At Newsweek, award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin named her five most important books."The Diary of Samuel Pepys" edited by Latham and Matthews.Read more about Tomalin's most important books.
Pepys was a young man on the make; I love his openness and lyrical appreciation of London.
It’s almost summer, and in certain circles, summer means summer share. After an intervention by her three best friends forces her out of a breakup-induced personal hiatus (read: depression), TV producer Tori Miller ditches her old look with the help of a makeover on a reality show pilot. She premieres her new-and-improved self in a rented Hamptons summer house she's sharing with seven complete strangers. Over the next three months, Tori becomes the wing-woman to a glamorous new B.F.F., attempts to win over her house’s prickly Resident Alpha Female, is drawn into a web of secrets by a charming Brit, and suddenly finds herself entangled in one too many complicated romances. But it isn’t long before Tori starts getting tripped up by the many Hamptons Unwritten Rules of Survival, which threaten not only to implode her new, carefully cultivated social standing but more importantly, call into question Tori’s ability to see people for who they truly are, including herself. Ultimately, Tori must decide who she really is, what she wants, and what she’s willing to give up to get there—all by Labor Day.Among the early praise for LoveHampton:
“A perfect teaser for summer fun to come, this breezy novel follows the exploits of a Manhattanite who finds that there’s more to life in a share house than party, party, party.”Read an excerpt from LoveHampton, and learn more about the author and her work at Sherri Rifkin's website and her blog.
–People StyleWatch
“In this breezy book, young New Yorker Tori Miller rents a summer house with seven total strangers in hopes of mending her broken heart by Labor Day. Think The Real World, only juicier.”
–Cosmopolitan Magazine
“In Rifkin’s dazzling debut, Manhattanite media pro Tori Miller shares a posh Hamptons summerhouse with five upwardly mobile 30-somethings. Wanting out of the depressing slide her life takes after being dumped by her first love and losing her dream job, Tori starts MillerWorks, her own TV production company. Still, Tori’s depressed, bringing about an intervention staged by her loyal employees, Jerry and Jimmy, her best friend Alice and the Transformation Trio—three make-over experts who use Tori as the pilot subject for their new reality TV show. Tori flirts with a glamming lifestyle, and her fling with George, a rich playboy with a publicist, while she’s also secretly canoodling with a housemate, banker Andrew Kane, is a recipe for disaster. Tori must think fast on her borrowed Manolos, especially when Cassie Dearborn, her new friend and housemate, needs help with her own disastrous Hampton hijinxs. Hotter than a sand dune in August, cooler than a mojito in South Beach (or Southhampton), this book will appeal to Sex and the City fans and summer beach readers alike.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Sherri Rifkin writes like Edith Wharton’s angry love child. Brilliantly done!”
—E. Jean Carroll, “Ask E. Jean” columnist for Elle and author of Mr. Right, Right Now!
Did Someone Say Participate? by Basar, MiessenRead about the book that topped Galilee's list.
This anthology is essential reading for those caught up in architectural research and practice – or, indeed, anyone with a keen eye for current forms of cultural inquiry and debate.
Anni Koskinen is out of a job. After ten years in the Chicago Police Department, her moral compass led her across the thin blue line to testify against a fellow cop – and, in the aftermath, she lost the only career she ever wanted.Among the early praise for the novel:
As she is putting a new life together, a gentle church worker appears on her doorstep and asks for a ride out of town. It’s not until the FBI gets involved that Anni realizes she has helped a fugitive escape. And not just any fugitive.
It’s hard to grasp that Rosa Saenz, a popular figure in her largely Latino parish, was once involved with a radical faction of the American Indian Movement. It’s even harder to believe that Rosa was responsible for the murder of an FBI agent in 1972.
But even a close friend in the Bureau urges Anni to work with Rosa’s defense team to find out what happened all those years ago. Because it soon becomes clear that it’s more important to the authorities to find Rosa guilty than to find the truth.
Caught in the vortex of a no-holds-barred federal investigation, angry cops who believe she's once again working for the wrong side, and a dangerous group of white supremacists bent on establishing their own version of history, Anni’s investigation into crimes of the past throws her in the path of a clear and present danger. And this time, she stands to lose much more than her job.
Drawing on parallels between counterintelligence practices of the Vietnam War era and today’s hostile climate for civil liberties, In the Wind gathers gale-force strength as the events of the past collide with the present – and, for Anni, the political becomes all too personal.
