Lockdown - Walter Dean Myers

Lockdown - Myers, Walter Dean

Summary: Teenage Reese, serving time at a juvenile detention facility, gets a lesson in making it through hard times from an unlikely friend with a harrowing past.



Booklist Reviews
Myers takes readers inside the walls of a juvenile corrections facility in this gritty novel. Fourteen-year-old Reese is in the second year of his sentence for stealing prescription pads and selling them to a neighborhood dealer. He fears that his life is headed in a direction that will inevitably lead him "upstate," to the kind of prison you don't leave. His determination to claw his way out of the downward spiral is tested when he stands up to defend a weaker boy, and the resulting recriminations only seem to reinforce the impossibility of escaping a hopeless future. Reese's first-person narration rings with authenticity as he confronts the limits of his ability to describe his feelings, struggling to maintain faith in himself; Myers' storytelling skills ensure that the messages he offers are never heavy-handed. The question of how to escape the cycle of violence and crime plaguing inner-city youth is treated with a resolution that suggests hope, but doesn't guarantee it. A thoughtful book that could resonate with teens on a dangerous path. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.


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Paris Trout - Pete Dexter

Paris Trout - Dexter, Peter

Publishers Weekly Reviews
An expertly crafted and bleakly fascinating tale of social conflict and madness in the deep South, this novel centers on the eponymous Paris Trout, owner of a general store and other property in Cotton Point, Ga., during the years just after World War II. A cunning, violent man, with deep roots in the community, Trout has become an economic predator of the town's poor blacks by running a loan service for them out of the safe in his store's back room. The tensions between Trout and the blacks reaches a critical point when Trout, along with a strong-arm goon, murders an 11-year-old black girl and badly injures a black woman while collecting a debt. Into the vortex of this storm are drawn a number of other characters, highlighting the racial and social divisions of Cotton Point: lawyer and gentleman Harry Seagraves, who is repelled by the case; Paris's wife Hannah, brutalized by her husband and in powerful psychological bondage to him; and Carl Bonner, a young, idealistic lawyer who seesaws between his past in the town and his recently acquired sense of being an outsider in its circumscribed society. Trout's murder trial forces Cotton Point to face some dark truths, while setting in motion a chain of events that lead to a crescendo of violence. Dexter (Deadwood, God's Pocket) is a deft and economical storyteller and a cruel but observant chronicler of deep South customs and characters, with something of a Faulknerian feeling for the bullying violence that can lay at the heart of an inbred small town. (June) Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.

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The professor and the madman - Simon Winchester

The professor and the madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary - Winchester, Simon

Summary: Describes how more than ten thousand definitions were submitted for the first Oxford English Dictionary from Dr. W. C. Minor, an American Civil War criminal whose life of genius and insanity make this true story both fascinating and unique. BOMC. - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
Distinguished journalist Winchester tells a marvelous, true story that few readers will have heard about. His narrative is based on official government files locked away for more than a century. As everyone knows, the Oxford English Dictionary is an essential library reference tool. The 12-volume OED took more than 70 years to produce, and one of its most distinguishing features is the copious quotations from published works to illustrate every shade of word usage. By the late 1890s the huge project was nearly half done, and the editor at the time, Professor James Murray, felt the need to meet and personally thank Dr. William Minor, with whom he had been in lengthy contact and who had contributed a lion's share of the quotations. As it turned out, Dr. Minor was an American surgeon who many years before had been found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity but had been incarcerated in an English asylum ever since. The tale of their affiliation and friendship reads like a creatively conceived novel. ((Reviewed August 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews


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Dancing with butterflies: a novel - Reyna Grande

Dancing with butterflies: a novel - Grande, Reyna


Summary: Chronicles the story of four women in Los Angeles bound together in friendship by their Mexican roots and their love of Folklorico dance. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
"Mexican-born Grande focuses on a subculture in the Latino community to explore universal themes in this worthy follow-up to her award-winning debut novel, Across a Hundred Mountains (2006). Folklórico, a dance that emphasizes the local culture of different regions of Mexico, is the focus around which the stories of four L.A. women and their losses are intertwined. Yesería, who founded Grupo Folklorico Alegría, takes desperate measures to regain her ability and appearance after arthritis curtails her performing. Elena, an Alegría member who codirects a folklórico group at the high school where she teaches, is so immobilized by grief after her baby is stillborn that she ends both her marriage and her dancing. Her younger sister and fellow dancer, Adriana, still angry over childhood events, increasingly allows her lesser self to lapse into destructive behavior. Soledad, a skilled seamstress who makes the group's costumes, has her hopes for the future dashed by the man she loves. Yet the strength of folklórico prevails, as the novel celebrates the sheer exhilaration and physicality of dance and the sustenance of female bonding." Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

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The silent land - Joyce Graham

The silent land - Graham, Joyce

Summary: Buried under a flash avalanche while skiing, young married couple Jake and Zoe miraculously dig their way out only to discover themselves alone in an eerily silent, evacuated region and unable to contact the outside world.



Staff Review:
This book kept me guessing. Is it a survival novel? Is it a horror story? Is it a ghost story? It's definitely a love story, and it really pulls you in. (From Stephen King's summer reading list.)

