The Baron in the Trees by Italo CalvinoRead about another balloon flight on Mullan's list.
Cosimo has abandoned his aristocrat inheritance for a life in the canopy of the trees that surround his childhood home. He says he will never touch the earth again. When he is near death, people gather to see him fall to the ground. But then a balloon appears above the trees, trailing a rope. Cosimo catches the rope and disappears.
The Homicide Department is upside down—Richard Christie is in the hospital, Artie Dolan is headed away on vacation, John Potocki’s life is falling apart, and Colleen Greer is so worried about her boss’s health, she can hardly think. A young boy in Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood dies of a suspicious overdose. The Narcotics police are working on tips and they draft Colleen and Potocki to help them. In this same neighborhood, four young kids have been abandoned and are living on their own. The Philips kids, brainy in school, are reluctant to compromise themselves. But they need cash. Connecting these people and their stories is Nick Banks, just out of prison and working off a debt to an old acquaintance involved in the drug trade. Nick is a charmer, a gentle fellow who’s had a lot of trouble in his life. One day he gives free food to the Philips kids, little guessing how connected their lives are about to become.Preview The Odds, and learn more about the book and author at Kathleen George's website.
Kathleen George’s latest work pushes the edge—a spectacularly original crime novel.
About the book, from the publisher:Turn-of-the-century Paris was the beating heart of a rapidly changing world. Painters, scientists, revolutionaries, poets--all were there. But so, too, were the shadows: Paris was a violent, criminal place, its sinister alleyways the haunts of Apache gangsters and its cafes the gathering places of murderous anarchists. In 1911, it fell victim to perhaps the greatest theft of all time--the taking of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Immediately, Alphonse Bertillon, a detective world-renowned for pioneering crime-scene investigation techniques, was called upon to solve the crime. And quickly the Paris police had a suspect: a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso....Browse inside The Crimes of Paris, and learn more about the book and authors at the publisher's website and the official website of Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.
I’ve always got two or three books on the go, and the last couple of months have been no exception. Not long ago I finished T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. Like so many other art historians, I’ve been an admirer of Clark’s scholarship for many years. More recently, though, he’s allowed his visual acuity to drive and shine out of his writing as never before. This culminates in The Sight of Death, which records, in diary form, his intense visual examinations of two paintings by seventeenth-century French artist Nicholas Poussin. Looking closely at the two paintings almost every day for many months, Clark began by jotting down general impressions, and then over the ensuing months wrote regular diary entries about his evolving reactions. As time passed he become more and more interested in – even obsessed by– both the details of the paintings and then by the larger themes that grew out of this visual scrutiny. The details were often tiny, easily overlooked bits of imagery, paint application or composition that, for less attentive viewers (which is to say, for almost everyone else), could easily seem minor to the point of inconsequentiality, if indeed they were noticed at all. Reading Clark’s cumulative, day-by-day recordings of his observations constitutes a master class in how to look at art with one’s full attention, on how to build substantial philosophical analyses on the basis of ongoing observations rather than of preconceptions, prejudices and assumptions, and on how ultimately to relate what one sees to one’s socio-political convictions. This book was a treat from beginning to end: a compelling read that gave me no end of lessons in how to look at works of art....[read on]
Brian Foss will soon be leaving his job as Professor of Art History and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, and will be taking on a new job as Professor of Art History and Director of the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University, in Ottawa.
One book on the list:Voyage in the DarkRead about another book on the list.
by Jean Rhys
William Morrow, 1935
“It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known.... The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different.” Thus opens Jean Rhys’s most autobiographical novel, “Voyage in the Dark.” Sent to England from her home in the West Indies, Anna Morgan becomes a chorus girl and the mistress of a much older, wealthy Englishman. When he abandons her, she is desolate, adrift in a world where “the houses are all exactly alike, and the streets going north, south, east, west, all exactly alike.” With few resources and nothing to go home to, Anna soon slips into a familiar immigrant’s cycle of drink and despair. What she (and Jean Rhys) never loses, however, is the clarity and freshness of her insights, her relentless eye for hypocrisy.
Writers love to sit around and drink too much cheap wine and cast their favorite actors in the blockbuster movie version of their books. I’ve spent more than one night getting tiddly on Shiraz and casting and recasting everything I’ve ever written, even though in real life, we writers have very little control over it.Read excerpts from The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, and learn more about the author and her books at Joshilyn Jackson's website and blog.
That’s probably a good thing, because I’ve never actually seen a book become a movie. Instead, I’ve seen screenwriters and directors and actors take a book as a springboard and make something all their own out of it. Movies can be directly or distantly related to their book-of-origin, but either way, they are absolutely separate works in a different medium by artists other than the author.
In The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, the main character is Laurel Hawthorne, a thirty-something wife, mother, and art quilter whose placid life explodes into chaos on the night she is visited by the ghost of her 14-year old neighbor, Molly Dufresne. The ghost leads Laurel to the real Molly floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool. No one in Laurel’s whitewashed neighborhood is up to solving the unseemly mystery of Molly’s death. Only her wayward, unpredictable sister, Thalia (who has a few ghosts of her own) is right for the task. But calling in a favor from Thalia is like walking straight into a frying pan protected only by Crisco…
I’ve always said that if Michael Caine wanted to make a movie out of The Girl Who Stopped Swimming and play Laurel as a 60 year old drag queen with a heroin addiction, I would say, “That sounds like a really FRESH direction, Mr. Caine. Write me a check!”
But if they did by chance ask me? I’d cast...[read on]
"Admissions. Admission. Aren't there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides...It's what we let in, but it's also what we let out."Read an excerpt from Admission, and learn more about the book and author at Jean Hanff Korelitz's website.
For years, 38-year-old Portia Nathan has avoided the past, hiding behind her busy (and sometimes punishing) career as a Princeton University admissions officer and her dependable domestic life. Her reluctance to confront the truth is suddenly overwhelmed by the resurfacing of a life-altering decision, and Portia is faced with an extraordinary test. Just as thousands of the nation's brightest students await her decision regarding their academic admission, so too must Portia decide whether to make her own ultimate admission.
Admission is at once a fascinating look at the complex college admissions process and an emotional examination of what happens when the secrets of the past return and shake a woman's life to its core.
One title on the list: Fool's Gold by Gillian TettRead about another book on Bennett's list.
Few financial writers have been more closely followed during this crisis than the British Press Awards Journalist of the Year 2009, Gillian Tett. As The Spectator notes, her "analytical and penetrating" articles for the FT have been compulsory reading in City circles for years. Tett is a former anthropologist and so, as Nicholas Shakespeare notes in The Daily Telegraph, she looks at financiers as if at "a strange Tajikistan tribe".
Here, that tribe is a small team at investment bank JP Morgan who harnessed "computers to create a fiendishly complex means of shifting risk from banks to investors" via a new breed of financial instrument, the credit derivative. Once these contracts, which let banks bet on whether a loan or bond might default, infected the subprime mortgage market, mayhem was all but guaranteed with ill-equipped regulators caught "behind the curve at every stage". Tett says only seven people were tasked with monitoring $4trn in Wall Street assets.
Given the subject, it's not for absolute beginners with its "jargon and stupefying numbers", says Dominic Lawson in The Times. But the human aspect more than compensates: using "raw private communications" between players at JP Morgan creates "pathos as well as pace". Tett offers "no solutions", but her account of the widescale failure to control the derivatives market is "devastating".
A warm, smart, and witty personal investigation of ethnicity and womanhood.Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.
In the second-generation immigrant home where Maria Laurino grew up, “independent” was a dirty word and “sacrifice” was the ideal and reality of motherhood. But out in the world, Mary Tyler Moore was throwing her hat in the air, personifying the excitement and opportunities of the freedom-loving American career woman. How, then, to reconcile one’s inner Livia Soprano—the archetypal ethnic mother—with a feminist icon?
Combining lived experience with research and reporting on our contemporary work-family dilemmas, Laurino brews an unusual and affirming blend of contemporary and traditional values. No other book has attempted to discuss feminism through the prism of ethnic identity, or to merge the personal and the analytical with such a passionate and intelligent literary voice. Prizing both individual freedom and an Old World in which the dependent young and old are cherished, Laurino makes clear how much the New World offers and how much it has yet to learn.
David Linden is Professor of Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Back in November 2000 he named his top 10 relationship novels for the Guardian. One title on the list:The Fermata by Nicholson BakerRead about another novel on the list.
Baker explores the dividing line between literature and pornography, and much of the time seems to decide that the latter is more interesting. Rarely have I read a more tumescent book.
Jenny Chase loves her job as assistant pro at the Harbor Terrace Country Club. But her idyllic lifestyle is threatened when she discovers the body of a greenskeeper hanging from a rafter in the cart barn. The police rule the death a suicide, but Jenny has her doubts. As evidence of foul play mounts, so does Jenny’s fear for her own life.Preview Where It Lies, and learn more about the book and author at K. J. Egan's website.
About the book, from the publisher:Aid organizations like Oxfam, CARE, World Vision, and Catholic Relief Services are known the world over. However, little is known about the relationship between these private voluntary organizations (PVOs) and the federal government, and how truly influential these organizations can be in the realm of foreign policy. Indeed since the end of the Second World War, humanitarian aid has become a key component of U.S. foreign policy and has grown steadily ever since. This history of interaction deflates the common claim that PVOs have been independent from the federal government, and that this independence has only recently been threatened.Learn more about Global Compassion at the Oxford University Press website.
Global Compassion is the first truly comprehensive study of PVOs and their complex, often-fraught interaction with the federal government. Rachel McCleary provides an ambitious analysis of the relationship between the two from 1939 to 2005. The book focuses on the work of PVOs from a foreign policy perspective, revealing how federal political pressures shape the field of international relief. McCleary draws on a new and one-of-a-kind data set on the revenue of private voluntary agencies, employing annual reports, State Department documents, and I.R.S. records, to assess the extent to which international relief and development work is becoming a commercial activity. She outlines the increasing financial dependence of these organizations on the federal government and the consequences of that dependency for various types of agencies, as well as the often competing goals of the federal government and religious PVOs. As a result, there is a continuing trend of decreasing federal funds to PVOs and of simultaneously increasing awards to commercial enterprises. Focusing on the interplay between public and private revenue, the discussion ends with the commercialization of foreign aid and the factors most likely to influence the future of PVOs in international relief and development.
In this thought-provoking and rigorously researched work, Rachel McCleary offers a unique, substantive look at an understudied area of U.S. foreign policy and international development, and provides a crucial analysis of what this relationship holds for the future.
One title on the list:Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina SediaRead about another book on Newitz's list.
Like Night Sessions, Sedia's novel is also a gamechanger in robot fiction. She's written a beautiful novel set on an alternate world that seamlessly blends science, robot technology, and the magic of alchemy. Her protagonist is a clockwork robot named Mattie whose inventor has allowed her to become an independent alchemist (sort of like a pharmacist) but refuses to hand over the key that winds her motors back up. So she remains dependent on him for her very life. When Mattie becomes involved with a revolutionary who opposes her inventor's political party, her struggle for independence takes on a new dimension.
