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An American Childhood
by Annie Dillard

ISBN 0060915188 (0-06-091518-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Annie Dillard remembers. She remembers the exhilaration of whipping a snowball at a car and having it hit straight on. She remembers playing with the skin on her mother's knuckles, which "didn't snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge." She remembers the compulsion to spend a whole afternoon (or many whole afternoons) endlessly pitching a ball at a target. In this intoxicating account of her childhood, Dillard climbs back inside her 5-, 10-, and 15-year-old selves with apparent effortlessness. The voracious young Dillard embraces headlong one fascination after another--from drawing to rocks and bugs to the French symbolists. "Everywhere, things snagged me," she writes. "The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world." From her parents she inherited a love of language--her mother's speech was "an endlessly interesting, swerving path"--and the understanding that "you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself," not for anyone else's approval or desire. And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in An American Childhood merely youthful; "still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day," she writes, "as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive." [via]
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Annals Former World
by John McPhie

ISBN 0374105197 (0-374-10519-7)
Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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More editions of Annals Former World:
- Annals Former World: ISBN 0374105197 (0-374-10519-7)
  Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Annals of the Former World
by John McPhee

ISBN 0374518734 (0-374-51873-4)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:
In 1978 New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee set out making notes for an ambitious project: a geological history of North America, centered, for the sake of convenience, on the 40th parallel, a history that encompasses billions of years. In 1981 he published the first of the four books that would come from his research: Basin and Range, a study of the mountainous lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. Two years later came In Suspect Terrain, a grand overview of the Appalachian mountain system. In 1986 McPhee released Rising from the Plains, a history of the Rocky Mountains set largely in Wyoming. And in 1993 came Assembling California, a survey of the area geologists find to be a laboratory of volcanic and tectonic processes, a place where geology can be watched in the making. Annals of the Former World gathers these four volumes, which McPhee always conceived of as a whole, to make that epic of the Earth's formation; to it he adds a fifth book, Crossing the Craton, which introduces the continent's ancient core, underlying what is now Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.
McPhee's great virtue as a journalist covering the sciences--and any other of the countless subjects he has taken on, for that matter--is his ability to distill and explain complex matters: here, for example, the processes of mineral deposition or of plate tectonics. He does so by allowing geologists to speak for themselves and an entertaining lot they are, those sometimes odd men and women who puzzle out the landscape for clues to its most ancient past. Annals of the Former World is a magisterial work of popular science for which geologists--and devotees of good writing--will be grateful. --Gregory McNamee [via]
More editions of Annals of the Former World:
- Annals of the Former World: ISBN 0374105200 (0-374-10520-0)
  Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- Annals of the Former World: ISBN 0374518734 (0-374-51873-4)
  Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux
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The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People
by Susan Orlean

ISBN 0375758631 (0-375-75863-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Susan Orlean, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Orchid Thief, has always been drawn to the extraordinary in the ordinary, so when her Esquire editor asked her to profile the child actor Macaulay Culkin using the title "The American Man at Age Ten," she insisted instead on writing about a "typical" kid. The result--one of the 20 profiles drawn from magazines such as Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone for this collection--is a vivid window into the life of an ordinary and endearing boy from New Jersey who grapples with girls, environmental destruction, and the magical childhood landscape "that erodes from memory a little bit every day." Orlean has two tricks up her sleeve that make her profiles irresistible. First, she's got a mean hook. Take this lead: "Of all the guys who are standing around bus shelters in Manhattan dressed in nothing but their underpants, Marky Mark is undeniably the most polite." Second, she has an uncanny way of drawing her subjects. Bill Blass "is a virtuoso of the high-pitched eyebrow and the fortissimo gasp," while a boxer (the dog kind) wears "the earnest and slightly careworn expression of a small-town mayor."
Orlean is a New Yorker herself, and most of her subjects hail from the Big Apple, including such unique personas as a real estate broker who can describe the inside of almost any apartment in the city ("Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal experience"); Nat, the new tailor at Manhattan Valet; her hairdresser; the city's most popular clown; an Ashanti king who drives a taxi; and the owner of the only buttons-only store in America. The author is keenly observant and always tries to walk in her subject's shoes, even when it's a show dog ("If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale"). When she does tackle the rich and famous, she uses these same talents to create portraits so intimate and zesty they're unlike any other. Orlean writes that her only justification for choosing a story is that she cares about it, and it shows. Her fondness for her subjects rubs off as she draws us into the tight and exquisite focus of their mundane and fascinating lives. --Lesley Reed [via]
More editions of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People:
- The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup : My Encounters with Extraordinary People: ISBN 0679462988 (0-679-46298-8)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
- The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People: ISBN 0375758631 (0-375-75863-1)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Control of Nature
by John McPhee