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Mermaid: a twist on the classic tale - Carolyn Turgeon

Mermaid: a twist on the classic tale - Turgeon, Carolyn

Summary: Princess Margrethe has been hidden away while her kingdom is at war. One gloomy, windswept morning, as she stands in a convent garden overlooking the icy sea, she witnesses a miracle: a glittering mermaid emerging from the waves, a nearly drowned man in her arms. By the time Margrethe reaches the shore, the mermaid has disappeared in to the sea. As Margrethe nurses the handsome stranger back to health, she learns that not only is he a prince, he is also the son of her father's greatest rival. Sure that the mermaid brought this man to her for a reason, Margrethe devises a plan to bring peace to her kingdom. Meanwhile, the mermaid princess Lenia longs to return to the human man she carried to safety. She is willing to trade her home, her voice, and even her health for legs and a chance to win his heart.--From back cover.

Booklist Reviews
Turgeon refashions Hans Christian Andersen's beloved classic, The Little Mermaid, into something altogether darker and more foreboding. When two women from two decidedly different worlds fall for the same prince, what else can ensue but heartache and misery? After rescuing a human from the sea, mermaid Princess Lenia falls hard for Prince Christopher, even agreeing to give up her beautiful voice and to endure the constant pain caused by her new legs in order to pursue him on dry land. Meanwhile, Princess Margrethe has also set her sights on the handsome prince in hopes of uniting their two warring kingdoms. With Lenia's life on the line and war looming on the horizon, the prince's choice is bound to have catastrophic consequences. More robust than a fractured fairy tale, Turgeon's brooding retelling gives voice to both women, fleshing out an essentially tragic tale of destiny and desire. Not exactly a cozy bedtime story, but guaranteed to keep you guessing who—if anyone—will live happily ever after. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.


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The tiger's wife - Tea Obreht

The tiger's wife - Obreht, Tea

Summary: Struggling to understand why his beloved grandfather left his family to die alone in a field hospital far from home, a young doctor in a war-torn Balkan country takes over her grandfather's search for a mythical ageless vagabond while referring to a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book."



Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Not even Obreht's place on the New Yorker's current "20 under 40" list of exceptional writers will prepare readers for the transporting richness and surprise of this gripping novel of legends and loss in a broken land. Drawing on the former Yugoslavia's fabled past and recent bloodshed, Belgrade-born Obreht portrays two besieged doctors. Natalia is on an ill-advised "good will" medical mission at an orphanage on what is suddenly the "other side," now that war has broken out, when she learns that her grandfather, a distinguished doctor forced out of his practice by ethnic divides, has died far from home. She is beset by memories, particularly of her grandfather taking her to the zoo to see the tigers. We learn the source of his fascination in mesmerizing flashbacks, meeting the village butcher, the deaf-mute Muslim woman he married, and a tiger who escaped the city zoo after it was bombed by the Germans. Of equal mythic mystery is the story of the "deathless man." Moments of breathtaking magic, wildness, and beauty are paired with chilling episodes in which superstition overrides reason; fear and hatred smother compassion; and inexplicable horror rules. Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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Simply from scratch - Alicia Bessette

Simply from scratch - Bessette, Alicia

Summary: After she joins a baking contest to try to shake off the lingering grief from her husband's death, Zell Carmichael Roy befriends her nine-year-old next-door neighbor, a motherless girl who joins Zell's quest for dessert-competition glory.



Kirkus Reviews
In this nicely wrought debut, a young widow emerges from her grief thanks to the intrusion of a nine-year-old neighbor and an unwinnable cooking contest.

As the novel opens, Rose-Ellen, Zell to her friends, nearly burns down her house. Attempting to enter the Polly Pinch Desserts That Warm the Soul Baking Contest (a satire of the perky Rachael Ray), Zell doesn't notice there's a wrapped present in her preheating oven. The present was left over a year ago by her late husband Nick in a favorite hiding place from the noncooking Zell, and now it is a cindered mess, left unopened and thrown in the attic. The fire serves as a happy catalyst—she begins to reconnect with old friends whom she's pushed away, and she meets her new neighbor Ingrid, the little girl whose misdelivered Polly Pinch magazine inspired Zell's attempt at baking. It's not the baking that interests either of them—Zell wants the $20,000 cash prize to donate to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund—Nick, who worked for their small-town Massachusetts newspaper, was killed in a freak accident while photographing the rebuilding in New Orleans—while Ingrid is obsessed with Polly Pinch because the motherless girl is convinced Polly is her real mom. Zell goes along with this (though she admits, if the redheaded, freckled Polly Pinch were African-American, she would look an awful lot like Ingrid), but the wild story alienates Ingrid at school, and so she and Zell bond and begin baking together. While Ingrid's hunky dad is busy with law school, Zell, her beloved greyhound Ahab and Ingrid spend countless hours in the kitchen creating perfectly inedible desserts. In a story about loneliness, the two are a perfect fit, both attempting in their own ways to re-create connections to their missing loved ones. Then the unthinkable happens—they finally make something good enough to get in the runoffs and are invited on the show, where Ingrid can finally meet her "mother."

Quietly charming, with a dash of romance.
Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Robopocalypse: a novel - Daniel H. Wilson

Robopocalypse: a novel - Wilson, Daniel H.