"Barbara Fister is the heir apparent to Sara Paretsky. IN THE WIND is an intriguing mystery, filled with great characters, an interesting and needed perspective on the city of Chicago, and a strong grounding in the politics and history of the past thirty years. Read it. You'll love it."Read an excerpt from In the Wind, and learn more about the author and her work at Barbara Fister's website and her blog.
--Kris Nelscott Edgar and Shamus award nominated author of the Smokey Dalton series
“An engaging character, a fast-paced plot, and a story that draws thought-provoking parallels between the turbulent 1970s and the world we live in today. An excellent second novel!”
--Marcia Muller, creator of the Sharon McCone series
"A tour de force of masterful storytelling, with scar tissue strong enough to stretch from the Vietnam era to today's assault on civil liberties. And Anni Koskinen is just the character to pull it all together - strong, honest, and caring - and all too capable of demonstrating both the power and danger of past mistakes. With In The Wind, Barbara Fister has created a vivid, intricately plotted and emotionally resonant novel that will stay with you a long, long time."
--Louise Ure, Shamus Award-winning author of The Fault Tree
"To the fine list of tough female PIs like V. I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, and Sharon McCone, eager readers can now add another terrific name: Anni Koskinen. In the Wind is smart and tough, and Barbara Fister, delivers her story with the wallop of a good right cross."
--William Kent Kruger, Anthony award-winning author of the Cork O'Connor series
"Chicago comes to life in this bold, thought-provoking, unabashedly political mystery."
--Sean Chercover, author of Big City Bad Blood and Trigger City
Now I'm reading another sort of tour de force, György Buzsáki's Rhythms of the Brain -- nonfiction, and a serious change of gears -- which is about how the brain's rhythms, the synchronization of the brain waves emitted by its various parts, lie at the heart of our capacity to think and take action. A beautiful, difficult book, dense with beautiful facts and ideas. [read on](In March 2007, György Buzsáki's Rhythms of the Brain was featured at the Page 69 Test.)
Oliver Sacks wrote of Dobbs' Reef Madness:"Brilliantly written, sometimes almost unbearably poignant, Reef Madness provides an enthralling picture of three grand scientific minds: the stormy relationship of Louis and Alexander Agassiz and their fateful enmeshment with Charles Darwin. The coral reef story becomes a micorcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century and which still split them today."Dobbs writes for publications including the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Science Times section, Wired, and Scientific American Mind, where he is a contributing editor. View a selected list of his articles.
Deputy Billy Lafitte is not unfamiliar with the law—he just prefers to enforce it, rather than abide by it. But his rule-bending and bribe-taking have gotten him kicked off the force in Gulfport, Mississippi, and he’s been given a second chance—in the desolate, Siberian wastelands of rural Minnesota. Now Billy’s only got the local girls and local booze to keep him company.Among the early praise for Yellow Medicine:
Until one of the local girls—cute little Drew, bassist for a psychobilly band—asks Billy for help with her boyfriend. Something about the drugs Ian’s been selling, some product he may have lost, and the men who are threatening him because of it. Billy agrees to look into it, and before long he’s speeding down a snowy road, tracking a cell of terrorists, with a severed head in his truck’s cab. And that’s only the start.
“Yellow Medicine starts with one of the most memorable and engaging anti-heroes in recent memory. Mix in bent cops, a psychobilly band called Elvis Antichrist, meth cookers in the Minnesota sticks, and a truly nasty pack of wannabe jihadists. Add a liberal helping of guns, knives and explosives. Serve it up at a breakneck pace in Anthony Neil Smith's stripped-down, unflinching prose style. You're gonna love it. ”Learn more about Yellow Medicine and its author at Anthony Neil Smith's website and his MySpace page.
—J.D. Rhoades, author of A Good Day in Hell
"In Yellow Medicine, Anthony Neil Smith delves into the psyche of a man driven by an outside-the-law concept of right and wrong. Billy is more anti-hero than good guy, with only his devotion to Drew as a saving grace. The plot has a noir feel to it that's heightened by the bleak winter setting, tough characters, and unrelenting suspense. Compelling writing drives this story to a satisfying, if bloody, conclusion."
—Mary Welk, Mystery Scene
"Plenty of action and the usual Smith weird take on things make this one something you'll want to grab as soon as it's in print and take your medicine."
