How to live, or, A life of Montaigne - Sarah Bakewell

How to live, or, A life of Montaigne: in one question and twenty attempts at an answer - Bakewell, Sarah

Summary: "How does one live? How does one do the good or honorable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Montaigne, perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays,' meaning 'attempts' or 'tries.' Into them, he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller and, over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw readers. This spirited biography relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored."--From publisher description.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In a wide-ranging intellectual career, Michel de Montaigne found no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well. By casting her biography of the writer as 20 chapters, each focused on a different answer to the question How to live? Bakewell limns Montaigne's ceaseless pursuit of this most elusive knowledge. Embedded in the 20 life-knowledge responses, readers will find essential facts—when and where Montaigne was born, how and whom he married, how he became mayor of Bordeaux, how he managed a public life in a time of lethal religious and political passions. But Bakewell keeps the focus on the inner evolution of the acute mind informing Montaigne's charmingly digressive and tolerantly skeptical essays. Flexible and curious, this was a mind at home contemplating the morality of cannibals, the meaning of his own near-death experience, and the puzzlingly human behavior of animals. And though Montaigne has identified his own personality as his overarching topic, Bakewell marvels at the way Montaigne's prose has enchanted diverse readers—Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and Gide—with their own reflections. Because Montaigne's capacious mirror still captivates many, this insightful life study will win high praise from both scholars and general readers.

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The art of Daniel Clowes - Daniel Clowes, Alvin Buenaventura, Chip Kidd and Chris Ware

The art of Daniel Clowes: modern cartoonist - Clowes, Daniel

Summary: Examines the work and accomplishments of the author of "Eightball," "Ghost World," and other alternative comics and graphic novels.



Booklist Reviews
Clowes is the ultimate alt-comics artist, combining drawing chops equal to those of Jaime Hernandez, the derisively skeptical attitude of a Peter Bagge, and a formal mastery of the medium that rivals Chris Ware's. This handsome volume, released in connection with a traveling exhibition of Clowes' artwork, offers an overview of his 25 years in comics, from his late-'80s magazine Eightball through his acclaimed graphic novels, including Ghost World (1997), David Boring (2000), and Wilson (2010). The volume opens with a recent, career-spanning interview and a generous selection of his groundbreaking Eightball-era work, followed by an appreciation by close friend Ware, who reminisces about their days as struggling cartoonists in Chicago in the early '90s (their informal collaborations are among the rarest of the many rarities reprinted in the book). Other essays offer insight into Clowes' later work, but it's the profusion of his artwork collected here—comics pages, unpublished sketches, New Yorker covers, and other commercial illustrations—that makes the most compelling case for Clowes as one of the most accomplished and important figures on the contemporary comics scene. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Dreaming in French - Alice Yaeger Kaplan

Dreaming in French: the Paris years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis - Kaplan, Alice Yaeger

Summary: Examines how spending time abroad in Paris changed the lives and outlooks of three notable American women. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Kaplan (The Interpreter, 2005) recounted her revelatory passion for all things French in French Lessons (1994). She now offers uniquely discerning portraits of three very different yet equally trailblazing American women whose "lives were transformed by a year in France, and who, in turn, transformed the United States." An elegant, socially well-connected book lover and "keen observer of beauty," Jackie Bouvier Kennedy was a Vassar student when she went to France in 1949 and found her true home. As Kaplan follows Kennedy to the White House and beyond, she praises her "quiet power and uncanny intelligence" while tracking her lifelong fascination with French art and culture. Leaving her husband and young son behind, Susan Sontag landed in France in 1958 and immersed herself in bohemian Paris and the French literary works that became the foundation for her influential, often controversial writing. Angela Davis' ardor for French propelled her out of segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to school in New York, then to Paris in 1963–64 as the only African American student in her year-abroad program. A woman of "intellectual intensity" and valor, she became a besieged activist and cause célèbre. Kaplan's avidly researched, fresh, and astute biographical triptych reveals as much about the evolution of women's lives as it does about how profoundly these three exceptional Francophiles deepened the American experience. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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The art of losing - Rebecca Connell

The art of losing - Connell, Rebecca

Summary: Louise, a young woman whose mother, Lydia, died in an automobile accident while she was a child, believes that her mother's lover, Nicholas, caused her death and seeks revenge against him by secretly creeping into his life.