Summary: A tale set in the near future finds the world thrown into chaos by rebelling artificial intelligences under the leadership of a murderous technology called Archos that kills its creator and takes over the global network, triggering an unprecedented united front among all human cultures. By the author of How to Build a Robot Army. 150,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Staff Review:
A really scary thriller, this sci-fi chiller is set in the aftermath of a robot uprising. (From Stephen King's summer reading list)

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A game of thrones - George R.R. Martin

A game of thrones - Martin, George R.R.

Summary: A tale of court intrigues in the land of Seven Kingdoms, a country blessed by golden summers that go on for years, and cursed by cruel winters that can last a generation.




Kirkus Reviews
~ After a long silence (Portraits of his Children, stories, 1987), the author of the cult The Armageddon Rag (1983) returns with the first of a fantasy series entitled, insipidly enough, A Song of Ice and Fire. In the Seven Kingdoms, where the unpredictable seasons may last decades, three powerful families allied themselves in order to smash the ruling Targaryens and depose their mad king, Rhaegar. Robert Baratheon claimed the throne and took to wife Tywin Lannister's daughter, Cersei; Ned Stark returned north to gloomy Winterfell with its massive, ancient Wall that keeps wildings and unspeakable creatures from invading. Some years later, Robert, now drunk and grossly fat, asks Ned to come south and help him govern; reluctantly, since he mistrusts the treacherous Lannisters, Ned complies. Honorable Ned soon finds himself caught up in a whirl of plots, espionage, whispers, and double-dealing and learns to his horror that the royal heir, Joffrey, isn't Robert's son at all but, rather, the product of an incestuous union between the Queen and her brother Jaime--he murdered Rhaegar despite the latter's surrender. Ned attempts to bargain with Cersei and steels himself to tell Robert--but too late. Swiftly the Lannisters murder the King, consign Ned to a dungeon, and prepare to seize the throne, opposed only by the remaining Starks and Baratheons. On the mainland, meanwhile, the brutal and stupid Viserys Targaryen sells his sister Dany to a barbarian horse-warrior in return for a promise of armies to help him reconquer the Seven Kingdoms. A vast, rich saga, with splendid characters and an intricate plot flawlessly articulated against a backdrop of real depth and texture. Still, after 672 dense pages, were you expecting a satisfying resolution? You won't get it: Be prepared for a lengthy series with an indefinitely deferred conclusion. Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews


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Work song - Ivan Doig

Work song - Doig, Ivan

Summary: In 1919, itinerant schoolteacher Morrie Morgan journeys to Butte in the hopes of making his fortune in copper mining but finds instead a rich assortment of local characters before an encounter with a former student leads to a violent union uprising.



Booklist Reviews
Doig's fictional forays into Montana history have long been distinguished by the author's ability to make compelling human drama out of the small-canvas concerns of everyday people. He did it with a one-room school in the outstanding Whistling Season (2006), and he does it again here with seemingly even more mundane subjects: the on-the-job tribulations of a librarian and the composition of a work song to inspire the beleaguered miners in Butte, Montana, in the early twentieth century. The librarian, the charismatic, quasi–con man Morrie Morris, returns from his stint as a teacher in Whistling Season; this time he lands in Butte eager to fill his pockets with some of the cash that's pouring from the city's copper mines but winds up working in the library instead. That leads to some clandestine songwriting, as the local miners attempt to create a suitably moving ditty to drive the troops in what looks like an upcoming strike. As usual, Doig incorporates plenty of large-canvas history into his mix of romance and human drama—the role of the Wobblies in confronting the West's implacable industrialists; the particulars of coal mining; and even the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series—and, also as usual, he tiptoes ever so carefully on the literary ledge that separates warm, character-driven drama from sentimental melodrama. He nearly loses his footing a time or two here, unlike in the perfectly balanced Whistling Season, but on the whole, this is an engaging, leisurely paced look at labor, libraries, and love in a roughneck mining town. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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The whistling season - Ivan Doig

The whistling season - Doig, Ivan

Summary: Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent and perpetually whistling Rose and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's reluctant sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project. 60,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ Doig's latest foray through Montana history begins in the late 1950s, with Superintendent of Public Instruction Paul Milliron on the verge of announcing the closure of the state's one-room schools, seen as hopelessly out of date in the age of Sputnik. But quickly the narrative takes us back to Paul's pivotal seventh-grade year, 1910, when he was a student in one of those one-room schools, and two landmark events took place: the Milliron family acquired a housekeeper, and Halley's comet came to Montana. Throughout his long career, Doig has been at his best when chronicling the passing of a season in the lives of a Montana family, usually farmers at around the turn of the century. It's no surprise, then, that this is his best novel since the marvelous English Creek (1985). As in all of his books, he digs the details of his historical moments from the dirt in which they thrived. We see Paul, his father, and his two younger brothers struggling to make a life on their dryland farm in the wake of their mother's death, and we feel their shock when they lay eyes on their new housekeeper, a recent widow who looks nothing like the "great-bosomed creature shrouded in gray" they had come to expect. The saga of how this stranger from Minneapolis and her brother (soon to become the new teacher) change lives in unexpected ways has all the charm of old-school storytelling, from Dickens to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Doig's antique narrative voice, which sometimes jars, feels right at home here, coming from the mouth of the young Paul, who is eagerly learning Latin as he tries to make sense of his ever-enlarging world. An entrancing new chapter in the literature of the West. ((Reviewed December 15, 2005)) Copyright 2005 Booklist Reviews.


