Hard as it is to argue whether Republicans are more civil than Democrats, or vice versa, Steve Laffey's memoir of the 2006 Rhode Island Senate primary goes some length toward settling the issue.
By: Bradley Vasoli
bvasoli@thebulletin.us |
The author of Birds in Fall, his 2006 novel based on the 1998 crash of a Swiss Air jetliner off the coast of Nova Scotia, has found inspiration on the 75-acre farm where he lives with his wife, gardening, raising goats and making cheese.
By: John Curran |
Before surgery videos, medical dramas, House and McDreamy laid bare the body's failings, there was a book that showed how each part was supposed to fit together.
By: Jennifer Kay |
For Lorna Landvik, author of such women-oriented novels as Patty Jane's House of Curl and Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, writing for the first time in a man's voice was not a problem.
By: Jeff Baenen
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Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart, highlights how "America is in an existential crisis from which the nation may not survive."
By: Joe Murray
jmurray@thebulletin.us |
Book Review
By: Jim Panyard
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Book Review
By JOHN AFFLECK
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Book Review
By: Jim Panyard
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Book Review
By: Henry C. Jackson
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Book Review
By: Dinesh Ramde
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Book Review
By: Jennifer Kay
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Book Review
By: Malcolm Ritter
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Book Review
By BRUCE DeSILVA
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Book Review
By LARRY McSHANE
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He feels as if he were "were witnessing the devolution of a culture," Easy says. "Even Otis Redding moaning about the dock of the bay on tinny but loud speakers spoke of a world that was grinding to a halt." |
Book Review
By: Rachel Konrad
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Book Review
By: Jim Panyard
jpanyard@thebulletin.us |
Book Review
By F.N. D'ALESSIO |
Book Review
By: Rachel Marx |
Book Review
By Lewis Whittington |
Johnny Cash's first wife, Vivian, never stopped loving her Man in Black. |
Stephen F. Hayes has performed a prodigious deed in his biography of Dick Cheney (Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President) |
Kids ask questions, and little ones ask them endlessly. Answering them will strain a parent's knowledge as well as his or her patience. |
The plot of Still Summer is definitely compelling: Three high school friends reunite 20 years later for a sailing cruise in the Caribbean. Instead of a few
weeks' rest and relaxation, the women encounter bad weather and worse luck. |
Augustus Cain, wounded in the Mexican-American War and from a lost love, is a slave catcher. It is a life, he says, that picked him and not one he chose.
Cain becomes indebted to a plantation owner named Eberly after losing a game of poker |
Mother Teresa's hidden faith struggle, laid bare in a new book that shows she felt alone and separated from God, is forcing a re-examination of one of the world's best known religious figures. |
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In Spook Country, Hollis Henry, investigative reporter and former rock singer, has a fascinating assignment. |
Melina Gerosa Bellows offers ways to enjoy and connect with kids rather than just simply dealing with them in her The Fun Book for Moms: 102 Ways to Celebrate Family (Andrews McNeel Publishing, $12.95).
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Be careful what you wish for, because it just might come true.
That is the basic thrust of Jane Fallon's amusing debut novel, Getting Rid of Matthew. |
Judge Deborah Knott promised her new husband, sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, that she wouldn't interfere in his work. |
A true visionary and man of many talents, de Gaulle understood the danger facing France at the end of the Great War. France had lost a greater proportion of its population than any belligerent power, and its birthrate was the lowest in the Western world. Although France had been victorious in that war, she had been bled dry. |
For many, the relationships that develop at work take on the dimensions of family. Sometimes these unions are just as dysfunctional as real families. Sometimes they are as supportive. Sometimes they are both. |
James "J.D." Dawson didn't want to become another statistic of young, lower-class black men in America - unemployed, in jail or dead.
By going off to college in Atlanta, he thinks that he'll be able to escape a notoriously rough neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., and move on to a better life.
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He is Oscar Feldman, a New York painter who embodies all the cliches of the bad-boy artist: a hot-tempered rebel, envious of his rivals, lecherous, a monumental egotist with a wife and a mistress.
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A former advertising executive and creator of various MTV programs, Rosen needs to rein in the self-consciousness in his writing and his character.