Publishers Weekly Reviews
Connell's first novel charts the riveting, decade-long struggle of 20-something Englishwoman Louise to come to terms with losing her mother at the age of 10. In 1983, Oxford professor Nicholas Steiner has a short-lived affair with Lydia, the wife of a university colleague and Louise's mother, before marrying another woman and having a son. Nicholas's attempt at domestic bliss is complicated by an unexpected encounter with Lydia, with whom he renews the affair, which ends only with Lydia's death in 1989. Nearly two decades later, certain that Nicholas is to blame for her mother's death, Louise assumes her mother's name, moves to the town where Nicholas and his family live, and sets out to confront and, she hopes, destroy him. But Louise/Lydia falls in love with Nicholas's son and moves in with the Steiner family, from whom she learns firsthand about life's ambiguities. Connell's story races through a series of breathtaking yet believable surprises, never failing to hold the reader's interest. (Oct.)

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This is how - Augusten Burroughs

This is how: proven aid in overcoming shyness, molestation, fatness, spinsterhood, grief, disease, lushery, decrepitude, & more-- for young and old alike - Augusten Burroughs

Summary: Draws on the author's roller-coaster experiences with limited opportunities, successes and failures while offering darkly whimsical, no-holds-barred advice on surviving everything from riding elevators and gaining weight to finishing drinks and finding love. By the author of Running With Scissors. 350,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Burroughs, whose best-selling memoir, Running with Scissors (2002), documented horrific childhood abuse, is uniquely qualified to write a self-help book. He is a survivor, with intimate knowledge of many of the topics addressed in the genre. His advice here, whether about addiction, aggression, self-loathing, or denial, can be summed up in three words: get over yourself. Life is too short, he says, to do anything but live in the moment and focus on the good. Burroughs is bracingly honest, offering remedies for the world-weary, from teenage girls molested by their fathers to adults coming to terms with the death of a life partner. Burroughs, whose struggles with alcohol were documented in Dry (2003), doesn't believe in Alcoholics Anonymous, which requires members to admit powerlessness. A person needs power, he says, to abolish alcohol from his or her life. With his trademark blend of black humor and heart, Burroughs serves up tough love and reasons for hope: "If you hate life, you haven't seen enough of it," he writes in a chapter about suicide. "If you hate your life, it's because your life is too small and doesn't fit you. However big you think your life is, it's nothing compared to what's out there." HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With a first printing of 350,000 copies and extensive promotion in print and online, Burroughs' one-of-a-kind take on the how-to book will have his fans standing in line for advice. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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A thousand-mile walk to the Gulf - John Muir

A thousand-mile walk to the Gulf - Muir, John

Summary: In 1867, John Muir, age twenty-eight, was blinded in an industrial accident. He lay in bed for two weeks wondering if he would ever see again. When his sight miraculously returned, Muir resolved to devote all his time to the great passion of his life -- studying plants. He quit his job in an Indiana manufacturing plant, said good-bye to his family, and set out alone to walk to the Gulf of Mexico, sketching tropical plants along the way. He kept a journal of this thousand-mile walk and near the end of his life, now famous as a conservation warrior and literary celebrity, sent a typescript of it to his publisher. The result is a wonderful portrait of a young man in search of himself and a particularly vivid portrait of the post-war American South. Here is the young Muir talking with freed slaves and former Confederate soldiers, pondering the uses of electricity, exploring Mammoth Cave, sleeping in a Savannah cemetery, delirious with malarial fever in the home of strangers at Cedar Key, traveling to Havana, Cuba, and sailing to San Francisco Bay. Once in California, Muir promptly set out for Yosemite Valley -- 200 miles away. There Muir found his destiny -- and a mountain range to test his apparently inexhaustible capacity for walking. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf bridges two Muir classics: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and My First Summer in the Sierra

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Girlchild - Tupelo Hassman

Girlchild - Hassman, Tupelo

Summary: Obsessively following the edicts of the Girl Scouts Handbook in spite of her lack of a troop, young Rory longs to escape the Reno trailer park where she lives with her bartender mother.



