CRDL MPPS
MPHS
MPMS Home
Search
Library Home
My Account
Cool Titles
Email the Librarian
Web Resources
Connect at Home
Directory
Events
FAQ
Dictionary
National Book Critics Circle 2016 (Fiction)
2016 (General NonFiction)
2016 (Biography)
LaRose
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City 1 of 1 Matthew Desmond
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life Item Not Ruth Franklin
2016 (Poetry)
2016 (Criticism)
2015 (Fiction)
House of Lords and Commons Ishion Hutchinson Item Not
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide Carol Anderson Item Not
The Sellout: A Novel Paul Beatty
2015 (General NonFiction)
2015 (Biography)
2015 (Autobiography)
Dreamland: The True Tale of Americas Opiate Epidemic Item Not Sam Quinones
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Negroland: A Memoir Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and 1 of 1 Margo Jefferson Mary Shelley Available Library Journal Item Not Charlotte Gordon Pulitzer Prize-winning critic
6 of 6 Available
Louise Erdrich
Available
Available
Available
1 of 1 Available
Available
Available
Book list *Starred Review* Heroin addiction has evolved from backalley ghettos to suburban ...More shopping malls, changing hearts and minds about how it is perceived and how it should be treated. That evolution pivots on a decision by Purdue Pharma to aggressively market OxyContin 2015 (Poetry) and efforts by Mexican drug Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude traffickers to push black-tar Item Not Ross Gay heroin. In the 1990s, both highly addictive drugs flooded the Available Book list markets in middle-class The Bloomington Community neighborhoods. OxyContin Orchard must have spread its benefited from changes in roots into Ross Gay, an Indiana philosophy on pain treatment ...More University English professor, as and from worry about addiction the organic poems in his third that prevented even cancer collection bear fruit, line by line, patients from getting pain relief to with each fresh word or phrase. the more freewheeling idea that These are accessible, alive 2014 (General NonFiction) pain relief is a human right. poems that give one the sense of Unscrupulous doctors operated A brief history of seven killings : a sitting and talking in the poet's pill mills, prescribing OxyContin novel kitchen. Often vulnerable and for dubious reasons and huge self-conscious in tone, they dig 1 of 1 Marlon James fees. Middle-class professionals, deep in the dirt of memory and Available Library Journal workers, and students found unearth powerful images. In In his novels, Jamaican-born themselves easy targets for Burial, the speaker adds his James centers on his homeland sellers of black tar, semifather's ashes to the soil while while giving larger scope to the processed opium produced in planting a plum tree, and he ...More African diaspora in caustically Mexico and sold by eager bands sees his mother as a bison, beautiful language. John Crow's of drug crews. Like pizza dragging her hooves through the Devil, featuring two battling deliverymen, the crews offered ash / of her heart, in c'mon! MarlonJames Marlon James, speedy delivery and good Whether by contemplating the Marilynne Robinson, Jane customer service. The 2014 (Poetry) extraordinary within everyday Smiley, Colm Tóibín | Barbaras distribution, centered in a small acts (sleeping in clothes, Citizen : an american lyric. Fiction Picks, Oct. 2014, Pt. Mexican village and spread drinking water, buttoning and 1preachers, was a finalist for the Item Not Claudia Rankine throughout the U.S. in midsize unbuttoning a shirt), or by Los Angeles Times Book Prize Available Library Journal towns and cities, defied the entwining past and present as he Art Seidenbaum Award for First typical profile of a drug cartel. Longlisted for the 2014 National pays homage to parents, friends, Fiction, while The Book of Night Journalist Quinones weaves an Book Award in poetry, this follow even his former love, Gay Women, about a slave revolt extraordinary story, including the up to Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An embraces the natural cycles of fomented by women, was a personal journeys of the ...More American Lyric brings together life and death as only an finalist for the National Book addicted, the drug traffickers, law essays, images, and poems on introspective gardener and Critics Circle Award and won the enforcement, and scores of the stress of citizenship in a accomplished poet can.--St. Dayton Literary Peace Prize. families affected by the scourge, deeply racist country. (c) John, Janet Copyright 2015 This third novel should be the as he details the social, Copyright 2014. Library Journals Booklist 2013 (General Nonfiction) charm that makes him a economic, and political forces LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary household name, partly because Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death that eventually destroyed of Media Source, Inc. No of the arresting subject. In a in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital communities in the American redistribution permitted. novel that moves from heartland and continues to have 2 of 2 Sheri Fink contentious 1970s Kingston, to a resounding impact.--Bush, Available Book list crack-ridden 1980s New York, Vanessa Copyright 2015 *Starred Review* As the then back to a resurgent Booklist floodwaters rose after Hurricane Jamaica, James offers a fictional Katrina, patients, staff, and investigation of the attempted ...More families who sheltered in New assassination of reggae star Bob Orleans' Memorial Hospital faced Marley just days before a crisis far worse than the storm Jamaica's 1976 general election itself. Without power, an and only 48 hours before he was evacuation plan, or strong scheduled to play the Smile 2013 (Poetry) leadership, caregiving became Jamaica Concert. You'll meet Metaphysical Dog: Poems chaotic, and exhausted doctors musicians and journalists, and nurses found it difficult to Item Not Frank Bidart assassins and drug dealers, and make even the simplest Available Publishers Weekly even ghosts in what promises to decisions. And, when it came to "At seventy-two, the future is be a wild ride. making the hardest decisions, what I mourn," Bidart announces some of them seem to have in this starkly inspiring eighth failed. A number of the patients ...More collection. The poet's spiky free deemed least likely to survive reverse remains direct, were injected with lethal sometimes even frightening, and combinations of drugs even as clearer than ever before about the evacuation finally began in mortality-his own death, and the 2012 (General Nonfiction) earnest. Fink, a Pulitzer Prize deaths of his friends and his winner for her reporting on Far From the Tree: Parents, Children parents; and yet, perhaps in the Memorial in the New York Times and the Search for Identity spirit of anticipatory mourning, Magazine, offers a stunning refamiliar interests-in old and new 1 of 1 Andrew Solomon creation of the storm, its movies, terse metaphysical Available Publishers Weekly aftermath, and the investigation argument, and sex, especially A profoundly moving new work of that followed (one doctor and two sex between men- are all research and narrative by nurses were charged with present. "The true language of National Book Award-winner second-degree murder but ecstasy/ is the forbidden// ...More Solomon (The Noonday Demon) acquitted by a grand jury). She language of the mystics," he says explores the ways that parents of evenhandedly compels readers in "Defrocked," exploring the marginalized children-being gay, to consider larger questions, not language of piety as well as of dwarf, severely disabled, deaf, just of ethics but race, resources, blasphemy as he returns to his autistic, schizophrenic, the history, and what constitutes the 2012 (Poetry) Bakersfield, Calif., childhood and product of rape, or given to greater good, while humanizing his family's Catholic belief. Useless Landscape/A Guide for Boys criminal tendencies or the countless smaller tragedies Bidart's taut lines investigate faith prodigious musical talent, to Item Not D. A. Powell that make up the whole. And, and doubt, art and yearning, name a few he chose-have been Available Library Journal crucially, she provides context, erotic fulfillment and literary transformed and largely enriched Poems by Powell (Chronic) are relating how other hospitals heritage, "fueled by the ruthless by caring for their high-needs the Apple products of the literary fared in similar situations. Both a gaze that/ unshackled the chains children. These children are world: sleek, urbane, wellbreathtaking read and an shackling/ queer me in marginalized by society, ...More designed marvels. They are so essential book for understanding adolescence," even as they classified traditionally as ill and startlingly hip that one can how people behave in times of investigate their own premises; abnormal, and shunned; in the almost be excused for not crisis.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 in "Writing 'Ellen West,' " they cases of those who are deaf or noticing that they are slowly Booklist also ask how Bidart composed homosexual, they were forced to infiltrating the mainstream. The one of his own most famous conform to mainstream strictures. homoeroticism that lies at the poems. The new volume veers 2011 (General Nonfiction) A seasoned journalist and LGBT center of this work is tongue-inaway from the interest in overt activist, Solomon relies on Libertys Exiles: American Loyalists in cheek, proceeding via allegory beauty, rendered in musical anecdotes to convey the and dispensing with much of the the Revolutionary World lines, that was evinced in herculean tasks facing parents campiness that characterizes 1 of 1 Maya Jasanoff Watching the Spring Festival and caregivers of special-needs earlier (and some current) queer Available (2009), leaning more in this Choice children because "stories writing. But as a literary artifact, volume on the wiry abstractions Jasanoff (Harvard) calls this the acknowledge chaos," and he this book's slick veneer and of Bidart's earlier work. At the "first global history of the loyalist takes great pains to probe the perfect lines sometimes seem at same time, the poems of diaspora," but greater value lies dark side of parental despair and odds with the awkward and Metaphysical Dog are at once ...More in her meticulous tracking of a anger, as well as ennobling exciting messiness of adolescent emotionally bracing and full of few families and individuals efforts of resilience and strength. sexuality, as if the poems had intellectual reward. Bidart is (some prominent, some not; Sifting through arguments about been disassembled and shipped widely admired by other Indians and slaves, paupers, off to Iowa City to have the rough nature versus nurture, Solomon influential poets; he seems in landed aristocrats) as they finds some startling moments of 2011 (Poetry) edges sanded out. Powell's line for even more attention than scattered across the planet in the discovery, for example, among treatment of sexuality lacks much he has received. (May) (c) Space, in Chains years following the American Deaf activists who ferociously of the transgressive power of a Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights Revolution. The loyalists--reviled 1 of 1 Laura Kasischke cling to their marginality, parents Dennis Cooper or Kathy Acker, reserved. or ignored by US historians and Available New York Times of children with Down syndrome both of whom manage to only lately rehabilitated--are who express their children's transform eroticism into limned as real people with a IF and when you go away to infinite "mystery and beauty," and something as dangerous as it is variety of motives and fates. college you can become the truculent compassion of transformative. VERDICT Powell Their role in the founding of somebody else; you can kill off Dylan Klebold's parents, 10 ...More is as good a technician as Canada, Sierra Leone, and the your old self and be reborn. So years after the Columbine High anyone in the business, and his Bahamas, as well as the history generations of young people School shootings. Solomon's latest book, both smart and of those who settled in Britain or have believed. But once they own trials of feeling marginalized accessible, will have award remained in the US, has been have done it - ditching provincial as gay, dyslexic, and depressive, panels queuing up to sing its more thoroughly examined in tastes and hometown boyfriends while still yearning to be a father, praises. [See Prepub Alert, other works. Jasanoff pulls for a sorority, a fraternity or an frame these affectingly rendered 8/18/11.]-Chris Pusateri, 2010 (General Nonfiction) together these stories via the ties undergraduate bohemia - they real tales about bravely playing Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, of family and friendship that may trade one conformity for the cards one's dealt. (Nov.) (c) The Warmth of Other Suns CO (c) Copyright 2012. Library overcame distances from another; they may feel haunted Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights 5 of 5 Isabel Wilkerson Journals LLC, a wholly owned Jamaica to Nova Scotia to by their former lives. No wonder reserved. Available subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. New York Times Bengal. The loyalists had much teenage life, on and off campus, No redistribution permitted. in common with the "patriots": seems to fit stories of vampires, In the winter of 1916, as they prompted London to ghosts, the undead. Laura Americans read the news of reorganize the empire as a more Kasischke is hardly the first to unimaginable slaughter in a ...More liberal democracy. A useful cast use such figures (as fans of distant yet rapidly spreading of characters begins the book, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" know) European war, it was easy to and comprehensive notes end it. but with her new novel, "The overlook stories like the one in The author has done her Raising," she pursues them The Chicago Defender reporting almost perfectly. Almost a homework and reduced a vast, that several black families in complex, and fragmentary story supernatural thriller, almost a 2010 (Poetry) Selma, Ala., had left the South. A to its essence. Summing Up: campus satire and almost but not popular African-American One with Others Highly recommended. Upperquite a coming-of-age tale, "The Item Not Raising" is also the best of CD Wright weekly, The Defender would division undergraduates and publish dozens of such stories in Available Book list above. T. S. Martin Sinclair Kasischke's eight novels, the one the coming years, heralding the Community College with the broadest canvas, the Wright revisits her native good jobs and friendly neighbors most observation, its large cast Arkansas, during the 1960s, to that awaited these migrants in arranged with a scary economy pay homage to V, a friend and Chicago, even printing train of detail. ...More mentor. We learn in a schedules to point the way north. percussively expressive mix of Smuggled into Southern railroad Most of "The Raising" takes memories, testimonials, news, depots by Pullman porters, place on a college campus - it history, and ruminations that V dropped off by barnstorming could be the University of was unhappily married, too often black athletes and entertainers, 2009 (General Nonfiction) Michigan, where Kasischke (who pregnant, forthright, flintily smart, The Defender emerged as both studied there) now teaches. