books tagged “Zeitgeist”

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  • About a Boy
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1573227331 (1-57322-733-1)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    Will Lightman is a Peter Pan for the 1990s. At 36, the terminally hip North Londoner is unmarried, hyper-concerned with his coolness quotient and blithely living off his father's novelty song royalties. Will sees himself as entirely lacking in hidden depths--and he's proud of it! The only trouble is, his friends are succumbing to responsibilities and children and he's increasingly left out in the cold. How can someone brilliantly equipped for meaningless relationships ensure that he'll continue to meet beautiful Julie Christie-like women and ensure that they'll throw him over before things get too profound? A brief encounter with a single mother sets Will off on his new career, that of "serial nice guy." As far as he's concerned--and remember, concern isn't his strong suit--he's the perfect catch for the young mother on the go. After an interlude of sexual bliss, she'll realise that her child isn't ready for a man in their life and Will can ride off into the Highgate sunset, where more damsels apparently await. The only catch is that the best way to meet these women is at single-parent get-togethers. In one of Nick Hornby's many hilarious (and embarrassing) scenes, Will falls into some serious misrepresentation at SPAT ("Single Parents-- Alone Together"), passing himself off as a bereft single dad: "There was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word."

    What interferes with Will's career arc, of course, is reality--in the shape of a 12-year-old boy who is in many ways his polar opposite. For Marcus, cool isn't even a possibility, let alone an issue. For starters, he's a victim at his new school. Things at home are pretty awful, too, since his musical-therapist mother seems increasingly in need of therapy herself. All Marcus can do is cobble together information with a mixture of incomprehension, innocence, self-blame and unfettered clear sight. As fans of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity already know, Hornby's insight into laddishness magically combines the serious and the hilarious. About a Boy continues his singular examination of masculine wish-fulfilment and fear. This time, though, the author lets women and children onto the playing field, forcing his feckless hero to leap over an entirely new--and entirely welcome--set of emotional hurdles. [via]

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  • The Book of Lists
    by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace
    ISBN 1841956619 (1-84195-661-9)
    Softcover, Canongate Books

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    The first and best compendium of facts weirder than fiction, of intriguing information and must-talk-about trivia has spawned many imitators - but none as addictive or successful. For nearly three decades, the editors have been researching curious facts, unusual statistics and the incredible stories behind them. Now, the most entertaining and informative of these have been brought together in a thoroughly up-to-date edition. Published all over the world, and containing lists written specially for each country, this edition has something for everyone. [via]

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  • Bridget Jones
    by Helen Fielding
    ISBN 8497936027 (84-9793-602-7)
    Softcover, Debolsillo

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    Los anos locos han terminado, pero no por mucho tiempo. Al final de El diario de Bridget Jones, Bridget consigue su principal proposito: encontrar al hombre perfecto. Ahora, en Bridget Jones: Sobrevivire, descubre que ocurre cuando realmente se convive con el hombre de tus suenos y este no lava nunca los platos. Sumergida en un mar de manuales de autoayuda y espoleada por los disparatados consejos de sus estrafalarias amigas Jude y Shazzer, Bridget vuelve a las andadas, se pelea continuamente con una ex amiga robanovios, soporta a una madre fascinada por los avances de la tecnologia domestica, vive en una casa en obras, y, por lo tanto, se ve obligada a padecer a un albanil obsesionado por la pesca. Bridget se embarcara, poco a poco, en una epifania espiritual que la llevara desde las colas de los bares del barrio londinense de Notting Hill hasta una isla de Bangkok, a la que viajara en compania de su amiga Shazzer. Alli encontrara playas llenas de palmeras y hongos alucinogenos... [via]

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  • Bridget Jones Sobrevivre/ Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason
    by Helen Fielding
    ISBN 8484505294 (84-8450-529-4)
    Softcover, Debolsillo

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    Predecesor: El diario de Bridget Jones Sinopsis: Los años locos han terminado, pero no por mucho tiempo. Al final de El diario de Bridget Jones, Bridget consigue su principal propósito: encontrar al hombre perfecto. Ahora, en Bridget Jones: Sobreviviré, descubre qué ocurre cuando realmente se convive con el hombre de tus sueños y éste no lava nunca los platos. Sumergida en un mar de manuales de autoayuda y espoleada por los disparatados consejos de sus estrafalarias amigas Jude y Shazzer, Bridget vuelve a las andadas, se pelea continuamente con una ex amiga robanovios, soporta a una madre fascinada por los avances de la tecnología doméstica, vive en una casa en obras, y, por lo tanto, se ve obligada a padecer a un albañil obsesionado por la pesca. Bridget se embarcará, poco a poco, en una epifanía espiritual que la llevará desde las colas de los bares del barrio londinense de Notting Hill hasta una isla de Bangkok, a la que viajará en compañía de su amiga Shazzer. Allí encontrará playas llenas de palmeras y hongos alucinógenos... [via]

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  • Hirsch, E.D.: Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
    Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
    by E.D. Hirsch
    ISBN 1569562199 (1-56956-219-9)
    Softcover, William a Thomas Braille

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  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
    by Mark Haddon
    ISBN 1400032717 (1-4000-3271-7)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years. [via]

