Nina: Jazz Legend and Civil-Rights Activist Nina Simone - Alice Briere-Haquet

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic - Alison Bechdel

Lincoln in the bardo - George Saunders

West of sunset - Stewart O'Nan

West of sunset - O'Nan, Stewart

Summary: A tale inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's last years in Hollywood finds him reflecting on past events at the height of the Jazz Age while falling in love, struggling to hold his family together and penning The Last Tycoon. By the best-selling author of Last Night at the Lobster. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* It would appear to be a daunting task to write a biographical novel of one of our most iconic writers, yet O'Nan avoids every pitfall. Focusing on the last years of F. Scott Fitzgerald's life, when he was depleted both mentally and physically from overwork and too much drink, O'Nan, in understated prose, renders a heartbreaking portrait of an artist soldiering on in the face of personal and professional ruin. Ensconced at the Garden of Allah complex in Hollywood, surrounded by a group of lively, hard-partying actors and writers, including Dorothy Parker and Humphrey Bogart, Fitzgerald is relegated to rewriting B-movie scripts. He is in desperate need of the money to pay for Zelda's stay in a sanitarium. Their family "vacations," in which he reports back to her doctor on her behavior, only underscore how far they have fallen from their once-glamorous life. He finds comfort, instead, in his relationship with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, a self-made woman who took care of her alcoholic mother for years and casts a wary eye on Scott's endless promises to give up drinking. O'Nan's convincing characterization of a man burdened by guilt and struggling to hold onto his dignity is, at once, a moving testament to grace under pressure and an intimate look at a legend.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: An eight-city tour, national review coverage, and an avalanche of prepub buzz will back up this luminous novel from the prolific O'Nan. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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My Struggle - Karl Ove Knausgård

My Struggle - Knausgård, Karl Ove

Summary: An autobiographical novel focuses on a young man trying to make sense of his place in the disjointed world that surrounds him.




Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Between 2009 and 2011, Norwegian novelist Knausgaard published a six-volume series entitled Min Kamp ("My Struggle"), a chronicle of the narrator's life, from boyhood to fatherhood. Called a "confessional novel," the series garnered critical acclaim, numerous awards, record sales, and a great deal of controversy due to its intensely autobiographical nature (friends and family publicly denounced the books). Clocking in at nearly 500 pages apiece, the first two installments focus on Karl Ove's strained relationship with his dying father, an overbearing schoolteacher, and Karl's fledgling romance with Linda, who would become his second wife. In Book Three, Karl Ove recounts his boyhood years on Tromøy, an island in southern Norway, during the 1970s and 1980s. Young Ove's adventures are extraordinarily humdrum. He and his brother, Yngve, play sports, chase girls, and discover rock music, but the ever-present tension between the boys and their taskmaster father begins to illuminate the dysfunctional family depicted in Book One. Notable for his meticulous attention to the quotidian details of everyday life, Knausgaard's pared-down style and plainspoken narrator manage to propel these long books, concerned less with sustaining plot than with the accumulation of tiny intensities and candid disclosures, which makes for strangely engaging, compulsively page-turning prose

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My struggle - Karl Ove Knausgaard

My struggle. Book three, Boyhood - Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Summary: "A family of four--mother, father and two boys--move to the South Coast of Norway to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory, upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, Book Three gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence."--Amazon.com

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Between 2009 and 2011, Norwegian novelist Knausgaard published a six-volume series entitled Min Kamp ("My Struggle"), a chronicle of the narrator's life, from boyhood to fatherhood. Called a "confessional novel," the series garnered critical acclaim, numerous awards, record sales, and a great deal of controversy due to its intensely autobiographical nature (friends and family publicly denounced the books). Clocking in at nearly 500 pages apiece, the first two installments focus on Karl Ove's strained relationship with his dying father, an overbearing schoolteacher, and Karl's fledgling romance with Linda, who would become his second wife. In Book Three, Karl Ove recounts his boyhood years on Tromøy, an island in southern Norway, during the 1970s and 1980s. Young Ove's adventures are extraordinarily humdrum. He and his brother, Yngve, play sports, chase girls, and discover rock music, but the ever-present tension between the boys and their taskmaster father begins to illuminate the dysfunctional family depicted in Book One. Notable for his meticulous attention to the quotidian details of everyday life, Knausgaard's pared-down style and plainspoken narrator manage to propel these long books, concerned less with sustaining plot than with the accumulation of tiny intensities and candid disclosures, which makes for strangely engaging, compulsively page-turning prose. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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The invention of wings - Sue Monk Kidd

