books tagged “USA”

books tagged “USA”

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  • Vidal, Gore: 1876
    1876
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0375708723 (0-375-70872-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Adventures of Augie March
    by Saul Bellow
    ISBN 0380009617 (0-380-00961-7)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    [MP3CD audiobook format in vinyl case.]

    [Read by Tom Parker - aka - Grover Gardner]

    Winner of the National Book Award

    This grand-scale heroic comedy tells the story of the exuberant young Augie, a poor Chicago boy growing up during the Depression. While his neighborhood friends all settle down into their various chosen professions, Augie, as particular as an aristocrat, demands a special destiny. He latches on to a wild succession of occupations, proudly rejecting each one as too limiting. It is not until he tangles with a glamorous perfectionist named Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, that his independence is seriously threatened. Luckily, his nature, like the eagle's, breaks down under the strain. He goes on to recruit himself to even more outlandish projects, but always ducks out in time to continue improvising his unconventional career.

    With a jaunty sense of humor embedded in a serious moral view, Bellow's story both celebrates and satirizes the irrepressible American spirit. [via]

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  • Alaska
    by James A. Michener
    ISBN 037576142X (0-375-76142-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A. Michener guides us across Alaskas fierce terrain, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling technological present, as his characters struggle for survival. The exciting high points of Alaskas story, from its brutal prehistory, through the nineteenth century and the American acquisition, to its modern status as Americas thriving forty-ninth state, are brought vividly to life in this remarkable novel: the gold rush; the tremendous growth and exploitation of the salmon industry; the discovery of oil and its social and economic consequences; the difficult construction of the Alcan Highway, which made possible the defense of the territory in World War II. A spellbinding portrait of a human community struggling to establish its place in the world, Alaska traces a bold and majestic history of the enduring spirit of a land and its people. [via]

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  • All the Dead Lie Down
    by Mary Willis Walker
    ISBN 0385478585 (0-385-47858-5)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Quotations from Mother Goose and Macbeth (as well as the Emily Dickinson snippet of the title) provide the chapter headings in this engaging novel of suspense. The apparent peculiarity of such juxtaposition brings home the brutality of those childhood rhymes and the dangers of obsession and revenge. Both serve Mary Willis Walker's purpose well in setting up this tightly constructed mystery in which investigative journalist Molly Cates's own obsession with her father's untimely death from 30 years before gets mixed up in a current and far more dangerous scheme to release chemical gases into the Senate chamber of the Texas Capitol. The two plots, the first a traditional mystery, the second more a tale of suspense, are unconnected except for Cates's involvement; she is obviously central to one and initially only tangential to the other. Such a device would have proved unwieldy in less skillful hands, but in Walker's case the disparate strands are brought together beautifully, and Cates has a suitable sense of her own fallibility and the difficulty of harboring hate for the better part of a generation.

    Walker's previous three novels have won six mystery-writers awards among them. All the Dead Lie Down is solid enough to continue the tradition set by the others. Within it there is much to relish: sensitive consideration of homelessness, thought-provoking questions about gun control, and a wry appreciation for the charm and arrogance of the Lone Star State and its citizens ("Texans do not scrimp on stars."). Indeed, Walker's sense of place--from Lubbock's dust and dry desolation to Austin's trendiness and political maneuvering--is sure and confident. There are moments when the worst of the perpetrators of the chemical weapons scare is portrayed simplistically, but this is more than made up for by the complexity of the other characters: the vagrants who discover the danger as well as the ghosts, both past and present, who haunt Molly in her investigations of her father's past. An excellent read, for even the most jaded of mystery lovers. [via]

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  • American Tabloid
    by James Ellroy
    ISBN 037572737X (0-375-72737-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . .

    Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . .

    Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . .

    Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . .

    James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open. [via]

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  • The Awakening
    by Kate Chopin
    ISBN 0380002450 (0-380-00245-0)
    Softcover, Avon Books

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    Book summary:

    "She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before." [via]

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  • Beezus and Ramona
    by Beverly Cleary
    ISBN 038070918X (0-380-70918-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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    Nine-year-old Beezus Quimby has her hands full with her little sister, Ramona. Sure, other people have little sisters that bother them sometimes, but is there anyone in the world like Ramona? Whether she's taking one bite out of every apple in a box or secretly inviting 15 other 4-year-olds to the house for a party, Ramona is always making trouble--and getting all the attention. Every big sister can relate to the trials and tribulations Beezus must endure. Old enough to be expected to take responsibility for her little sister, yet young enough to be mortified by every embarrassing plight the precocious preschooler gets them into, Beezus is constantly struggling with her mixed-up feelings about the exasperating Ramona.

    There's no one in the world like Beverly Cleary, either. This terrifically popular author of over two dozen children's books has withstood the test of time for generations, as her many awards, including the Newbery Medal, attest. Two books in the Ramona series, Ramona and Her Father and Ramona Quimby, Age 8, were also named Newbery Honor Books. Louis Darling's wonderful ink illustrations are the kind that will stay with a reader for a lifetime. (Ages 8 to 12) --Emilie Coulter [via]

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  • Black Notice
    by Patricia Cornwell
    ISBN 0375707719 (0-375-70771-9)
    Softcover, Random House Large Print

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    It's Christmastime in Richmond, Virginia, but no one seems merry--least of all Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta, back for her 10th outing as a crime-solving coroner. Actress Kate Reading also returns, reading her third unabridged audio for Patricia Cornwell's death-drenched series. This one finds Scarpetta still recovering from the murder of her lover and in a generally foul mood as an investigation of a badly decomposed body leads her to INTERPOL, and eventually, Paris. Series regulars Police Detective Pete Marino, recently demoted, and niece Lucy are in equally cantankerous states of mind, resulting in more blue language than Cornwell regulars may be used to. Reading proves she's up to the task, maintaining multiple distinct voices and highlighting the occasional humor in the overwhelmingly dark novel. A London-based stage actress, she captivates the listener without careening into melodrama. (Running time: 12.5 hours, 8 cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs [via]

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  • Burr
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0375708731 (0-375-70873-1)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers.