Booklist Reviews
In this inventive, exciting debut, Hassman writes a 1980s Reno trailer park into a neon, breathing world. Reno is just like Tahoe, only without anything beautiful. Narrator Rory Dawn, whose mother, simultaneously tripping on acid and giving birth, gave her a name that sounds like a screaming sunrise and calls her girlchild for short, is a grade-schooler when we meet her. Like the 1972 Nobility double-wide she lives in, trailer-park anthropologist Rory's own foundation is lacking, at best. She inventories her mother's alcoholism and mental illness with heartbreaking, childish normalcy. The abuse she suffers at the hands of her inept babysitters turns her into an introverted bookworm who wins spelling bees (until she worries her smarts will alienate her beloved mother) and finds solace in the library. Rory's name fills the circulation card of her school's Girl Scout Handbook, and she earns proficiency badges as a troop of one. Hassman's creatively titled, short, free-form chapters are helium-filled imagination fodder, and Hassman takes what could be trite or unbelievable in less talented hands and makes it entirely the opposite. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Mapplethorpe: a biography - Patricia Morrisroe

Mapplethorpe: a biography - Morrisroe, Patricia

Summary: Describes the photographer's intensely private life, his personal relationships, the evolution of his seminal photographic art, and his battle with AIDS - (Baker & Taylor)



Kirkus Reviews
~ A rivetingly detailed, unforgivingly blunt biography of the photographer whose celebrity portraits and depictions of the sadomasochistic gay subculture ignited public controversy. More voyeuristic titillation than serious art historical examination, Morrisroe's study of Mapplethorpe (19461989) gains credibility from her exhaustive research: The New York based journalist interviewed the artist about his life on numerous occasions before his death from AIDS, spoke at length to former lovers and art world associates, and won the confidence of his long-estranged parents. The book opens with heavy irony at Mapplethorpe's Catholic funeral in Floral Park, Queens, the artist's boyhood home. His youth was an awkward period of slow self-discovery in the shadow of a gregarious older brother and domineering father. At Brooklyn's Pratt Institute in the '60s, the ROTC cadet blossomed into an acid-eating hippie art student. He soon found his muse in aspiring rock poet Patti Smith; the pair moved to Manhattan and held court from the Chelsea Hotel. The author depicts Mapplethorpe as a conniving seducer who wrote his own ticket to the art world by winning the love and support of Sam Wagstaff, a prominent and monied photography collector. With his patronage, Mapplethorpe flourished, turning his personal fascinations into compelling photo series, most frequently of gay S&M rituals, black men, bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, eroticized flowers, and celebrities. Morrisroe treats Mapplethorpe as a kind of sexualized social savant with a magic touch, making much ado of his shameless career manipulations pitting galleries and power players against one another. Pathos comes to the fore in the chapters on the '80s, in which the dying artist achieves ever-greater levels of fame and controversy. Rich in sharp observation and risque revelation, an immorality tale that shamelessly mines Mapplethorpe's sad legacy for all it's worth. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Vanity Fair; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews

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Executioner's song - Norman Mailer

Executioner's song - Mailer, Norman

Summary: A reconstruction of the crime and fate of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who sought his own execution in Utah where he was imprisoned, is based on taped interviews with relatives, friends, lawyers, and law-enforcement officials - (Baker & Taylor)


Review
This is an absolutely astonishing book. -- The New York Times Book Review, Joan Didion

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Space chronicles - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Space chronicles: facing the ultimate frontier - Tyson, Neil deGrasse

Summary: Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson presents his views on the future of space travel and America's role in that future, giving his readers an eye-opening manifesto on the importance of space exploration for America's economy, security, and morale.