Somebody told him to write about what he knows, when really he should do something crazy and foreign and go set a story there. |
This isn't great literature, nor is Crosby a great writer - or even a very good one. But she weaves an engaging mystery with likable characters who stumble upon two murders to solve. |
Criminals commit crimes as a means to an end - not necessarily an evil act, just a wrong one. An evil person - or bad monkey - enjoys the crime, commits it for it's own sake, and the more psychological harm, the better. Just how do the Bad Monkeys judge who is evil and who is criminal? |
I am about to be even more annoying at parties. Armed with your ignorance, no random trivia will go un-one-upped. |
Born in Richmond, Va., and trained as a lawyer, Saira Rao's experiences as a judge's clerk in Philadelphia inspired her to write her first novel, Chambermaid, released July 10. |
Lenin fought his special war quietly - no shots fired - but it wasn't all that private. |
The Australians peopling David Malouf's short stories feel the same pull. Bookish and wayward children, a celebrated politician, bored parents, a draftee waiting to ship off, a woman howling in the streets in grief - all restlessly seek some kind of validation from their own landscape. |
The seventh and final book in the world-wide literary phenom was released to record-breaking crowds at 12:01 a.m. on July 21. And J.K. Rowling, an once unknown writer scribbling in an Edinburgh café just 10 years ago, did not disappoint. |
The volume is divided into five categories: Clinical Contributions; The Child Analyst at Work; Theoretical Contributions; Research Studies; and Applied Psychoanalysis. Of particular interest to the general readership is probably the last one, which deals with the psychoanalytic investigation of movies, literature, philosophy and religion, among others. |
"You're married," a friend tells McCone, who resisted the institution. "You've made that ultimate commitment. In theory, since you and Hy have been together a long time, it shouldn't make a difference. But take it from one who knows: it does." |
Lest the reader is tempted to think that these are the views of his fictional character alone, Burke has been telling interviewers that President Bush's response to Katrina was so loathsome that it fell into "a category that has no name." |
No one thinks they're weird when they're a little kid. It takes the taunts of schoolmates or older siblings before a youngster gets self-conscious about the things that make them different. |
| | | | | | | Courtesy of Darren Hunter
The Exile Project, written by Darren Hunter, questions our place in existence. | |
"A sense of direction will always find you in exile."
- Darren Hunter, The Exile Project |
Most adults would rather not revisit the humiliations of high school. Larry Doyle revels in them. |
In the cutthroat world of Wall Street, where money is king and power an aphrodisiac, most menial workers barely merit a second glance. |
Jane Hubbell Kinneson, the owner and lone resident of Kingdom Mountain, communes daily with "my dear people," a family of wooden figures she has carved from native basswood. |
In her search for hidden details of her own family's history, China Galland stumbles onto an overgrown burial ground for slaves and gets to know the descendants who have been locked out of Love Cemetery. |
In the summer of 1958, Bryn Mawr College's incoming class of first-year students received the College Handbook. Among its directives on campus activities and clubs nestled this gem of propriety: "Bring a tea set. It's almost part of Bryn Mawr tradition to have tea on particular occasions." |
It is 2017, and Los Angeles is under assault by electronic image. |
The menagerie at Bedlam Farm continues to grow in Dog Days (Villard, 288 pages, $23.95), the engaging new entry in Jon Katz's memoirs about living the country life with man's best friend. |
Finding love in Saudi Arabia is practically impossible, especially for young Muslim women.
That's the premise 25-year-old author Rajaa Alsanea tackles in her novel, "Girls of Riyadh," which has already created a stir throughout the Arab world. |
Dr. Impossible, a villain with super powers, was speaking to him.
"I pulled over to the side of the road and started writing in a notebook," Grossman says.
Plans for world domination? The secret to a powerful machine or potion? Psychotic ramblings that would take Grossman on a long vacation at a sanitarium? |
The story unfolds with a series of unpredictable turns and double crosses. By crime fiction standards it is a long book - 448 pages - but the clear prose and page-turning suspense make it a quick and enjoyable summer read. |
Gore's strong screenwriting skills - she wrote for "Futurama" and "Saturday Night Live" - intrude on the flow of her novel. Mishaps involving camel spit and naked romps with Thanksgiving desserts seem more like comic gags in adolescent movies than moments in what is essentially the story of a quirky, likable young woman struggling to stay pure in a political cesspool.
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The former magazine maven, credited with taking gossip upscale as editor of Vanity Fair in the 1980s, has released The Diana Chronicles just before what would have been Diana's 46th birthday on July 1 and the 10th anniversary of her death in August. |
At times, it seems The Blood of Flowers (Little, Brown and Company; 384 pages; $23.99) is too complex, what with themes ranging from carpet-weaving to age-old Iranian traditions to the oppression of women.
Yet, like the most prized Persian rugs, it all fits together beautifully. |
Legalisms or sound bites: That's how we usually learn about church-state squabbles in the news.Nobody talks about how it feels to be right in the middle of an ACLU lawsuit in a small, fundamentalist town. But in a new book, a Texas woman who filed such a suit does exactly that. |
In December 2002, writer Mick Brown convinced one of most elusive figures in rock 'n' roll history to sit down for an interview.
Phil Spector, the one-time wunderkind producer of "Be My Baby" and "You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin'," the architect of the legendary Wall of Sound, had declined requests to talk to the media for 25 years. |
The title comes from a Hubert Humphrey quote that Holly's grandfather, who suffers from Alzheimer's, is fond of: "My friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts; it's what you do with what you have left." |
Nearly 1,000 books have been written about this case, almost all arguing for some conspiracy or another. The most recent Gallup poll (2003) revealed that 75 percent of Americans believe Kennedy's murder was the work of a conspiracy.