    Burr is a portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr's past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States. [via]

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  • Ivins, Molly: Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America
    Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America
    by Molly Ivins, Lou Dubose
    ISBN 0375713115 (0-375-71311-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • City of Light
    by Lauren Belfer
    ISBN 0385337647 (0-385-33764-7)
    Softcover, Delta

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    City of Light is quite simply electrifying. Not that there's anything simple about this rich novel, which is first and foremost an examination of illusion, invisibility, and power--physical and personal. Set in the spring of 1901, as preparations for the Pan-American Exposition would seem to promise Buffalo, New York, a permanent place in the world, Lauren Belfer's book is narrated by the never-married headmistress of a fashionable girls' school. At 36, Louisa Barrett does her best to free her charges from their societal shackles. "I'm rather ashamed of all the things I've been able to give my students through the subterfuge of training them to be better wives," she says proudly. What Louisa is most concerned about, however, is her 9-year-old goddaughter, Grace Sinclair, who has grown increasingly unstable since her mother's sudden death. Meanwhile, Grace's father is heading up Buffalo's hydroelectric power plans with dangerous zeal--much to the chagrin of local conservationists who oppose any exploitation of Niagara Falls. Will Tom's intensity, which smacks of fanaticism, extend so far as murder?

    But this offers only the barest idea of Belfer's complex grid. In 500 fast pages, she creates a fascinating, disquieting world in which nothing is what it seems. As Louisa battles against her instinct for self-preservation, her past--particularly a vile encounter with the corpulent Grover Cleveland--threatens to undermine her carefully created persona and loose her greatest secret. Looking back on the events of 1901 from the safety (and disappointment) of 1909, Louisa is the most astringent and intriguing of narrators. To Lauren Belfer's endless credit, City of Light is panoramic, subtle, and very physical. In her first novel, she makes us feel the rush of water, the thrill of light, the snap, crackle, and pop of social tension, and--alas for Louisa--the despair of tragic inevitability. --Sophie Atherton [via]

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  • Clandestine
    by James Ellroy
    ISBN 0380805294 (0-380-80529-4)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    This Book is in very nice condition, no markings and crisp binding [via]

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  • The Client
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0385339089 (0-385-33908-9)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    In a weedy lot on the outskirts of Memphis, two  boys watch a shiny Lincoln pull up to the  curb...Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother  were sharing a forbidden cigarette when a chance  encounter with a suicidal lawyer left Mark knowing  a bloody and explosive secret: the whereabouts of  the most sought-after dead body in America. Now Mark is caught  between a legal system gone mad and a mob killer  desperate to cover up his crime. And his only ally is  a woman named Reggie Love, who has been a lawyer  for all of four years. Prosecutors are  willing to break all the rules to make Mark talk. The  mob will stop at nothing to keep him quiet. And  Reggie will do anything to protect her client --  even take a last, desperate gamble that could win  Mark his freedom... or cost them both their  lives. [via]

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  • Barnes, Linda: Cold Case
    Cold Case
    by Linda Barnes
    ISBN 0385306148 (0-385-30614-8)
    Hardcover, Dell Publishing

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  • Devil in Massachusetts a Modern Enquiry into the S
    by Starkey
    ISBN 0385035098 (0-385-03509-8)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    This historical narrative of the Salem witch trials takes its dialogue from actual trial records but applies modern psychiatric knowledge to the witchcraft hysteria. Starkey's sense of drama also vividly recreates the atmosphere of pity and terror that fostered the evil and suffering of this human tragedy. [via]

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  • Don't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned
    by Kenneth C. Davis
    ISBN 0380719088 (0-380-71908-8)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    By the vastly amusing author of Don't Know Much About History and Don't Know Much About Geography, this fresh look at America's greatest conflict will dispel all those misconceptions you acquired by watching "Gone With the Wind". Davis has a genius for bringing history to life, sorting out the players, the politics and the key events -- Harpers Ferry, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Emancipation, Reconstruction -- in a way that will enlighten even the most dedicated back-of-the-class napper. A brilliant crash course, this book vividly brings to life the people -- from Dred Scott to Abraham Lincoln -- and the everyday details that make up History with a capital H. [via]

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  • The Dying Animal
    by Philip Roth
    ISBN 037571412X (0-375-71412-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, youre not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York collegeas well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthetes critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.

    The agency of Kepeshs undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself draggedhelplessly, bitterly, furiouslyinto the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger. [via]

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  • McBain, Ed: Eight Black Horses: An 87th Precinct Novel
    Eight Black Horses: An 87th Precinct Novel
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 0380700298 (0-380-70029-8)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Block, Lawrence: Eight Million Ways to Die
    Eight Million Ways to Die
    by Lawrence Block
    ISBN 0380715732 (0-380-71573-2)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • The Emperor of Ocean Park
    by Stephen L. Carter
    ISBN 0375712925 (0-375-71292-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    A complex, smart mystery filled with intrigue, drama, and more than a little danger awaits in Stephen L. Carter's engaging debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park. After the funeral of his powerful father (a federal judge whose nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court became a public scandal), Talcott Garland, an African American law professor at an Ivy League university, is left to unravel the meaning of a cryptic note and carry out "the arrangements" his father left behind. Armed with fortitude and familial devotion--though paranoid of his wife's fidelity--Talcott soon finds himself in an investigation that entangles him with a number of questionable Washington, D.C., denizens, including attorneys and government officials, law professors, the FBI, shady underworld figures, chess masters, and friends and family. All the while Talcott tries not to hurt his attorney wife's chance for a judicial nomination--and their fragile marriage--but the closer he comes to unraveling his father's dark secrets, the more dangerous things become.

    Clocking in at over 650 pages, the novel could easily have been streamlined; many of Talcott's thoughts are unnecessarily repeated. But Carter's storytelling skills are adept: tension builds, surprises are genuine, clues are not handed out freely. The prose, while somewhat meandering, can be crisp and insightful, as demonstrated in Carter's description of the misguided paths of young attorneys who sacrifice

    all on the altar of career... at last arriving... at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.
    --Michael Ferch [via]

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  • Empire Falls
    by Richard Russo
    ISBN 0375726403 (0-375-72640-3)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Like most of Richard Russo's earlier novels, Empire Falls is a tale of blue-collar life, which increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets. This time, though, the author has widened his scope, producing a comic and compelling ensemble piece. There is, to be sure, a protagonist: fortysomething Miles Robey, proprietor of the local greasy spoon and the recently divorced father of a teenage daughter. But Russo sets in motion a large cast of secondary characters, drawn from every social stratum of his depressed New England mill town. We meet his ex-wife Janine, his father Max (another of Russo's cantankerous layabouts), and a host of Empire Grill regulars. We're also introduced to Francine Whiting, a manipulative widow who owns half the town--and who takes a perverse pleasure in pointing out Miles' psychological defects.