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The memory palace - Mira Bartok

The memory palace - Bartok, Mira


Summary: A gorgeous memoir about the 17 year estrangement of the author and her homeless schizophrenic mother, and their reunion.



Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Bartók's mother, Norma Herr, was a pianist who suffered from schizophrenia and was homeless for much of her life. When Bartók was a child, her unpredictable mother tried to jump out of a second-floor window. After enduring years of painful uncertainty, Bartók and her sister made the difficult decision to cut off all ties to their mother, with only a post office address as a tenuous connection. They changed their names, too, and had unpublished telephone numbers and addresses. Only after Bartók suffered a debilitating brain injury in an automobile accident and discovered her mother's stored artifacts were she and her mother able to re-connect. After the accident, Bartók covered her computer with Post-it notes of "things I can't remember anymore," yet memories of her childhood fill these pages as images come flooding back and she tries valiantly to make sense of them within a contemporary context that bridges the past and the present. By the time mother and daughter meet again, some 17 years later in 2006, her mother is dying from cancer. Poignant, powerful, disturbing, and exceedingly well-written, this is an unforgettable memoir of loss and recovery, love and forgiveness. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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Small island - Andrea Levy

Small Island - Levy, Andrea

A novel of the immigrant experience brings together the lives of four very different people--Hortense Joseph, a recent arrival in London from Jamaica; her husband Gilbert, a war veteran who finds himself as a black man in Britain to be a second-class citizen; Queenie, Gilbert's white landlady; and her husband, Bernard, a fellow veteran of World War II. Winner of the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction. Original. 25,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Kirkus Reviews
The winner of the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the 2004 Orange Prize-the first writer to win both for the same novel-draws on her Jamaican background in the alluring story of two couples, one Jamaican and one English, whose paths cross in WWII-era England.The Jamaican Gilbert Joseph volunteers for the Royal Air Force, but life in England isn't what he expected, with its tasteless boiled food and insidious racism. After the war, he returns to Jamaica but still hopes to study law in England, and when Hortense, a Jamaican teacher, offers him the money to travel to England if he'll marry her, he agrees-only to discover, back in England, that he cannot study law and the best job he can find is as a postal-truck driver. When Hortense joins him six months later, she is not only shocked by his threadbare fifth-floor room but offended by the prejudice she encounters and discouraged when her Jamaican teacher's credential is rejected. In the story of the adjustments these bright, well-educated and dignified immigrants must make, Gilbert's earthiness offers a delicious counterpoint to Hortense's prideful ambition. Other voices include that of the Josephs' white landlady, Queenie Bligh, the daughter of a provincial butcher, and of her husband Bernard, an older bank clerk in India with the RAF. Queenie meets Gilbert during the war, when he once brings her wandering father-in-law back to her home. The father-in-law, shell-shocked in WWI, is killed by an MP during a brawl at the movies caused when Gilbert refuses to follow the "rules" that segregate the theater racially. When her husband Bernard doesn't come home to their big London house after the war, Queenie takes in lodgers, including Gilbert and Hortense. The growing tensions among the three-and the disruption when Bernard returns at last-bring a spellbinding story to a surprising, heart-rending climax.An enthralling tour de force that animates a chapter in the history of empire. This is Levy's fourth novel, but first U.S. publication. Copyright Kirkus 2005 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.


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Bull Canyon - Mary Lin Pardey

Bull Canyon: a boatbuilder, a writer and other wildlife - Pardey, Mary Lin

Summary: Lin Pardey and her husband Larry are internationally famous for their sailing adventures. But in 1980 -- fresh from an eleven years-long sailing journey, where they forged the early years of their marriage on high seas and in exotic locales -- they came to California looking for a good spot to build a boat, test Lin s skills as a writer and taste the apparent security life ashore could offer. Nestled in a rocky outcropping of winding, sparsely populated dirt roads, 60 miles from the sea and 50 miles from Los Angeles, Bull Canyon would seem an unlikely place for boat-building. But when Lin and Larry set eyes on the abandoned stone cottage at the top of a rutted, dusty lane, it was love at first sight. The house was certainly a fixer-upper, but there was plenty of room to build a boat, not to mention peace, quiet, and an abundance of natural beauty. They knew they'd come home. Bull Canyon would bring them joy, victories and failures but also packrats in the pantries, flooding rains that would make Noah himself cower, the occasional cougar, and an oddball collection of neighbors as ready to assist these hapless appearing newcomers as they were to gossip or occasionally cause trouble. It would be a life lived close to the land, coaxing vegetables out of acrid soil, living side-by-side with wildlife of all types, navigating dangerous roads to simply get to the nearest grocery store, no piped in water, no electricity, no phones not even a proper address to receive mail. Their marriage would be tested, too, working side-by-side, 24/7. Life in the canyon would prove daunting, gritty, and dangerous, and a tougher bargain in the end than what they'd signed up for. But as tough as life could be there, Bull Canyon was, indeed, the place where dreams could come true. It was here that Lin and Larry tapped into the affirming core of their marriage, accomplished back-breaking physical feats (moving enormous boulders and pouring tons of hot lead, among others), and grew to love the magical yet difficult environment. In the tradition of Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence, Pardey takes readers on a voyage landlocked, but a voyage nonetheless of the heart, sharing candidly and with great humor the four years she and her determined husband spent in Bull Canyon. From the Thanksgiving when they had to hang the turkey from a ceiling hook to keep it safe from invading animals, to their constant companion, Dog (who is actually a cat), to Lin's run-in with a couple of drunk hunters, to Larry's careful coaxing of rough-sawn timber into the beautiful boat, Taleisin, their story, related in the warm, personal voice of the fireside storyteller, is a funny, tender, and engrossing tale. Bull Canyon is the story of two dreamers and schemers who have taken life by the horns and bring the reader along for the wild and joyous ride.