ISBN 0374522596 (0-374-52259-6)
Softcover, Noonday Pr

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Book summary:
Master how-it-works writer John McPhee has instructed his readers in the arcana of how oranges are commercially graded, how mountains form, how canoes are built and oceans crossed. In The Control of Nature he turns his attention once more to geology and the human struggle against nature. In one sketch, he explores the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' unrealized plan to divert the flow of the Mississippi River into a tributary, the Atchafalaya, for flood control; in another, he looks at the ingenious ways in which an Icelandic engineer saved a southern harbor on that island from being destroyed by a lava flow; in a third, he examines a complex scheme to protect Los Angeles from boulders ejected from mountains by compression and tectonic movement. As always, McPhee combines a deep knowledge of his subject with a narrative approach that is wholly accessible; you may not have thought you were interested in earthquakes and flood control, but he gently leads you to take a passionate concern in such matters. [via]
More editions of The Control of Nature:
- The Control of Nature: ISBN 0374128901 (0-374-12890-1)
  Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- The Control of Nature: ISBN 0374522596 (0-374-52259-6)
  Softcover, Noonday Pr
Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life
by Philip Gerard

ISBN 157766339X (1-57766-339-X)
Softcover, Waveland Pr Inc

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Book summary:
In Creative Nonfiction, Philip Gerard offers would-be writers instruction and advice to help them create compelling nonfiction pieces. He uses one of his own pieces as an example, and takes the reader step by step through the writing process.' [via]
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Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
by David Sedaris

ISBN 0316010790 (0-316-01079-0)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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Book summary:
It just isnt fair: most of us would be lucky to be able to express ourselves in writing half as well as David Sedaris does in his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. But on top of his skills with the written word, the author also has substantial gifts as a performer, and he proves this on the audio version of the book. In his essay The Change in Me,Sedaris remembers that his mother was good at imitating people, and its clear that he takes after her. Whether hes doing impressions of high-voiced brother Paul, or recalling times when he and his sisters tried to win good karma by speaking and acting like well-behaved, fairytale children, Sedariss nuanced performance hits the right note on both the opening, comedic stories, and the more poignant essays that tend to come later in the reading. In fact, for those who have already read some of the best stories in other publications including The New Yorker, the CD or cassette version of this collection is probably the best bet for furthering your appreciation of the material.
Sedariss career is closely linked with two things: audio (he was discovered by NPRs Ira Glass), and the personal lives of himself and his family. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, he describes fights with his boyfriend, and his sister-in-laws difficult pregnancy. When sister Lisa complains about the stories involving the family, he writes about that, too. Sedaris's latest provides more evidence that he is a great humorist, memoirist and raconteur, and readers are lucky to have the opportunity to know him so well. Perhaps they are luckier still not to know him personally. --Leah Weathersby [via]
More editions of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim:
- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim: ISBN 0316143464 (0-316-14346-4)
  Hardcover, Little Brown & Co
- Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim: ISBN 0316010790 (0-316-01079-0)
  Softcover, Little Brown & Co
The Force of Spirit
by Scott Russell Sanders

ISBN 0807062979 (0-8070-6297-9)
Softcover, Beacon Pr

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More editions of The Force of Spirit:
- The Force of Spirit: ISBN 0807062960 (0-8070-6296-0)
  Hardcover, Beacon Pr
- The Force of Spirit: ISBN 0807062979 (0-8070-6297-9)
  Softcover, Beacon Pr
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The Fourth Genre : Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Non-Fiction
by Robert L. Root, Michael Steinberg

ISBN 0205426050 (0-205-42605-0)
Softcover, Pearson Education Canada

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Book summary:
This best-selling anthology is a comprehensive and indispensable introduction and guide to the way creative nonfiction is written today. An anthology in Part I introduces readers to works by exemplary contemporary writers in the genre of creative nonfictionAnnie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, among others. Part II presents articles discussing the forms and issues surrounding the fourth genre, including pieces by writers whose work appears in Part I. Part III pairs essays and memoirs with articles by their authors explaining their composing processes when they wrote the essay. Ideal for individuals interested in learning to write contemporary creative nonfiction. [via]
More editions of The Fourth Genre : Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Non-Fiction:
- The Fourth Genre : Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Non-Fiction: ISBN 0205426050 (0-205-42605-0)
  Softcover, Pearson Education Canada
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The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/on Creative Nonfiction
by Michael Steinberg, Robert L. Root

