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Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley
In this cycle of 14 bittersweet stories, Walter Mosley
breaks out of the genre--if not the setting--of his bestselling Easy
Rawlins detective novels. Only eight years after serving out a
prison sentence for murder, Socrates Fortlow lives in a tiny,
two-room Watts apartment, where he cooks on a hot plate, scavenges
for bottles, drinks, and wrestles with his demons. Struggling to
control a seemingly boundless rage--as well as the power of his
massive "rock-breaking" hands--Socrates must find a way to live an
honorable life as a black man on the margins of a white world, a
task which takes every ounce of self-control he has. Easy
Rawlins fans might initially find themselves disappointed by the
absence of a mystery to unravel. But it's a gripping inner drama
that unfolds over the pages of these stories, as Socrates comes to
grips with the chaos, poverty, and violence around him. He tries to
get and keep a job delivering groceries; takes in a young street kid
named Darryl, who has his own murder to hide; and helps drive out
the neighborhood crack dealer. Throughout, Mosley captures the
rhythms of Watts life in prose both musical and hard-edged,
resulting in a haunting look at a life bounded by lust, violence,
fear, and a ruthlessly unsentimental moral vision.
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El Atardecer de los Niños by Uriel Quesada
Uriel Quesada Román es un escritor
de gran trayectoria en las letras nacionales. Nació en San José,
Costa Rica en 1962. Es licenciado en Estadística por la Universidad
de Costa Rica (1990) y doctor en Literatura Latinoamericana por la
Universidad de Tulane (2003). Su desarrollo como cuentista culmina
con el libro "Lejos, tan lejos". No obstante, tiene en su haber "Ese
día de los temblores" (1985), "El atardecer de los niños" (colección
de cuentos que fue Premio Editorial Costa Rica en 1988 y Premio
Nacional Aquileo Echeverría en 1990). En la década de los noventa
publicó "Larga vida al deseo" (1996) y "Si trina la canaria" (1999).
Después de casi un quinquenio de no publicar -como se ha hecho
costumbre con Uriel- vuelve con un libro de cuentos que se las trae.
Escritos de manera magistral, los cuentos de "Lejos, tan lejos"
desarrollan temáticas polémicas como el homosexualismo, la violencia,
la prostitución masculina y otras tendencias transgresoras.
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The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
Feisty Marietta Greer changes her name to "Taylor" when
her car runs out of gas in Taylorville, Ill. By the time she reaches
Oklahoma, this strong-willed young Kentucky native with a quick
tongue and an open mind is catapulted into a surprising new life.
Taylor leaves home in a beat-up '55 Volkswagen bug, on her way to
nowhere in particular, savoring her freedom. But when a forlorn
Cherokee woman drops a baby in Taylor's passenger seat and asks her
to take it, she does. A first novel, The Bean Trees is an
overwhelming delight, as random and unexpected as real life. The
unmistakable voice of its irresistible heroine is whimsical, yet
deeply insightful. Taylor playfully names her little foundling
"Turtle," because she clings with an unrelenting, reptilian grip; at
the same time, Taylor aches at the thought of the silent, staring
child's past suffering. With Turtle in tow, Taylor lands in Tucson,
Ariz., with two flat tires and decides to stay. The desert climate,
landscape and vegetation are completely foreign to Taylor, and in
learning to love Arizona, she also comes face to face with its
rattlesnakes and tarantulas. Similarly, Taylor finds that
motherhood, responsibility and independence are thorny, if welcome,
gifts. This funny, inspiring book is a marvelous affirmation of
risk-taking, commitment and everyday miracles. -- Review
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc
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Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned
soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese
industrial titan. His hosts hope that Mr. Hosokawa can be persuaded
to build a factory in their Third World backwater. Alas, in the
opening sequence, just as the accompanist kisses the soprano, a
ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion
through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president,
who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera.
And thus, from the beginning, things go awry. Among the
hostages are not only Hosokawa and Roxane Coss, the American
soprano, but an assortment of Russian, Italian, and French
diplomatic types. Reuben Iglesias, the diminutive and gracious vice
president, quickly gets sideways of the kidnappers, who have no
interest in him whatsoever. Meanwhile, a Swiss Red Cross negotiator
named Joachim Messner is roped into service while vacationing. He
comes and goes, wrangling over terms and demands, and the days
stretch into weeks, the weeks into months. Joined by no common
language except music, the 58 international hostages and their
captors forge unexpected bonds. Time stands still, priorities
rearrange themselves. Ultimately, of course, something has to give,
even in a novel so imbued with the rich imaginative potential of
magic realism. But in a fractious world, Bel Canto remains a
gentle reminder of the transcendence of beauty and love.
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
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The Big Picture by Ben Carson
In his grade school days, Ben Carson would hardly have
been voted “most likely to become a famous surgeon.” His classmates
had already given him another label: class dummy. Then a light
clicked on for Ben—and a consuming passion for learning that
catapulted him from “zero” test grades to a Yale scholarship, a
pioneering role in modern medicine, and an influence that has
extended from inner-city schools to corporate boardrooms and
Washington corridors of power. What made the difference? Belief in
his own potential, a commitment to education and making the most of
his opportunities to learn, determination to make the world a better
place, and faith in a God who knows no limits.
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Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon
In 1964, 12-year-old Cory Mackenson lives with his
parents in Zephyr, Alabama. It is a sleepy, comfortable town. Cory
is helping with his father's milk route one morning when a car
plunges into the lake before their eyes. His father dives in after
the car and finds a dead man handcuffed to the steering wheel. Their
world no longer seems so innocent: a vicious killer hides among
apparently friendly neighbors. Other, equally unsettling
transmogrifications occur: a friend's father becomes a shambling
bully under the influence of moonshine, decent men metamorphose into
Klan bigots, "responsible" adults flee when faced with danger for
the first time. With the aid of unexpected allies, Cory faces
hair-raising dangers as he seeks to find the secret of the dead man
in the lake. McCammon writes an exciting adventure story. He also
gives us an affecting tale of a young man growing out of childhood
in a troubled place and time.
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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Nobel prize winner's virtuosic first novel asks
powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety
and grace that have always characterized her writing. Surrounded by
images of white icons - Shirley Temple, Mary Jane, and the classic
family from Dick & Jane readers - Pecola Breedlove, a young black
girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the
dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she
yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she
believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows
more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of
adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with
beauty and conformity.
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A classic science fiction work that continues to be a
significant warning to our society today. "Community,
Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World
State. The World Controllers have created the ideal society.
Genetic science has brought the human race to perfection. From the
Alpha-Plus mandarin class to the Epsilon Semi-Morons, man is bred
and educated to be content with his pre-destined role.
Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and
recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers.
Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression,
babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of
entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of
sight, hearing, and touch. Bernard Marx seems alone in
feeling discontent. Harbouring an unnatural desire for solitude,
and a perverse distaste for the pleasures of compulsory
promiscuity, Bernard has an ill-defined longing to break free. A
visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the
old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his
distress-Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing
light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring
masterpiece.
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* Captain Alatriste by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Capt. Diego Alatriste y Tenorio works as a hired sword
in 1600s Spain-and a very good swordsman he is, having survived
scorching battle in Flanders when most of his fellow soldiers were
slaughtered. One casualty was a friend whose young son now serves
as the captain's squire and narrates this splendid tale. Two masked
men have hired Captain Alatriste to rough up some Englishmen
arriving in Madrid; shortly thereafter, the powerful Fray Emilio
Bocanegra lends the authority of the Church to his order that these
visiting heretics be killed. On the verge of murder in an alley,
Captain Alatriste spares his victims when one begs for the life of
the other. Thus he gets caught up in some messy affairs of state,
as the two Englishmen are very important indeed. In the early works
that made him famous, like The Club Dumas, Perez-Reverte presented
beautiful if exceedingly complex intellectual puzzles; here he has
streamlined his prose to rapier point and strikes home with a dark
and moving work. This is as gripping as any swashbuckler, with
Spain's Golden Age tellingly resurrected, but it is a much more
sobering tale of honor, responsibility, and political machination.
Captain Alatriste's powerful personality fairly radiates from the
page. -- Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2005 Reed
Business Information.