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  • Trefil, James: The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
    The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
    by James Trefil, Joseph F. Kett, E.D. Hirsch
    ISBN 0395437482 (0-395-43748-2)
    Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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    "The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 2nd edition" is a compendium of the words, phrases, names, places, events and other items, familiar to most Americans, which combines our common knowledge as a 'collective memory' and informs our late 20th Century discourse; allows us to comprehend daily newspapers, magazines, news reports, to understand our peers, leaders and even jokes; and colors the sound of our national culture. This is not 'expert' knowledge but rather the shared 'common' knowledge which allows people to communicate, forms the basis of communities, and distinguishes our national culture as unique. [via]

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  • Die Gerettete Zunge: Geschichte Einer Jugend
    by Elias Canetti
    ISBN 3446170227 (3-446-17022-7)
    Hardcover, Hanser

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    Der erste Band der auf drei Bücher angelegten Autobiografie, Die geretteteZunge, reicht bis zum 16. Lebensjahr Canettis. Geburts- und zugleich symbolischerAusgangsort des Schriftstellers ist das bulgarische Rustschuk, ein multilingualerSchmelztiegel der Kulturen. Aus der Vielfalt der Sprachen - die Familienwaren ehemals aus Spanien eingewanderte sephardische Juden, die einen auchheute noch bestehenden eigenen Dialekt pflegen, die Eltern in Wien erzogen,Freunde kamen aus Russland, Hausangestellte aus Bulgarien, Armenien etc.- wählte Canetti das Deutsche zur Muttersprache die Mutter unterrichteteihn in der Schweiz. Alle Erinnerungen, die Historisches nur gelegentlichberühren, sind auf den späteren Schriftsteller bezogen neben der Entwicklungeiner überreichen Fantasie, Bildungs- und Lektüreerfahrungen sind einzelneEreignisse besonders herausgehoben, etwa der frühe Tod des Vaters und diedamit verbundene Fixierung auf die Mutter. Mit den Bänden Die Fackel imOhr. Lebensgeschichte 1921-31, die im Titel auf den Einfluss von Karl Kraus1874-1936 und dessen Zeitschrift Die Fackel hinweist, und Das Augenspiel.Lebensgeschichte 1931-37 erschienen 1980 bzw. 1985 komplettiert Canettidie metaphorisch angedeutete Ausbildung der Sinne Sprechen, Hören undSehen zu einem Credo dichterischer Subjektivität. [via]

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  • El Diario De Bridget Jones / Bridget Jones's Diary
    by Helen Fielding, Random House Mondadori
    ISBN 8497592603 (84-9759-260-3)
    Softcover, Debolsillo

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    Helen Fielding ha creado un personaje cómico, hilarante que hable sin tapujos sobre sus contemporaneos, Bridget Jones. El Diario de Bridget Jones es una sabia combinación de Anita Loos and Jane Austen y ha conseguido un éxito espectacular en todos los paises. [via]

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  • The English: A Portrait of a People
    by Jeremy Paxman
    ISBN 1585671762 (1-58567-176-2)
    Softcover, Overlook Press, The

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    What is it about the English? Not the British overall, not the Scots, not the Irish or the Welsh, but the English. Why do they seem so unsure of who they are? As Jeremy Paxman remarks in his preface to The English, being English "used to be so easy". Now, with the Empire gone, with Wales and Scotland moving into more independent postures, with the troubling specter of a united Europe (and despite the raucous hype of "Cool Britannia"), the English seem to have entered a collective crisis of national identity.

    Jeremy Paxman has set himself the task of finding just what exactly is going on. Why, he wonders, "do the English seem to enjoy feeling so persecuted? What is behind the English obsession with games? How did they acquire their odd attitudes to sex and food? Where did they get their extraordinary capacity for hypocrisy?" He ranges widely in pursuit of answers, sifting through literature, cinema, and history. It is an intriguing investigation, encompassing many aspects of national life and character (such as it is), including the obligatory visit to that baffling phenomenon, the funeral of Princess Diana. Yet Paxman finds something fresh and interesting to say about even that now rather threadbare topic. In the end, he seems to find further questions to ask instead of answers. But why not? To him it is a sign that the English are acquiring a new sense of self. And some indication of this might lie in the obvious response to his remark that the English, being top of the British Imperial tree, had nicknames for their fellow nationalities--Jock, Taffy, Paddy, and Mick--but there was no corresponding name for an Englishman. Of course, there is one now, and it comes from one of the bits of empire to which so many undesirables were exported: Whinging Pom. --Robin Davidson, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Fever Pitch
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1573226882 (1-57322-688-2)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.

    Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems."

    Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger [via]

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  • Coupland, Douglas: Generation X
    Generation X
    by Douglas Coupland
    ISBN 1417706643 (1-4177-0664-3)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Generation X should feel dated--its title is no longer a part of the zeitgeist, and the generation it defined has been irrevocably changed. Gen Xers--the post-boomers born in the 1960s and even the late '50s--are no longer the socially terrified twentysomethings that populate Douglas Coupland's first and finest novel. The economic boom of the late 1990s dragged them out of their McJobs and back into the corporate world, transforming them into younger versions of the yuppies that Coupland lampoons so well. Surprisingly, though, the culture that is described in Generation X has not changed all that much; it has simply been passed on, in an Internet-friendly form, to the latest crop of bright young things.