Kirkus Reviews
Astrophysicist Tyson, the director of Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, delivers a forceful, cumulative argument for space exploration even in the face of a disastrous economy. In this collection of articles and talks, the author investigates what space travel means to us as a species and, more specifically, what NASA means to America. Deploying an energetic tone, scattershot with clever twists and peculiar, entertaining factoids, Tyson handles the species half of the equation from the comic angle. That perspective is inclusive and humbling, open and encouraging of wonder, and the author finds in Earth a precious mote in the vastness, allowing readers to transcend the primal and celebrate great scientific laws to appreciate our place in the universe. It also helps us get past the jingoistic aspects of space exploration, for if NASA--the other half of Tyson's concern--is driven by anything, it is military politics. "When science does advance, when discovery does unfold, when life on Earth does improve," he writes, "they happen as an auxiliary benefit and not as a primary goal of NASA's geopolitical mission statement." But those auxiliary benefits are the critical, serendipitous fallout of the space program: GPS, cordless power tools, ear thermometers, household water filters, long-distance telecommunication devices, smoke detectors and much more. You can't script the benefits; you have to have faith in the cross-pollinating splendors of science, and Tyson finds little evidence for this in the current Congress. If Tyson handles both the rarified and scientific justifications of continued space funding with aplomb, his economic reasoning falls short. One half a penny of each tax dollar sounds scant, but that leaves only 199 like-sized programs for the entire government. An enthusiastic, persuasive case to start probing outer space again.

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The age of miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

The age of miracles - Walker, Karen Thompson

Summary: Imagines the coming-of-age story of young Julia, whose world is thrown into upheaval when it is discovered that the Earth's rotation has suddenly begun to slow, posing a catastrophic threat to all life.



Kirkus Reviews
In Walker's stunning debut, a young California girl coming of age in a dystopian near future confronts the inevitability of change on the most personal level as life on earth withers. Sixth-grader Julia, whose mother is a slightly neurotic former actress and whose father is an obstetrician, is living an unremarkable American middle-class childhood. She rides the school bus and takes piano lessons; she has a mild crush on a boy named Seth whose mother has cancer; she enjoys sleepovers with her best friend Hanna, who happens to be a Mormon. Then one October morning there's a news report that scientists have discovered a slowing of the earth's rotation, adding minutes to each day and night. After initial panic, the human tendency to adapt sets in even as the extra minutes increase into hours. Most citizens go along when the government stays on a 24-hour clock, although an underground movement of those living by "real time" sprouts up. Gravity is affected; birds begin to die, and astronauts are stranded on their space station. By November, the "real time" of days has grown to 40 hours, and the actual periods of light and dark only get longer from that point. The world faces crises in communication, health, transportation and food supply. The changes in the planet are profound, but the daily changes in Julia's life, which she might be facing even in a normal day, are equally profound. Hanna's family moves to Utah, leaving Julia without a best friend to help defend against the bullies at the bus stop. She goes through the trials and joys of first love. She begins to see cracks in her parents' marriage and must navigate the currents of loyalty and moral uncertainty. She faces sickness and death of loved ones. But she also witnesses constancy and perseverance. Julia's life is shaped by what happens in the larger world, but it is the only life she knows, and Walker captures each moment, intimate and universal, with magical precision. Riveting, heartbreaking, profoundly moving. Copyright Kirkus 2012 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Harbor nocturne - Joseph Wambaugh