    Miles does indeed have a tendency to take it on the chin. And his role as Mr Nice Guy thrusts him into all sorts of clashes with his not-so-nice contemporaries, even as the reader patiently waits for him to blow his top. It would be impossible to summarise Russo's multiple plot lines here. Suffice it to say that he touches on love and marriage, lust and loss and small-town economics, with more than a soupcon of class resentment stirred into the broth. This is, in a sense, an epic of small and large frustrations: "After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?" Yet Russo's comedic timing keeps the novel from collapsing into an orgy of breast-beating, and his dialogue--snappy and natural and efficiently poignant--is itself sufficient cause to put Empire Falls on the map. --Bob Brandeis, Amazon.com [via]

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  • Flags of Our Fathers
    by James Bradley, Ron Powers, Michael French
    ISBN 0385730640 (0-385-73064-0)
    Softcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    In the winter of 1945, on the tiny island of Iwo Jima, a ferocious, epic battle was fought, resulting in the loss of more than 48,000 lives and producing what was to become one of the most recognizable symbols of World War II: a photograph of six soldiers raising an American flag on the peak of Mount Suribachi. One of the six, Navy corpsman John Bradley, came away from this historical moment with a deep and mysterious silence about his role in the flag raising. Even his wife heard him speak of it only once in their 47-year marriage. After Bradley's death, his son James began to piece together the facts of his father's heroism, as well as that of the other five men, all of whom became reluctant heroes because of their presence during that fateful instant when the shutter clicked and created a wartime icon.

    Based on James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers for adults, this abridged version for younger readers retains the somewhat terse drama, intense heartbreak, and bittersweet triumph of the original narrative. Through his research on the event and the soldiers (three of the men were killed in combat within days of the flag raising), Bradley explores the dubious nature of heroism and the devastating effects of war. (Ages 14 and older) --Emilie Coulter [via]

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  • Flags of Our Fathers : Heroes of Iwo Jima
    by James Bradley, Ron Powers, Michael French
    ISBN 0385729324 (0-385-72932-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Children's Books

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    In the winter of 1945, on the tiny island of Iwo Jima, a ferocious, epic battle was fought, resulting in the loss of more than 48,000 lives and producing what was to become one of the most recognizable symbols of World War II: a photograph of six soldiers raising an American flag on the peak of Mount Suribachi. One of the six, Navy corpsman John Bradley, came away from this historical moment with a deep and mysterious silence about his role in the flag raising. Even his wife heard him speak of it only once in their 47-year marriage. After Bradley's death, his son James began to piece together the facts of his father's heroism, as well as that of the other five men, all of whom became reluctant heroes because of their presence during that fateful instant when the shutter clicked and created a wartime icon.

    Based on James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers for adults, this abridged version for younger readers retains the somewhat terse drama, intense heartbreak, and bittersweet triumph of the original narrative. Through his research on the event and the soldiers (three of the men were killed in combat within days of the flag raising), Bradley explores the dubious nature of heroism and the devastating effects of war. (Ages 14 and older) --Emilie Coulter [via]

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  • The Foundation Trilogy
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0380001012 (0-380-00101-2)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    The Foundation Series is a science fiction series by Isaac Asimov. The series is best known for the Foundation Trilogy, which comprises the books Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. In 1965, the Foundation Trilogy beat several other science fiction and fantasy series (including The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien) to receive a special Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series." It is still the only series so honored. Asimov himself wrote that he assumed the one-time award had been created to honor The Lord of the Rings, and he was amazed when his work won.

    A saga of enormous scope and boundless imagination, Isaac Asimov's Hugo-winning Foundation Trilogy is one of the great masterworks of science fiction. Set 50,000 years in the future, it tells of the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire and the history of a universal ruling organization created to reduce the duration of the coming Dark Age.

    Foundation introduces mathematician Hari Seldon, whose science of psychohistory can predict the future on a colossal scale. But what Hari foresees is an empire's collapse and an age of barbarism lasting 30,000 years. Gathering the finest minds in the galaxy, he devises a Plan to preserve the collective knowledge of the human race...only to find that the Foundation itself is under seige.

    In Foundation and Empire, the Foundation has attained power, but can it prevail against an ambitious young general determined to restore the Empire to its former glory, or a mutant intelligence whose mysterious power to bend minds to his will not even Hari Seldon could have predicted?

    In Second Foundation, the mutant sets out to find the last threat to his power: a secretly evolved Second Foundation, whose colony of telepaths the First Foundation also wants destroyed. [via]

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  • Get Shorty
    by Elmore Leonard
    ISBN 0385315678 (0-385-31567-8)
    Softcover, Dell Publishing

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    Nobody writes openings like Elmore Leonard. Case in point: "When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio's on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off." You need to know about this because you need to know why there's bad blood between Chili Palmer and Ray Bones, the guy who stole his coat and is now his boss--and has ordered him to collect $4,200 from a dead guy. Except the guy didn't die; he went to Las Vegas with $300,000. So Chili goes to Las Vegas, one thing leads to another, and pretty soon he's in Los Angeles, hanging out with a movie producer named Harry Zimm and learning what it takes to be a player in Hollywood.

    Get Shorty is classic Elmore Leonard: While other people write "crime fiction," Leonard's come up with a masterful social comedy that happens to be about criminals (and other fast operators). He's a master of snappy dialogue and dizzying plot twists. The best parts of Get Shorty move along so briskly you almost forget there's somebody with a firm control over the story. And you'll be rooting for Chili to get the money, the girl, and the studio deal. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • Gone, Baby, Gone
    by Dennis Lehane
    ISBN 0380730359 (0-380-73035-9)
    Softcover, Avon Books

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    Cheese Olamon, "a six-foot-two, four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who'd somehow arrived at the misconception he was black," is telling his old grammar school friends Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro why they have to convince another mutual chum, the gun dealer Bubba Rugowski, that Cheese didn't try to have him killed. "You let Bubba know I'm clean when it comes to what happened to him. You want me alive. Okay? Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone." Of all the chilling, completely credible scenes of sadness, destruction, and betrayal in Dennis Lehane's fourth and very possibly best book about Kenzie and Gennaro, this moment stands out because it captures in a few pages the essence of Lehane's success.

