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 | Moment of Glory: The Year Underdogs Ruled Golf
John Feinstein (Little, Brown, 9780316025317, $26.99)
After winning 6 of the 12 Majors from 2000 to 2002, Tiger Woods struggled in 2003. Four unknown players would seize the day, rising to become champions in his wake.
Mike Weir – considered a good golfer but not a great one – triumphed in The Masters, becoming the first Canadian to win a Major. Jim Furyk emerged victorious in the U.S. Open; in the British Open, Ben Curtis became the only player since Francis Ouimet in 1913 to prevail on his first time out; and Shaun Micheel came from nowhere to prevail at the PGA Championship. How does one moment of glory affect the unsung underdog for years to follow?
Feinstein chronicles the champions' ups and downs, giving readers an insider's look into how victory (and defeat) can change players' lives.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER TIM SKIPP
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| The More You Ignore Me
Jo Brand (Harper Collins, 9780061973581, $13.99)
Little Alice's family, tucked away in a cottage in the deepest part of Herefordshire, England, is more than a bit weird. Her mother, Gina, is obsessed with the weatherman on the local news, and when she climbs onto the roof – naked -- with her daughter's pet guinea pig in her arms, she is whisked off to the local psychiatric hospital posthaste. Keith, Alice's father, tries to keep calm, but his patience is being severely tested by his in-laws, whose disturbed behavior terrifies the community. Alice is convinced she needs five personalities to cope because a mother-daughter reconciliation seems damned near impossible. And at this point, the stage may be set for even more heartbreak than Alice can imagine.
The More You Ignore Me is a genuinely funny and original novel about mental illness, growing up, and celebrity obsession from much-loved comedienne Jo Brand.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER MICHAEL FORTNEY |
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| The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn
Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking Press, 9780670021727, $30.00)
Little Bighorn and Custer are names synonymous in the American imagination with unmatched bravery and spectacular defeat. Mythologized as Custer's Last Stand, the June 1876 battle has been equated with other famous last stands, from the Spartans' defeat at Thermopylae to Davy Crockett at the Alamo.
In his tightly structured narrative, Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly sketches the two larger-than-life antagonists: Sitting Bull, whose charisma and political savvy earned him the position of leader of the Plains Indians, and George Armstrong Custer, one of the Union's greatest cavalry officers and a man with a reputation for fearless and often reckless courage. Philbrick reminds readers that the Battle of the Little Bighorn was also, even in victory, the last stand for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian nations. Increasingly outraged by the government's Indian policies, the Plains tribes allied themselves and held their ground in southern Montana. Within a few years of Little Bighorn, however, all the major tribal leaders would be confined to Indian reservations.
Throughout, Philbrick beautifully evokes the history and geography of the Great Plains with his characteristic grace and sense of drama. The Last Stand is a mesmerizing account of the archetypal story of the American West, one that continues to haunt our collective imagination.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER CRAIG MILLER |
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| Claiming Ground
Laura Bell (Knopf, 9780307272881, $24.95)
In 1977, Laura Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics. So begins her unabating search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.
By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots. Brimming with careful insight and written in a spare, radiant prose, her story is a heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape and the peculiar sweetness of hard labor, to finding oneself even in isolation, to a life formed by nature, and to the redemption of love, whether given or received.
Quietly profound and moving, astonishing in its honesty, in its deep familiarity with country rarely seen so clearly, and in beauties all its own, Claiming Ground is a truly singular memoir.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOHN GRAMLICH
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| The Lonely Polygamist
Brady Udall (Norton, 9780393062625, $26.95)
Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all midlife crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart. Brady Udall, one of our finest American fiction writers, tells a tragicomic story of a deeply faithful man who, crippled by grief and the demands of work and family, becomes entangled in an affair that threatens to destroy his family's future. Like John Irving and Richard Yates, Udall creates characters that engage us to the fullest as they grapple with the nature of need, love, and belonging.
Beautifully written, keenly observed, and ultimately redemptive, The Lonely Polygamist is an unforgettable story of an American family – with its inevitable dysfunctionality, heartbreak, and comedy – pushed to its outer limits.
Signed copies are now available.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
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| My Name Is Mary Sutter
Robin Oliveira (Viking Press, 9780670021673, $26.95)
In this stunning first novel, Mary Sutter is a brilliant, head¬strong midwife from Albany, New York, who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Determined to overcome the prejudices against women in medicine – and eager to run away from her recent heartbreak – Mary leaves home and travels to Washington, D.C. to help tend the legions of Civil War wounded. Under the guidance of William Stipp and James Blevens – two surgeons who fall unwittingly in love with Mary's courage, will, and stubbornness in the face of suffering- -- and resisting her mother's pleas to return home to help with the birth of her twin sister's baby, Mary pursues her medical career in the desperately overwhelmed hospitals of the capital.
Like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Robert Hicks's The Widow of the South, My Name Is Mary Sutter powerfully evokes the atmosphere of the period. Rich with historical detail (including marvelous depictions of Lincoln, Dorothea Dix, General McClellan, and John Hay among others), and full of the tragedies and challenges of wartime, My Name Is Mary Sutter is an exceptional novel. And in Mary herself, Robin Oliveira has created a truly unforgettable heroine whose unwavering determination and vulnerability will resonate with readers everywhere.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER KATHY SIMONEAUX |
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| I Thought You Were Dead
Pete Nelson (Algonquin Books, 9781565125971, $23.95)
For Paul Gustavson, a hack writer for the wildly popular For Morons series, life is a succession of obstacles. His wife has left him, his father has suffered a debilitating stroke, his girlfriend is dating another man, he has impotency issues, and his overachieving brother invested his parents' money in stocks that tanked. Still, Paul has his friends at Bay State bar, a steady line of cocktails, and a new pair of running shoes (he’s promised himself to get in shape). And then there’s Stella, the one constant in his life, who gives him sage advice, doesn’t judge him, and gives him unconditional love. However, Stella won’t accompany Paul into his favorite dive bar. "I'll roll on dead carp, I'll even eat cat turds, but that place grosses me out." Stella, you see, is Paul's aging Lab-shepherd mix, and she knows Paul better than he knows himself.
