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› Find signed collectible books: 'After the First Death'
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The hijacking of a bus of children by terrorists is described from the perspectives of a hostage, a terrorist, an Army general involved in the rescue operation, and his son, chosen as the go-between. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bel Canto'
In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. His hosts hope that Mr. Hosokawa can be persuaded to build a factory in their Third World backwater. Alas, in the opening sequence, just as the accompanist kisses the soprano, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president, who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera. And thus, from the beginning, things go awry.
Among the hostages are not only Hosokawa and Roxane Coss, the American soprano, but an assortment of Russian, Italian, and French diplomatic types. Reuben Iglesias, the diminutive and gracious vice president, quickly gets sideways of the kidnappers, who have no interest in him whatsoever. Meanwhile, a Swiss Red Cross negotiator named Joachim Messner is roped into service while vacationing. He comes and goes, wrangling over terms and demands, and the days stretch into weeks, the weeks into months.
With the omniscience of magic realism, Ann Patchett flits in and out of the hearts and psyches of hostage and terrorist alike, and in doing so reveals a profound, shared humanity. Her voice is suitably lyrical, melodic, full of warmth and compassion. Hearing opera sung live for the first time, a young priest reflects:
Never had he thought, never once, that such a woman existed, one who stood so close to God that God's own voice poured from her. How far she must have gone inside herself to call up that voice. It was as if the voice came from the center part of the earth and by the sheer effort and diligence of her will she had pulled it up through the dirt and rock and through the floorboards of the house, up into her feet, where it pulled through her, reaching, lifting, warmed by her, and then out of the white lily of her throat and straight to God in heaven.Joined by no common language except music, the 58 international hostages and their captors forge unexpected bonds. Time stands still, priorities rearrange themselves. Ultimately, of course, something has to give, even in a novel so imbued with the rich imaginative potential of magic realism. But in a fractious world, Bel Canto remains a gentle reminder of the transcendence of beauty and love. --Victoria Jenkins [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Between Extremes : A Journey Beyond Imagination'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cleopatra's Sister'
A palaeontologist by choice--and perhaps due to the accidental discovery of a fossil fragment on the north coast of England when he was six years old--Howard Beamish is flying to Nairobi on a professional mission when his plane is forced to land in an imaginary country called Callimbia. On assignment to write a travel piece for Sunday magazine, journalist Lucy Faulkner is on the same flight. What happens to Howard and Lucy in Callimbia is one of those accidents that determine fate, that can bring love and take away joy, that reveal to us the precariousness of our existence and the trajectory of our lives. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Delphic Choice'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Die Trying'
Television writer Lee Child's otherwise riveting first thriller, Killing Floor, was criticized by some reviewers because of an unconvincing coincidence at its center. Child addresses that problem in his second book--and thumbs his nose at those reviewers--by having his hero, ex-military policeman Jack Reacher, just happen to be walking by a Chicago dry cleaner when an attractive young FBI agent named Holly Johnson comes out carrying nine expensive outfits and a crutch to support her soccer-injured knee. As Holly stumbles, Reacher grabs her and her garments--which gets him kidnapped along with her by a trio of very determined badguys. "He had no problem with how he had gotten grabbed up in the first place," Child writes. "Just a freak of chance had put him alongside Holly Johnson at the exact time the snatch was going down. He was comfortable with that. He understood freak chances. Life was built out of freak chances, however much people would like to pretend otherwise." Lucky for Holly--whose father just happens to be an Army general and current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thus making her a tempting target for a bunch of Montana-based extremists--Reacher still has all the skills and strengths associated with his former occupation. And Child still knows how to write scenes of violent action better than virtually anyone else around. --Dick Adler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dilessi Murders'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dwellers in the Crucible'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Evil Cradling/the Five-Year Ordeal of a Hostage'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gotham Central 3: Unresolved Targets'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Miltiant Islam'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In the Presence of My Enemies'
2004 ECPA Gold Medallion winner!
Soon after September 11, the news media stepped up its coverage of the plight of Martin and Gracia Burnham, the missionary couple captured and held hostage in the Philippine jungle by terrorists with ties to Osama Bin Laden. After a year of captivity, and a violent rescue that resulted in Martin's death, the world watched Gracia Burnham return home in June 2002 with a bullet wound in the leg and amazing composure.