Can any one book quiet all doubts, refute all theories, end the speculation forever?
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Iraq: Soldiers. Brutality. War. Secrets. The images of the dusty, war-torn land are all too familiar.
Fortunately, in the biography Nabeel's Song, journalist Jo Tatchell gives readers a glimpse into Iraq's not-too-distant past when the arts flourished and tables overflowed with food. |
As always, Smith elevates a police procedural story to a taste of Russia, a glass of vodka poured quivering to the brim. |
Centralia still beckons curiosity seekers. What they find is a ghost town like no other, a place with an intact street grid but almost nothing on it, where clouds of sulfurous steam waft from a rocky moonscape and the ground is warm to the touch. |
The Reacher books are well plotted and fast-paced. Bad Luck and Trouble continues that tradition. It is also salted with small details that Reacher uses to reach his conclusions. Something as innocent as a visit to the widow of a dead friend whose young son opens the door becomes much more than a small incident when Reacher begins to ponder it. |
The streets of old New York are getting mighty crowded with fictional characters. Contemporary authors seem more apt then ever to dip into the city's rich past to tell their tales. Among the few who stand out are E.L. Doctorow, Kevin Baker, Caleb CThis time, Hamill settles on one year, 1934, and one very mortal protagonist, Dr. James Delaney in North River?(Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $25.99).arr, Thomas Kelly - and Pete Hamill. |
Everyone knows about Abraham Lincoln: 16th president of the United States, saved the Union, freed the slaves. And, oh yes, war criminal, depressive, secular saint and business management guru. |
Robert B. Parker's three series characters - Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone and Spenser - have a charming habit of wandering into one another's books. With Spare Change (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 291 pages, $24.95), the latest Sunny Randall novel, the author recycles so many characters that the book is something of a family reunion for regular Parker readers. |
In her new book, The Real All-Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation, Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins recounts in rich detail the triumphant - and often overlooked - history of the Carlisle Indians, a series of ragtag teams of American Indians from a tiny school in central Pennsylvania that regularly bested the well-moneyed powerhouses of football's formative years. |
Jean Edward Smith's 880-page book, FDR, published by Random House, acknowledges that the U.S. failed to take significant measures to help the Jews in Europe. But Smith refuses to assign any of the responsibility to President Roosevelt. Again and again, he tries to find other parties to blame. |
The first novel by Min Jin Lee - a Korean immigrant who went to Yale University - looks at the precarious time after college graduation when dreams may not be realized, carefully laid plans can collapse and life can take unexpected and often difficult turns. |
The sad intersection of Mariam and Laila's seemingly disparate lives is the basis for A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead Books, 370 pages, $25.95), an evocative and engrossing new novel by Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-American author of the 2003 best seller The Kite Runner. |
The book originally appeared as a 16-part serial in The New York Times Magazine, but for the hardcover version, Connelly has improved the story, adding complications and enriching the detail. As the dramatic search for the missing uranium unfolds, the FBI is chasing terrorists. Bosch is hunting a killer. Naturally, it's Bosch's approach that breaks the case.
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Crocodile is a bleak, but necessary read. The title refers to an ancient African belief that a mystical crocodile causes the solar eclipse. Mugabe is the real-life crocodile in the book; though always distant, his policies cast their shadow throughout the tale and the lives portrayed.
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There was a time when The Clash, the brilliant British quartet that blended politics with punk rock, was (quite properly) billed as "The Only Band That Matters."A new biography about lead singer Joe Strummer explains why... |
If nothing else, one has to give credit to the son of Greek immigrants for his staying power. His term was more than his four predecessors combined. Serving in such a sensitive position in both the Clinton and Bush II administrations is also a political feat, due mainly to the fact he was seen as a good soldier by Republicans and Democrats alike. |
Can I Keep My Jersey?: 11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond (Villard, 330 pages, $23.95) is an athlete's mostly humorous, sometimes heart-string-tugging, always interesting journal of the ups and downs of his career, but it's not necessary for a reader to be a sports fan to enjoy it or appreciate it. |
Many Americans know some version of Burr's downfall, and Isenberg explains that tragedy in great detail. But, just as thoroughly, she also describes his development into a flawed but compassionate and intelligent soldier, attorney and politician. Burr was ahead of his time as a supporter of the empowerment of women and a champion of the downtrodden. |
Elmore Leonard excels at creating smart, sexy, confident female characters; and Honey may be the best of them since Rum Punch, (1992), whose female lead was later immortalized by Pam Grier in the movie Jackie Brown. |
Two articles on the new book and the author. |
Raised in a cartoonish house with four rooms stacked one atop another, a dirt floor in the kitchen and a swing dangling from the living room ceiling, the
children in Maxine Swann's novel want nothing more than to fit in with their peers. |
How can a young, beautiful woman slip from sanity into madness over the course of a few days? What sudden trauma pushed her over the edge? What long-hidden scars rose up to send her into the chasm? |
Palahniuk never manages to turn his list of gross-outs into an involving narrative, in part because he tells his story in the form of an oral history, with different characters providing often conflicting accounts.It's a great concept, modeled on nonfiction books like Jean Stein's excellent Edie Sedgwick biography, and at times the voices overlap beautifully, with what feels like pure truth emerging from the contradictions. |
After countless books about his boyhood, his presidency, the hunt for his killer and yes, even his feet, maybe it was time for a new book devoted to what happened to Lincoln's body after he was done using it. |
"I call the book 'Let's Face It' because the world is in a mess," he remarked. "My generation hasn't done much to cure it. The world has the lowest esteem of my country. I dedicated the book to the next generation and to my seven grandchildren. I want them to look at the problems we have and try to bring our country back to the position we had, when we were respected around the world."