A mind-bending, time-bending, zeitgeist-defining novel about the days leading up to December 21, 2012—the day the Maya predicted the world would endRead excerpts from In the Courts of the Sun, and learn more about the book and author at Brian D'Amato's website.
December 21, 2012. The day time stops. Jed DeLanda, a descendant of the Maya living in the year 2012, is a math prodigy who spends his time playing Go against his computer and raking in profits from online trading. (His secret weapon? A Mayan divination game—once used for predicting corn-harvest cycles, now proving very useful in predicting corn futures—that his mother taught him.) But Jed’s life is thrown into chaos when his former mentor, the game theorist Taro, and a mysterious woman named Marena Park, invite him to give his opinion on a newly discovered Mayan codex.
Marena and Taro are looking for a volunteer to travel back to 664 AD to learn more about a “sacrifice game” described in the codex. Jed leaps at the chance, and soon scientists are replicating his brain waves and sending them through a wormhole, straight into the mind of a Mayan king…
Only something goes wrong. Instead of becoming a king, Jed arrives inside a ballplayer named Chacal who is seconds away from throwing himself down the temple steps as a human sacrifice. If Jed can live through the next few minutes, he might just save the world.
Bringing to mind Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and Gary Jennings’s Aztec, yet entirely unique, In the Courts of the Sun takes you from the distant past to the near future in a brilliant kaleidoscope of ideas.
Historical symbol of wealth and fertility, stigma of the modern West, and currently the world’s second-leading cause of preventable death: despite advances in hygiene, science, and public health, obesity and its corpulent imagery are inescapable reminders of a global epidemic and its manifold incarnations. For the first time, the number of overweight people in the world has overtaken the number of those malnourished and in Fat, Gluttony, and Sloth, the current crisis is put in historical perspective. The authors examine the changing meaning of “fat” in the public consciousness—reconsidering art, literature, and the history of medicine alongside circus freaks, pharmacology, and present-day trends in food and fashion—all in an effort to glean knowledge from examining our heavy past.Read more about Fat, Gluttony and Sloth at the University of Chicago Press website.
One paragraph from his entry: Larry Brown's Dirty Work is amazing: best book I've read this year. Basically, it's two Vietnam vets, side by side in a hospital, talking. One of them is a quadruple amputee, the other's just arrived after an accident. The two of them take turns with the narration, recounting their lives and what they've lost. I was stunned by the way Brown harnessed the energy of these voices, the way he was able to evoke the history of two absolutely wrecked lives and sneak in a storyline whose ending had me shaking my head for days.[read on]Matthew Vollmer's work has appeared in a number of journals and magazines,
including Paris Review, Epoch, VQR, Tin House, and Oxford American.Vollmer's irresistible first collection offers a large cast of yearning characters: some lonely, some lost, some in love and some who, landing on the other side of life's devastations—the loss of spouses, children, parents, lovers, friends, money—now find their grief restive and revolting.... Expertly structured and utterly convincing, these stories represent the arrival of a strong new voice.Visit Matthew Vollmer's website.
Atonement, by Ian McEwanAtonement also appears on Mullan's lists of ten of the best weddings in literature and ten of the best identical twins in fiction.
In a desire-charged tiff, Cecilia and Robbie fight over who will fill a precious vase, a family heirloom which survived being retrieved by a soldier in Flanders and brought all the way back to England. Robbie tries to take it off her. "With a sound like a dry twig snapping, a section of the lip of the vase came away in his hand ..."
Elizabeth J. Duncan spins a charming tale of murder and intrigue in this winning first novel.Preview The Cold Light of Mourning, and learn more about the book and author at Elizabeth J. Duncan's website and blog.
The picturesque North Wales market town of Llanelen is shocked when Meg Wynne Thompson, a self-made beauty who has turned out to be something of an unpopular bride, goes missing on her wedding day…and turns up dead. The last person believed to have seen her is manicurist Penny Brannigan, an expatriate Canadian who has lived in North Wales for almost twenty-five years. When Penny notices that something is not quite right at the funeral of her dearest friend, she becomes emotionally invested in the case, and sets out to investigate.
It seems that several people, including the bride’s drunken, abusive father, had reasons to wish Meg dead, but when the trail leads to her groom’s home, an explosive secret will shake the small town.
With its bucolic Welsh setting and vivid, colorful characters, this mystery is sure to delight the most discerning of traditional-mystery fans.
The entry begins: The casting session for Mudbound, The Movie took place in September of 2007, six months before the book came out in hardback, on the front porch of the Blue Mountain Center, an artists colony in the Adirondacks. I was sitting with my friend Tanya Selvaratnam (actress, producer and playwright), taking in the glorious view of the lake and mountains over a glass of red wine. Tanya had just finished reading the galley of the book. She thought it would make a great movie, and that actors would want to do it because there were so many juicy roles. Who, she asked, did I have in mind for the seven main characters?Read an excerpt from Mudbound, and learn more about the author and her work at Hillary Jordan's website and blog.
I hadn’t really thought it through, except for Laura, whom I’d always, from the very early days, imagined played by Laura Linney. She’s the right age for the role, and she’s a chameleon who can look plain as well as pretty. Her intelligence, dignity, and the appearance of vulnerability underlain by inner steel all make her perfect for the role of Laura McAllan. (Now, having seen her as Abigail Adams, I’m even more convinced she should get the part.)
We tossed around a number of candidates for my stolid, landsick Henry and ended up settling on...[read on]
She named a best books list for The Week. One title on the list:The Handyman by Carolyn See (Ballantine, $19).Read about another book on Lisa See's list.
My favorite of my mother’s novels. While waiting to start art school, Bob becomes a handyman. Going from house to house and disaster to disaster, he discovers that while he’s not very good at fixing things, he’s very good at repairing people’s lives. It’s about the origins of fame, the quirks of destiny, and what it means to be an artist.
About the book, from the publisher:The internationalization of economies and other changes that accompany globalization have brought about a paradoxical reemergence of the local. A significant but largely unstudied aspect of new local-global relationships is the growth of "localist movements"--efforts to reclaim economic and political sovereignty for metropolitan and other subnational regions. In Localist Movements in a Global Economy, David Hess offers an overview of localism in the United States and assesses its potential to address pressing global problems of social justice and environmental sustainability.Read excerpts from Localist Movements in a Global Economy, and learn more about the book at the MIT Press website.
Since the 1990s, more than 100 local business organizations have formed in the United States, and there are growing efforts to build local ownership in the retail, food, energy, transportation, and media industries. In this first social science study of localism, Hess adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines theoretical reflection, empirical research, and policy analysis. His perspective is not that of an uncritical localist advocate; he draws on his new empirical research to assess the extent to which localist policies can address sustainability and justice issues.
After a theoretical discussion of sustainability, the global corporate economy, and economic development, Hess looks at four specific forms of localism: "buy local" campaigns; urban agriculture; local ownership of electricity and transportation; and alternative and community media. He then examines "global localism"—transnational local-to-local supply chains—and other economic policies and financial instruments that would create an alternative economic structure. Localism is not a panacea for globalization, he concludes, but a crucial ingredient in projects to build more democratic, just, and sustainable politics.
One book on her list:The Girl Who Played with FireRead about another title on Nelson's list.
by Stieg Larsson
In an American mystery writer’s hands, this novel—the second in a trilogy that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—might read like a Law & Order episode. But the late Swedish journalist-turned-novelist’s brooding tone and the fantastically odd bisexual geek heroine Lisbeth Sander make this everything the folks at Knopf have been crowing that it is: riveting, unputdownable, a sure bestseller.
I envision the summer as a time for at last reading what I’ve been forced to put off all year long. Yet when I thought about them collectively,I realized that the books that I have on the go are in fact not, as I would have hoped, something altogether different from my daily reality as a professor of English Literature during the period from September to April. Most of them have something to do with academic life, with teaching, or with some of my most beloved canonical authors. Perhaps, then, these books serve as apt transitions from the academic term to the summer months. I suppose I need to ease into it slowly.
I am reading Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, a satire on academic and family life that is said to be based loosely on Howard’s End. While Smith’s wit and insights about anxiety-ridden academe are right on the mark, I do ask myself why....[read on]
Sara Malton is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature, culture, law, and finance. Her work has appeared inVictorian Literature and Culture, Studies in the Novel, and The European Romantic Review. She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Fellowships.
About the book, from the publisher:Deep in the heart of seventh-century Arabia, a new prophet named Muhammad has arisen. As his message of enlightenment sweeps through Arabia and unifies the warring tribes, his young wife Aisha recounts Muhammad's astonishing transformation from prophet to warrior to statesman. But just after the moment of her husband's greatest triumph -- the conquest of the holy city of Mecca -- Muhammad falls ill and dies in Aisha's arms. A young widow, Aisha finds herself at the center of the new Muslim empire and becomes by turns a teacher, political leader, and warrior.Read an excerpt from Mother of the Believers, and learn more about the book and author at Kamran Pasha's website and blog.
Written in beautiful prose and meticulously researched, Mother of the Believers is the story of an extraordinary woman who was destined to help usher Islam into the world.
Frank Partnoy is the author of F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader and Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Greed Corrupted the Financial Markets. He has worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and a corporate lawyer, and has testified as an expert before both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. A graduate of Yale Law School, he currently teaches law at the University of San Diego. His new book is The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals.Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of CrowdsRead about another book on Partnoy's list.Are crowds wise or mad? Witnesses to witch hunts, religious crusades or investment bubbles tend to vote for madness. Charles Mackay certainly did. Mackay (1814-89) compiled this treatise on a wide variety of mass delusions, including the belief in alchemy, the enthusiasm for dueling and the appetite for Nostradamus’s prophecies. But the book is most memorable for its discussion of financial lunacy, such as those two infamous 17th-century bubbles, the tulip mania in Holland and the South Sea Co. frenzy in England. “Men, it has been well said, think in herds,” Mackay writes. “It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Some of his stories might be apocryphal, but all are entertaining, particularly the one about the poor sailor who ate a prized tulip bulb, thinking it was an onion.
About the book, from the publisher:Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule.Read an excerpt from The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.
Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony.
Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.
When Melody Grace McCartney was six years old, she and her parents witnessed an act of violence so brutal that it changed their lives forever. The federal government lured them into the Witness Protection Program with the promise of safety, and they went gratefully. But the program took Melody's name, her home, her innocence, and, ultimately, her family. She's been May Adams, Karen Smith, Anne Johnson, and countless others--everyone but the one person she longs to be: herself. So when the feds spirit her off to begin yet another new life in another town, she's stunned when a man confronts her and calls her by her real name. Jonathan Bovaro, the mafioso sent to hunt her down, knows her, the real her, and it's a dangerous thrill that Melody can't resist. He's insistent that she's just a pawn in the government's war against the Bovaro family. But can she trust her life and her identity to this vicious stranger whose acts of violence are legendary?Read an excerpt from The Girl She Used to Be, and learn more about the book and author at David Cristofano's website.