The invention of wings - Kidd, Sue Monk

Summary: "The story follows Hetty 'Handful' Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. "The Invention of Wings" follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), Kidd allows herself to go beyond the record to flesh out the inner lives of all the characters, both real and imagined"-- Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Inspired by the true story of early-nineteenth-century abolitionist and suffragist Sarah Grimké, Kidd paints a moving portrait of two women inextricably linked by the horrors of slavery. Sarah, daughter of a wealthy South Carolina plantation owner, exhibits an independent spirit and strong belief in the equality of all. Thwarted from her dreams of becoming a lawyer, she struggles throughout life to find an outlet for her convictions. Handful, a slave in the Grimké household, displays a sharp intellect and brave, rebellious disposition. She maintains a compliant exterior, while planning for a brighter future. Told in first person, the chapters alternate between the two main characters' perspectives, as we follow their unlikely friendship (characterized by both respect and resentment) from childhood to middle age. While their pain and struggle cannot be equated, both women strive to be set free—Sarah from the bonds of patriarchy and Southern bigotry, and Handful from the inhuman bonds of slavery. Kidd is a master storyteller, and, with smooth and graceful prose, she immerses the reader in the lives of these fascinating women as they navigate religion, family drama, slave revolts, and the abolitionist movement. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Beginning with her phenomenally successful debut, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), Kidd's novels have found an intense readership among library patrons, who will be eager to get their hands on her latest one. Copyright 2013 Booklist Reviews.

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The Paris wife - Paula McLain

The Paris wife - McLain, Paula

Summary: Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by brash "beautiful boy" Ernest Hemingway, and after a brief courtship and small wedding, they take off for Paris, where Hadley makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband's career.


Booklist Reviews
History is sadly neglectful of the supporting players in the lives of great artists. Fortunately, fiction provides ample opportunity to bring these often fascinating personalities out into the limelight. Gaynor Arnold successfully resurrected the much-maligned Mrs. Charles Dickens in Girl in a Blue Dress (2009), now Paula McLain brings Hadley Richardson Hemingway out from the formidable shadow cast by her famous husband. Though doomed, the Hemingway marriage had its giddy high points, including a whirlwind courtship and a few fast and furious years of the expatriate lifestyle in 1920s Paris. Hadley and Ernest traveled in heady company during this gin-soaked and jazz-infused time, and readers are treated to intimate glimpses of many of the literary giants of the era, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the real star of the story is Hadley, as this time around, Ernest is firmly relegated to the background as he almost never was during their years together. Though eventually a woman scorned, Hadley is able to acknowledge without rancor or bitterness that "Hem" had "helped me to see what I really was and what I could do." Much more than a "woman-behind-the-man" homage, this beautifully crafted tale is an unsentimental tribute to a woman who acted with grace and strength as her marriage crumbled. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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The paladin - Brian Garfield

The paladin: a novel based on fact - Garfield, Brian

Summary: In 1940, Winston Churchill recruits a fifteen-year-old schoolboy to serve as a secret agent--code name Christopher Robin - (Baker & Taylor)