* Also available in the original Spanish language under the title
El capitán Alatriste
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A Child Called "It": an abused child's journey from victim to
victor by Dave Pelzer
David J. Pelzer's mother, Catherine Roerva, was, he
writes in this ghastly, fascinating memoir, a devoted den mother to
the Cub Scouts in her care, and somewhat nurturant to her
children--but not to David, whom she referred to as "an It." This
book is a brief, horrifying account of the bizarre tortures she
inflicted on him, told from the point of view of the author as a
young boy being starved, stabbed, smashed face-first into mirrors,
forced to eat the contents of his sibling's diapers and a spoonful
of ammonia, and burned over a gas stove by a maniacal, alcoholic
mom. Sometimes she claimed he had violated some rule--no walking on
the grass at school!--but mostly it was pure sadism. Inexplicably,
his father didn't protect him; only an alert schoolteacher saved
David. One wants to learn more about his ordeal and its aftermath,
and now he's written a sequel, The Lost Boy, detailing his
life in the foster-care system. Though it's a grim story,
A Child Called "It" is very much in the tradition of Chicken
Soup for the Soul and the many books in that upbeat series,
whose author Pelzer thanks for helping get his book going. It's all
about weathering adversity to find love, and Pelzer is an expert
witness.
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Chocolat by Joanne Harris
Vianne Rocher blows in to the small French town of
Lansquenet-sous-Tannes on the Caranval wind, the final celebration
before Lent begins. On the first day of Lent, the season where
Catholics traditionally take vows of abstinence and fast, she opens
a delightful, beguiling chocolate shop that, much to the chagrin of
Reynaud, the town priest, becomes a favorite to many townsfolk.
Vianne and her shop seem to exude an influence on the town and its
people as Josephine finally finds the strength to confront an
abusive husband, Armande's friendship with Vianne blooms over into
other parts of her life, and changes in spirit and
personality--even slight--seem to magically stir change. Even
Reynaud has a bout with temptation. Chocolat is an enchanting story
filled with folklore and magical realism as well as real life
situations and people. The religious current, especially as told
through the voice of and seen through the eyes of Reynaud, moves
through a spooky labyrinth of guilt, denial, self-righteousness,
pity, fear, hatred, and loathing, with surprises around each
corner. -- Sarah Atkinson Linville
"literaryreveler.com"
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Clover by Dori Sanders
Clover is just ten years old when her beloved father
dies, leaving her alone in their rural South Carolina town. Alone,
that is, with her new white stepmother, who had married Clover's
father on the last day of his life. Despite her peculiar ideas on
food and other matters, Sara Kate stays on and does her best to be
a mother to Clover as both struggle with grief and readjustment.
This is a simple tale, simply told, and it clearly portrays
Clover's emotional ups and downs. The dialog is often
self-conscious and unnatural, and neither of the main characters is
as fully developed as one might wish. Nevertheless, this is a very
appealing novel that will fit comfortably into the hands of fiction
readers, particularly those with a regional interest.
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Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain
made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New
York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous
literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to
sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic
returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication
of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons.
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at
Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back
to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves.
His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate
and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty
hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the
intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father’s derelict farm and
learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been
swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain
asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful,
majestically lovely, and keenly moving.
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The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother
by James McBride
The Color of Water tells the
remarkable story of Ruth McBride Jordan, the two good men she
married, and the 12 good children she raised. Jordan, born Rachel
Shilsky, a Polish Jew, immigrated to America soon after birth; as
an adult she moved to New York City, leaving her family and faith
behind in Virginia. Jordan met and married a black man, making her
isolation even more profound. The book is a success story, a
testament to one woman's true heart, solid values, and indomitable
will. Ruth Jordan battled not only racism but also poverty to raise
her children and, despite being sorely tested, never wavered. In
telling her story--along with her son's--The Color of Water
addresses racial identity with compassion, insight, and realism. It
is, in a word, inspiring, and you will finish it with unalloyed
admiration for a flawed but remarkable individual. And, perhaps, a
little more faith in us all.
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El coronel no tiene quien le escriba by Gabriel García Márquez
El coronel no tiene quien le escriba es una novela
publicada por el escritor colombiano Gabriel García Márquez en
1961. Se ha dicho de esta breve novela que es una de las más
emotivas que haya escrito García Márquez, y su protagonista, aquel
viejo coronel que espera la pensión que nunca llega, es considerado
como uno de los personajes más entrañables que haya creado el
novelista cataquero. El propio autor de la novela reconoció
tras escribirla que era la más simple de las novelas que había
escrito hasta la fecha. En ella no se detectan muchas de las
facetas características de este autor, como son los frecuentes
saltos en la trama, la mezcolanza entre fenómenos fantásticos y
situaciones reales, y algunos otros detalles que suelen resaltar en
la lectura. La novela pretende reflejar el sentimiento de
desasosiego ante la espera, tal y como el autor lo expresó.
Muchos años después de publicarse la novela, en 1999, el director
mexicano Arturo Ripstein llevó al cine la obra, con el mismo título
que el original.
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Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins has few illusions about
the world--at least not about the world of a young black veteran in
the late 1940s in Southern California. His stint in the Army didn't
do anything to dissuade him from his belief that justice doesn't
come cheap, especially for men like him. "I thought there might be
some justice for a black man if he had money to grease it," Easy
says. Fired from his job on the line at an aircraft plant, he's in
danger of losing his home, symbol of his tenuous hold on middle
class status. That's a good enough reason to accept a white man's
offer to pay him for finding a beautiful, mysterious Frenchwoman
named Daphne Monet, last seen in the company of a well-known
gangster. Easy's search takes the reader to an L.A. few writers
have shown us before--the mean streets of South Central, the
after-hours joints in dirty basement clubs, the cheap hotels and
furnished rooms, the places people go when they don't want to be
found. Evocative of a past time, and told in a style that's
reminiscent of Hammet and Chandler, yet uniquely his own, Mosley's
depiction of an inherently decent man in a violent world of
intrigue and corruption rang up big sales when it was published in
1990. The minor characters are deftly and brilliantly
developed, especially Mouse, who saves Easy's life even as he draws
him deeper into the mystery of Daphne Monet. -- Review
from
Amazon.com |
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred
Lansing
In the summer of 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton set off
aboard the Endurance bound for the South Atlantic. The goal
of his expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland, but more
than a year later, and still half a continent away from the
intended base, the Endurance was trapped in ice and
eventually was crushed. For five months Shackleton and his crew
survived on drifting ice packs in one of the most savage regions of
the world before they were finally able to set sail again in one of
the ship's lifeboats. Alfred Lansing's Endurance is a
white-knuckle account of this astounding odyssey. Through the
diaries of team members and interviews with survivors, Lansing
reconstructs the months of terror and hardship the Endurance
crew suffered. In October of 1915, there "were no helicopters, no
Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes. Thus their plight was
naked and terrifying in its simplicity. If they were to get
out--they had to get themselves out." How Shackleton did indeed get
them out without the loss of a single life is at the heart of
Lansing's magnificent true-life adventure tale.
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Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal
by Eric Schlosser
Schlosser's incisive history of the development of
American fast food indicts the industry for some shocking crimes
against humanity, including systematically destroying the American
diet and landscape, and undermining our values and our economy. The
first part of the book details the postwar ascendance of fast food
from Southern California, assessing the impact on people in the
West in general. The second half looks at the product itself: where
it is manufactured (in a handful of enormous factories), what goes
into it (chemicals, feces) and who is responsible (monopolistic
corporate executives). In harrowing detail, the book explains the
process of beef slaughter and confirms almost every urban myth
about what in fact "lurks between those sesame seed buns." Given
the estimate that the typical American eats three hamburgers and
four orders of french fries each week, and one in eight will work
for McDonald's in the course of their lives, few are exempt from
the insidious impact of fast food. Throughout, Schlosser fires
these and a dozen other hair-raising statistical bullets into the
heart of the matter. While cataloguing assorted evils with the
tenacity and sharp eye of the best investigative journalist, he
uncovers a cynical, dismissive attitude to food safety in the fast
food industry and widespread circumvention of the government's
efforts at regulation enacted after Upton Sinclair's similarly
scathing novel exposed the meat-packing industry 100 years ago. --
Review copyright Publishers Weekly, 2000
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Ferris Beach by Jill McCorkle
Here is a marvelous follow-up to McCorkle's acclaimed
Tending to Virginia ( LJ 9/1/87). From age five, Katie Burns has
thought of Ferris Beach, South Carolina, home of her ``foundling''
cousin Angela, as both forbidden and alluring. During the decade
covered by this entrancing coming-of-age novel (mid-Sixties to
mid-Seventies), many people besides Angela compete for Katie's
allegiance. Symbolizing freedom are orange-haired Misty Rhodes,
whose mother Mo puts rock gardens on the lawn; Katie's first love
Merle Hucks; and--to a certain extent--her father Alfred Tennyson
(``Fred'') Burns. In contrast, there are prim Cleva Burns and her
tea-giving friend Mrs. Poole, steeped in Southern propriety.
