All the light we cannot see - Anthony Doerr

All the light we cannot see - Anthony Doerr

Summary: "From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work"-- Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* A novel to live in, learn from, and feel bereft over when the last page is turned, Doerr's magnificently drawn story seems at once spacious and tightly composed. It rests, historically, during the occupation of France during WWII, but brief chapters told in alternating voices give the overall—and long—­narrative a swift movement through time and events. We have two main characters, each one on opposite sides in the conflagration that is destroying Europe. Marie-Louise is a sightless girl who lived with her father in Paris before the occupation; he was a master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History. When German forces necessitate abandonment of the city, Marie-Louise's father, taking with him the museum's greatest treasure, removes himself and his daughter and eventually arrives at his uncle's house in the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Young German soldier Werner is sent to Saint-Malo to track Resistance activity there, and eventually, and inevitably, Marie-Louise's and Werner's paths cross. It is through their individual and intertwined tales that Doerr masterfully and knowledgeably re-creates the deprived civilian conditions of war-torn France and the strictly controlled lives of the military occupiers.High-Demand Backstory: A multipronged marketing campaign will make the author's many fans aware of his newest book, and extensive review coverage is bound to enlist many new fans. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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Woman at Otowi Crossing - Frank Waters

Woman at Otowi Crossing - Waters, Frank

Summary: Based on the real life of Edith Warner, who ran a tearoom at Otowi Crossing, just below Los Alamos, The Woman at Otowi Crossing is the story of Helen Chalmer, a person in tune with her adopted environment and her neighbors in the nearby Indian pueblo and also a friend of the first atomic scientists. The secret evolution of atomic research is a counterpoint to her psychic development.In keeping with its tradition of allowing the best of its list to thrive, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press is particularly proud to reissue The Woman at Otowi Crossing by best-selling author Frank Waters. This new edition features an introduction by Professor Thomas J. Lyon and a foreword by the author's widow, Barbara Waters.The story is quintessential Waters: a parable for the potentially destructive materialism of the mid-twentieth century. The antidote is Helen Chalmer's ability to understand a deeper truth of her being; beyond the Western notion of selfhood, beyond the sense of a personality distinct from the rest, she experiences a new and wider awareness.The basis for an opera of the same name, The Woman at Otowi Crossing is the powerful story of the crossing of cultures and lives: a fable for our times.

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The second half of life - Angeles Arrien

The second half of life: opening the eight gates of wisdom - Arrien, Angeles

Summary: When you find the courage to change at midlife," Angeles Arrien teaches, "a miracle happens." Your character is opened, deepened, strengthened, softened. You return to your soul's highest values. You are now prepared to create your legacy: an imprint of your dream for our world-a dream that can fully come true in The Second Half of Life. Working with images, poetry, metaphors, and other forms of symbolic language from diverse world cultures, Dr. Arrien introduces us to the Eight Gates of Initiation. By mastering their lessons and gifts, you harvest the meaning and purpose of your life, and come into spiritual maturity. With The Second Half of Life, she takes you step-by-step through each gate to deepen your most valuable relationships, reclaim your untended creative talents, and shift your focus from ambition to meaning to grow into the exceptional elder you've always imagined you would one day become. Book jacket. - (Soundstrue)

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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 last banquet - Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The last banquet - Grimwood, Jon Courtenay

Summary: Follows an adventurous man, once a penniless orphan, through French society during the Enlightenment as he searches for the perfect taste, befriends Benjamin Franklin, becomes pen pals with the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire, and improves contraceptive methods