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic and avidly literary. ( She had a cheerleader and chronicler of an Nicole Werner was the beauty as Generation Discovered the Beauty and brain like the Reading Room in exodus that would lead about six well as the brain of her small the old British Museum. ) Much Terror of Science million AfricanAmericans to town; at college, she joined admired within her circle, 1 of 1 Richard Holmes abandon the states of the Old Omega Theta Tau, the rich, bookish, card-playing, and Available Book list Confederacy between 1915 and prestigious, "keep-your-recordbourbon-drinking V was an 1970. "If all of their dream does As a researcher of British clean sorority," whose girls are unlikely yet magnificent hero. not come true," it confidently science during the Romantic supposedly all virgins. She also MacArthur fellow Wright is known predicted, "enough will come to period of English literature, began dating Craig Clementsfor her social consciousness and pass to justify their actions." ...More Holmes suitably emphasizes the Rabbitt, a morose stoner with improvisational style, and she individual facing nature, so bad grades who felt even more takes both qualities up a notch in Prophetic words, indeed, Isabel characteristic of the Romantic out of place in the friendly this dramatically investigative Wilkerson insists in "The Warmth sensibility. Alighting on Midwest than he did in his and looping portrait of V, both in of Other Suns," her massive and astronomer William Herschel preppie New Hampshire 2009 (Poetry) her prime--when she went masterly account of the Great (1738-1822) and chemist hometown. At the end of their against her overtly racist and Migration. Wilkerson, who won a Versed Humphrey Davy (1778-1829), freshman year, Nicole died in a staunchly segregationist Pulitzer Prize for feature writing both of whom were artistic (music Item Not car crash; Craig was driving, and Rae Armantrout neighbors to join a group of at The New York Times in 1994 and poetry, respectively), Available Publishers Weekly nearly the whole campus blames African Americans on a Walk and currently teaches journalism Holmes connects them via him. In recent years, Armantrout's against Fear and in her long at Boston University, has a botanist Joseph Banks. In a reputation has soared-she subsequent exile and personal stake in the story. Her "The Raising" is the story, or precursor to a modern pattern, began in the '70s as an obscure, martyrdom. Such hate, such mother left rural Georgia, her mystery, of Nicole's ghost, Banks moved from his youthful ...More early practitioner of language sorrow, such valor. Wright's father southern Virginia, to settle pursued over Craig's sophomore success as a naturalist on James poetry, and now her poems sharply fractured, polyphonic, in Washington, D.C. Wilkerson year. Mira Poison teaches a Cook's voyages into regularly appear in the New and suspenseful book-length knows well the highly charged seminar on "Death, Dying and administration president of the Yorker. Her new book comprises poem is both a searing nature of this field. For many the Undead"; Craig's roommate Royal Society and promoted two sequences-"Versed" and dissection of hate crimes and years, commentators routinely Perry, who grew up inseparable both Herschel and Davy. They "Dark Matter"-of loosely their malignant legacy and a from Nicole, joins Mira's class demeaned these migrants as the came to Banks' notice seemingly interlinked poems dealing with lyric, droll, and fiery elegy to a dregs of a failed society. Even 2008 (Poetry) because he has been seeing from nowhere, and their the prolific poet's usual subjects woman of radiant resistance.-the distinguished black apparitions of his dead friend. determination to discover is well (the body, contemporary society, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 sociologist E. Franklin Frazier Mira studies the dead because violence) as well as more Strauss) told in Holmes' biographical Booklist fretted over the "ignorant, her mother died young; while narratives. Elevated to societal personal explorations of illness Item Not August Kleinzahler uncouth and impoverished" she tries to write a sequel to her notice, Herschel and especially and mortality, all relayed in Available throngs that had invaded his Publishers Weekly book about funeral customs, her Davy excited popular interest in Armantrout's concentrated, beloved Chicago. Arguments The witty, gritty poet and stay-at-home husband looks ultimate questions their scientific crystalline voice, with a raged for decades about the memoirist Kleinzahler (The after their 2-year-old twins, who findings seemed to open up, predilection for skipping some tangled pathology of black Strange Hours Travellers Keep) are (like the sorority girls) nearly questions whose ripples into the steps along the way to sense. families divided from their rural ...More has produced chiseled, indistinguishable, and who (like literature of Byron and Mary and The first sequence, peppered roots and thrown together in sometimes curt and finely the sorority girls) seem to Percy Shelley Holmes with pop culture references and dead-end Northern slums. "The observed free verse for decades. communicate only in private, in elaborates. Readers interested quoted speech, features silly yet migrants were cast as poor Kleinzahler has lived in ways no one else understands. in any of these figures, or in the surprisingly serious poems on illiterates," Wilkerson says, "who Montreal, San Francisco, Shelly Lockes, who works at the lives of astronomer Caroline topics like "'[b]reaking/ Anna 2008 (Biography) imported out-of-wedlock births, Vancouver, Portugal and Berlin; university, witnessed Nicole's Herschel and explorer Mungo Nicole news// as she buries/ her The World Is What It Is: The Authorized joblessness and welfare his sketches of characters and highway accident, and the Park, have in Holmes a fine son.'Å" In the playful "Scumble," dependency wherever they Biography of V.S. Naipaul places from at least four reports do not match what she guide to the arts and sciences, the poet speculates as to "What if went." continents include affectionately Item Not saw. Pretty, flighty, untrustworthy Patrick French Romantic style.--Taylor, Gilbert I were turned on by seemingly cynical portraits of hoodlums, Available Josie, an OTT sister who Copyright 2009 Booklist Book list innocent words/ such as... But the more recent scholarship, odes to the autumn failures of becomes Shelly's assistant, may *Starred Review* Nobel laureate 'extrapolate?'Å" The second which Wilkerson embraces, tells baseball teams and swiftly know why Nicole's real story Naipaul's readers know of his section, "Dark Matter," is another story. Today, these black cinematic depictions of Tartar remains untold. fierce intellect and literary evasively intimate and migrants are viewed as a hordes in medieval Europe, ...More prowess, his irascibility and occasionally, albeit modern version of the Kasischke set previous novels in "ripping the ears off hussars." pitiless condemnations. So how characteristically, bleak, as Europeans who flooded high schools and summer camps Hackensack, N.J.; the foggy Bay authorized was this living Armantrout (Next Life) America's shores in the late (one, "The Life Before Her Eyes," Area with its foggier ex-hippies; biography? And how did French contemplates her own struggle became a movie starring Uma 1800s and early 1900s. What and northern European lakes cope? One should never with cancer "with a shocked linked them together, Wilkerson 2009 (Fiction) Thurman). She understands the and mountains all receive their underestimate a narcissist's smile,/ while an undiscovered writes, was their heroic awkwardness, and the low-grade due in a poetry that aspires to the The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao craving for attention, and French tumor/squats on her kidney." In determination to roll the dice for terror, of teenage life, when we feel of bebop and the delight of 2 of 2 is fearlessly inquisitive. He is Junot Diaz what may be moments of a better future. It is no surprise, want so much for big questions travel writing, that never bores Available also a superb stylist who intense, sardonic honestyLibrary Journal therefore, to find census data to have right answers, but no one and rarely repeats itself. New combines sharp observations "Chuck and I are pleased/ to showing that blacks who left the Having caught everyone's we trust ever seems to know poems add to, rather than with judicial analysis, a skill have found a spot/where my South had far more schooling attention with his short stories, what they are. Kasischke's selfswerve away from, Kleinzahler's much in demand in portraying ashes can be scattered"-the poet than blacks who stayed. Or that D!az offers a debut novel starring hating collegians (Craig most of strengths in close observation such a contrary, celebrated, and poses metaphysical questions the migrants had higher ...More ghetto geek Oscar, whose family all) can become unpleasant and all-over-the-map diction, controversial man of with open endings: jarring employment numbers than labors under a Fuk# (or curse) companions, but she does not from slang to technical terms. letters. French sensitively moments in which the stakes are Northern-born blacks and a more that delivers prison, tragic make us stay with them all the Overheard speech in "Above documents Naipaul's Trinidad suddenly, impossibly high. (Feb.) stable family life, as shown by accidents, and, worst of all, bad way through. Instead, her novel Gower Street," a poem about the childhood and the prejudice his (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All lower divorce rates and fewer luck in love. With a national tour. gradually shifts its center from loneliness of international travel, immigrant Indian family faced as rights reserved children born outside of (c) Copyright 2010. Library Craig to Mira and Shelly, adults ranges from an answering well as Naipaul's paralyzing marriage. Put simply, Wilkerson Journals LLC, a wholly owned machine's anodyne messages to unfortunate enough to depend depression as an outsider in says, the well-known "migrant subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. for their lives and careers on an explicit sexual come-on; in England. To understand Naipaul, 2007 (Fiction) advantage" has worked No redistribution permitted. what teenagers do and say. "Vancouver," "the neon mermaid one must understand his father, historically for Americans of all The Inheritance of Loss over the fish place/ looks best and French perceptively "The Raising" holds tight to its 1 of 1 Kiran Desaicolors. that way, in the rain." This ninth recounts Seepersad's symbols (sexy virgins, corpses, Available book of poems and first trade Publishers Weekly improbable rise as a journalist "The Warmth of Other Suns" is ghosts). Even a roll of Lifesavers press new-and-selected should This stunning second novel from and his terrible fall. But it is the Wilkerson's first book. (Its title is has implications, and when bring this master of free verse Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava women in Naipul's life who have borrowed from the celebrated Craig spots "The Nicole Werner lines even more admirers. (Apr.) Orchard) is set in mid-1980s empowered him and who make black writer Richard Wright, who Memorial Cherry Orchard," OTT (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All ...More India, on the cusp of the this such a riveting, fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the may as well stand for Over the rights reserved Nepalese movement for an heartbreaking biography. 1920s to feel the warmth of those Top. Yet Kasischke remains independent state. Jemubhai Patricia Hale defied her family to other suns.) Based on more than aware that she works in familiar Popatlal, a retired Cambridgemarry Naipaul, and sacrificed a thousand interviews, written in traditions: her scenes play educated judge, lives in broad imaginative strokes, this everything to support his literary knowingly with the expectations Kalimpong, at the foot of the quest, only to have her Genius book, at 622 pages, is something (the helpless professor seduced 2006 (Fiction) Himalayas, with his orphaned fall passionately in love with a of an anomaly in today's by a student, the super-secret The March granddaughter, Sai, and his woman who was his shrinking world of nonfiction women-only ritual) that her cook. The makeshift family's 1 of 1 E. L. Doctorow conspicuous mistress for more publishing: a narrative epic precedents raise, from "Buffy" to neighbors include a coterie of Available than two decades. French's deep rigorous enough to impress all Library Journal Euripides' "Bacchae." (As in Anglophiles who might be savvy respect for Pat infuses this but the crankiest of scholars, yet The author who made the Euripides, power comes from readers of V.S. Naipaul but who sexually candid biography with so immensely readable as to historical novel a real literary sexuality, which neither the men, are, perhaps, less aware of how sorrow, wonder, and dignity, and land the author a future place on event returns with the story of nor most of the women, control.) fragile their own social standing one can't help but assume that Oprah's couch. ...More General Sherman's march Sentence by sentence Kasischke is-at least until a surge of unrest this was the ever-wily, truththrough Georgia and the writes crisply, attentively, without WILKERSON follows the journey disturbs the region. Jemubhai, seeking Naipaul's secret Carolinas. With a seven-city tour. compromising her fast pace. of three Southern blacks, each with his hunting rifles and intention.--Seaman, Donna (c) Copyright 2010. Library When Craig and Nicole take a representing a different decade English biscuits, becomes an Copyright 2008 Booklist Journals LLC, a wholly owned walk in the snow, "Craig held of the Great Migration as well as obvious target. Besides subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. onto her hand, but between his a different destination. It's a 2005 (Fiction) threatening their very lives, the No redistribution permitted. insulated ski glove and her fat shrewd storytelling device, revolution also stymies the Gilead wool mitten, he might as well because it allows her to highlight fledgling romance between 16 2 of 2 have been holding anything - the Marilynne Robinson two issues often overlooked: first, year-old Sai and her Nepalese Available university mascot's paw, a tree Library Journal that the exodus was a tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, branch swathed in bandages. As his life winds down, Rev. continuous phenomenon meanwhile, lives miserably as an She said something into the John Ames relates the story of spanning six decades of illegal alien in New York. All of scarf, but he couldn't hear it." his own father and grandfather, American life; second, that it these characters struggle with ...More both preachers but one a pacifist consisted of not one, but rather their cultural identity and the As well constructed as "The and one a gun-toting abolitionist. three geographical streams, the forces of modernization while Raising" is, the novel can seem, Amazingly, just Robinson's patterns determined by the train trying to maintain their emotional well, constructed: loose ends tied second novel. (c) Copyright connection to one another. In this routes available to those bold together, with a broad audience 2010. Library Journals LLC, a enough to leave. alternately comical and (one that it should find) in mind. 2004 (Fiction) wholly owned subsidiary of contemplative novel, Desai deftly To watch Kasischke truly reckon The Known World People from Arkansas, Alabama Media Source, Inc. No shuttles between first and third with the messiness of death and and Mississippi boarded the Item Not redistribution permitted. Edward P. Jones worlds, illuminating the pain of life, with the ways they can Illinois Central to Midwestern Available exile, the ambiguities of postdemolish any plan we ever cities like Cleveland, Chicago colonialism and the blinding devise, we have to go to her and Detroit; those from Florida, desire for a "better life," when poetry. Her new collection, Georgia, the Carolinas and one person's wealth means "Space, in Chains," is neither the Virginia rode the Seaboard Air another's poverty. Agent, Michael most elegant nor the most Line up the East Coast to Carlisle. (Jan.) (c) Copyright consistent of her eight books of Washington, Philadelphia and PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved poems, but it might be the most New York; those in Louisiana ambitious - and the most and Texas took the Union Pacific disturbing, as it strives to 2003 (Fiction) to Los Angeles, Oakland and comprehend first and last things. Atonement other parts of the West Coast. Her earlier books (especially the Wilkerson is superb at minding flawless "Fire & Flower") often Item Not Ian McEwan the bends and detours along the Available tracked her experience as a way. She notes, for example, that teenager or as a mother, with her some migrants, unfamiliar with stepdaughter and nowteenage the conductor's Northern accent, son. The Kasischke of "Space, in would mistakenly get off at the Chains" is an adult daughter, cry of "Penn Station, Newark," revisiting the deaths of her the stop just before Penn Station, parents and thinking about her New York. Many decided to stay own limited span. put, she adds, giving Newark "a good portion of its black 2002 (Fiction) Looking backward and forward population." within her life, Kasischke finds a
Austerlitz