Despite tantalizing hints of buried secrets and a few occasions of
real tragedy, what predominates is McCorkle's deft comic sense, her
keen ear for dialog and eye for detail, and a grab bag of cultural
allusions (Barry Sadler; Peter, Paul & Mary) bespeaking a specific
time and place. Finally--most movingly--there is the revelation
that love often goes deeper in the staid conventional forms than
one might sometimes suspect.-- Review by Elise Chase, Forbes
Library, Northampton, Mass.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the
civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three
years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the
good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert
Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to
an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of
loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an
ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria
and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant
travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind
faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises
and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and
beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. "If
the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins
wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so
completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and
more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works,
it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Much like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein is a story we all think we know, but really
don't. Very few films have consciously attempted to follow the
novel too closely; thus, everything popular culture "knows" about
Frankenstein does not originate from literature, but from
films. This is a shame, in a way, because the novel itself is, if
not the progenitor, an early vessel of so many archetypes found
science fiction and horror.
Swiss medical student Victor Frankenstein discovers the
secret of life (which he never reveals, lest someone repeat the
mistake). He then puts together a body, essentially a man, from
various corpses. He then becomes horrified by the creature he has
built, and abandons. The creature, suffering a great deal of
neglect and abuse, still manages to get a thorough education, and
learns of his lineage. After murdering Victor's younger brother,
and framing the family maid, the creature tells his (admittedly)
sad tale to his "father", and then demands a mate. Victor, in a
panic, agrees, then thinks better of it at the last moment,
destroying the new bride. In retaliation, the creature murders all
of Victor's loved ones (including his wife), and leads Victor on a
merry chase across the world.
Numerous archetypes are present here. The basic fear of
what evil technology may bring along with the good is a central
theme, as is the warning against playing God. So is the implicit
admonition to be responsible in all things, be it during innovation
or being a parent. The creature is, for all intents and purposes,
an android-everyone from Gort to C-3PO owe their existence to the
Frankenstein monster. And the monster that slays all but one
protagonist is a staple of horror, be it traditional monster
movies, like "Alien", or more realistic slasher movies like
"Halloween". But certain of these elements have been lost in most
interpretations. The creature is actually intelligent, and
well-spoken, a child that's horribly neglected, but with the
strength and intelligence to strike back: id without superego, and
without restraints.
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The Gate to Women's Country by Sherri Tepper
Tepper's finest novel to date is set in a
post-holocaust feminist dystopia that offers only two political
alternatives: a repressive polygamist sect that is slowly
self-destructing through inbreeding and the matriarchal
dictatorship called Women's Country. Here, in a desperate effort to
prevent another world war, the women have segregated most men into
closed military garrisons and have taken on themselves every other
function of government, industry, agriculture, science and
learning. The resulting manifold responsibilities are seen through
the life of Stavia, from a dreaming 10-year-old to maturity as
doctor, mother and member of the Marthatown Women's Council.
As in Tepper's Awakeners series books, the rigid social systems are
tempered by the voices of individual experience and, here, by an
imaginative reworking of The Trojan Woman that runs through the
text.
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Gifted Hands by Ben Carson
In 1987, Dr. Benjamin Carson gained worldwide
recognition for his part in the first successful separation of
Siamese twins joined at the back of the head. The extremely complex
and delicate operation, five months in the planning and twenty-two
hours in the execution, involved a surgical plan that Carson helped
initiate. Carson pioneered again in a rare procedure known as
hemispherectomy, giving children without hope a second chance at
life through a daring operation in which he literally removed one
half of their brain. But such breakthroughs aren't unusual for Ben
Carson. He's been beating the odds since he was a child. Raised in
inner-city Detroit by a mother with a third grade education, Ben
lacked motivation. He had terrible grades. And a pathological
temper threatened to put him in jail. But Sonya Carson convinced
her son that he could make something of his life, even though
everything around him said otherwise. Trust in God, a
relentless belief in his own capabilities, and sheer determination
catapulted Ben from failing grades to the top of his class--and
beyond to a Yale scholarship . . . the University of Michigan
Medical School . . . and finally, at age 33, the directorship of
pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore,
Maryland. Today, Dr. Ben Carson holds twenty honorary doctorates
and is the possessor of a long string of honors and awards,
including the Horatio Alger Award, induction into the "Great Blacks
in Wax" Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, and an invitation as Keynote
Speaker at the 1997 President's National Prayer Breakfast. Gifted
Hands is the riveting story of one man's secret for success, tested
against daunting odds and driven by an incredible mindset that
dares to take risks. This inspiring autobiography takes you into
the operating room to witness surgeries that made headlines around
the world--and into the private mind of a compassionate,
God-fearing physician who lives to help others. Through it all
shines a humility, quick wit, and down-to-earth style that make
this book one you won't easily forget.
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Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The scant confirmed facts about the life of Vermeer,
and the relative paucity of his masterworks, continues to be
provoke to the literary imagination. The tale this time is
told alluringly indeed by the housemaid who sat as model for the
painting in question. Griet is only 16, in 1664, when she's hired
as a maid in the grand Delft household of Johannes Vermeer, who
practices the Catholic faith and has a family consisting of wife,
mother-in-law, cook, and 5 children (by story's end there will be
11). Griet's own faith is Protestant, and her humble family has
been made even poorer since her father, a tile-painter, had an
accident that left him blind. Hard-working and sweet-tempered Griet
is taken on, then, partly as an act of charity, but the austere and
famous painter is struck by her sensitive eye for color and
balance, and after a time he asks her to grind paints for him in
his attic studio and perhaps begins falling in love with her, as
she certainly does with him. Let there be no question, however, of
anything remotely akin to declared romance, the maids station being
far, far below the eminent painters, not to mention that his
bitterly jealous wife Catharine remains sharply resentful of any
least privilege extended to Griet a complication that Vermeer
resolves simply through intensified secrecy. There's a limit,
though, to how much hiding can be done in a single house however
large, and when Griet begins sitting for Vermeer (his patron, the
lecherous Ruijven, who has eyes (and hands) for Griet, brings it
about), suspicions rise. That's as nothing, though, to the storm
that sweeps the house and all but brings about Griet's very ruin
when Catharine discovers that the base-born maid has committed the
thieving travesty of wearing her pearl earrings. Courageous Griet,
though, proves herself a survivor in this tenderhearted and
sharp-eyed ramble through daily life and high art in 17th-century
Delft.
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The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
Walls, who spent years trying to hide her childhood
experiences, allows the story to spill out in this remarkable
recollection of growing up. From her current perspective as a
contributor to MSNBC online, she remembers the poverty, hunger,
jokes, and bullying she and her siblings endured, and she looks
back at her parents: her flighty, self-indulgent mother, a
Pollyanna unwilling to assume the responsibilities of parenting,
and her father, troubled, brilliant Rex, whose ability to turn his
family's downward-spiraling circumstances into adventures allowed
his children to excuse his imperfections until they grew old enough
to understand what he had done to them--and to himself. His grand
plans to build a home for the family never evolved: the hole for
the foundation of the The Glass Castle, as the dream house was
called, became the family garbage dump, and, of course, a metaphor
for Rex Walls' life. Shocking, sad, and occasionally bitter, this
gracefully written account speaks candidly, yet with surprising
affection, about parents and about the strength of family ties--for
both good and ill. -- Stephanie Zvirin Copyright 2005 Booklist
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The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
In the first book of the His Dark Materials
trilogy, Pullman has created a wholly developed universe, which is,
as he states, much like our own but different in many ways--here
Earth is one of only five planets in the solar system, every human
has a daemon (the soul embodied as an animal familiar) and, in a
time similar to our late 19th century, Oxford scholars and agents
of the supreme Calvinist Church are in a race to unleash the power
that will enable them to cross the bridge to a parallel universe.
