A visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan

A visit from the Goon Squad - Egan, Jennifer

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


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

Check Availability

The discomfort zone - Jonathan Franzen

The discomfort zone: a personal history - Franzen, Jonathan

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



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

Check Availability

Half the sky - Nicholas Kristof

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

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



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

Check Availability

Fierce attachments: a memoir - Vivian Gornick

Fierce attachments: a memoir - Gornick, Vivian

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




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


Check Availability

Palace walk - Najib Mahfuz

Palace walk - Mahfuz, Najib

Series: The Cairo trilogy

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


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


Check Availability

Jitterbug perfume - Tom Robbins

Jitterbug perfume - Robbins, Tom

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




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

Check Availability

The kindness of strangers - Mike McIntyre

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

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



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

Check Availability

Retribution - Max Hastings

Retribution: the battle for Japan - Hastings, Max

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

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

Check Availability

The graveyard book - Neil Gaiman

The graveyard book - Gaiman, Neil

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




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


Check Availability

Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger

Franny and Zooey - Salinger, J.D.

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




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

Check Availability

Laika - Nick Abadzis

Laika - Abadzis, Nick

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


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

Check Availability

The tempest - William Shakespeare

The tempest - Shakespeare, William

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

No Review Available

Check Availability

The insult - Rupert Thomson

The insult - Thomson, Rupert

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


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

Check Availability

Townie - Andre Dubus III

Townie - Dubus, Andre

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



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

Check Availability

Halfway to Hollywood - Michael Palin

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

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



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

Check Availability

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

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

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


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


Check Availability

Stiff - Mary Roach

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

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

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

Check Availability

All over but the shoutin' - Rick Bragg

All over but the shoutin' - Bragg, Rick

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

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


Check Availability

A cook's tour - Anthony Bourdain

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

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



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


Check Availability

Given up for dead - Bill Sloan

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

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



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

Check Availability

Queen of fashion - Caroline Weber

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

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



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

Check Availability

Year of wonders - Geraldine Brooks

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

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



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


Check Availability

The pleasure seekers: a novel - Tishani Doshi

The pleasure seekers: a novel - Doshi, Tishani

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



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

Check Availability

Let's take the long way home - Gail Caldwell

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

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


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


Check Availability

Moby-duck - Donovan Hohn

Moby-duck: the true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea, and of the beachcombers, oceanographers, environmentalists, and fools--including the author--who went in search of them - Hohn, Donovan

Summary: When the author heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. His accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories. This work is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable. With each new discovery, he learns of another loose thread, and with each successive chase, he comes closer to understanding where his castaway quarry comes from and where it goes.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Like Bill Bryson on hard science, or John McPhee with attitude, journalist Hohn travels from beaches to factories to the northern seas in pursuit of a treasure that mystifies as much as it provokes. His quest is to determine what happened to a load of 28,800 Chinese manufactured plastic animals in a container that fell off a ship en route to Seattle in 1992. Hohn's inquiry leads him to 10 Little Rubber Ducks (2005), children's author Eric Carle's idealized board-book version, and also to the plastic-strewn beaches of an Alaskan island, a Hong Kong toy fair, and the Sesame Street origins of the rubber duck's popularity. By turns thoughtful, bemused, or shocked, Hohn finds the story growing beyond his wildest visions as he learns about the science of ocean currents and drift and the lure of cheap plastic in a consumer culture that has dangerously lost its way. The resulting book is a thoroughly engaging environmental/travel title that crosses partisan divides with its solid research and apolitical nature. Rubber ducks as harmless, ubiquitous symbols of childhood? Not anymore, not by a long shot. This dazzles from start to finish. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.


Check Availability

Cinderella ate my daughter - Peggy Orenstein

Cinderella ate my daughter: dispatches from the front lines of the new girlie-girl culture - Orenstein, Peggy

Summary: Reveals the dark side of pink and pretty and offers ways to prevent raising daughters who only care about image.