Kirkus Reviews
Jean-Marie d'Aumout is a liberal, democratic Frenchman obsessed with flavor whose life, narrated in an elegant debut, lays bare the extreme contrasts of pre-Revolutionary France. First encountered at age 5, eating beetles from a dung heap, his parents dead in their run-down chateau, the boy who will become the Marquis d'Aumout never grows out of his fascination with how things taste. Rescued by the Duc d'Orléans, who gives him his first, divine taste of Roquefort cheese, d'Aumout is sent to school and then military academy, where the friends he makes will shape his life. Charlot, heir to the wildly wealthy Saulx estate, will introduce him to one of his sisters, Virginie, whose life d'Aumout will save twice. Grimwood's sensuous, intelligent, occasionally drifting account of the marquis's progress is constantly informed by French politics, notably the immense gulf between the nobility and the peasants whom d'Aumout at least treats with fairness. Scenes at Versailles underline the decadence which will lead to social collapse. Through it all, d'Aumout is driven by a hunger to taste everything--rat, wolf, cat, etc.--and an erotic appetite that is explicitly filled. Ben Franklin puts in a late appearance before the revolution begins, and d'Aumout prepares for a final, extraordinary meal. Studded with bizarre recipes, this vividly entertaining account of a life lived during groundbreaking times is a curious, piquant pleasure. Copyright Kirkus 2013 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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The last banquet - Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The last banquet - Grimwood, Jon Courtenay

Summary: Follows an adventurous man, once a penniless orphan, through French society during the Enlightenment as he searches for the perfect taste, befriends Benjamin Franklin, becomes pen pals with the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire, and improves contraceptive methods.



Kirkus Reviews
Jean-Marie d'Aumout is a liberal, democratic Frenchman obsessed with flavor whose life, narrated in an elegant debut, lays bare the extreme contrasts of pre-Revolutionary France. First encountered at age 5, eating beetles from a dung heap, his parents dead in their run-down chateau, the boy who will become the Marquis d'Aumout never grows out of his fascination with how things taste. Rescued by the Duc d'Orléans, who gives him his first, divine taste of Roquefort cheese, d'Aumout is sent to school and then military academy, where the friends he makes will shape his life. Charlot, heir to the wildly wealthy Saulx estate, will introduce him to one of his sisters, Virginie, whose life d'Aumout will save twice. Grimwood's sensuous, intelligent, occasionally drifting account of the marquis's progress is constantly informed by French politics, notably the immense gulf between the nobility and the peasants whom d'Aumout at least treats with fairness. Scenes at Versailles underline the decadence which will lead to social collapse. Through it all, d'Aumout is driven by a hunger to taste everything--rat, wolf, cat, etc.--and an erotic appetite that is explicitly filled. Ben Franklin puts in a late appearance before the revolution begins, and d'Aumout prepares for a final, extraordinary meal. Studded with bizarre recipes, this vividly entertaining account of a life lived during groundbreaking times is a curious, piquant pleasure. Copyright Kirkus 2013 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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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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The song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

The song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

Summary: A retelling of the legend of Achilles follows Patroclus and Achilles, the golden son of King Peleus, as they lay siege to Troy after Helen of Sparta is kidnapped--a cause that tests their friendship and forces them to make the ultimate sacrifice. - (Baker & Taylor)


Publishers Weekly Reviews
Following in Mary Renault's footsteps and adding some surefooted steps of her own, Miller debuts with a novel that combines the poetic drama of The Iliad with a 21st-century understanding of war, sex, sexual politics, and Trojan War heroism. Miller's tale begins with Patroclus' unhappy childhood as the disappointing son of an ambitious king. Exiled to Phthia, the 10-year-old is befriended by confident Prince Achilles. Over time their friendship blooms into love, while Achilles' mother, the sea nymph Thetis, grows jealously resentful. Patroclus and Achilles follow Agamemnon to recapture Helen from Troy, but the siege wears heavily on Achilles, who awaits the destiny his mother has foretold and his mentor, the centaur Master Chiron, has forewarned: to become the greatest of Greek warriors. In addition to the central story of Achilles and Patroclus, Miller offers a complex study of Briseis, the trophy beauty who inspires a rift between Achilles and Agamemnon; evokes Iphigenia's sacrifice at Aulis in one quick, brutal image; and probes relationships Homer only hinted at. With language both evocative of her predecessors and fresh, and through familiar scenes that explore new territory, this first-time novelist masterfully brings to life an imaginative yet informed vision of ancient Greece featuring divinely human gods and larger-than-life mortals. She breaks new ground retelling one of the world's oldest stories about men in love and war, but it is the extraordinary women—Iphigenia, Briseis, and Thetis—who promise readers remarkable things to come as Miller carves out a custom-made niche in historical fiction. Agent: Barer Literary. (Mar.)

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Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall: a novel - Mantel, Hilary

Summary: Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter's efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price.