—Bill Crider
Read the full entry.This was the first crime novel I read with old New York City as a setting. But it would certainly not be my last. I credit The Lunatic Fringe with leading me on to Robert J. Randisi’s Bat Masterson novel, The Ham Reporter (1986), William Marshall’s distinguished pair of Virgil Tillman tales, The New York Detective (1989) and Faces in the Crowd (1991), Caleb Carr’s two historical novels, The Alienist (1994) and The Angel of Darkness (1997), E.L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (1994), the pseudonymous J.D. Christilian’s Scarlet Women (1996), Andrew Bergman’s private eye Jack Levine novels, including Tender Is Levine (2001), and Suspension (2000), Richard E. Crabbe’s brilliant story of chicanery centered around the 1880s construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. However, The Lunatic Fringe is the one of those I recall most vividly. Perhaps because I went on to read it two more times, after relishing it so on the first run-through.
Every once in a while, a book linked to China comes along that garners such widely varying reviews that I begin to wonder if the reviewers all had the same text in front of th--Marshal Zeringueem. I had this experience last with Mao: The Unknown Story, a book that I reviewed myself (hint as to my take: George W. Bush claimed to think the tome excellent; he and I rarely see things the same way; this instance was no exception). And now, along comes Wolf Totem. And, once again, disagreements are not just about one aspect of the book but about many.
One veteran reviewer of China books, Jonathan Mirsky, for example, calls Wolf Totem “the best Chinese book I've read for many years,” and presents it as both a gripping tale and one with a nicely subversive anti-authoritarian political edge. He sums up his fondness for it by saying it is “enlightening, poignant, mysterious…a miracle.” Another writer with a long engagement with China, Linda Jaivin, by contrast, noting that the book’s fans liken it to Herman Melville’s best known novel, writes that the prose is “so bloated with banality, repetition and cliché, that comparisons to Moby Dick, to my mind, relate only to the ratio of blubber to ambergris.” As for its politics, she finds these worrisome enough to inspire the rhetorical question: “Is sentimentality the last refuge of the crypto-fascist?”
I’m not going to enter the reviewing fray here, but do I think, given how much interest the book has generated, a quirky sort of list of five is in order. By the time readers get to number 5, they will have more than enough links to get a sense of the incredible diversity of the responses Wolf Totem has generated.... [read on]
Paramedic Lauren Yates stumbles into a world of trouble the night she discovers a killer and his victim in an inner Sydney alley. When the killer threatens to make her life hell if she tells the police what she’s seen, she believes him – he’s Thomas Werner, her sister’s violent ex, father to Lauren’s niece, and not a man to cross.Among the early praise for The Darkest Hour:
But when another victim of a stabbing reveals to Lauren with his dying breath that Werner attacked him, too, she finds herself with blood on her hands and Detective Ella Marconi on her back. Ella is keen to cement her temporary placement in the homicide squad and views Lauren as the perfect witness for this latest murder because she can testify to the victim’s last words.
Ella soon realises Lauren is hiding something, however, and while her colleagues label her suspicion an obsession, she begins her own investigation. But the harder Ella pushes, the more Lauren resists, and the worse the threat from Werner becomes, putting them both in increasingly serious jeopardy.
"The Darkest Hour is the follow up to Katherine Howell's superb debut thriller Frantic and succeeds in maintaining the momentum that was initiated with the first book. Returning is homicide detective Ella Marconi but she is one half of this dual protagonist story. In a rarity for crime novels, The Darkest Hour features two strong female lead characters with paramedic Lauren Yates filling the other role.... Importantly to the success of the book, The Darkest Hour sits on a thoroughly absorbing plot but it's the character development that gives the story substance. We are introduced further into Ella Marconi's life during the course of the book and gain a deeper understanding of the pressures she faces other than her work. Equally, the complex emotional jungle that tangles Lauren Yates' life ensures that the reader takes a stake in her welfare and cares about how she is treated in adverse circumstances.... Katherine Howell has again combined a solid police procedural thriller with the adrenaline-charged uncertainty of a paramedic's daily life. This is novel that exudes strength as a quality crime thriller, it's emotion charged action and relentlessly fast paced."Read an excerpt from The Darkest Hour, and learn more about the author and her work at Katherine Howell's website.
