anecdotes, Pollan’s fascinating account of four everyday plants — apples, tulips, potatoes and cannabis — and their co evolution with human society challenges traditional views about humans, nature, and the very meaning of domestication.
[ Show Detail ] - July 12th, 2007
- The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
In an astonishing feat of narrative invention, one of our most ambitious novelists imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America — and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.
[ Show Detail ] - August 1st, 2007
- Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions by Sister Helen Prejean
Since the 1993 publication of her memoir Dead Man Walking and the 1995 film it inspired, Sister Helen Prejean has become a powerful and articulate presence in the fight against the death penalty in America. In The Death of Innocents, Prejean focuses her argument on the ways in which an unjust system may be killing innocent people. She tells the story of two inmates she came to know as a spiritual adviser. Dobie Williams, a poor black man with an IQ of 65 from rural Louisiana, was executed after being represented by incompetent counsel and found guilty by an all-white jury based mostly on conjecture and speculation. Joseph O’Dell was convicted of murder after the court heard from an inmate who later admitted to giving false testimony for his own benefit. O’Dell received neither an evidentiary hearing nor potentially exculpatory DNA testing and was executed, insisting on his innocence the whole while. Besides exploring the shaky cases against them, Prejean describes in vivid detail the thoughts and feelings of Williams and O’Dell as their bids for clemency fail and they are put to death. The second part of the book details “the machinery of death,” the legal process that Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, dismayed at the inequities of the death penalty, cited as his reason for resigning and that current justice Antonin Scalia has boasted of being a part of. Prejean is impassioned as she describes what she sees as an arrogant attitude by both Scalia and the contemporary judicial system. Her chance confrontation with Scalia at an airport is a gripping collision of disparate worlds. In recent years, DNA testing has overturned the convictions of scores of prisoners, including many on death row. As the death penalty is increasingly called into question, Sister Helen Prejean will surely be a force in that debate.
[ Show Detail ] - September 5th, 2007
- Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
If the stereotype of the “bonehead jock” is ever to be defeated, it will be at Crutcher’s hands. In these six short stories, he and his athlete protagonists take on such weighty issues as racism, homophobia, sexism and the teenager’s essential task of coming to terms with his parents. At the same time the author makes the world of sports compelling enough to engage even the most sedentary readers. Three of the stories revolve around characters featured in Crutcher’s The Crazy Horse Electric Game , including the memorable eccentric known as Telephone Man. Also starring in his own story is Lionel Serbousek, the orphaned artist and swimmer of Stotan! In the book’s final tale, Louie Banks (from Running Loose ) is befriended by a young man with AIDS and must cope once again with the untimely death of a loved one. The stories’ locales—mostly small towns in Montana and Idaho—are vividly evoked, and make a satisfying change from the well-known big cities and bland suburbs where so many YA novels are set.
[ Show Detail ] - October 3rd, 2007
- King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
Hochschild’s superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II’s rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild’s highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold’s atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold’s “civilizing mission” led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold’s colonial regime in 1890. Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold’s predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world
[ Show Detail ] - November 7th, 2007
- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
Lily is haunted by memories —- of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness. In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “old sames,” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become “old sames” at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.
[ Show Detail ] - December 5th, 2007
- I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson
Ex-expatriate Bryson, who chronicled one effort at American reentry in his bestselling A Walk in the Woods, collects another: the whimsical columns on America he wrote weekly, while living in New Hampshire in the mid-to-late 1990s, for a British Sunday newspaper. Although he happily describes himself as dazzled by American ease, friendliness and abundance, Bryson has no trouble finding comic targets, among them fast food, computer efficiency and, ironically, American friendliness and putative convenience. As he edges into Dave Barry-style hyperbole, Bryson sometimes strains for yuks, but he’s deft when he compares the two cultures, as in their different treatment of Christmas, pointing out how the British “pack all their festive excesses” into that single holiday. Bryson also nudges into domestic territory with regular references to his own British wife, the resolutely sensible Mrs. B. In a few columns, Bryson adopts a sentimental tone, writing about his family and his new hometown of Hanover. In others, he’s more sober, criticizing anti-immigration activists, environmental depredation and drug laws (though he draws out the humor in these as well). Not all the columns hit their mark, and they are best read in small groupings, but this collection should sell well enough, although not likely to the heights of A Walk in the Woods.
