A visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

A visit from the Goon Squad - Egan, Jennifer

Summary: Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs confront their pasts in this powerful story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem.


Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Egan is a writer of cunning subtlety, embedding within the risky endeavors of seductively complicated characters a curious bending of time and escalation of technology's covert impact. Following her diabolically clever The Keep (2006), Egan tracks the members of a San Francisco punk band and their hangers-on over the decades as they wander out into the wider, bewildering world. Kleptomaniac Sasha survives the underworld of Naples, Italy. Her boss, New York music producer Bennie Salazar, is miserable in the suburbs, where his tattooed wife, Stephanie, sneaks off to play tennis with Republicans. Obese former rock-star Bosco wants Stephanie to help him with a Suicide Tour, while her all-powerful publicist boss eventually falls so low she takes a job rehabilitating the public image of a genocidal dictator. These are just a few of the faltering searchers in Egan's hilarious, melancholy, enrapturing, unnerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a novel. As episodes surge forward and back in time, from the spitting aggression of a late-1970s punk-rock club to the obedient, socially networked "herd" gathered at the Footprint, Manhattan's 9/11 site 20 years after the attack, Egan evinces an acute sensitivity to the black holes of shame and despair and to the remote-control power of the gadgets that are reordering our world. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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The discomfort zone - Jonathan Franzen

The discomfort zone: a personal history - Franzen, Jonathan

Summary: The author describes growing up in a family of all boys in Webster Groves, Missouri, reflecting on such topics as the dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship, his role as the school prankster, his marriage, and the life lessons he has learned from birds.



Booklist Reviews
After winning the National Book Award in fiction for The Corrections (2001), Franzen has proven himself to be an exceptionally engaging essayist, first in How to Be Alone (2002) and now in this cycle of magnetizing meditations on family and culture, love and death, art and nature. A consummate storyteller, Franzen possesses a low-key, even sheepish sense of humor rooted in his middle-class Midwest upbringing. Peanuts was his cherished guide for the perplexed, inspiring a shrewd homage to Charles Shulz that veers smoothly into a poignant portrait of Franzen's nearly humorless father. Elsewhere, Franzen's strong-willed mother reigns supreme, and he is at once personally frank and socially revealing in funny and affecting reflections about his church youth group during the freaky 1970s, unrequited love, pranks gone wrong, and literary discoveries. This gratifyingly unpredictable and finely crafted collection ends with a tour de force, "My Bird Problem," a thoughtful, wry, and edgy musing on marital bliss and misery, global warming, the wonder of birds, and our halfhearted effort to protect the environment. ((Reviewed August 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews.

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Half the sky - Nicholas Kristof

Half the sky turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide - Kristof, Nicholas

Summary: Two Pulitzer Prize winners issue a call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women in the developing world. They show that a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad and that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women's potential.



Booklist Reviews
Despite an estimated 107 million women and girls missing in the world population due to every form of abuse, from infant neglect to honor killings, "gendercide" receives none of the coverage and outrage of other human-rights violations, lament these two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists. The husband-and-wife team chronicles the horrific abuses suffered by girls and women: sold into sex slavery, abused and exploited as workers, beaten and killed to protect male honor, and generally denied education, medical attention, and food reserved for boys and men. The authors focus on sex trafficking, gender-based violence (including honor killings and mass rape), and maternal mortality. They also examine the economic forces at work that promise more opportunities, along with required education and resulting autonomy, for female workers and entrepreneurs as developing countries recognize how they waste this valuable resource. Kristof and WuDunn reinforce the truth behind the terrible statistics with passionately reported personal stories of girls and women (including photographs) and efforts to help them, including a final chapter suggesting how readers can help. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

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Fierce attachments: a memoir - Vivian Gornick

Fierce attachments: a memoir - Gornick, Vivian

Summary: The author recounts her childhood experiences living in a tenement, looks at her relationship with her mother, and describes the lives of women bound to husbands they didn't love - (Baker & Taylor)




Publishers Weekly Reviews
This supple, energized memoir chronicles Gornick's volatile relationship with her mother and her unsuccessful battle to reject a legacy of hatred, depression, humiliation and self-pity. An able storyteller with a keen ear for dialogue, Gornick (Essays in Feminism effectively montages the intimate, crude kaffeeklatsches in the Bronx tenement of her youth with street scenes from present-day Manhattan. Particularly vivid is the portrait of Nettie, the sensual, Gentile outsider among Jewish immigrant neighbors, who drives a deeper wedge between mother and daughter when she takes the young Gornick under her tutelage. The author's inherited rage particularly doomed her relationships with men, she feels, and she supplies bleak details from her failed marriage as well as her affairs with an older married man and a psychotic childhood love. Unfortunately, the insightful ``deprivation litany'' bogs down with ``knee-jerk antagonism,'' therapy-talk and self-indulgence as a 48-year-old Gornick obsessively censures an 80-year-old mother. (April 20) Copyright 1987 Cahners Business Information.