ISBN 0321434846 (0-321-43484-6)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group

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Book summary:
The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, 2/e is a comprehensive and indispensable introduction and guide to the way creative nonfiction is written today. The selections represent a wide range of contemporary creative nonfiction, including examples in essay, memoir, literary journalism, and cultural criticism. These readings establish a thorough grounding in the nature of the genre and provide excellent models for writing. The articles about nonfiction forms, issues, and writing strategies in Part II, mostly written by authors whose work appears in Part I, give readers an inside view of the writers' creative processes. Part III consists of essays and memoirs paired with articles by their authors discussing the essays' creation and the writers' methods and strategies. Introductions to each part provide an overview of that section, preparing readers for the selections to come. Two alternative tables of contents organize the readings by subgenres and approaches, connecting the three distinctive sections of the book. For anyone interested in writing creative non-fiction. [via]
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Great Plains
by Ian Frazier

ISBN 0140131701 (0-14-013170-1)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Book summary:
National Bestseller

With his unique blend of intrepidity, tongue-in-cheek humor, and wide-eyed wonder, Ian Frazier takes us on a journey of more than 25,000 miles up and down and across the vast and myth-inspiring Great Plains. A travelogue, a work of scholarship, and a western adventure, Great Plains takes us from the site of Sitting Bulls cabin, to an abandoned house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde, to the scene of the murders chronicled in Truman Capotes In Cold Blood. It is an expedition that reveals the heart of the American West.
[via]
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers

ISBN 1568959095 (1-56895-909-5)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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National Bestseller The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback for decades to come. The Vintage edition includes a new appendix by the author. [via]
More editions of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: ISBN 0375725784 (0-375-72578-4)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: ISBN 1568959095 (1-56895-909-5)
  Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc
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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : A Memoir Based on a True Story
by Dave Eggers

ISBN 0684863472 (0-684-86347-2)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:").
But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)
The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting.
All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park [via]
More editions of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : A Memoir Based on a True Story:
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : A Memoir Based on a True Story: ISBN 0684863472 (0-684-86347-2)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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High Tide in Tucson
by Barbara Kingsolver

ISBN 0060927569 (0-06-092756-9)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
The bestselling author of Animal Dreams and Pigs in Heaven brings her acclaimed voice to the essay, in a handsomely designed book. High Tide in Tucson provides readers with a reflection of Kingsolver's sensibility and creativity, as she constantly examines the urgent business of being alive. 25 line drawings. [via]
More editions of High Tide in Tucson:
- High Tide in Tucson: ISBN 0786206306 (0-7862-0630-6)
  Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
- High Tide in Tucson: ISBN 0060927569 (0-06-092756-9)
  Softcover, Harpercollins
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High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never
by Barbara Kingsolver, Paul Mirocha

ISBN 0060172916 (0-06-017291-6)
Hardcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited

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Book summary:
Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven.
In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Her canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find instructions for life in surprising places: a museum of atomic bomb relics, a West African voodoo love charm, a family of paper dolls, the ethics of a wild pig who persistently invades a garden, a battle of wills with a two-year-old, or a troop of oysters who observe high tide in the middle of Illinois.
In sharing her thoughts about the urgent business of being alive, Kingsolver the essayist employs the same keen eyes, persuasive tongue, and understanding heart that characterize her acclaimed fiction. Defiant, funny, courageously honest, High Tide in Tucson proves once again that "there is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature."--Washington Post Book World [via]
More editions of High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never:
- High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never: ISBN 0060172916 (0-06-017291-6)
  Hardcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
by Truman Capote

ISBN 1568491522 (1-56849-152-2)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Book summary:
"Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. [via]
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Isaac's Storm
by Erik Larson, Isaac Monroe Cline