    Private detectives Kenzie and Gennaro, who live in the same working-class Dorchester neighborhood of Boston where they grew up, have gone to visit drug dealer Cheese in prison because they think he's involved in the kidnapping of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. Without sentimentalizing the grotesque figure of Cheese, Lehane tells us enough about his past to make us understand why he and the two detectives might share enough trust to possibly save a child's life when all the best efforts of traditional law enforcement have failed. By putting Kenzie and Gennaro just to one side of the law (but not totally outside; they have several cop friends, a very important part of the story), Lehane adds depth and edge to traditional genre relationships. The lifelong love affair between Kenzie and Gennaro--interrupted by her marriage to his best friend--is another perfectly controlled element that grows and changes as we watch. Surrounded by dead, abused, and missing children, Kenzie mourns and rages while Gennaro longs for one of her own. So the choices made by both of them in the final pages of this absolutely gripping story have the inevitability of life and the dazzling beauty of art.

    Other Kenzie/Gennaro books available in paperback: Darkness, Take My Hand, A Drink Before the War, Sacred. --Dick Adler [via]

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  • A Good Day to Die
    by Jim Harrison
    ISBN 0385283431 (0-385-28343-1)
    Softcover, Doubleday

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    Book summary:

    Their plans were conceived in a drunken excitement and resulted in more horror than any of them could have imagined.  There was the poet able to retreat into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; the Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers and violence; and the girl who loved only one of them -- at first.  With their ideals ostensibly in order, they set out from Florida to save the Grand Canyon from a dam they believed was being built.  Along with the tapedeck for the car, the liquor and the drugs, there was also a case of dynamite. [via]

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  • Harriet the Spy
    by Louise Fitzhugh
    ISBN 0385327838 (0-385-32783-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    Ages 8-12. Thirty-two years before it was made into a movie, Harriet the Spy was a groundbreaking book: its unflinchingly honest portrayal of childhood problems and emotions changed children's literature forever. Happily, it has neither dated nor become obsolete and remains one of the best children's novels ever written. The fascinating story is about an intensely curious and intelligent girl, who literally spies on people and writes about them in her secret notebook, trying to make sense of life's absurdities. When her classmates find her notebook and read her painfully blunt comments about them, Harriet finds herself a lonely outcast. Fitzhugh's writing is astonishingly vivid, real and engaging, and Harriet, by no means a typical, loveable heroine, is one of literature's most unforgettable characters. School Library Journal wrote, "a tour de force... bursts with life." The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books called it "a very, very funny story." And The Chicago Tribune raved, "brilliantly written... a superb portrait of an extraordinary child." [via]

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  • Hazard of New Fortunes
    by William Dean Howells, David J. Nordloh, Arthur Meier Schlesinger
    ISBN 0375759271 (0-375-75927-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Centering on a conflict between a self-made millionaire and an idealistic reformer in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York, A Hazard of New Fortunes insightfully renders the complexities of the American experience at a time of great social and economic upheaval and transformation. In its depiction of wealth, poverty, and New York City life, it remains a strikingly contemporary work.

    Reproduced here is the authoritative Indiana University Press Edition edited and annotated by David J. Nordloh, with full scholarly commentary and extensive textual apparatus. [via]

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  • House of Sand and Fog
    by Andre Dubus
    ISBN 0375727345 (0-375-72734-5)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Andre Dubus III wastes no time in capturing the dark side of the immigrant experience in America at the end of the 20th century. House of Sand and Fog opens with a highway crew composed of several nationalities picking up litter on a hot California summer day. Massoud Amir Behrani, a former colonel in the Iranian military under the Shah, reflects on his job-search efforts since arriving in the U.S. four years before: "I have spent hundreds of dollars copying my credentials; I have worn my French suits and my Italian shoes to hand-deliver my qualifications; I have waited and then called back after the correct waiting time; but there is nothing." The father of two, Behrani has spent most of the money he brought with him from Iran on an apartment and furnishings that are too expensive, desperately trying to keep up appearances in order to enhance his daughter's chances of making a good marriage. Now the daughter is married, and on impulse he sinks his remaining funds into a house he buys at auction, thus unwittingly putting himself and his family on a trajectory to disaster. The house, it seems, once belonged to Kathy Nicolo, a self-destructive alcoholic who wants it back. What starts out as a legal tussle soon escalates into a personal confrontation--with dire results.

    Dubus tells his tragic tale from the viewpoints of the two main adversaries, Behrani and Kathy. To both of them, the house represents something more than just a place to live. For the colonel, it is a foot in the door of the American dream; for Kathy, a reminder of a kinder, gentler past. In prose that is simple yet evocative, House of Sand and Fog builds to its inevitable denouement, one that is painfully dark but unfailingly honest. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • House of the Seven Gables
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Oliver
    ISBN 0375756876 (0-375-75687-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is one of Hawthorne's defining works, a vivid depiction of American life and values replete with brilliantly etched characters. The tale of a cursed house with a "mysterious and terrible past" and the generations linked to it, Hawthorne's chronicle of the Maule and Pyncheon families over two centuries reveals, in Mary Oliver's words, "lives caught in the common fire of history." This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition uses the definitive text as prepared for The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne; this is the Approved Edition of the Center for Scholarly Editions (Modern Language Association). It includes newly commissioned notes on the text. [via]

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  • McBain, Ed: Ice: A Major New Novel about the World of the 87th Precinct
    Ice: A Major New Novel about the World of the 87th Precinct
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 0380671085 (0-380-67108-5)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Bartlett, Bruce: Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the American Legacy
    Impostor : How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the American Legacy
    by Bruce Bartlett
    ISBN 0385518277 (0-385-51827-7)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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  • In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead
    by James Lee Burke
    ISBN 038072121X (0-380-72121-X)
    Softcover, Avon Books

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    Book summary:

    Hollywood has sent its emissaries to New Iberia Parish to film a Civil War epic in the steaming mists of the Louisiana bayou -- reawakening the ghosts of a past best left undisturbed.