Kirkus Review
/* Starred Review */ A remarkable adventure novel ostensibly based on fact and written in collaboration with its real-life hero, "Christopher Creighton." While a ten-year-old schoolboy, Creighton accidentally knocked over a fresh brick wall being put up by his fat, cigar-smoking country neighbor, Winston Churchill, who then took a liking to the lad. Over the next five years they became quite friendly, and when Winston was made Prime Minister, he called the boy for a secret visit and asked him to be a spy for England--by visiting schoolfriend Prince Paul in Belgium and discovering the dispositions of the Belgian army. (Winston will then be able to figure out whether Hitler plans to invade France through Belgium.) Christopher is magnificently successful, meets Von Ribbentrop, overhears and reports back the vital information that Belgium will capitulate to Hitler without a shot. . . and so the British decide to retreat to Dunkirk and evacuate rather than stay and fight a hopeless cause. Soon Christopher is Winston's personal secret agent, his teenage paladin: he goes through horrid training exercises in which he actually kills German prisoners; he is himself beaten nearly to death for training purposes; and he is later sent to implant time bombs in a Dutch submarine's torpedoes and destroy the sub with all aboard (all allies?). Why? Because the Admiralty does not want Roosevelt to receive Dutch intelligence about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor, intelligence that might be used to keep the U.S. out of the war. And after three more assassinations of innocent soldiers, Christopher's last job is to pass himself off as a double agent and give the Germans false information about the Normandy landing--but only after unendurable torture and an attempt at suicide using a hollow cyanide tooth. . . . How much of this is true, how much fiction? One has to assume that if all or most of it were verifiable, this would have been non-fiction, not a novel. Still, veteran Garfield punches it all out with assured panache: larger-than-life Churchill, exploit after exploit, horror upon horror. So, believe it or not, this is a ripping good yarn--with food for all sorts of WW II-history speculation. (Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1980)

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Blood & beauty - Sarah Dunant

Blood & beauty: the Borges: a novel - Dunant, Sarah

Summary: "By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family--in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia--in order to succeed. Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest--though increasingly unstable--weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli's The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player."--www.Amazon.com.

Kirkus Reviews
The big, bad Borgia dynasty undergoes modern reconsideration in the best-selling British author's epic new biofiction. Eclipsing her earlier period novels in scope, Dunant's (Sacred Hearts, 2009, etc.) latest is an impressively confident, capable sweep through the corrupt politics and serpentine relationships of a legendary family. Marshaling a mass of material, including contemporary research, Dunant delivers a colorful, sensual and characteristically atmospheric account of Rodrigo Borgia's ascent to the papacy as Alexander VI in 1492 and his subsequent tireless efforts to build a power base through the strategic use of his four children. Cesare is the sly, shrewd son, a match for his father in guile but with a colder heart, who moves ruthlessly from cardinal to soldier as politics and advancement dictate. Beloved daughter Lucrezia makes one strategic marriage after another while nursing a powerful attachment to Cesare. Two more sons play similarly useful roles, forging alliances. The politics are complicated, but Dunant's clear account is balanced by oddly affectionate character portraits informed by her interest in the psychology of these larger-than-life figures. Closing at a bittersweet moment that fuses family fortunes and realpolitik, the author promises a second volume. Dunant's biggest and best work to date, this intelligently readable account of formative events and monster players has Hilary Mantel–era quality best-seller stamped all over it. Copyright Kirkus 2013 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Smarty girl: Dublin savage - Molloy, Honor

Smarty girl: Dublin savage - Molloy, Honor

Summary: An autobiographical novel set in 1960s Ireland, this irresistible story follows the rise and fall of the O’Feeney family, seen through the eyes of a precocious little girl. More savage than civilized, Noleen is a rare character from a Dublin long forgotten, where Nelson’s Pillar still stands in O’Connell Street?but not for long?and where untamed musicians gather in the O’Feeneys’ kitchen to raise a jar and the roof. Noleen’s father, a successful actor and scoundrel king of the city, does his best to destroy his family, while her mother tries to save it. Noleen schemes to make it through each Dublin day, cadging sweets and growing tough in the midst of chaos. In the end, however, nothing?not even a fierce girl’s powerful imagination?can hold the family together and keep them, safe as geese in the sky, in their home on Tolka Row.

"What Malloy does in remembering this journey is brave and honest, and the child-like spirit and voice she so skillfully captures are truly remarkable." - Irish America

“As magical as a fairy tale and just as grim, Honor Molloy’s Smarty Girl pierces the heart with its pure Irish song.” - Brown Alumni Magazine

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The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford (DVD)

The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford (DVD)

Summary: Everyone in 1880s America knows Jesse James. He's the nation's most notorious criminal and is being hunted by the law in 10 states. He's also the land's greatest hero, lauded as a Robin Hood by the public. No one knows of Robert Ford, at least not yet. But the ambitious 19-year-old aims to change that. He befriends Jesse and rides with his gang. And if that doesn't bring Ford fame, he will have to find a deadlier way. Friendship becomes rivalry and the quest for fame becomes obsession.