Staff Review:
A nonfiction set in the 1980's, this is the story of a time gone by now. No phones, no electricity, no running water, Lin and Larry create an idyllic world in a little canyon north of Los Angeles. A lovely book.

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A short walk in the Hindu Kush - Eric Newby

A short walk in the Hindu Kush - Newby, Eric


Summary: Recounts the author's exploration of the Hindu Kush Mountains in the northeastern Afghanistan province of Nuristan - (Baker & Taylor)



Book News
First published in 1958, this is one of the first and perhaps the most widely known of celebrated English travel writer Eric Newby's many works. After some years working in the fashion industry, Newby and a companion decided to go mountain climbing in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, despite having almost nothing in the way of climbing experience. They gained what little experience they had going on short climbs in Wales, also described here, prior to the narrative of their trek in Afghanistan. Evelyn Waugh penned the brief preface. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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Journey to the east - Herman Hesse

Journey to the east - Hesse, Herman

Summary: In simple, mesmerizing prose, Hermann Hesse tells of a journey both geographic and spiritual. H.H., a German choirmaster, is invited on an expedition with the League, a secret society whose members include Paul Klee, Mozart, and Albertus Magnus. The participants traverse both space and time, encountering Noah’s Ark in Zurich and Don Quixote at Bremgarten. The pilgrims’ ultimate destination is the East, the “Home of the Light,” where they expect to find spiritual renewal. Yet the harmony that ruled at the outset of the trip soon degenerates into open conflict. Each traveler finds the rest of the group intolerable and heads off in his own direction, with H.H. bitterly blaming the others for the failure of the journey. It is only long after the trip, while poring over records in the League archives, that H.H. discovers his own role in the dissolution of the group, and the ominous significance of the journey itself.

Kirkus Reviews
The story is really an inconsequential element of this dissertation. The author's membership in an organization called The League has been rescinded and he is seeking reentry. A loss of faith and vision is responsible for the subtle ostracism from the League and corresponds to the loss of a raison d'etre on the part of the erstwhile member. Coming across Leo, a member who had accompanied the League on the journey - an integral part of their lives - Hesse realizes that the journey which he had imagined terminated was going on all around him. The lack of faith had blinded his perception of it. Through a mortification of his ego, he is again accepted into the League. This mystical structure, the League, represents the spiritual community through which one gains happiness. Isolation, our common denominator, will never germinate into the fruits of a full life. One must join the brotherhood of man in their faith - not necessarily in God, or science - more appropriately, in their faith in each other. Only through involvement with others in a common vision can the solitude of a man be comforted and controlled. The vision while it is collective and, therefore, anonymous, still preserves the unique and precious design of the individual. Membership in the League will give meaning to his personal predispositions as well as comfort his isolation. This novel, written several years after Steppenwolf, has a market among intellectuals and college students.


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Birds of America - Lorrie Moore

Birds of America - Moore, Lorrie

Summary: A long-awaited collection of stories--twelve in all--by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.



Booklist Reviews
Moore's wit works its magic best in her short stories. Her novels, including Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), are tenderly ironic, but her stories are breathtakingly funny, acutely observant, and unexpectedly poignant. Take "Willing," for instance, a tale about Sidra, a self-described "minor movie star once nominated for a major award," who has left Hollywood to sulk in a Days Inn in Chicago. Very little happens. She visits her boring parents, refuses to let the maids in to clean, and has an affair with a thoroughly inappropriate man, but the Dorothy Parker^-like dialogue, Sidra's caustic self-analysis, and such evocative details as a plant "dried to a brown crunch" all coalesce into a richly empathic tale. Ardor and its absence often occupy Moore, and she is adept at cracking the code of difficult relationships. We're all strange birds, Moore--who reads like Ann Beattie's younger, midwestern sister--seems to be saying in these fresh, quirky, and honest stories, and that's fine, as long as you have a good heart. ((Reviewed August 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews


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Haroun and the sea of stories - Salman Rushdie

Haroun and the sea of stories - Rushdie, Salman


Summary: Abandoned by his wife, professional storyteller Shah of Blah suffers further insult when he loses his gift for gab, and his courageous son sets out to restore his former talents - (Baker & Taylor)




Publishers Weekly Reviews
Following the unprecedented controversy generated by The Satanic Verses , Rushdie offers as eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise. Supposedly begun as a bedtime story for Rushdie's son, Haroun concerns a supremely talented storyteller named Rashid whose wife is lured away by the same saturnine neighbor who poisons Rashid's son Haroun's thoughts. ``What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'' Haroun demands, parroting the neighbor and thus unintentionally paralyzing Rashid's imagination. The clocks freeze: time literally stops when the ability to narrate its passing is lost. Repentant, Haroun quests through a fantastic realm in order to restore his father's gift for storytelling. Saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland , Rushdie's fabulous landscape operates by P2C2Es (Processes Too Complicated To Explain), features a court where all the attendant Pages are numbered, and unfurls a riotous display of verbal pranks (one defiant character chants ``You can chop suey, but / You can't chop me!''; elsewhere, from another character: `` `Gogogol,' he gurgled. `` `Kafkafka,' he coughed''). But although the pyrotechnics here are entertaining in and of themselves, the irresistible force of the novel rests in Rushdie's wholehearted embrace of the fable--its form as well as its significance. It's almost as if Rushdie has invented a new form, the meta-fable. Rather than retreating under the famous death threats, Rushdie reiterates the importance of literature, stressing not just the good of stories ``that aren't even true'' but persuading us that these stories convey the truth. As Haroun realizes, ``He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.'' (Jan.) Copyright 1990 Cahners Business Information.