Kirkus Reviews
Exhaustive examination of the circumstances surrounding Henry VIII's schism-inducing marriage to Anne Boleyn.Versatile British novelist Mantel (Giving Up the Ghost, 2006, etc.) forays into the saturated field of Tudor historicals to cover eight years (1527–35) of Henry's long, tumultuous reign. They're chronicled from the point of view of consummate courtier Thomas Cromwell, whose commentary on the doings of his irascible and inwardly tormented king is impressionistic, idiosyncratic and self-interested. The son of a cruel blacksmith, Cromwell fled his father's beatings to become a soldier of fortune in France and Italy, later a cloth trader and banker. He begins his political career as secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England. Having failed to secure the Pope's permission for Henry to divorce Queen Katherine, Wolsey falls out of favor with the monarch and is supplanted by Sir Thomas More, portrayed here as a domestic tyrant and enthusiastic torturer of Protestants. Unemployed, Cromwell is soon advising Henry himself and acting as confidante to Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, former mistress of both Henry and King Francis I of France. When plague takes his wife and children, Cromwell creates a new family by taking in his late siblings' children and mentoring impoverished young men who remind him of his low-born, youthful self. The religious issues of the day swirl around the events at court, including the rise of Luther and the burgeoning movement to translate the Bible into vernacular languages. Anne is cast in an unsympathetic light as a petulant, calculating temptress who withholds her favors until Henry is willing to make her queen. Although Mantel's language is original, evocative and at times wittily anachronistic, this minute exegesis of a relatively brief, albeit momentous, period in English history occasionally grows tedious. The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction.Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor. Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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The end of your life book club - Will Schwalbe

The end of your life book club - Schwalbe, Will

Summary: Recounts how the author and his mother read and discussed books during her chemotherapy treatments, describing how the activity involved a wide range of literary genres, furthered their appreciation for literature, and strengthened their bond. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Schwalbe and his mother accidentally formed a book club in a cancer-treatment waiting room. As they discuss what they will read while Mary Anne is treated for pancreatic cancer, they deepen their already strong relationship. Schwalbe didn't plan to write this memoir as he was living it, so it's mostly nuggets of emotionally important remarks in the context of the development of his mother's illness. Will's love and respect for his mother shine through in the story of a remarkable woman's life, from how she helped refugees to her seeking to build libraries in Afghanistan. With 21 years of book-publishing experience, Schwalbe quickly introduces the books themselves in one or two paragraphs. The works they read offer a way to approach topics they otherwise wouldn't discuss, and the focus is more on what the books reveal than what happens in them. This touching and insightful memoir about the slow process of dying will appeal to readers of Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) and The Last Lecture (2008) but also to people who love delving into books and book discussions. Like Mary Anne, who reads the ending first, you know how this book is going to end, but although it is a story about death, it is mostly a celebration of life and of the way books can enrich it. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Prairie nocturne - Ivan Doig

Prairie nocturne - Doig, Ivan

Summary: Teaching voice lessons to the privileged members of society during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Susan Duff is hired by a man who once harbored political ambitions to teach his African American chauffeur how to sing. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
Doig returns to several of the characters from his much-loved Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987) in this gripping story set not only in Montana's Two Medicine country, the landscape indelibly associated with the author, but also in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. It's 1924, and Susan Duff, the headstrong schoolgirl from Rascal Fair, is now a middle-aged voice teacher in Helena, resigned to spinsterhood after her affair with gubernatorial candidate Wes Williamson cost him the election. Then Wes seeks her out with a proposition: teach his black chauffeur, Monty, to sing. Returning to Two Medicine country, Susan does just that, as the narrative twists and turns its way back into the pasts of the three principal characters and ahead into their shared futures in New York: Monty on the concert stage and Susan and Wes, their relationship still tumultuous, in the wings. As always, Doig incorporates a vast amount of fascinating historical material into his personal drama: the story of the "Buffalo soldiers" of the tenth cavalry in the late nineteenth century; the saga of the Ku Klux Klan's incursion into Montana; and, of course, the Harlem Renaissance itself. The heart of the matter, though, is the three-sided relationship among Susan, Wes, and Monty; skirting the melodrama into which this triptych might easily have tumbled, Doig tightens the reins on his sometimes mannered prose and constructs a subtle, highly textured love story, nicely balancing period detail and well-modulated emotion. ((Reviewed August 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews

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This side of brightness - Colum McCann

This side of brightness - McCann, Colum

Summary: Tells the story of a group of tunnel diggers in New York and how a spectacular accident underground changes their lives and affects the next three generations - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ It is 1916, and somewhere under the East River in New York, the sandhogs and other workers labor through mud and muck and darkness to build a transit system for a fledgling metropolis. The sandhogs, the men out front who burrow through the earth, are the physically strong and mentally tenacious among the working poor; many of them once labored in mines. The earth is close in life and death; but they take pride in their work, which allows them a livable wage at the cost of their health. On this side of brightness, it is anathema to play the petty game of race that sports itself on earth's surface. Nathan Walker, a young black from Georgia, handsome, well formed, and generous, who reminds one of Melville's lovely Billy Budd, comes to New York with love in his heart for his home near the Okefenokee swamp and will build a bond with his fellow sandhogs--two Irishmen, Conn O'Leary and Sean Power, and an Italian, Rudy "Rhubard" Vanucci. Their bond is cemented in a way they could not have dreamed of when a small hole in the tunnel wall results in a spectacular river blowout. The tragedy shapes Walker's life in a story that spans generations. McCann is a fine and bold writer, as his previous books prove (Songdogs, 1995, and Fishing the Sloe-Black River, 1996). So it's not surprising to find him tackling the peculiar, unexplored, and violent nexus between the downtrodden and persecuted Irish and African American in a flawed promise land; but one is jolted by the level of understanding he conveys about the needs and compunctions of human existence. ((Reviewed March 1, 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

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A lady cyclist's guide to Kashgar - Suzanne Joinson

A lady cyclist's guide to Kashgar - Joinson

Summary: In 1923, Eva English and her devout sister Lizzie embark on a journey to be missionaries in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, while in modern-day London, a young woman's act of kindness to a Yemeni refugee results in an unexpected journey.



Booklist Reviews
Joinson's debut opens with a dramatic birth whose repercussions are felt for decades. The novel begins in 1923, with the story of two missionary sisters, Eva and Lizzie English. The pair and their leader, Millicent, are traveling to the Chinese city of Kashgar, where they will serve as missionaries and where Eva hopes to secretly write a cycling guide. Their journey is irrevocably altered when Millicent assists a young girl giving birth. When Eva, Lizzie, and Millicent are suddenly detained after the mother's death, their future remains uncertain. Shifting to modern-day London, Joinson picks up the story of Middle Eastern scholar Frieda, who returns home after months of travel to discover that an apartment has been left to her by a woman she has never met. Alternating between Frieda's and Eva's voices, Joinson slowly reveals what connects Frieda to the fateful desert birth decades before. This complex and involving historical novel examines the idea of home, the consequences of exile, the connection between mother and daughter, and the power dynamics of sexual relationships. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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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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Bone fire - Mark Spragg

Bone fire - Spragg, Mark

Summary: The inhabitants of Ishawooa, Wyoming have enough to contend with on a daily basis, from runaway children to Lou Gehrig's disease, even before a teenager is found dead in a meth lab and motorcycle rallies and rodeos fill the tiny local jail.



Booklist Reviews 
*Starred Review* Using several of the characters from his two award-winning novels, The Fruit of Stone (2002) and An Unfinished Life (2004), Spragg returns to high-country Wyoming and the struggles of a group of self-reliant individuals to come to terms with their vulnerability and need for connection. Einar, the cranky but tenderhearted horse rancher from An Unfinished Life, has suffered a stroke and is being cared for by Griff, who hopes to move to Chicago to study sculpture. Meanwhile, McEban, another hard-bitten rancher, who lost the love of his life in The Fruit of Stone, faces more loss, when the wandering father of McEban's 10-year-old ward decides he wants back into his son's life. And Crane, the local sheriff, now married unhappily to Griff's alcoholic mother, faces what could be the onset of the same disease that killed his grandfather. A summary of so much angst sounds almost soap operatic, but Spragg's novel is anything but that. It's about the way ordinary people endure life's crushing defeats with stoic forbearance, but also how they deal with the isolation their pinched stoicism brings. "I wish I would've said something like that out loud," McEban says at one point, speaking for all the characters whose silence is both eloquent and tragic. With its many subplots, this novel lacks some of the narrative power of Spragg's earlier work, but it has moments of lyrical beauty, emotional depth, and crisp clarity that make it essential reading for anyone interested in the literature of the West. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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Historic conversations on life with John F. Kennedy - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Historic conversations on life with John F. Kennedy: interviews with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 1964 - Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