Staff Review
This film has been the most persistent and poignant imagery and story telling that I have encountered since Talk to Her and Happy Together. This film is haunting, beautiful, and oddly timeless. Character worship is the basic plot, and this love and obsession eventually leads to the death of a legend. That mythology and hype is elevated and revered today to an unhealthy level. I am drawn to this relationship of adorer and adored. Brad Pitt exudes a charisma that is undeniable and Casey Affleck refutes it with his quivery nervous dialogue that evokes an appreciation of his cleverness and embarrassment of his transparent intentions of grandiose delusions. Film and painting implicitly put the viewer in a voyeuristic role. There is typically a distance between viewer and what is viewed. Perhaps fueled by long pauses that emulate real time (this is a long film) or the awkwardness of Pitt and Affleck’s interactions, this film engaged me more than other films.
There is a stillness and attention to composition that reminds me of a couple phenomenal painters:
Andrew Wyeth  and Michael Borremans.  The palette is similar with these painters and this film. This film is going to make me trade my brushes for lenses.

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The assassination of Jesse James by the coward, Robert Ford - Ron Hansen

The assassination of Jesse James by the coward, Robert Ford - Hansen, Ron

Summary: A fictionalized portrait of the legendary outlaw Jesse James, his violent career, and his murderer, Robert Ford, in an epic tale of the Old West - (Baker & Taylor)



Reviews
"Hansen has turned low history into high art. This is a terrific book." -- Newsday

"Here is THE James book . . . Put Hansen on your bedside table." -- Richmond News-Leader

"One of our finest stylists of American historical fiction." -- Christian Science Monitor

"This book is a wonderful achievement." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"Vivid and sustained." -- --New York Times Book Review

"Vivid and sustained." -- New York Times Book Review

. . . vivid and sustained . . . -- The New York Times Book Review, David Freeman

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Miss Spitfire - Sarah Miller

Miss Spitfire: reaching Helen Keller - Miller, Sarah

Summary: At age twenty-one, partially-blind, lonely but spirited Annie Sullivan travels from Massachusetts to Alabama to try and teach six-year-old Helen Keller, deaf and blind since age two, self-discipline and communication skills. Includes historical notes and timeline.

Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Miller's accomplished debut imagines Annie Sullivan's first experiences with her famous pupil, Helen Keller, from the young teacher's train ride to Alabama, during which she anticipated teaching a charge who had "no words, only sensations," to the breakthrough at the water pump, where she taught Helen to use language. Miller based her story on Sullivan's letters, excerpts of which begin each chapter, and in Sullivan's voice, Miller muses about the monumental questions and challenges that she faced: "It's up to me to show Helen that communication between people exists at all." Many lengthy passages detailing the wild, messy intimacy and the violent physical altercations between Sullivan and young Helen may tire some readers, but they amplify the visceral sense of Sullivan's exhausting struggle. In language that often reads like poetry, Miller creates a strong portrait of Sullivan's accomplishments, as well as her character—volatile, ferociously intelligent, and yearning for love and belonging, just like Helen. "Words bridge the gaps between two minds. Words are a miracle," Sullivan says. Miller's words reach beyond the historical facts here, encouraging readers to think about the small miracles of connection they can accomplish with words every day. Photos, a chronology, and an extensive bibliography conclude this stirring, fictionalized account.

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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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Dead end in Norvelt - John Gantos

Dead end in Norvelt - Gantos, John

Summary: In the historic town of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, twelve-year-old Jack Gantos spends the summer of 1962 grounded for various offenses until he is assigned to help an elderly neighbor with a most unusual chore involving the newly dead, molten wax, twisted promises, Girl Scout cookies, underage driving, lessons from history, typewriting, and countless bloody noses.