In I Thought You Were Dead, author Pete Nelson delivers a novel that is all at once heartwarming, heartbreaking, and heart-wrenchingly funny. Most of all, it’s a story that proves that when a good dog is by your side – especially one with whom you can have an engaging conversation – life can be full of surprises.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA |
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| The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes (Vintage, 9781400031870, $17.95)
When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook on his first Endeavour voyage in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery – astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical – swiftly follow in Richard Holmes’s original evocation of what truly emerges as an Age of Wonder.
Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The Age of Wonder investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of “dynamic science,” of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. Three lives dominate the book: William Herschel and his sister Caroline, whose dedication to the study of the stars forever changed the public conception of the solar system, the Milky Way, and the meaning of the universe; and Humphry Davy, who, with only a grammar school education stunned the scientific community with his near-suicidal gas experiments that led to the invention of the miners’ lamp and established British chemistry as the leading professional science in Europe. This age of exploration extended to great writers and poets as well as scientists, all creators relishing in moments of high exhilaration, boundary-pushing and discovery.
Holmes’s extraordinary evocation of this age of wonder shows how great ideas and experiments – both successes and failures – were born of singular and often lonely dedication, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. He has written a book breathtaking in its originality, its storytelling energy, and its intellectual significance.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JULIA LOVING |
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| I Shudder And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey
Paul Rudnick (Harper, 9780061780189, $23.99)
In his plays, his screenplays, and his writing for the New Yorker and Premiere, Paul Rudnick has established himself as a comic master whose talents transcend genre. Now, in I Shudder, he trains his wickedly perceptive eye on everything from his New Jersey family to Hollywood to demented alcoholic Broadway stars waving swords. At his Uncle Rudy's funeral, Rudnick's beloved Aunt Lil put one hand on her husband's coffin and her other hand on Rudnick's shoulder and said, "Your Uncle Rudy always loved you. He never understood why, in your writing, you had to use that kind of language, but he loved you."
Charming and touching, I Shudder is rendered in Rudnick's gorgeous, zinger-laden prose and reminds us of the need to keep our tongues sharp in the midst of life's many obstacles and absurdities. Here is one of the most accomplished collections in years, from a writer who ranks with David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs as one of our most gifted and hilarious social observers.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir
Neil White (Perennial, 9780061351631, $14.99)
Neil White, a journalist and magazine publisher, wanted the best for those he loved – nice cars, beautiful homes, luxurious clothes. He loaned money to family and friends, gave generously to his church, and invested in his community – but his bank account couldn't keep up. Soon White began moving money from one account to another to avoid bouncing checks. His world fell apart when the FBI discovered his scheme and a judge sentenced him to serve eighteen months in a federal prison.
But it was no ordinary prison. The beautiful, isolated colony in Carville, Louisiana, was also home to the last people in the continental United States disfigured by leprosy. Hidden away for decades, this small circle of outcasts had forged a tenacious, clandestine community, a fortress to repel the cruelty of the outside world. It is here, in a place rich with history, where the Mississippi River briefly runs north, amid an unlikely mix of leprosy patients, nuns, and criminals, that White's strange and compelling journey begins. He finds a new best friend in Ella Bounds, an eighty-year-old African American double amputee who had contracted leprosy as a child. She and the other secret people, along with a wacky troop of inmates, help White rediscover the value of simplicity, friendship, and gratitude.
Funny and poignant, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts is an uplifting memoir that reminds us all what matters most.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
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| The Calligrapher's Daughter
Eugenia Kim (Henry Holt, 9780805092264, $16.00)
In early-twentieth-century Korea, Najin Han, the privileged daughter of a calligrapher, longs to choose her own destiny. Smart and headstrong, she is encouraged by her mother – but her stern father is determined to maintain tradition, especially as the Japanese steadily gain control of his beloved country. When he seeks to marry Najin into an aristocratic family, her mother defies generations of obedient wives and instead sends her to serve in the king’s court as a companion to a young princess. But the king is soon assassinated, and the centuries-old dynastic culture comes to its end.
In the shadow of the dying monarchy, Najin begins a journey through increasing oppression that will forever change her world. As she desperately seeks to continue her education, will the unexpected love she finds along the way be enough to sustain her through the violence and subjugation her country continues to face? Spanning thirty years, The Calligrapher’s Daughter is a richly drawn novel in the tradition of Lisa See and Amy Tan about a country torn between ancient customs and modern possibilities, a family ultimately united by love, and a woman who never gives up her search for freedom.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA |
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| Invisible
Paul Auster (Henry Holt, 9780805090802, $25.00)
Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.
Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann (Random House, 9780812973990, $15.00)
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.” A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS JULIA LOVING AND JOE DRABYAK |
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| How I Became a Famous Novelist
Steve Hely (Grove Press, 9780802170606, $14.00)
In this blistering evisceration of celebrity culture and literary fame, a roguish loser sets out to write the best-sellingest best seller of all time. When he actually pulls it off, he winds up tearing like a tornado across America’s cultural landscape.
What Pete Tarslaw wants is simple enough:
FAME – Realistic amount. Enough to open new avenues of sexual opportunity. Personal assistant to read mail, grocery shop, etc.
FINANCIAL COMFORT – Never have a job again. Retire. Spend rest of life lying around, pursuing hobbies (boating? skeet shooting?)
STATELY HOME BY THE OCEAN (OR SCENIC LAKE) – Spacious library, bay windows, wet bar. HD TV, discreetly placed. Comfortable couch.
HUMILIATE EX-GIRLFRIEND AT HER WEDDING
This is the story of how he succeeds in getting it all, and what it costs him in the end.
Narrated by an unlikely literary legend, How I Became a Famous Novelist pinballs from the post-college slums of Boston to the fear-drenched halls of Manhattan’s publishing houses, from the gloomy purity of Montana’s foremost writing workshop to the hedonistic hotel bars of the Sunset Strip.