    The restless specters wait in the shadows for cajun cop Dave Robicheaux -- as he hunts a serial butcher who is preying on the less-then-innocent young. For these spirits are the guardians of Robicheaux's darkest torments -- and they hold the key to his ultimate salvation...or a final, fatal downfall.

    [via]

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  • Paretsky, Sara: Indemnity Only
    Indemnity Only
    by Sara Paretsky
    ISBN 0385302606 (0-385-30260-6)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • Das, Gurcharan: India Unbound
    India Unbound
    by Gurcharan Das
    ISBN 0385720742 (0-385-72074-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Canty, Kevin: Into the Great Wide Open
    Into the Great Wide Open
    by Kevin Canty
    ISBN 0385473885 (0-385-47388-5)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
    by Russell Shorto
    ISBN 0385503490 (0-385-50349-0)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.

    In the late 1960s, an archivist in the New York State Library made an astounding discovery: 12,000 pages of centuries-old correspondence, court cases, legal contracts, and reports from a forgotten society: the Dutch colony centered on Manhattan, which predated the thirteen original American colonies.  For the past thirty years scholar Charles Gehring has been translating this trove, which was recently declared a national treasure.  Now, Russell Shorto has made use of this vital material to construct a sweeping narrative of Manhattans founding that gives a startling, fresh perspective on how America began. 
     
    In an account that blends a novelists grasp of storytelling with cutting-edge scholarship, The Island at the Center of the World strips Manhattan of its asphalt, bringing us back to a wilderness islanda hunting ground for Indians, populated by wolves and bearsthat became a prize in the global power struggle between the English and the Dutch.  Indeed, Russell Shorto shows that Americas founding was not the work of English settlers alone but a result of the clashing of these two seventeenth century powers.  In fact, it was AmsterdamEuropes most liberal city, with an unusual policy of tolerance and a polyglot society dedicated to free tradethat became the model for the city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan.  While the Puritans of New England were founding a society based on intolerance, on Manhattan the Dutch created a free-trade, upwardly-mobile melting pot that would help shape not only New York, but America.
     
    The story moves from the halls of power in London and The Hague to bloody naval encounters on the high seas.  The characters in the sagathe men and women who played a part in Manhattans foundingrange from the philosopher Rene Descartes to James, the Duke of York, to prostitutes and smugglers.  At the heart of the story is a bitter power struggle between two men: Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony, and a forgotten American hero named Adriaen van der Donck, a maverick, liberal-minded lawyer whose brilliant political gamesmanship, commitment to individual freedom, and exuberant love of his new country would have a lasting impact on the history of this nation.  [via]

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  • McBain, Ed: Kiss
    Kiss
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 0380713829 (0-380-71382-9)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • McBain, Ed: Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man
    Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 038501600X (0-385-01600-X)
    Hardcover, Doubleday

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  • Block, Lawrence: A Long Line of Dead Men
    A Long Line of Dead Men
    by Lawrence Block
    ISBN 0380720248 (0-380-72024-8)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • McBain, Ed: Long Time No See: An 87th Precinct Mystery
    Long Time No See: An 87th Precinct Mystery
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 0380703696 (0-380-70369-6)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Lullaby
    by Chuck Palahniuk
    ISBN 0385722192 (0-385-72219-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The consequences of media saturation are the basis for an urban nightmare in Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk's darkly comic and often dazzling thriller. Assigned to write a series of feature articles investigating SIDS, troubled newspaper reporter Carl Streator begins to notice a pattern among the cases he encounters: each child was read the same poem prior to his or her death. His research and a tip from a necrophilic paramedic lead him to Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who sells "distressed" (demonized) homes, assured of their instant turnover. Boyle and Streator have both lost children to "crib death," and she confirms Streator's suspicions: the poem is an ancient lullaby or "culling song" that is lethal if spoken--or even thought--in a victim's direction. The misanthropic Streator, now armed with a deadly and uncontrollably catchy tune, goes on a minor killing spree until he recognizes his crimes and the song's devastating potential. Lullaby then turns into something of a road trip narrative, with Streator, Boyle, her empty-headed Wiccan secretary Mona, and Mona's vigilante boyfriend Oyster setting out across the U.S. to track down and destroy all copies of the poem.

    In his previous works, including the cult favorite Fight Club, Palahniuk has demonstrated a fondness for making statements about the condition of humanity, and he uses Lullaby like a blunt object to repeatedly overstate his generally dim view. Such dogmatic venom undermines the persuasiveness of his thesis about mass communication and free will, but thankfully, Palahniuk offers some respite here by allowing for sympathy and love, as well as through his razor-sharp humor, such as his mock listings for Helen's possessed properties: "six bedrooms, four baths, pine-paneled entryway, and blood running down the kitchen walls...." At such moments, Lullaby casts a powerful spell. --Ross Doll [via]

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  • McBain, Ed: Lullaby
    Lullaby
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 038070384X (0-380-70384-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
    by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman
    ISBN 0375714499 (0-375-71449-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. Contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, Herman and Chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting. Whether or not you've seen the eye-opening movie, buy this book, and you will be a far more knowledgeable person and much less prone to having your beliefs manipulated as easily as the press. [via]

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  • The Martian Chronicles
    by Ray Bradbury
    ISBN 0380973839 (0-380-97383-9)
    Hardcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger.

    The Martian Chronicles

    Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth's settlement of the fourth world from the sun.

    Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars ... and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.

    Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.

    [via]

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  • The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
    by Brady Udall
    ISBN 0375719180 (0-375-71918-0)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close. With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall's high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable. What persists is Edgar's innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West. [via]

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  • Mischief
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 0380713845 (0-380-71384-5)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    The Deaf Man is back! In his first appearance since Eight Black Horses in 1985, the nemesis of the 87th returns with a vengeance. Zeroing in on Steve Carella, his favorite foil, he bombards the squadroom with directives that seem to describe in detail exactly what he's up to this time - but not quite. What he's planning is his most devilish million-dollar caper to date. In the squadroom, an otherwise slow March night is enlivened by the murder of a graffiti writer under a highway bridge. Over the course of several weeks, more of the city's outlaw artists are killed under mysterious circumstances, and a team run by Detective Parker begins to put the pieces together. Meanwhile, a new criminal activity surfaces: Someone is abandoning helpless elderly men and women at different locations around the city. As if all this weren't enough, racial tensions in the city are at an all-time high. While pressure mounts on various fronts, the city announces a free rap concert in the park, set for a day in the very near future. As the shattering finale of Mischief looms, seemingly unrelated developments intertwine in an ending that sets a new standard even for McBain's most discerning fans. It's been said that "nobody writes the police procedural as well as Ed McBain" (San Diego Union). And in his latest tale of the 87th Precinct, Mischief McBain proves his mastery of the genre beyond reasonable doubt. [via]