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Lyndsay Faye, author of the acclaimed debut novel, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson.My favorite mysteries are almost always historical, and a great comment made by fellow author Marco Conelli at Southhampton's MAYHEM festival last weekend clarified one of the reasons for me: technology (from pinning your location through your cell phone to finding matching fibers in a suspect's car) is a huge buzzkill. For the real police, technology is wonderful, but for the author it can be deadly. It's simply too easy. Where is the joy in telling a suspect his alibi was busted by his own car's GPS system? As a result, I'm always delighted to find a good period mystery, and greatly enjoyed Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor, which I finished a couple of days ago.Read an excerpt from Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson, and learn more about the author and her novel at Lyndsay Faye's website.
There are several things going for this novel, not least of which is Andrew Taylor's spare, cutting prose, but one that interests me for its sheer cleverness is his useof diary entries. They're a classic device, of course, but presented here with a cunning twist--the omniscient narrator addresses you directly, presenting a passage for you to read near the beginning of each chapter. And while the murder mystery is certainly compelling, it's not more compelling than figuring out who you is. Or are, rather. It sounds rather existential without an example, and one of the best is at the beginning: "Sometimes you frighten yourself. So what is it exactly? A punishment? A distraction? A relief? You're not sure. You tell yourself that it happened more than four years ago, that it doesn't matter anymore and nothing you can do can change a thing. But you don't listen, do you? All you do is go back to that nasty little green book." The diary entry follows, but the commentary has already set an ominous tone....[read on]
One title on Ott's list: Takeover. By Lisa Black. 2008. Morrow, $24.95 (9780061544453).Read about another novel on Ott's list.
Corpse don’t frighten Cleveland forensic scientist Theresa MacLean. Living, breathing criminals do. So why does she agree to become a hostage in exchange for her fiancé, a police officer held at the Federal Reserve Building by two would-be robbers? A tightly plotted, relentlessly suspenseful thriller from a former fingerprint analyst with the Cleveland coroner’s office.
About the book, from the publisher:In this sweeping history of vodka scion Pyotr Smirnov and his family, distinguished journalist Linda Himelstein plumbs a great riddle of Russian history through the story of a humble serf who rose to create one of the most celebrated business empires the world has ever known. At the center of this vivid narrative, Pyotr Smirnov comes to life as a hero of wonderful complexity—a man of intense ambition and uncanny business sense, a patriarch of a family that would help define Russian society and suffer from the Revolution's aftermath, and a loyalist to a nation that would one day honor him as a treasure of the state.Browse inside The King of Vodka, and learn more about the book and author at Linda Himelstein's website.
Born in a small village in 1831, Smirnov relied on vodka—a commodity that in many ways defines Russia—to turn a life of scarcity and anonymity into one of immense wealth and international recognition. Starting from the backrooms and side streets of 19th century Moscow, Smirnov exploited a golden age of emancipation and brilliant grassroots marketing strategies to popularize his products and ensconce his brand within the thirsts and imaginations of drinkers around the world. His vodka would be gulped in the taverns of Russia and Europe, praised with accolades at World Fairs, and become a staple on the tables of Tsars. His improbable ascent—set against a sobriety crusade supported by Chekhov and Tolstoy, mounting political uprisings and labor strikes, the eventual monopolization of the vodka trade by the state—would crumble amidst the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution. Only a set of bizarre coincidences—including an incredible prison escape by one of Smirnov's sons in 1919—would prevent Smirnov's legacy from fading into oblivion.
Set against a backdrop of political and ideological currents that would determine the course of global history—from the fall of the Tsars to the rise of Communism, from vodka's popularization by none other than James Bond to Smirnoff's emergence as a multi-billion dollar brand—Smirnov's story of triumph and tragedy is a captivating historical touchstone. The King of Vodka is much more than a biography of an extraordinary man. It is a work of narrative history on an epic scale.
Though I’ve imagined Dreamsnake as a movie, and I wrote a script for it, until recently no actor jumped off the screen to tell me she could play Snake, the healer, the protagonist of the book.Learn more about the book and author at Vonda N. McIntyre's website.
A number of the book’s characters are a challenge to cast.
Arevin, who falls in love with Snake, has to be played by someone with both strength and sensitivity. Critics of Dreamsnake have accused the men in it of being weak, but it seems to me that those critics can’t tell the difference between a weak character and a secondary one. Especially when the book was first published, and especially in science fiction, critics weren’t used to a man as secondary to a woman protagonist.
Arevin is an incredibly strong character: he leaves everything and everyone he knows, venturing into a post-apocalyptic world, in order to correct a wrong.
Matthew Gray Gubler (Dr. Spencer Reid in Criminal Minds) has that strength, and the emotional chops to make Arevin believable. He can also...[read on]
Adam Leith Gollner is the author of The Fruit Hunters : A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession.Lolita by Vladimir NabokovRead about another title on the list.
"She had painted lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple… She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it – it made a polished plop. Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple…"Fruits and forbidden carnality go way back, an association Nabokov exploits giddily in this climactic scene. It's a Sunday morning in June. Lolita is wearing bobbysocks and a pink cotton dress. Humbert wakes, puts on his purple silk dressing down, and goes downstairs in search of Lo. He finds her pawing a Red Delicious apple, and slithers next to her on the candy-striped davenport. Sprawling herself athwart Humbert, the tanned nymphet devours her immemorial fruit, arousing "a hidden tumor of unspeakable passion". Humbert cannot contain his surreptitious euphoria: "I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body."
Bobby Clark is just sixteen when he drops out of school to follow his big brother, Jim, into the jewelry business. Bobby idolizes Jim and is in awe of Jim’s girlfriend, Lisa, the best saleswoman at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange.Learn more about the book and author at the Farrar, Straus and Giroux website and Clancy Martin's faculty webpage.
What follows is the story of a young man’s education in two of the oldest human passions, love and money. Through a dark, sharp lens, Clancy Martin captures the luxury business in all its exquisite vulgarity and outrageous fraud, finding in the diamond-and-watch trade a metaphor for the American soul at work.
One book from the entry: Right now I'm reading Infinite Jest, by the late David Foster Wallace. I'm about 200 pages in, which has taken weeks. It's incredibly dense reading that requires care and focus to appreciate. It's set in a tennis academy near Boston, as well as a rehab centre, though it's not yet clear who the voices in the centre are. He overwrites sometimes, explaining things in such detail and depth of language (keep a dictionary handy), showing off in ways that I think will deter many readers. But the writing is extraordinary.[read on]Howard Shrier was born and raised in Montreal and has worked in a wide variety of media, including magazine and radio journalism, theatre and television, sketch comedy and improv.
Liars Anonymous. By Louise Ure. 2009. St. Martin’s/Minotaur, $25.95 (9780312375867).Read about another book on Ott's list.
Jessica Dancing Gamage got away with murder and has been living with it ever since. Now the past comes back full force when she is forced to return to her home turf. This masterfully constructed psychological thriller, which rests on fiercely moral underpinnings, cements Ure’s position alongside such masters as Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters.
About the book, from the publisher:In 1755 Benjamin Franklin observed “a man without a wife is but half a man” and since then historians have taken Franklin at his word. In Citizen Bachelors, John Gilbert McCurdy demonstrates that Franklin's comment was only one side of a much larger conversation. Early Americans vigorously debated the status of unmarried men and this debate was instrumental in the creation of American citizenship.Read more about Citizen Bachelors at the Cornell University Press website.
In a sweeping examination of the bachelor in early America, McCurdy fleshes out a largely unexamined aspect of the history of gender. Single men were instrumental to the settlement of the United States and for most of the seventeenth century their presence was not particularly problematic. However, as the colonies matured, Americans began to worry about those who stood outside the family. Lawmakers began to limit the freedoms of single men with laws requiring bachelors to pay higher taxes and face harsher penalties for crimes than married men, while moralists began to decry the sexual immorality of unmarried men. But many resisted these new tactics, including single men who reveled in their hedonistic reputations by delighting in sexual horseplay without marital consequences. At the time of the Revolution, these conflicting views were confronted head-on. As the incipient American state needed men to stand at the forefront of the fight for independence, the bachelor came to be seen as possessing just the sort of political, social, and economic agency associated with citizenship in a democratic society. When the war was won, these men demanded an end to their unequal treatment, sometimes grudgingly, and the citizen bachelor was welcomed into American society.
Drawing on sources as varied as laws, diaries, political manifestos, and newspapers, McCurdy shows that in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the bachelor was a simultaneously suspicious and desirable figure: suspicious because he was not tethered to family and household obligations yet desirable because he was free to study, devote himself to political office, and fight and die in battle. He suggests that this dichotomy remains with us to this day and thus it is in early America that we find the origins of the modern-day identity of the bachelor as a symbol of masculine independence. McCurdy also observes that by extending citizenship to bachelors, the founders affirmed their commitment to individual freedom, a commitment that has subsequently come to define the very essence of American citizenship.
oodman.In this poignant tale of self-discovery, a young man struggles to survive the New York City housing projects in the face of familial, communal, and personal devastation.Read an excerpt from Hold Love Strong, and learn more about the book and author at Matthew Aaron Goodman's website.
Born to a thirteen-year-old in the bathroom of his family's small apartment, Abraham Sing leton enters a world laden with the obstacles inherent in an impoverished community. In spite of the crack epidemic and the HIV crisis that ravage their neighborhood, the Singleton family -- cousins, an uncle, an aunt, Abraham, and his mother -- is held together by Abraham's heroic grandmother, whose deep faith and stoic nature have always given them a sense of wholeness and hope. But when the family goes through several harrowing losses, not even his grandmother may be strong enough to lead them through.
At the center of this story is Abraham, the youngest of the Singletons. Deeply intuitive and cerebral, he is determined to thrive in a place that has destroyed the dreams of those around him. College means opportunity, yet it also means leaving behind those he loves. Abraham's journey into adulthood will break his heart but ultimately offer the possibility of redemption.
In this haunting, lyrical, and evocative novel, Matthew Goodman composes a paean to the power of family and belonging in the African-American community. Hold Love Strong is a spellbinding coming-of-age tale about love, hope, and the will to survive, and a stunning universal story about the incredible capacity of the human spirit.
A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting by Hara Estroff MaranoRead about the other six books on Skenazy's list.When people ask me, “What do kids lose if we don’t let them go Free-Range?” I usually answer something like, “The joy of childhood! The exhilaration of shouting, ‘I DID IT MYSELF!!’” But in this book, Marano, an editor at Psychology Today, actually visits campuses to see how overprotected kids do once they are out on their own. She is troubled by what she finds: A lot of young adults unable to function, and even breaking down in record numbers. When parents try to do too much for their kids, she says, they end up hurting more than helping. Hers is a cautionary tale.