The story line has all the hallmarks of a myth: brought up ignorant
of her true identity, 11-year-old Lyra goes on a quest from East
Anglia to the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate
Roger and her imprisoned uncle, Lord Asriel. Deceptions and
treacheries threaten at every turn, and she is not yet certain how
to read the mysterious truth-telling instrument that is her only
guide. After escaping from the charming and sinister Mrs. Coulter,
she joins a group of "gyptians" in search of their children, who,
like Roger, have been spirited away by Mrs. Coulter's henchmen, the
Gobblers. Along the way Lyra is guided by friendly witches and
attacked by malevolent ones, aided by an armored polar bear and a
Texan balloonist, and nearly made a victim of the Gobblers' cruel
experiments. -- Review Copyright 1996 Publishers Weekly
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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has
unnerved readers since its original publication in 1959. A tale of
subtle, psychological terror, it has earned its place as one of the
significant haunted house stories of the ages. Eleanor Vance
has always been a loner--shy, vulnerable, and bitterly resentful of
the 11 years she lost while nursing her dying mother. "She had
spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for
her to talk, even casually, to another person without
self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words." Eleanor
has always sensed that one day something big would happen,
and one day it does. She receives an unusual invitation from Dr.
John Montague, a man fascinated by "supernatural manifestations."
He organizes a ghost watch, inviting people who have been touched
by otherworldly events. A paranormal incident from Eleanor's
childhood qualifies her to be a part of Montague's bizarre
study--along with headstrong Theodora, his assistant, and Luke, a
well-to-do aristocrat. They meet at Hill House--a notorious estate
in New England. Hill House is a foreboding structure of
towers, buttresses, Gothic spires, gargoyles, strange angles, and
rooms within rooms--a place "without kindness, never meant to be
lived in...." Although Eleanor's initial reaction is to
flee, the house has a mesmerizing effect, and she begins to feel a
strange kind of bliss that entices her to stay. Eleanor is a magnet
for the supernatural--she hears deathly wails, feels terrible
chills, and sees ghostly apparitions. Once again she feels isolated
and alone--neither Theo nor Luke attract so much eerie company. But
the physical horror of Hill House is always subtle; more disturbing
is the emotional torment Eleanor endures. Intense, literary, and
harrowing, The Haunting of Hill House belongs in the same
dark league as Henry James's classic ghost story, The Turn of
the Screw.
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The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
The dramatic and chilling story of an Ebola virus
outbreak in a surburban Washington, D.C. laboratory, with
descriptions of frightening historical epidemics of rare and lethal
viruses. More hair-raising than anything Hollywood could think of,
because it's all true. Far more infectious than AIDS,
filoviruses (thread viruses) are relentless killer machines that
consume a human body in days, causing a gruesome death. Symptoms
include liquefying flesh, spurts of blood, black vomit and brain
sludge. Outbreaks of the Ebola filovirus devasted Sudan and Zaire
in 1976. And in 1989 Philippine monkeys in a Reston, Va., research
lab, found to be infected with Ebola, were the target of a U.S.
Army-led biohazard task force that decontaminated the lab,
exterminating hundreds of monkeys to prevent the possible airborne
spread of the disease to humans. In a horrifying and riveting
report, portions of which appeared in the New Yorker, Preston (
American Steel ) exposes a real-life nightmare potentially as
lethal as the fictive runaway germs in Michael Crichton's The
Andromeda Strain. Preston plausibly argues that the emergence of
AIDS, Ebola and other highly adaptable rain-forest viruses is a
consequence of ecological ruin of the tropics. -- Review
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus
In an enthralling tragedy built on a foundation of
small misfortunes, Dubus (Bluesman, 1993, etc.) offers in detail
the unraveling life of a woman who, in her undoing, brings
devastation to the families of those in her path. It was bad enough
when Kathy Lazaro stepped out of the shower one morning to find
herself evicted from her house, a small bungalow to be auctioned
the very next day in a county tax sale; bad enough that her
recovering-addict husband had left her some time before, and that
she had no friends at all in California to help her move or put her
up. Then she also had to fall for the guy who evicted her, Deputy
Les Burdon'married, with two kids. Sympathetic to her plight, Les
lines up legal counsel and makes sure she has a place to stay, but
his optimism (and the lawyer's) hits an immovable object in proud
ex-Colonel Behrani, formerly of the Iranian Air Force, who fled his
homeland with his family when the Shah was deposed and who has
struggled secretly in San Francisco for years to maintain
appearances until his daughter can make a good marriage. He's
sunken his remaining life savings into buying Kathy's house, at a
tremendous bargain, planning to reinvent himself as a real-estate
speculator, and he has no wish to sell it back when informed that
the county made a bureaucratic error. Hounded by both Kathy and
Les'who has moved out, guiltily, on his family and brought his
lover, herself a recovering addict, back to the bar scene'Behrani
is increasingly unable to shield his wife and teenaged son from the
ugly truth, but he still won't yield. Then Kathy tries to kill
herself, and Les takes the law into his own hands . . . . No
villains here, but only precisely rendered proof that the road to
hell is paved with good intentions.
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* The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Esperanza and her family didn't always live on Mango
Street. Right off she says she can't remember all the houses
they've lived in but "the house on Mango Street is ours and we
don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the
people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and
there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But
even so, it's not the house we thought we'd get." Esperanza's
childhood life in a Spanish-speaking area of Chicago is described
in a series of spare, poignant, and powerful vignettes. Each story
centers on a detail of her childhood: a greasy cold rice sandwich,
a pregnant friend, a mean boy, how the clouds looked one time,
something she heard a drunk say, her fear of nuns: "I always cry
when nuns yell at me, even if they're not yelling." Esperanza's
friends, family, and neighbors wander in and out of her stories;
through them all Esperanza sees, learns, loves, and dreams of the
house she will someday have, her own house, not on Mango Street.
* Also available in the original Spanish language under the title
La casa en Mango Street
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If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him by Sharyn McCrumb
Three grievously wronged women take murderous revenge
in this sharp-edged, witty tale, the eighth appearance of forensic
anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson. Her skills at research and
detection come into play when she is hired as an investigator by
her brother Bill's Virginia law firm. Bill has been asked to defend
a woman accused of poisoning her philandering husband, a piously
hypocritical preacher. Another law partner, the resolute Amy Powell
Hill, ponders how best to defend a Richmond socialite who gleefully
admits to shooting both her ex-husband and his new wife.
Intertwined with these contemporary cases is a 19th-century
mystery: How did a genteel Southern lady manage to poison her
wealthy Yankee husband? Buoyed by intriguing characters, a
wry (sometimes macabre) wit, and lush Virginia atmosphere,
McCrumb's mystery spins merrily along on its own momentum,
concluding that justice will triumph... but in surprising ways.
-- Review Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee
One of the most moving and meaningful plays in American
theatre--based on the famed Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a
Tennessee teacher was tried for teaching evolution. The
accused was a slight, frightened man who had deliberately broken
the law. His trial was a Roman circus, the chief gladiators being
the two great legal giants of the century. Locked in mortal combat,
they bellowed and roared imprecations and abuse. The spectators sat
uneasily in the sweltering heat with murder in their hearts, barely
able to restrain themselves. At stake was the freedom of every
American.
“Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee were classic Broadway scribes
who knew how to crank out serious plays for thinking Americans. . .
. Inherit the Wind is a perpetually prescient courtroom
battle over the legality of teaching evolution. . . . We’re still
arguing this case–all the way to the White House.”
–Chicago Tribune
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Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
Into Thin Air is a riveting first-hand account of a
catastrophic expedition up Mount Everest. In March 1996, Outside
magazine sent veteran journalist and seasoned climber Jon Krakauer
on an expedition led by celebrated Everest guide Rob Hall. Despite
the expertise of Hall and the other leaders, by the end of summit
day eight people were dead. Krakauer's book is at once the story of
the ill-fated adventure and an analysis of the factors leading up
to its tragic end. Written within months of the events it
chronicles, Into Thin Air clearly evokes the majestic
Everest landscape. As the journey up the mountain progresses,
Krakauer puts it in context by recalling the triumphs and perils of
other Everest trips throughout history. The author's own anguish
over what happened on the mountain is palpable as he leads readers
to ponder timeless questions.
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Journey on the James: Three weeks through the heart of
Virginia by Earl Swift.