ISBN 0375708278 (0-375-70827-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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On September 8, 1900, a massive hurricane slammed into Galveston, Texas. A tidal surge of some four feet in as many seconds inundated the city, while the wind destroyed thousands of buildings. By the time the water and winds subsided, entire streets had disappeared and as many as 10,000 were dead--making this the worst natural disaster in America's history.
In Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson blends science and history to tell the story of Galveston, its people, and the hurricane that devastated them. Drawing on hundreds of personal reminiscences of the storm, Larson follows individuals through the fateful day and the storm's aftermath. There's Louisa Rollfing, who begged her husband, August, not to go into town the morning of the storm; the Ursuline Sisters at St. Mary's orphanage who tied their charges to lengths of clothesline to keep them together; Judson Palmer, who huddled in his bathroom with his family and neighbors, hoping to ride out the storm. At the center of it all is Isaac Cline, employee of the nascent Weather Bureau, and his younger brother--and rival weatherman--Joseph. Larson does an excellent job of piecing together Isaac's life and reveals that Isaac was not the quick-thinking hero he claimed to be after the storm ended. The storm itself, however, is the book's true protagonist--and Larson describes its nuances in horrific detail.
At times the prose is a bit too purple, but Larson is engaging and keeps the book's tempo rising in pace with the wind and waves. Overall, Isaac's Storm recaptures at a time when, standing in the first year of the century, Americans felt like they ruled the world--and that even the weather was no real threat to their supremacy. Nature proved them wrong. --Sunny Delaney [via]
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Isaac's Storm: The Drowning of Galveston, 8 September 1900
by Erik Larson

ISBN 0756765862 (0-7567-6586-2)
Hardcover, Diane Pub Co

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More editions of Isaac's Storm: The Drowning of Galveston, 8 September 1900:
- Isaac's Storm: The Drowning of Galveston, 8 September 1900: ISBN 0756765862 (0-7567-6586-2)
  Hardcover, Diane Pub Co
The Literary Journalists
by Norman Sims

ISBN 0345310810 (0-345-31081-0)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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More editions of The Literary Journalists:
- The Literary Journalists: ISBN 0345310810 (0-345-31081-0)
  Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris

ISBN 0316776963 (0-316-77696-3)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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Book summary:
David Sedaris became a star autobiographer on public radio, onstage in New York, and on bestseller lists, mostly on the strength of "SantaLand Diaries," a scathing, hilarious account of his stint as a Christmas elf at Macy's. (It's in two separate collections, both worth owning, Barrel Fever and the Christmas-themed Holidays on Ice.) Sedaris's caustic gift has not deserted him in his fourth book, which mines poignant comedy from his peculiar childhood in North Carolina, his bizarre career path, and his move with his lover to France. Though his anarchic inclination to digress is his glory, Sedaris does have a theme in these reminiscences: the inability of humans to communicate. The title is his rendition in transliterated English of how he and his fellow students of French in Paris mangle the Gallic language. In the essay "Jesus Shaves," he and his classmates from many nations try to convey the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim. "It is a party for the little boy of God," says one. "Then he be die one day on two... morsels of... lumber," says another. Sedaris muses on the disputes between his Protestant mother and his father, a Greek Orthodox guy whose Easter fell on a different day. Other essays explicate his deep kinship with his eccentric mom and absurd alienation from his IBM-exec dad: "To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests."
Every glimpse we get of Sedaris's family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist ("for whom the word pen had two syllables") by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn't share his obsession with breasts, and sings "Light My Fire" all wrong--"as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match." As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign "guessays" on what would happen in the next day's episode.
It all adds up to the most distinctively skewed autobiography since Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. The only possible reason not to read this book is if you'd rather hear the author's intrinsically funny speaking voice narrating his story. In that case, get Me Talk Pretty One Day on audio. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Mi vida en rose / Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris

ISBN 8497934903 (84-9793-490-3)
Softcover, Debolsillo

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More editions of Mi vida en rose / Me Talk Pretty One Day:
- Mi vida en rose / Me Talk Pretty One Day: ISBN 8497934903 (84-9793-490-3)
  Softcover, Debolsillo
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Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
by John Berendt

ISBN 0679751521 (0-679-75152-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success. (One resident into whose orbit Berendt fell, the Lady Chablis, went on to become a minor celebrity in her own right.) But equally important was Berendt's depiction of Savannah socialite Jim Williams as he stands trial for the murder of Danny Hansford, a moody, violence-prone hustler--and sometime companion to Williams--characterized by locals as a "walking streak of sex." So feel free to call it a "true crime classic" without a trace of shame. [via]
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Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil: A Savannah Story
by John Berendt

ISBN 0679643419 (0-679-64341-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