Harbor nocturne - Wambaugh, Joseph

Summary: "In the southernmost Los Angeles district of San Pedro, one of the world's busiest harbors, an unlikely pair of lovers are unwittingly caught between the two warring sides of the law amid the investigation of a horrifying human-trafficking ring. When Dinko Babich, a young longshoreman, delivers Lita Medina, a young Mexican dancer, from the harbor to a Hollywood nightclub, theirs lives are forever changed as the two are caught in the crosshairs of the multitude of cops and criminals, the law-abiding and the lawless, who occupy the harbor."--Dust jacket.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Wambaugh fills his books with over-the-top, crazy war stories, disturbing, sometimes revolting in their details and insights into human nature and made more shocking because readers know Wambaugh gets his stories from real cops. And, while that could be more than enough, Wambaugh embeds the stories he hears from cops within fiercely and ingeniously plotted mysteries. The war story–mystery combination works because cops naturally tell each other their stories in the downtimes between calls. This latest is part of Wambaugh's Hollywood Station series, in which police do battle against the crazies on the streets and in the hills. The action expands, this time, to the L.A. district of San Pedro, one of the world's busiest harbors, which boasts a harbor's share of lowlifes and career criminals. A love story starts when a druggie longshoreman takes the assignment of driving a young Mexican stripper from a harbor bar to a Hollywood nightclub, a decision that gets the longshoreman enmeshed in the sex-trafficking trade. Fans of Hollywood Station (2006), the first in the series, will be glad to see surfer cops Flotsam and Jetsam return, along with the always-ambitious Hollywood Nate Weiss, now pushing 40 and fearing that his chances to be discovered are as flimsy as his SAG card. A very fast ride-along, enlivened by cop gallows humor, snarky street altercations, and an insistent pull to the dark side. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Oh, the places you'll go - Dr. Seuss

Oh, the places you'll go - Dr. Seuss

Summary: Advice in rhyme for proceeding in life; weathering fear, loneliness, and confusion; and being in charge of your actions.

"Don't be fooled by the title of this seriocomic ode to success; it's not 'Climb Every Mountain,' kid version. All journeys face perils, whether from indecision, from loneliness, or worst of all, from too much waiting. Seuss' familiar pajama-clad hero is up to the challenge, and his odyssey is captured vividly in busy two-page spreads evoking both the good times (grinning purple elephants, floating golden castles) and the bad (deep blue wells of confusion). Seuss' message is simple but never sappy: life may be a 'Great Balancing Act,' but through it all 'There's fun to be done.'"--(starred) Booklist. - (Random House, Inc.)


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The Lorax - Dr. Seuss

The Lorax - Dr. Seuss

Summary: The Once-ler describes the results of the local pollution problem.

"Unless someone like you...cares a whole awful lot...nothing is going to get better...It's not."

Long before saving the earth became a global concern, Dr. Seuss, speaking through his character the Lorax, warned against mindless progress and the danger it posed to the earth's natural beauty.

"The big, colorful pictures and the fun images, word plays and rhymes make this an amusing exposition of the ecology crisis."—School Library Journal. - (Random House, Inc.)

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Insurgent - Veronica Roth

Insurgent - Roth, Veronica

Summary: "As war surges in the dystopian society around her, sixteen-year-old Divergent Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves--and herself--while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love"-- Provided by publisher.


Booklist Reviews
While the hugely popular Divergent (2011) welcomed dystopian fans of every stripe with its irresistable concept and hybridization of genres, this sequel is more for hard-core fans—a good thing if you're a devotee but a bit overwhelming for fence-riders. Rocked by the recent simulation war, the five factions engage in increasingly dangerous power plays to pick up the pieces. Tris and her love, Tobias, both daredevils of the Dauntless faction, are key players in these skirmishes, most of which focus upon the fiendishly logical Erudites and almost all of which are complicated by backstabbers and turncoats. It remains a great deal of fun to watch these cliques-taken-to-extremes duke it out with their various strengths and weaknesses, and Roth delivers the goods when it comes to intense, personal violence (no superpowers to be found here) and compelling set pieces (as when Tris undergoes a public "truth serum" interrogation). Newcomers, and even some old hands, might get buried under all the transposable characters and faction minutia, but those who stick it out will be rewarded with quite the cliff-hanger HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Divergent was the kind of best-seller juggernaut debut authors dream of. With high-profile movie rights already sold, you can bet you'll see this sequel on everyone's must-read list. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Harbor - John Ajvide Lindqvist