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A wartime proposal to turn Alaska into a sanctuary for Jews fleeing the rising Nazi menace failed.But suppose it hadn't.That's the premise of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon's new book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a multilayered novel that is a detective yarn, alternate history, love story and terrorist thriller all wrapped up in one genre-bending package. |
One of the reasons for her popularity in Britain, Shriver suspects, is the popularity of book clubs. "That's a terrific book club book," she says of We Need to Talk About Kevin. She believes The Post-Birthday World has the same ability to inspire conversation. |
Homes holds back little in the first half of the memoir, The Mistress's Daughter?(Viking. 238 pages. $24.95). Her pain, confusion and sadness are palpable and it makes for an extraordinarily compelling read. But something falls apart in the second half. |
Savage doesn't really provide answers, sticking to an unshakable objectivity that doesn't always fit the juicy topic. But good for him for doing the heavy research while many others coddle their MTV-groomed short attention spans and turn up their iPods. |
Those who read his first book will be glad to find that Byron and his gang of friends are back in Haunted Mountain and again undertake an important mission for the good of all creatures in Everandon - this time at the behest of the high king Silverlance, who has now reclaimed his crown, thanks to the success of their first adventure.
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Robinson, who was welterweight and middleweight champion in the late 1940s and the 1950s, was Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Barry Bonds are rolled up into one. |
Myers, calling on a tradition of music journalism that hit its heyday in the 1970s with writers like Lester Bangs, mixes straight up commentary with completely made-up farce. One of the best pieces of the bunch is an "Outer Limits"-like story about how the playing of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" is the only way to kill invading space aliens. |
For decades, the World War II generation was famously tightlipped about the wartime years. Only late in life have they finally been telling their stories.
But Tom Franks intended to keep his secrets to the grave. |
A time to remember: Pete Dexter was part of the remarkable generation of journalists who wrote local columns in Philadelphia newspapers in the 1980s. His pieces chronicled both the ordinary and the extraordinary in our area during a time of high-profile public corruption, racial and political conflict and mayoral incompetence. |
Immortal Chaos: Townes Van Zandt lived a chaotic life. Underappreciated in his lifetime by the casual music fan, but revered by musicians as one of the best of his kind, Van Zandt wrote classics made famous by others including "Pancho and Lefty" and "If I Needed You." Too bad the first official biography of his life follows the same pattern. |
Out of that experience and after a decade of research and writing, Olmstead has produced Coal Black Horse, a Civil War novel in stores now that generated enormous publicity ahead of its publication. |
"Presidential nomination campaigns are characterized more by the manipulation of personal images and claims of 'winner' status than by a discussion of the issues," Rubin writes. |
What started out as almost a form of therapy eventually turned into a book called The Invisible Wall that chronicles his childhood in a northern England mill town and - considering that it wasn't published until he was 96 - serves as an inspiration for aspiring authors. |
"The tragedy is in real life, the crime is truly unsolved," Lippman says. "It's not like they figured it out or, for whatever reason, didn't bring charges. ... This case, as far as I know, was a stone-cold mystery that would thwart modern science."
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McCarthy, one of the country's most revered and press-shy authors - a man only slightly more accessible than J.D. Salinger - will give his first ever television interview, lured by the long arm of Winfrey, publishing's biggest hit-maker and a media superstar. |
You must remember this, a flick is still a flick: In the newly published Ingrid, Charlotte Chandler tells of a lunch Bergman and Humphrey Bogart had before filming. She comments that "Ingrid remembered that the only subject they found in common was how much they both wanted to get out of 'Casablanca.'" |
"The process of writing the story - it was all about keeping myself in it, in that world," the author said. "And I agree, it's not necessarily a world I want to hang out in." Nevertheless, it was a story he felt compelled to write. |
A whodunit where even the author has a mysterious persona. |
For children who like to take a ride on the wild animal side: You must be this young to read this book. |
Whether you are a workhorse mixologist or an ameteur party tender, if you don't know what is in a drink, you might want to follow the oddessey of Brian Rae, who for ten years searched high and low for every drink manual he could get his hands on. |
Doc Ford, introduced 14 books ago in Sanibel Flats (1990), is a retired intelligence agency hit man trying to make a living as a marine biologist. But try as he might, he can never seem to leave his past behind. In each novel, this improbable character reluctantly gets mixed up in an unlikely and perilous adventure. |
This story line gives Morrell, the creator of Rambo, plenty of opportunity to introduce his trademark action scenes. Readers who want something more than an adrenaline rush from this Ph.D. in American literature need not fear. |
Baring one's soul can be messy and it's definitely scary, but readers respond, usually with great appreciation, admiration and empathy. And savvy readers feel shortchanged when an author wimps out. |
In Nineteen Minutes, Picoult deftly layers and combines all the elements to relay the fictional tale of a shooting massacre at a high school. The before, the during and the after is all there, and it's not pretty.