    Those who missed Generation X when it first appeared may be surprised to find that most of the associations that have been tacked on to its catchphrase title are not present in the novel. Coupland's characters--Dag, Claire, and Andy, three young neurotics from "good" upper-middle-class homes--are not financially ambitious, but they are not slackers either. Rather than drearily complaining that there is nothing worth doing, they are trying very hard to make sense of their lives and their culture. They do this by telling stories to each other, desperately and sincerely. Andy likens his friends' need for storytelling to the proceedings of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:

    "Never be afraid to cough up a bit of diseased lung for the spectators," said a man who sat next to me at a meeting once, a man with skin like a half-cooked pie crust and who had five grown children who would no longer return his phone calls: "How are people ever going to help themselves if they can't grab onto a fragment of your own horror? People want that little fragment, they need it. That little piece of lung makes their own fragments less scary." I'm still looking for a description of storytelling as vital as this.
    Storytelling is an ancient invention; Coupland simply restates its importance in a world of short attention spans and jump-cutting media. This side of Generation X hasn't aged at all and isn't likely to. And the other, better-known side of the novel--Coupland's razor-sharp cultural field guide--will remain relevant as long as university graduates still have to choose between economic uncertainty and corporate monoculture and still respond by refusing to grow up in conventional ways. Anyone who has avoided Generation X because of its unfortunate association with a few demographic buzzwords should consider giving Coupland a second look. --Jack Illingworth [via]

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  • Lloyd, David: Global Frequency: Planet Ablaze
    Global Frequency: Planet Ablaze
    by David Lloyd, Warren Ellis, David Baron, Jon J. Muth, Garry Leach, Steve Dillon, Simon Bisley, Roy Martinez, Glenn Fabry
    ISBN 1401202748 (1-4012-0274-8)
    Softcover, Dc Comics

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  • Ellis, Warren: Global Frequency: Planet Ablaze
    Global Frequency: Planet Ablaze
    by Warren Ellis, Simon Bisley
    ISBN 1401202918 (1-4012-0291-8)
    Softcover, Dc Comics

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  • The Grapes of Wrath
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 141770392X (1-4177-0392-X)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, America, still recovering from the Great Depression, came face to face with itself in a startling, lyrical way. John Steinbeck gathered the country's recent shames and devastations--the Hoovervilles, the desperate, dirty children, the dissolution of kin, the oppressive labor conditions--in the Joad family. Then he set them down on a westward-running road, local dialect and all, for the world to acknowledge. For this marvel of observation and perception, he won the Pulitzer in 1940.

    The prize must have come, at least in part, because alongside the poverty and dispossession, Steinbeck chronicled the Joads' refusal, even inability, to let go of their faltering but unmistakable hold on human dignity. Witnessing their degeneration from Oklahoma farmers to a diminished band of migrant workers is nothing short of crushing. The Joads lose family members to death and cowardice as they go, and are challenged by everything from weather to the authorities to the California locals themselves. As Tom Joad puts it: "They're a-workin' away at our spirits. They're a tryin' to make us cringe an' crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin' to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop. They're workin' on our decency."

    The point, though, is that decency remains intact, if somewhat battle-scarred, and this, as much as the depression and the plight of the "Okies," is a part of American history. When the California of their dreams proves to be less than edenic, Ma tells Tom: "You got to have patience. Why, Tom--us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people--we go on." It's almost as if she's talking about the very novel she inhabits, for Steinbeck's characters, more than most literary creations, do go on. They continue, now as much as ever, to illuminate and humanize an era for generations of readers who, thankfully, have no experiential point of reference for understanding the depression. The book's final, haunting image of Rose of Sharon--Rosasharn, as they call her--the eldest Joad daughter, forcing the milk intended for her stillborn baby onto a starving stranger, is a lesson on the grandest scale. "'You got to,'" she says, simply. And so do we all. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Gray, John: Heresies
    Heresies
    by John Gray
    ISBN 1862077185 (1-86207-718-5)
    Softcover, Granta Books

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  • High Fidelity
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1573228214 (1-57322-821-4)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    It has been said often enough that baby boomers are a television generation, but the very funny novel High Fidelity reminds that in a way they are the record-album generation as well. This funny novel is obsessed with music; Hornby's narrator is an early-thirtysomething English guy who runs a London record store. He sells albums recorded the old-fashioned way--on vinyl--and is having a tough time making other transitions as well, specifically adulthood. The book is in one sense a love story, both sweet and interesting; most entertaining, though, are the hilarious arguments over arcane matters of pop music. [via]

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  • How to Be Good
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1573229326 (1-57322-932-6)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    In Nick Hornby's How to Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her husband David, the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds parking lot, having just slept with another man. What Katie doesn't yet realize is that her fall from grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the interstate at rush hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being angry. He's about to become good--not politically correct, organic-food-eating good, but good in the fashion of the Gospels. And that's no easier in modern-day Holloway than it was in ancient Israel.