This is the horrifying, hilarious tale of how Pete Tarslaw’s “pile of The Tornado Ashes Club, became the most talked about, blogged about, read, admired, and reviled novel in America. It will change everything you think you know – about literature, appearance, those people out there, somewhere in truth, beauty, and America, who still care about books.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| Look Again
Lisa Scottoline (St. Martin's Griffin, 9780312380731, $13.99)
When reporter Ellen Gleeson gets a “Have You Seen This Child?” flyer in the mail, she almost throws it away. But something about it makes her look again, and her heart stops – the child in the photo is identical to her adopted son, Will. Her every instinct tells her to deny the similarity between the boys, because she knows her adoption was lawful. But she’s a journalist and won’t be able to stop thinking about the photo until she figures out the truth. And she can’t shake the question: if Will rightfully belongs to someone else, should she keep him or give him up? She investigates, uncovering clues no one was meant to discover, and when she digs too deep, she risks losing her own life – and that of the son she loves.
Lisa Scottoline breaks new ground in Look Again, a thriller that’s both heart-stopping and heart-breaking, and sure to have new fans and book clubs buzzing.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS NAN HART, DAVID ENGLISH, AND JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENTS: Look Again, is a timely and topical thriller – a tale of an adopted son and missing children – that tugs at the heart at the same moments that it ratchets up the tension. Lisa Scottoline can relate a story with the intimacy of a living room conversation among old friends. There is an economy and charm to her writing that beguiles the reader and ensnares them in a web of suspense, and there is no one better in creating a sense of empathy with the lead character. Look Again, is a must read – suspense fiction that is keenly observed. And like those photos of missing youngsters on milk cartons and mail circulars, this volume is definitely worth more than a passing glance. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Little Bee
Chris Cleave (Simon & Schuster, 9781416589648, $14.00)
The Somerset Maugham Award-winning author of Incendiary presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women. This is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK AND JULIA LOVING
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| English
Wang Gang (Penguin, 9780143116547, $15.00)
During the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution, a twelve-year-old boy named Love Liu wonders what life is like beyond the region of Xinjiang in China’s remote northwest. Here, conformity is valued above all else, and suspicion governs every exchange among neighbors, classmates, and even friends. Into this stifling atmosphere comes a tall, clean-shaven teacher from Shanghai, with an elegant gray wool jacket and an English dictionary tucked under his arm.
With the dictionary at his disposal, Love Liu throws himself into learning English, and a whole new world opens up for him. But in an atmosphere of accusation and recrimination, one in which the teacher is deemed morally suspect and mere innuendo can cost someone his life, Love Liu’s ideals face a test more challenging than any he’ll meet in the classroom.
A major bestseller in China, with rights sold around the world, English is a transcendent novel about a boy’s self-discovery, a country’s shame, and the transporting power of language.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER THEA KOTROBA |
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| Flipping Out
Marshall Karp (Minotaur Books, 9780312378233, $14.99)
Nora Bannister is a bestselling mystery novelist who buys run-down houses in LA. While her business partners turn the house into a showpiece, Nora makes it the scene of a grisly murder in her “House To Die For” series. As soon as the new book goes on sale, so does the house – and the bidding frenzy begins. It seems a lot of people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in a real house where a fictional character has died a violent death.
Just before Nora’s latest book hits the market, one of her house-flipping partners is murdered. LAPD Detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs are assigned the case, but this one is a hot potato – the dead woman is also the wife of one of their fellow cops. As Mike and Terry dig into the victim’s private life, more bodies turn up . . .
Is someone stalking the house flippers or is the murderer after cops’ wives? Either way, Mike and Terry have to track down the killer before he murders his next logical target – Marilyn Biggs, Terry’s wife.
STAFF COMMENTS: If you enjoy thrillers with a hefty dose of both humor and homicide, you can do no better than the writings of Marshall Karp. In the course of two volumes – The Rabbit Factory and Bloodthirsty – Karp has quickly established himself as the new court jester of crime fiction. His likeable detective team of Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs have unraveled the mystery of each challenging case with a good deal of both mirth and mayhem. This duo has the patter and comedic timing of the best Borscht Belt acts down pat as they trod the L.A. police beat. And fans will be delighted that Lomax and Biggs return – still swinging some serious night “shtick” – in their latest investigation, Flipping Out. In this new volume someone is targeting a ladies’ group of real estate speculators, introducing them to cemetery plots rather than more desirable suburban housing tracts. One might say members are being “foreclosed” with extreme prejudice. Funny, fast paced, and frightfully creative, Flipping Out. is one of the most entertaining police procedurals that you will read this year. And you can bet your house on that! – Joe Drabyak |
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| A Reliable Wife
Robert Goolrick (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 99781565129771, $14.95)
Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt – a passionate man with his own dark secrets – has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways.
With echoes of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, Robert Goolrick's intoxicating debut novel delivers a classic tale of suspenseful seduction, set in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER KATHY SIMONEAUX AND JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: When a wealthy and widowed industrialist in snowbound, rural Wisconsin circa 1907 acquires a mail-order bride the lives of both individuals slide dangerously down a new path as each party struggles with an agenda of their own and iciness in their hearts. Robert Goolrick’s prose has the delicacy of a snowflake, the sharpness of the bitter cold, and the narrative momentum of an avalanche. This debut work of fiction is a worthy follow-up to his acclaimed memoir. – Joe Drabyak
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| The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann (Vintage, 9781400078455, $15.95)
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker magazine writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century": What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?
In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization – which he dubbed “Z” –existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.
Fawcett’s fate – and the tantalizing clues he left behind about “Z” – became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z” form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOHN GRAMLICH and TIM SKIPP |
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| My Abandonment
Peter Rock (Mariner, 9780156035521, $13.95)
A thirteen-year-old girl and her father live in Forest Park, the enormous nature preserve in Portland, Oregon. There they inhabit an elaborate cave shelter, bathe in a nearby creek, store perishables at the water’s edge, use a makeshift septic system, tend a garden, even keep a library of sorts. Once a week, they go to the city to buy groceries and otherwise merge with the civilized world. But one small mistake allows a backcountry jogger to discover them, which derails their entire existence, ultimately provoking a deeper flight.