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  • McBain, Ed: The Mugger
    The Mugger
    by Ed McBain
    ISBN 0380700816 (0-380-70081-6)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Mystic River
    by Dennis Lehane
    ISBN 0380731851 (0-380-73185-1)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    Dennis Lehane's Mystic River takes the material of the ordinary police procedural thriller and shapes it into heart-break. As boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean were friends, until one day Dave was abducted by two men pretending to be cops, and was never quite the same again. As men, Dave is a damaged fantasist, safe in a quietly happy marriage; Jimmy a retired criminal making a good respectable living for the sake of his children; and Sean is the homicide cop who finds himself investigating the murder of Jimmy's eldest daughter Katie. This is not just a book about what becomes of the children who grow into adults; it is about what happens to a neighbourhood when the rules change, when an old established working-class district acquires gentrified espresso bars at one end and the beats of the city's most dangerous whores at the other. It is also a book about the tragedy of all sudden violent deaths; we never forget our sense of Katie as she was, dancing on the last night of her life--she is never just the corpse here, never just the object of mourning and investigation. --Roz Kaveney [via]

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  • Gurganus, Allan: Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
    Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
    by Allan Gurganus
    ISBN 0375726632 (0-375-72663-2)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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  • On Photography
    by Susan Sontag
    ISBN 0385267061 (0-385-26706-1)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism (1977), this is "a brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking of the world and ourselves over the lost 140 years."-Washington Post  BOOK WORLD [via]

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  • The Partner
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0385339100 (0-385-33910-0)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Literary slugger John Grisham returns with a story about-- surprise!--a lawyer in trouble. Patrick Lanigan had been a young partner in a prominent Southern law firm. He had a beautiful wife, a new baby girl, and a bright future. Then one winter night Patrick was trapped in a burning car; the casket they buried held nothing but ashes.

    A short distance away, Patrick watched his own burial then fled. A fortune was stolen from his ex-firm's offshore account. And Patrick ran, covering his tracks the whole way.

    But, now, they've found him. [via]

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  • Kimmelman, Michael: Portraits : Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere
    Portraits : Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre and Elsewhere
    by Michael Kimmelman
    ISBN 0375754830 (0-375-75483-0)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Princess Diaries
    by Meg Cabot
    ISBN 0380814021 (0-380-81402-1)
    Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    Mia Thermopolis is your average urban ninth grader. Even though she lives in Greenwich Village with a single mom who is a semifamous painter, Mia still puts on her Doc Martens one at a time, and the most exciting things she ever dreams about are smacking lips with sexy senior Josh Richter, "six feet of unadulterated hotness," and passing Algebra I. Then Mia's dad comes to town, and drops a major bomb. Turns out he's not just a European politician as he's always lead her to believe, but actually the prince of a small country! And Mia, his only heir, is now considered the crown princess of Genovia! She doesn't even know how to begin to cope: "I am so NOT a princess.... You never saw anyone who looked less like a princess than I do. I mean, I have really bad hair... and... a really big mouth and no breasts and feet that look like skis." And if this news wasn't bad enough, Mia's mom has started dating her algebra teacher, the paparazzi is showing up at school, and she's in a huge fight with her best friend, Lilly. How much more can this reluctant Cinderella handle?

    Offbeat Mia will automatically win the heart of every teenage girl who's ever just wanted to fit in with as little fuss as possible. Debut author Meg Cabot's writing is silly and entertaining, with tons of pop culture references that will make teens feel right at home within her pages. This is a wonderfully wacky read. (Ages 12 and older) --Jennifer Hubert [via]

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  • The Pursuit of Happiness: Discovering the Pathway to Fulfillment, Well-Being, and Enduring Personal Joy
    by David G. Myers
    ISBN 0380715228 (0-380-71522-8)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    Social psychologist David G. Myers has reviewed thousands of recent scientific studies conducted worldwide in search of the key to happiness. With wit and wisdom, he explodes some of the popular myths on the subject and presents specific techniques for finding true joy in living:

    • Are most people happy?
    • What are the inner traits of happy people?
    • Are extroverts happier than introverts?
    • Are men happier than women?
    • Does religious faith promote inner peace and joy?
    • Does well-being come with being well-off?
    • Are happy children more likely to become happy adults?
    • What part do friends play in personal happiness?
    • Is age a factor in feeling happy?
    • What can you do to improve your own sense of well-being?
      and much more
    [via]

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  • Red Dragon
    by Thomas Harris
    ISBN 0385319673 (0-385-31967-3)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Lying on a cot in his cell with Alexandre Dumas's Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine open on his chest, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter makes his debut in this legendary horror novel, which is even better than its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs. As in Silence, the pulse-pounding suspense plot involves a hypersensitive FBI sleuth who consults psycho psychiatrist Lecter for clues to catching a killer on the loose.

    The sleuth, Will Graham, actually quit the FBI after nearly getting killed by Lecter while nabbing him, but fear isn't what bugs him about crime busting. It's just too creepy to get inside a killer's twisted mind. But he comes back to stop a madman who's been butchering entire families. The FBI needs Graham's insight, and Graham needs Lecter's genius. But Lecter is a clever fiend, and he manipulates both Graham and the killer at large from his cell.

    That killer, Francis Dolarhyde, works in a film lab, where he picks his victims by studying their home movies. He's obsessed with William Blake's bizarre painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, believing there's a red dragon within him, the personification of his demonic drives. Flashbacks to Dolarhyde's terrifying childhood and superb stream-of-consciousness prose get us right there inside his head. When Dolarhyde does weird things, we understand why. We sympathize when the voice of the cruel dead grandma who raised and crazed him urges him to mayhem--she's way scarier than that old bat in Psycho. When he falls in love with a blind girl at the lab, we hope he doesn't give in to Grandma's violent advice.