In this riveting personal account, Burnham tells the real story behind the news about their harrowing ordeal, about how it affected their relationship with each other and with God, about the terrorists who held them, about the actions of the U.S. and Philippine governments, and about how they were affected by the prayers of thousands of Christians throughout the world. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Incident At Badamya'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Indelible'
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Maiden's Grave'
An acclaimed thriller pits FBI negotiator Arthur Potter against an escaped murderer who takes a busload of deaf girls and their teachers hostage in an abandoned slaughterhouse. Reprint. K. NYT. PW. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mortal Pursuit'
It's just another night of routine patrol in California's Santa Barbara hills for a female rookie police officer. But an investigation of a reported burglary has her stumble upon a wealthy family held captive in their mansion by a team of vicious killers. Somehow she must find a way to free them without becoming a hostage herself. The odds are already against her--and the sudden unveiling of a devastating secret makes staying alive seem even less likely! . [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Negotiator'
Veteran hostage negotiator Kate O'Malley has seen humankind at its worst. In fact, she has become something of a legend for her ability to parlay a successful outcome from even the most desperate situations. FBI special agent Dave Richman, introduced in Henderson's Danger in the Shadows, has every reason to have lost faith. But he hasn't and Kate has. From their first encounter during a bank holdup, these two very disparate people are inexplicably drawn to each other. But can they overcome the obstacles? Dave's Christianity is as much a part of him as his desire for Kate, while Kate claims no particular belief in God. And can Dave relinquish his need to protect Kate when it is her job to place herself in danger? But Dave may not have a choice when a secret from Kate's past returns to haunt her--or kill her. Full of surprises, Dee Henderson's The Negotiator is a walk on the wild side and readers will love every thrilling minute!--Alison Trinkle [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'News of a Kidnapping'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Noticia De Un Secuestro / News of a Kidnapping'
The Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude probes the 1990 kidnapping of journalists in Colombia by Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Wings of Eagles'
Number-one bestselling author Ken Follett tells the inspiring, true story of the Middle East hostage crisis that began in 1979, and of the unconventional means Ross Perot used to save his countrymen.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Plowing the Dark'
No one who enjoyed Richard Powers's remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised that he has returned to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. In Plowing the Dark, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern." TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marveling that
their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate.Powers's lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it argues that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Ride the Wind'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Saving Fish from Drowning'
Amy Tan, who has an unerring eye for relationships between mothers and daughters, especially Chinese-American, has departed from her well-known genre in Saving Fish From Drowning. She would be well advised to revisit that theme which she writes about so well.
The title of the book is derived from the practice of Myanmar fishermen who "scoop up the fish and bring them to shore. They say they are saving the fish from drowning. Unfortunately... the fish do not recover," This kind of magical thinking or hypocrisy or mystical attitude or sheer stupidity is a fair metaphor for the entire book. It may be read as a satire, a political statement, a picaresque tale with several "picaros" or simply a story about a tour gone wrong.
Bibi Chen, San Francisco socialite and art vendor to the stars, plans to lead a trip for 12 friends: "My friends, those lovers of art, most of them rich, intelligent, and spoiled, would spend a week in China and arrive in Burma on Christmas Day." Unfortunately, Bibi dies, in very strange circumstances, before the tour begins. After wrangling about it, the group decides to go after all. The leader they choose is indecisive and epileptic, a dangerous combo. Bibi goes along as the disembodied voice-over.
Once in Myanmar, finally, they are noticed by a group of Karen tribesmen who decide that Rupert, the 15-year-old son of a bamboo grower is, in fact, Younger White Brother, or The Lord of the Nats. He can do card tricks and is carrying a Stephen King paperback. These are adjudged to be signs of his deity and ability to save them from marauding soldiers. The group is "kidnapped," although they think they are setting out for a Christmas Day surprise, and taken deep into the jungle where they languish, develop malaria, learn to eat slimy things and wait to be rescued. Nats are "believed to be the spirits of nature--the lake, the trees, the mountains, the snakes and birds. They were numberless ... They were everywhere, as were bad luck and the need to find reasons for it." Philosophy or cynicism? This elusive point of view is found throughout the novel--a bald statement is made and then Tan pulls her punches as if she is unwilling to make a statement that might set a more serious tone.
There are some goofy parts about Harry, the member of the group who is left behind, and his encounter with two newswomen from Global News Network, some slapstick sex scenes and a great deal of dog-loving dialogue. These all contribute to a novel that is silly but not really funny, could have an occasionally serious theme which suddenly disappears, and is about a group of stereotypical characters that it's hard to care about. It was time for Amy Tan to write another book; too bad this was it. --Valerie Ryan [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Step on a Crack'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Utopia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Utopia : A Thriller'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Noticia De Un Secuestro / News of a Kidnapping'
The Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude probes the 1990 kidnapping of journalists in Colombia by Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Un Lugar Llamado Nada / Saving Fish from Drowning'
Doce amigos estadounidenses estan a punto de emprender el viaje de su vida desde el pie del Himalaya en China hacia las selvas inexploradas de Brimania para profundizar en el arte y la cultura de ambos paises. La manana del dia de Navidad, todos menos uno inician una excursion de medio dia, pero ya no regresan. Se encuentran en medio de la selva, en un poblado secreto donde se oculta una tribu medio extinguida que ve en uno de ellos a su salvador. [via]
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