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John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success. (One resident into whose orbit Berendt fell, the Lady Chablis, went on to become a minor celebrity in her own right.) But equally important was Berendt's depiction of Savannah socialite Jim Williams as he stands trial for the murder of Danny Hansford, a moody, violence-prone hustler--and sometime companion to Williams--characterized by locals as a "walking streak of sex." So feel free to call it a "true crime classic" without a trace of shame. [via]
More editions of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil: A Savannah Story:
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil : A Savannah Story: ISBN 0679449574 (0-679-44957-4)
  Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
- Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil: A Savannah Story: ISBN 0679643419 (0-679-64341-9)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Naked
by David Sedaris

ISBN 1568954867 (1-56895-486-7)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Book summary:
Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing. [via]
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A Natural History of the Senses
by Diane Ackerman

ISBN 0679735666 (0-679-73566-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
"One of the real tests of writers," notes Ackerman in this liveliest of nature books, "is how well they write about smells. If they can't describe the scent of sanctity in a church, can you trust them to describe the suburbs of the heart?" Ackerman passes the test, writing with ease and fluency about the five senses. Did you know that bat guano smells like stale Wheat Thins? That Bach's music can quell anger around the world? That the leaves that shimmer so beautifully in fall have "no adaptive purpose"? Ackerman does, and she guides us through questions of sensation with an eye for the amusingly arcane reference and just the right phrase. [via]
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The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings
by Amy Tan

ISBN 0399150749 (0-399-15074-9)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group

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- The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings: ISBN 0399150749 (0-399-15074-9)
  Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life
by Amy Tan

ISBN 0142004898 (0-14-200489-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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- The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life: ISBN 0142004898 (0-14-200489-8)
  Softcover, Penguin Group USA
Paris Era Una Fiesta
by Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Ferrater

ISBN 9871144377 (987-1144-37-7)
Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp

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More editions of Paris Era Una Fiesta:
- Paris Era Una Fiesta: ISBN 9871144377 (987-1144-37-7)
  Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
by Annie Dillard

ISBN 1568497067 (1-56849-706-7)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Book summary:
An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons-a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays -King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers. [via]
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Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
by Terry Tempest Williams

ISBN 0679740244 (0-679-74024-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
The only constants in nature are change and death. Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer from northern Utah, has seen her share of both. The pages of Refuge resound with the deaths of her mother and grandmother and other women from cancer, the result of the American government's ongoing nuclear-weapons tests in the nearby Nevada desert. You won't find the episode in the standard history textbooks; the Feds wouldn't admit to conducting the tests until women and men in Utah, Nevada, and northwestern Arizona took the matter to court in the mid-1980s, and by then thousands of Americans had fallen victim to official technology. Parallel to her account of this devastation, Williams describes changes in bird life at the sanctuaries dotting the shores of the Great Salt Lake as water levels rose during the unusually wet early 1980s and threatened the nesting grounds of dozens of species. In this world of shattered eggs and drowned shorebirds, Williams reckons with the meaning of life, alternating despair and joy. [via]
More editions of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place:
- Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place: ISBN 067940516X (0-679-40516-X)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
- Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place: ISBN 0679740244 (0-679-74024-4)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Running With Scissors: A Memoir
by Augusten Burroughs

ISBN 1417666943 (1-4176-6694-3)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs's harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. "I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor's office," he writes, "And it certainly wouldn't be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours." There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist's eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back. But just as he dreamed of doing with that old table, Burroughs employs a vigorous program of decoration and fervent polishing to a life that many would have simply thrown in a landfill. Despite her abandonment, he never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother. And rather than despair about his lot, he glamorizes it: planning a "beauty empire" and performing an a capella version of "You Light Up My Life" at a local mental ward. Burroughs's perspective achieves a crucial balance for a memoir: emotional but not self-involved, observant but not clinical, funny but not deliberately comic. And it's ultimately a feel-good story: as he steers through a challenging childhood, there's always a sense that Burroughs's survivor mentality will guide him through and that the coffee table will be salvaged after all. --John Moe [via]
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Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West
by Wallace Stegner

ISBN 0375759328 (0-375-75932-8)
Softcover, Modern Library

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Book summary:
Stegner's enchantment with the West and his ability to capture in words what the land has taught him, not only about nature but about the human condition, are beautifully united in this collection of 16 essays. Stegner introduces the reader to a western literary tradition as varied as the landscape itself. [via]
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The Woman Warrior
by Maxine Hong Kingston