About the book, from the publisher:At the height of the roaring '20s, Swedish émigré Ivar Kreuger made a fortune raising money in America and loaning it to Europe in exchange for matchstick monopolies His enterprise was a rare success story throughout the Great Depression.Read more about the book and author at Frank Partnoy's website, and watch Frank Partnoy on The Daily Show.
Yet after Kreuger's suicide in 1932, the true nature of his empire emerged. Driven by success to adopt ever-more perilous practices, Kreuger had turned to shell companies in tax havens, fudged accounting figures, off-balance-sheet accounting, even forgery. He created a raft of innovative financial products— many of them precursors to instruments wreaking havoc in today's markets. When his Wall Street empire collapsed, millions went bankrupt.
Frank Partnoy, a frequent commentator on financial disaster for the Financial Times, New York Times, NPR, and CBS's "60 Minutes," recasts the life story of a remarkable yet forgotten genius in ways that force us to re-think our ideas about the wisdom of crowds, the invisible hand, and the free and unfettered market.
I just finished a two-year stint as a judge in a fiction prize competition, so most if not all of my discretionary reading time was taken up with reading all or part of roughly 80 nominated novels per year...oy vey. If you like novels do not ever accept such an assignment. Since this year's awards were announced about a month ago I've read nothing fictional, nothing at all. Maybe my novel appetite will return some day.Robert Roper has won awards for his fiction and nonfiction alike. His book Fatal Mountaineer won the 2002 Boardman-Tasker Prize given by London’s Royal Geographical Society. His journalism appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic, and other publications. He teaches at Johns Hopkins.
That said, a couple of novels from the last two years gave me a lot of pleasure. One is Finding Nouf, by Zoë Ferraris. It's a cleanly written, humanly rich nominal murder mystery set in contemporary Saudi Arabia. The author was married to a Saudi man some years ago and lived there and kept her eyes open. Imagine a modern-day Emily Bronte parachuted into the land of Wahabi restrictions on women's education and free movement. No kind of tract, the novel biopsies Saudi society with exquisite thoroughness and quietly presents an impossible love story...which becomes excitingly less impossible by book's end....[read on]
Read more about his Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War at the publisher's website."At its heart, despite so much suffering and death, Roper's book is a moving, vivid exploration of love in many forms....One of the great strengths of Now the Drum of War, whose title is taken from a line in Whitman's poem "City of Ships," is that it extends its reach to the whole Whitman family."Writers Read: Robert Roper.
—Floyd Skloot, Philadelphia Inquirer
"In Now the Drum of War, Robert Roper captures this turning point in Whitman's life -- the transformation of his poetry but also the dramatic new chapter in the story of the Whitman family."
—Daniel Mark Epstein, Wall Street Journal
Brigid O'ShaughnessyRead about another femme fatale on Mullan's list.
In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Brigid has hired private eye Sam Spade to protect her. Spade sleeps with Brigid even though he knows that she killed his former partner, Miles Archer. In the end, he turns her in.
When a priest suggested to one of the first governors of Louisiana that he banish all disreputable women to raise the colony’s moral tone, the governor responded, “If I send away all the loose females, there will be no women left here at all.” Primitive, mosquito infested, and disease ridden, early French colonial New Orleans offered few attractions to entice respectable women as residents. King Louis XIV of France solved the population problem in 1721 by emptying Paris’s La Salpêtrière prison of many of its most notorious prostitutes and convicts and sending them to Louisiana. Many of these women continued to ply their trade in New Orleans.Learn more about Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women at the publisher's website.
In Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women, Judith Kelleher Schafer examines case histories from the First District Court of New Orleans and tells the engrossing story of prostitution in the city prior to the Civil War. Louisiana law did not criminalize the selling of sex until the Progressive Era, although the law forbade keeping a brothel. Police arrested individual public women on vague charges, for being “lewd and abandoned” or vagrants. The city’s wealthy and influential landlords, some of whom made huge profits by renting their property as brothels, wanted their tenants back on the streets as soon as possible, and they often hired the best criminal attorneys to help release the women from jail. The courts, in turn, often treated these “public women” leniently, exacting small fines or sending them to the city’s workhouse for a few months. As a result, prosecutors dropped almost all prostitution cases before trial.
Relying on previously unexamined court records and newly available newspaper articles, Schafer ably details the brutal and often harrowing lives of the women and young girls who engaged in prostitution. Some watched as gangs of rowdy men smashed their furniture; some endured beatings by their customers or other public women enraged by fits of jealousy; others were murdered. Schafer discusses the sexual exploitation of children, sex across the color line, violence among and against public women, and the city’s feeble attempts to suppress the trade. She also profiles several infamous New Orleans sex workers, including Delia Swift, alias Bridget Fury, a flaming redhead with a fondness for stabbing men, and Emily Eubanks and her daughter Elisabeth, free women of color known for assaulting white women.
Although scholars have written much about prostitution in New Orleans’ Storyville era, few historical studies on prostitution in antebellum New Orleans exist. Schafer’s rich analysis fills this gap and offers insight into an intriguing period in the history of the “oldest profession” in the Crescent City.
The year is 1763.Twenty-two-year-old James Boswell of Edinburgh is eager to advance himself in London society. Today his sights are set on furthering his acquaintance with Dr. Samuel Johnson, famed for his Dictionary; they are going to take a boat across the Thames to Greenwich Palace. Watching them secretly is John Boswell, James's younger brother. He has stalked his older brother for days. Consumed with envy, John is planning to take revenge on his brother and Johnson for presumed slights. He carries a pair of miniature pistols that fire a single golden bullet each and there is murder in his heart.Read an excerpt of The Brothers Boswell, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.
One book on her list:Portrait of Dr. GachetRead about another book on Scotti's list.
by Cynthia Saltzman
Viking, 1998
The most vexing vanishing act since the disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 is the loss of Vincent van Gogh's last major work, "Portrait of Dr. Gachet." Van Gogh painted the portrait of his French physician in the summer of 1890. A few days later, he committed suicide. As Cynthia Saltzman recounts in meticulous detail, "Dr. Gachet" passed through many hands over the course of a century. In the late 1930s, it was seized by the Nazis and sold by Hermann Goering for $53,000. The painting was last seen in public at Christie's auction house in New York in May 1990, when Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito caused a sensation by bidding $82.5 million, an unprecedented sum, to win the work. Shortly after the van Gogh arrived in Tokyo, though, Saito's fortunes changed. He was charged with bribery, lost his business and lived his remaining years under house arrest. When he died in 1996, "Dr. Gachet" seemed to pass away with him; its fate is unknown.
About the book, from the publisher:Beth Luxenberg was an only child. Everyone knew it: her grown children, her friends, even people she’d only recently met. So when her secret emerged, her son Steve Luxenberg was bewildered. He was certain that his mother had no siblings, just as he knew that her name was Beth, and that she had raised her children, above all, to tell the truth.Read the prologue to Annie’s Ghosts and visit Steve Luxenberg’s website, where you can see photos and documents relating to the book and read his blog.
By then, Beth was nearly eighty, and in fragile health. While seeing a new doctor, she had casually mentioned a disabled sister, sent away at age two. For what reason? Was she physically disabled? Mentally ill? The questions were dizzying, the answers out of reach. Beth had said she knew nothing of her sister’s fate.
Six months after Beth’s death in 1999, the secret surfaced once more. This time, it had a name: Annie.
Steve Luxenberg began digging. As he dug, he uncovered more and more. His mother’s name wasn’t Beth. His aunt hadn’t been two when she’d been hospitalized. She’d been twenty-one; his mother had been twenty-three. The sisters had grown up together. Annie had spent the rest of her life in a mental institution, while Beth had set out to hide her sister’s existence. Why?
Employing his skills as a journalist while struggling to maintain his empathy as a son, Luxenberg pieces together the story of his mother’s motivations, his aunt’s unknown life, and the times in which they lived. His search takes him to imperial Russia and Depression-era Detroit, through the Holocaust in Ukraine and the Philippine war zone, and back to the hospitals where Annie and many others were lost to memory.
Combining the power of reportage with the intrigue of mystery, Annie’s Ghosts explores the nature of self-deception and self-preservation. The result is equal parts memoir, social history, and riveting detective story.
A race against evil . . .Browse inside Running from the Devil, and learn more about the book and author at Jamie Freveletti's website and blog.
Emma Caldridge, a chemist for a cosmetics company, is en route from Miami to Bogotá when her plane is hijacked and spins out of control into the mountains near the Venezuelan border. Thrown unhurt from the wreckage, she can do nothing but watch as guerrillas take the other passengers hostage.
An endurance marathon runner, Emma silently trails the guerrillas and their captives, using her athletic prowess and scientific knowledge to stay alive. Those skills become essential when she discovers an injured passenger, secret government agent Cameron Sumner, separated from the group. Together they follow the hostages, staying one step ahead by staying one step behind.
Meanwhile, as news of the hijacking breaks in Washington, the Department of Defense turns to Edward Banner, former military officer and current CEO of a security consulting firm, for help. Banner quickly sends a special task force to the crash site, intent on locating the survivors before it’s too late.
But finding Emma and Sumner is only the beginning, as Banner starts to realize that Emma was on a personal mission when the plane went down. There is more to the beautiful, talented biochemist than anyone ever imagined, for in her possession is a volatile biological weapon in an ingenious disguise, one that her enemies have set for auction to the highest bidder.
Combining the action-packed plotting of Lee Child and Daniel Silva, and the rich scientific detail of Kathy Reichs and Tess Gerritsen, Running from the Devil is a breathtaking debut from a bold and daring new author.
Among the early praise for Plastic Fantastic:"Eugenie Samuel Reich offers an inside look into how the scientific establishment deals with human imperfection. Plastic Fantastic is a transfixing cautionary tale of how easily wrongdoers can hide and thrive in modern science."Learn more about Plastic Fantastic and the author's other work at Eugenie Samuel Reich's website.
—Jörg Blech, author of Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills
"In a warts 'n all expose of the scientific process, Eugenie Reich investigates the world's greatest scientific fraud. Fascinating, startling and highly readable. If you thought science was as pure as the driven snow, prepare to be shocked."
—Justin Mullins, consultant editor, New Scientist
“A riveting tale of scientific detective work, and a story about an important issue in science that is often overlooked. A well researched page-turner.”
—Amir Aczel, author of Fermat’s Last Theorem
Actors for the lead roles in a movie version of my novel? This question requires slipping fully into fantasy. I watch so few contemporary movies. The more convoluted the world gets, the more I retreat into TCM. Part of the idea for Chin Up, Honey came from a nostalgic look back to the sixties. Writing the flashbacks for Emma and John Cole gave me a great deal of fun. There’s a movie scene in the book, where Emma is watching Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.Learn more about the book and author at Curtiss Ann Matlock's website and blog.