Summary: Presents the annotated transcription and original audio for the 1964 interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy on her experiences and impressions as the wife of John F. Kennedy, offering an intimate and detailed account of the man and his times. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with a nation deep in mourning and the world looking on in stunned disbelief, Jacqueline Kennedy found the strength to set aside her own personal grief for the sake of posterity and begin the task of documenting and preserving her husband's legacy. In January of 1964, she and Robert F. Kennedy approved a planned oral-history project that would capture their first-hand accounts of the late President as well as the recollections of those closest to him throughout his extraordinary political career. For the rest of her life, the famously private Jacqueline Kennedy steadfastly refused to discuss her memories of those years, but beginning that March, she fulfilled her obligation to future generations of Americans by sitting down with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and recording an astonishingly detailed and unvarnished account of her experiences and impressions as the wife and confidante of John F. Kennedy. The tapes of those sessions were then sealed and later deposited in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum upon its completion, in accordance with Mrs. Kennedy's wishes.

Kirkus Reviews
The late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis speaks candidly about life in Camelot. Just before publication of this collection of interviews with journalist/historian Arthur Schlesinger, conducted in 1964, a few leaked bits of conversation revealed that Jacqueline was content to leave the politics to her husband. This led to Kennedy's being lambasted as a lightweight at best, a betrayer of feminism at worst. The interviews, gathered in transcribed form with elegant introductions by first daughter Caroline Kennedy and historian Michael Beschloss, indicate that she was anything but a lightweight, even if, as Beschloss wryly notes, "well-bred young women of Jacqueline's generation were not encouraged to sound like intellectuals." Jackie preceded the generation of feminists that would soon arise (and then became a role model, speaking frankly in Ms. and other movement publications). But the real defense comes through her words here, gathered only a few months after JFK's assassination. They reveal a nimble if worried mind. Personally, JFK wasn't the easiest man to live with, due in part to the sour stomach born of nerves and "those awful years campaigning…living on a milkshake and a hot dog," as well as the terrible general health that he bore stoically in public but that caused him private agony. Jackie is shrewd in her assessments about people: Stewart Udall rose to head the Interior Department, she notes, because he delivered Arizona to JFK in the 1960 election--but then emerged as a real leader. She also provides on-the-spot commentary about unfolding world events, such as the ever-more-urgent specter of Vietnam and a divided Germany (the only ambassadors JFK "really disliked" were those from Germany and Pakistan). All politics is local--and personal. These interviews are invaluable in providing a fly-on-the-wall view of life in the Kennedy White House--and there has never been so intimate a view from a First Lady's perspective. Copyright Kirkus 2011 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.


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East of Eden - John Steinbeck

East of Eden - Steinbeck, John

Summary: This novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected by his father.

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Fugitive pieces - Anne Michaels

Fugitive pieces - Michaels, Anne

Summary: A young orphan smuggled out of Poland during World War II, poet Jakob Beer comes to understand the extraordinary power of language to destroy, restore, and witness as he struggles to cope with both grief and the healing of memory - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Stories of the Holocaust keep surfacing in the minds of writers like bone fragments working their way through skin. Award-winning poet Michaels revisits that monstrous time in her beautiful first novel, a work every bit as haunting as her fellow Canadian Michael Ondaatje's celebrated The English Patient. Michaels' lyrical tale revolves around the life of a young Polish Jew, Jakob Beer, who, after witnessing the murder of his parents, is miraculously rescued by Athos, a Greek geologist. A man of heroic intellect and spirituality, Athos risks his life to bring Jakob to Greece only to find that the tide of evil has even reached those hallowed shores. They immigrate to Canada, and their mentor-disciple relationship deepens as each studious year passes. The earth is sacred to Athos; he finds wisdom in the stony pages of mountain and ravine. Language is holy for Jakob; he becomes a poet whose work, in turn, comforts others. As Michaels, an exquisitely sensual writer, reveals the souls of her extraordinary characters and, like Athos, "applies the geologic to the human," she defines love in its most lasting, resonant, and meaningful manifestations. ((Reviewed February 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