Inspired by a true story and told through the startlingly sincere voice of a young narrator, Caroline, Peter Rock's My Abandonment is a riveting journey into life at the margins, and a mesmerizing tale of survival and hope.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: This mesmerizing and mysterious novel relates the tale of a father and his thirteen-year-old daughter living well off the grid virtually homeless in the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest. How did they find themselves in such circumstances? Is the father a Vietnam vet suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder, a recovering alcoholic, a widower, a man who has suffered a great tragedy in life, and is he truly the father of this child? I will find myself thinking of this volume for a very long time. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Sashenka
Simon Montefiore (Simon & Schuster, 9781416595557, $15.00)
In the tradition of Doctor Zhivago and Sophie's Choice, comes this sweeping epic of Russia from the last days of the Tsars to today's age of oligarchs.
Winter 1916: St. Petersburg, Russia, is on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police...
Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and their dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.
Twenty years on, Sashenka is married to a powerful, rising Red leader with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, while in the secret world of the elite her own family is safe. But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair that will have devastating consequences.
Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heartbreaking tale of betrayal and redemption, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism – and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER KATHY SIMONEAUX |
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| The Lost Witness
Robert Ellis (Minotaur Books, 9780312366162, $7.99)
With his novel City of Fire, Robert Ellis debuted a dynamic new character in Los Angeles detective Lena Gamble, but also captured a vivid picture of the city of Los Angeles. Readers and critics made City of Fire an instant phenomenon, as the book became a Los Angeles Times bestseller and was named a top summer read by People magazine, USA Today, and The New York Times.
Now Lena Gamble is a cop held in disgrace by department higher-ups for the explosive way the Romeo case played out, though she’s still hailed as a hero by her colleagues for catching the killer. For her punishment, she hasn’t handled a real murder investigation in eight months. When the chief finally tosses her a case, she’s thrilled until she gets a look at the scene and realizes he’s probably setting her up to be exiled once and for all: The victim is unidentified, and there are no witnesses, and no leads. Just the body, chopped into pieces and dropped in a Dumpster – gruesome enough to ensure that once again the media will be following Lena’s every move.
Robert Ellis delivers another powerful, high-speed read, featuring one of the most engaging and vibrant police characters on the shelf today.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS JOE DRABYAK, DAVID ENGLISH, AND NAN HART |
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| The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Tiffany Baker (Grand Central Publishing, 9780446194228, $13.99)
When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how record-breaking huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. When he, too, relinquished his increasingly tenuous grip on life, Truly and Serena Jane are separated – Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town on the farm of the town sad-sack, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation at the hands of her peers.
Serena Jane's beauty proves to be her greatest blessing and her biggest curse, for it makes her the obsession of classmate Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans who have been doctors in Aberdeen for generations. Though they have long been the pillars of the community, the earliest Robert Morgan married the town witch, Tabitha Dyerson, and the location of her fabled shadow book – containing mysterious secrets for healing and darker powers – has been the subject of town gossip ever since. Bob Bob Morgan, one of Truly's biggest tormentors, does the unthinkable to claim the prize of Serena Jane, and changes the destiny of all Aberdeen from there on.
When Serena Jane flees town and a loveless marriage to Bob Bob, it is Truly who must become the woman of a house that she did not choose and mother to her eight-year-old nephew Bobbie. Truly's brother-in-law is relentless and brutal; he criticizes her physique and the limitations of her health as a result, and degrades her more than any one human could bear. It is only when Truly finds her calling – the ability to heal illness with herbs and naturopathic techniques – hidden within the folds of Robert Morgan's family quilt, that she begins to regain control over her life and herself. Unearthed family secrets, however, will lead to the kind of betrayal that eventually break the Morgan family apart forever, but Truly's reckoning with her own demons allows for both an uprooting of Aberdeen County, and the possibility of love in unexpected places.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: This fiction debut will surely gets my vote as one of the best of 2009. The extremely large Truly Plaice will take up a big space in both your head and your heart. – Joe Drabyak
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| Serena
Ron Rash (Ecco, 9780061470844, $14.99)
The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains – but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.
Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS KATHY SIMONEAUX, NAN HART, JOHN GRAMLICH, TIM SKIPP, AND JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: It's a rare occasion when we all agree on the quality of a work. This fine novel has a compelling storyline, memorable characters, and fine historical detail. Serena is an absolutely first-rate read!
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| After the Fire: A True Story of Friendship and Survival
Robin Gaby Fisher (Little, Brown, 9780316066211, $24.99)
On January 19, 2000, a fire raged through Seton Hall University's freshman dormitory, killing three students and injuring 58 others. Among the victims were Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, roommates from poor neighborhoods who made their families proud by getting into college. They managed to escape, but both were burned terribly. After the Fire is the story of these young men and their courageous fight to recover from the worst damage the burn unit at Saint Barnabas hospital had ever seen. It is the story of the extraordinary doctors and nurses who work with the burned. It is the story of mothers and fathers, of faith and family and the invisible ties that bind us to each other. It is the story of the search for the arsonists--and the elaborate cover-up that nearly obscured the truth. And it is the story of the women who came to love these men, who knew that real beauty is a thing not seen in mirrors.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: On January 19, 2000, a fire swept through a freshman dormitory at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. Three students were killed in the blaze and fifty-eight others were seriously injured. This is the poignant account of that disaster and its impact on two victims – roommates Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos – both critically injured in the inferno. The details of their long rehabilitation are, at turns, horrific, heartbreaking, deeply human, and wondrously heroic. This is a powerful tale of tragedy, medical miracles, and friendship that will smolder in memory long after the final page. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Q & A
Vikas Swarup (Scribner, 9780743267489, $15.00)
Vikas Swarup's spectacular debut novel opens in a jail cell in Mumbai, India, where Ram Mohammad Thomas is being held after correctly answering all twelve questions on India's biggest quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion? It is hard to believe that a poor orphan who has never read a newspaper or gone to school could win such a contest. But through a series of exhilarating tales Ram explains to his lawyer how episodes in his life gave him the answer to each question.\
Ram takes us on an amazing review of his own history – from the day he was found as a baby in the clothes donation box of a Delhi church to his employment by a faded Bollywood star to his adventure with a security-crazed Australian army colonel to his career as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal.