That said, I have from the beginning seen Robert Duvall in the role of the elder Winston Valentine. Winston is a secondary character who became prominent and appears in each of the Valentine series of novels. Readers, and myself, have fallen in love with him. In a movie version of the book, I see him as the town narrator.
For the lead role of emotional Emma Berry...[read on]
Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Penguin, $20).Read about another title on Stewart's list.
“Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs”—“I hate journeys and travelers”—is the first line. The structural anthropologist’s ironic, paradoxical insights into “primitive culture” and the illusions of foreigners are combined with an adventure up the Amazon.
About the book, from the publisher: This lively book traces the development of American conservatism from Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Daniel Webster, through Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover, to William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, and William Kristol. Conservatism has assumed a variety of forms, historian Patrick Allitt argues, because it has been chiefly reactive, responding to perceived threats and challenges at different moments in the nation’s history.Read an excerpt from The Conservatives and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.
While few Americans described themselves as conservatives before the 1930s, certain groups, beginning with the Federalists in the 1790s, can reasonably be thought of in that way. The book discusses changing ideas about what ought to be conserved, and why. Conservatives sometimes favored but at other times opposed a strong central government, sometimes criticized free-market capitalism but at other times supported it. Some denigrated democracy while others championed it. Core elements, however, have connected thinkers in a specifically American conservative tradition, in particular a skepticism about human equality and fears for the survival of civilization. Allitt brings the story of that tradition to the end of the twentieth century, examining how conservatives rose to dominance during the Cold War. Throughout the book he offers original insights into the connections between the development of conservatism and the larger history of the nation.
Even though hardened crime reporter Hannah Vogel knows all too well how tough it is to survive in 1931 Berlin, she is devastated when she sees a photograph of her brother’s body posted in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead. Ernst, a cross-dressing lounge singer at a seedy nightclub, had many secrets, a never-ending list of lovers, and plenty of opportunities to get into trouble.Read an excerpt from A Trace of Smoke, and learn more about the book and author at Rebecca Cantrell's website and blog. Watch the video trailer for A Trace of Smoke.
Hannah delves into the city’s dark underbelly to flush out his murderer, but the late night arrival of a five-year-old orphan on her doorstep complicates matters. The endearing Anton claims that Hannah is his mother… and that her dead brother Ernst is his father.
As her investigations into Ernst’s murder and Anton's parentage uncover political intrigue and sex scandals in the top ranks of the rising Nazi party, Hannah fears not only for her own life, but for that of a small boy who has come to call her “mother.”
Michael Krepon is co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, Diplomat Scholar at the University of Virginia, and the author or editor of many books, including Cooperative Threat Reduction, Missile Defense, and the Nuclear Future, Space Assurance or Space Dominance? The Case Against Weaponizing Space, Nuclear Risk Reduction in South Asia, and Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia.Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (1959).Read about another book on Krepon's list.Brodie moved to the RAND Corporation, where he wrote this work seeking to counter the prevailing winds of nuclear policy on which Kissinger had set sail. Brodie's background as a naval historian provided an excellent vantage point to assess nuclear matters. Brodie resisted enthusiasms on almost every page. This book continues to offer rewards. For example, he warned against preventive war which required "an extraordinary, indeed almost boundless, degree of conviction and resolution on the part of the President."
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Philip Ball, author of several books on aspects of science and its interactions with other aspects of culture including Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind and The Sun and Moon Corrupted (a novel).I’m not sure if this makes it a good or bad time to be asking what I’m reading: I am currently one of the judges for the Royal Society Science Book Prize (formerly the Aventis Prize), which means that the honest answer to the question is ‘too damned much’. Six boxes too much.Philip Ball is a freelance science writer and a Consultant Editor for Nature. He worked as an editor for physical sciences at Nature for over ten years, where his brief extended from biochemistry to quantum physics and materialsBut of course there are some pleasurable things among them, though I’m scarcely at liberty yet to say what those are.
Aside from all that, I have recently finished Simon Winchester’s biography of Joseph Needham, The Man Who Loved China (HarperCollins). It is extremely good. I’m embarrassed to say that, although Winchester has seemingly always been well reviewed, I’d not read anything of his before. But on the strength of this I can see why he is so highly regarded. Needham, the biochemist-turned-Sinologist who introduced the West to the history of Chinese science, had the kind of life that cried out for a biography, but Winchester doesn’t put a foot wrong, making effective use of his strong knowledge of China and providing a reliably balanced view of Needham’s successes and failures.
This encouraged me to indulge my Sinophile side by reading...[read on]
science. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology.
For the Guardian, he named his top 10 subterranean books. One title on the list:The Time Machine by HG WellsRead about another book on Smith's list.
One of the finest works of science fiction set in the subterranean. In the dystopian future imagined by Wells, the Morlocks are a race who lived below ground. In researching my book, I was amazed to find that some of my fellow countrymen have made similar lifestyle choices to the Morlocks. It's no slight on the good people of Wolverley in the West Midlands to say that they're cavemen. There, a des res called Rock House was on the market, carved out of a cliff face and a snip at £25,000.
About the book, from the publisher:The American military base on the island of Diego Garcia is one of the most strategically important and secretive U.S. military installations outside the United States. Located near the remote center of the Indian Ocean and accessible only by military transport, the base was a little-known launch pad for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and may house a top-secret CIA prison where terror suspects are interrogated and tortured. But Diego Garcia harbors another dirty secret, one that has been kept from most of the world--until now.Read an excerpt from Island of Shame, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.
Island of Shame is the first major book to reveal the shocking truth of how the United States conspired with Britain to forcibly expel Diego Garcia's indigenous people--the Chagossians--and deport them to slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where most live in dire poverty to this day. Drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, military strategists, and exiled islanders, as well as hundreds of declassified documents, David Vine exposes the secret history of Diego Garcia. He chronicles the Chagossians' dramatic, unfolding story as they struggle to survive in exile and fight to return to their homeland. Tracing U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to the war on terror, Vine shows how the United States has forged a new and pervasive kind of empire that is quietly dominating the planet with hundreds of overseas military bases.
Island of Shame is an unforgettable exposé of the human costs of empire and a must-read for anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and its consequences.
About the book, from the publisher:War of Words tells the shocking story of the birth of the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper founded in a time when the news business was literally a matter of life and death.Learn more about the author and his work at Simon Read's website and blog.
In San Francisco of the Old West, bad news was considered the best news and the term “circulation war” was literal. In this midst, Charles de Young—cofounder of the San Francisco Chronicle—launched his fledgling paper in 1865. With a nose for news and an ear for gossip, he promoted politicians he favored and lambasted those he scorned. His weapon of choice for ridding San Francisco of corruption was not sword or pistol, but pen.
De Young’s verbal venom targeted Isaac Kalloch, a golden-tongued preacher with a tainted past. Kalloch’s run for mayor infuriated de Young. Insults volleyed back and forth until the verbal blows erupted into explosive violence on the streets of San Francisco.
Using newspaper accounts, diaries, and letters, Simon Read reaches back in time to reconstruct a news story that captivated the nation, granting modern newshounds in-the-moment access to the shocking events that led to the start of one of America’s greatest newspapers.
One title from Booklist's 2009 top ten list of crime fiction for youth, as complied by Ian Chipman: The Crossroads. By Chris Grabenstein. 2008. illus. Random, $16.99 (9780375846977). Gr. 5–8.Read about another book from the list.
This modern ghost story incorporates high-velocity action into a creepy psychological thriller, sending 11-year-old Zack Jennings on a collision course with a haunted intersection and a murderous tree.
In this unforgettable book, distinguished author Anne Nelson shares one of the most shocking and inspiring–and least chronicled–stories of domestic resistance to the Nazi regime. The Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, was the Gestapo’s name for an intrepid band of German artists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats (almost half of them women) who battled treacherous odds to unveil the brutal secrets of their fascist employers and oppressors.Read an excerpt from Red Orchestra, and learn more about the book and author at Anne Nelson's website.
Based on years of research, featuring new information, and culled from exclusive interviews, Red Orchestra documents this riveting story through the eyes of Greta Kuckhoff, a German working mother. Fighting for an education in 1920s Berlin but frustrated by her country’s economic instability and academic sexism, Kuckhoff ventured to America, where she immersed herself in jazz, Walt Disney movies, and the first stirrings of the New Deal. When she returned to her homeland, she watched with anguish as it descended into a totalitarian society that relegated her friends to exile and detention, an environment in which political extremism evoked an extreme response.
Greta and others in her circle were appalled by Nazi anti-Semitism and took action on many fronts to support their Jewish friends and neighbors. As the war raged and Nazi abuses grew in ferocity and reach, resistance was the only possible avenue for Greta and her compatriots. These included Arvid Harnack–the German friend she met in Wisconsin–who collected anti-Nazi intelligence while working for their Economic Ministry; Arvid’s wife, Mildred, who emigrated to her husband’s native country to become the only American woman executed by Hitler; Harro Schulze-Boysen, the glamorous Luftwaffe intelligence officer who smuggled anti-Nazi information to allies abroad; his wife, Libertas, a social butterfly who coaxed favors from an unsuspecting Göring; John Sieg, a railroad worker from Detroit who publicized Nazi atrocities from a Communist underground printing press; and Greta Kuckhoff’s husband, Adam, a theatrical colleague of Brecht’s who found employment in Goebbels’s propaganda unit in order to undermine the regime.
For many members of the Red Orchestra, these audacious acts of courage resulted in their tragic and untimely end. These unsung individuals are portrayed here with startling and sympathetic power. As suspenseful as a thriller, Red Orchestra is a brilliant account of ordinary yet bold citizens who were willing to sacrifice everything to topple the Third Reich.
Most of what I read is related to something I’m writing or something I’m teaching.Konstantinou's dissertation-in-progress is titled “Wipe That Smirk off Your Face:
I’ve been working on a dissertation chapter on David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, so right now I’m rereading novels, essays, and stories by Wallace, and related criticism. As I’ve trekked from café to café around San Francisco, I’ve been carrying Wallace’s thousand-page backbreaking novel, Infinite Jest, which is I should say a pretty stunningly impressive piece of writing, especially when you learn how quickly Wallace wrote the book, and study how profoundly he singlehandedly managed to change the landscape of ambitious postmodern-type fiction. I’ve also just started reading Dave Eggers’ What is the What. So far, so good.[read on]
Postironic Fiction and the Public Sphere,” which “studies authors who have sought to transcend what they see as the pernicious power of postmodern irony.”
One of my favorite things to come across while I'm reading is a really fantastic action scene. When the author's somehow managed to tell me where everybody is, what they're doing, how they're feeling, what the action means, and what the consequences are -- that's a real talent, and a gem to come across in print.Learn more about the book and authors at Anna Katherine's website and blog.
