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More editions of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Presents America 2006 Calendar:

  • The Fifties
    by David Halberstam
    ISBN 0449909336 (0-449-90933-6)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    "In retrospect," writes David Halberstam, "the pace of the fifties seemed slower, almost languid. Social ferment, however, was beginning just beneath this placid surface." He shows how the United States began to emerge from the long shadow of FDR's 12-year presidency, with the military-industrial complex and the Beat movement simultaneously growing strong. Television brought not only situation comedies but controversial congressional hearings into millions of living rooms. While Alfred Kinsey was studying people's sex lives, Gregory Pincus and other researchers began work on a pill that would forever alter the course of American reproductive practices. Halberstam takes on these social upheavals and more, charting a course that is as easy to navigate as it is wide-ranging. [via]

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  • Fight Club
    by Chuck Palahniuk
    ISBN 0393327345 (0-393-32734-5)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    The only person who gets called Ballardesque more often than Chuck Palahniuk is, well... J.G. Ballard. So, does Portland, Oregon's "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation" deserve that kind of treatment? Yes and no. There is a resemblance between Fight Club and works such as Crash and Cocaine Nights in that both see the innocuous mundanities of everyday life as nothing more than the severely loosened cap on a seething underworld cauldron of unchecked impulse and social atrocity. Welcome to the present-day U.S. of A. As Ballard's characters get their jollies from staging automobile accidents, Palahniuk's yuppies unwind from a day at the office by organizing bloodsport rings and selling soap to fund anarchist overthrows. Let's just say that neither of these guys are going to be called in to do a Full House script rewrite any time soon.

    But while the ingredients are the same, Ballard and Palahniuk bake at completely different temperatures. Unlike his British counterpart, who tends to cast his American protagonists in a chilly light, holding them close enough to dissect but far enough away to eliminate any possibility of kinship, Palahniuk isn't happy unless he's first-person front and center, completely entangled in the whole sordid mess. An intensely psychological novel that never runs the risk of becoming clinical, Fight Club is about both the dangers of loyalty and the dreaded weight of leadership, the desire to band together and the compulsion to head for the hills. In short, it's about the pride and horror of being an American, rendered in lethally swift prose. Fight Club's protagonist might occasionally become foggy about who he truly is (you'll see what I mean), but one thing is for certain: you're not likely to forget the book's author. Never mind Ballardesque. Palahniukian here we come! --Bob Michaels [via]

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  • Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
    by Fannie Flagg
    ISBN 0449911357 (0-449-91135-7)
    Softcover, Fawcett Books

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    Book summary:

    A folksy, funny and endearing story of life in a small town in Alabama in the Depression and in the 1980s. However, the novel's laughter and tears are interrupted by a strange murder and a still stranger trial. [via]

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  • Huckleberry Finn / Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 0394847245 (0-394-84724-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published. [via]

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  • Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison
    ISBN 0451038142 (0-451-03814-2)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

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    We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.

    As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

    What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."

    Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Udall, Brady: Letting Loose the Hounds
    Letting Loose the Hounds
    by Brady Udall
    ISBN 039304033X (0-393-04033-X)
    Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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  • Berg, A. Scott: Lindbergh
    Lindbergh
    by A. Scott Berg
    ISBN 0425170411 (0-425-17041-1)
    Softcover, Berkley Pub Group

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    Charles Lindbergh's solo flight from New York to Paris captured the imagination of a postwar generation hungry for heroes, and cemented an exalted spot for the 25-year-old pilot from Minnesota in the collective American imagination. A. Scott Berg's thorough new biography of the aviator suggests that despite the public scrutiny that accompanied his every move until his death in 1974, Lindbergh remained an intensely private man. The son of ill-matched parents who separated when he was 6, he was painfully shy and emotionally guarded. "Aviation created a brotherhood of casual acquaintances ... in which he felt comfortable," writes Berg with characteristic perceptiveness.