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Palace walk - Najib Mahfuz

Palace walk - Mahfuz, Najib

Series: The Cairo trilogy

Summary: The engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900's.


Library Journal Reviews
This extraordinary novel provides a close look into Cairo society at the end of World War I. Mahfouz's vehicle for this examination is the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad, a middle-class merchant who runs his family strictly according to the Qur'an and directs his own behavior according to his desires. Consequently, while his wife and two daughters remain cloistered at home, and his three sons live in fear of his harsh will, al-Sayyid Ahmad nightly explores the pleasures of Cairo. Written by the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize, Palace Walk begins Mahfouz's highly acclaimed ``Cairo Trilogy,'' which follows Egypt's development from 1917 to nationalism and Nasser in the 1950s. This novel's enchanting style and sweeping social tapestry ensure a large audience, one that will eagerly await the English translation of the entire trilogy. A significant addition to any collection. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/89.-- Paul E. Hutchison, Fishermans Paradise, Bellefonte, Pa. Copyright 1989 Cahners Business Information.


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Jitterbug perfume - Tom Robbins

Jitterbug perfume - Robbins, Tom

This philosophical epic, with a large cast of characters, addresses the fervent desire of the human race to overcome the tyranny of aging and physical death - (Baker & Taylor)




Review
Robbins again celebrates the joy of individual expression and self-reliance. He lays before us the time honored warts and hairs of the world’s philosophies—problems with religion, war, politics, family, marriage and sex—and leaves no twist or turn unstoned. —Saturday Review

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The kindness of strangers - Mike McIntyre

The kindness of strangers: penniless across America - McIntyre, Mike

Summary: A former columnist for The Washington Post describes his coast to coast walk, from San Francisco to Cape Fear, with no money or plans, depending only on the kindness of the people he encountered along the way. Original. - (Baker & Taylor)



Publishers Weekly Reviews
McIntyre decided to confront his fears and the shaky path his life was taking by hitchhiking from San Francisco to Cape Fear, N.C. Along the way, he hoped to find some kindness in the soul of America and vowed to accept no money, only food, shelter and friendship. Rather like William Least-Heat Moon's Blue Highways or Andrei Codrescu's Road Scholar, The Kindness of Strangers is the story of those who help and hinder his journey: the vast array of kind souls and weirdoes, as well as Americana at its best and worst. He stays a night with Edie, who cares for her brain-damaged granddaughter yet happily takes him in. A woman with a tear-shaped tattoo teaches him to feel at home in nature, not to fear the dark woods where he sometimes sleeps. He finds a sense of family on a ranch in South Dakota and meets a couple who give him a tent, although it is one of their most valuable possessions. Not everyone along the way is kind and generous, and there are plenty of strangers with dark ulterior motives. Exhausted and road-weary, he finally arrives in Cape Fear and realizes that it is a misnomer: "The name is as misplaced as my own fears. I see now that I have always been afraid of the wrong things. My great shame is not my fear of death, but my fear of life." McIntyre writes eloquently and rekindles optimism in America's character. (Nov.) Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information.

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Retribution - Max Hastings

Retribution: the battle for Japan - Hastings, Max

Summary: "A chronicle of the horrific final year of the Pacific war. By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan's defeat was inevitable, but how the victory would be achieved remained to be seen. Hastings gives us incisive portraits of the key figures--MacArthur, Nimitz, Mountbatten, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. But he is equally adept in his portrayals of the ordinary soldiers and sailors--American, British, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese--caught in some of the war's bloodiest campaigns. Hastings discusses Japan's war against China--now all but forgotten in the West, MacArthur's follies in the Philippines, the Marines at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria. He analyzes the decision-making process that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--which, he convincingly argues, ultimately saved lives. Finally, he delves into the Japanese wartime mind-set, which caused an otherwise civilized society to carry out atrocities that haunt the nation to this day."--From publisher description.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In this companion to Hastings' effusively praised Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–45 (2004), the notable military historian wrestles with controversies about the last year of World War II in Asia and the Pacific. From qualities of commanders to experiences of soldiers and civilians to atomic bombings, Hastings thematically surveys the consequences of the Japanese government's refusal to confront a defeat that was unavoidable after American capture of the Marianas Islands in June 1944. As with German resistance, Japan's death ride produced a sizable fraction of WWII-related fatalities in that last year, a shock that Hastings argues must be incorporated into an understanding of what happened and why. As inevitable as Allied victory may have been, no leader could predict how or when it would arrive. The cataclysmic form that it assumed—fire bombings punctuated by mushroom clouds—has, to an extent, bestowed victim status on Japan. Hastings' work stands as a stern refutation of that idea's persistence in both academic and popular circles, without, however, absolving the Allies of his moral scrutiny. Encompassing the British, Chinese, and Soviet roles in vanquishing Japan, Hastings is both comprehensive and finely acute in this masterful interpretive narrative. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.