[ Show Detail ] - January 8th, 2008
- My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
In 16th-century Istanbul, master miniaturist and illuminator of books Enishte Effendi is commissioned to illustrate a book celebrating the sultan. Soon he lies dead at the bottom of a well, and how he got there is the crux of this novel. A number of narrators give testimony to what they know about the circumstances surrounding the murder. The stories accumulate and become more detailed as the novel progresses, giving the reader not only a nontraditional murder mystery but insight into the mores and customs of the time. In addition, this is both an examination of the way figurative art is viewed within Islam and a love story that demonstrates the tricky mechanics of marriage laws. Award-winning Turkish author Pamuk (The White Castle) creatively casts the novel with colorful characters (including such entities as a tree and a gold coin) and provides a palpable sense of atmosphere of the Ottoman Empire that history and literary fans will appreciate.
[ Show Detail ] - February 6th, 2008
- His Excellency, George Washington by Joseph Ellis
To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions.
Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being.
[ Show Detail ] - March 5th, 2008
- The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
The title of Manil Suri’s first novel gets right to the point. His protagonist, having purchased the right to sleep on the ground-floor landing of a Bombay apartment house, slips slowly from a coma into death. As this aging alcoholic takes leave of the earth, his neighbors surround him, arguing over who gave Vishnu a few dried chapatis, who called the doctor for him, and who will pay for the ambulance to cart him away. Meanwhile, the hero of The Death of Vishnu is lost in memories. Drifting through increasingly vivid scenes from his past, he recalls his relatively rare snatches of love and joy—and especially his romance with Padmini, a self-involved prostitute. On one particular day, it seems, he stole one of his employer’s cars and drove his love interest to the honeymoon town of Lonavala, where he showered her with gifts and finally lifted her veil to kiss her like a bride:
Then the absurdity of the situation strikes him. The preposterousness of his images, the foolishness of his feelings, the comicality of chasing currents that skim across Padmini’s face. He thinks how absurd this whole trip has been, how absurd is the presence of the two of them in Lonavala, how absurd is the scenery itself that stretches before them. He thinks of poor, ridiculous Mr. Jalal, waiting back in Bombay for his Fiat, and of how Padmini will react when he asks her to buy them petrol so they can get back.
Vishnu also recalls his secret passion for Kavita Asrani, the beautiful teenage daughter of one of the families for whom he works. Given the protagonist’s focus on his hapless love life, the scope of Suri’s dazzling debut may appear narrow. However, the apartment house upon whose floor Vishnu spends his final hours functions as a microcosm of Indian society. It helps to know even a smattering about Hindu mythology or India’s religious conflicts. But even if you don’t, there is plenty to relish in The Death of Vishnu, with its comical, richly drawn characters, loving attention to the details of everyday life, and provocative exploration of destiny and free will[ Show Detail ] - April 2nd, 2008
- Roanoke by Lee Miller
November of 1587, a report reached London claiming Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to land English settlers in America had foundered. The colony on Roanoke Island off of the coast of North Carolina-115 men, women, and children-had disappeared without a trace. For four hundred years, the question of what became of the doomed settlers has remained unanswered. Where did they go? What really happened? Why were they on Roanoke Island in the first place, as that was not their destination? Using her consummate skills as an anthropologist and ethnohistorian, Lee Miller casts new light on the previously inexplicable puzzle of Roanoke, unraveling a thrilling web of deceit that can be traced back to the inner circle of Queen Elizabeth’s government to finally solve the lasting mystery of the Lost Colony
[ Show Detail ] - May 7th, 2008
- Plant Life by Pamela Duncan
“Plant Life is an American classic. Like Our Town or Winesburg, Ohio, it presents a compelling and moving portrait of an entire community. In this case, it is the life of a cotton mill, and three generations of women who work there—whose whole lives have been determined by the mill. Stark, poetic, funny, gritty, and intense, their stories will move you to tears and make you laugh at the same time. Never have the lives of Southern working women been so well documented, their stories so truly told. Plant Life is a mature work of a great compassion and insight.”—Lee Smith, bestselling author
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