Winner of the 9th annual Southern Environmental Law
Center Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award (in Literary non-fiction) for
outstanding writing on the southern environment.
From its beginnings as a trickle of icy water in
Virginia's northwest corner to its miles-wide mouth at Hampton
Roads, the James River has witnessed more recorded history than any
other feature of the American landscape--as home to the continent's
first successful English settlement, highway for Native Americans
and early colonists, battleground in the Revolution and the Civil
War, and birthplace of America's twentieth- century navy.
In 1998, restless in his job as a reporter for the
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Earl Swift landed an assignment traveling
the entire length of the James. He hadn't been in a canoe since his
days as a Boy Scout, and he knew that the river boasts whitewater,
not to mention man- made obstacles, to challenge even experienced
paddlers. But reinforced by Pilot photographer Ian Martin and a lot
of freeze-dried food and beer, Swift set out to immerse himself--he
hoped not literally--in the river and its history. What Swift
survived to bring us is this engrossing chronicle of three weeks in
a fourteen- foot plastic canoe and four hundred years in the life
of Virginia. Fueled by humor and a dauntless curiosity about the
land, buildings, and people on the banks, and anchored by his
sidekick Martin--whose photographs accompany the text--Swift points
his bow through the ghosts of a frontier past, past Confederate
forts and POW camps, antebellum mills, ruined canals, vanished
towns, and effluent-spewing industry. Along the banks, lonely
meadowlands alternate with suburbs and power plants, marinas and
the gleaming skyscrapers of Richmond's New South downtown. Enduring
dunkings, wolf spiders, near-arrest, channel fever, and twenty-knot
winds, Swift makes it to the Chesapeake Bay.
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The John McPhee Reader
John McPhee was born in Princeton, New
Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge
University. His writing career began at Time magazine and
led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he
has been a staff writer since 1965. The same year he published his
first book, A Sense of Where You Are, and soon followed with
The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine
Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles
(collection, 1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1969),
Levels of the Game (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid
(1972), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve
of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame
(collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe
(1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve
of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in
the category of science.
First published in 1976, The John McPhee Reader
is comprised of selections from the author’s first twelve books.
His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and
uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack
storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a
journalist whom L.E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, who
Geoffrey Wolff said “is bringing his work to levels that have no
measurable limit,” who has been called “a master craftsman” so many
times that it is pointless to number them.
"What makes a piece of John McPhee's reportage so reliably
superior? . . . Most obviously, he finds interesting things to
write about . . . Then there us his facility for dreaming up odd
and out-of-the-way approaches to his subjects . . . Add to this his
knack for illustrating with amusing anecdotes . . . And there you
have an approximate John McPhee recipe, lacking only the dramatic
confrontations, the interesting characters, and the unusual vantage
points, which I neglected to mention."—Christopher Lehmann, The
New York Times
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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Kindred utilizes the devices of
science fiction in order to answer the question "how could anybody
be a slave?" A woman from the twentieth century, Dana is repeatedly
brought back in time by her slave-owning ancestor Rufus when his
life is endangered. She chooses to save him, knowing that because
of her actions a free-born black woman will eventually become his
slave and her own grandmother. When forced to live the life of a
slave, Dana realizes she is not as strong as her ancestors. Unable
to will herself back to her own time and unable to tolerate the
institution of slavery, she attempts to run away and is caught
within a few hours. Her illiterate ancestor Alice succeeds in
eluding capture for four days even though "She knew only the area
she'd been born and raised in, and she couldn't read a map." Alice
is captured, beaten, and sold as a slave to Rufus. As Dana is sent
back and forth through time, she continues to save Rufus's life,
attempting during each visit to care for Alice, even as she is
encouraging Alice to allow Rufus to rape her and thus ensure Dana's
own birth. As a twentieth-century African-American woman trying to
endure the brutalities of nineteenth-century slavery, Dana answers
the question, "See how easily slaves are made?" For Dana, to choose
to preserve an institution, to save a life, and nurture
victimization is to choose to survive.
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The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand."
--Randy Pausch.
A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?
When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.
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Last Man Standing by David Baldacci
The hero of Baldacci's latest thriller is Web London, a member of the elite FBI Hostage Rescue Team. One night, on what seems like a routine drug raid, Web freezes up, hesitant to rush into the fray. It turns out to be a trap; the team members trigger unmanned machine guns and are slaughtered. Web is the last one in and manages to drop to the ground without getting hit. He destroys the machine guns and saves a little boy, Kevin, but he is tormented by the feeling that he let his team down. Web is regarded as a hero by most people in the FBI because of his actions during a hostage situation at a school, where he saved a member of his team and took two bullets and a fireball, which left him scarred. After his team's death, some members of the FBI are suspicious of Web, and when the news media gets wind of the fact that he froze up, they begin to hound him. He seeks counseling from Claire Daniels, a psychiatrist, who tries to draw out Web's buried feelings. Meanwhile, Web tries to find out exactly who set up his team, searching for drug dealers who had the ability to execute the plan, but as he investigates, he finds he may have enemies closer to home. Baldacci's fans, of which there are many, will be happy to see him back in thriller-writing mode. -- Review Copyright 2005 Kristine Huntley, Booklist.
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* Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
Each chapter of screenwriter Esquivel's utterly
charming interpretation of life in turn-of-the-century Mexico
begins with a recipe--not surprisingly, since so much of the action
of this exquisite first novel (a bestseller in Mexico) centers
around the kitchen, the heart and soul of a traditional Mexican
family. The youngest daughter of a well-born rancher, Tita has
always known her destiny: to remain single and care for her aging
mother. When she falls in love, her mother quickly scotches the
liaison and tyrannically dictates that Tita's sister Rosaura must
marry the luckless suitor, Pedro, in her place. But Tita has one
weapon left--her cooking. Esquivel mischievously appropriates the
techniques of magical realism to make Tita's contact with food
sensual, instinctual and often explosive. Forced to make the cake
for her sister's wedding, Tita pours her emotions into the task;
each guest who samples a piece bursts into tears. Esquivel does a
splendid job of describing the frustration, love and hope expressed
through the most domestic and feminine of arts, family cooking,
suggesting by implication the limited options available to Mexican
women of this period. Tita's unrequited love for Pedro survives the
Mexican Revolution the births of Rosaura and Pedro's children, even
a proposal of marriage from an eligible doctor. In a poignant
conclusion, Tita manages to break the bonds of tradition, if not
for herself, then for future generations.
-- Review Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
* Also available in the original Spanish language under the title
Como Agua para Chocolate
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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael
Beah
This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of
12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the
best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child
abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey
transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American
hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family,
wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided
by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and
army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled
life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's
brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and
partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman
for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in
the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle.
When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah
fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. (Beah
graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.) Told in clear, accessible
language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this
memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war
and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide.
-- Review Copyright © Reed Business Information
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My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The difficult choices a family must make when a child is diagnosed with a serious disease are explored with pathos and understanding in this 11th novel by Picoult (Second Glance, etc.). The author, who has taken on such controversial subjects as euthanasia (Mercy), teen suicide (The Pact) and sterilization laws (Second Glance), turns her gaze on genetic planning, the prospect of creating babies for health purposes and the ethical and moral fallout that results. Kate Fitzgerald has a rare form of leukemia. Her sister, Anna, was conceived to provide a donor match for procedures that become increasingly invasive. At 13, Anna hires a lawyer so that she can sue her parents for the right to make her own decisions about how her body is used when a kidney transplant is planned. Meanwhile, Jesse, the neglected oldest child of the family, is out setting fires, which his firefighter father, Brian, inevitably puts out. Picoult uses multiple viewpoints to reveal each character's intentions and observations, but she doesn't manage her transitions as gracefully as usual; a series of flashbacks are abrupt. Nor is Sara, the children's mother, as well developed and three-dimensional as previous Picoult protagonists. Her devotion to Kate is understandable, but her complete lack of sympathy for Anna's predicament until the trial does not ring true, nor can we buy that Sara would dust off her law degree and represent herself in such a complicated case. Nevertheless, Picoult ably explores a complex subject with bravado and clarity, and comes up with a heart-wrenching, unexpected plot twist at the book's conclusion. -- Review from Publishers Weekly, Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
In 1932, two North Carolina teenagers from opposite
sides of the tracks fall in love. Spending one idyllic summer
together in the small town of New Bern, Noah Calhoun and Allie
Nelson do not meet again for 14 years. Noah has returned from WWII
to restore the house of his dreams, having inherited a large sum of
money. Allie, programmed by family and the "caste system of the
South" to marry an ambitious, prosperous man, has become engaged to
powerful attorney Lon Hammond. When she reads a newspaper story
about Noah's restoration project, she shows up on his porch step,
re-entering his life for two days. Will Allie leave Lon for Noah?