Booklist Reviews
Orenstein's Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap (1994) was a watershed best-seller, and she has continued to write extensively—both in print and online—about the hazards of growing up female in contemporary America. Here she explores the increasing "pinkification" of girls' worlds, from toys to apparel to tween-targeted websites, and she writes not only as a detached, informed journalist but also as a loving, feminist mother, bewildered as her daughter, "as if by osmosis," learns the names of every Disney princess, while her classmate, "the one with Two Mommies," arrives daily at her Berkeley preschool "dressed in a Cinderella gown. With a bridal veil." Orenstein skillfully integrates extensive research that demonstrates the pitfalls of "the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness," which can increase girls' vulnerability to depression, distorted body images and eating disorders, and sexual risks. It's the personal anecdotes, though, which are delivered with wry, self-deprecating, highly quotable humor, that offer the greatest invitation to parents to consider their daughters' worlds and how they can help to shape a healthier, soul-nurturing environment. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

Check Availability

Cake wrecks - Jen Yates

Cake wrecks: when professional cakes go hilariously wrong - Yates, Jen

Summary: What is it about messed-up cakes that people find so appealing? Maybe it's because we all have a cake story to tell. Good or bad, these cakes tell little stories about us. Presents pictures of and commentary on cakes with mistakes, organized into such categories as literary lols, beyond bizarre, and wedding wrecks.

BookPage Reviews

Half-baked slices of life

According to Jen Yates, author of the hilarious new collection Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong, “A Cake Wreck is any cake that is unintentionally sad, silly, creepy, inappropriate.” For Yates, the pursuit of the hilariously mis-decorated cake is “about finding the funny in unexpected, sugar-filled places.”

When she began blogging at CakeWrecks.com in May 2008, Yates’ intentions were modest. She wanted a place to collect photos for baking inspiration, as well as a way to share the occasional laugh with family and friends. She never imagined so many readers would respond to her signature wit, or that in less than a year, tens of thousands of people from around the world would be regularly visiting her site for sugary highs (and lows).

Many of the photographs in Cake Wrecks are taken “on the front lines” in bakeries and submitted by CakeWrecks.com readers. But this book isn’t “just the blog put to paper,” Yates assures us, for there is “lots (and lots) of new, never-before-seen Wreckage” to be had—75 percent of the book, to be exact.

Even better, Yates provides the history behind many of the cakes on display. There’s the story of the one that started it all—it read “Best Wishes Suzanne/Under Neat that/We will miss you”—and this reader’s personal favorite, the sprinkled and space-age wonder that is Darth Vader cradling a sleeping and pink-ribboned baby girl.

It’s all here, each wreck a disaster of hilarity. In Cake Wrecks, Yates proves there’s plenty of the weird, wonderful and truly great to go around.

Copyright 2009 BookPage Reviews.

Check Availability

El regalo del tiempo/The gift of time - Jorge Ramos

El regalo del tiempo/The gift of time - Ramos, Jorge

Summary: In a series of letters to his two children, Paola and Nicolás, author and television personality Jorge Ramos discusses love, death, religion, sex, family, the immigrant experience, success, and other topics.



Criticas Reviews
Ramos, coanchor of Univision News since 1986, is one the most influential, respected, and popular Latinos in the United States and Latin America. He has won seven Emmys for excellence in journalism and received countless other honors. His face and name are ubiquitous in the Latino world—his nightly news casts reach millions of Latinos, his weekly column is carried in more than 35 U.S. and Latin American newspapers, his daily commentary is heard by millions on Univision Radio, and his seven books have all been best sellers. Written as a series of 15 letters to his children, this is his most personally revealing book and will undoubtedly endear him even more to his many fans and readers. While readers will enjoy the personal details he shares, such as his fear of flying and the surgical history of his imperfect nose and inability to smell, it is the expression of his values and beliefs that will resonate with readers. In his letters, he shares important principles and perspectives that many Latinos would surely want to pass on to their children, such as spending time with family and building loving relationships, finding and dedicating yourself wholeheartedly to your passion, and appreciating different perspectives and values while honoring your own. Ramos has written an intimate and timeless book that will appeal to parents and children of all ages. Highly recommended for all public libraries, academic libraries, and bookstores.—Yolanda J. Cuesta, Cuesta MultiCultural Consulting, Sacramento, CA Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.