    Lindbergh's wife, the writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, gave Berg unrestricted access to her husband's and her own voluminous personal papers--and he made good use of them to assess both the couple's relationship and their activities. Probably the most startling revelation is a brief but candid discussion of Anne's affair in the late 1950s with a New Jersey doctor, which helped assuage her need to vent emotions in a way her buttoned-up husband found insupportable. (During the horrendous days in 1932 when their 20-month-old son was kidnapped and killed, Berg notes, she never once saw Charles cry.) The biography is solid on all aspects of Lindbergh's career, including his notorious urging that America stay out of World War II; Berg rebuts charges that Lindbergh was a Nazi or a traitor, but rightly criticizes the anti-Semitism latent in some of his speeches. With this book, Berg succeeds in surveying Lindbergh's fascinating life and assessing its historic impact. [via]

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  • Little Women
    by Louisa May Alcott, Gregory Eiselein, Anne K. Phillips
    ISBN 0393976149 (0-393-97614-9)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy manage to lead interesting lives despite Father's absence at war and the family's lack of money. Whether they're putting on a play or forming a secret society, their gaiety is infectious. Written from Louisa May Alcott's own experiences, this remarkable novel has been treasured for generations. [via]

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  • Udall, Brady: The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint: A Novel
    The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint: A Novel
    by Brady Udall
    ISBN 0393020363 (0-393-02036-3)
    Hardcover, Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.

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  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave
    by Frederick Douglass
    ISBN 0451161882 (0-451-16188-2)
    Softcover, New Amer Library

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    Book summary:

    Written more than a century ago by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who went on to become a famous orator, U.S. minister, and a leader of his people, this masterpiece is one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever recorded. Douglass's shocking narrative takes the reader into the world of the South's antebellum plantations and reveals the daily terrors he suffered as a slave, shedding invaluable light on one of the most unjust periods in the history of America. Published for the first time as a Signet Classic. [via]

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  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism
    by Frederick Douglass, William L. Andrews, William S. McFeely
    ISBN 0393969665 (0-393-96966-5)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    Upon its publication in 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself became an immediate best-seller.

    In addition to its far-reaching impact on the antislavery movement in the United States and abroad, Douglasss fugitive slave narrative won recognition for its literary excellence, which has since earned it a place among the classics of nineteenth-century American autobiography. This Norton Critical Edition reprints the 1845 first edition of Douglasss compelling work.  Explanatory annotations accompany the text.

    A rich selection of "Contexts" provides the reader with contemporary perspectives.  Included are the little-known preface that Douglass wrote in 1846 for the second Irish edition; a public exchange of letters between A. C. C. Thompson, a former slaveholder, and Douglass; three autobiographical portraits of Douglass's parents; Douglasss account of his escape from slavery, which he chose not to include in the 1845 Narrative; samples of Douglasss use of his slave experience in two of his most influential antislavery speeches; and reminiscences by James Monroe Gregory and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Douglass as both orator and friend.

    "Criticism" collects six essential assessments of the Narratives historical and literary aspects, by William S. McFeely, Peter Ripley, Robert B. Stepto, William L. Andrews, Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Deborah E. McDowell. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included. [via]

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  • Peculiar Institution
    by Kenneth M. Stampp
    ISBN 0394440153 (0-394-44015-3)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Robert Kennedy and His Times
    by Arthur Schlesinger
    ISBN 0395248973 (0-395-24897-3)
    Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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    Book summary:

    Schlesinger, historian and friend of Bobby Kennedy, has had access for the first time to private papers, letters, and journals which make possible a fresh look at both personal relationships and public events. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award for Biography.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • The Secret History : A Novel
    by Donna Tartt
    ISBN 0449911519 (0-449-91151-9)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "Powerful...Enthrallling...A ferociously well-paced entertainment."THE NEW YORK TIMESRichard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable. As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another...a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life...and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning...."A smart, craftsman-like, viscerally compelling novel."TIMESelected by the Book-of-the-Month ClubA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKFrom the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade
    by Kurt Vonnegut
    ISBN 0440180295 (0-440-18029-5)
    Softcover, Bantam Books

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    Book summary:

    Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

    Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor. [via]

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  • The Sound and the Fury
    by William Faulkner, David Minter
    ISBN 0393964817 (0-393-96481-7)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.