--Australian Crime Fiction Database
Volk’s Game tells the story of the theft of a long-lost Leonardo Da Vinci painting from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The story takes place against the backdrop of post-Soviet Russia, a country still captured in the flaming embrace of change.Visit the Volk's Game website, read Chapter One, and watch the video trailer.
The novel was recently optioned, so I suppose now is as good a time as any to dream about the cast and director for the movie.
The title character, Volk, is both a Russian army colonel and a gangster, one of those men perfectly positioned to take advantage of Russia’s latest economic model: capitalism sucked through the filter of a police state. But Volk wants something more from his life and Da Vinci’s painting gives him the chance to obtain it, to find something good amid all the evil that surrounds him. Brooding, conflicted, violent, and passionate about the painting—Volk is deep, but definitely not the expressive type. The actor who plays him will have to possess a menacing on-screen presence and the ability to reveal his emotions through action instead of words. My nominee is...[read on]
MOONRAKER by Ian FlemingRead more about Faulks' list.
Early Bond. He doesn't sleep with the girl and the big dénouement is in Kent. It breaks all the rules and it really only has three scenes. But what good scenes they are.
LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
Ludic, dandified, euphuistic - and then some. Nabokov's most story-driven book. The hero in the end is not H.H., Lolita or moral ambivalence, but Style.
Filled with a remarkable cast of characters and set against the backdrop of imperial Russia, this tale of forbidden romance could be the stuff of a great historical novel. But in fact The Pearl tells a true tale, reconstructed in part from archival documents that have lain untouched for centuries. Douglas Smith presents the most complete and accurate account ever written of the illicit love between Count Nicholas Sheremetev (1751-1809), Russia’s richest aristocrat, and Praskovia Kovalyova (1768-1803), his serf and the greatest opera diva of her time.Among the praise for The Pearl:
Blessed with a beautiful voice, Praskovia began her training in Nicholas’s operatic company as a young girl. Like all the members of Nicholas’s troupe, Praskovia was one of his own serfs. But unlike the others, she utterly captured her master’s heart. The book reconstructs Praskovia’s stage career as “The Pearl” and the heartbreaking details of her romance with Nicholas—years of torment before their secret marriage, the outrage of the aristocracy when news of the marriage emerged, Praskovia’s death only days after delivering a son, and the unyielding despair that followed Nicholas to the end of his life. Written with grace and style, The Pearl sheds light on the world of the Russian aristocracy, music history, and Russian attitudes toward serfdom. But above all, the book tells a haunting story of love against all odds.
“The Pearl is a bright, sparkling jewel of a book; a masterpiece that deserves as large an audience as possible. Russia’s greatest love story has never been properly told, until now.”Read more about The Pearl at Douglas Smith's website.
--Amanda Foreman, author of the #1 bestselling Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
“The Pearl is a book I've always wanted to see written--a portrait of one of the greatest and least known love stories in European history. Douglas Smith, a brilliant historian who writes like a novelist, has brought it to life in a rare blend of meticulous research and gripping emotional narrative that opens to the reader both the recondite world of Russian serf theater, and an extraordinary human drama. Mesmerizing”
--Andrea Lee, author of Russian Journal and Interesting Women
“Far more than the ‘pearl’ of its title, this is a dazzling, multi-faceted jewel of a book which can be admired and read by scholars and lovers of romantic tragedy alike. It is a remarkable work of dual biography; it is also an unforgettable story.”
--Robert K. Massie, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Nicholas and Alexandra and Peter the Great
A Guggenheim, Civitella Ranieri, and Berlin Prize Fellow, Nicholas Dawidoff is currently the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow atThe more I read, the more I realize how much I will never read—a forlorn truth that so oppressed my grandfather he went ahead and calculated how many books he would complete in his lifetime. Discovering that the number was a mere five thousand, he plunged even deeper into despond. What revived him is what buoys me, the promise of all that was waiting out there for him. On that glistening shelf of my future I include books of my past. I seem to spend a lot of time returning to books I’ve already read; every time I begin again the experience deepens. Recent books in that respect are Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It which is among the most beautiful and haunting stories about family I have ever read.... [read on]
Princeton University. His books include The Fly Swatter, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and In the Country of Country, which was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Conde Nast Traveller. His first book, The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life Of Moe Berg, was a national bestseller and appeared on many best book lists.