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The house in France: a memoir - Gully Wells

The house in France: a memoir - Wells, Gully

Summary: "Set in Provence, London, and New York: a daughter's wonderfully evocative and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather--Dee Wells, the glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated and worldly Oxford philosopher--and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything. Gully Wells takes us into the heart of London's liberated intellectual inner circle of the 1960s. Here are Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Miller, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Kennedy, and later in New York Mayor Lindsay and Mike Tyson . . . her mother as a television commentator earning a reputation for her outspoken style and progressive views . . . her stepfather, an icon in the world of twentieth-century philosophy, proving himself as prodigious a womanizer as he was a thinker. And throughout, there is La Migoua, the house in France, on a hill between Toulon and Marseilles, where her parents and their friends came together and where Gully herself learned some of the long-lasting lessons of a life well-lived. A dazzling portrait of a woman who 'caught the spirit of the sixties' and one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, drawn from the vivid memory of the child who adored them both."-- Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Wells had the perfect childhood for her vocation as travel writer and features editor of Condé Nast Traveler and the good sense to enjoy it, even though her mother was as vexing as she was scintillating. Wells is a breathtakingly frank, nimbly hilarious, and sensuously precise memoirist and portraitist, capturing the chimerical energy of her famously sexy and outrageous Canadian American expat mother. Dee was a controversial journalist, critic, television personality, and novelist as well as a glamorous yet raucous partygoer and hostess. After divorcing her young daughter's diplomat father, Dee moved to 1960s London and corralled the renowned Oxford philosopher and notorious womanizer A. J. Ayer into marriage. "Clever and funny" celebrities, the couple lived carousel lives (assiduously observed by young Gully) in London and their funky old house in Provence, until their love affairs pulled them apart. Wells remembers intoxicating conversations and outrageous behavior in scenes worthy of Oscar Wilde, featuring the likes of Bertrand Russell, Iris Murdoch, and John and Robert Kennedy. She tells her own fascinating story, too, including her long-ago on-and-off romance with Martin Amis. Desire and ambition, creativity and fame, betrayal and love, all take on new dimensions in Wells' sparkling and spiky look back at protean and brilliant iconoclasts. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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Sea of poppies - Amitav Ghosh

Sea of poppies - Ghosh, Amitav

Summary: Preparing to fight China's nineteenth-century Opium Wars, a motley assortment of sailors and passengers, including a bankrupt rajah, a widowed tribeswoman, and a free-spirited French orphan, comes to experience family-like ties that eventually span continents, races, and generations.


Booklist Reviews
"A passion for history propels Ghosh's sweeping novels, in which love leaps the fences of race, caste, nationality, and class. After his complex tale of humankind's relationship with nature in The Hungry Tide (2005), Ghosh returns to the narrative grandeur of The Glass Palace (2001) in this lengthy yet fast-flowing historical novel about England's ruthlessly run opium industry in occupied India. It begins in a "sea of poppies" in Bengal, and culminates on board the Ibis, an old slave ship carrying a motley group of outcasts. There's brave Deeti, a young fugitive widow; dashing Zachary, the son of a former slave and her American master; adventurous Paulette, a French orphan; and Neel, a fallen raja. In vivid settings ranging from the hellish precincts of an enormous opium factory, to absurdly lavish upper-class households, to the Ibis' grim hold, Ghosh unfurls tales of betrayal and tyranny, revelation and transformation, while reveling in the mischievous inventiveness of a bawdy polyglot lingo favored by sailors on Eastern seas. With intimations of Dickens and Melville, Ghosh's vital saga encompasses suspense and satire, perverse cruelty and profound kindness, and the countless ways humans conceal desire and fear behind arrogance and brutality. More frolicsome language, penetrating insights, and high adventure will follow now that the Ibis trilogy is under way." Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.

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