Swarup's Q & A is a beguiling blend of high comedy, drama, and romance that reveals how we know what we know – not just about trivia, but about life itself. Cutting across humanity in all its squalor and glory, Vikas Swarup presents a kaleidoscopic vision of the struggle between good and evil – and what happens when one boy has no other choice in life but to survive.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| God Is Dead
Ron Currie Jr. (Penguin, 9780143113485, $14.00)
When God descends to Earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, the result is a world both bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Ron Currie’s provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God’s demise; a group of young men who, fearing the end of the world, take fate into their own hands; mental patients who insist that a god still exists; armies taking up the eternal war between fate and free will; and parents who, in the absence of a deity and the “lack of anything to do on Sundays,” worship their children. On the surface, this is a world utterly transformed – yet certain things remain unchanged: protective parents clash with willful, idealistic teenagers; idols are exalted; small-town rumor mills run unabated; and children often don’t realize how to forgive their parents until it’s too late.
In God Is Dead, Currie brings together a prescient satirical gift worthy of Jonathan Swift, the raw appeal of Chuck Palahniuk’s blackest comedy, and the thought-provoking ethical questions of Kurt Vonnegut, all with a light touch, empathy, and wisdom that make for an exhilarating reading experience. Offbeat yet accessible, God Is Dead is an exciting debut from a fresh new voice in contemporary fiction.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER MICHAEL FORTNEY |
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| Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson (Picador, 9780312427085, $14.00)
Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he's out on a walk. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction.
This remarkable volume was named as one of the TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by the New York Times Book Review, as well as being selected as the winner in the IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD competition.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOHN GRAMLICH |
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| The Meaning of Night
Michael Cox (Norton, 9780393330342, $14.95)
“After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.” So begins the extraordinary story of Edward Glyver – booklover, scholar, and murderer. As a young boy, Glyver always believed he was destined for greatness. A chance discovery convinces him that he was right: greatness does await him, along with immense wealth and influence. Overwhelmed by his discovery, he will stop at nothing to win back a prize that he knows is rightfully his.
Glyver’s path to reclaim his prize leads him from the depths of Victorian London, with its foggy streets, brothels, and opium dens, to Evenwood, one of England’s most beautiful and enchanting country houses, and finally to a consuming love for the beautiful but enigmatic Emily Carteret. His is a story of betrayal and treachery, of death and delusion, of ruthless obsession and ambition. And at every turn, driving Glyver irresistibly onward, is his deadly rival: the poet-criminal Phoebus Rainsford Daunt.
The Meaning of Night is an enthralling novel that will captivate readers right up to its final thrilling revelation.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER DAVID ENGLISH |
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| The Spellman Files
Lisa Lutz (Pocket Books, 9781416594178, $7.99)
Meet Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, private investigator. This twenty-eight-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking, and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to GET SMART reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors – but the upshot is she's good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people's privacy comes naturally to Izzy. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman.
Part Nancy Drew, part Dirty Harry, Izzy walks an indistinguishable line between Spellman family member and Spellman employee. Duties include: completing assignments from the bosses, aka Mom and Dad (preferably without scrutiny); appeasing her chronically perfect lawyer brother (often under duress); setting an example for her fourteen-year-old sister, Rae (who's become addicted to "recreational surveillance"); and tracking down her uncle (who randomly disappears on benders dubbed "Lost Weekends"). But when Izzy's parents hire Rae to follow her (for the purpose of ascertaining the identity of Izzy's new boyfriend), Izzy snaps and decides that the only way she will ever be normal is if she gets out of the family business. But there's a hitch: she must take one last job before they'll let her go – a fifteen-year-old, ice-cold missing person case. She accepts, only to experience a disappearance far closer to home, which becomes the most important case of her life.
The Spellman Files is the first novel in a winning and hilarious new series featuring the Spellman family in all its lovable chaos.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS KATHY SIMONEAUX AND JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: If you dipped into the DNA of Amy and David Sedaris, added a dollop of Lucille Ball’s genetic material and retained cartoonist Charles Addams to supervise the blending, the resulting creation would very much resemble this funny debut. Lisa Lutz has given us a rollicking tale concerning a sweet but dysfunctional family of private detectives who use their considerable spy craft to keep tabs on each other. There’s a lot of parental meddling, mayhem and mirth in this spirited mystery. – Joe Drabyak |
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| Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul
Karen Abbott (Random House, 9780812975994, $15.00)
Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history – and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago’s notorious Levee district at the dawn of the last century, the Club’s proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where thirty stunning Everleigh “butterflies” awaited their arrival. Courtesans named Doll, Suzy Poon Tang, and Brick Top devoured raw meat to the delight of Prince Henry of Prussia and recited poetry for Theodore Dreiser. Whereas lesser madams pocketed most of a harlot’s earnings and kept a “whipper” on staff to mete out discipline, the Everleighs made sure their girls dined on gourmet food, were examined by an honest physician, and even tutored in the literature of Balzac.
Not everyone appreciated the sisters’ attempts to elevate the industry. Rival Levee madams hatched numerous schemes to ruin the Everleighs, including an attempt to frame them for the death of department store heir Marshall Field, Jr. But the sisters’ most daunting foes were the Progressive Era reformers, who sent the entire country into a frenzy with lurid tales of “white slavery” – the allegedly rampant practice of kidnapping young girls and forcing them into brothels. This furor shaped America’s sexual culture and had repercussions all the way to the White House, including the formation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
With a cast of characters that includes Jack Johnson, John Barrymore, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., William Howard Taft, “Hinky Dink” Kenna, and Al Capone, Sin in the Second City is Karen Abbott’s colorful, nuanced portrait of the iconic Everleigh sisters, their world-famous Club, and the perennial clash between our nation’s hedonistic impulses and Puritanical roots. Culminating in a dramatic last stand between brothel keepers and crusading reformers, Sin in the Second City offers a vivid snapshot of America’s journey from Victorian-era propriety to twentieth-century modernity.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER TIM SKIPP
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| The Visible World
Mark Slouka (Mariner Books, 9780547053677, $13.95)
The Visible World is an evocative, powerfully romantic novel about a son's attempt to understand his mother's past, a search that leads him to a tragic love affair and the heroic story of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi by the Czech resistance. The narrator of The Visible World, the American-born son of Czech immigrants living in New York, grows up in an atmosphere haunted by fragments of a past he cannot understand. At the heart of that past is his mother, Ivana, a spontaneous, passionate woman drifting ever closer to despair. As an adult, the narrator travels to Prague, hoping to learn about a love affair between his then young mother and a member of the resistance named Tomas, an affair whose untimely end, he senses, lay behind Ivana's unhappiness. Ultimately unable to complete his knowledge of the past, he imagines the two lovers as participants in one of the more dramatic (and true) moments of the war, and through the deeply romantic story he tells, creates not only the ending of their story but the beginning of his own.