Check Availability

The chocolate war - Robert Cormier

The chocolate war - Cormier, Robert

Summary: A high school freshman discovers the devastating consequences of refusing to join in the school's annual fund raising drive and arousing the wrath of the school bullies.



Staff Review

Don't let the sweet title fool you.

What begins as a harmless Vigil prank of Jerry refusing to sell chocolates turns into a revolution of determination and a war of wills. Jerry's rebellion is poignant; he does not defy Brother Leon with self confidence and internal strength, rather he is filled with fear and uncertainty, yet has resolved to make a stand, no longer to conform, to 'disturb the universe' and make his own decisions. Several of the characters are at the age where they are beginning to test authority, and have realized that adults are not trustworthy reliable rocks of wisdom that they were once led to believe. Cormier captures the teen spirit, and the power of conformity, with amazing accuracy. Brilliantly written.

Warning! The film based on the book totally misses the mark. 

"My Books are an Antidote to the TV View of Life" -  Robert Cormier

Check Availability

The sociopath next door - Martha Stout

The sociopath next door: the ruthless versus the rest of us - Stout, Martha

Summary: "[The author] reveals [in this book] that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people--one in twenty-five--has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. ... They can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt. ... Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others' suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win. ... To arm us against the sociopath, [the author] teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game."--BooksInPrint.

Kirkus Reviews
From the author of The Myth of Sanity (2001), a remarkable philosophical examination of the phenomenon of sociopathy and its everyday manifestations.Readers eager for a tabloid-ready survey of serial killers, however, will be disappointed. Instead, Stout (Psychiatry/Harvard Medical School) busies herself with exploring the workaday lives and motivations of those garden-variety sociopaths who are content with inflicting petty tyrannies and small miseries. As a practicing therapist, she writes, she has spent the past 25 years aiding the survivors of psychological trauma, most of them "controlled and psychologically shattered by individual human perpetrators, often sociopaths." Antisocial personality disorder, it turns out, occurs in around four percent of the population, so it's not too surprising that treating their victims has kept Stout quite busy for the past quarter-century. Employing vivid composite character sketches, the author introduces us to such unsavory characters as a psychiatric administrator who specializes in ingratiating herself with her office staff while making her patients feel crazier; a captain of industry who killed frogs as a child and is now convinced he can outsmart the SEC; and a lazy ladies' man who marries purely to gain access to his new wife's house and pool. These portraits make a striking impact, and readers with unpleasant neighbors or colleagues may find themselves paying close attention to Stout's sociopathic-behavior checklist and suggested coping strategies. In addition to introducing these everyday psychopaths, the author examines why the rest of us let them get away with murder. She extensively considers the presence or absence of conscience, as well as our discomfort with questioning those seen as being in power. Stout also ponders our willingness to quash our inner voice when voting for leaders who espouse violence and war as a solution to global problems-pointed stuff in a post-9/11 political climate.  Deeply thought-provoking and unexpectedly lyrical.Agent: Susan Lee Cohen Copyright Kirkus 2004 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