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The difference between design and art is that "design always has a function," Roberts says. "And obviously, the better it works - and it also has a wonderful aesthetic, or it's changing the way we do something - it has a higher value in terms of its importance, in my mind." |
The latest from the best-selling author of Midwives tells the painful, yet seemingly straightforward tale of Laurel Estabrook, an appealing and incredibly realistic 30-year-old who was attacked as a college sophomore while riding her bike in the hills of Vermont. |
Ace of Spades is part of an emerging genre of memoirs - including Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres in 2005, and the newly released Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification by Caille Millner - around a similar theme. That is, while adults in the 1960s and '70s were publicly grappling with the social upheaval of the civil rights movement, many of their children also did quiet battle on the front lines of integration. Many had intense racial identity struggles, but were mostly left to sort it out for themselves. |
Michael P. Tremoglie's "A Sense Of Duty" does for big city police training what Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam classic, "Full Metal Jacket" did for U. S. Marine boot camp. You're an insider dealing with the doubts, frustrations and obstacles that recruits battle throughout their tenure. It's a novel that could just as easy be non-fiction. It's "just the facts" style of writing challenges the reader to confront the same dilemmas the characters are pressured to address. |
Series Allows Readers To Create Their Own Romance Novels |
Unlike words, illustrations could not be prosecuted for libel, and these engravings, many of them meticulously detailed and beautifully watercolored, are almost all salacious, malicious and sardonic - and wickedly funny even to the uninformed eye. |
Surveillance imagines how a society would function under constant scrutiny. Set in Seattle in the near future, the novel opens with a horrific accident scene. It turns out it is just a rehearsal for a possible disaster, and Raban creates a society in which such exercises - and random checkpoints - are commonplace.
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What happened to John Franklin and his 129 men is a frustrating mystery to historians, but a boon for Dan Simmons, whose new novel imagines what might have befallen the expedition. In The Terror (Little, Brown and Company. 769 pages. $25.99), the explorers find themselves not just frozen into relentless Arctic sea ice, their ships being slowly squeezed to splinters, but hunted by a gigantic beast that often appears to materialize out of ice and snow itself. Its exact nature is as difficult to discern as the featureless landscape, shrouded in fog, swirling blizzards and darkness that descends for months on end. |
Over the next 500 pages, the New Yorker critic chronicles those whose struggles consumed them, and those who triumphed; though, of course, as with the works these artists made, the biographical picture is rarely so black and white. Facing such diverse foes as alcoholism, war, writer's block and domestic disarray, some managed only to hold their ground for a time. |
Consolation was in part inspired by the construction of the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, which is home to the Maple Leafs of the NHL and Raptors of the NBA. But it also is a reaction to what Redhill calls a movement to bring a more Times Square-like atmosphere to the city. At the intersection of Yonge and Dundas streets, there are massive video screens that display advertisements for beauty supplies, cell phones and television programs. |
House of Meeting takes the form of a letter from an unnamed narrator to his American stepdaughter. Born in 1919, he has seen things that would chill the heart of most Westerners. A veteran of World War II, he confesses to being part of an army that raped its way through eastern Europe. After he is incarcerated in one of Stalin's infamous gulags, his brother, Lev, joins him. Much to his dismay, he learns his brother has married a woman, Zoya, for whom he has long yearned.
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As Nicholas Lemann chronicles in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 2006. 257 pages. $24.00), America lost that struggle. At the end of the American Civil War, Congress and and President Andrew Johnson faced the question of how to reconstruct the defeated South. The prospects were not encouraging.
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The plot of the novel, as the title implies, involves a breach in confidence and loyalty. Main character Lara McCauley and her husband, Mac, find their marriage falling apart. He takes up with his translator, a Maronite Catholic named Nadia, and Lara develops a strange relationship with Thomas, a Polish-Brazilian man who works for a number of organizations who are either covering or vested in the conflict. |
This is a book that examines family mythology, genetic determinism, the line between sanity and madness, the difference between intuition and hallucination |
Hurricane Punch is Tim Dorsey's ninth novel, all of them featuring Serge. When we last encountered him in The Big Bamboo (2006), Serge was obsessed with reviving the movie business in his native Florida. But his obsessions never last long; in fact, some of them (Roman Catholicism, magic eight balls, becoming a newspaper columnist) burst upon him in a blaze of passion and vanish in minutes.