While I'm not saying that I'm anywhere near that fabulous when it comes to action scenes, I definitely try to pay attention to what I'm doing. In Salt and Silver, there are two kinds of action scenes: ones involving sex, and ones involving violence. I'm going to stick the violence examples, but honestly, this stuff applies either way.
There are three concerns I have when writing an action scene:
1. As with anything in a story, I've got to get from one end of it to the other -- beginning, rising tension, climax, denouement. Those are the very basic building blocks of creating a scene, a chapter, a book... and if I skip any of them, there's going to be a frustrated reader somewhere.
2. But while I'm doing that, I'm also thinking to myself, "What exactly is the story getting out of this?" If I'm just having an angsty vampire battle to fill time, why should the reader bother reading it? Heck, why should the characters bother going through with it? Even sex scenes fall under this one -- if I'm going to have my characters get it on, then it's got to mean something (emotionally, metaphorically, prophetically...).
3. But most of all...[read on]
In 2005 Ruth Gledhill, the (London) Times religion correspondent, picked a critic's chart of the best biblical fiction.THE GILDED CHAMBER Rebecca KohnRead about another book to make Gledhill's list.
A tale of love and redemption in which Esther becomes queen and saves her people.
Writer Lisa Jones went to Wyoming for a four-day magazine assignment and came home four years later with a new life.Read an excerpt from Broken: A Love Story, and learn more about the book and author at Lisa Jones' website and blog.
At a dusty corral on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she met Stanford Addison, a Northern Arapaho who seemed to transform everything around him. He gentled horses rather than breaking them by force. It was said that he could heal people of everything from cancer toÊbipolar disorder. He did all this from a wheelchair; he had been a quadriplegic for more than twenty years.
Intrigued, Lisa sat at Stanford's kitchen table and watched. She saw neighbors from the reservation and visitors from as far away as Holland bump up the dirt road to his battered modular home, seeking guidance and healing for what had broken in their lives. She followed him into the sweat lodge -- a framework of willow limbs covered with quilts -- where he used prayer and heat to shrink tumors and soothe agitated souls. Standing on his sun-blasted porch, pit bulls padding past her, she felt the vibration from thundering bands of Arabian horses that Stanford's young nephews brought to the ring to train.
And she listened to his story. Stanford spent his teenage years busting broncs, seducing girls, and dealing drugs. At twenty, he left the house for another night of partying. By morning, a violent accident had robbed him of his physical prowess and left in its place unwelcome spiritual powers -- an exchange so shocking that Stanford spent several years trying to kill himself. But eventually he surrendered to his new life and mysterious gifts.
Over the years Lisa was a frequent visitor to Stanford's place, the reservation and its people worked on her, exposing and healing the places where she, too, was broken.
Broken entwines her story with Stanford's, exploring powerful spirits, material poverty, spiritual wealth, friendship, violence, confusion, death, and above all else,"a love that comes before and after and above and below romantic love."
Newly divorced, Andrew Stratton lives in his head and not with his heart. He teaches architectural theory but has never built a building. He writes about “The Anatomy of Livable Places”– communities where form and material are in harmony–but has no sense of where he belongs. He is capable of deep, tender emotions but is unable to express them. When his wife leaves him for another man and excoriates his cautious nature in the process, Andrew is like a house shaken off a faulty foundation. Sifting through the rubble, he must figure out what should be salvaged and what should be scrapped.Read an excerpt from Water, Stone, Heart, and learn more about the book and author at Will North's website and blog.
Escaping from the predictable routine of his university life in Philadelphia, Andrew travels to England and channels his pain into a weeklong course on building stone walls. In the village of Boscastle, he discovers a magical landscape of dizzying cliffs, jagged coastline, lush valleys, and hills lined with stone hedges that have stood the test of time. At the Stone Academy, Andrew immerses himself in the grueling task of piecing together rock into intricate walls. Under the tutelage of his weathered instructor, he learns there is more to laying stone than hard labor. And he soon falls under the spell of Boscastle’s rhythms and quirks, which include a weekly sing-along, a museum devoted to witchcraft, and a colorful group of residents ranging from a precocious nine-year-old girl who communes with nature to an offbeat reverend who has been known to give referrals to the town witch.
Moved by the warmth and connectedness of the village, Andrew begins to shed his sheltered self. But his willingness to open his heart is tested when he falls for Nicola Rhys-Jones, an American expatriate seeking to escape a history of abuse. Thorny, sarcastic, and sexy, Nicola is an artist who paints tranquility panels for hospitals. But her life before Boscastle has been anything but peaceful. As their verbal sparring veers into darker territory, Andrew grapples with his status in Boscastle. Is he just a tourist on holiday or does he now have a stake in the village that has welcomed him?
Readers new to Will North’s work as well as fans of The Long Walk Home will be swept away by this bittersweet novel about love, loss, and the power of nature to alter our lives.
Her entry begins: I tend to read multiple books at once, and I try to mix purposeful reading that I’m doing for research or teaching with reading that I run across browsing the new books at the library or based on recommendations from friends.
At the moment, I’m re-reading Jonathan Spence’s The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds, which is an easy book to dip in and out of as each chapter addresses a different set “Western observers” of China. I’ve assigned the book for a course this summer, and so have been reading with an eye to what questions the book will raise for my students. Another China-related book that I’ve just begun is Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China by Kang Zhengguo. Kang laoshi was my second-year Chinese teacher and, as students often do, my classmates and I mused about his personal story (which seemed drama-filled). In this case, he’s written a 400-page memoir, and so now...[read on]
Kate Merkel-Hess is a Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese history at University of California, Irvine, editor of the blog The China Beat, and has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, Current History, History Compass, The Nation (online edition), Far Eastern Economic Review (online edition), The Huffington Post, and History News Network.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar WildeRead about another disastrous performance on Mullan's list.
Self-adoring Dorian is engaged to Sybil Vane, a young actress. He takes his epicurean role model Lord Henry Wotton to see her perform in Romeo and Juliet. Love has fatally damaged her abilities and she strikes Wilde's aesthetes as "absolutely false". Even "the common, uneducated audience of the pit" begin hissing. Dorian breaks off the engagement and Sybil kills herself.
The imperial expansion of Europe across the globe was one of the most significant events to shape the modern world. Among the many effects of this cataclysmic movement of people and institutions was the intermixture of cultures in the colonies that Europeans created. Protestant Empire is the first comprehensive survey of the dramatic clash of peoples and beliefs that emerged in the diverse religious world of the British Atlantic, including England, Scotland, Ireland, parts of North and South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Beginning with the role religion played in the lives of believers in West Africa, eastern North America, and western Europe around 1500, Carla Gardina Pestana shows how the Protestant Reformation helped to fuel colonial expansion as bitter rivalries prompted a fierce competition for souls.Read an excerpt from Protestant Empire, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.
The English—who were latecomers to the contest for colonies in the Atlantic—joined the competition well armed with a newly formulated and heartfelt anti-Catholicism. Despite officially promoting religious homogeneity, the English found it impossible to prevent the conflicts in their homeland from infecting their new colonies. Diversity came early and grew inexorably, as English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics and Protestants confronted one another as well as Native Americans, West Africans, and an increasing variety of other Europeans. Pestana tells an original and compelling story of their interactions as they clung to their old faiths, learned of unfamiliar religions, and forged new ones. In an account that ranges widely through the Atlantic basin and across centuries, this book reveals the creation of a complicated, contested, and closely intertwined world of believers of many traditions.
Woodsburner springs from a little-known event in the life of one of America’s most iconic figures, Henry David Thoreau. On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods—an event that altered the landscape of American thought in a single day.Read an excerpt from Woodsburner, and learn more about the book and author at John Pipkin's website.
Against the background of Thoreau’s fire, Pipkin’s ambitious debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while also painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment. Pipkin’s Thoreau is a lost soul, plagued by indecision, resigned to a career designing pencils for his father’s factory while dreaming of better things. On the day of the fire, his path will intersect with three very different local citizens, each of whom also harbors a secret dream. Oddmund Hus, a lovable Norwegian farmhand, pines for the wife of his brutal employer. Elliott Calvert, a prosperous bookseller, is also a hilariously inept aspiring playwright. And Caleb Dowdy preaches fire and brimstone to his congregation through an opium haze. Each of their lives, like Thoreau’s, is changed forever by the fire.
Like Geraldine Brooks’s March and Colm Tóibín’s The Master, Woodsburner illuminates America’s literary and cultural past with insight, wit, and deep affection for its unforgettable characters, as it brings to vivid life the complex man whose writings have inspired generations.
One title on the list:Vichy FranceRead about another book on Spotts' list.
by Robert O. Paxton
Knopf, 1972
Nearly four decades ago, Robert O. Paxton's "Vichy France" touched off what came to be regarded as a sort of Copernican revolution in studies of French collaboration. Paxton was the first to show that the collaborationist policy of the French government in occupied France was voluntary -- even, as with Vichy's anti-Semitism, anticipating and going further than the Germans had asked. Paxton's classic inspired young French scholars, opening the way to a flood of works that seems to widen with the passage of time. Justice done? Far from it. French television regularly broadcasts fictional stories of the Resistance but rarely one of collaboration. A year ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an address to his nation: "The true France was not at Vichy [and] never collaborated." Official myth and historic fact continue to live side by side. And shame persists.
The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Mark McGurl, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.At the outer edges of my research—in the sense that I don’t know exactly why I am reading it, or whether I will have anything to say about it when I am done—I have developed a fascination with conteRead an excerpt from McGurl's The Program Era and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website. Visit Mark McGurl's UCLA webpage.mporary secular apocalyptic fiction. The relevance of this body of work to our time is perhaps too obvious to go on about. What strikes me instead is how strong much of it is. “The Golden Age of Apocalyptic Fiction” would be an ironic label for our times, but it might be accurate.
A literary scholar like me is required to be suspicious of the patriarchal pathos of a work like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in which a father and son experience the end of the world as we know it, but I was moved by the novel anyway, and impressed with the grim authority of its vision. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is more political in its sensibilities, and equally impressive. While McCarthy needs no other reason for the apocalypse than human damnation, Atwood traces the path to the collapse...[read on]
One title on the list: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.Read about Number One on Walt's list.
Combines biology and macro-history in a compelling fashion, explaining why small differences in climate, population, agronomy, and the like turned out to have far-reaching effects on the evolution of human societies and the long-term balance of power. An exhilarating read.
For three days in January 2007, the most-emailed article in The New York Times was “Appreciations: Mr. Noodle,” an editorial noting the passing, at age 96, of billionaire Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen. The very existence of the noodle inventor came as a shock to many, but not to Andy Raskin, who had spent nearly three years trying to meet Ando. Why?Read more about the book and author at Andy Raskin's website and the Ramen Advice blog.
To fix the problems that plagued his love life.