The Visible World is a literary page-turner and an immensely moving novel about the vagaries of love and our need to make sense of life through the telling of stories.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: Like any avid reader I have created, from a lifetime of volumes, an internal list of my very favorites. Rarely will a new book find its way into my top ten. THE VISIBLE WORLD, however, has leapfrogged all others into my top three. At its heart, this is a powerful, deeply romantic story of a man – child of Czech immigrants – trying to identify the missing pieces in the emotional lives of his parents. It is storytelling without equal and flawless in its execution. There are countless booksellers who aspire to be great writers. Because of this novel, I no longer count myself among their ranks. If someone were to ask why, I would simply hand them a copy of this volume. I could never hope to write anything as brilliant and breathtakingly beautiful as The Visible World. – Joe Drabyak |
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| The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
Don Robertson (Harper Collins, 9780061452963, $12.95)
On a quiet autumn afternoon in 1944, nine-year-old Morris Bird III decides to visit a friend who lives on the other side of town. So he grabs the handle of his red wagon and, with his little sister in tow, begins an incredible pilgrimage across Cleveland . . . and out of childhood forever.
Set against the backdrop of one of the worst industrial disasters in American history, Don Robertson's enduring, beloved masterwork is a remarkable story of destiny, bravery, and responsibility, as fresh and relevant as when it first appeared in print.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: I am delighted that this great book that I first read 40 years ago has been rediscovered and returned to print. – Joe Drabyak
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| Lottery
Patrica Wood (Penguin, 9780425222201, $14.00)
Perry L. Crandall knows what it’s like to be an outsider. With an IQ of 76, he’s an easy mark. Before his grandmother died, she armed Perry well with what he’d need to know: the importance of words and writing things down, and how to play the lottery. Most important, she taught him whom to trust – a crucial lesson for Perry when he wins the multimillion-dollar jackpot. As his family descends, moving in on his fortune, his fate, and his few true friends, he has a lesson for them: never, ever underestimate Perry Crandall.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| Coal Black Horse
Robert Olmstead (Algonquin Books, 9781565126015, $13.95)
When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she sends her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.
At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety – blue on one side, gray on the other – Robey thinks he's off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life: with boldness, bravery, and self-posession.
Coal Black Horse joins the pantheon of great war novels – All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Naked and the Dead.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| The Cold Dish
Craig Johnson (Penguin, 9780143036425, $14.00)
In this outstanding first novel, Craig Johnson draws on his background in law enforcement and his deep attachment to the American West to produce a literary mystery of stunning authenticity, and full of memorable characters. Walt Longmire, sheriff of Wyoming’s Absaroka County, knows he’s got trouble when Cody Pritchard is found dead. Two years earlier, Cody and three accomplices had been given suspended sentences for raping a Northern Cheyenne girl. Is someone seeking vengeance? Longmire faces the most volatile and challenging case in his twenty-four years as sheriff and means to see that revenge, a dish that is best served cold, is never served at all.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOHN GRAMLICH |
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| Leisureville: Adventures in America's Retirement Utopias
Andrew D. Blechman (Grove Press, 9780802144188, $15.00)
Andrew Blechman’s first book, the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Pigeons, was a charming look at the much-maligned bird and the quirky subcultures that flock to it. In Leisureville, Blechman investigates another subculture, but one with more significant consequences.
When his next-door neighbors in a quaint New England town suddenly pick up and move to a gated retirement community in Florida called “The Villages,” Blechman is astonished by their stories, so he goes to investigate. Larger than Manhattan, with a golf course for every day of the month, two downtowns, its own newspaper, radio, and TV stations, The Villages is a city of nearly one hundred thousand (and growing), missing only one thing: children. Started in the 1950s and popularized by Del Webb’s Sun City, age-segregated retirement is an exploding phenomenon. More than twelve million people will soon live in these communities, under restrictive covenants, with limited local government, and behind gates that exclude children. And not all of the residents are seniors, or even retirees.
Blechman delves into life in the senior utopia, offering a hilarious first-hand report on all its peculiarities, from ersatz nostalgia and golf-cart mania to manufactured history and the residents’ surprisingly active sex life. He introduces us to dozens of outrageous characters including the Villages press-wary developer who wields remarkable control over the community, and an aging ladies man named Mr. Midnight, with whom Blechman repeatedly samples the nightlife.
But Leisureville is more than just a romp through retirement paradise: Blechman traces the history of the trend, and travels to Arizona to show what has happened to the pioneering utopias after decades of segregation. He investigates the government of these “instant” cities, attends a builder’s conference, speaks with housing experts, and examines the implications of millions of Americans dropping out of society to live under legal segregation. This is an important book on an underreported phenomenon that is only going to get bigger, as baby boomers reach retirement age. A fascinating blend of serious history, social criticism, and hilarious, engaging reportage, Leisureville couldn’t come at a better time.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: Tottering along as I am toward my golden years, I found this monograph by Andrew Blechman to be fun, informative, endlessly fascinating, and even a little frightening. The author’s narrative of his rollicking tour of America’s age-restricted, retirement utopias provides readers with wonderful, anecdotal accounts of the history of these communities, the life therein, and the compelling social issues that such developments raise for us all. This is a volume that should be read by everyone regardless of age. – Joe Drabyak |
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| The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine
Benjamin Wallace (Three Rivers Press, 9780307338785, $14.95)
In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux – one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson – went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?
It would take more than two decades for those questions to be answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players – among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent’s elegant archrival, whose palate is covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the truth about Rodenstock.
Pursuing the story from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wine, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson’s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank up the culture.
Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange, The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries. It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new voice in narrative non-fiction.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: Benjamin Wallace has uncorked an absolutely fascinating account of the world’s most expensive bottle of wine. This is an intoxicating read with the complexity and nuances of a great vintage. As your book “sommelier” I recommend that you drink deep of this heady narrative concerning world-class connoisseurs, deep-pocketed collectors, extremely costly crushed grapes and – quite possibly – a diabolically clever con man. – Joe Drabyak |
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| High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed
Michael Kodas (Hyperion, 9781401309848, $15.99)
In 2004, journalist Michael Kodas joined local mountain climbers from home on an expedition to Mount Everest. He anticipated an exhilarating and arduous adventure among a group of like-minded idealists that he could report to his readers back in Connecticut. But on the Himalayan mountain, he discovered thieves, prostitutes, con men, and blackmailers. There were people who would do ANYTHING for a quick buck, or a guarantee of reaching the top. And some of them were on his own team.
Thieves stole equipment on which the team’s lives depended, Kodas’s life was threatened by one of his teammates, and a climbing partner was beaten unconscious by another in Base Camp. He returned from the Himalaya disillusioned. But a plea for help from the daughter of a mountaineer who vanished on Everest on the very day that Kodas had retreated from his own disintegrating team prompted him to return to Everest and uncover an underworld that preys on unsuspecting climbers on major peaks around the world.
High Crimes is a shocking expose of the dark underside of Everest: people stepping over dying climbers on their way up; unscrupulous con men who sell faulty oxygen tanks that leave climbers without air when their lives depend on it; drugs and prostitution in Base Camp; and people all but murdered in the cutthroat race to get to the top. Illustrated with incredible photographs and written with thriller-like pacing, High Crimes is a gripping and fascinating story.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: Whether it be ego, adventure, or self-actualization, climbing Mt. Everest has become the goal of many, and that ambition has spawn a multi-million dollar industry. But with the big money comes the elements of high crime. Who would have guessed that there are more charlatans, con artists, crooks, prostitutes, thugs and drug dealers at the top of the world than there are in Times Square! – Joe Drabyak |
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| Knockemstiff
Donald Ray Pollock (Anchor Books, 9780767928304, $13.95)
In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents.
Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are woebegone, baffled and depraved—but irresistibly, undeniably real. Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump off the page at the reader with inexorable force. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.
With an artistic instinct honed on the works of Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews, Pollock offers a powerful work of fiction in the classic American vein. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: In a striking collection of linked short stories, Pollock dips into the forlorn and frequently abhorrent lives of the inhabitants of a tough Ohio town – a “community” bypassed by both the interstates and the blue highways. Each memorable story chronicles some account of busted heads, bad drugs, broken hearts, or lost dreams. Lake Wobegon it’s not, but this is definitely one place well worth the visit. – Joe Drabyak
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| Dear American Airlines
Jonathan Miles (Mariner, 9780547237909, $13.95)
Sometimes the planes don’t fly on time.
Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a lament for a life gone awry, for years misspent, talent wasted, and happiness lost. A man both sinned against and sinning, Bennie writes in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging erudition, underlined by a consistent ground note of regret for the actions of a lifetime – and made all the more urgent by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the wedding, he might have a chance to do something right. A margarita blend of outrage, wicked humor, vulnerability, intelligence, and regret, Dear American Airlines gives new meaning to the term “airport novel” and announces the emergence of major new talent in American fiction.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: Estranged from his only daughter for some twenty years, Benjamin R. Ford is overjoyed when he receives an invitation to her West Coast nuptials. However, in transit to the happy event, American Airlines strands him in the purgatory of Chicago’s O’Hare. Vexed by this development, Ben spends his time composing a 200 page, ferocious letter of complaint to the air carrier. In the course of this missive readers come to learn of his life, loves, and – oddly enough – the world of translated literature. While Benjamin Ford might remain earthbound, author Jonathan Miles definitely soars in this frantic and funny debut! – Joe Drabyak |
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| City of Thieves
David Benioff (Plume, 9780452295292, $15.00)
A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won't talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds. Lev Beniov considers himself “built for deprivation.” He's small, smart, and insecure, a Jewish virgin too young for the army, who spends his nights working as a volunteer firefighter with friends from his building. When a dead German paratrooper lands in his street, Lev is caught looting the body and dragged to jail, fearing for his life. He shares his cell with the charismatic and grandiose Kolya, a handsome young soldier arrested on desertion charges. Instead of the standard bullet in the back of the head, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful colonel to use in his daughter's wedding cake. In a city cut off from all supplies and suffering unbelievable deprivation, Lev and Kolya embark on a hunt to find the impossible. A search that takes them through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and the devastated surrounding countryside creates an unlikely bond between this earnest, lust-filled teenager and an endearing lothario with the gifts of a conman. Set within the monumental events of history, City of Thieves is an intimate coming-of-age tale with an utterly contemporary feel for how boys become men.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS JOE DRABYAK AND TIM SKIPP
STAFF COMMENT: STAFF COMMENT: This is superior fiction infused with the charm of a fairy tale, the hard facts of history, the exhilaration of a great adventure, the traditions of the Bildungsroman, and the intimacy of a personal memoir. City of Thieves is, quite simply, storytelling at its very best! – Tim Skipp |
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| Mudbound
Hillary Jordan (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 978156126770, $13.95)
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm – a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not – charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBERS JOE DRABYAK AND KATHY SIMONEAUX
STAFF COMMENT: Mudbound is a story as dark and rich as the soil of the Mississippi delta. Debut novelist Hillary Jordan herein explores the inequities of race through the experiences of two families – one black and one white – as they toil upon the shared land of a Deep South farm in the days following the end of World War II. Heartfelt and haunting, this is a splendid work that transported me into that highly charged and deeply emotional terrain first traveled in a reading of To Kill a Mockingbird some 40 years ago. Simply stunning! – Joe Drabyak |
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| Heart in the Right Place
Carolyn Jourdan (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 9781565126138, $14.95)
Carolyn Jourdan had it all: the Mercedes Benz, the fancy soirees, the best clothes. She moved in the most exclusive circles in Washington, D.C., rubbed elbows with big politicians, and worked on Capitol Hill. As far as she was concerned, she was changing the world.