set of identities, most of them Item Not W. G. Sebald The first of Wilkerson's three cast off or used up. She sees Available main characters, and plainly her School Library Journal herself in "the mirror breathing favorite, is Ida Mae Brandon Winner of the Berlin Literature above the sink," in "the child at Gladney, a sharecropper's wife and Literatur Nord prizes and the the rummage sale -/more from Mississippi. Married at 16, Los Angeles Times Book Award, souvenirs than memories," and the mother of three, Ida Mae ...More Sebald has previously been in the wayward adolescent lived to serve her husband, published here by New among the "Empty/plastic cups George, whose dire prospects Directions but now jumps to a after the party on the beach." Her reflected the feudal Southern bigger house. The narrator poems, some in blocks of prose, agriculture that had replaced recounts the story of his friend, some strewn with rhyme, strive 2001 (Fiction) slavery after the Civil War. Each Jacques Austerlitz, who came to for patterns as adults strive for Being DeadDecember, at "settling time," Britain on a kindertransport and responsibility; sometimes they as an adult must painfully Item Not fall apart instead, producing the Jim Crace George would meet with Mr. Edd, the white landowner, to learn reconstruct his past. (c) Available Book list breakneck lists of noun phrases how he had done. In a Copyright 2010. Library Journals that (along with irregular rhymes) In his latest novel, Crace (author malevolent ritual, played out LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary are her formal trademarks. These of Quarantine, 1998) archly across the cotton South, Mr. Edd of Media Source, Inc. No lists can imply panic or explores life and death and the would open his ledger book to redistribution permitted. ...More exhilaration or cumulative, daily effect of chance upon the two. prove that the annual debt for exasperation. "At the Public From the very beginning we supplies bought on credit almost Pool" envisions "A strange blue learn that Celice and Joseph, exactly matched the value of porcelain sheet./A naked lake, two married, middle-aged George's annual crop. George transparent as a need," and then zoologists, are murder victims. Gladney didn't know much about 2000 (Fiction) "The Hall of Stuff We Bought at From there the book moves arithmetic, but he did know the Motherless Brooklyn the Mall. The plugged-up backward and forward in time, dangers of challenging a white 1 of 1 fountain at the center/of the changing points of view along Jonathan Lethem man's figures. So he'd thank Mr. Available Museum of Crap That Couldn't the way, to show why they came Book list Edd and return to his shack with Last/has flooded it all." to be where they were when they Here's a detective story with a a few dollars to show for a year's were murdered and what unique twist: the narratorworth of backbreaking toil. AS much as she gathers odd happened after their deaths. protagonist, Lionel Essrog, out to images from her own memory, Thus, we are not only privy to In 1937, a cousin down the road ...More solve the murder of his boss and Kasischke knows how she, too, Celice's and Joseph's thoughts was beaten almost to death by a mentor, suffers from Tourette's is typical. She knows how even and feelings but to those of their white posse that wrongly syndrome. Lethem's latest novel the strangest lives follow simple daughter, whose rebellious suspected him of stealing a few is a seriocomic takeoff on the patterns - we are born, we grow period is suddenly cut short, and of Mr. Edd's turkeys. Fearing he'd genre that breaks down barriers up, we nurture or fail to nurture 1999 (Fiction) even the murderer. However, the be next, and tired of working by getting inside Lionel's head. It children, we do our work or fail to narrative's most arresting The Love of a Good Woman dawn to dusk for pennies, also tosses Zen Buddhism and do it, we die. "The Photograph scenes, occurring during the George told Ida Mae to pack up the Mafia into the mix, treating 1 of 1 Album in the Junk Shop" agrees: Alice Munro days between the murders and the family. A few days later, they both with a serious irreverence Available Library Journal the discovery of the dead couple, boarded the Jim Crow car of an that other writers often shy away We are all the same, it claims. In the title story, set in the early involve a macabre, though Illinois Central train heading from. The plot's a simple one: This spring of 1951, three young boys detached, description (worthy of north. someone has set up Frank on a lark make a grim discovery? the zoologists themselves) of forgotten couple kissing Minna, the shady owner of a ...More the drowned body of the town They eventually settled in how their bodies are returned to Brooklyn car service cum optometrist. Their secret Chicago, where George found before the Christmas tree, in a the ecosystem of the dunes, detective agency, for a hit. Years knowledge gives them a sense work in a Campbell Soup factory, year where they had briefly made love earlier, Minna had plucked four of purpose and self-importance. Ida Mae in a hospital. There no before being assaulted. Yet misfit teenagers from St. But this secret pales beside the they will be holding longer were "colored" and nothing is strained, for Crace Vincent's Orphanage and chose darker one that emerges late in pulls off a remarkable fusion of "white" signs to degrade them, them to be his errand boys. Now, the Christ child between them, the story of how the man came to but the specter of racial caste chaos theory and natural order in 1998 (Fiction) as grown men, they work, or whose die. In "Before the Change," a was omnipresent. The Gladneys telling this story. --Frank Caso rather worked, for Minna as woman recovering from the The Blue Flower survived by exploiting the small name they wish us to believe drivers/detectives. (Minna Men, breakup of her engagement to a 1 of 1 Penelope Fitzgerald but significant advantages of declares Lionel.) One night, theology student is filled with Available Northern life, while retaining the Library Journal is Jim. Lionel and another of the four, conflicting emotions on a visit work ethic of their rural Fitzgerald never repeats herself, Gilbert Coney, stake out a Zen home with her father, the town Beside the child as Christ (each Mississippi roots. In one and her latest novel, named center on New York's Upper East abortionist. In the closing story, child is a type of Christ), especially telling episode, Ida Book of the Year by 19 British Side while Minna, wearing a "My Mother's Dream," the Kasischke arrays less hopeful Mae had to decide whether to ...More newspapers in 1995, is her most wire, goes in for a conversation. pregnant widow of a World War II adults: Lazarus as a florist, join a strike against her hospital original book yet. Here she The upshot is that they screw up pilot is left to cope with his dotty delivering unwelcome or cross an angry picket line in reconstructs the life of 18thand Minna is "taken for a ride" family. In their home on her own messages, afraid to sleep; car order to pay the monthly bills. It century German romantic poet and murdered in Brooklyn. Who with an irritable baby on an passengers in a hospital parking wasn't a hard decision, Novalis, focusing on his impossibly hot, pre-airordered the hit? Was it the Zen lot; her father envisioned postWilkerson explains. "The concept boisterous family, his struggle to abbot or perhaps two ancient conditioning day, she is forced to 1997 (Fiction) humously "in the massive of not working a job one had articulate his longings, and, most Brooklyn godfathers who may or close all the windows lest the shadows/of the columns/of the agreed to do was alien to Ida Women in their Beds tellingly, his passion for 12-yearmay not be homosexual lovers? neighbors assume she is an unfit Museum of Griefs-to-Come." A Mae." old Sophie, a simple child he Item Not Gina Berriault Lionel's description of the mother. Munro's stories are woman who "sprawls out on a intends to marry despite the Available Publishers Weekly investigation--complete with always afforded the luxury of The other main characters, beach with a book," a "man furious reservations of family and Tourette tics and observations--is Whether focusing on yuppies or space and the weight of detail. George Swanson Starling and hammering on the roof all friends. Fitzgerald doesn't make a tour de force of language. The drifters, social workers or Indian Like carefully preserved home Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, afternoon" and all the other it entirely clear what draws descriptions of the buildups to restaurateurs, heroin addicts or movies, they capture moments of also had compelling reasons to people in her poems are building Friedrich von Hardenberg the tics are masterful, and the tics ...More teenage baby-sitters, Berriault the past that are at once leave the South. Starling, the "a bridge from here to there," but (Novalis's real name) to little themselves, especially the verbal (The Lights of Earth) writes with intensely recognizable and valedictorian of his "colored" "it is the kind of bridge that blows Sophie?but that is precisely the ones, are in the best tradition of great psychological acuity and a profoundly revealing. These high school class in central away . . . Not built to weather point. Throughout, he is carried the Zen non sequitur--thus compassion that comes always exquisite stories, some never Florida, had dropped out of much at all . . . Not even health. aloft by an inchoate desire for neatly, and securely, tying the from observation, never from before published, are highly college when his money ran out Not even peace." 1996 (Fiction) something beyond that is narrative and the plot. But the sentimentality. These 35 short recommended. [Previewed in and gone to work picking citrus summed up in his little story of Mrs. Ted Bliss interesting thing is the subtle way stories have been published in Kasischke's best lines are catchy Prepub Alert, LJ 7/98.]?Barbara in the fields. Appalled by the the blue flower: "I have no in which the verbal outbursts Item Not magazines ranging from the as pop songs are catchy: you Stanley Elkin Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., conditions, he tried to organize a craving to be rich, but I long to work upon the reader: at first you Available Paris Review to Harper's Bazaar; find yourself repeating them Kingston, Ont. (c) Copyright Library Journal work stoppage; a friend warned see the blue flower....I can are stunned, but in time, as with 10 of them are here issued in before you know how they work, 2010. Library Journals LLC, a him that the local growers, After her husband's death, imagine and think about nothing his colleagues, Lionel's strange book form for the first time. In or what they mean. "See, cold wholly owned subsidiary of backed by a homicidal sheriff, Dorothy Bliss stays on alone in else." As a counterpoint to her behavior and outbursts merely "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I spy for time, who needs you Media Source, Inc. No were planning to lynch him. In The Towers, their Miami Beach protagonist's beautifully captured extend the boundary of normal Am?" the dapper Alberto Perera, now?" You can accuse her of redistribution permitted. 1945, Starling boarded the Silver ...More retirement condo. Everyone romanticism, Fitzgerald behavior. --Frank Caso "a librarian who did not look like melodrama, of playing to the Meteor bound for New York. continues to address her as Mrs. successfully evokes the sights, one," fears that the young drifter gallery, but you should not deny Ted Bliss, as if she had no sound, and smells?and the who has befriended him, wishing Foster, from Monroe, La., had the her fearsome honesty, nor the identity of her own. But Dorothy constant sorrows?of domestic life to discuss the Spanish poetry he most privileged background of homely weirdness of her images. adapts quickly to change, and in 18th-century Germany. A little 1995 (Fiction) carries in his pockets, is out to kill the three. The son of demanding A poem about her own death soon she is on The Towers's Atreasure; highly recommended.? him; but the drifter is only trying middle-class parents, educated imagines "the last hour waiting The Stone Diaries list, hobnobbing with "Tommy Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" to understand how?both literally at Morehouse, the most patiently on a tray . . . the spoon Overeasy," an elegant South 2 of 2 Carol Shields (c) Copyright 2010. Library and philosophically?to live. A 79prestigious black college in slipping quietly into the beautiful American drug lord, and the Available Publishers Weekly Journals LLC, a wholly owned year-old psychologist woos a America, trained as a surgeon, soup." No poet has tried so hard building's chief engineer, a Canadian writer Shields's novels subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. young, pragmatic waitress in Foster wasn't about to waste to cut through suburban Yiddish-speaking Aztec. By the and short stories ( Swann ; The No redistribution permitted. "The Infinite Passion of away in the small-minded South, American illusion while time Hurricane Andrew bears Republic of Love , etc.) are Expectation." When she meets delivering sharecroppers' babies respecting the lives, young and down on southern Florida, a fully ...More intensely imagined, humanely his ex-wife and witnesses the and being paid with "the side of a old, that it nurtures or saves. No self-sufficient Mrs. Bliss simply generous, beautifully sustained selfishness spawned by a life freshly killed hog." Monroe was poet has joined the chasm of barricades herself inside and and impeccably detailed. spent in deferment, she flees. In known for sending its migrants to ontological despair to the pathos rides out the storm. Elkin has a Despite rave reviews on both the clever "The Search for J. California, a route taken by the of household frustration so well highly developed sense of the sides of the Atlantic, she has yet Kruper," an extremely famous parents of the future basketball as Kasischke at her best, and absurd and a wonderful ear for to achieve an audience here; and narcissistic novelist, noted star Bill Russell and of the Black she is - though eerie, though spoken language. Multicultural one hopes this latest effort, for writing grand, poorly Panther leader Huey Newton. In willing to let threads dangle, Miami Beach provides him with shortlisted for the Booker Prize, disguised autobiographical 1951, Foster joined that western
Available
Jefferson relates her upbringing among America's black elite. (LJ ...More 9/15/15) © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
2015 (Criticism)
2014 (Fiction)
The Argonauts Maggie Nelson
Lila Marilynne Robinson
Item Not Available