    If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.

    Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:

    And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.
    What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin [via]

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  • Eugenides, Jeffrey: The Virgin Suicides
    The Virgin Suicides
    by Jeffrey Eugenides
    ISBN 0446670251 (0-446-67025-1)
    Softcover, Grand Central Pub

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  • Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
    by Bernard Bailyn
    ISBN 0394757785 (0-394-75778-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in History is reinterpreted by the foremost colonial historian of American history, using the perspective of migration as an organizing principle. 32 photos, 19 maps. [via]

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  • Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau, Walter Harding
    ISBN 0395720427 (0-395-72042-7)
    Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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    Book summary:

    On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into the cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond. Now, on the 150th anniversary of that event, Houghton Mifflin is proud to publish an exceptional new edition of what is perhaps the most important book in our history as a publisher. Walden: An Annotated Edition features the definitive text of the book with extensive notes on Thoreau's life and times by the distinguished biographer and critic Walter Harding. In the third chapter, Thoreau writes, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?" For many readers, Walden is that book. Written a century and a half ago, it grows more meaningful every day, and whether you are reading it for the first time or the hundredth, Walter Harding's insightful comments will open your eyes to the true depths of this masterpiece.
    [via]

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  • Walden and Civil Disobedience
    by Henry David Thoreau
    ISBN 0395051134 (0-395-05113-4)
    Softcover, Houghton Mifflin College Div

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    Book summary:

    Henry David Thoreau was a sturdy individualist and a lover of nature. In March, 1845, he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived until September 1847. Walden is Thoreaus autobiograophical account of his Robinson Crusoe existence, bare of creature comforts but rich in contemplation of the wonders of nature and the ways of man. On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience is the classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty, and is considered one of the most famous essays ever written. This newly repackaged edition also includes a selection of Thoreau's poetry. [via]

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  • Thoreau, Henry David: Walden and Other Writings
    Walden and Other Writings
    by Henry David Thoreau, Brooks Atkinson, Townsend Scudder
    ISBN 0394604210 (0-394-60421-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Walden and Resistance to Civil Government
    by Henry David Thoreau, Owen Thomas, William Rossi
    ISBN 0393959058 (0-393-95905-8)
    Softcover, Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.

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    Book summary:

    On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into the cabin he had built on the shore of Walden Pond, thus beginning the most famous experiment in simple living in American history. On the 150th anniversary of that event, Houghton Mifflin, successor to Thoreau's original publisher, is proud to publish a new edition of Walden, annotated by the distinguished Thoreau scholar Walter Harding and illustrated with Thoreau's own drawings. Even those who have read Walden many times will find much that is new in this edition, and those reading the book for the first time will discover why it has changed the lives of generations of readers. [via]

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  • Walden Or, Life in the Woods and "on the Duty of Civil Disobedience"
    by Henry David Thoreau
    ISBN 0451527070 (0-451-52707-0)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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    Book summary:

    A philosophy of life and observations on government included in these famous books. [via]

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  • Washington Square
    by Henry James
    ISBN 0451524993 (0-451-52499-3)
    Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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    Book summary:

    Washington Square (1881), by Henry James, tells the story of Catherine Sloper, the plain, obedient daughter of the widowed, well-to-do Dr. August Sloper of Washington Square. When a handsome, feckless man-about-town proposes to Catherine, her father forbids the marriage because he believes the man to be after Catherine's fortune and future inheritance. The conflict between father, daughter, and suitor provokes consequences in the lives of all three that make this story one of James's most piercingly memorable. [via]

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