Harbor - Lindqvist, John Ajvide

Summary: "From the author of the international and New York Times bestseller Let the Right One In (Let Me In) comes this stunning and terrifying book which begins when a man's six-year-old daughter vanishes. One ordinary winter afternoon on a snowy island, Anders and Cecilia take their six-year-old daughter Maja across the ice to visit the lighthouse in the middle of the frozen channel. While the couple explore the lighthouse, Maja disappears -- either into thin air or under thin ice -- leaving not even a footprint in the snow. Two years later, alone and more or less permanently drunk, Anders returns to the island to regroup. He slowly realises that people are not telling him all they know; even his own mother, it seems, is keeping secrets. What is happening in Domaro, and what power does the sea have over the town's inhabitants? As he did with Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead, John Ajvide Lindqvist serves up a blockbuster cocktail of suspense in a narrative that barely pauses for breath"-- Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews
This eerie, atmospheric tale of desperation and strange bargains with incomprehensible forces begins with the disappearance of seven-year-old Maja. Two years later, her father, Anders, is back on the island, scene of her vanishing, intent on reassembling his life. He spent the interval drunk; his wife, Celia, left him; and he's obsessed with how perfect life with Maja was. His grandmother, Anna-Greta, knows something she's not telling. In fact, most of Domaro's year-round residents know at least something about the town's relationship with the surrounding sea. Anna-Greta's lover Simon, a former stage magician, has his own secrets but slowly discovers the island's secrets as his own becomes harder to keep. Living in the Shack, where he'd lived with Celia and Maja, Anders becomes increasingly convinced that Maja isn't dead and that he must rescue her. He'll go to any length, and eventually, the history of the island becomes clear. The book's long, complex buildup to a particularly satisfying conclusion is shot through with the very best kind of horror—subtle, persistent, finally front-and-center. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.


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In one person - John Irving

In one person - Irving, John

Summary: A tale inspired by the U.S. AIDS epidemic in the 1980s follows the experiences of individuals--including the bisexual narrator--who are torn by devastating losses and whose perspectives on tolerance and love are shaped by awareness of what might have been.


Booklist Reviews 
*Starred Review* Much of Irving's thirteenth novel is piquantly charming, crisply funny, and let-your-guard-down madcap in the classic mode of a Frank Capra or Billy Wilder film. This shrewdly frolicsome ambience is tied to the amateur theatrical productions that provide the primary source of entertainment in mid-twentieth-century First Sister, Vermont, a no-place-to-hide yet nonetheless secretive small town sporting a private boy's prep school. Here lives young, fatherless Billy, whose lumberman-by-day, actor-by-night Grandpa Harry plays women's roles with baffling authenticity. By the time Billy turns 13, he realizes that something sets him apart beyond his speech impediment and determination to become a writer, namely his crushes on the "wrong people," including his future stepfather, teacher and Shakespeare scholar Richard, and Miss Frost, the tall, strong librarian who eventually proves to be the key to the truth about Billy's bisexuality and his biological father. Storytelling wizard that he is, Irving revitalizes his signature motifs (New England life, wrestling, praising great writers, forbidden sex) while animating a glorious cast of misfit characters within a complicated plot. A mesmerizing, gracefully maturing narrator, Billy navigates fraught relationships with men and women and witnesses the horrors of the AIDS epidemic. Ever the fearless writer of conscience calling on readers to be open-minded, Irving performs a sweetly audacious, at times elegiac, celebration of human sexuality. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Irving is always a huge draw, and this sexually daring and compassionate tale, which harks back to the book that made him famous, The World according to Garp (1978), will garner intense media attention. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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