    This book is awesomely detailed, ingeniously plotted, judiciously gory, and fantastically imagined. If you haven't read it, you've never had the creeps. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The Red Scream
    by Mary Willis Walker
    ISBN 038546858X (0-385-46858-X)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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    Book summary:

    In this 1995 winner of the Edgar Award for best mystery novel, crime reporter Molly Cates has chronicled the exploits of Louie Bronk, a brutal serial killer scheduled for execution, for her first book. With his execution just a few days away, Molly decides to write the closing chapter on her disturbing relationship with the man known as the Texas Scalper. Strangely, both her boss and the husband of the woman whose murder got Bronk the death penalty pressure her to back off the story. When she receives a chilling anonymous letter and another body is found, she begins to suspect that Bronk is not the killer at all. Her quest for the truth, she discovers, not only discredits her work, but places her own life on the line. [via]

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  • Second Foundation
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0380008238 (0-380-00823-8)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    Paperback. [via]

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  • Shutter Island
    by Dennis Lehane
    ISBN 038073186X (0-380-73186-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades -- with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.

    [via]

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  • Sister Carrie
    by Theodore Dreiser
    ISBN 0375753214 (0-375-75321-4)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.

    Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason [via]

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  • Bradley, Omar Nelson: Soldier's Story
    Soldier's Story
    by Omar Nelson Bradley, A. J. Liebling
    ISBN 0375754210 (0-375-75421-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Barth, John: The Sot-Weed Factor
    The Sot-Weed Factor
    by John Barth
    ISBN 0385240880 (0-385-24088-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Bisson, Terry: Talking Man
    Talking Man
    by Terry Bisson
    ISBN 0380751410 (0-380-75141-0)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Grandin, Temple: Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism
    Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism
    by Temple Grandin
    ISBN 0385477929 (0-385-47792-9)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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  • This Side of Paradise
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean
    ISBN 0375758860 (0-375-75886-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    This Side of Paradise is the book that established F. Scott Fitzgerald as the prophet and golden boy of the newly dawned Jazz Age. Published in 1920, when he was just twenty-three, the novel catapulted him to instant fame and financial success. The story of Amory Blaine, a privileged, aimless, and self-absorbed Princeton student, This Side of Paradise closely reflects Fitzgerald's own experiences as an undergraduate. Amory Blaine's journey from prep school to college to the First World War is an account of "the lost generation." The young "romantic egotist" symbolizes what Fitzgerald so memorably described as "a new generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken." A pastiche of literary styles, this dazzling chronicle of youth remains bitingly relevant decades later."This Side of Paradise commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit," wrote Edmund Wilson. "But it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life." [via]

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  • Dick, Philip K.: Time Out of Joint
    Time Out of Joint
    by Philip K. Dick
    ISBN 037571927X (0-375-71927-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Block, Lawrence: Time to Murder and Create
    Time to Murder and Create
    by Lawrence Block
    ISBN 0380763656 (0-380-76365-6)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Total Recall
    by Sara Paretsky
    ISBN 0385313667 (0-385-31366-7)
    Hardcover, Dell Publishing

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    Book summary:

    Chicago private investigator V.I. Warshawski returns in an exceptionally well-plotted thriller that focuses attention on V.I.'s longtime friend Lotty Herschel. In a handful of chapters that punctuate the contemporary narrative, the Austrian-born physician tells her own story. More than just a device to draw the many threads of this complex novel together, Lotty's history illuminates the depth and complexity of a character that readers of Sara Paretsky's many books-- like V.I. herself--only thought they knew.

    At a conference on the recovery of Holocaust assets, a man named Paul Radbuka surfaces, claiming to be part of the past that Lotty left buried in war-torn Europe half a century ago. The aging Lotty is emotionally shattered. She has never talked to V.I. about those years following her escape from Austria--her youth as an orphaned teenager in England and the brilliant medical career that ultimately brought her to America. But Radbuka's claims have such a dramatic effect on her that V.I. feels compelled to investigate him. Radbuka's early life in a concentration camp has recently come back to him, aided by the ministrations of a recovered-memory therapist. Now he's demanding that Lotty and her friend Max, another émigré, acknowledge his connection to them, something neither is prepared to do. Is Radbuka really who he claims to be? And if he's the impostor Lotty says he is, why is she so terrified of him?

    V.I.'s efforts to pin down Radbuka's identity dovetail with another case, that of a client with a beef against an insurance company that's trying to keep the state legislature from passing a Holocaust Asset Recovery Act. It's a little too tidy for coincidence, but since it gives Paretsky a chance to show off her knowledge of Chicago politics, the reader is delighted to accept it. While it's Lotty's voice that brings the dead to life and the past into the present, it's V.I.'s dogged perseverance and abiding affection for her friend that drive this powerful, brilliantly executed novel to a conclusion. This is one of Paretsky's strongest outings in years. --Jane Adams [via]

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  • Brautigan, Richard: Trout Fishing in America
    Trout Fishing in America
    by Richard Brautigan
    ISBN 0385290837 (0-385-29083-7)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • Turn of the Century
    by Kurt Anderson
    ISBN 0385335040 (0-385-33504-0)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Everyone will compare Kurt Andersen's scathingly funny first novel to Tom Wolfe's fictional debut, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Like Wolfe, Andersen is a merry terrorist, a status-attuned assassin with liquid nitrogen in his veins, a prose style with the cool purr of an Uzi, and the entire society in his crosshairs. And like the Man in White's protagonist, Sherman McCoy, Andersen's George Mactier is a master of the contemporary universe--not just Manhattan, but decadent post fin-de-siècle Hollywood, the globe-gobbling, infotainment-tainted news media, and cyberspace from Seattle to Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley.

    Turn of the Century opens in February 2000, in a bizarro world with just a tangy twist of futuristic extrapolation. George has parlayed a Newsweek writing job into a PBS documentary into a $16,575-a-week job as a producer at the sinister MBC network. His series, NARCS, is a veritable Cuisinart of fact and fiction in which the actors get to participate in real drug busts and get all the best lines, since they're working from scripts. In the most notorious episode, the dealer they arrest turns out to be an Actors Equity member (thanks to Rent), so he gets union scale and a recurring role.