    Hornby means us to take his title literally: How can we be good, and what does that mean? However, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerizes us with that cocktail of wit and compassion that has become his trademark. The result is a multifaceted jewel of a book: a hilarious romp, a painstaking dissection of middle-class mores, and a powerfully sympathetic portrait of a marriage in its death throes. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as we watch David forcing his kids to give away their computers, drawing up schemes for the mass redistribution of wealth, and inviting his wife's most desolate patients round for a Sunday roast. But that's because How to Be Good manages to be both brutally truthful and full of hope. It won't outsell the Bible, but it's a lot funnier. --Matthew Baylis [via]

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  • D'Souza, Dinesh: Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience
    Illiberal Education: Political Correctness and the College Experience
    by Dinesh D'Souza
    ISBN 1878802089 (1-878802-08-9)
    Softcover, John m Ashbrook Center for Public

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  • Schalit, Joel: Jerusalem Calling: A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Everything World
    Jerusalem Calling: A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Everything World
    by Joel Schalit
    ISBN 1888451173 (1-888451-17-3)
    Softcover, Akashic Books

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  • John Steinbeck
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 1883011159 (1-883011-15-9)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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    This second volume in the authoritative edition of John Steinbeck (with "Novels and Stories, 1932-1937") features the Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece "The Grapes of Wrath" in a newly corrected text based on the author's manuscript, typescript, and galleys. "The Harvest Gypsies is Steinbeck's investigative report on migrant farm workers which laid the groundwork for the novel. "The Long Valley" displays his brilliance with short stories, including such classics as "The Chrysanthemums," "Flight," and "The Red Pony." "The Log from the Sea of Cortez," about a marine biological expedition, combines science, philosophy, and adventure. [via]

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  • JPod
    by Douglas Coupland
    ISBN 1596911050 (1-59691-105-0)
    Softcover, Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA

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    Already dubbed Microserfs 2.0 by some pundits--a winking allusion to Douglas Coupland's previous novel Microserfs, which similarly chronicled pop-culture-damaged twentysomething misfits flailing, foundering, and occasionally succeeding in the high-tech sector--JPod is, like all of Coupland's novels, a byproduct of its era and yet strangely detached from it. Only this time with a bold and very crafty narrative device: Douglas Coupland, novelist, is a character in Douglas Coupland's novel. Which, when you think about it, makes sense since the type of people Coupland depicts are precisely the type of people who consume Coupland novels. As the once-great comedian Dennis Miller might holler, "Stop him before he sub-references again!" Readers familiar with Coupland's oeuvre know what to expect with the characterizations here. They also know that Coupland on a roll is both savagely observant and laugh-out-loud funny: "Bree was showing someone photos of her recent holiday visiting Korean animation sweathshops. She was bummed because she couldn't get into North Korea: too much legal juju. [She said] 'I just wanted to know what it's like to be in a society with no technology except for three dial telephones and a TV camera they won from Fidel Castro in a game of rock paper scissors.'" Much of the book is like that, built on granular and meandering exchanges between characters about . . . stuff. While JPod's flow is hobbled by some preposterous twists and character traits and by random words, phrases, and numbers splattered gratuitously across successive pages in oversized typeface, it's hard to imagine Coupland fans walking away disappointed. --Kim Hughes [via]

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  • Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
    by Michelle Goldberg
    ISBN 0393329763 (0-393-32976-3)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    "A potent wakeup call to pluralists in the coming showdown with Christian nationalists."Publishers Weekly, starred review

    Michelle Goldberg, a senior political reporter for Salon.com, has been covering the intersection of politics and ideology for years. Before the 2004 election, and during the ensuing months when many Americans were trying to understand how an administration marked by cronyism, disregard for the national budget, and poorly disguised self-interest had been reinstated, Goldberg traveled through the heartland of a country in the grips of a fevered religious radicalism: the America of our time. From the classroom to the mega-church to the federal court, she saw how the growing influence of dominionism-the doctrine that Christians have the right to rule nonbelievers-is threatening the foundations of democracy.

    In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military retirees pledging to seize the nation in Christ's name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country's social problems.

    With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into a Christian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture. In her examination of the ever-widening divide between believers and nonbelievers, Goldberg illustrates the subversive effect of this conservative stranglehold nationwide. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America. [via]

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  • A Long Way Down
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1594481938 (1-59448-193-8)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    In his eagerly awaited fourth novel, New York Times-bestselling author Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when they've reached the end of the line.

    Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives.

    In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Nick Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.

    Intense, hilarious, provocative, and moving, A Long Way Down is a novel about suicide that is, surprisingly, full of life.

    What's your jumping-off point?

    Maureen
    Why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvelous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the post office, people tut. Or sometimes they say "Excuse me, I was here first." They don't say "You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity." That would be a bit strong.

    Martin
    I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicides on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: "He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed." And then you read the story about the poor bastard: His wife was sleeping with his best friend, he'd lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before . . . Hello, Mr. Coroner? I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right.

    Jess
    I was at a party downstairs. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it-Happy New Year to you, too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you'd still have wanted to jump off the roof by five past twelve. And I wasn't the happiest person in London anyway. Obviously.

    JJ
    New Year's Eve was a night for sentimental losers. It was my own stupid fault. Of course there'd be a low-rent crowd up there. I should have picked a classier date-like March 28, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or November 25 (Nick Drake). If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless f*ck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant.     [via]

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  • Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism
    by Thomas L. Friedman
    ISBN 1400031257 (1-4000-3125-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    From the Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times columnist and bestselling author of From Beirut to Jerusalem and The Lexus and the Olive Tree comes this smart, penetrating, brilliantly informed book that is indispensable for understanding todays radically new world and Americas complex place in it.