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I'm down: a memoir - Mishna Wolff

I'm down: a memoir - Wolff, Mishna

Summary: Traces the author's experiences of growing up with a white father who believed himself to be African-American, describing how his efforts to indoctrinate his daughter into black culture caused her to be rejected by her black and white peers.



Kirkus Reviews
A humorist and former model recalls growing up gifted and white in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood.In the early 1970s, Wolff and her parents, all Caucasian, moved back to her father's childhood neighborhood, Rainier Valley in south Seattle. The neighborhood had changed from white to black, and her father decided that the family should be black too. "He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains, and a Kangol," writes the author, "telling jokes like Redd Fox and giving advice like Jesse Jackson." Wolff's mother soon tired of the project and divorced her father. At age seven or eight, Wolff says, she was terrible at acting black, and she became a source of constant irritation and disappointment to her father. She could not dance, sing or even jump rope, and she displayed weakness in a tough neighborhood. Just as she discovered she was good at something black—rapid-fire insults along the lines of "Your mama's so fat…" or "You're so ugly…"—her mother transferred her to a school for gifted children (all of them white and rich). So started Wolff's perilous journey of self-identity. The blackness of her neighborhood only made her feel out of place at school, and the whiteness of her school only alienated her from her father and the black woman he married, to the point where she moved out to live with her mother. By age 12 she was a mess, suffering from insomnia, migraines and a deep anxiety that she would always be poor and never have "a lucrative anesthesia practice like all my friends." Over time, Wolff found some balance. Even her father, in a lovingly told final episode, gave her what she most wanted—his acceptance.Deftly and hilariously delineates the American drama of race and class for one little girl.Agent: Erin Hosier/Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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The spirit catches you and you fall down - Anne Fadiman

The spirit catches you and you fall down: a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures - Fadiman, Anne

Summary: A study in the collision between Western medicine and the beliefs of a traditional culture focuses on a hospitalized child of Laotian immigrants, members of the Hmong tribe, whose belief that illness is a spiritual matter came into conflict with doctors' methods. - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
The Lee family had suffered much in Laos and Thailand before coming to the U.S. and settling in Merced, California, among an already large Hmong population. Fadiman explores relations between young Lia Lee, her parents, and various physicians. She brings Hmong culture vividly to life and shows how naturally misunderstandings arise when American health-care providers deal with Hmong patients and their families. For example, the Hmong feel that soul strings must be tied around parts of the body when the individual is endangered; American nurses understandably but insensitively cut off these dirty ties. Fadiman's brief history of the Hmong also explains Lia's parents' desire to be independent and in charge, in the process filling a gap in many a reader's knowledge. Her book has a scope much broader than that of a medical case history, and it could well spark discussion of such questions as whether an immigrant lacks intelligence if she cannot express herself quickly and clearly in English and whether a foreign culture is always inferior. ((Reviewed September 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

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Inside of a dog: What dogs see, smell, and know - Alexandra Horowitz

Inside of a dog: What dogs see, smell, and know - Horowitz, Alexandra

Summary: What do dogs know? How do they think? The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human.


LJ Express Reviews
Dogs have no sense of time; don't see in color; don't learn by observation-or do they? Cognitive scientist Horowitz (psychology, Barnard Coll.) explains that to understand the dog, we must understand his umwelt, his perception of his surroundings based upon anatomy, physiology, experience, and evolution. Debunking long-held misconceptions about the dog's sensory and emotional life, Horowitz gives dog lovers who have always believed that dogs can learn through example or anticipate an owner's return a wealth of current scientific information to confirm their perceptions. Verdict An essential read for pet owners and students of animal behavior who have followed developments in the emerging field of comparative psychology in Stanley Coren's How Dogs Think, Temple Grandin's Animals Make Us Human, and Patricia B. McConnell's Tales of Two Species.-Florence Scarinci, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

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True grit - Charles Portis

True grit - Portis, Charles


Summary: Pursuing a murderer who has escaped into Indian Territory, U.S. Marshal Rooster J. Cogburn teams up with a bounty-hunting Texas Ranger and Mattie Ross, a cantankerous young lady who is bent on revenge.



Review
True Grit, first published in 1968 and the basis for the movie by the same name starring John Wayne, tells the story of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross. A coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash money. That's when Mattie fearlessly heads out to avenge her father's blood, convincing one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest U.S. Marshal there is, to accompany her. But their plans run into an obstacle -- namely, a Texas Ranger who is also investigating the murder, and whose idea of justice is vastly different from Mattie and Rooster's.