Publishers Weekly In a fast-shifting terrain of "homonormativity," Nelson, poet and author of numerous ...More works of gender and sexuality (The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning; Bluets), plows ahead with a disarmingly blushing work about trying to 2014 (Biography) simultaneously embrace her Tennessee williams : mad pilgrimage identity, her marriage with of the flesh. nomadic transgender filmmaker Harry, and Item Not John Lahr motherhood. She mixes a Available Publishers Weekly memoir of her love for Harry Writing with sympathy and with clinical depictions of their insight, former New Yorker attempts to get her pregnant, drama critic Lahr (Prick Up as well as a critical meditation Your Ears) invests the...More on the queer craft of Tennessee Williams of this "becoming," investigating the brilliant new biography with ways that "new kinship the same vitality and honesty systems mime older nuclearthat the playwright used to 2014 (Criticism) family arrangements" and bring his characters to life. whether those older models The Essential Ellen Willis Williams wrote that he "saw are good, oppressive, useful, Ellen Willisevery play and every film I Item Not or fair. Nelson takes her title ever worked on as a Available from the notion that the confession," and Lahr looks to Argonauts could continually his scripts as the chief means replace their ship's parts over of understanding his turbulent time, "but the boat [was] still life, beginning with the called the Argo." The new delicate poetry of The Glass waters she's sailing include Menagerie, which is encoded learning how to be a with sentiments from his stepparent to Harry's young fraught childhood son and then a mother to her 2013 (Biography) relationships with his mother newborn, no longer scorning and sister. Quoting Jonathan Swift: His Life and His heterosexual "breeders," and extensively from diaries, World becoming much more notebooks, and journals, Lahr 1 of 1 Leo Damrosch forgiving of what she once depicts Williams as an artist Available Choice saw as too-outrageous queer who "made a spectacle of his radicalism, since all-including More than 50 years after the haunted interior." His detailed her husband, undergoing his first volume appeared and 30 account of Williams's work own gender voyage via after the set was completed, with Elia Kazan on the stage testosterone therapy and ...More Irvin Ehrenpreis's Swift: The productions of A Streetcar surgery-have a "shared, Man, His Works, and the Age Named Desire, Cat on a Hot crushing understanding of (3v: 1962; CH, Jan'69; CH, Tin Roof, and other projects what it means to live in a Apr'84) remains the standard reveals the complex dynamics patriarchy." Nelson writes in scholarly biography of the of one of the greatest 2013 (Criticism) fine, fragmented exhalations, writer. Two more recent lives-partnerships in modern Distant Reading inserting quotes from David Nokes's Jonathan Swift: theater, just as his exploration numerous theorists as she A Hypocrite Reversed (CH, Item Not Franco Moretti of Williams's troubled goes (Eve Kosofsky May'86) and Victoria Available romantic relationships Sedgwick, D.W. Winnicott). Glendinning's Jonathan Swift: highlights the self-destructive Her narrative is an honest, A Portrait (CH, Oct'99, 37proclivities that fueled and joyous affirmation of one 0775)--have challenged the threatened his creativity. happily unconventional family Ehrenpreis for dominance, Lahr's feel for Williams's finding itself. Agent: P.J. Mark, without success. Now literary creations-he describes Janklow & Nesbit Associates. Damrosch (Harvard) joins the The Glass Menagerie's (May) © Copyright PWxyz, fray with a new life, more Amanda Wingfield as an LLC. All rights reserved. sympathetic to its subject than "embattled bundle of 2012 (Biography) Nokes's and more substantial Southern decorum and and less speculative than The Passage of Power: The Years of Puritan denial"-and for Glendinning's. Damrosch did Lyndon Johnson Williams himself show a no original archival research: perspicacity wanting in 1 of 1 Robert Caro everything comes from printed previous biographies. Though Available Choice sources and, despite the Lahr acknowledges the The fourth volume of Caro's author's protestations, not successes of previous monumental biography of much new primary material Williams scholars, his Lyndon Johnson (CH, Apr'83; has turned up since achievement is not likely to be ...More CH, Oct'90, 28-1143; CH, Ehrenpreis. One therefore surpassed. 80 photos. Agent: Oct'02, 40-1113) extends from gets no really new portrait of Georges Borchardt, Georges the 1960 presidential Swift. Damrosch differs from Borchardt Inc. (Sept.) (c) campaign through Johnson's his predecessors in terms of Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All 1964 State of the Union reliability of sources 2012 (Criticism) rights reserved. address. It thus follows the (Damrosch finds some Strange Magic: Charmed States and depth of Johnson's secondhand reports more the Arabian Nights humiliation as vice president plausible than Ehrenpreis and his ascent to the summit Item Not Marina Warner does) and because he is less of power after President Book list given to Freudian Available Kennedy's assassination. interpretation. Beyond that, This learned, lively, and wellThroughout, Robert Kennedy the book differs mostly in written book concerns the is Johnson's foil in one of the emphasis. Damrosch does wide-ranging influence of The bitterest rivalries in US provide plenty of context for ...More Arabian Nights a polyvocal politics. Caro's narrative students, who will find this a anthology of world myths, examines Johnson's curiously very accessible and readable fables and fairy tales on cautious quest for the 1960 guide to Swift's life and times. Western culture. Even Freud's Democratic nomination and Specialists will continue to couch, carpet, and Middle 2011 (Biography) his reluctance to appear too rely on Ehrenpreis. Summing Eastern antiquities created an eager to win it until it was too George F. Kennan: An American Life Up: Recommended. UpperOriental setting for the first late, and Robert Kennedy's division undergraduates Item Not psychoanalytical cures. John Lewis Gaddis endeavor to deny him the vice through faculty. J. T. Lynch Available Warner's densely detailed, Book list presidential nomination. As Rutgers, The State University loose, baggy monster of a *Starred Review* Diplomat vice president, Johnson of New Jersey, Newark book covers an impressive and historian Kennan (1904became uncharacteristically array of subjects from Voltaire 2005) cooperated with this withdrawn, marginalized by and Goethe to Borges and biography that in its Kennedy's staff. After ...More Nabokov. It includes and documentary thoroughness Kennedy's death, Johnson interprets 15 of the tales, and lucidity about his worked to assure continuity, which describe fantasy, enigmatic, fragile personality convincing Kennedy's staff to magic, and enchantment as must stand as the definitive remain. In the first seven well as cruelty and portrait. Of undoubted weeks of his presidency, 2011 (Criticism) executions, humanity and brilliance in his adulthood, Johnson employed his justice. They were first Otherwise Known as the Human Kennan throughout his life undeniable political skills and translated into French by the Condition: Selected Essays and was acutely sensitive, solitary, the image of his martyred orientalist Antoine Galland in Reviews often pessimistic, but predecessor to lay the 1704-12. The most popular Item Not Geoff Dyer ultimately philosophical an groundwork for civil rights, tax stories, Aladdin and the outlook encapsulated in his Available cuts, and the War on Poverty. Publishers Weekly Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba Around the Cragged Hill Caro foreshadows dark days In this new collection of and the Forty Thieves, were (1993). The youthful sources ahead, but in these seven previously published writings, not in the original collection of those traits Gaddis roots in weeks Johnson is at the peak Dyer (Jeff in Venice, Death in but rather invented by the feelings of abandonment of his abilities. A masterful ...More Varanasi) traverses a broad translator. Warner writes, provoked by the premature achievement of biography territory stretching from Sharazad plays the part of an death of Kennan's mother, in and historical analysis. photographers such as Arabian Penelope, delaying testing experiences in military Summing Up: Essential. All Richard Avedon and William her fate by weaving an school and Princeton levels/libraries. A. J. Dunar Gedney ("His gaze is neither endless tapestry of stories, University, and in rapidly 2010 (Biography) University of Alabama in penetrating nor alert but, on which instead of unwinding maturing appreciations for the Huntsville How to Live OR a life of Montaigne in reflection, we would amend actually grows. At the end of a behaviors of governments, his One Question and Twenty that verdict to accepting"); thousand nights, the sultan own and others, while he was musicians Miles Davis and 1 of 1 Sarah Bakewell decrees that she deserves to a young foreign service officer Def Leppard; writers like D.H. Available live and inscribes her stories Book list in the 1920s and 1930s. An Lawrence, Ian McEwan, and in a golden book.--Meyers, *Starred Review* In a wideinveterate diarist and letter Richard Ford; as well as Jeffrey Copyright 2010 ranging intellectual career, writer, Kennan probably personal ruminations on, say, Booklist Michel de Montaigne found deluged Gaddis with his reader's block. In a fond ...More no knowledge so hard to interior life, which seemed tribute to the power and acquire as the knowledge of beset by self-doubt and beauty of Albert Camus's life how to live this life well. By despair over matters personal and work, Dyer reflects on his casting her biography of the (Kennan apparently had own encounters with the writer as 20 chapters, each several affairs) and public. 2010 (Criticism) writer's work in Algeria: focused on a different answer Apart from the years 1946-50, "Coming here and sitting by Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics to the question How to live? politicians ignored his advice this monument, rereading Bakewell limns Montaigne's Item Not Clare Cavanagh and prophecies on world these great essays, ceaseless pursuit of this most Available politics, but within that Choice testaments to all that is the elusive knowledge. window, Kennan was Extraordinarily rich and best in us, is a way of Embedded in the 20 lifeuniquely influential as the sophisticated in its delivering personally my letter knowledge responses, enunciator of containment comparative grasp of poetry, of thanks." In a masterful readers will find essential policy toward the Soviet ...More this volume may establish a essay on W.G. Sebald and facts when and where Union during the early Cold new standard in literary Thomas Bernhard, Dyer Montaigne was born, how and War. The work of an eminent criticism. Cavanagh (Slavic writes: "The comic whom he married, how he historian of that very subject, languages and literature, obsessiveness and neurosis became mayor of Bordeaux, Gaddis' biography is doubly Northwestern Univ.) implicitly common to many of Sebald's 2009 (Biography) how he managed a public life significant and a new affirms both the general view characters is like a sedated in a time of lethal religious essential in any reading, Cheever: A life that poets are the version of the relentless, and political passions. But recreational or scholarly, in Item Not unacknowledged legislators Blake Bailey raging frenzy into which Bakewell keeps the focus on the history of American Available of the universe and also Library Journal Bernhard's narrators the inner evolution of the foreign policy.--Taylor, Gilbert Roman Jakobson's dictum habitually drive themselves." Bailey, author of a biography acute mind informing Copyright 2010 Booklist that "poetry is language in its Dyer's writing does what the of Richard Yates (A Tragic Montaigne's charmingly aesthetic function." With the best critical writing always Honesty) and editor of the digressive and tolerantly objective of providing an ...More does, encouraging us to view, Library of America's John skeptical essays. Flexible and "overview of twentieth-century read, or listen closely to art, Cheever: Complete Novels curious, this was a mind at Eastern-European poetry in literature, and music as well and John Cheever: Collected home contemplating the its Russian and Polish as to pay close attention to Stories and Other Writings, morality of cannibals, the incarnations," Cavanagh various cultural forms and presents a massively detailed meaning of his own nearoffers a "comparative study of their impact on our personal biography of the man. Bailey death experience, and the modern poetry on both the lives. (Mar.) (c) Copyright had access to letters, journals, puzzlingly human behavior of 2009 (Criticism) Eastern and Western side of PWxyz, LLC. All rights and other writings by the animals. And though the great political divide that reserved. Notes from No Mans Land: American author as well as cooperation Montaigne has identified his came to be known midfrom Cheever's wife, children, Essays own personality as his century as the 'Iron Curtain.'" Item Not Eula Biss and close friends and overarching topic, Bakewell Her subjects include a broad colleagues, which makes this Book list marvels at the wayAvailable range of eminent literary biography more complete Montaigne's prose has *Starred Review* Biss calls figures: Alekandr Blok, than Scott Donaldson's 1988 enchanted diverse readers our attention to things so William Butler Yeats, Walt John Cheever. Bailey's Hazlitt and Sterne, Woolf and intrinsic to our lives they have Whitman, Vladimir portrait of Cheever as author, Gide with their own ...More become invisible, such as Mayakovsky, the Russian family man, lover, and public reflections. Because telephone poles and our Acmeists (Anna Akhmatova, figure contains everything Montaigne's capacious mirror assumptions about race. Nikolai Gumilev, Osip readers would want to know still captivates many, this Family was the focus of her Mandelstam), Wisawa about this important figure in insightful life study will win first book, The Balloonists Szymborska, Adam American literature. The high praise from both scholars (2002). In her second, a Zagajewski, and Czesaw biographer is sympathetic 2008 (Poetry) and general readers.-collection of fishhook essays, Miosz, among many others. toward his subject but Christensen, Bryce Copyright Half the World in Light(University of she grabs readers with Summing Up: Essential. presents all sides of 2010 Booklist compelling personal Arizona Press) Upper-division Cheever's complex character, disclosures, then heads into Item Not Juan Felipe Herrera undergraduates through including his alcoholism, the rapids of racial identity. Available faculty. V. D. Barooshian bisexuality, fears, struggles, Whether she is writing about emeritus, Wells College and often turbulent white and black dolls, her relationships with fellow whiteness within a racially writers and family. Bailey also mixed family, or teaching in provides close readings of all Harlem, Biss, inquisitive and of Cheever's novels and many buoyant, swings back and of his short stories. Highly forth between the shores of recommended for all public nurture and nature, asking and academic library 2008 (General Nonfiction) tough questions about which collections. [See Prepub Alert, aspects of race and culture The Forever War LJ 11/1/08.]-Morris Hounion, we inherit and which we Item Not Dexter Filkins NYC Coll. of Technology Lib., acquire. With nods to Didion Available CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Book list and Baldwin, her sinuous Library Journals LLC, a Filkins, foreign correspondent essays dart off and zigzag, wholly owned subsidiary of for the New York Times, has and we hold on tight. Biss Media Source, Inc. No covered the struggle against compares the lesson plans for redistribution permitted. ...More Islamic extremism in freed slaves in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Reconstruction-era public and Iran. He marshals his schools with what is taught to broad experience to present a today's African American wide-ranging view of this students, and chronicles her struggle, told through a series experiences as a minority in 2008 (Nonfiction) of intense, vivid, and startling black worlds, including her Medical Apartheid: The Dark History vignettes. Embedded with stint as a reporter for an marines during the struggle of Medical Experiments on Black African American community for Fallujah, Filkins describes Americans from Colonial Times to newspaper in San Diego. an almost surreal scene of the Present Matters of race, sense of confusion and unvarnished 1 of 1 self, and belonging involve Harriet Washington violence. In Kabul, Filkins Available everyone, and Biss' crossingPublishers Weekly witnesses the amputation of a the-line perspective will This groundbreaking study pickpocket's hand, followed provoke fresh analysis of our documents that the infamous by the execution of an fears and expectations.-Tuskegee experiments, in accused murderer under the Seaman, Donna Copyright ...More which black syphilitic men Taliban regime. At a press 2009 Booklistwere studied but not treated, briefing, a Taliban minister of was simply the most information recites a litany of publicized in a long, and forbidden activities that is both continuing, history of the absurd and terrifying. An 2007 (Nonfiction) American medical interview with Ahmad Shah Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves establishment using AfricanMassoud, the Lion of Panjshir, and the American Revolution Americans as unwitting or who bravely fought both the unwilling human guinea pigs. Item Not Soviets and the Taliban, is Simon Schama Washington, a journalist and Choice particularly poignant, since he Available bioethicist who has worked at This powerful, engaging would eventually be Harvard Medical School and narrative tells the rich story of assassinated by al-Qaeda Tuskegee University, has African American loyalists, operatives. Filkins accumulated a wealth of ...More their British supporters, and accompanies Americans documentation, beginning their adversaries from the searching a Sunni village for with Thomas Jefferson onset of the American insurgents, where their exposing hundreds of slaves Revolution to 1808, when the insensitivity probably creates to an untried smallpox British Crown assumed formal more enemies than they 2006 (Nonfiction) vaccine before using it on control over Sierra Leone, capture. A portrait of the whites, to the 1990s, when the Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral where perhaps a thousand of difficulty, complexity, and New York State Psychiatric History of Nuclear Disaster these loyalists settled after a savagery of a conflict that will Institute and Columbia sojourn in Nova Scotia. Item Not be with us for some time.