    Thomas L. Freidman received his third Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. In Longitudes and Attitudes he gives us all of the columns he has published about the most momentous news story of our time, as well as a diary of his private experiences and reflections during his postSeptember 11 travels. Updated for this new paperback edition, with over two years worth of Friedmans columns and an expanded version of his diary, Longitudes and Attitudes is a broadly influential work from our most trusted observer of the international scene. [via]

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  • The Lovely Bones
    by Alice Sebold
    ISBN 159413023X (1-59413-023-X)
    Softcover, Thorndike Press

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    Book summary:

    On her way home from school on a snowy December day, 14-year-old Susie Salmon is lured into a cornfield and brutally raped and murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut novel, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective working on her case.

    As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams", where "there were no teachers... We never had to go inside except for art class... The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue".

    The Lovely Bones works as an odd yet affecting coming-of-age story. Susie struggles to accept her death while still clinging to the lost world of the living, following her family's dramas over the years. Her family disintegrates in their grief: her father becomes determined to find her killer, her mother withdraws, her little brother Buckley attempts to make sense of the new hole in his family and her younger sister Lindsey moves through the milestone events of her teenage and young adult years with Susie riding spiritual shotgun. Random acts and missed opportunities run throughout the book--Susie recalls her sole kiss with a boy on earth as "like an accident--a beautiful gasoline rainbow".

    Though sentimental at times, The Lovely Bones is a moving exploration of loss and mourning that ultimately puts its faith in the living and that is made even more powerful by a cast of convincing characters. Sebold orchestrates a big finish and though things tend to wrap up a little too well for everyone in the end, one can only imagine (or hope) that heaven is indeed a place filled with such happy endings. --Brad Thomas Parsons, Amazon.com [via]

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  • Man and Boy
    by Tony Parsons
    ISBN 1570717257 (1-57071-725-7)
    Hardcover, Sourcebooks Inc

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    Book summary:

    Harry Silver has it all: a beautiful wife, a wonderful son, a great job in the media--but in one night he throws it all away.

    Just yesterday Harry gave himself a shiny red sports car for his thirtieth birthday. Today he faces the baffling questions of a suddenly single dad:
    --How do you wash a four-year-old's hair?
    --Should he eat green spaghetti for breakfast?
    --What do you tell his Mommy from the emergency room phone?

    In this poignant and witty novel, Harry has to bring up his child alone, look after his parents, work out his relationships and hold down a job.

    As millions of women have discovered before him, that is not as simple as it may have seemed.

    Man and Boy is by turns funny, sharp, warm and heart-wrenching. It is a brilliantly engaging novel from one of the most gifted and influential commentators writing today. [via]

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  • Misadventures
    by Sylvia Smith
    ISBN 1841950955 (1-84195-095-5)
    Softcover, Canongate Books Ltd

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    Book summary:

    Sylvia Smith's first book is something of an enigma. Smith, born at the close of the Second World War in East London to working-class parents, is an unmarried, career secretary who has chosen to write her memoirs. Curiously nothing of note has happened to Smith to encourage the belief that her reminiscences might be of interest to the general reader but, fantastically, this only makes the book both more of a curiosity and more of a compelling read. In a series of short, deadpan, dated chapters Sylvia records a series of vignettes that each encapsulate the mostly lows and sometimes highs of the quotidian. Her life has not been without incident--it is just that not many of us would consider incidents such as being stood up on a second date, witnessing a non-fatal, non-serious car crash or the low-level embarrassment of being drunk worth recording. Smith's genius, or that of her publishers (it is difficult to know at what level of irony we are dealing here, on whom the joke actually is) is to understand that these moments are indeed worth recording because they are moments we all share. Most lives are ordinary lives, ordinary lives are the lives most of us live. And Smith's biography, which is hilarious in its mundanity, glorious in its saturating bathos, validates the day to day. All great stories are the embellishment of the ordinary, but here something special has been created precisely because of its seeming lack of affectation, its flat directness feeling like a wonderful antidote to the overwritten, stylised recording endemic to biography. A triumph and a real treat. --Mark Thwaite [via]

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  • Buruma, Ian: Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance
    Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance
    by Ian Buruma
    ISBN 1594201080 (1-59420-108-0)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • No Logo: El Poder De Las Marcas
    by Naomi Klein
    ISBN 8449312485 (84-493-1248-5)
    Softcover, Paidos Iberica Ediciones S A

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  • The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
    by John Battelle
    ISBN 1591841410 (1-59184-141-0)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question -- in all its shades of meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing.

    Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley.

    But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

    More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the Database of Intentions." Somewhere in Google's archives, for instance, you can find the agonized research of a gay man with AIDS, the silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker, and the anxiety of a woman checking out her blind date. Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on.

    No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology -- something as transformational as the Macintosh was in the mid- 1980s. And he has finally found it in search.

    Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major players from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street, including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier, who invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken Georgian whose business Google built, destroyed, and built again.

    Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually works, explores the amazing power of targeted advertising, and reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don't be evil" as its corporate motto.