It was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold.Among the early acclaim for The Billionaire’s Vinegar:
In 1985, at a heated auction by Christie’s of London, a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite Bordeaux—one of a cache of bottles unearthed in a bricked-up Paris cellar and supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson—went for $156,000 to a member of the Forbes family. The discoverer of the bottle was pop-band manager turned wine collector Hardy Rodenstock, who had a knack for finding extremely old and exquisite wines. But rumors about the bottle soon arose. Why wouldn’t Rodenstock reveal the exact location where it had been found? Was it part of a smuggled Nazi hoard? Or did his reticence conceal an even darker secret?
It would take more than two decades for those questions to be answered and involve a gallery of intriguing players—among them Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding British auctioneer who speaks of wines as if they are women and staked his reputation on the record-setting sale; Serena Sutcliffe, Broadbent’s elegant archrival, whose palate is covered by a hefty insurance policy; and Bill Koch, the extravagant Florida tycoon bent on exposing the truth about Rodenstock.
Pursuing the story from Monticello to London to Zurich to Munich and beyond, Benjamin Wallace also offers a mesmerizing history of wine, complete with vivid accounts of subterranean European laboratories where old vintages are dated and of Jefferson’s colorful, wine-soaked days in France, where he literally drank up the culture.
Suspenseful, witty, and thrillingly strange, The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the vintage tale of what could be the most elaborate con since the Hitler diaries. It is also the debut of an exceptionally powerful new voice in narrative non-fiction.
“It is the fine details—the bouquet, the body, the notes, the finish–that make this book such a lasting pleasure, to be savored and remembered long after the last page is turned. Ben Wallace has told a splendid story just wonderfully, his touch light and deft, his instinct pitch-perfect. Of all the marvelous legends of the wine trade, this curiously unforgettable saga most amply deserves the appellation: a classic.”Read an excerpt from The Billionaire’s Vinegar, and learn more about the book and author at Benjamin Wallace's website.
—Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and A Crack in the Edge of the World
“The Billionaire’s Vinegar is the ultimate page-turner. Written with literary intelligence, it has a cast of characters like something out of Fawlty Towers meets The Departed. It takes you into a subculture so deep and delicious, you can almost taste the wine that turns so many seemingly rational people into madmen. It is superb nonfiction.”
—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights
“[Wallace] offers a revealing look at the influx into the esoteric field of wine connoisseurship of major-player egos and big money, which created a tricky and rarified market similar to that for expensive art—and encouraged fakes in both…There's no denying the appeal of this enthrallingly mad and recondite subject.”
—Kirkus
“Terrific.”
—Slate
“A riveting wine history, wine mystery, and more”
—Food & Wine
“Wallace sips the story slowly, taking leisurely digressions into techniques for faking wine and detecting same with everything from Monticello scholarship to nuclear physics. He paints a colorful backdrop of eccentric oenophiles, decadent tastings and overripe flavor rhetoric… Investigating wines so old and rare they could taste like anything, he playfully questions the very foundations of connoisseurship.”
—Publishers Weekly
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an alien race, a race gone for hundreds of thousands of years. But then an archeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon: a weapon that will destroy the entire colony, and its star, if they cannot deactivate it.Among the praise for Mike Brotherton's work:
Evidence at the site suggests that the weapon was created for the ancient Argonauts by another race, a race of traders. And within that evidence are a map of their interstellar trading empire, and the coordinates of their main trading station. Although the information is a hundred thousand years out of date, the only hope for Argo is to send a ship and crew into the unknown, to try to negotiate for a way to shut down the weapon.
Read the prologue and first four chapters of Spider Star. Learn more about the author and his work at Mike Brotherton's website.“Humans on the planet Argo have long used the alien technology left by the world's former inhabitants, called Argonauts. When a group of archaeologists accidentally triggers a doomsday weapon that must be deactivated or it will destroy the human colony, the planet sends out a ship and crew on a desperate mission-to find the ancient trading race who had created the weapon for the Argonauts. Brotherton, the author of Star Dragon and an astronomy professor, writes convincingly of a distant future, crafting personal stories out of an oversize adventure.”