The book's slim dimensions and cliche-ridden prose will make
comparisons to The Bridges of Madison County inevitable.
What renders Sparks's sentimental story somewhat distinctive are
two chapters, which take place in a nursing home in the '90s, that
frame the central story. The first sets the stage for the reading
of the eponymous notebook, while the later one takes the characters
into the land beyond happily ever after, a future rarely examined
in books of this nature. Early on, Noah claims that theirs may be
either a tragedy or a love story, depending on the perspective.
Ultimately, the judgment is up to readers.
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October Sky: A Memoir by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
Inspired by Werner von Braun and his Cape Canaveral
team, 14-year-old Homer Hickam decided in 1957 to build his own
rockets. They were his ticket out of Coalwood, West Virginia, a
mining town that everyone knew was dying--everyone except Sonny's
father, the mine superintendent and a company man so dedicated that
his family rarely saw him. Hickam's smart, iconoclastic mother
wanted her son to become something more than a miner and, along
with a female science teacher, encouraged the efforts of his
grandiosely named Big Creek Missile Agency. He grew up to be a NASA
engineer and his memoir of the bumpy ride toward a gold medal at
the National Science Fair in 1960--an unprecedented honor for a
miner's kid--is rich in humor as well as warm sentiment. Hickam
vividly evokes a world of close communal ties in which a
storekeeper who sold him saltpeter warned, "Listen, rocket boy.
This stuff can blow you to kingdom come." Hickam is candid about
the deep disagreements and tensions in his parents' marriage, even
as he movingly depicts their quiet loyalty to each other. The
portrait of his ultimately successful campaign to win his aloof
father's respect is equally affecting.
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On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon by Kaye Gibbons.
Gibbons, author most recently of Sights Unseen
(1995), has evolved a distinctive narrative style based on the
poignant eloquence and acuity of young female narrators struggling
to transcend the moral and spiritual failings of their troubled
families. Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, her newest creation, fits the
mold but with a subtle twist; she's telling her tale at the end of
her long and tumultuous life, a life derailed, as so many were, by
the Civil War. Like Jane Smiley in her latest novel, Gibbons has
gone back to that still-smoldering conflict and imagined it from a
wholly personal and feminine perspective, concerned not with
politics but with blood and suffering. Two opposing characters
embody her dismay over ignorance, brutality, racism, selfishness,
and hate versus her belief in virtue, compassion, generosity,
knowledge, and love: Emma Garnet's father, an evil, slave-owning
tyrant; and Clarice, his black housekeeper, who, in spite of being
at the lowest echelon of southern society, is the true leader of
their Virginia estate. It is Clarice who teaches Emma Garnet how to
be a decent human being, lessons that lead to her controversial but
loving marriage to a distinguished and altruistic Northerner, Dr.
Quincy Lowell. The Lowells would have lived an easy life had there
been no war, but they are drawn inexorably into the horror. Quincy
and Clarice literally work themselves to death caring for the
wounded, while Emma Garnet, who becomes as adept at surgery as
Quincy, survives to mourn the dead. Gibbons is unsparing in her
depiction of the gruesome reality of the carnage, and unflinching
in her effort to convey the madness of that time and the havoc it
wreaked on people's souls.
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A Painted House by John Grisham
Ever since he published
The Firm in 1991, John Grisham has remained the undisputed
champ of the legal thriller. With A Painted House, however,
he strikes out in a new direction. As the author is quick to note,
this novel includes "not a single lawyer, dead or alive," and
readers will search in vain for the kind of lowlife machinations
that have been his stock-in-trade. Instead, Grisham has delivered a
quieter, more contemplative story, set in rural Arkansas in 1952.
It's harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the family has hired a
crew of migrant Mexicans and "hill people" to pick 80 acres of
cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream team. But
it's backbreaking work, particularly for the 7-year-old narrator,
Luke: "I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy bolls from the
stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack, afraid
to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid
to slow down because someone would notice." What's more,
tensions begin to simmer between the Mexicans and the hill people,
one of whom has a penchant for bare-knuckles brawling. This leads
to a brutal murder, which young Luke has the bad luck to witness.
At this point--with secrets, lies, and at least one knife fight in
the offing--the plot begins to take on that familiar, Grisham-style
momentum. Still, such matters ultimately take a back seat in A
Painted House to the author's evocation of time and place. This
is, after all, the scene of his boyhood, and Grisham waxes
nostalgic without ever succumbing to deep-fried sentimentality.
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Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
To the list of great American child narrators that
includes Huck Finn and Scout Finch, let us now add Reuben "Rube"
Land, the asthmatic 11-year-old boy at the center of Leif Enger's
remarkable first novel, Peace Like a River. Rube recalls the
events of his childhood, in small-town Minnesota circa 1962, in a
voice that perfectly captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the
northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers.
"Here's how it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees
plenty. In the winter of his 11th year, two schoolyard
bullies break into the Lands' house, and Rube's big brother Davy
guns them down with a Winchester. Shortly after his arrest, Davy
breaks out of jail and goes on the lam. Swede is Rube's younger
sister, a precocious writer who crafts rhymed epics of romantic
Western outlawry. Shortly after Davy's escape, Rube, Swede, and
their father, a widowed school custodian, hit the road too,
swerving this way and that across Minnesota and North Dakota,
determined to find their lost outlaw Davy. In the end it's not Rube
who haunts the reader's imagination, it's his father, torn between
love for his outlaw son and the duty to do the right, honest thing.
Enger finds something quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone
Minnesota decency of America's heartland. Peace Like a River
opens up a new chapter in Midwestern literature.
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
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Red Hot Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Being Young
and Latino in the United States edited by Lori Marie
Carlson with an introduction by Oscar Hijuelos
i think in spanish i write in english i want to go back
to puerto rico, but i wonder if my kink could live in ponce,
mayaguuml;ez and carolina tengo las venas aculturadas escribo en
spanglish abraham in espantilde;ol --from "My Graduation Speech,"
by Tato Laviera. A new collection of bilingual poems from the
bestselling editor of Cool Salsa. Ten years after the publication
of the acclaimed Cool Salsa, editor Lori Marie Carlson has brought
together a stunning variety of Latino poets for a long-awaited
follow-up. Established and familiar names are joined by many new
young voices, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos
has written the Introduction. The poets collected here illuminate
the difficulty of straddling cultures, languages, and identities.
They celebrate food, family, love, and triumph. In English,
Spanish, and poetic jumbles of both, they tell us who they are,
where they are, and what their hopes are for the future. --
Synopsis from Books in Print
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The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Skillfully interweaving biblical tales with events and
characters of her own invention, Diamant's (Living a Jewish Life,
1991) sweeping first novel re-creates the life of Dinah, daughter
of Leah and Jacob, from her birth and happy childhood in
Mesopotamia through her years in Canaan and death in Egypt. When
Dinah reaches puberty and enters the Red Tent (the place women
visit to give birth or have their monthly periods), her mother and
Jacob's three other wives initiate her into the religious and
sexual practices of the tribe. Diamant sympathetically describes
Dinah's doomed relationship with Shalem, son of a ruler of Shechem,
and his brutal death at the hands of her brothers. Following the
events in Canaan, a pregnant Dinah travels to Egypt, where she
becomes a noted midwife. Diamant has written a thoroughly enjoyable
and illuminating portrait of a fascinating woman and the life she
might have lived.
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Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
by Mary Pipher
From her work as a psychotherapist for adolescent
females, Pipher here posits and persuasively argues her thesis that
today's teenaged girls are coming of age in "a girl-poisoning
culture." Backed by anecdotal evidence and research findings, she
suggests that, despite the advances of feminism, young women
continue to be victims of abuse, self-mutilation (e.g., anorexia),
consumerism and media pressure to conform to others' ideals. With
sympathy and focus she cites case histories to illustrate the
struggles required of adolescent girls to maintain a sense of
themselves among the mixed messages they receive from society,
their schools and, often, their families. Pipher offers concrete
suggestions for ways by which girls can build and maintain a strong
sense of self, e.g., keeping a diary, observing their social
context as an anthropologist might, distinguishing between thoughts
and feelings. Pipher is an eloquent advocate. -- Review
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in
a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world
in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only
prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of
cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck
between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it
is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of
the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless
saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to
feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right
around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the
only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated
son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the
father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief,
that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's
Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for
love. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son
transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle
between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of
the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a
penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those
batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally,
dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing
pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as
the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the
hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place,
the oddest of all things: faith.