    For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded -- and the implications of a world in which every click can be preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-opening and indispensable read. [via]

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  • Coulter, Ann: Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
    Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
    by Ann Coulter
    ISBN 1400049520 (1-4000-4952-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    "Liberals have been wrong about everything in the last half century," writes conservative pundit Ann Coulter, author of the bestselling anti-Clinton tome High Crimes and Misdemeanors. They've been especially wrong about Republicans, she writes. The bulk of Slander, in fact, is a well-documented brief dedicated to the proposition that most of the media despises anybody whose political opinions lie an inch to the right of the New York Times editorial page. This is hardly an original observation, though few have presented it with such verve. Coulter is the shock-jock of right-wing political commentary, able to dash off page after page of over-the-top but hilarious one-liners: "Liberals dispute slight reductions in the marginal tax rates as if they are trying to prevent Charles Manson from slaughtering baby seals." There's a certain amount of irony about an author who says "liberals prefer invective to engagement" also declaring, "The good part of being a Democrat is that you can commit crimes, sell out your base, bomb foreigners, and rape women, and the Democratic faithful will still think you're the greatest." But then carefully measured criticism never has been Coulter's shtick--or her appeal. Fans of Rush Limbaugh and admirers of Bernard Goldberg's Bias won't want to miss Slander. --John Miller [via]

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  • Songbook
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 1573223565 (1-57322-356-5)
    Softcover, Riverhead Books

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    Book summary:

    The personal essays in Nick Hornby's Songbook pop off the page with the immediacy and passion of an artfully arranged mix-tape. But then, who better to riff on 31 of his favorite songs than the author of that literary music-lover's delight, High Fidelity?

    "And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do," writes Hornby. More than his humble disclaimer, he captures "the narcotic need" for repeat plays of Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like a Bird," and testifies that "you can hear God" in Rufus Wainwright's coy reinterpretation of his father Loudon's "One Man Guy" ("given a neat little twist by Wainwright Junior's sexual orientation..."). Especially poignant is his reaction to "A Minor Incident," a Badly Drawn Boy song written for the soundtrack of the film version of Hornby's book About a Boy. While Hornby was writing the book, his young son was diagnosed with autism--a fact that adds greater resonance to the seemingly unrelated song he hears much later: "I write a book that isn't about my kid, and then someone writes a beautiful song based on an episode in my book that turns out to mean something much more personal to me than my book ever did." Meandering asides and observations like this linger in your mind (just like a fantastic song) long after you've flipped past the final page.

    The 11-song CD that accompanies the book is a great touch, but it's too bad it doesn't contain all of the featured songs--most likely the unfortunate result of licensing difficulties. Overall, Hornby's pitch-perfect prose, the quirky illustrations from Canadian artist Marcel Dzama, and a good cause--proceeds benefit TreeHouse, a U.K. charity for children with autism, and 826 Valencia, the nonprofit Bay Area learning center--add up to make Songbook a hit. Solid gold. --Brad Thomas Parsons [via]

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  • Updike, John: Terrorist
    Terrorist
    by John Updike
    ISBN 1585478601 (1-58547-860-1)
    Hardcover, Center Point Pub

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  • Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
    by Ann Coulter
    ISBN 1400050324 (1-4000-5032-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Liberals loyalty to the United States is off-limits as a subject of political debate. Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for rational discussion?

    In a stunning follow-up to her number one bestseller Slander, leading conservative pundit Ann Coulter contends that liberals have been wrong on every foreign policy issue, from the fight against Communism at home and abroad, the Nixon and the Clinton presidencies, and the struggle with the Soviet empire right up to todays war on terrorism. Liberals have a preternatural gift for always striking a position on the side of treason, says Coulter. Everyone says liberals love America, too. No, they dont. From Truman to Kennedy to Carter to Clinton, America has contained, appeased, and retreated, often sacrificing Americas best interests and security. With the fate of the world in the balance, liberals should leave the defense of the nation to conservatives.

    Reexamining the sixty-year history of the Cold War and beyondincluding the career of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Whittaker ChambersAlger Hiss affair, Ronald Reagans challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down this wall, the Gulf War, and our present war on terrorismCoulter reveals how liberals have been horribly wrong in all their political analyses and policy prescriptions. McCarthy, exonerated by the Venona Papers if not before, was basically right about Soviet agents working for the U.S. government. Hiss turned out to be a high-ranking Soviet spy (who consulted Roosevelt at Yalta). Reagan, ridiculed throughout his presidency, ended up winning the Cold War. And George W. Bush, also an object of ridicule, has performed exceptionally in responding to Americas newest threats at home and abroad.

    Coulter, who in Slander exposed a liberal bias in todays media, also examines how history, especially in the latter half of the twentieth century, has been written by liberals and, therefore, distorted by their perspective. Far from being irrelevant today, her clearheaded and piercing view of what weve been through informs us perfectly for challenges today and in the future.

    With Slander, Ann Coulter became the most recognized and talked-about conservative intellectual of the year. Treason, in many ways an even more controversial and prescient book, will ignite impassioned political debate at one of the most crucial moments in our history.


    From the Hardcover edition. [via]

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  • Zafra, Jessica: Twisted
    Twisted
    by Jessica Zafra
    ISBN 9712704203 (971-27-0420-3)
    Hardcover

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  • White Teeth: Reader's Companion
    by Zadie Smith
    ISBN 1568959508 (1-56895-950-8)
    Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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    Book summary:

    Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.

    Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."

    Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar. Reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's... parts." And the men, of course, have their own involvement in bodily functions:

    The deal was this: on January 1, 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that he can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man.
    Not all of White Teeth is so amusingly carnal. The mixed blessings of assimilation, for example, are an ongoing torture for Samad as he watches his sons grow up. "They have both lost their way," he grumbles. "Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave." These classic immigrant fears--of dilution and disappearance--are no laughing matter. But in the end, they're exactly what gives White Teeth its lasting power and undeniable bite. --Eithne Farry [via]

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  • Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
    by John Heath, Victor Davis Hanson
    ISBN 1893554260 (1-893554-26-0)
    Softcover, Encounter Books

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    Book summary:

    The answer to the attention-grabbing question posed by classicists Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath in the title of this passionate defense of their field (which is also a damnation of their academic colleagues) is not a pretty one. "It was," they admit sadly, "an inside job."

    Why, at the end of the 20th century, should we give a hoot in the first place about a brutal, misogynist society that rose to greatness on the back of slaves? Because, they argue, it was the first place; for all the faults of ancient Greece, the seeds of what Western civilization is today were planted there. "What we mean by Greek wisdom," they explain, "is that at the very beginning of Western culture the Greeks provided a blueprint for an ordered and humane society that could transcend time and space, one whose spirit and core values could evolve, sustain, and drive political reform and social change for ages hence."

    But Hanson and Heath are not content to simply make a fiery, articulate case for what's right about understanding this particular ancient civilization in a contemporary world where more and more non-Western societies openly seek to embrace the democratic spirit. They go on to launch a deliciously vituperative jeremiad on what's wrong with the priorities of those entrusted with passing on this wisdom. Classics departments, as portrayed in Who Killed Homer?, appear to be filled with politically correct, insecure footnote fawners who, steeped in minutiae, miss the Big Picture. Hanson and Heath have a plan, sure to raise the hackles of tenured professors, for reviving classical studies that emphasizes the importance of teaching, communicating, and popularizing over publishing arcane monographs in journals not even the writer's family will ever read, insisting that the alternative--the extinction of a vivid intellectual pursuit--borders on cultural suicide. --Jeff Silverman [via]

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  • The Wisdom Of Crowds
    by James Surowiecki, Surowiecki, James (AFT)
    ISBN 0385721706 (0-385-72170-6)
    Softcover, Anchor Books

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    Book summary:

    In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliantbetter at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

    With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world. [via]

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  • The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business,Economies, Societies and Nations
    by James Surowiecki
    ISBN 0385503865 (0-385-50386-5)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.  H. L. Mencken
     
    H. L. Mencken was wrong.

    In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliantbetter at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

    This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized and how we live our daily lives. With seemingly boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, economic behaviorism, artificial intelligence, military history and political theory to show just how this principle operates in the real world. 

    Despite the sophistication of his arguments, Surowiecki presents them in a wonderfully entertaining manner. The examples he uses are all down-to-earth, surprising, and fun to ponder. Why is the line in which youre standing always the longest? Why is it that you can buy a screw anywhere in the world and it will fit a bolt bought ten-thousand miles away? Why is network television so awful? If you had to meet someone in Paris on a specific day but had no way of contacting them, when and where would you meet? Why are there traffic jams? Whats the best way to win money on a game show? Why, when you walk into a convenience store at 2:00 A.M. to buy a quart of orange juice, is it there waiting for you? What do Hollywood mafia movies have to teach us about why corporations exist?

    The Wisdom of Crowds is a brilliant but accessible biography of an idea, one with important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, conduct our business, and think about our world.

    [via]

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  • Zafra, Jessica: Womenagerie and Other Tales from the Front
    Womenagerie and Other Tales from the Front
    by Jessica Zafra
    ISBN 9712704750 (971-27-0475-0)
    Hardcover

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  • The World of Yesterday
    by Stefan Zweig
    ISBN 1406735744 (1-4067-3574-4)
    Softcover, Hesperides Pr

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  • A Propos D'UN Gamin
    by Nick Hornby
    ISBN 2264030305 (2-264-03030-5)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Book summary:

    Pour Marcus, douze ans, une mère divorcée, dépressive et baba cool, la vie n'est pas toujours facile. Surtout quand de surcroît cette mère végétarienne n'écoute que des tubes des années soixante-dix, vous attife de vêtements ringards et que les durs de l'école ne jurent que par le hip-hop. Quant à Will, la trentaine, branché, riche, oisif et fier collectionneur d'amours épisodiques, il a du mal à trouver sa place dans la société. Malgré leur méfiance réciproque, l'homme et l'enfant que tout oppose vont finir par se trouver et s'épauler pour affronter l'adolescence et des liens sociaux distendus. Cette rencontre paradoxale entre un mâle solitaire  prototype de l'homme moderne !  et un gosse tendre et marginal est magistralement orchestrée par Nick Hornby. Une histoire de parents célibataires, d'enfants solitaires, de fringues, de foot et de musique. Après les succès de Haute fidélité et Carton jaune, l'auteur signe là son livre le plus accompli. Le ton est sarcastique et drôle, les situations d'un réalisme désarmant et les émotions sincères. C'est enfin un regard d'une grande lucidité sur les désordres amoureux de cette fin de siècle. --Stellio Paris [via]