--Library Journal
“Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel. An amazingly detailed world and a story full of scientific wonder.”--Publishers Weekly on Star Dragon
“Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence (in the form of the ship's brain, which is modeled on Ernest Hemingway), bioscience, and other things...a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard-science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love.”--Booklist, starred review
I've reached the age when I realize that there are a finite number of books I will be able to read in my lifetime. So I'm now making my way through books I've been meaning to read as long as I can remember. I'm trying to read novels, because my regular line of work--writing about science--normally leaves me reading journal papers and reviews late into the night. Right now I'm finishing up The Red and the Black. It's wonderful but quite strange in some ways. Stendhal will spend pages and pages on the hero's mulling how to steal a ladder, but spend a brief paragraph on the climax of a major political plot. [read on]Zimmer's previous books include Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Parasite Rex--"as fine a book as one will find on the subject" according to Scientific
American--and Soul Made Flesh, a history of the brain, which was named one of the top 100 books of 2004 by the New York Times Book Review.
More fascinating than fiction, Seduced by Secrets takes the reader inside the real world of one of the most effective and feared spy agencies in history. The book reveals, for the first time, the secret technical methods and sources of the Stasi (East German Ministry for State Security) as it stole secrets from abroad and developed gadgets at home, employing universal, highly guarded techniques often used by other spy and security agencies. Seduced by Secrets draws on secret files from the Stasi archives, including CIA-acquired material, interviews and friendships, court documents, and unusual visits to spy sites, including "breaking into" a prison, to demonstrate that the Stasi overestimated the power of secrets to solve problems and created an insular spy culture more intent on securing its power than protecting national security. It recreates the Stasi's secret world of technology through biographies of agents, defectors, and officers and by visualizing James Bond–like techniques and gadgets. In this highly original book, Kristie Macrakis adds a new dimension to our understanding of the East German Ministry for State Security by bringing the topic into the realm of espionage history and exiting the political domain.Among the early acclaim for Seduced by Secrets:
“Thoroughly researched, Seduced by Secrets gives us an important, unmatched, insider account of East German intelligence. Kristie Macrakis writes with a scholar’s eye and novelist’s skills, revealing secrets and spy tradecraft never meant for public disclosure.”Read an excerpt from the book, and visit the Seduced by Secrets website and Kristie Macrakis' faculty webpage.
--Pete Earley, best-selling author of Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War
“This book on the vaunted GDR secret service provides a fascinating inside view of the Stasi’s spying efforts as well as technologies. Written in an accessible style, it is nonetheless based on exhaustive research in the Stasi files and many oral interviews. The first part paints vivid pictures of some of the major spy cases of the Cold War. The second part, which will gladden the heart of any espionage aficionado, discusses spy technology from invisible ink to smell samples. The result is a remarkable and readable synthesis of the East German spying operations.”
--Konrad Jarausch, Lurcy Professor of European Civilization, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Easily the most detailed, painstaking research yet undertaken on the Stasi’s techniques and secrets. Certainly the most absorbing analysis of an organization hitherto steeped in mystery.”
--Nigel West, Director of Counterintelligence Studies, The Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Washington DC
"Seduced by Secrets makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of how the Stasi did what it did..."
--Daniel Johnson, Commentary
A classic book that disappointed:Read more about Randall Kennedy's most important books.
W.E.B. DuBois's "The Souls of Black Folk" is one of the most lauded books in the African-American canon, but I found it disappointingly thin.
A classic you've never read:
Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Why? Laziness.
Jane, a loving mother of two, has drowned her toddler son and is charged with his murder in this powerful examination of love, loss, and family legacy. When a prosecutor decides Jane's husband Tom is partially to blame for the death and charges him with "failure to protect," Tom's attorney proposes a radical defense. He plans to create reasonable doubt about his client's alleged guilt by showing that Jane's genealogy is the cause of her violence, and that she inherited her latent violence in the same way she might inherit a talent for music or a predisposition to disease. He argues that no one could predict or prevent the tragedy, and that Tom cannot be held responsible.Among the early praise for the novel:
With the help of a woman gifted with the power of retrocognition—the ability to see past events through objects once owned by the deceased—the defense theory of dark biology takes form. An unforgettable journey through the troubled minds and souls of eight of Jane's ancestors (named below), spanning decades and continents, this debut novel deftly illustrates the ways nature and nurture weave the fabric of one woman's life, and renders a portrait of one man left in its tragic wake.
"Harrington begins with a fascinating premise and develops it fully. This debut novel is as much character study as a legal thriller."Read an excerpt from Janeology and learn more about Karen Harrington at her website or visit her blog.