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The graveyard book - Neil Gaiman

The graveyard book - Gaiman, Neil

Summary: After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural residents agree to raise him as one of their own.




Kirkus Reviews
Wistful, witty, wise, and creepy. Gaiman's riff on Kipling's Mowgli stories never falters, from the truly spine-tingling opening, in which a toddler accidentally escapes his family's murderer, to the melancholy, life-affirming ending. Bod (short for Nobody) finds solace and safety with the inhabitants of the local graveyard, who grant him some of the privileges and powers of the dead—he can Fade and Dreamwalk, for instance, but still needs to eat and breathe. Episodic chapters tell miniature gems of stories (one has been nominated for a Locus Award) tracing Bod's growth from a spoiled boy who runs away with the ghouls to a young man for whom the metaphor of setting out into the world becomes achingly real. Childhood fears take solid shape in the nursery-rhyme–inspired villains, while heroism is its own, often bitter, reward. Closer in tone to American Gods than to Coraline, but permeated with Bod's innocence, this needs to be read by anyone who is or has ever been a child. (Illustrations not seen.) (Fantasy. 10 & up) Copyright Kirkus 2008 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.


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Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey - Salinger, J.D.

Summary: Meet Franny and her younger brother, Zooey, in two Salinger stories.




Review
Volume containing two interrelated stories by J.D. Salinger, published in book form in 1961. The stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger's short fiction. Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the "Jesus prayer" as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown. In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the "Jesus prayer" is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

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Laika - Nick Abadzis

Laika - Abadzis, Nick

Summary: This is the journey of Laika, the abandoned puppy destined to become Earth's first space traveler. With the blending of fact and fiction, this story intertwines three compelling lives. Along with Laika, there is Korolev, a driven engineer at the top of the Soviet space program and Yelena, the lab technician responsible for Laika's health and life.


Staff Review
Abadzis blends history and storytelling, in an artfully rendered story with heart. The author did his research and brings together the smallest details, down to the accurate representation of the phases of the moon, with the passion and imagination that the world felt for the small dog on a fateful mission.

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The tempest - William Shakespeare

The tempest - Shakespeare, William

Summary: Shakespeare's play about a shipwrecked Duke who learns to command the spirits.

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The insult - Rupert Thomson

The insult - Thomson, Rupert

Summary: Wounded by a gunshot to the head that leaves him blind, Martin Blom is warned that he will never see again, but on one spring evening, Martin experiences a miracle when he discovers that he can see in the dark. By the author of The Five Gates of Hell. 25,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Kirkus Reviews
A feverishly imagined tale of a blind man who develops night vision and uses it to search for a vanished lover, this is a surpassingly bleak and defiantly illogical study of obsession from the highly touted Thomson (Air and Fire, 1994, etc.). In a Kafkaesque transformation, Martin Blom awakens in a hospital bed, blind after being struck in the head by a stray bullet while carrying groceries to his car--a blindness that his neurosurgeon says is permanent. Morris's disbelief and self-pity are normal responses, but when he discovers to his wonder that he can see--in the dark--his life assumes a new, furtive meaning. He breaks completely with his past, including parents and fianc e, to embrace a nocturnal existence, moving in secret to a disreputable hotel in the heart of the city and making friends with other equally odd creatures of the night. The mysterious Nina enters his life, fulfilling his wildest sexual fantasies. But she breaks with him, then disappears, when she discovers his peculiar powers of sight, leaving a heartbroken Martin under suspicion of foul play. In desperation, and increasingly certain that he's serving as some bizarre sort of guinea pig for his neurosurgeon (his night vision is suddenly replaced by nonstop TV broadcasts in his head), he digs into Nina's past and visits her distant hometown. There, safe from the police, and from the TV signals, Martin settles into a rundown spa and is treated by an elderly woman to an extraordinary tale of incest, retardation, and gruesome violence. Martin and Nina are, it turns out, but the latest victims of the train of events set in motion by the woman's youthful transgression. The pieces of this grim saga remain just that: Vivid fragments in a pattern that fails to cohere. But there is nonetheless a dark, hugely suggestive power at work here, cumulatively having the visceral impact of a nightmare. Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews

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Townie - Andre Dubus III

Townie - Dubus, Andre

Summary: The author of"House of Sand and Fog" describes his childhood in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime and his weekly visits with his father, an eminent author who taught on a college campus.



Staff Review
Dark and intense, this memoir is hard to read at times, but is worth it.

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Halfway to Hollywood - Michael Palin

Halfway to Hollywood: diaries, 1980-1988 - Palin, Michael

Summary: A second volume of diaries by the Monty Python comedian traces the years during which the iconic troupe completed their final group performance before Palin segued to such productions as "A Fish Called Wanda."



Staff Review
If you're a Monty Python fan at all, you'll love the second volume of Michael Palin's diaries. Hilarious, sweet and cheerful, I really enjoyed it.

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Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

Unbroken a World War II airman's story of survival, resilience, and redemption - Hillenbrand, Laura

Summary: On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared--Lt. Louis Zamperini. Captured by the Japanese and driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor.


Booklist Reviews
A second book by the author of Seabiscuit (2001) would get noticed, even if it weren't the enthralling and often grim story of Louie Zamperini. An Olympic runner during the 1930s, he flew B-24s during WWII. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he endured a captivity harsh even by Japanese standards and was a physical and mental wreck at the end of the war. He was saved by the influence of Billy Graham, who inspired him to turn his life around, and afterward devoted himself to evangelical speeches and founding boys' camps. Still alive at 93, Zamperini now works with those Japanese individuals and groups who accept responsibility for Japanese mistreatment of POWs and wish to see Japan and the U.S. reconciled. He submitted to 75 interviews with the author as well as contributing a large mass of personal records. Fortunately, the author's skills are as polished as ever, and like its predecessor, this book has an impossible-to-put-down quality that one commonly associates with good thrillers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This departure from the author's previous best-seller will nevertheless be promoted as necessary reading for the many folks who enjoyed the first one or its movie version. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.


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Stiff - Mary Roach

Stiff: the curious life of human cadavers - Roach, Mary

Summary: Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers--some willingly, some unwittingly--have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

Publishers Weekly
"Uproariously funny" doesn't seem a likely description for a book on cadavers. However, Roach, a Salon and Reader's Digest columnist, has done the nearly impossible and written a book as informative and respectful as it is irreverent and witty. From her opening lines ("The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back"), it is clear that she's taking a unique approach to issues surrounding death. Roach delves into the many productive uses to which cadavers have been put, from medical experimentation to applications in transportation safety research (in a chapter archly called "Dead Man Driving") to work by forensic scientists quantifying rates of decay under a wide array of bizarre circumstances. There are also chapters on cannibalism, including an aside on dumplings allegedly filled with human remains from a Chinese crematorium, methods of disposal (burial, cremation, composting) and "beating-heart" cadavers used in organ transplants. Roach has a fabulous eye and a wonderful voice as she describes such macabre situations as a plastic surgery seminar with doctors practicing face-lifts on decapitated human heads and her trip to China in search of the cannibalistic dumpling makers. Even Roach's digressions and footnotes are captivating, helping to make the book impossible to put down.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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All over but the shoutin' - Rick Bragg

All over but the shoutin' - Bragg, Rick

Summary: This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most. But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives--and the country that shaped and nourished them--with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

Booklist Reviews
Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize^-winning national correspondent for the New York Times, relates a rags-to-riches tale that begins in George Wallace's Alabama. Abandoned by her husband, Bragg's mother was left to raise three sons on her own. They were dirt poor, but Bragg remembers childhood as being "sweet and warm," thanks largely to his mother, a woman whose courage never failed. After just six months of college, Bragg started his career as a sportswriter for small-town papers in Alabama, eventually making his way to reporting news for the St. Petersburg Times. An application for a Nieman Fellowship took him to Harvard, where the interview panel wanted to know if his country boy image was "just a gimmick." But it was that distinctive southern voice that led eventually to the New York Times job. Bragg never forgets what he owes to his mother, and the book's climax is the Pulitzer Prize award ceremony, which his mother attended, having taken her first ride on an airplane and her first ride on an elevator to get there. ((Reviewed September 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews


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A cook's tour - Anthony Bourdain

A cook's tour: in search of the perfect meal - Bourdain, Anthony

Summary: From Japan where he eats traditional fugu, a poisonous blowfish that can only be prepared by specially licensed chefs, to a delectable snack in the Mecong Delta, follows the author as he embarks on a quest around the world to find the ultimate meal. - (Baker & Taylor)



Kirkus Reviews
Over-the-top and highly diverting international culinary adventures, always to be taken with a generous grain of salt-and make it Fleur de Sel-and best consumed a bite at a time.Forget the "perfect meal" baloney. What chef Bourdain (the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, not reviewed, etc.) is looking for on his yearlong earth-spanning journey is a good mix of food, memory, and context, and if it comes with a modest side of danger and another of humor, more the better. Bourdain enjoys being outrageous-"blowing chunks" is how he vomits, and his "pig-fisting" is more aptly known as cleaning the intestine of a pig-and he over-relishes the mock macho ("Casinos? Run by the most vicious, hard-core Commie mass murderers in history? Well, why not check it out?"). But his enthusiasm is mighty engaging, and his snappy, full-bore writing style-whether being sarcastic, passionate, or descriptive-is good entertainment. And exhausting. Food, oh boy, does he know his food; only when speaking of food (and the rare landscape that gets right into his soul) does Bourdain get serious. In these tales, Bourdain lives close to the ground, getting the local experience, enjoying the alchemy of food in which necessity is the mother of cooking magic. With TV crew in tow-a series is in the works-Bourdain attends the butchering (literal and figurative) of a pig in Portugal and bacaloa-making in the Basque country, and partakes in vodka and black bread in Russia, a tagine of kefta in Morocco, and some truly nasty encounters in Mexico and Cambodia. (Truly nasty encounters, indeed, most everywhere.) And he seems never happier than when sticking it to the self-righteous, be they San Francisco vegans or folks decrying the making of foie gras (the birds, Bourdain notes, are fed "a considerably lesser amount comparative to body weight than, say, a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast").Ultimately, then, it's not about the food, it's about the chef and author: a high-maintenance gent, brash, insightful, a jokester, and certainly someone you wouldn't want by your side at a touchy border crossing.Author tour Copyright Kirkus 2001 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.


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Given up for dead - Bill Sloan

Given up for dead: America's heroic stand at Wake Island - Sloan, Bill

Summary: An account of America's first battle of World War II describes the ordeal of American soldiers and civilians who defended Wake Island against a surprise Japanese attack just hours after Pearl Harbor. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
This is the third recently published account about the capture of Wake Island in December 1941 (after Pacific Alamo by John Wukovits [2003] and Hell Wouldn't Stop by Chet Cunningham [2002]), and like its predecessors, the book avails itself of the handful of witnesses to the combat there. Sloan distinguishes himself with a seasoned journalistic approach, emphasizing the personal experience of young marines and civilian construction workers who defeated an initial Japanese attempt to land but succumbed to a second one. The possibility that Wake could have held out has generated conflicting memoirs and naval accounts, which Sloan draws on in his narrative as he recounts the fighting from the perspective of the foxhole. Collectively lauded as heroes at a grim time, when the war was going Japan's way, the marines are ably individualized by Sloan in ground-pounding dramatization of the gory action at every gun position. The last-stand courage of Wake's warriors continues to draw readers of military history. ((Reviewed September 1, 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews

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Queen of fashion - Caroline Weber

Queen of fashion: what Marie Antoinette wore to the Revolution - Weber, Caroline

Summary: Examines the various stages in Marie Antoinette's life from the perspective of the fashions that she popularized, from her struggle to adapt to the traditions of French royal glamour to the extreme costumes she developed to project an image of power.