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  • Les Amants Maudits
    by Katia Granoff
    ISBN 2264002190 (2-264-00219-0)
    Hardcover, Union generale d'editions

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  • Bridget Jones: L'Age de Raison
    by Helen Fielding
    ISBN 2290316210 (2-290-31621-0)
    Softcover, Librio

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    Book summary:

    410pages. poche. broché.  Hourra! Finies, les années de solitude. Depuis quatre semaines et cinq jours, entretiens relation fonctionnelle avec adulte mâle, prouvant par conséquent que je ne suis pas paria de l'amour comme craint précédemment. Voici la suite tant attendue de l'irrésistible journal de Bridget Jones, la célibataire la plus drôle de la planète. Où elle découvre à quel point l'important n'est pas de trouver un prince charmant, mais surtout de le garder! Nous retrouvons les tribus de copines, les Célibattantes et les Mariées-Fières-de-l'Être, les parents à côté de la plaque. et ses éternelles bonnes résolutions (perdre au moins cinq kilos, arrêter de fumer et de boire du chardonnay), qui font de cette aventurière des temps désespérément modernes notre névrosée préférée. [via]

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  • Le Journal De Bridget Jones
    by Helen Fielding, Arlette Stroumza
    ISBN 229030039X (2-290-30039-X)
    Softcover, J Ai Lu Editions

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    › Find signed collectible books: 'Le Journal De Bridget Jones'
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    Il est vrai que les femmes modernes et célibataires ont également leurs soucis ! Helen Fielding a choisi de nous les narrer à travers le journal de Bridget Jones, 29 ans, célibataire sans enfant et de terribles angoisses. Exemples : son poids à surveiller chaque jour, le nombre de cigarettes fumées, les calories ingurgitées, les pensées négatives et par-dessus le marché une mère extravagante et adultère. Bref, dans un élan de machisme incontrôlable, on pourrait suggérer que ce livre est surtout destiné aux lectrices de Elle et à la rigueur - ce qui est nouveau - à ceux de Men's Health.

    Seulement voilà, derrière l'humour pointe l'ironie ou les remarques acerbes sur la gent masculine. Car Miss Bridget, si tourmentée qu'elle soit par son aspect physique et ses carences affectives, est également une féministe, mais de son temps. Elle assume seule sa vie professionnelle et sociale et refuse catégoriquement que les hommes viennent dans son giron pour se faire consoler, la dominer ou l'embobiner.

    Ce petit livre, rafraîchissant comme un bouquet de roses pleines d'épines, est pour les hommes un complément indispensable à la lecture de Haute fidélité de Nick Hornby, traitant des affres du célibat masculin. Pour les femmes, il viendra conforter quelques certitudes ou leur donnera des pistes à suivre. --Stellio Paris [via]

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Dutch

  • Das Tagebuch Der Bridget Jones
    by Helen Fielding
    ISBN 344244392X (3-442-44392-X)
    Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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    Book summary:

    Bridget Jones ist knapp über 30, arbeitet als Lektorin in einem Verlag, hat einen aktiven großen Freundeskreis -- eine selbstbewusste junge Frau also. Aber ihr Lebenslauf weist ein großes Manko auf: Sie ist Single. Ein unhaltbarer Zustand, wie auch ihre Eltern, deren Freunde sowie ihre verheirateten Freundinnen finden. Die sie prompt immer wieder einladen, um ihr alleinstehende Männer vorzustellen. Dieses Weihnachten war Mark Darcy der auserwählte Kandidat ihrer Eltern -- ein unmöglicher Mensch, grauenhaft gekleidet, mit dem man keine zwei vernünftigen Worte wechseln kann. Außerdem flirtet sie wie wild mit Daniel, ihrem Chef. Und ihre Freundinnen sind stolz auf sie -- hat sie es doch geschafft, sich wieder anzuziehen und zu gehen, nachdem Daniel ihr erklärt hatte, nur weil er scharf auf sie sei, wolle er noch lange keine Beziehung mit ihr. Nebenbei kämpft sie noch mit ihren Gewichtsproblemen, einem langweiligen Job, dem Single-Dasein als solchem und mit der Tatsache, dass ihre Mutter nun nach all den Jahren plötzlich anfängt auf Männerpirsch zu gehen und ein rasantes Eigenleben entwickelt.

    Ein Unterhaltungsroman im besten Sinne des Wortes. Singles um die 30, die schon mindestens eine Diät hinter sich haben, werden sicher vieles wieder erkennen. Die Krisensitzungen mit den besten Freundinnen zum Beispiel, die wohlmeinenden Ratschläge derer, die schon unter der Haube sind (und deren Männer fremdgehen). Und bekannt ist vielleicht auch das Kalorienzählen, die Ausreden vor sich selbst, warum es denn nun ausgerechnet Schokolade anstelle vollwertiger Ernährung sein musste -- und das schlechte Gewissen am Tag danach. Ich konnte auf alle Fälle herzlich lachen. --Daniela Ecker [via]

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  • Moor, Piet de: Schemerland: Stemmen Uit Midden-Europa
    Schemerland: Stemmen Uit Midden-Europa
    by Piet de Moor
    ISBN 9055155284 (90-5515-528-4)
    Hardcover, Van Gennep

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Italian