- Svetlana Alexievich University ran drug Specialists knew many Available Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Publishers Weekly experiments on Africanportions of this saga, but its Booklist A chorus of fatalism, stoic American and black complexity--not to mention US bravery and black, black Dominican boys to determine racism--has kept it outside the humor is sounded in this a genetic predisposition for mainstream. Weaving the haunting oral history of the "disruptive behavior." ...More stories of freedom-seeking 1986 nuclear reactor Washington is a great African Americans--Thomas catastrophe in what is now storyteller, and in addition to Peters, David George, and northeastern Ukraine. giving us an abundance of Phyllis Halstead, among Russian journalist Alexievich information on "scientific 2005 (Nonfiction) others--with the actions of records a wide array of racism," the book, even at its British abolitionists Granville The Reformation: A History voices: a woman who clings most distressing, is Sharp and John Clarkson, to her irradiated, dying Item Not Diarmaid MacCulloch compulsively readable. It Schama (Columbia Univ.) husband though nurses warn Available Library Journal covers a wide range of topics illustrates how African her "that's not a person the history of hospitals not Does the world really need Americans used their anymore, that's a nuclear charging black patients so another general history of the understanding of law, reactor"; a hunter dispatched that, after death, their bodies Reformation? MacCulloch including the Somerset case, to evacuated villages to could be used for anatomy ...More (history of the Church, Oxford and their belief in British exterminate the household classes; the exhaustive Univ.; Thomas Cranmer: A proclamations of liberty in pets; soldiers sent in to clean research done on black Life, etc.) thinks so, believing exchange for loyalty to gain up the mess, bitter at the prisoners throughout the 20th that contemporary scholarship freedom and ultimately, in callous, incompetent Soviet century and paints a powerful needs wider dissemination. many cases, their own land. 2004 (Nonfiction) authorities who "flung us and disturbing portrait of To that end, he has produced Frustrated by slaveholding there, like sand on the Sons of Mississippi medicine, race, sex and the the definitive survey for this loyalists, southern interests reactor," but accepting their lot abuse of power. (Dec. 26) (c) Item Not generation. As in similar Paul Hendrickson impacting the Treaty of Paris, as a test of manhood; an Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All Available studies, religious and political Library Journal British racism, and the idealistic nuclear engineer rights reserved disputes are covered vicissitudes of climate and Hendrickson (The Living and whose faith in communism is thoroughly. What sets this weather, black loyalists the Dead) uses a photograph shattered. And there are the work apart is the sweep of its experienced hardship and published in the July 1962 local peasants who take this coverage, both ...More cruelty, but consistently acted Life magazine as a focus for latest in a long line of geographically (from Britain on their preference for examining race and racism in disasters in stride, filtering and Ireland in the west to freedom over comfort. late 20th-century American back to their homes to harvest Poland and Lithuania in the Schama's story serves as a society. The picture, taken in their contaminated potatoes, east) and chronologically powerful corrective for any Oxford, MI, by Charles Moore, shrugging that if they survived 2003 (Nonfiction) (1490-1700). Also noteworthy who seek a simplistic centers on seven white law the Germans, they'll survive is the attention to the A Problem From Hell meaning of the American enforcement officers. One, radiation. Alexievich shapes movement's social impact on Sheriff Billy Ferrell, holds a Item Not Revolution. ^BSumming Up: Samantha Power these testimonies into such diverse topics as Recommended. All billy club, while the other four Available Publishers Weekly novelistic "monologues" that calendar reform, colonization, levels/libraries. E. R. Crowther look on smiling. These men Power, a former journalist for convey a vivid portrait of latefamily life and sex roles, Adams State College were called to Oxford with U.S. News and World Report Communist malaise, in which homosexuality, witchcraft, and others to curb anticipated and the Economist and now bullying party bosses, more. This well-written book is violence accompanying the ...More the executive director of paranoid propaganda and a joy to read, with new facts integration of the University of Harvard's Carr Center for chaotic mobilizations are and interpretations on nearly Mississippi by James Human Rights, offers an resisted with bleak sarcasm every page; still, the work's Meredith. All seven uncompromising and ("It wasn't milk, it was a size and information density participated in the riots that disturbing examination of radioactive byproduct"), will make it slow going for 2002 (Nonfiction) left two people dead and 20th-century acts of genocide mournful philosophizing (" those without a basic hundreds injured. Double Fold and U.S responses to them. In [t]he mechanism of evil will knowledge of the subject. Hendrickson uses the lives of Item Not clean, unadorned prose, Nicholson Baker work under conditions of With that caveat, this is highly these men to explore Available Power revisits the Turkish apocalypse") and lots of Book list recommended for larger Southern racial attitudes of genocide directed at vodka. The result is an Is it the librarian's job to public libraries and academic the period, giving us Armenians in 1915-1916, the indelible X-ray of the Russian preserve books as intrinsically library collections in biographies of photographer Holocaust, Cambodia's soul. (May) (c) Copyright valuable objects in European and Christian Moore and of Meredith, Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on PWxyz, LLC. All rights ...More themselves, or is it more history. [Previewed in Prepub whose interesting life since Kurdish populations, Rwanda, reserved important for a librarian to Alert, LJ 11/15/03.]has included working as an and Bosnian "ethnic create and preserve access to Christopher Brennan, SUNY aide to Sen. Jesse Helms. cleansing," and in doing so, the information contained Coll. at Brockport Lib. (c) Hendrickson then extends the argues that U.S. intervention within those books' texts? Copyright 2010. Library study to examine 2001 (Nonfiction) has been shamefully How one answers that Journals LLC, a wholly owned contemporary racial views inadequate. The emotional Newjack: Guarding Sing-Sing question will in large part subsidiary of Media Source, through portraits of the force of Power's argument is predict that reader's reaction Item Not Inc. No redistribution Ted Conover lawmen's grandchildren and carried by moving, sometimes to Baker's provocative volume Available permitted. Library Journal Meredith's son, Joe. almost unbearable stories of outlining libraries' recent Having already documented Hendrickson uses a large the victims and survivors of attempts to control the everthe lives of illegal aliens number of interviews as well such brutality. Her analysis of increasing amount of paper in (Coyotes) and hoboes as archival materials and U.S. politics what she casts as their collections. Baker ...More (Rolling Nowhere), journalist periodical literature to create the State Department's focuses on libraries' Conover gives a compelling a thoughtful and illuminating unwritten rule that nonaction conversion of newspaper firsthand account of life as a portrait of American racial is better than action with a PR collections from their bulky corrections officer. The site is attitudes. Highly backlash; the Pentagon's original formats to Sing Sing, once widely known recommended for all libraries. unwillingness to see a moral 2000 (Nonfiction) technologically efficient for housing the electric chair [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ imperative; an isolationist microform. Baker sides with Time, Love, Memory that killed 614 inmates but 11/1/02.]-Stephen L. Hupp, right; a suspicious left and a those who believe that the 1 of 1 now unremarkable among Jonathan Weiner West Virginia Univ. population unconcerned with medium is just as important as Available New York State's prisons. Parkesburg (c) Copyright Book list distant nations aims to show the message, and he takes Refused entry as a journalist, 2010. Library Journals LLC, a Geneticist Seymour Benzer is how ingrained inertia is, even library managers to task for Conover actually attended the wholly owned subsidiary of little known outside his as she argues that the U.S. exaggerating the destruction training academy and Media Source, Inc. No specialty, but Weiner lifts him must reevaluate the principles wrought by acid paper in their became a bona fide officer for redistribution permitted. ...More from obscurity in this it applies to foreign policy rush to embrace microforms' a year. Once on the job, he exploration of Benzer's study choices. In the face of putative space-saving and appears to have identified of the genetic contribution to firsthand accounts of reproduction advantages. completely with the persona behavior. The effort antedates genocide, invocations of Along the way he reveals of a prison guard: He feels his Benzer's entry onto the geopolitical considerations startling, suspect links 1999 (Nonfiction) head swim as he tries to molecular biological stage in and studied and repeated between leading twentiethenforce rules that are We Wish to Inform You That the late 1940s. Weiner refusals to accept the reality of century librarians and the routinely ignored to avoid Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With narrates the discovery of the genocidal campaigns simply Central Intelligence Agency. confrontations. He braces Our Families gene in the 1910s by T. H. fail to convince, she insists. Baker's retelling of the Library himself to walk the galleries Morgan. Morgan's "Fly Room" Item Not But Power also sees signs Philip Gourevitch of Congress' sorry massamid catcalls and threats of became the generic label for that the fight against genocide Available Library Journal deacidification program violence and tries to keep on the labs of geneticists, since has made progress. makes readers wonder if a In 1994, the world was top of the games inmates that is where they studied Prominent among those who library-industrial complex informed of the inexplicable play. Given the monotony, their favorite organism, fruit made a difference are exists paralleling the military mass killings in Rwanda, in dehumanization, and flies. Following the discovery Raphael Lemkin, a Polish version. Over the course of his ...More which over 800,000 were imminent dangers, why would of DNA's double-helix Jew who invented the word library investigations, Baker killed in 100 days. Gourevitch, anyone choose this structure, Benzer made a genocide and who lobbied evolved from dispassionate a staff writer for The New profession? A good revolutionary impact by the U.N. to make genocide the reporter to vocal advocate for Yorker, spent over three years accompanying volume is showing how genes could be subject of an international preservation of newspapers, putting together an oral Lucien X. Lombardo's Guards 1998 (Nonfiction) split, and, further, how they treaty, and Senator William culminating in his history of the mass killing that Imprisoned (1981. o.p.), which could be mapped. But Proxmire, who for 19 years The Spirit Catches You and You Fall establishment of his own occurred in this small country. points out that, in areas of because Benzer was not a spoke every day on the floor Down corporation to buy and He interviewed the survivors, high unemployment, these self-promoter and didn't write of the U.S. Senate to urge the preserve libraries' discarded who told him their horror 1 of 1 Anne Fadiman are the most lucrative jobs popular books, his U.S. to ratify the U.N. treaty newspaper folios. Librarians stories of violence. Most of the Available requiring a minimal amount of Library Journal achievements weren't widely inspired by Lemkin's work. and their public supporters killings were done with a education. Furthermore, some Award-winning reporter trumpeted, as were those of This is a well-researched and will find Baker's controversial machete. Friends killed officersDnot allDcan wield a Fadiman has turned what James Watson, an powerful study that is both a allegations disturbing and not friends, teachers killed kind of power hard to emulate began as a magazine accomplished self-promoter. history and a call to action. glibly answered. --Mark students, and professional in the outside world. Highly ...More assignment into a riveting, Content as a pure researcher, Photos. (Mar.) (c) Copyright Knoblauch workers killed co-workers. recommended for public and cross-cultural medicine Benzer became interested in PWxyz, LLC. All rights The United Nations was slow academic libraries. [Excerpted classic in this anthropological the nature-versus-nurture reserved in reacting to this crisis and in the New exploration of the Hmong question, and he and the refused to classify the incident Yorker.DEd.]DFrances population in Merced County, young researchers he 1997 (Nonfiction) as genocide. The title of this Sandiford, Green Haven California. Following the case mentored established the book comes from a Tutsi Correctional Facility Lib., Bad Land of Lia (a Hmong child with a principle that some behaviors pastor's letter to his church Stormville, NY (c) Copyright progressive and Item Not Jonathan Raban in flies, such as a sense of president, a Hutu. While this is 2010. Library Journals LLC, a unpredictable form of Available Library Journal time (they've got one), a powerful book, it sometimes wholly owned subsidiary of epilepsy), Fadiman maps out reproduction, and memory, Hunting Mister Heartbreak (LJ bogs down in the details of Media Source, Inc. No the controversies raised by are directed by identifiable 4/15/91) told of British-born Rwandan politics. It is redistribution permitted. the collision between Western genes. Weiner explains how Raban's last journey through doubtful the average reader medicine and holistic healing these ideas enmeshed ...More the United States. Bad Land, will want to pick it up, but the traditions of Hmong Benzer in the sociobiology emanating from his latest history of this genocide must immigrants. Unable to enter controversy of the late 1970s, travels, might have been titled be told. This book should find the Laotian forest to find herbs but more importantly, Weiner "Finding Mister Heartbreak," itself on the shelves of for Lia that will "fix her spirit," presents a lucid narrative of as he examines the 1910-20 academic libraries where 1996 (Nonfiction) her family becomes resigned how genetic research is diaspora of homesteaders to African history collections are to the Merced County A Civil Action conducted. His skill at the badlands of southeastern strong. [Previewed in Prepub emergency system, which has simplifying without Item Not Montana. Attracted by free Jonathan Harr Alert, LJ 5/15/98.]?Michael little understanding of Hmong "dumbifying" a dauntingly Available land and glowing promotional Publishers Weekly Sawyer, Northwestern animist traditions. Fadiman complex science stands pamphlets distributed by the Regional Lib., Elkin, NC (c) This tale of a somewhat reveals the rigidity and Weiner in good stead with the railroads, settlers flocked to Copyright 2010. Library quixotic quest by an idealistic weaknesses of these two readership of his estimable this semi-arid region to try Journals LLC, a wholly owned young lawyer concerns his ethnographically separated The Beak of the Finch (1994). their hand at dry-land farming. ...More subsidiary of Media Source, efforts to secure damages cultures. In a shrinking world, --Gilbert Taylor Their dreams too often turned Inc. No redistribution from two corporate giants, this painstakingly researched to nightmares featuring permitted. Beatrice Foods and W.R. account of cultural dislocation drought, cold, grasshoppers, Grace, for allegedly polluting has a haunting lesson for and isolation, and by the end the water in Woburn, Mass., a every healthcare provider. 1995 (Nonfiction) of the "Dirty Thirties" many Boston suburb, with Highly recommended for all were gone. Raban shows a The Rape of Europa carcinogens. Jan collections.?Rebecca Cresstravel writer's eye and a social Schlichtmann had hoped that Item Not Lynn Nicholas Ingebo, Fordham Health critic's sensibilities while a victory would send a Available Publishers Weekly Sciences Lib., Wright State probing the land, message to the boardrooms ``Never had works of art been Univ., Dayton, Ohio (c) homesteaders' journals and of America and felt that the so important to a political Copyright 2010. Library letters, and the reminiscences cluster of leukemia victims in movement and never had Journals LLC, a wholly owned of their descendants. Woburn (the disease had ...More they been moved about on subsidiary of Media Source, Recommended. [Portions of claimed the lives of at least six such a vast scale.'' Nicholas's Inc. No redistribution this book were excerpted in children) guaranteed his lavishly illustrated work permitted. the May 20, 1996, issue of the success. But he reckoned chronicles the transfer, trading New Yorker.?Ed.]?Jim Burns, without certain developments: and looting of a large Ottumwa P.L., Iowa (c) first, the case went to a federal Back proportion of Europe's cultural Copyright 2010. Library court, a less sympathetic treasures by the Nazis and Journals LLC, a wholly owned venue for damage suits than the recovery of most of them subsidiary of Media Source,