Check Availability

The wind-up bird chronicle - Haruki Murakami

The wind-up bird chronicle - Murakami, Haruki

Summary: The collapse of a marriage is superimposed on an investigation of recovered war memories and a man's search for his own identity - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ "Really, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it's been a lot of fun being with you. No kidding. I mean, you're such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things. . . . So hanging around you hasn't been boring in any way. . . . But tell you the truth, it's made me nervous too." The speaker is May Kasahara, a Japanese teenager who bears a strong resemblance to Holden Caulfield. She's speaking to Toru Okada, who lives down the street from May in Tokyo and to whom a series of very strange things has been happening. Her words could also stand as a response to this absolutely mesmerizing, befuddling, unaccountably brilliant novel. Murakami is one of Japan's most popular writers, but while his previously translated books have been well received critically in the U.S., they have yet to garner overwhelming popular acclaim. This one will receive plenty of attention, but it's hard to imagine it sharing best-seller slots with the likes of John Grisham. It's just too much book for that.Just what kind of book is it? That's the befuddling part. Plot summary is nearly useless: Toru Okada loses his cat and then his wife. He devotes himself to finding the latter but spends much of his time in the bottom of a well, hoping to pass through the wall and into an alternate world where the secrets lie. Meanwhile, he encounters a series of ever more puzzling characters, including a World War II veteran who recounts the horrifying story of the battle of Nomonhan, during which thousands of Japanese died meaninglessly in conflict with Russians and Mongolians. This overwhelming tidal wave of story washes over Toru Okada, who absorbs each new revelation implacably, hoping but usually failing to make sense of it. Murakami is utterly at ease with multiple subjects, genres, and styles--surrealism, deadpan comedy, military history, detective fiction, love story. His canvas is as broad as twentieth-century Japan, his brush strokes imbued with the lines and colors of American pop culture. Oddly, it all holds together on the stoic shoulders of Toru Okada and his single-minded determination to reclaim the woman he loves no matter how absurd the world around her becomes. In the scary but never boring vastness of this novel, it's nice to find one buoy on the horizon we recognize. ((Reviewed Aug. 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

Check Availability

Electric barracuda - Tim Dorsey

Electric barracuda - Dorsey, Tim

Summary: "Serge Storms, that lovable thermonuclear vigilante and one stop Florida trivia shop, has been leaving corpses strewn across the Sunshine State for more than a decade. The authorities, especially one tenacious state agent, have begun to notice the exponential body count, and send a police task force to track down Serge. Could his luck finally have run out?"--From publisher.


Booklist Reviews
In Dorsey's thirteenth Serge Storms novel, the manic spree-killer and Florida native son is off his meds again and building a website that encourages tourists to undertake "fugitive" vacations. Serge envisions midwestern families pretending to be "on the lam" and visiting remote, un-Disneyfied locales long favored by Florida outlaws. In pursuit is a police task force. The cops have finally tumbled to Serge as prime suspect in Florida's most grotesque murders. And the cops are followed by a number of mysterious civilians as well as the Doberman, a reality-TV bounty hunter with plummeting ratings. Once again, it's a Smokey and the Bandit chase story, fueled by dangerous drugs; imaginative dispatchings of arrogant Wall Street plutocrats; beautiful, dangerous women; and Agent Mahoney, whose decade-long pursuit of Serge has reduced him to speaking in the hilarious, fractured argot of a pulp fiction shamus. It's Dorsey's standard mash-up, bizarre and often very funny. His wonderful tour of Florida's boltholes might make them prime-tourist destinations, but fortunately, they are very difficult to reach. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

Check Availability

Europe's last summer - David Fromkin

Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? - Fromkin, David

Summary: Draws on current scholarship to argue that hostilities that led to World War I were started intentionally, describing the negotiations and personalities of key leaders that contributed to the failure of diplomatic efforts.


Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Fromkin's answer to the question posed in his subtitle is succinct: Helmuth von Moltke, imperial Germany's army chief in 1914. In his clearly delineated argument, Fromkin addresses alternative theories about the cause of World War I, but he returns to the decision chain of a small number of officials in Berlin and Vienna. Their destruction of key evidence hampers the precise reconstruction of their actions as does, Fromkin maintains, historians' confusion about what the Germans were licensing in agreeing to whatever chastisement Vienna decided to deliver upon Serbia, on the pretext of avenging the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In contrast to theorists of rigid alliances, to whom the notorious "blank check" initiated events almost beyond human control, Fromkin arraigns the actions of Moltke and his colleagues, especially in late July 1914, when the procrastinating Austrians had yet to crush Serbia in war, as Moltke expected. Hijacking the bollixed-up situation, he overrode Kaiser Wilhelm II's resistance, Fromkin concludes, to a deliberate instigation of a second war against Russia and France. The boldness of Fromkin's argument is enough to warrant attention, but his fluidity of expression guarantees a large audience for this book. ((Reviewed February 15, 2004)) Copyright 2004 Booklist Reviews.

Check Availability