Like Mattie herself, True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching. This is an American classic through and through.
- (Center Point Pub)

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Valley of the dolls - Jacqueline Susann

Valley of the dolls - Susann, Jacqueline

Summary: The story of three women and their struggle to make it in the entertainment industry. Upon making it to the top, the sad realization sets in that they have no place to go but down.

Staff Review
Susann's cult classic, full of drugs, drama, and celebrity scandal is an intoxicating summer read.

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The perfect Nazi - Martin P. Davidson

The perfect Nazi: uncovering my grandfather's secret past and how Hitler seduced a generation - Davidson, Martin P.

Summary: Traces the author's research into his family's history after learning at his mother's deathbed that his formidable grandfather had been a Nazi SS officer, describing his discoveries of how his grandfather embodied the persona of an ideal soldier whose fortunes reflected the rise and fall of the Nazi party. - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
As a film editor with the BBC, Davidson persuaded his employer to broadcast all two hours and 20 minutes of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, in response to public debate surrounding the filmmaker's autobiography. He had no idea at the time that Bruno Langbehn, his maternal grandfather, had likely been "one of those grim-faced SS hoplites marching in the film's endless formations." His family had always been tight-lipped about his grandfather's past, and he could never forget the provocatively unrepentant comments old Bruno would make after a few drinks. But it wasn't until after Bruno's death that the whole truth began to emerge: Davidson's grandfather had been a dedicated Nazi, an "early joiner" who rose through the ranks to become a decorated SS officer (and colleague of Adolf Eichmann). Scouring records and photographs and visiting the places where Bruno lived, Davidson pieces together his grandfather's past, and through this biography sheds some light on the mechanisms of Nazi ideology. Though an investigation of this sort could easily succumb to sensationalism, Davidson treads carefully and remains candid about the discomfort his research causes him. The result is an engrossing and deeply personal narrative that raises as many questions as it seems to answer. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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Nine lives - William Dalrymple

Nine lives: in search of the sacred in modern India - Dalrymple, William

Summary: Examines how traditional religions are observed in present-day India through the experiences of such individuals as a Tantric practicing middle-class woman from Calcutta, a prison warder from Kerala who is worshipped as an incarnate deity, and a Jain nun who watched a friend ritually starve.


Booklist Reviews
Dalrymple, author of prizewinning works of far-roaming inquiry, including The Last Mughal (2007), knows when to let others speak. Which is what he does with great finesse in this evocative set of portraits of nine spiritual seekers living across India. Nine lives that open doors onto nine of India's many arduous paths to the divine and reveal striking, nearly surreal juxtapositions between the old and the new. There's the haunting tale of a Jain nun who as a girl renounced her life of privilege and the wrenching story of Rani Bai, a devadasi, or servant of the goddess Yellamma, who was forced into prostitution as a girl. Hari Das describes what it feels like "to be taken over by a god" when he performs theyyam, the sacred possession dance of Kerala, only to return to his dangerous work as a prison guard. Dalrymple sets each vivid profile within an intricately drawn history of the ancient and now-endangered tradition each devotee is dedicated to preserving in the escalating battle between holiness and hustle that is transforming India. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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All the pretty horses - Cormac McCarthy

All the pretty horses - McCarthy, Cormac

Summary: Cut off from the life of ranching he has come to love by his grandfather's death, John Grady Cole flees to Mexico, where he and his two companions embark on a rugged and cruelly idyllic adventure. 25,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)


Publishers Weekly Reviews
This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico; they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. Although the year is 1948, the landscape--at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain--seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity--they roll cigarettes and say what they mean--and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In what is perhaps the book's most spectacular feat, horses and men are joined in a philosophical union made manifest in the muscular pulse of the prose and the brute dignity of the characters. ``What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them,'' the narrator says of John Grady. As a bonus, Grady endures a tragic love affair with the daughter of a rich Spanish Hacendado , a romance, one hopes, to be resumed later in the trilogy. (May) Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information.

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Martin Dressler - Steven Millhauser

Martin Dressler: the tale of an American dreamer - Millhauser, Steven

Summary: A young entrepreneur in late-nineteenth-century New York City, Martin Dressler rises from helper in his father's cigar store as an elusive dream and his love for two sisters comes to life in the Grand Cosmo, an extravagant hotel. - (Baker & Taylor)


Kirkus Reviews
A chronicle of obsession, self-indulgence, and, in a curious way, moral growth, expertly poised between realistic narrative and allegorical fable, from the author of such intriguing, if sometimes unduly gossamer, fictions as Edwin Mullhouse (1972) and In the Penny Arcade (1986). The eponymous Martin, a quiet, diligent youth who learns the rudiments of business practices as a clerk in his father's Manhattan cigar store in the 1890s, rises gradually to wealth and fame as bellhop and eventually second-in-command at a well-known New York hotel, then proprietor of his own cigar store, afterward a thriving lunchroom, and, before his 30th birthday, of the ultramodern Dressler Hotel and its even more successful successors, most notably the Grand Cosmo, ``a leap beyond the hotel,'' that incorporates elements of a traveling Chautauqua, a theme park, and even a hint of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. Millhauser gives equal weight--as never before in his fiction--to both the dreamlike nature of Martin's ambitions and progress, and the quotidian mechanics of achieving that success: The novel is built up from an amazing density of specific period detail that never for a moment seems oppressive or ostentatious. Millhauser also develops with great skill the relationships through which Martin realizes his own nature: those with business associates and mentors, and especially with ``the Vernon women,'' a mother and two adult daughters with whom he establishes an unconventional friendship, leading him to a profitable partnership and a disillusioning marriage. This strange story ends with Martin on the verge of ruin, having realized that ``he had dreamed the wrong dream, the dream that others didn't wish to enter,'' yet in no sense defeated, still enchanted, empowered- -and limited--by his dream. A fascinating and provocative portrayal of turn-of-the-century America tht hums with energy and wit. It might be another of Dreiser's densely packed tales of financiers and titans, written at characteristic white heat, but by an immeasurably more graceful stylist. Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews

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Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery

Anne of Green Gables - Montgomery, L.M.