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The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama
Praised for her lovely first novel, Women of the
Silk (1991), Tsukiyama has extended herself even further and
written an extraordinarily graceful and moving novel about goodness
and beauty. The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father,
Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s
as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old
Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer
home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with
tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper
and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year,
Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength,
but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the
soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and
arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to
appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love
Matsu's soul mate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.
Tsukiyama is a wise and spellbinding storyteller.
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The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees,
14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on
their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy
when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she
barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer
to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily
accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of
Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words
"Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a
mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in
this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s
against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's
beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white
men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes
the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can
think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more
about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly
trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted
novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the
Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate
Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's
debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern
Gothic.
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Shane by Jack Schaefer
Shane was written by local Virginian-Pilot writer Jack Schaefer. Fascinated by the West and what it represents in American culture, he only traveled to that region after this novel was written. He first published his book as a magazine serial, but it appeared in book form in 1949 and was adapted to film in 1953. The plot is so regconizable to a modern audience that it's hard to remember that from Shane came so many other American classics - it is the standard by which later
westerns were judged. Set in 1889 Wyoming and narrated by
young Bob Starrett, it tells of the enigmatic cowboy Shane, who
aids the community in resisting the intentions of a land-greedy
cattle rancher. ~ Lisa Ray
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Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Old passions, prejudices, and grudges surface in a
Washington State island town when a Japanese man stands trial for
the murder of a fisherman in the 1950s. Guterson (The Country Ahead
of Us, the Country Behind, 1989, etc.) has written a thoughtful,
poetic first novel, a cleverly constructed courtroom drama with
detailed, compelling characters. Many years earlier, Kabuo
Miyamoto's family had made all but the last payment on seven acres
of land they were in the process of buying from the Heine family.
Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Kabuo's family was
interned. Etta Heine, Carl's mother, called off the deal. Kabuo
served in the war, returned, and wanted his land back. After
changing hands a few times, the land ended up with Carl Heine. When
Carl, a fisherman, is found drowned in his own net, all the
circumstantial evidence, with the land dispute as a possible
motive, points to Kabuo as the murderer. Meanwhile, Hatsue
Miyamoto, Kabuo's wife, is the undying passion of Ishmael Chambers,
the publisher and editor of the town newspaper. Ishmael, who
returned from the war minus an arm, can't shake his obsession for
Hatsue any more than he can ignore the ghost pains in his
nonexistent arm. As a thick snowstorm whirls outside the courtroom,
the story is unburied. The same incidents are recounted a number of
times, with each telling revealing new facts. In the end, justice
and morality are proven to be intimately woven with beauty--the
kind of awe and wonder that children feel for the world. But
Guterson communicates these truths through detail, not
philosophical argument: Readers will come away with a surprising
store of knowledge regarding gill-netting boats and other specifics
of life in the Pacific Northwest. Packed with lovely moments and as
compact as haiku--at the same time, a page-turner full of twists.
-- Review Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP.
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Sophie's Choice by William Styron
"[One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the
remembrance of a girl I'd once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid
half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that
hers was a story I had to tell." That very day, William Styron
began writing the first chapter of Sophie's Choice. First
published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with
Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a
writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional
entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house:
Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a
beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a
concentration camp...and whose past is strewn with death that she
alone survived. "Sophie's Choice is a passionate,
courageous book...a philosophical novel on the most important
subject of the twentieth century," said novelist and critic John
Gardner in The New York Times Book Review. "One of the reasons
Styron succeeds so well in Sophie's Choice is that, like
Shakespeare (I think the comparison is not too grand), Styron knows
how to cut away from the darkness of his material, so that when he
turns to it again it strikes with increasing force....Sophie's
Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more
thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are
unearthing one by one--sorting through lies and terrible
misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a
rattlesnake's nest--may be authentic secrets of history and our own
human nature."
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Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers by Mary
Roach
"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 -- Review
copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Sula by Toni Morrison
At its center--a friendship between two women, a
friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and
Nel--both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio
town--meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of
princes. Through their girlhood years they share
everything--perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even
crime--until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop
neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging
around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a
fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance
men, bug-ridden flour...at the invisible line that cannot be
overstepped. Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America
for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel
is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She
belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand
of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at
church suppers, asking after folks--where you deal with evil by
surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain,
she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and
the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they
recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady
who let a train take her leg for the insurance)...that a child
drowned in the river years ago...that there was a plague of robins
when she first returned... In clear, dark, resonant language,
Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives,
but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is
destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty
years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even
more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God
is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The
novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the
black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and
her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts
as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright
and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black
people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her
scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore
the impact of black-white relations either:
It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was
the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been
tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and
other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the
bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They
became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations
through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge
is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the
murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself
to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend,
Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em
what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah
tongue is in mah friend's mouf." Hurston's use of
dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who
accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black
stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been
replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and
especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching
God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and
women, and allows them to speak in their own voices.
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his
arm badly broken at the elbow.... When enough years had gone by to
enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events
leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all,
but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before
that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first
gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out."
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the
Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life
of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father,
Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of
a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story
explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes
of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class,
justice, and the pain of growing up. Like the slow-moving
occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the
heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before
Scout's first year at school. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a
boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the
hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a
peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances
surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a
drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's
consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom
Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in
events beyond their understanding. During the trial, the town
exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of counterbalance as
well--in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine
habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up
for what he knows is right; and finally in Scout's hard-won
understanding that most people are essentially kind "when you
really see them." By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill
a Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new
generations, and deserves to be reread often. -- Synopsis from
Alix Wilber, Amazon.com
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Three Cups of Tea : One Man's
Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson and David Relin
On a 1993 expedition to climb K2 in honor of his sister
Christa, who had died of epilepsy at 23, Mortenson stumbled upon a
remote mountain village in Pakistan. Out of gratitude for the
villagers' assistance when he was lost and near death, he vowed to
build a school for the children who were scratching lessons in the
dirt. Raised by his missionary parents in Tanzania, Mortenson was
used to dealing with exotic cultures and developing nations. Still,
he faced daunting challenges of raising funds, death threats from
enraged mullahs, separation from his family, and a kidnapping to
eventually build 55 schools in Taliban territory. Award-winning
journalist Relin recounts the slow and arduous task Mortenson set
for himself, a one-man mission aimed particularly at bringing
education to young girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Readers
interested in a fresh perspective on the cultures and development
efforts of Central Asia will love this incredible story of a
humanitarian endeavor. Review Copyright © Vanessa Bush, American
Library Association.
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Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
Isabella Swan, 17, narrates this riveting first novel, propelled by suspense and romance in equal parts. The story opens with a cryptic scene of the heroine "facing death," then flashes back to Bella's departure from Phoenix, where her mother lives with her new husband, as the teen heads off to live with her father, the police chief in Forks, Wash. From the first day at her new high school, she finds herself magnetically drawn to Edward Cullen, whose behavior towards her is erratic ("I'd just explained my dreary life to this bizarre, beautiful boy who may or may not despise me"). Then she finds out why his interest in her runs hot and cold: he is a vampire-but of an unusual variety. Edward, his siblings and their adoptive parents have disciplined themselves to feed on animals rather than humans; and Edward is obsessed with Bella. Other elements factor into the plot, including a rival group of vampires who are not as disciplined as the Cullens. This plot twist (which includes a subplot about one of the Cullens' past life) contributes to a rushed denouement (much of it takes place offstage) that is perhaps the novel's only weakness. The main draw here is Bella's infatuation with outsider Edward, the sense of danger inherent in their love, and Edward's inner struggle-a perfect metaphor for the sexual tension that accompanies adolescence. These will be familiar to nearly every teen, and will keep readers madly flipping the pages of Meyer's tantalizing debut. -- Review Copyright 2005 Publisher's Weekly
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Une si longue lettre by Mariama Bâ
Une si longue lettre
de la Sénégalaise Mariama Bâ est un classique. Un ouvrage paru en
1979 et qui ose aborder des sujets tabous comme les castes,
l’éducation sexuelle, le corps des femmes. Vingt ans après la mort
de son auteur, c’est toujours un livre majeur.