Booklist Reviews
Plenty of proof here, from an associate professor of French at Barnard (and author of Terror and its Discontents, 2003), that clothes did indeed make the woman. Weber's thesis, made clear at the outset, is that the dauphine-soon-turned-queen's costumes became an accurate symbol of her individuality and personality versus political unrest. No minutiae is left unnoticed; for example, Marie Antoinette's struggles with the strictly mandated whalebone corset was the epitome of her initial lack of acceptance by the French court, whereas her creation of the three-foot-high pouffed hair-dress was emblematic of her preoccupation with fashion. One revolution in women's accoutrements, unfortunately, was swapped for another more deadly revolution in politics and freedom. Tales of intrigue dot every page (for instance, the long-standing feud with Louis XV's mistress, Comtesse du Barry), as do the foibles of commoners and royalty. Using bold and engaging prose, the author has created a whole new appreciation for academic writings. ((Reviewed September 15, 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews

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Year of wonders - Geraldine Brooks

Year of wonders: a novel of the plague - Brooks, Geraldine

Summary: Eighteen-year-old Anna Frith tells the story of her remote English village, Eyam, which was infected by the plague in 1666 and where, persuaded by their vicar, the townspeople decided to quarantine themselves. - (Baker & Taylor)



Library Journal Reviews
Usually, "Black Death" brings to mind thoughts of a 14th-century Europe ravaged and emptied by pestilence. But there were plague outbreaks throughout the early modern period, notably in England in 1665-66. Particularly hard hit during that particular epidemic was the Derbyshire village of Eyam, whose story is told here. The plague traveled to Eyam in a bundle of cloth. The unfortunate recipient, a tailor, then becomes the first to die in an epidemic that leaves the village shrunk to one-third of its former population. What makes the tale of Eyam remarkable is that the citizens, led by their pastor, agreed to impose a quarantine on themselves in order to stop the plague from spreading. The usual response to news of plague in early modern Europe was flight, for there was no cure and death was almost certain. Brooks (Foreign Correspondence) tells the story of Eyam's heroic battle from the perspective of young Anna Frith, servant to the pastor and his wife. Widowed before the epidemic, Anna is the mother of two small children and landlady to the unfortunate tailor. She nurses her friends and family to little avail during the horrors of the plague year, but her spirit remains unbroken. Like Eyam itself, Anna prevails and lives to see another day. Fans of Judith Merkle Riley's historical novels (e.g., Master of All Desires, LJ 11/15/99) will find much to savor in the new work. Recommended for all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/01.] Wendy Bethel, Grove City P.L., OH Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.


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The pleasure seekers: a novel - Tishani Doshi

The pleasure seekers: a novel - Doshi, Tishani

Summary: A prize-winning poet's first work of fiction describes the love story between Babo, an Indian man, and Sian, a fair-skinned woman from Wales, who forged a life for themselves and their hybrid family in Madras, India. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
"Doshi's rich debut is the story of three generations of the Patel family in Madras, India. Prem Kumar and his wife Trishala send their eldest son Babo off to England to study with the hope that he'll eventually return home full of ideas for running the family paint business. So they are devastated when they learn that he has fallen in love with a Welsh girl named Siân. Eventually they reconcile themselves to the relationship, and allow Babo to marry Siân on one condition: the couple will reside in Madras at the Patel home for at least two years. Siân agrees, leaving her home behind and growing to love Madras so much that when the two years are up, she decides she and Babo should stay, albeit in a house of their own. Babo and Siân have two children, cautious Mayuri and precocious Bean, who eventually follows in her father's footsteps to England. Doshi tackles some heavy issues, such as the difficulties of leaving family behind and the ongoing repercussions of that choice, with intelligence and grace." Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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Let's take the long way home - Gail Caldwell

Let's take the long way home: a memoir of friendship - Caldwell, Gail

Summary: Caldwell reflects on her own coming-of-age in midlife, as she learns to open herself to the power and healing of sharing her life with a best friend. Traces the author's close friendship with the late fellow writer Caroline Knapp, describing their shared experiences with sobriety, a love of dogs, and Caroline's battle with cancer.


Booklist Reviews
Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic, reflected on her Texas heritage and literary ardor in her first gorgeously crafted memoir, A Strong West Wind (2006). Her second, a gripping mix of confession, elegy, and resolve, focuses on Caldwell's profound friendship with sister writer Caroline Knapp. One would expect the two independent women to have met in literary circles in the 1990s: both lived in Cambridge, both wrote for newspapers—Caldwell reviewing books for the Boston Globe, Knapp writing a column for an alternative paper. Instead it was their love for dogs (Clementine, Caldwell's beloved Samoyed, darn near steals the show), passion for the water (Caldwell as a swimmer, Knapp as a rower), and struggles with alcoholism that brought them together. Knapp confronted her addiction in Drinking: A Love Story (1996). Caldwell kept her trials to herself until now. Interweaving her vivid memories of Knapp, who died unexpectedly at age 42 in 2001, with tales sweet and harrowing of her own efforts to overcome fear and embrace life, Caldwell creates an adroitly distilled memoir of trust, affinity, and love. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.


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