And then her mother had a heart attack. Carolyn came home to help her father with his rural medical practice in the Tennessee mountains. She'd fill in for a few days as the receptionist until her mother could return to work. Or so she thought. But days turned into weeks.
Her job now included following hazmat regulations for cleaning up bodily fluids; maintaining composure when confronted with a splinter the size of a steak knife; distinguishing between a "pain," a "strain," and a "sprain" on indecipherable Medicare forms; and tending to the loquacious Miss Hiawatha, whose daily doctor visits were never billed.
Eventually, Jourdan gave up her Mercedes and made do with a twenty-year-old postal jeep. She shed her suits for scrubs. And the funny thing was, she liked her new life. As she watched her father work tirelessly and uncomplainingly, she saw what making a difference really meant: being on call all hours of the day and night, tolerating the local drug addict's frequent phone calls, truly listening to Miss Hiawatha. It meant just showing up, every day, and taking care of every person in Strawberry Plains and beyond, whether he got paid to do it or not. And for his daughter, it meant learning that her real place to change the world was right here – in her hometown – by her father's side.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK
STAFF COMMENT: When her mother’s sudden illness necessitates a return to East Tennessee to help her dad with his rural medical practice, Carolyn Jourdan – an attorney and senatorial aide – finds that she needs to trade all the sophisticated trappings of the Washington Beltway for a new lifestyle filled with blue dungarees and bandages. The resulting memoir is well seasoned with salt-of-the-earth characters and new insights both touching and profound. With touches of ER, Mayberry, and the writings of James Herriot, this sweet and restorative volume is just what the doctor ordered! – Joe Drabyak |
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| Here If You Need Me: A True Story
Kate Braestrup (Back Bay Books, 9780316066310, $13.99)
Ten years ago, Kate Braestrup and her husband Drew were enjoying the life they shared together. They had four young children, and Drew, a Maine state trooper, would soon begin training to become a minister as well. Then early one morning Drew left for work and everything changed. On the very roads that he protected every day, an oncoming driver lost control, and Kate lost her husband.
Stunned and grieving, Kate decided to continue her husband's dream and became a minister herself. And in that capacity she found a most unusual mission: serving as the minister on search and rescue missions in the Maine woods, giving comfort to people whose loved ones are missing, and to the wardens who sometimes have to deal with awful outcomes. Whether she is with the parents of a 6-year-old girl who had wandered into the woods, with wardens as they search for a snowmobile rider trapped under the ice, or assisting a man whose sister left an infant seat and a suicide note in her car by the side of the road, Braestrup provides solace, understanding, and spiritual guidance when it's needed most.
Here If You Need Me is the story of Kate Braestrup's remarkable journey from grief to faith to happiness. It is dramatic, funny, deeply moving, and simply unforgettable, an uplifting account about finding God through helping others, and the tale of the small miracles that occur every day when life and love are restored.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| Last Night at the Lobster
Stewart O'Nan (Penguin, 9780143114420, $13.00)
Stewart O’Nan has been called “the bard of the working class” and has now crafted a frank and funny yet emotionally resonant tale set within a vivid workaday world seldom seen in contemporary fiction.
Perched in the far corner of a run-down New England mall, The Red Lobster hasn’t been making its numbers and headquarters has pulled the plug. But manager Manny DeLeon still needs to navigate a tricky last shift. With only four shopping days left until Christmas, Manny must convince his near-mutinous staff to hunker down and serve the final onslaught of hungry retirees, lunatics, and holiday office parties. All the while, he’s wondering how to handle the waitress he’s still in love with, his pregnant girlfriend at home, and the perfect present he still needs to buy.
Last Night at the Lobster is a poignant yet redemptive look at what a man does when he discovers that his best might not be good enough.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER MICHAEL FORTNEY |
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| Breakfast With Buddha
Roland Merullo (Algonquin Books, 9781565126169, $13.95)
The only thing certain about a journey is that it has a beginning and an end – for you never know what may happen along the way. And so it is with this journey into the minds and souls of two very different men – one of them in search of the truth, the other a man who may have already found it.
When Otto Ringling, a husband, father, and editor, departs on a cross-country drive from his home in a New York City suburb to the North Dakota farmhouse in which he grew up, he is a man on a no-nonsense mission: to settle the estate of his recently deceased parents. However, when his flaky sister convinces him to give a ride to her guru, a crimson-robed Skovordinian monk, Otto knows there will be a few bumps in the road.
As they venture across America, Otto and the affable, wise, irritating, and inscrutable holy man engage in a battle of wits and wisdom. Otto, a born skeptic, sees his unwanted passenger as a challenge: a man who assumes the knowledge of the ages yet walks a mortal's path. But he also sees their unexpected pairing as an opportunity to take Volya Rinpoche on a journey of cultural discovery, with visits to quintessentially American landmarks (the Hershey's factory, Wrigley Field) and forays into some favorite American pastimes (bowling, miniature golf, dining out).
It is Otto, however, who has embarked on the real journey, that of self-discovery, led by his strange and remarkable passenger. By the time they reach North Dakota, Otto's head is reeling with the understanding that so much of what he had believed – as well as so much of what he had doubted – must be re-thought before his journey can truly begin.
Witty and inventive, Breakfast with Buddha takes readers into the heart of America and in the process shows us a man about to discover his own true heart.
RECOMMENDED BY STAFF MEMBER JOE DRABYAK |
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| Fieldwork
Mischa Berlinski (Picador, 9780312427467, $14.00)
When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one of Thailand’s English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead – a suicide – in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder.
Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya’s crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology – and into the family history of Martiya’s victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back. Finally, Mischa’s obssession takes him into the world of the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life becomes a battleground for two competing, and utterly American, ways of looking at the world.
Vivid, passionate, funny, deeply researched, and page-turningly plotted, Fieldwork is a novel about fascination and taboo –scientific, religious, and sexual. It announces an assured and captivating new voice in American fiction.
STAFF COMMENTS: This is a spellbinding story of anthropologists, missionaries, demon possession, sexual taboos, murder, and an obsessed young reporter. I was mesmerized by this surprising and exotic tale so adventurously told. – Joe Drabyak |
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