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"It isn't that kind of business," says Jason Epstein, a longtime editor with Doubleday and Random House whose many authors have included Norman Mailer and E.L. Doctorow. "It's very gentlemanly, and there isn't a lot of scandal to write about. You publish a book, it sells or it doesn't sell, and then you publish another one."
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Vidal has published his final volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation (277 pages, Doubleday, $26.00). Like the first, it is a feast of memory, to be savored and not to be read quickly. Running a close second to Vidal's family and political connections is Vidal's prolific and long-running career as a writer, and the wide literary acquaintance his sixty years of unstinting literary effort brought him. |
Trouble is the second novel by Jesse Kellerman, the son of popular crime writers Jonathan and Faye Kellerman. He had an auspicious debut with Sunstroke, a quirky, noir detective yarn told in the voice of a sardonic narrator. But Trouble doesn't measure up to the promise of the first book.
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Magician Steve Cohen discusses how to create a colorful personality, build confidence, prepare for important encounters with one person or many, predict the behavior of others and gain control over the way others behave, just like he does in his performances. |
"There's something about letting readers tell the story in their own words, in their own voices, that's really appealing," the 50-year-old Wiesner, who lives just outside of Philadelphia, told The Associated Press. "It's something I've been intrigued about even in high school. It just struck a real chord with me." |
Clint Willis' new book, The Boys of Everest: Chris Bonington and the Tragedy of Climbing's Greatest Generation, whisks armchair adventurers onto such climbing challenges as the Eiger in Switzerland, Mount Annapurna in Nepal, the K2 in Pakistan and on the Nepal-Tibet border, Everest, where climbers battling treacherous rock faces and unforgiving weather met glory and doom. |
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Civil unrest was erupting around the country, but New Haven was dubbed the "Model City" after launching the nation's most extensive anti-poverty campaign, spending more per capita than any other city. But amid the splendor of Yale, New Haven still struggled with poverty. The Black Panthers had set up a New Haven chapter and Seale, during a 1969 visit, threatened to kill police.
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"We were all young; we thought we knew the score, but we didn't, necessarily. And so we were green in that sense. And marijuana was green. The first and best flash of hope, because hope is also supposed to be green. So it has a lot of layers." |
Among the piles of books and papers in associate director and editorial director of the Yale University Press, Jonathan Brent's New Haven office is an enlarged copy of a memo to Soviet leader Josef Stalin recommending the execution of 16,000 Polish military officers in 1940. The mass killings were carried out by gunshots to the back of the head, Brent said. "The guns got so hot, young officers brought fresh guns," he said.
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Cummington, a small town once home to 19th-century poet William Cullen Bryant, is the primary residence of one of today's most celebrated poets and translators, Richard Wilbur. The 85-year-old is a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, often cited as an heir to Robert Frost and other New England writers. |
Mark Updegrove's book details the reality ex-presidents must face once they vacate the Oval Office, reverting to an ordinary citizen for the first time in years. At one point in history, ex-presidents were accepting of their new life of obscurity and privacy. But lately they've been rejecting their fade to obscurity by building new careers as respected diplomats and international emissaries.
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No cinematic block of work has ever been better received by the general public, with the possible exception of the Three Stooges, but Curly, Larry and Moe were one-reel actors and comedians while Bowery Boys, Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall were the heart of a group of New York gang kids who in all their incarnations appeared in nearly 100 movies.
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No one ever faced the added pressure of being hailed - at age 18 - as the savior of a league coming off labor issues so grave they led to the cancellation of an entire season. But that was the backdrop to Sidney Crosby's first season, chronicled in The Rookie by Toronto Globe and Mail sportswriter-turned-national-correspondent Shawna Richer (Triumph Books, $24.95, 316 pages). |
"Most people know they can't play professional basketball," says best-selling author David Baldacci. "They're not tall enough, they're not fast enough, they're not quick enough. But people think, 'I've got a brain, I've got a hand, I've got a computer - I can be a writer.' They don't understand the skill sets that go into being a writer as well, and sometimes they're almost as unique as being an NBA or NFL or professional athlete."
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The Case of the Missing Books is author, Ian Sansom's attempt to reconcile a community's need for a library with the increasing de-emphasis on such places. It's also a mystery, a comic farce and a sociological study that features a most unlikely protagonist.
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The main character is Ray Dudgeon, a private detective running a one-man shop out of a predictably seedy office where, true to stereotype, he keeps a pistol and a bottle in his desk draw-er. But his quirky personality and interesting back story make him more than a cliche. |
Jack Prelutsky was recently named the first ever "Children's Poet Laureate," by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. It's a title, complete with $25,000 cash prize and an inscribed medallion, he will hold for two years, a sort of blessed community service that compels him to give two major public readings and act as adviser, ambassador and pollinator of his art.