Summary: By mistake, Anne, an eleven-year-old orphan, is sent to live with a lonely, middle-aged brother and sister on a farm on Prince Edward Island and proceeds to make an indelible impression on everyone.



Review
When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, send for a boy orphan to help them out at the farm, they are in no way prepared for the error that will change their lives. The mistake takes the shape of Anne Shirley, a redheaded 11-year-old girl who can talk anyone under the table. Fortunately, her sunny nature and quirky imagination quickly win over her reluctant foster parents. Anne's feisty spirit soon draws many friends--and much trouble--her way. Not a day goes by without some melodramatic new episode in the tragicomedy of her life. Early on, Anne declares her eternal antipathy for Gilbert Blythe, a classmate who commits the ultimate sin of mocking her hair color. Later, she accidentally dyes that same cursed hair green. Another time, in her haste to impress a new neighbor, she bakes a cake with liniment instead of vanilla. Lucy Maud Montgomery's series of books about Anne have remained classics since the early 20th century. Her portrayal of this feminine yet independent spirit has given generations of girls a strong female role model, while offering a taste of another, milder time in history. --Emilie Coulter

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At Freddie's - Penelope Fitzgerald

At Freddie's - Fitzgerald, Penelope

Summary: Freddie, the elderly proprietress of the Temple Stage School for children, attempts to outwit two successful businessmen who are interested in taking over the school - (Baker & Taylor)

Review
"A work of immense poise and dignity, but warmth and humor, too... This is definitely one of the most charming - but strongly textured - novels anyone will read in a long while." Booklist, ALA

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Devil's food cake murder - Joanne Fluke

Devil's food cake murder - Fluke, Joanne


Summary: When someone shoots visiting Lutheran minister Matthew Walters, Hannah Swenson and cronies investigate Matthew's background, especially his relationship to his creepy, paroled convict cousin, Paul.



Booklist Reviews
When Matthew Walters returns to Lake Eden, Minnesota, to fill in for the Reverend Bob Knudson, who will soon be leaving on his honeymoon, Grandma Knudson suspects that Walters is not the same person who summered with her as a teen while his parents were doing missionary work. She asks Hannah Swensen, owner of the Cookie Jar bakery, to verify Walters' identity. Hannah determines Walters is who he says he is, but shortly thereafter, he's murdered. Hannah and her family, along with her dentist boyfriend, Norman, work to solve the crime. Hannah's life is complicated by Norman's former fiancée relocating to Lake Eden to join his dental practice. Series readers will enjoy plot twists, the small-town winter setting, and the bakery backdrop, but the main pleasure here remains the opportunity to get reacquainted with Hannah, her family, and the other Lake Eden residents. Fans will be eagerly awaiting the next installment, thanks especially to a bombshell Norman drops at the end of the story. As always, delicious, easy-to-follow recipes are sprinkled throughout the text. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews

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The tie that binds - Kent Haruf

The tie that binds: a novel - Haruf, Kent

Summary: Edith Goodenough, the courageous daughter of Colorado homesteaders, finds herself bound by duty, love, and obligation to her crippled father and, by strength and determination, learns to live within the constraints of that responsibility - (Baker & Taylor)



Reviews
"An impressive, expertly crafted work of sensitivity and detail. . . . Powerful." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[A] fine first novel that dramatically and accurately explores the lives of people who work the land in the stark American Middle West." --The New York Times Book Review

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Nerve - Taylor Clark

Nerve: poise under pressure, serenity under stress, and the brave new science of fear and cool - Clark, Taylor

Summary: Draws on a variety of case studies to explain why some people thrive under pressure while others fail miserably, and explains how to build confidence and steady shaky nerves.




Booklist Reviews
Clark, author of Starbucked (2007), maintains his light, frequently humorous tone in this (mostly) serious look at the psychology of stress. Drawing on various forms of research, and numerous real-life stories, the author explores the reasons why we feel stress, our responses to it, and what we can do to deal with it constructively. Clark takes us through the history of stress research, from early breakthroughs (Walter Cannon's 1915 elucidation of the fight-or-flight response) to experimental research ("most of what we know about the science of fear comes from tormenting rats," Clark wryly observes) to today's cutting-edge explorations of the workings of the human brain. The subjects of his real-life stories of dealing with stress under intense pressure range from Russian sub commanders to game-show contestants to tsunami survivors to pro athletes to musicians. The author makes some shrewd observations (for example, that Cannon's fight-or-flight response leaves out a third F: freeze), and, unlike many authors of popular-science books, he really knows how to write, too: the book is informative, engaging, and, in quite a few places, funny. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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