    As George stumbles into a Wolfesque calamity spiral, his wife, Lizzie Zimbalist, ascends to power. Lizzie is a brilliant software entrepreneur: her "force-feedback technology" alternative-history game can sense players' fear. "If you travel to 1792 Paris, for instance, you are designated a besotted peasant or a frightened aristocrat or an angry sansculotte according to your heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance; too many twitches, the wrong sort of palpitation, and you're a marquess (or marchioness) headed for the guillotine." Needless to say, her insights into the year 2000 earn her bigtime interest from George's boss and Microsoft. Lizzie is a character at least as vivid as George, and their hectic family life is uncloying and acutely observed.

    Andersen's plot (involving Bill Gates's potential death) has more hairy turns than the Hana Highway--read carefully or you'll go off the road. But you're guaranteed a wild ride with amazing characters: an irreverent investor inspired by James Cramer, a hilarious MBC toady, Timothy Featherstone--who's as marvelous a creation as Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success--and worlds' worth of social caricatures. Kurt Andersen has an uncanny ear for the way we talk now and Turn of the Century is sharp, knowing, and subversive. Let's all pray that it isn't prescient as well. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea
    by Richard Henry Dana, Gary Kinder
    ISBN 0375757945 (0-375-75794-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Tracing an awe-inspiring oceanic route from Boston, around Cape Horn, to the California coast, Two Years Before the Mast is both a riveting story of adventure and the most eloquent, insightful account we have of life at sea in the early nineteenth century. Richard Henry Dana is only nineteen when he abandons the patrician world of Boston and Harvard for an arduous voyage among real sailors, amid genuine danger. The result is an astonishing read, replete with vivid descriptions of storms, whales, and the ship's mad captain, terrible hardship and magical beauty, and fascinating historical detail, including an intriguing portrait of California before the gold rush. As D. H. Lawrence proclaimed, "Dana's small book is a very great book." [via]

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  • Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
    by Jon Krakauer
    ISBN 0385509510 (0-385-50951-0)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    In 1984, Ron and Dan Lafferty murdered the wife and infant daughter of their younger brother Allen. The crimes were noteworthy not merely for their brutality but for the brothers' claim that they were acting on direct orders from God. In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer tells the story of the killers and their crime but also explores the shadowy world of Mormon fundamentalism from which the two emerged. The Mormon Church was founded, in part, on the idea that true believers could speak directly with God. But while the mainstream church attempted to be more palatable to the general public by rejecting the controversial tenet of polygamy, fundamentalist splinter groups saw this as apostasy and took to the hills to live what they believed to be a righteous life. When their beliefs are challenged or their patriarchal, cult-like order defied, these still- active groups, according to Krakauer, are capable of fighting back with tremendous violence. While Krak! auer's research into the history of the church is admirably extensive, the real power of the book comes from present- day information, notably jailhouse interviews with Dan Lafferty. Far from being the brooding maniac one might expect, Lafferty is chillingly coherent, still insisting that his motive was merely to obey God's command. Krakauer's accounts of the actual murders are graphic and disturbing, but such detail makes the brothers' claim of divine instruction all the more horrifying. In an age where Westerners have trouble comprehending what drives Islamic fundamentalists to kill, Jon Krakauer advises us to look within America's own borders. --John Moe [via]

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  • Walker, Mary Willis: Under the Beetle's Cellar
    Under the Beetle's Cellar
    by Mary Willis Walker
    ISBN 0385468598 (0-385-46859-8)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • The Waste Land and Other Writings
    by T. S. Eliot
    ISBN 0375759344 (0-375-75934-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Also includes Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems (1920), and The Sacred Wood
    Introduction by Mary Karr
     
    First published in 1922, The Waste Land, T. S. Eliots masterpiece, is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliots poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a potent new poetic language. As Kenneth Rexroth wrote, Eliot articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression. As commanding as his verse, Eliots criticism also transformed twentieth-century letters, and this Modern Library edition includes a selection of Eliots most important essays. [via]

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  • Welcome to the Monkey House
    by Kurt Vonnegut
    ISBN 0385333501 (0-385-33350-1)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonneguts shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonneguts audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
      [via]

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  • What Maisie Knew
    by Henry James, Diane Johnson
    ISBN 0375760083 (0-375-76008-3)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Wizard of Oz
    by L. Frank Baum, Charles Santore
    ISBN 0375811370 (0-375-81137-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    In the 100 years since L. Frank Baum first published his Wonderful Wizard of Oz, countless authors and illustrators have adapted, interpreted, and retold this story of Dorothy and her unusual companions, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. But for sheer opulence and sumptuous color, award-winning artist Charles Santore's 100th anniversary edition takes the cake. Santore's large, fairy-tale style watercolors feature ominous, shadowy forests, magnificent but deadly poppies, the whimsical, green-tinted landscapes of Oz, and the golden gray fields of Kansas. Each page is awash in color; many of the two-page spreads have no text to distract readers from the illustrations' myriad details--not-yet-blooming poppy buds, the Tin Woodman's watering can head, and the radiant good witch, Glinda, posing on her ruby-encrusted throne. The text is condensed rather than adapted; so virtually every word is Baum's own. Although some scenes have been left out, Baum's classic story rings through, loud and clear. Sharing this lush edition with a favorite child would be the perfect way to celebrate a century of Oz. (Ages 4 to 8) --Emilie Coulter [via]

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  • Woman: An Intimate Geography
    by Natalie Angier
    ISBN 0385498411 (0-385-49841-1)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, as far as the health care profession is concerned the standard operating design of the human body is male. So when a book comes along as beautifully written and endlessly informative as Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography, it's a cause for major celebration. Written with whimsy and eloquence, her investigation into female physiology draws its inspiration not only from scientific and medical sources but also from mythology, history, art, and literature, layering biological factoids with her own personal encounters and arcane anecdotes from the history of science. Who knew, for example, that the clitoris--with 8,000 nerve fibers--packs double the pleasure of the penis; that the gene controlling cellular sensitivity to male androgens, ironically enough, resides on the X-chromosome; or that stress hormones like cortisol and corticosterone are the true precursors of friendship?

    The mysteries of evolution are not a new subject for Angier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biology writer for the New York Times whose previous books include The Beauty of the Beastly and Natural Obsessions. The strengths of Woman begin with Angier's witty and evocative prose style, but its real contribution is the way it expands the definition of female "geography" beyond womb, breasts, and estrogen, down as far as the bimolecular substructure of DNA and up as high as the transcendent infrastructure of the human brain. --Patrizia DiLucchio [via]

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