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Waiting by Ha Jin
Jin's quiet but absorbing second novel (after In the
Pond) captures the poignant dilemma of an ordinary man who
misses the best opportunities in his life simply by trying to do
his duty—as defined first by his traditional Chinese parents and
later by the Communist Party. Reflecting the changes in Chinese
communism from the '60s to the '80s, the novel focuses on Lin Kong,
a military doctor who agrees, as his mother is dying, to an
arranged marriage. His bride, Shuyu, turns out to be a country
woman who looks far older than her 26 years and who has, to Lin's
great embarrassment, lotus (bound) feet. While Shuyu remains at
Lin's family home in Goose Village, nursing first his mother and
then his ailing father, and bearing Lin a daughter, Lin lives far
away in an army hospital compound, visiting only once a year.
Caught in a loveless marriage, Lin is attracted to a nurse, Manna
Wu, an attachment forbidden by communist strictures. According to
local Party rules, Lin cannot divorce his wife without her
permission until they have been separated for 18 years. Although
Jin infuses movement and some suspense into Lin's and Manna's
sometimes resigned, sometimes impatient waiting—they will not
consummate their relationship until Lin is free—it is only in the
novel's third section, when Lin finally secures a divorce, that the
story gathers real force. Though inaction is a risky subject and
the thoughts of a cautious man make for a rather deliberate prose
style (the first two sections describe the moments the characters
choose not to act), the final chapters are moving and deeply
ironic, proving again that this poet and award-winning short story
writer can deliver powerful long fiction about a world alien to
most Western readers. (Oct.) FYI: Jin served six years in the
People's Liberation Army, and came to the U.S. in 1985. --
Review Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc
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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian
Trail by Bill Bryson
Returning to the U.S. after 20 years in England, Iowa
native Bryson decided to reconnect with his mother country by
hiking the length of the 2100-mile Appalachian Trail. Awed by
merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he
nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a
consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard
lessons about self-reliance. Bryson (The Lost Continent)
carries himself in an irresistibly bewildered manner, accepting
each new calamity with wonder and hilarity. He reviews the
characters of the AT (as the trail is called), from a pack of
incompetent Boy Scouts to a perpetually lost geezer named Chicken
John. Most amusing is his cranky, crude and inestimable companion,
Katz, a reformed substance abuser who once had single-handedly
"become, in effect, Iowa's drug culture." The uneasy but always
entertaining relationship between Bryson and Katz keeps their walk
interesting, even during the flat stretches. Bryson completes the
trail as planned, and he records the misadventure with insight and
elegance. He is a popular author in Britain and his impeccably
graceful and witty style deserves a large American audience as
well.
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Walking Across Egypt by Clyde Edgerton
A quietly humorous story set in a small town in North
Carolina. Seventy-eight year old Mattie Riggsbee, spunky and
determined, has one regret: she has no grandchildren, as her son
and daughter inconveniently remain unmarried. The story gathers
momentum after a slightly sluggish start, when Wesley Benfield,
wayward teenager and orphan, comes into Mattie's life. Their need
for each other is apparent, and their attempts to get together,
despite the disapproval of Mattie's family and neighbors, are the
focus of the story. Wesley is captivated by Mattie's good cooking
and grandmotherly attention, and when he escapes from a house of
detention, he heads straight to Mattie. There is a hilarious scene
in church, where the fleeing Wesley and the pursuing deputy
sheriff, both disguised as choir members, sit beside each other in
full view of the congregation. Edgerton infuses all of his
characters with reality, and provides a balanced perspective on age
and youth. His understanding of teenagers is nowhere more evident
than in the contrast between the reality of Wesley's situation and
the humor of his exaggerated fantasies.
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Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
When his parents are killed in a traffic accident, Jacob
Jankowski hops a train after walking out on his final exams at
Cornell, where he had hoped to earn a veterinary degree. The train
turns out to be a circus train, and since it's the Depression, when
someone with a vet's skills can attach himself to a circus if he's
lucky, Jacob soon finds himself involved with the animal
acts-specifically with the beautiful young Marlena, the horse
rider, and her husband, August. Jacob falls for Marlena
immediately, and the ensuing triangle is at the center of this
novel, which follows the circus across the states. Jacob learns the
ins and outs of circus life, in this case under the rule of the
treacherous Uncle Al, who cheats the workers and deals roughly with
patrons who complain about blatant false advertising and rip-off
exhibits. Jacob and Marlena are attracted to each other, but their
relationship is fairly innocent until it becomes clear that August
is not merely jealous but dangerously mentally deranged.
Old-fashioned and endearing, this is an enjoyable, fast-paced story
told by the older Jacob, now in his nineties in a nursing home. --
Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta Copyright 2006 Reed Business
Information.
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Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts
A funny thing happens to Novalee Nation on her way to
Bakersfield, California. Her ne'er-do-well boyfriend, Willie Jack
Pickens, abandons her in an Oklahoma Wal-Mart and takes off on his
own, leaving her with just 10 dollars and the clothes on her back.
Not that hard luck is anything new to Novalee, who is "seventeen,
seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight--and
superstitious about sevens.... For most people, sevens were lucky.
But not for her," Billie Letts writes. "She'd had a bad history
with them, starting with her seventh birthday, the day Momma Nell
ran away with a baseball umpire named Fred..." Still, finding
herself alone and penniless in Sequoyah, Oklahoma is enough to make
even someone as inured to ill fortune as Novalee want to give up
and die. Fortunately, the Wal-Mart parking lot is the Sequoyah
equivalent of a town square, and within hours Novalee has met three
people who will change her life: Sister Thelma Husband, a kindly
eccentric; Benny Goodluck, a young Native American boy; and Moses
Whitecotton, an elderly African American photographer. For the next
two months, Novalee surreptitiously makes her home in the Wal-Mart,
sleeping there at night, exploring the town by day. When she goes
into labor and delivers her baby there, however, Novalee learns
that sometimes it's not so bad to depend on the kindness of
strangers--especially if one of them happens to be Sam Walton, the
superchain's founder. Where the Heart Is oddly mixes
heart-warming vignettes and surprising, brutal violence. Novalee's
story is juxtaposed with occasional chapters chronicling Willy
Jack's downward spiral into prison, disappointment, and
degradation. And even in Sequoyah, sudden storms, domestic
violence, kidnapping, and deadly fires punctuate Novalee's progress
from homeless, unwed teen mom to successful, happy member of the
community. This is not a subtle book; there's never any doubt that
our heroine will make a home for herself and her baby or that Willy
Jack will get what he deserves for abandoning them. Still, Billie
Letts has created several memorable characters, and there's always
room for another novel that celebrates the life-affirming qualities
of reading, the importance of education, and the power of love to
change lives.
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Zoya's Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle
for Freedom
Now 23, Zoya was a child during the
Russian invasion and a teen when the Taliban took power. The
daughter of activists in Kabul, Zoya was raised by her grandmother
after her parents disappeared. She now belongs to RAWA, a group her
mother belonged to. Her reflections show the complex scars
made by the tug of war between factional governments and tribal
warlords, especially the effects of the Taliban. Many of Zoya's
stories (e.g., women only permitted to leave their homes wearing a
burqa and accompanied by a male; women often suffering and dying
for want of a female physician) are also covered in Latifa's My
Forbidden Face. Zoya tells of a society where kite
flying, bright colors and even women's laughter is forbidden, and
enforcers are often armed with Russian military leftovers or crude
stones. Yet the Afghans Zoya speaks of remain rebellious and
hopeful. She writes, "When I... saw Kabul in the daylight, even the
mountains beyond the city which had seemed so peaceful to me when I
was a child looked sad. But... that I had seen them again... made
me feel stronger." Assigned by RAWA to live and work in a refugee
camp near the Afghan-Pakistani border, Zoya now also travels abroad
to raise funds for her organization. Her narrative voice is quiet
and clear, making her recollections of the breathtaking violence
she has witnessed nail-bitingly vivid and her descriptions of her
struggle candid and poignant. -- Review Copyright 2002 Cahners
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