--Booklist
"In a thriller world saturated with James Pattersons, John Grishams and Stephen Kings, this debut novel from Karen Harrington comes as a breath of fresh air."
--New Mystery Reader
"Not only is Harrington a masterful conjurer of a suspenseful thriller, but she is also a wordsmith able to maintain the reader's attention and involvement in her masterful exploration of the science of psychology, genetics, and the fascination with the concept of retrocognition, all the while unraveling a mystery not unlike decoding a strand of DNA."
--Grady Harp, Amazon Vine Voice
Nicholas Dawidoff's books include The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg and the newly released The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball.The NaturalRead about the book that topped Dawidoff's list.
by Bernard Malamud
Harcourt, Brace, 1952"The Natural" is a great American novel, undervalued because people think of it as that lower form, a sports book. Bernard Malamud, himself an undervalued writer, said that he "threw everything in" to this allegorical account of Roy Hobbs, the gifted and tragic young phenom who "coulda been a king." Instead, he ends up part Ulysses, part Shoeless Joe Jackson. I was raised by a schoolteacher who said that "The Natural" explodes the fantasy of American innocence with more art and moral subtlety than "The Great Gatsby." Back then, my boat sailed hard against that current. Older now, I read these two novels about the bitter yearning to relive a shimmering past and I see how she could have thought so.
The latest contributor to Writers Read: Sarah Anderson, whose latest books include the second edition of Inside Notting Hill, co-authored with Miranda Davies, and Halfway to Venus: A One-Armed Journey, her memoir and story of living with one arm.
The novel I finished most recently is Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, a book I had been meaning to read for years. I found it intensely moving and couldn’t believe that it had first been published in 1948. I found myself sobbing on buses (where I do a lot of my reading) – a very powerful book. [read on]Read more about Halfway to Venus.
Shut Up, I'm Talking is a smart, hilarious insider take on Israeli politics that reads like the bastard child of Thomas Friedman and David Sedaris. Now a political writer for Salon, Gregory Levey stumbled into a job as speechwriter for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations at age twenty-five and suddenly found himself, like a latter-day Zelig, in the company of foreign ministers, U.S. senators, and heads of state. Much to his surprise, he was soon attending U.N. sessions and drafting official government statements. The situation got stranger still when he was transferred to Jerusalem to write speeches for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.Among the early praise for the memoir:
Shut Up, I'm Talking is a startling account of Levey's journey into the nerve center of Middle Eastern politics at one of the most turbulent times in Israeli history. During his three years in the Israeli government, the Second Intifada continued on in fits and starts, Yasser Arafat died, Hamas came to power, and Ariel Sharon fell into a coma. Levey was repeatedly thrust into highly improbable situations -- from being the sole "Israeli" delegate (even though he's Canadian) at the U.N. General Assembly, with no idea how "his" country wanted to vote; to nearly inciting an international incident with his high school French translation of an Arab diplomat's anti-Israel remarks; to communicating with Israeli intelligence about the suspected perpetrators of suicide bombings; to being offered leftover salami from Ariel Sharon's lunch. As Levey got better acquainted with the personalities in the government's inner sanctum, he witnessed firsthand the improvisational and ridiculously casual nature of the country's behind-the-scenes leadership -- and realized that he wasn't the only one faking his way through politics.
With sharp insight and great appreciation for the absurd, Levey offers the first-ever look inside Israel's politics from the perspective of a complete outsider, ultimately concluding that the Israeli government is no place for a nice Jewish boy.
"This brilliant and blindingly funny book is like a nonfictional season of The West Wing set in the Knesset. If you ever wanted an insider tale about why the Middle East is such a complicated, heartrending, and yet unbelievably compelling saga then look no further. Gregory Levey has captured the soul of this conflict with charm, grace, and diplomatic wit."Read an excerpt from Shut Up, I’m Talking, and learn more about the book and its author at Gregory Levey's website and his blog.
--Matthew Polly, bestselling author of American Shaolin
"In Levey’s insightful, often hilarious memoir, the political writer chronicles his meteoric rise from seriously underqualified speechwriter for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations to seriously underqualified speechwriter for Ariel Sharon. Along the way, he provides an amusing—almost frightening—insider’s view of the surprisingly cavalier nature of contemporary Israeli government, politics, and diplomacy."