5 of 5 Available
Book list *Starred Review* We catch glimpses of the Reverend John Ames' much younger second wife, ...More Lila, in Robinson's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, Gilead (2004), the first in a deeply reflective saga set in a small Iowa town, the second volume of which is Home (2008). 2014 (Autobiography) We now learn Lila's astonishing Cant we talk about something more story, which begins with a pleasant? thunderbolt opening scene, in which an abused little girl is swept 1 of 1 Roz Chast up by a strange young woman Available New York Times called Doll. The two roam the countryside as itinerant workers, CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT settling down just long enough for SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?, Lila to learn to read and write. As by Roz Chast. (Bloomsbury, $19.) ...More life grows even more harrowing Chast, who has contributed during the Great Depression, and cartoons to The New Yorker for Doll's dangerous secrets catch up nearly 40 years, illustrates the to her, capable and strong Lila experience of caring for her dying 2013 (Fiction) fends for herself, ultimately arriving parents in this poignant and in Gilead. The wanderer and the Americanahdevastating graphic memoir, one minister embark on a wondrously of the Book Review's 10 Best 1 of 1 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie unlikely and fitful courtship as Lila Books of 2014. As our reviewer, Available New York Times asks confounding questions about Alex Witchel put it: "No one has existence, belief, trust, and justice. perfect parents, and no one can WHAT'S the difference between an Bringing the land to ravishing life, write a perfect book about her African-American and an season by season, Robinson sets relationship to them. But Chast has American-African? From such a ...More the tentative lovers' profoundly come close." distinction springs a deep-seated involving emotional and discussion of race in Chimamanda THE STATE WE'RE IN: Maine metaphysical struggles within both Ngozi Adichie's third novel, Stories, by Ann Beattie. (Scribner, the singing web of nature and the "Americanah." Adichie, born in $15.) In these linked tales, indelible stories of the Bible. 2013 (Autobiography) Nigeria but now living both in her Beattie's first collection of new Robinson has created a tour de homeland and in the United Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from stories in 10 years, psychological force, an unforgettably dramatic States, is an extraordinarily selfHaiti states matter just as much as odyssey, a passionate and aware thinker and writer, Item Not Amy Wilentz geography. The collection traffics learned moral and spiritual inquiry, possessing the ability to lambaste Available in ennui, with recurring characters. Library Journal a paean to the earth, and a witty society without sneering or One is Jocelyn, a teenager living and transcendent love story all Haiti has been marked by colonial patronizing or polemicizing. For with her aunt and uncle for the within a refulgent and resounding oppression, revolution, dictators, her, it seems no great feat to summer while her mother novel so beautifully precise and and foreign occupation by balance high-literary intentions recuperates from a mysterious cadenced it wholly transfixes and ...More American imperialism-to say with broad social critique. illness; she is a bright spot in the transforms us. HIGH-DEMAND nothing of widespread poverty, "Americanah" examines blackness world presented by the book. BACKSTORY: Robinson's readers social and political turmoil, in America, Nigeria and Britain, but will be primed for the welldisease, and the crippling it's also a steady-handed SOUTH TOWARD HOME: Travels promoted third title in her earthquake in 2010. Caught in the dissection of the universal human 2012 (Fiction) in Southern Literature, by Margaret cherished Iowa saga as the author remarkable prose of Wilentz (The experience - a platitude made Eby. (Norton, $15.95.) Equal parts Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk tours the country.--Seaman, Rainy Season) the tragedy is told fresh by the accuracy of Adichie's travelogue and critical inquiry, this 2 of 2 Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist Ben Fountain observations.through the eyes of Fred Voodoo, book considers the region's literary Haiti's fictional everyman, a figure Available Library Journal heritage. Eby, an Alabamian by who fits invisibly in Haitian society So an African-American is a black Lots of underground anticipation birth and upbringing, goes on but whose insight is unmatched. person with long generational for this first novel from pilgrimage to the haunts of 10 The author's fluid and engaging lines in the United States, most PEN/Hemingway winner Fountain, favorite authors, including William narrative delves into Haiti's history likely with slave ancestors. She ...More helped by this movie pitch: "A Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery and focuses on the current plight might write poetry about "Mother Catch-22 for our time." (c) O'Connor and Harper Lee. of a nation of ten million living in Africa," but she's pleased to be Copyright 2012. Library Journals stark poverty. Sean Penn, "Papa from a country that gives LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of LAST BUS TO WISDOM, by Ivan Doc" Duvalier, Jimmy Carter, and international aid rather than from Media Source, Inc. No Doig. (Riverhead, $16.) Known for 2012 (Autobiography) dozens of other personages one that receives it. An Americanredistribution permitted. chronicling life in Big Sky Country, appear across her pages, as do African is an African newly Swimming Studies Doig, who died last year, turned to the voodoo priests and the Tonton emigrated to the United States. In Item Not Leanne Shapton Montana once more in this, his Macoutes, Duvalier's personal her native country, she didn't Available final novel. Eleven-year-old Donal police force. VERDICT Tragic, realize she was black - she fit that Cameron, under his grandmother's ironic, humorous, scary, and description only after she landed care, takes a Greyhound bus from fascinating, the book is a in America. In college, the Africanher ranch to Wisconsin, where he remarkable achievement and a American joins the Black Student lives briefly with an unkind relative. must read for those interested in Union, while the American-African Soon enough, though, he's back Caribbean affairs. An signs up with the African Students out West again, joined by a oneAssociation. overwhelming positive eyed sailor he meets along the recommendation.-Boyd Childress, way. Adichie understands that such formerly with Auburn University fine-grained differentiations don't Libs., AL (c) Copyright 2012. MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE: 2011 (Fiction) penetrate the minds of many Library Journals LLC, a wholly The Quest for Common Ground Binocular Vision: New and Selected Americans. This is why a lot of owned subsidiary of Media Between Humans and Robots, by Stories people here, when thinking of race Source, Inc. No redistribution John Markoff. (Ecco/HarperCollins, Item Not and class, instinctively speak of Edith Pearlman permitted. $15.99.) In the world of artificial Available "blacks and poor whites," not "poor Publishers Weekly intelligence, there are two blacks and poor whites." Many of A finely tuned collection by writer's prevailing approaches: an aim to Adichie's best observations regard writer Pearlman combines the best augment human capacities, or the nuances of language. When of previous collections (How to goal of creating machines to do people are reluctant to say "racist," ...More Fall; etc.) with austere, polished the work currently performed by they say "racially charged." The new work. Pearlman's characters people. This thoughtful analysis by phrase "beautiful woman," when for the most part are stiff-upperMarkoff, a reporter for The New enunciated in certain tones by lipped Northeasterners who take York Times, wades into the ethical certain haughty white women, what comes and don't grumble: in and philosophical questions that 2011 (Autobiography) undoubtedly means "ordinary"The Noncombatant," Richard, a such technological advances looking black woman." Adichie's The Memory Palace: A Memoir 49-year-old doctor suffering inevitably raise. characters aren't, in fact, black. 1 of 1 gravely from cancer during the tail Mira Bartok FINALE: A Novel of the Reagan They're "sable" or "gingerbread" or Available end of WWII, rages quietly in his Publishers Weekly Years, by Thomas Mallon. "caramel." Sometimes their skin is small Cape Cod town as This moving, compassionately (Vintage, $16.95.) It's 1986 during so dark it has "an undertone of celebrations erupt and memories candid memoir by artist and this novel, and Reagan, partway blueberries." of the wasted lives of the dead are children's book author Bartok through his second term, has yet to swept away. A fictional Godolphin, ...More describes a life dominated by her "Americanah" tells the story of a become canonized as the Mass., is the setting for many of the gifted but schizophrenic mother. smart, strong-willed Nigerian Republican Party's patron saint. stories, such as "Rules," in which Bartok and her sister, Rachel, both woman named Ifemelu who, after Mallon - whom our reviewer, the well-meaning staff at a soup of whom grew up in Cleveland, are she leaves Africa for America, Robert Draper, called "a poised kitchen try not to pry into the lives abandoned by their novelist father endures several harrowing years storyteller who traffics in history's of the "cheats and crazies, drunks and go to live with their mother at of near destitution before ironic creases" - draws on a mix of 2010 (Fiction) and dealers" who frequent the their maternal grandparents' graduating from college, starting a fictional and real-life characters, place. "Hanging Fire" is a perfectly A Visit from the Goon Squad home. By 1990, a confrontation in blog entitled "Raceteenth or including Mikhail Gorbachev and crafted story about a 21-year-old which her mother cuts her with 0 of 1 Various Observations About Jennifer Egan Nancy Reagan's astrologer. college graduate, Nancy, on the broken glass leads Bartok (nee Available American Blacks (Those Formerly Book list cusp of embarking on life and Myra Herr) to change her identity SISTERS IN LAW: How Sandra Known as Negroes) by a Non*Starred Review* Egan is a writer certain only of her obligation to and flee the woman she calls "the Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader American Black" and winning a of cunning subtlety, embedding herself. The tale of retired cry of madness in the dark." Ginsburg Went to the Supreme fellowship at Princeton (as Adichie within the risky endeavors of gastroenterologist Cornelia Fitch Eventually, the estrangement Court and Changed the World, by once did; she has acknowledged ...More seductively complicated in "Self-Reliance" reads like the leaves her mother homeless, Linda Hirshman. (Harper that many of Ifemelu's experiences characters a curious bending of fulfillment of Nancy's own selfwandering with her belongings in Perennial, $16.99.) The justices are her own). Ever hovering in time and escalation of determined trajectory: after a a knapsack, writing letters to her can be seen "as representatives of Ifemelu's thoughts is her high technology's covert impact. successful career, she determines daughter's post office box. the different ways that smart, school boyfriend, Obinze, an Following her diabolically clever how she wants to leave this life: Reunited 17 years later, Bartok is ambitious women navigated life in equally intelligent if gentler; more The Keep (2006), Egan tracks the with dignity and a wink. This suffering memory loss from an mid-20th-century America," Linda self-effacing Nigerian, who members of a San Francisco punk should win new converts for accident; her mother is 80 years 2010 (Autobiography) Greenhouse wrote here. outstays his visa and takes illegal band and their hangers-on over Pearlman. (Jan.) (c) Copyright jobs in London. (When Obinze the decades as they wander out Half a Life old and dying from stomach PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. cancer. Only through memories do trips and falls to the ground, a cointo the wider, bewildering world. Item Not Darin Strauss they each find solace for their worker shouts, "His knee is bad Kleptomaniac Sasha survives the Available Book list collective journey. Using a because he's a knee-grow!") underworld of Naples, Italy. Her Although the accident was what mnemonic technique from the boss, New York music producer insurers call a no fault fatality, the Ifemelu and Obinze represent a Renaissance-a memory palaceBennie Salazar, is miserable in the moment Strauss' car struck and new kind of immigrant, "raised well Bartok imagines, chapter by suburbs, where his tattooed wife, ...More killed his classmate Celine, a girl fed and watered but mired in chapter, a mansion whose rooms Stephanie, sneaks off to play he hardly knew, his life was dissatisfaction." They aren't fleeing secure the treasured moments of tennis with Republicans. Obese understandably changed forever. war or starvation but "the her reconstructed past. With a key former rock-star Bosco wants Prompted to tell his story (he first oppressive lethargy of found stashed in her mother's Stephanie to help him with a told portions on This American choicelessness." Where Obinze knapsack, she unlocks a rental Suicide Tour, while her allLife) by new fatherhood and the fails - soon enough, he is deported storage room filled with paintings, powerful publicist boss eventually 2009 (Fiction) realization that the earth-crumbling - Ifemelu thrives, in part because diaries, and photos. Bartok turns falls so low she takes a job Wolf Hall event had occurred half his lifetime she seeks authenticity. Never has these strangely parallel narratives rehabilitating the public image of a ago, Strauss takes advantage of 0 of 1 Ifemelu felt as free as the day she Hilary Mantel and overlapping wonders into a genocidal dictator. These are just the perhaps unfortunate ability the Available stops hiding her Nigerian accent haunting, almost patchwork, Book list a few of the faltering searchers in accident gave him to introspect under an American one, the narrative that lyrically chronicles a Mantel fictionalizes the life and Egan's hilarious, melancholy, and proceeds to do so for 200 accent that convinces complex mother-daughter times of Thomas Cromwell, crafty enrapturing, unnerving, and pages of conversational free-form telemarketers she is white. She relationship. (Feb.) (c) Copyright architect of Henry VIII's annulment piercingly beautiful mosaic of a essay. Remaining well on this side refuses to straighten her hair (a PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. ...More from Catherine of Aragon, the novel. As episodes surge forward of overly sentimental, Strauss favorite Web site is execution of Sir Thomas Moore, and back in time, from the spitting deconstructs the past 18 years and HappilyKinkyNappy.com), even if Henry's schism with the Church of aggression of a late-1970s punkviews them from every vantage she must endure muttered Rome, and the Reformation. rock club to the obedient, socially point; he sees his embarrassingly disparagements from AfricanDelving deeply into the networked herd gathered at the 2009 (Autobiography) self-centered thoughts Americans when out with a white psychology of the man behind the Footprint, Manhattan's 9/11 site 20 immediately afterward and the man - "You ever wonder why he Somewhere Towards the End throne, she paints a portrait of a years after the attack, Egan premature graying of his hair and likes you looking all jungle like Item Not brilliant schemer, bullied by his Diana Athill evinces an acute sensitivity to the stress-related stomach problems that?" Available brutish blacksmith father black holes of shame and despair Publishers Weekly of his late twenties. Name an determined to rise above his and to the remote-control power of When it comes to facing old age, Early on, a horrific event leaves experience. It's a good bet I've circumstances by dint of his own the gadgets that are reordering our writes Athill, "there are no lessons Ifemelu reeling, and years later, thought of Celine while wits and the strength of his own world.