The Ramen King and I is Raskin’s memoir about how despair—and a series of bizarre adventures at Japanese restaurants—led him to confront the truth of his romantic past, and how Ando became his unlikely spiritual guide. Through letters ostensibly penned to the culinary sage, Raskin reveals a relationship history plagued by infidelity, jealousy, and betrayal. After devouring Ando’s essays (with titles such as “Peace Follows from a Full Stomach” and “Mankind is Noodlekind”), he sets out to meet the food pioneer—and to discover the secret to a committed relationship.
I dream about seeing my books made into movies. I’ve rehearsed my Academy Awards speech so many times I know it off by heart. You’d think out of fifty-some books at least one would make it to the screen, right? So it’s not surprising that I know exactly who I’d pick to star as the main characters in the stupendous, the outstanding, the extraordinary Pennyfoot Hotel Mysteries movie.Visit Kate Kingsbury's website.
For instance, take Cecily Sinclair. She’s the middle-aged manager of a country club. Feisty, independent to a fault, a little reckless at times, outspoken when needs be, especially when her role as a woman is challenged. Intelligent enough to solve murders, yet constantly drawn into dire peril because of her blind loyalty to her family, friends and staff, as well as the eclectic and often eccentric guests who pass through the doors of the renowned and infamous Pennyfoot Hotel.
Nothing really remarkable there, unless you take into account that this is the turn-of-the-century England, when...[read on]
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage, $8).Read about another book on Fox's list.
It’s kind of surprising for someone who’s a self-described optimist to love this apocalyptic road story so much. But McCarthy captures the step-in-front-of-a-train, protect-at-all-costs mind-set of a father and transfers it to the starkest possible context.
"Audition or die." Delivered by a trio of psychotic clowns, this ultimatum plunges Jamie into the horrible alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between hell and earth from which humankind's greatest tragedies have originated. Yet, in this place-peopled by the gruesome, grotesque, and monstrous-where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself. When he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead...Read excerpts from The Pilo Family Circus, and learn more about the author and his work at Will Elliott's website.
About the book, from the publisher: A fascinating guided tour through the history, folklore, and function of the endangered honeybee.Learn more about the book and author at the Plan Bee website and Susan Brackney's website.
Featured recently in major national news stories because they are disappearing at an alarming rate, bees are the unsung—and absolutely essential— heroes of the food chain. Now they get their due in this delightfully illustrated, fact-filled book, courtesy of a professional beekeeper and nature writer who explores:
• Why honey bees are disappearing—and what we can do about it
• Who’s who in the hive—the queen bee, the workers, and the drones
• The role of bees in our food system
• Swarming behavior—what it is, what it means, and how it’s controlled
• Bees by the numbers—number of bees per hive, number of wing beats per second, and other fascinating facts
• Bees in folklore, literature, and pop culture
• And much more
One title on Pryce's list:Speak, Memory by Vladimir NabokovRead about another tale on Pryce's list.
Nabokov writes an elegy to his lost childhood in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg; the backward lens of time imparting a particularly golden hue to such remembered exotica as Pears soap, Golden Syrup and countless other marvels shipped out from London. The prose is wonderful and occasionally sublime, especially in the child's eye view of the five-day train journey each summer to Biarritz.
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Elsa Marston, who writes for young people, focusing largely on the Middle East--ancient and modern, fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book is Santa Claus in Baghdad and Other Stories About Teens in the Arab World (Indiana University Press 2008); a film has been made from the title story, available from www.santaclausinbaghdad.com. Some other recent books are Women in the Middle East: Tradition and Change, The Ugly Goddess (YA novel, ancient Egypt), Muhammad of Mecca, Prophet of Islam (historical biography), and Songs of Ancient Journeys: Animals in Rock Art (poetry). Personal encounters between different cultures are one of her basic interests and, having married into a Lebanese family, with many opportunities to live in different parts of the Arab world, the story of her own life. A New Englander by origin, and longtime resident of Indiana, she welcomes visits to her website at www.elsamarston.com.I recently noticed Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky in an airport bookstore. Recalling comments by my late husband (Iliya Harik) about Bowles as an important--though challenging--writer, and piqued by the book cover's hints about cultural encounter,Visit Elsa Marston's website.I decided to buy a copy. It is indeed challenging. The basic story line is about three young Americans who travel around Algeria in the late 1940s, deeper and deeper into the Sahara, until the husband dies, his wife wanders off by herself, and their male friend tries to pick up the pieces. Meanwhile, the wife has been rescued by a dashing young caravan merchant, who eventually imprisons her in his remote desert house, makes her his fourth wife, and feeds her on lamb fat. I am not fond of being challenged quite this much, and I cannot say whether this book is more adventure, fantasy, surrealism, orientalism, anthropology, Hollywood nonsense, metaphysics, or poetry. When it was first published, in 1949, it apparently launched Bowles' reputation as one of the century's most significant literary writers. For that reason I would recommend it for those who, as I did, feel that they should read something by Paul Bowles. At least it reminded me of my own various encounters with the deserts of North Africa, although they were hardly so bizarre.[read on]
A mesmerizing story of a community of Chinese immigrants in a small California town in 1928, weaving history and mythology around the lives of the townspeople and the ghosts who haunt themLearn more about the book and author at Shawna Yang Ryan's website and blog.
Locke, CA, 1928— Three bedraggled Chinese women suddenly appear out of the mist one afternoon in a small Chinese farming town on the Sacramento River, and their arrival throws the community into confusion. Two of the women are unknown to the townspeople, while the third is the long-lost wife of Richard Fong, the handsome manager of the local gambling parlor, who had left her behind in China many years earlier and had not yet returned for her.
Richard’s wife’s unexpected arrival complicates his life in no small way—not least with two prostitutes at the local brothel he frequents. One, the beautiful young Chloe, depends on him but has eyes for someone else, someone even more forbidden—the local preacher’s daughter. The other, Poppy, the psychic madam of the brothel, is desperately in love with him, and she begins to sink into despair as he grows further and further away from her.
As the lives of the townspeople become inextricably intertwined with the newly arrived women, Poppy’s premonitions begin to foretell a deep unhappiness for all involved. And when a flood threatens the livelihood of the entire town, the frightening power of these mysterious women who arrived in the mist will be revealed.
Shawna Yang Ryan’s melodic first novel is a passionate, sophisticated intertwining of fact and fiction that examines mingling cultures, modern myths, and forgotten history. Water Ghosts beautifully chronicles separation and betrayal, loneliness and longing, and what happens when a Chinese ghost story begins to come true.
In 2005 Amanda Craig picked a critic's chart of boarding school classics for the (London) Times.THE MOTH DIARIES Rachel KleinRead about another book on Craig's list.
Vampire tale set in a 1960s school
It's another Fourth of July in Dacus, South Carolina and the carnival fright house isn't impressing Avery's 7-year-old niece Emma. That is, until the leg falls off a mannequin posed with a chainsaw. Then even Emma recognizes the human leg bone protruding from the wizened limb.Learn more about the author and her books at Cathy Pickens' website.
The next day, Avery joins her sister Lydia and her brother-in-law at a faculty picnic up on the mountain. The festivities are interrupted when one of the faculty wives disappears off the waterfall.
Between the owners of the fright house wanting Avery to help them get reopened before they miss out on the holiday crowd, and the widower's new protective lady friend insisting that someone needs to be safeguarding his financial interests, Avery has her work cut out for her. She finds herself following the money as she pieces together a very cold case and a very cold-blooded murder.
Cathy Pickens's signature wit and verve are in full force as she spins the most enjoyable yarn yet in this delightful Southern cozy series.
Phil Camp has a problem. Not the fact that he wrote a parody of a self-helpbook (Where Can I Stow My Baggage?) that the world took seriously and that became an international bestseller, or that he wrote the book under a phony name, Marty Fleck, and the phony name became a self-help guru overnight. Phil cannot be Marty Fleck. He can barely be himself.Read an excerpt from Everything Hurts, and learn more about the book and author at Bill Scheft's website and blog.
No, Phil's problem is that he has been walking with a limp for nine months. Phil is in constant pain, yet there is nothing physically wrong with his body that would cause such agony. This problem leads him to the controversial Dr. Samuel Abrun, a real doctor who wrote a real self-help book (The Power of "Ow!") that made thousands of people pain-free.
So what happens when the self-help fraud meets the genuine item? Does he get better? Can he hobble out of his own way to help himself? Most important, can the reader make it through fifty pages without thinking, Wait a minute. Is that a twinge I feel in my lower back or just gas?
Phil embraces Abrun's unorthodox psychogenic theories passionately but manages to save some passion for Abrun's daughter, Janet, herself a doctor who has her own theories about, and remedies for, chronic pain. If all this weren't enough, Phil tries to delve further into his past with his unconventional psychotherapist, the Irish Shrink, even if it means revealing dark secrets he never remembered telling him the first two or three times. To top it all off, Phil confronts his alter ego's nemesis, right-wing radio blowhard Jim McManus, only to find out they share a common enemy -- the same family.
Like Carl Hiassen and Larry David, author Bill Scheft understands that the best humor is always excruciating. That fits the story of Everything Hurts and its lesson: Pain is the ultimate teacher. By the end, Phil Camp, the self-proclaimed "self-help fraud," turns out to be the real thing. And the real thing turns out to be flawed and confused, but hopeful. In other words, human.
One novel on the list:A Tale of Two Cities by Charles DickensRead about another novel on Mullan's list.
Sydney Carton is a brilliant but indolent barrister. He discovers he bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Darnay, a French emigre he has defended against a treason charge. Both men love the same woman, Lucie Manette. Darnay returns to Paris, where he is sentenced to death by guillotine. Carton redeems himself by taking Darnay's place.
About the book, from the publisher:In the first book-length examination of the connections between the commercial fishing industry in colonial America and the American Revolution, Christopher Magra places the origins and progress of this formative event in a wider Atlantic context. The Fisherman’s Cause utilizes extensive research from archives in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. in order to take this Atlantic approach. Dried, salted cod represented the most lucrative export in New England. The fishing industry connected colonial producers to transatlantic markets in the Iberian Peninsula and the West Indies. Parliament’s coercive regulation of this branch of colonial maritime commerce contributed to colonists’ willingness to engage in a variety of revolutionary activities. Colonists then used the sea to forcibly resist British authority. Fish merchants converted transatlantic trade routes into military supply lines, and they transformed fishing vessels into warships. Fishermen armed and manned the first American navy, served in the first coast guard units, and fought on privateers. These maritime activities helped secure American independence.Read an excerpt from The Fisherman's Cause.