--Margaret Flanagan, Booklist
"A funny, sometimes horrifying look at the inner workings of international government agencies.... [Levey] makes speechwriting seem cooler than even Aaron Sorkin imagined.... Read it for the hilarity and the keen portraiture, but try to pretend these people don't actually make decisions about the fate of the world."
--Kirkus Reviews
My most recent book, Late Night Talking, is about a late night radio talk show host who vents with her listeners about the everyday aggravations of modern life, from rude cell phone users and poor gym etiquette, to bad drivers and people who don’t clean up after their dogs. Jeannie Sterling is passionate about making the world a better place, one annoying person at a time.Visit Leslie Schnur's website and read an excerpt from Late Night Talking.
Jeannie is me.
Or I am she.
Except I spend my days writing books and am usually too intimidated to ask someone to get off her cell phone in a restaurant or wipe his sweat off the bike at the gym.
Jeannie gets into some trouble with her best friend, Luce, who is also me, and has poignant memories of her mother, long dead, who is also me. Except for the dead part.
When I write, I imagine the actors who could play the roles. But since all the female characters are me, this is very difficult and depends on how much chocolate I ate the night before and how I feel about the writing I’ve done that day, or whether it is a big budget production or an indie. Should Jeannie be played by.... [read on]
San Francisco pastry chef Mary Ryan is back at her old alma mater. Initially ecstatic to be teaching, Mary finds herself trying to straddle both worlds, caught between her original mentors and her contemporaries.Among the early praise for the novel:
To make matters worse, Homicide Detective O‚’Connor has enrolled as a student, claiming to be on disability from the San Francisco Police Department.
In the middle of this turf war, Mary is confronted by the dean Robert Benson. Mary must either force Coolie Martin to leave the school or lose her job. Why would Coolie‚’s father, a member of the Board of Directors, allow this to happen? But when faculty and staff begin dying, Mary thinks that Coolie‚’s forced exit might only be part of a larger, more sinister plot.
Acting on a hint from O‚’Connor, Mary contacts the only person who can help her: nemesis Thom Woods. Will Mary and Thom uncover the truth before another chef bakes his last pie?
"The growing rift between the 'dinosaurs' and the 'young brats' on the teaching staff at San Francisco's École d'Epicure fuels the highly amusing action in Johnson's superior second cozy to feature funky pastry chef Mary Ryan (after 2002's Beat Until Stiff). This enjoyable romp should gain Johnson new fans."Learn more about Roux Morgue and its author at Claire M. Johnson's website and her blog.
--Publishers Weekly
"Girl Power! The chick-lit mystery subgenre has been reinventing itself for a while.... Claire Johnson uses a culinary school in Roux Morgue to illustrate how a young chef can be exceptional both at her profession and snooping around solving murders."
--Library Journal
"Sexual tension, cooking tips and a neatly packaged mystery. All in all, a tasty tale."
--Kirkus
Andy Cave is a world-class Alpinist and the author of Learning to Breathe and Thin White Line.For me, the best books on Alpinism describe those who have genuinely pushed the boundaries of what is possible. Successful mountaineering literature, however, must do more than just transport the reader to an alien, frozen world through evocative prose and original metaphor. The best have emotional depth, allowing the reader to engage with the protagonists' internal thoughts and motives. Done well, the common theme of courage overcoming adversity can inspire us to seek new challenges in our own lives.Read about Number One on Cave's list.A Slender Thread by Stephen Venables
This is a superb, nailbiting account of a British alpinist's narrow escape from death during an expedition to the Indian Himalayas. An exceptional mountaineer, Venables was the first Briton to ascend Everest without oxygen, and did so by a new route. But he is also a gifted writer willing to depict the fraught tensions among the disparate group of talented, determined individuals with whom he is climbing. Venables' vivid descriptions of the earth's high and wild places combined with the gripping action make this a must-read.
Many would be surprised to learn that the preferred method of birth control in the United States today is actually surgical sterilization. This book takes an historical look at the sterilization movement in post-World War II America, a revolution in modern contraceptive behavior. Focusing on leaders of the sterilization movement from the 1930's through the turn of the century, this book explores the historic linkages between environment, civil liberties, eugenics, population control, sex education, marriage counseling, and birth control movements in the 20th-century United States.Learn more about The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century at the Oxford University Press website.
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