--Seaman, Donna Copyright to be learnt, no discoveries to be when she returns to Nigeria, she's experiencing it. Strauss already resolve. Competent, complex, and 2010 Booklist ...More made, no solutions to offer." As the still haunted by it. Meantime, back has a few well-received novels the consummate behind-theacclaimed British memoirist (who in Lagos, Obinze has found wealth under his belt (Chang and Eng, scenes wheeler-dealer, Mantel's wrote about her experiences as a as a property developer. Though 2000; The Real McCoy, 2002), Cromwell is not an unsympathetic book editor in Stet) pushes past the book threatens to morph into a and his turn to nonfiction of a character; in fact, readers will be 90, she realizes that "there is not simple story of their reunion, it highly personal nature, a slowsurprised that he is presented in a much on record on falling away" stretches into a scalding release mediation on grief, is no far more favorable light than the and resolves to set down some of assessment of Nigeria, a country less symphonic.--Bostrom, Annie 2008 (Criticism) sainted Thomas Moore. This her observations. She is bluntly too proud to have patience for Copyright 2010 Booklist wholly original and authentically Childrens Literature: A Readers History unconcerned with conventional "Americanahs" - big shots who detailed take on an often reviled wisdom, unapologetically from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of return from abroad to belittle their real-life figure will appeal to fans of recounting her extended role as Chicago Press) countrymen - and yet one that, meaty historical dramas and sometimes unwittingly, endorses 1 of 1 Seth Lerer "the Other Woman" in her fictional biographies.--Flanagan, companion's prior marriage--then foreign values. (Of the winter Available Margaret Copyright 2009 Booklist explaining how he didn't move in scenery in a school's Christmas with her until after they'd stopped pageant, a parent asks, "Are they having sex, which is why it was no teaching children that a Christmas big deal for her to invite his next is not a real Christmas unless mistress to move in with them to snow falls like it does abroad?") save expenses. She is equally "Americanah" is witheringly frank in discussing how, as their trenchant and hugely empathetic, life turns "sad and boring," she both worldly and geographically copes with his declining health, 2008 (Autobiography) precise, a novel that holds the just as she cared for her mother in My Fathers Paradise: A Sons Search for discomfiting realities of our times her final years. Firmly resolute that His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq fearlessly before us. It never feels no afterlife awaits her, Athill finds 0 of 1 Ariel Sabar false. just enough optimism in this world Available New York Times to keep her reflections from Mike Peed is on the editorial staff slipping into morbidity--she may In Per Petterson's novel, a woman of the Sunday Review section of not offer much comfort, but it's a The Times. remembers the bold, reckless, bracing read. (Jan.) (c) Copyright politically committed boy who ...More PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved taught her how to live. IT would be inaccurate, and not a little rude, to suggest that the Norwegian writer Per Petterson 2008 (Fiction) burst out of nowhere last year with 2666 the stateside success of his novel Item Not Roberto Bolaño "Out Stealing Horses"-Norway, Available Library Journal after all, isn't nowhere - but This sprawling, digressive, American readers could be Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" forgiven for feeling that way. "Out reads like five independent but Stealing Horses," Petterson's fifth ...More interrelated novels, connected by novel but just his second to be a common link to an actual series published in the United States, of mostly unresolved murders of struck like a comet, sending female factory workers in the area readers and critics into fits of of Ciudad Juùrez (here called justifiable swooning. The novel, in Santa Teresa), a topic also which a hermitic 67-year-old 2008 (Biography) addressed in Margorie AgosIn's widower peels back memories of a Stanley, the Impossible Life of Africas Secrets in the Sand. The first part childhood disarranged through follows four literary critics who Greatest Explorer abandonment by his father and a wind up in Mexico in pursuit of the Item Not Tim Jeal terrible shotgun accident, landed obscure (and imaginary) German Available on numerous best-books-of-theNew York Times writer Benno von Archimboldi, a year lists (including the one in this scenario that recalls Bolano's The publication) and clambered up Poor Africa, the happy hunting Savage Detectives. The second several best-seller lists. This was a ground of the mythomaniac, the and third parts, respectively, focus righteous coup for Graywolf Press, rock star buffing up his or her ...More on Professor Almafitano and the nonprofit publisher in St. Paul image, the missionary with a faith African American reporter Quincy that picked up "Out Stealing to sell, the child buyer, the retailer Williams (also called Oscar Fate), Horses" after many New York of dirty drugs or toxic cigarettes, whose attempts to expose the houses had rejected it. With a gust the editor in search of a scoop, the murders are thwarted. The fourth, of momentum at its back, Graywolf empire builder, the aid worker, the and by far the longest, section has now released Petterson's third tycoon wishing to rid himself of his consists mostly of detached 2007 (Biography) novel, "To Siberia," which was first millions, the school builder with a accounts of the hundreds of published in Norway in 1996 and bucket of patronage, the James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of murders; culled from newspaper translated into English, by-Anne experimenting economist, the Alice B. Sheldon and police reports, they offer a Born, two years later. diamond merchant, the oil 1 of 1 relentless onslaught of the Julie Phillips executive, the explorer, the slave Available Publishers Weekly In its best, most lucent moments, gruesome details and become trader, the eco-tourist, the Journalist Phillips has achieved a "To Siberia" evokes the same increasingly tedious. The last adventure traveler, the bird wonder: an evenhanded, reflective grandeur that made "Out section returns to Archimboldi. watcher, the travel writer, the scrupulously documented, Stealing Horses" burn so brightly, Boasting Bolano's trademark escapee, the colonial and his ...More objective yet sympathetic portrait with the memories this time devices--ambiguity, open endings, crapulosities, the banker, the of a deliberately elusive coming from a 60-year-old woman characters that assume different busybody, the Mandela-sniffer, the personality: Alice Sheldon (1915whose present situation - unlike names, and an enigmatic title, political fantasist, the buccaneer 1987), who adopted the persona that of Trond Sander, the narrator along with splashes of humor--this and your cousin the Peace Corps of science fiction writer James of "Out Stealing Horses," whose posthumously published work is Volunteer. Oh, and the atoner, of 2006 (Biography) Tiptree Jr. Working from Sheldon's accounts of household doddering consistently masterful until the last whom Thoreau observed in a American Prometheus: The Triumph and (and Tiptree's) few interviews; acted as a pressure valve on the half of the final part, which shows skeptical essay: "Now, if anything Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer Sheldon's professional papers, crush of his remembrances - is some haste. The book is rightly ail a man so that he does not many unpublished; and the papers never revealed. Even her name 2 of 2 praised as Bolano's masterpiece, Kai Bird perform his functions ... if he has of Sheldon's writer-explorergoes unmentioned. Unlike Trond, Available but owing to its unorthodox length committed some heinous sin and Publishers Weekly socialite mother, Phillips has then, she is nothing but the past: it will likely find greater favor partially repents, what does he Though many recognize crafted an absorbing melange of an otherwise empty vessel filled among critics than among general do? He sets about reforming the Oppenheimer (1904-1967) as the several disparate lives besides with memories of her World War IIreaders. In fact, before he died, the world." Thoreau, who had Africa father of the atomic bomb, few are Sheldon's, each impacting hers era childhood in what is surely author asked that it be published specifically in mind, added, "Do ...More as familiar with his career before like a deadly off-course asteroid. Frederikshavn, a Danish port town in five parts over just as many you hear it, ye Wolofs?" and after Los Alamos. Sherwin (A From Sheldon's sad poor-littleon the Jutland peninsula; of her years; it's a pity his relatives World Destroyed) has spent 25 rich-girlhood to her sadder suicide grandfather, a vinegary farmer These people have been in and refused to honor his request. [Also years researching every facet of (by a prior pact first shooting her from nearby Vrangbaek who out of the continent since the available in a three-volume slipOppenheimer's life, from his 2005 (Biography) blind and bedridden husband), hangs himself in a cowshed; of her beginning of the 19th century, cased paperback edition.]-childhood on Manhattan's Upper Sheldon, perpetually wishing mother, a devout Christian whose much earlier if we include the Arab Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., De Kooning: An American Master West Side and his prewar years as she'd been born a boy, made what sanctified brooding is leavened slave traders and the tourist Dublin, OH (c) Copyright 2010. a Berkeley physicist to his public 1 of 1 Mark Stevens she called "endless makeshift" only by her hymn-singing at the Herodotus. A common Library Journals LLC, a wholly humiliation when he was branded Available Publishers Weekly attempts to express her tormenting piano, and her father, whose denominator in this assortment of owned subsidiary of Media a security risk at the height of This sweeping biography, 10 creativity as, among others, a disappointment at being shut out foreign visitors - high-minded Source, Inc. No redistribution anticommunist hysteria in 1954. years in the making, chronicles in debutante, a flamboyant of the family farm (shades of Lars permitted. pests and exploiters alike - is their Teaming up with Bird, an fastidious detail de Kooning's rise bohemian, a WAC officer, a CIA from "Out Stealing Horses") results wish to transform themselves while acclaimed Cold War historian (The ...More from his humble beginnings in photoanalyst, and a research in a string of botched occupations claiming they want to change Color of Truth), Sherwin examines Rotterdam to his fame as an scientist before producing Tiptree's and less sanctified bouts of Africa. Henry Morton Stanley is a the evidence surrounding abstract expressionist and his "haunting, subversive, manybrooding. But mostly - at times classic case. "We went into the Oppenheimer's "hazy and vague" descent into alcoholism and layered [science] fiction" at 51. oppressively, perhaps even heart of Africa self-invited - therein connections to the Communist Alzheimer's. Emigrating to New Sheldon masked her authorship obsessively she focuses her lies our fault," Stanley confided to 2004 (Biography) Party in the 1930sAloose York in 1926, de Kooning (1904until 1976, and afterward remembering on her older brother, his diary. The words are quoted in interactions consistent with the Khrushchev: The Man and His Era 1997) situated himself among produced little fiction, feeling that a Jesper. this magnificent new life of the activities of contemporary Item Not fellow artists and role models like William Taubman woman writing as a man could not man, by Tim Jeal, a biography that progressives. But those politics, in Available Arshile Gorky. In 1938, he met and Jesper is bold, reckless, Publishers Weekly be convincing. Through all the has many echoes for our own time. combination with Oppenheimer's later married painter Elaine Fried; handsome, whip smart, politically ironic sorrows of a life Sheldon Amherst College political science abrasive personality, were enough the two remained married despite committed, Romantically doomed Burton and Speke poked at the wished she hadn't had to live as a professor Taubman's thorough for conservatives, from fellow de Kooning's predilection for bed the Frederikshavn version of a edges of Lake Victoria, and woman, Phillips steadfastly and and nuanced account is the first scientist Edward Teller to FBI hopping. (An affair with Joan Ward young John Reed. He gets into a Livingstone walked in circles ...More elegantly allows one star, bright as full-length American biography of director J. Edgar Hoover, to work resulted in a daughter, Lisa, and bar fight at 14; he decorates his around Lake Bangweulu the Sirius Sheldon loved, to gleam. Khrushchev-and will likely be the at destroying Oppenheimer's indeed, the authors spend more seaside fort with a portrait of Lenin; speculating on the source of the 16 pages of b&w photos. (Aug.) (c) definitive one for a long time. postwar reputation and prevent ink on de Kooning's womanizing for mischievous sport, he trails the Nile, pretending to be a Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights Russians, Taubman explains, are him from swaying public opinion than his art making.) In the early town lamplighter to extinguish missionary. Jeal was the first to reserved still divided by Khrushchev's against the development of a 2003 (Biography) 1940s, de Kooning's work each lamp just after it is lit, or reveal in his 1973 life of legacy, largely because of the hydrogen bomb. Bird and Sherwin appeared in group shows; his first catcalls the local baron; he Livingstone that the melancholy Charles Darwin great contradiction at the heart of identify Atomic Energy solo show was a commercial attempts, dangerously, to skate Scot had made just one Christian his career: he worked closely with Item Not Janet Browne Commission head Lewis Strauss failure. The artist did not meet with across the frozen sea to a distant convert (who later lapsed). Even Stalin for nearly 20 years, Available Publishers Weekly as the ringleader of a "conspiracy" real success until the 1950s, when lighthouse; he runs outside during the Arab slave traders stayed approved thousands of arrests and When Browne published her first that culminated in a security his paintings Excavation and thunderstorms to dance in earthy away from l'Afrique profonde. But executions, and continued to volume on the life of Darwin seven clearance hearing designed as a Woman 1 made him "first among joy; and when the Nazis invade, on his second African journey, a idolize the dictator until the latter's years ago (Charles Darwin: "show trial." Strauss's tactics equals" in the art world. Stevens, he throws himself into the few years after finding Livingstone, death. Yet it was Khrushchev who ...More Voyaging), she secured her included illegal wiretaps of New York magazine's art critic, resistance. Local girls "lie in bed at Stanley thrust his way through the publicly revealed the enormity of reputation as the last word on the Oppenheimer's attorney; those and Swan, a former senior arts night and think of him," claims his midsection of Africa from east to Stalin's crimes, denounced him, Victorian naturalist. Now she has transcripts and other government editor at Newsweek, see in de sister, whom he affectionately calls west, and later from west to east. and introduced reforms that, published the much-anticipated documents are invaluable in Kooning's life the realization of "Sistermine," and he can even His journeys were valiant, well Taubman argues, "allowed a second half, and it is more debunking the charges against classic stories-the triumph of the squeeze a "blush and giggle" out organized, and the man was a 2002 (Biography) nascent civil society to take spellbinding than the first, which Oppenheimer. The political drama immigrant, the man consumed by of their dour mother. He is, in short, hero. But he was also prone to shape"-eventually making way for Boswells Presumptious Task ended on a cliffhanger of sorts. is enhanced by the close attention his success, the nonexistence of "mad, bad and dangerous to exaggeration in reporting the perestroika. Taubman untangles Item Not Darwin was back from his Beagle Adam Sisman to Oppenheimer's personal life, life's second acts-and this know," as Lady Caroline Lamb events of his travels, and he had the fascinating layers of deception Available voyages, his famous evolutionary and Bird and Sherwin do not Choice comprehensive biography, which described Lord Byron. Dangerous many personal secrets. and self-deception in principles were distilled in his conceal their occasional frustration Sisman's biography of the famous attempts to explain de Kooning's to be the sister of, for certain. The Khrushchev's own memoir, mind and the Bible-centered with his arrogant stonewalling and "Yet despite the pain and biographer invites comparison art through a careful catalogue of sheer force of his personality acts weighing just how much the leader science of his day was about to be panicky blunders, even as they weakness of his physical body," with Peter Martin's A Life of James his personal life, is a must read for like a black hole on Sistermine's was likely to have known about the convulsed forever. Here, Browne shed light on the psychological Jeal writes of Stanley's exhaustion ...More Boswell (CH, Apr'01). Whereas his admirers. Illus. Agent, Molly life - heating it and irradiating it, purges and his own culpability in picks up the story a year before the roots for those failures, restoring after the first traverse of Africa, an Martin gives roughly equal Friedrich at Aaron Priest. 