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"What is absolutely obvious from all the letters, the diaries and the scientific and meteorological report," author David Crane says, "is on the return journey from the pole, they went on with exactly the same determination, the same standards, as when they'd gone out there. It's almost impossible for us now - we belong to a different culture - not to believe their morale must have been so shattered by discovery of Amundsen's priority, that the will to survive was somehow fatally damaged. |
The 71-year-old Calvin Trillin is, of course, a thinking man, author of more than a dozen books, ranging from the humorous Alice, Let's Eat; to the emotional Remembering Denny, about the suicide of a former Yale University classmate; to the historical An Education in Georgia, Trillin's first-hand account of the first two black students to attend the University of Georgia. |
Many Philadelphians know that the U.S. Marines began right here in Philadelphia, at the Tun Tavern. Fewer are aware, however, that the U.S. Navy started here too. Author Ian Toll's story breaks into five parts: the design and construction of the frigates, the Quasi-War with the French, the War with the Barbary Pirates in North Africa (in which the U.S. frigate Philadelphia, built by subscriptions raised in this city, was lost), the War of 1812 with Great Britain (in which the Chesapeake, an unlucky ship, and the Constellation were defeated by the British) and the subsequent history of the four surviving frigates. |
There are other, wonderfully imagined passages, including Macchiano's friendship with Jewish mobster Herbie Goldstein in Las Vegas, and a surrealistic summit between the Teamsters and Richard Nixon in 1972. Frankie Machine survived it all. When he is, like Michael Corleone in "Godfather III," pulled back in, it's a matter of life and death, with no compromise available.
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No publication date or other details were offered. Rowling is still working on the book, she explained on her Web site in an entry posted early Thursday.
"I'm now writing scenes that have been planned, in some cases, for a dozen years or even more," she wrote. "I don't think anyone who has not been in a similar situation can possibly know how this feels: I am alternately elated and overwrought. I both want, and don't want, to finish this book (don't worry, I will.)"
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Bookspan, the book-club company owned by Bertelsmann AG and Time Warner Inc., says its Black Expressions Book Club boasts 460,000 members, compared with 345,000 for its famed Book of the Month Club. Black Expressions is expected to generate double-digit growth in both its sales and membership through the next few years, estimates Markus Wilhelm, Bookspan's CEO. "The growth has been stunning," he says.
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This year's choices for the holidays are especially noteworthy, with an impressive selection of books that demonstrate, quite profoundly, the universal spirit of the season. Joy, wonder, anticipation and goodwill are evident in each and every one.
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It is Perry Skinner's character who speaks most for the author when he looks out on the Everglades and says, "This is my church." "That's exactly the way I feel about the place, it's precisely the way," Hiaasen says. "And it's also the way I feel about much of organized religion. To me, that's the closest thing you feel to being near a Creator, whatever or whoever you feel the Creator might be. |
"My concern does not lie with the content of the novels. Rather my concern is with the illustrations and their availability to children and the community. Does this community want our public library to continue to use tax dollars to purchase pornography?"
Louise Mills, Concerned Parent |
"When I took this job 10 years ago, every publisher said to me, 'Political books don't sell.' Boy, has the world changed. Now political books are hot," said Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, a trade group for the book publishing industry. |
According to handwriting analyst Michelle Dresbold, what and how we write indicates who we are. Our handwriting is a barometer of temperament, integrity, personality and even sexuality. "It's close to 99 percent accurate," says Dresbold, the author of Sex, Lies and Handwriting: A Top Expert Reveals the Secrets Hidden in Your Handwriting, (Free Press, $24), which will be in bookstores tomorrow. |
On bookstore shelves now, in time for the holiday gift-buying season, are some popular books from '90s icons, including former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill's The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy (co-written with Judah S. Kraushaar) and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina's Tough Choices.
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Twenty-five books may sound like a lot, but it's only a fraction of the output of this author. Richard Stark is actually Donald E. Westlake, who has written more than 90 novels under a gaggle of pen names as well as his real one.
The ruse started early in his career, when he was churning out so many fine short stories that some crime magazines were written entirely by him. But as time went on, the pen names began to speak with different throats. |
In the summer 1967, Newark experienced a series of race-related upheavals that tore the New Jersey city apart. Brett Ellen Block's second novel, The Lightning Rule, is set during that violent stretch of six days that was sparked by the beating of a black cab driver after he was arrested for allegedly driving around a double-parked police car. |
The idea for the book came from publisher Harvard Business School Press, which looked to crossover appeal to carry it beyond a business audience to a general readership, including many L.L. Bean, Inc. customers. The Harvard Business School was familiar with the company, having done a number of case studies on it over the years, and it approached Gorman in 1999 about writing the book.
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Crichton means to warn us that biotechnology is woefully unregulated, its power unappreciated by politicians and the general public. Biotechnology companies put profit above public health by charging exorbitant licensing fees for their patented discoveries, he charges, and testing dangerous new therapies on patients without informing them of the risks.