ISBN 0072435194 (0-07-243519-4)
Softcover, McGraw-Hill College

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Book summary:
The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain. [via]
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The Woman Warrior China Men
by Maxine Kingston, Mary Gordon

ISBN 1400043840 (1-4000-4384-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Herefor the first time in one volumeare two classic, brilliantly original works on the experience of Chinese immigrants in America. In both books Maxine Hong Kingston mines her familys past and her cultures stories, weaving myth and memory to fashion works of enormous revelatory power.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is Kingstons disturbing and fiercely beautiful account of growing up Chinese-American in California. The young Kingston lives in two worlds: the America to which her parents have emigrated, a place inhabited by white ghosts, and the China of her mothers talk stories, a place haunted by the ghosts of the past. Her mother, who had been a doctor in China but in the United States is reduced to running a laundry, tells her daughter traditional tales of strong, wily women warriorstalesthat clash puzzlingly with the real oppression of Chinese women. Kingston learns to fill in the mystifying spaces in her mothers stories with stories of her own, engaging her familys past and her own present with anger, imagination, and dazzling passion.

China Men, a National Book Award winner for fiction, is Kingstons unforgettable imaginative journey into the hearts and minds of generations of Chinese men in America, from those who worked on the transcontinental railroad in the 1840s to those who fought in Vietnam. Mixing vivid fables and legends, personal stories from her own family, and details of the historical hardships faced by Chinese immigrants in different times and places, Kingston illuminates their long, arduous search for the Gold Mountain. [via]
More editions of The Woman Warrior China Men:
- The Woman Warrior China Men: ISBN 1400043840 (1-4000-4384-0)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts
by Maxine Hong Kingston

ISBN 0394400674 (0-394-40067-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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Book summary:
The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain. [via]
More editions of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts:
- The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts: ISBN 0394400674 (0-394-40067-4)
  Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion

ISBN 1400078431 (1-4000-7843-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage-and a life, in good times and bad-that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later-the night before New Year's Eve-the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." [via]
More editions of The Year of Magical Thinking:
- The Year of Magical Thinking: ISBN 140004314X (1-4000-4314-X)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
- The Year of Magical Thinking: ISBN 1400078431 (1-4000-7843-1)
  Softcover, Random House Inc

Spanish

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A Sangre Fria
by Truman Capote, Fernando Rodríguez

ISBN 8433920308 (84-339-2030-8)
Softcover, Anagrama Editorial S. A.

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Book summary:
El 15 de noviembre de 1959, en un pueblecito de Kansas, los cuatro miembros de la familia Clutter, fueron salvajemente asesinados en su casa. Cinco anos despues los asesinos fueron ahorcados. A partir de los asesinatos y tras largas y minuciosas investigaciones con los protagonistas reales de la historia, el autor dio un vuelco a su carrera de narrador y escribio este libro, la novela que le sconsagro definitivamente como uno de los grandes de la literatura norteamericana del siglo XX. [via]
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- A Sangre Fria: ISBN 8433920308 (84-339-2030-8)
  Softcover, Anagrama Editorial S. A.
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Memoria Del Fuego: Los Nacimientos
by Eduardo Galaeno

ISBN 9682312027 (968-23-1202-7)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
Historias de grandeza y de debilidad, de astucia y de traicion, de inocencia y de dignidad forman parte de nuestra gran historia, de todo eso que hizo de nosotros casi 400 millones de desposedos. [via]
More editions of Memoria Del Fuego: Los Nacimientos:
- Memoria Del Fuego: Los Nacimientos: ISBN 9682312027 (968-23-1202-7)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc
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LA Novena Revelacion/the Celestine Prophecy
by James Redfield, Cristina Sardoy

ISBN 9500826011 (950-08-2601-1)
Softcover, Downtown Book Center Inc

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- LA Novena Revelacion/the Celestine Prophecy: ISBN 9500826011 (950-08-2601-1)
  Softcover, Downtown Book Center Inc

French

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Je Parler Francais
by David Sedaris, Georges Monny

ISBN 2290319740 (2-290-31974-0)
Softcover, J Ai Lu Editions

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Book summary:
livre autobiographique quelque peu loufoque sur les tribulations d'un jeune americain en France [via]
More editions of Je Parler Francais:
- Je Parler Francais: ISBN 2290319740 (2-290-31974-0)
  Softcover, J Ai Lu Editions

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