Library Media Connection
The town of Norvelt, Pennsylvania was founded in 1934 to provide out-of-work miners with affordable housing. By 1962, when this story takes place, the town is in decline. Jack's summer plans are thwarted when his mother places him under "house arrest," allowing him only to help arthritic Miss Volker. She dictates obituaries and historical facts to Jack who types them up and takes them to the newspaper office. When Miss Volker is accused of poisoning the women who died that summer, Jack sets out to clear her name. This is an interesting coming of age story. The town of Norvelt does exist, and author Jack Gantos did live there as a child. The town is populated by a series of eccentric characters who contribute to the humor of the story, and the relationship that develops between Jack and Miss Volker rings true. Gantos fans will find this one of his best works. Charlotte Decker, Librarian and Educational Reviewer, Cincinnati, Ohio [Editor's Note: Available in e-book format.] RECOMMENDED ¬ 2011 Linworth Publishing, Inc.

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Almost French - Sarah Turnbull

Almost French: love and a new life in Paris - Turnbull, Sarah

Summary: A Sydney journalist recounts her unexpected move to Paris, through which she fell in love and came to cherish the city's charm, fashion, food, paradoxes, and dinner parties. 50,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Library Journal Reviews
In an unpretentious manner, the strong yet empathetic Turnbull relates the transition from her Australian home to a new life with her French fiance, adding a good twist of dry, self-deprecating humor. A freelance journalist, Turnbull has a knack for describing the salient and entertaining episodes succinctly yet vividly, which prevents the story from descending into monotony. From meeting her husband's extended family to attending haute couture fashion shows, Turnbull candidly assesses her new environment. She also takes the stereotypes of French culture, such as the obsession with aesthetics, acknowledges their basis in reality, and then delves deeper to find an explanation for each. Turnbull's love for her husband tempers the frustration and humiliation she experiences while mastering not only the language but also the idiosyncratic rules and customs of the French. This enjoyable and insightful book is suitable for public library collections.-Rebecca Bollen, North Bergen, NJ Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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The five - Robert McCammon

The five - McCammon, Robert

Summary: Follows an eponymous rock band struggling to survive on the margins of the music business as they move through the American Southwest on what might be their final tour together, where the band members come to the attention of a damaged Iraq war veteran, and their lives are changed forever.



Staff Review
A story about a rock 'n' roll band who goes on a road trip that they never expected. Amazingly detailed, and full of rock knowledge, you won't forget this band.

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Zoo City - Lauren Beukes

Zoo City - Beukes, Lauren

Summary: Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things. Being hired by famously reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum of the criminal underclass. Set in a wildly re-imagined Johannesburg, it mixes refugees, crime, the music industry, African magic and the nature of sin.



Staff Review
A unique science fiction story set in a futuristic South Africa. Completely original.

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Dancer: a novel - Colum McCann

Dancer: a novel - McCann, Colum

Summary: Presents a fictional account of the life of Rudolf Nureyev, following his first ballet lessons under Anna Vasileva, his relationship with the ambitious Yulia, and his experiences with Venezuelan hustler Victor. - (Baker & Taylor)



Library Journal Reviews
McCann's latest (after Everything in This Country Must) is hugely ambitious: a fictionalized account of the life of Rudolph Nureyev-the Cold War danseur noble lauded as the world's first "pop star dancer"-as told by those who knew him. Among the narrators are the irrepressible Yulia, the daughter of Nureyev's first ballet teacher; Margot Fonteyn, Rudik's brilliant dance partner; Victor, a gay hustler from the Lower East Side with a penchant for blow, bath houses, and back talk; and others. What emerges is a pastiche of both the man and the myth, the disparate voices combining to create a lyrical and variegated portrait. The narrative technique can, however, be disorienting and even frustrating, as the reader cares more about some narrators than others and is loath to depart from them. McCann also has a somewhat irksome tendency to over-explain moments he should allow to resonate on their own. Still, the work hangs together well and is finally an enormous achievement. Both the Soviet Union of the war-torn 1940s and the displacement and hopefulness of an exile's life are perfectly evoked, and Nureyev-impossible, erratic, and brilliant-is a golden flame that sets everything ablaze. Recommended for all contemporary fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/02.]-Tania Barnes, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.


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