40,000 but, in some sense, obliterating it them. He also shows that shadows publication of On the Origin of human complexity to a man who almost unthinkable 7,000-mile attention to all the phases of first printing; author tour. (Nov.) (c) as well. of Stalinism lingered through Species, with the arrival of a had been both elevated and journey to crack the secrets of the Boswell's life, Sisman dispenses Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights Khrushchev's 11 years in power: package from Alfred Russel demonized. 32 pages of photos "To Siberia" is divided into three central African watershed, "Henry with the years before his meeting reserved his fourth-grade education left him 2001 (Biography) Wallace, whose own ideas on not seen by PW. (Apr. 10) (c) sections, but really there are two: pulsed with almost mystical selfwith Johnson in a mere 19 pages, both awed and threatened by the natural selection virtually mirrored Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan memories of life with Jesper, and belief: 'For my real self lay darkly and the years he spent with Russian intelligentsia, which he Darwin's, forcing him to go public; of life without. Petterson stitches all encased, & was ever too haughty Johnson in another 40. The author 1 of 1 Herbert Bixreserved persecuted; intending to deas Browne shows, he proved these recollections together to & soaring for such miserable devotes the rest of the book to the Available Book list escalate the Cold War, the himself a master tactician of form a kind of episodic quilt, environments as the body that years during which Boswell wrote Most postwar histories have mercurial, blustering first secretary institutional and media spin. sliding from past tense to present encumbered it daily.' " Journal of a Tour (published in portrayed Emperor Hirohito in one ended up provoking dangerous Browne's subject is monumental, tense (occasionally in the same 1785) and especially The Life of of two ways: a shy, hands-off standoffs with the U.S. The This "real self" is the one that Jeal but her writing style is never sentence: "You could touch the air, Samuel Johnson (1791): the ...More monarch who preferred marine bumbling, equivocal speeches gets to grips with. Most of what we overburdened by the weight. like glass, and everything seems endless delays, the quests for biology to affairs of state or a quoted here make Khrushchev have been told of Stanley, and Rather, her prose is elegant in its very close") as each memory is inaccessible information, the pacifistic but weak ruler who was seem a rank amateur in much of which he wrote himself, is clarity of thought, her sewn to the next. As in personal disputes, the rivalries dragged by militarists into a war of international affairs-or, as wrong. Jeal nails the falsehoods craftsmanship impeccable in the Sistermine's life, the novel's with other biographers, the conquest against his better Taubman politely puts it, he had as "misguided lies." For one thing way it weaves a coherent whole 2000 (Biography) warmth and vitality are contained emotional crises, and the frequent judgment. Bix has written trouble "thinking things through." his name was not Henry Morton from the innumerable threads of within the "with Jesper" sections, career disappointments. Sisman's The Hairstons extensively on Japanese history Working closely with Khrushchev's Stanley. He was not, as he thought, experience and persona which are rife with beautifully Boswell is no mindless tape 1 of 1 and is currently a professor in the Henry Wiencek children, and interviewing his claimed, an American from New that comprised this colossal life. incantatory moments: when Jesper recorder but a dedicated (if too Available graduate school of social sciences surviving top-level Central Library Journal Orleans. He had not been Darwin's science, Browne shows Sistermine how to sweeteasily sidetracked) literary at Tokyo's Hitotsubasbi University. Committee colleagues and aides, adopted. It was not The New York This profile of the Hairstons, a contends, was characterized by talk a cow into letting her sleep on craftsman, working to shape a life In this provocative and disturbing Taubman has pieced together a Herald's idea for him to find large family of planters and slaves his systematic use of its back for heat, or when the pair into a narrative--and sometimes work, he paints a far more complex remarkably detailed chronicle, Livingstone, and the Livingstone spreading from Virginia and North correspondence, which the author make a blood-oath to someday struggling with things that do not fit portrait of Hirohito. Aided by newly complete with riveting scenes of ...More he found was not, as he claimed, a Carolina to Mississippi, examines puts to effective use in her escape their drab Danish in a biography. Nothing here will available material from Japanese Kremlin intrigue and acute saintly figure devoted to the uplift the intricate situations forged by narrative, again illustrating how existence. Jesper has his sights be news to scholars, but the book archives, Bix convincingly asserts psychological analysis that further of Africa He did not utter the words interracial relationships and the naturalist's thought was as set on Morocco ("Marrakech, Fez, is lively and accessible, and that the emperor was deeply illuminates some of the "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" He reveals the fate of the family in the much the collective product of his Meknes, Kasba," goes his complements Martin's Life well. involved in most aspects of the nightmarish episodes of Soviet was not the violent hanger and crucible of war, emancipation, and day as it was its single-most doxology), while Sistermine Highly recommended for general 1999 (Biography) Pacific war, from start to finish, and history. 32 pages of photos not flogger he was reputed to be, nor the struggle for equality. Journalist intellectual catalyst. Readers are yearns to replant herself in Siberia readers and undergraduates. J. T. he voiced few objections to the seen by PW. (Mar.) (c) Copyright A Beautiful MInd was he a willing cat's-paw for King Wiencek's conversational left with the image of the sailor ("Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Lynch Rutgers, The State most brutal outrages of his military. PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Leopold's infernalities. But, as this narrative, based both on archival 1 of 1 returned home to dig in his Sylvia Nasar Irkutsk," goes hers). "There were University of New Jersey, Newark It is particularly disturbing to see book demonstrates in a way that research and a series of Available garden, stare into the past and, in Book list the great plains with unbroken how the cocoon of lies spun makes it a superb adventure story encounters with family members, dying, slip into legend. (Sept.) (c) lines, and a sky and a light as from The shadowy line between genius around Hirohito has been used by as well as a feat of advocacy, highlights the contingent Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights the dawn of the world," she and madness is exemplified in the conservative and especially Stanley was probably the greatest construction of historical accounts reserved imagines, "and timbered houses life of mathematician John Nash, reactionary politicians in Japan to explorer ever to set foot in Africa while revealing the complex and and flocks of birds like a thousand ...More Strangelovian game theorist of advance their nationalistic contradictory beliefs and emotions flamingoes that changed into nuclear war, 1994 Nobelist in agenda. This book will The man we know as Stanley was that characterized these tangled seagulls when they took off and economics, and schizophrenic. undoubtedly cause a storm of born John Rowlands in North relationships, filled with guilt, flew and filled the world before Nasar is a rare author who controversy, especially in Japan. Wales to a dissolute mother, and anger, and ultimately forgiveness they dissolved and were gone." As explicates both calculus and However, it is a vital contribution to at the age of 6 was confined to the without absolution. The result is a geographical idylls go, hers is mental disease. an ongoing and critical debate. -misery of a workhouse. He voyage of discovery down the worth a raised eyebrow, but Jay Freeman escaped once but was sent back 1998 (Biography) stream of history. Wiencek reminds Jesper does nothing but nurture it by ashamed and indifferent us that no such story, especially When a German pen pal informs Ernie Pyles War relatives. He was discharged from one as compelling as this, can be Sistermine that Siberia equals 2 of 2 James Tobin this semi-prison at 15, got a job on rendered simply in terms of black prison camps, Jesper reassures Available Book list an American ship, which he and white. Recommended for most her. "Nazi propaganda," he snorts. jumped in New Orleans. He Tobin pays homage to Ernie Pyle, libraries. [Previewed in Prepub worked awhile there, America's most celebrated and BUT then he is gone - to Morocco, Alert, LJ 10/15/98.]?Brooks D. experimented with a new name beloved war correspondent. Living naturally; Jesper's drive, like his Simpson, Arizona State Univ., and identity and joined the and working among the troops he personality (and his fate) is...More Tempe (c) Copyright 2010. Library Confederate Army, in a local so vividly chronicled, Pyle offered superheated - and Sistermine, Journals LLC, a wholly owned regiment, the Dixie Grays, in 1861. a unique insider's perspective of along with the reader, must subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. He fought at the battle of Shiloh, the harsh reality experienced by contend with the suck of his No redistribution permitted. was captured by a Union patrol, the common soldier during World absence. She drifts to clapped into prison at Camp War II. His superlative front-line Copenhagen, to Stockholm, to 1997 (Biography) Douglas and given the choice of coverage was devoured by Oslo. She works as a telephone Angelas Ashes fighting for the North or rotting. He citizens on the home front, who operator and as a waitress in a changed sides, marched under a hungered for news of their "boys" 6 of 6 Frank McCourt cafe, and turns to grim promiscuity Union flag, then deserted and in uniform. Unlike most other war Available School Library Journal to eke her way through the cold sailed to Wales, where he was correspondents, Pyle gave faces nights. Even a great-uncle's YA?Despite impoverishing his again rejected by his mother: and voices to the ordinary GIs who soused advances go unrefused, family because of his alcoholism, "Never come back to me again populated the horrific battlefields and when a woman makes a pass McCourt's father passed on to his unless you are in far better of Europe, North Africa, and the at her, she admits she is "not like ...More son a gift for superb storytelling. circumstances than you seem to Pacific Islands. Pyle's death in that, but if I allow her to kiss me I He told him about the great Irish be in now." combat, alongside the ordinary am sure she will let me sit in this heroes, the old days in Ireland, the soldiers he admired and extolled, chair as long as I like." It's here, in people in their Limerick "Unloved and deeply sensitive, but served as an especially fitting the "without Jesper" section, that neighborhood, and the world angry, too," Jeal writes, Stanley 1996 (Biography) postscript to his extraordinary the novel slackens, along with beyond their shores. McCourt searched for a way to prove Savage Art career as an eyewitness to war. A Sistermine's life: "He has gone to writes in the voice of the child?with himself. In being rejected he had respectful and insightful biography Morocco, and I have come to this Item Not no self-pity or review of events? Robert Polito also been liberated, and his of a giant among journalists. town at the very end of the fjord Available and just retells the tales. He Publishers Weekly reading (especially travel books) Margaret Flanagan where everything was gray and recounts his desperately poor A series of Vintage reprints and was another liberation. He made a green on the way in on the boat, early years, living on public Hollywood films like The Getaway disastrous journey to Turkey and and then nothing but gray for days assistance and losing three and The Grifters have helped was for a while a war and weeks." Make that years. A J. siblings, but manages to make the ...More develop a wider popular and correspondent, reporting on the M. Coetzeelike chilliness blows book funny and uplifting. Stories of critical following for crime author massacre of American Indians in through these pages, but the trying on his parents' false teeth Jim Thompson (1906-1977) than Iowa and Ethiopians in Magdala. overall effect is of a slow gray fade and his adventures as a post-office he sustained while alive. More Then, at 31, he persuaded James - the black-and-white bleakness of delivery boy will have readers twisted, sadistic and nihilistic than Gordon Bennett Jr. of The New 1995 (Biography) Kansas after the Oz of Jesper's laughing out loud. Young people Chandler or Caine, Thompson's York Herald that he could make company. "The days go by," she will recognize the truth in these Shot in the Heart trademarks were his fiendish firstheadlines finding David says, "and I go with them." Or as a compelling tales; the emotions person psychopaths and lowlifes Item Not Mikal Gilmore Livingstone, who was not exactly young poet calling himself John expressed; the descriptions of and his grim tales of failed lives Available lost but who hadn't been heard Publishers Weekly Cougar once wrote: "Oh yeah, life teachers, relatives, neighbors; and and thwarted crimes. Polito, from for a while and was fading Executed by firing squad in Utah in goes on/long after the thrill/of living the casual cruelty adults show director of the writing program at from the public memory. 1977 after murdering two young is gone." toward children. Readers will Manhattan's New School, here Mormon men, Gary Gilmore, who enjoy the humor and the music in The success of this African trip untangles the man from his two...More insisted he be put to death, gained It spoils nothing to reveal that the language. A vivid, wonderfully from the coast to Livingstone's hut volume autobiography (Bad Boy notoriety through Norman Mailer's Sistermine never makes it to readable memoir.?Patricia near the shores of Lake and Roughneck), revealing a book The Executioner's Song and Siberia Except that in a way, she Noonan, Prince William Public Tanganyika was a great coup and maverick alcoholic who was a TV film. In a haunting portrait of a does: "Sometimes when I think of Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. a bold headline, and it had the dogged by spells of depression dysfunctional family that molded a Jesper all I can see is his dark Library Journals LLC, a wholly effect of transforming the fortunes and missed opportunities murderer, rock music journalist back on the way across the white owned subsidiary of Media of both men. Stanley proved throughout his hand-to-mouth Mikal Gilmore, Gary's brother, fills sea to Hirsholmene," she says, Source, Inc. No redistribution himself a more than able explorer career. The son of a corrupt in multiple gaps in Mailer's permitted. referring to Jesper's skate across