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Eytan Kollin, co-author of The Unincorporated Man and a teacher of history, government and economics.I’m currently reading three books and just finished the last of Kage Baker's 'Company' novels. I like a series that takes time to develop well and Baker’s was certainly one of them. Of particular interest in the Company novels was its unique take on both time travel and causality and whatVisit The Unincorporated Man website and blog.happens when these seemingly opposing forces bounce off each other. The great thing about any series is continuity of characters and situations because if you’re invested in both you don’t want either to end! Of course I don't feel the need for them to go on forever either (e.g. how many Remo Williams books does a man need to read? – Because I’m thinking the first eighty-seven pretty much gets you the gist). Back to Kage, though; her ten Company novels were each long enough to regret them going away but not so long that I wondered why I soldiered on.[read on]
This was an interesting exercise because, with the exception of the main character, I hadn’t really pondered actors for the characters in this book. I did have input on casting the heroine for the book trailer, but that’s not the same as imagining someone going through all the character’s emotions. As Jess Riley said in her post, I assumed that if a movie is ever made, I’d leave casting to the people who know about such things.Learn more about the book and author at Alex Bledsoe's website and blog.
Blood Groove is a horror novel set in 1975 Memphis, so it’s a period piece. The protagonist, Eastern European vampire Rudolfo Vladimir Zginski (a.k.a."Rudy") was originally based on Mike Raven's look from the 1970 Hammer film Lust for a Vampire. Zginski is smooth, intelligent, and absolutely heartless, although there is an element of George Hamilton’s Love at First Bite ironic Dracula in there as well. Robert Carlyle, with a look similar to the one he had in 1999's Ravenous (the non-scruffy part), would be perfect.
The heroine, Fauvette, is a Kentucky hillbilly made a vampire at fourteen half a century earlier. She's...[read on]
Honored Guest by Joy Williams (Vintage, $14).Read about another book on Palahniuk's list.
Don’t let the praise by highbrow critics scare you away from this 2004 story collection. We’re so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than for another person, thus the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior. No one does this better than Joy Williams.
About the book, from the publisher:What’s the matter with Sylvie?Learn more about the book and author at Margaret Leroy's website.
Such a pretty girl. Four years old; well-loved by her young mother, Grace. But there’s something… off about the child. Her deathly fear of water; her night terrors; most of all, her fixation with a photo of an Irish fishing village called Coldharbour.
“Sylvie, tell me about your picture. Why’s it so special, sweetheart?” My heart is racing, but I try to make my voice quite calm.
“That’s my seaside, Grace.” Very matter-of-fact, as though this should be obvious. “I lived there, Grace. Before.”
I sit very still for a long slow moment. Cold moves over my skin.
“I don’t know about it,” I say.
“Don’t you, Grace?” She seems surprised.
Every once in a blue moon, a masterful writer dives into Gothic waters and emerges with a novel that—like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, or, more recently, Patrick McGrath’s Asylum—simultaneously celebrates and transcends the genre. Welcome Margaret Leroy to the clan.
Haunted and haunting, Yes, My Darling Daughter is a wonderfully original, deliciously suspenseful mystery. Impossible though it may seem, Grace has to face the fact that her daughter may be remembering a past life. And not only that: the danger haunting Sylvie from her past life is still very much a threat to her in this one.
About the book, from the publisher:As a teenager, Bill German knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life: chronicle the career and adventures of his favorite rock band, the Rolling Stones. And in 1978, on his sixteenth birthday, he set out to make his dream a reality. Feverishly typed in his Brooklyn bedroom, and surreptitiously printed in his high school’s mimeograph room German’s Stones-only newsletter, Beggars Banquet, was born. His teachers discouraged it, his parents dismissed it as a phase, and his disco-loving classmates preferred the Bee Gees, but, for German, this primitive, pre-Internet fanzine was a labor of love. And a fateful encounter with his idols on the streets of New York soon proved his efforts weren’t in vain.Read an excerpt from Under Their Thumb, and learn more about the book and author at Bill German's website and blog.
Impressed with Beggars Banquet, the Stones gave the ’zine instant cred on the rock scene by singing its praises–and by inviting German to hang with the band. At first a fish out of water in the company of rock royalty, German found himself spilling orange juice on a priceless rug in Mick Jagger’s house and getting pegged as a narc by pals of Keith Richards and Ron Wood. But before long he became a familiar fixture in the inner sanctum, not just reporting Stones stories but living them. He was a player in the Mick-versus-Keith feud and was an eyewitness to Keith’s midlife crisis and Ron’s overindulgences. He even had a reluctant role in covering up Mick’s peccadilloes. “In the span of a few months,” German recalls, “I’d gone from wanting to know everything about my favorite rock stars to knowing too much.”
In this warts-and-all book, which includes many never-before-seen photographs, German takes us to the Stones’ homes, recording sessions, and concerts around the world. He charts the band’s rocky path from the unthinkable depths of a near breakup to the obscenely lucrative heights of their blockbuster tours. And ultimately, German reveals why his childhood dream come true became a passion he finally had to part with.
Under Their Thumb is an up-close and extremely personal dispatch from the amazing, exclusive world of the Rolling Stones, by someone who was lucky enough to live it–and sober enough to remember it all.
Richard Ford, author of the Frank Bascombe trilogy and other works, told Newsweek about his five most essential books.A BOOK TO WHICH YOU ALWAYS RETURN: "Collected Stories" by Eudora Welty. Proves you can do remarkable things if you just stay home and do them.Read more about Ford's most essential books.
A CLASSIC YOU REVISITED WITH DISAPPOINTMENT: "Ulysses" by James Joyce. Way too long, and unduly obscure. Should have stuck to short stories.
The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Anne Nelson, author of Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler.The shrinks must have a name for it: you work on a book for years, buried in research. Then you finish it, it comes out – and you’re still compulsively reading on the subject. My new book, Red Orchestra, is about a circle of anti-Nazi resisters who infiltrated the regime in order to oppose it.Anne Nelson teaches international media studies at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).
That inquiry led to all kinds of questions: about the Holocaust and concentration camps; on the nature of censorship and propaganda;and on the psychology of resistance. My guess is that I’ll be reading about this period and these themes for the rest of my life.
One book that stunned me recently was Giles MacDonough’s After the Reich (just out in paperback). Given the endless tomes on World War II itself, there is surprisingly little published on life immediately after the war. MacDonough’s research is formidable, walking us through the immediate post-war period in Germany and the surrounding regions. It is a....[read on]
A standout fiction debut by a prize-winning young writer whose memoir, The Summer of Ordinary Ways, was a favorite of critics and booksellers Nicole Helget’s fierce and lyrical memoir of growing up on a Minnesota dairy farm received widespread acclaim.Read an excerpt from The Turtle Catcher, and learn more about the book and author at Nicole Helget's website.
People magazine hailed the young author’s ability to “take the messiest of lives and fashion something beautiful.”Here, in her first novel, Helget turns her extraordinary sensibility to a haunting love story with a heinous crime at its core.
In a rural Minnesota town of German immigrants in the tumultuous days of World War I, The Turtle Catcher brings together two misfits from warring clans. Liesel, the one girl in the upstanding family of Richter boys, harbors a secret about her body that thwarts all hope for a normal life.Her closest friend is Lester, the “slow” boy in the raffish Sutter family, a gentle, kind soul who spends his days trapping turtles in the lake. Yearning for human touch in the wake of her parents’ deaths, Liesel turns to her only friend—leading her brother, just returned from the war, to an act that will haunt not only both families but the entire town.
Helget’s novel is a story of loyalty and betrayal that, like her earlier book, proves her uncommon understanding of the natural world and human frailties. Both moving and heartfelt, The Turtle Catcher confirms this young writer’s exceptional talent.
One title on her list:MiddlemarchRead about another book on Brown's list.
by George Eliot
1873
My very favorite. In this masterly portrait of provincial life in 19th-century England, George Eliot anatomizes the fictional town of Middlemarch. We witness the ebb and flow of Middlemarchian reputations across hundreds of pages. Prominent among the many characters is Nicholas Bulstrode, a pious banker and pillar of the community who prides himself on his supposed self-denial and probity. But then a guilty secret from his past resurfaces -- in the figure of the blackmailing John Raffles, another banker! This juggernaut Victorian novel has it all when it comes to contemporary themes. As Eliot shows, the trophy wife is nothing new: Another plot thread is the course of the marriage of the decent Dr. Tertius Lydgate and the deadly, dainty Rosamond Vincy, who traps him, with her wheedling extravagance, into a slow descent toward ruin.
About the book, from the publisher:When the French Revolution degenerated into violent factionalism and civil war during the early 1790s, American conservative northeasterners reacted in profound terror. Alarmed by the possibility that the United States would follow her “sister republic” into chaos and civic bloodshed, northern Federalists and their Congregationalist allies reacted by aggressively attacking the violence of the French Revolution and its supposed American votaries. The Reign of Terror in America argues that American fears of the violence of the French Revolution led to antislavery, antiwar, and public education movements in the nineteenth-century United States. It is the first history of how Americans perceived the Reign of Terror, and reveals how significantly fears of French Violence changed the United States. Ultimately, these fears inspired a stark opposition to the violence of slaveholding, provided material for dramatic attacks on southern slavery, and helped to spark the Civil War.Read an excerpt from The Reign of Terror in America.
Nancy Bachrach is living in Paris, selling deodorant to the French, when a freak accident kills her father aboard his cabin cruiser, the aptly dubbed Mr. Fix It, in her incongruously named hometown of Providence. Her mother, Lola, the self-proclaimed “center of the universe,” whose medical history reads like the chapter headings of a psychiatric manual, lies in a coma “on death’s waiting list.” Nancy rushes home and sits by her mother’s ventilator—thinking about Sunny von Bülow and eyeing the plug. Thus begins a family reunion with her brother, Ben (a piano prodigy and eventual surgeon who was born with three thumbs), and sister, Helen (the wild child, now an “abnormal psychologist”).See what book about a crazy mother is featured in Writers Read: Nancy Bachrach.
This is a dark, hilarious tale of genius, madness, ineptitude, collateral damage, and hope—with an ending that’s improbable, as only the truth can be. Aching and tender, unflinching and wry, The Center of the Universe is a multi generational mother-daughter story—a splendid, funny, lyrical book about family, truth, memory, and the resilience of love.
This knockout punch of a thriller from a critically acclaimed author follows a young Cuban detective’s quest for vengeance against her father’s killer in a Colorado mountain townVisit Adrian McKinty's blog.
A man is killed in a hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road in the town of Fairview, Colorado. He is an illegal immigrant in a rich Hollywood resort community not unlike Telluride. No one is prosecuted for his death and his case is quietly forgotten.
Six months later another illegal makes a treacherous run across the border. Barely escaping with her life and sanity intact, she finds work as a maid with one of the employment agencies in Fairview. Secretly, she begins to investigate the shadowy collision that left her father dead.
The maid isn’t a maid. And she’s not Mexican, either. She’s Detective Mercado, a police officer from Havana, and she’s looking for answers: Who killed her father? Was it one of the smooth- talking Hollywood types? Was it a minion of the terrifying county sheriff? And why was her father, a celebrated defector to the United States, hiding in Colorado as the town ratcatcher?
Adrian McKinty’s live-wire prose crackles with intensity as we follow Mercado through the swells of emotion and violence that lead up to a final shocking confrontation.