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With financial support from a state-owned bank, the 30-volume project marks the latest twist in what Solzhenitsyn's wife called the "very dramatic fate of Solzhenitsyn's books," which helped reveal the brutality of the Soviet system and dictator Josef Stalin's labor camps.
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Author Alex Grobman carefully explains why the legitimacy of Israel - a full-fledged member state of the United Nations - was so profoundly dishonored, and what forces joined together to give birth to, midwife, and ensure the passage of this denunciation. He also exposes the failure of both Diaspora Jewry and Israeli leadership to prevent, or try to promptly rescind, the "Zionism is Racism" Resolution. The picture Grobman paints is detailed and accurate, but it certainly is not pretty.
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"Around six million years ago, we began to develop this large appendage at the end of our feet that enabled us to stand up," says Chip Walter, the author of Thumbs, Toes and Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human. "Every time you take a step, 40 percent of your weight is supported by your big toe. That means it would be very, very difficult to walk on these long stilts of articulated bone that we call legs if we didn't have that toe."
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The book is organized like a standard dictionary. Each listing includes a pronunciation key, the word's historical origins and a sentence demonstrating the proper usage of the word. A reverse dictionary, a list of Web sites for word lovers and a bibliography enhance the usefulness of this book as a reference tool. What distinguishes "The Gilded Tongue" from the banausic (practical or utilitarian) volumes on my reference shelf is that it is great fun to read.
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author Jon Katz now writes about dogs and rural life from the place he named Bedlam Farm. He has written five books about dogs and has two more in the works, including one exploring whether dogs have souls.
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, detailed Satrapi's experiences as a child growing up during the Iranian revolution in 1979. Its sequel, Persepolis II: The Story of a Return, follows her to Austria, where she was sent by her parents to continue her education after she became increasingly resistant to the Islamic fundamentalism taught in her Iranian school, and her subsequent return to Iran. |
Historical research often inspires Philippa Gregory's novels. For example, she stumbled across a mention of a ship called the "Mary Boleyn" while reading about the Tudor navy. She figured it was a mistake, that it should have said Anne, but further research showed Anne did indeed have a sister named Mary who was Henry's lover first. The story was known to historians, but Gregory said it took a novelist to realize the blockbuster story possibilities, including sisterly jealousy and court intrigue.
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His new novel, The Collectors, returns the foursome, a quirky bunch whose numbers include an ex-CIA operative playfully named Oliver Stone who is - no surprise - a conspiracy theorist. The characters are a byproduct of Baldacci's first novel, Absolute Power, which was made into a movie of the same name starring Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman. |
Cormac McCarthy has done it again. Unlike so many authors who mine the realm of fiction harvested out of reality, McCarthy's writing grows with each new book, and this, his tenth novel, is his best: dark, stark, brilliant and ultimately redemptive; revealing the light in an ocean of darkness.
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The Lay of the Land, Richard Ford's first book since A Multitude of Sins, a collection of short stories, continues the Bascombe saga the readers first embraced 20 years ago, one that is intrinsically part of the American literary landscape.
But while most regard holidays as festive occasions, in Bascombe's world there is a sense of dislocation, of having an important connection severed when life is paused.
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Terror gripped the streets of San Francisco in late 1973 and early 1974.
Black men affiliated with the Nation of Islam were shooting whites, at random and out in the open. In less than six months, 15 people were killed and seven were injured, including a future mayor of San Francisco.
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You might compare Harry Bosch to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, or Bruce Willis' John McClane, but he is more complex and a lot more interesting.
Echo Park is Connelly's 17th crime novel, and the 12th featuring Bosch. At 56, the Los Angeles cop may have slowed a step, but he certainly hasn't mellowed. |
It's the kids that come into the Marine Corps at 18 who never had shoes on their feet, and we're putting them on the battlefield out there and saying, Defend the United States of America from enemies foreign and domestic, and these kids do everything and even more than what is ever required of them."
What was asked of them is a lot, the reader recognizes as each describes enduring heat, boredom, terror, pain and loss. For many, there's also guilt and a desire to return once they've come home.
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The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf. 851 Pages. $35), captures the enormous range of Disney's contributions, and restores the flesh and blood to a man whose name for many has become synonymous with blandness and even corporate greed.
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The first-time author, Joe Miller, was a reporter at an alternative publication, The Pitch, when problems in the Kansas City school district came to a head. Test scores were so low and the administration so unstable that the district faced the possibility of a state takeover if it didn't make changes.
In the midst of the turmoil, the school board demoted the principal at Rinehart's Central High School - the most expensive of the buildings constructed as part of a $2 billion desegregation plan. |
The James Frey controversy was the impetus for "Can You Handle the Truth? Ethics in Writing," the theme of this year's 412: Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival. The event takes place today through Nov. 11 at various sites in Pittsburgh.
Lee Gutkind, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the event's organizer, says there was a need to respond to the media frenzy that erupted after revelations Frey had distorted facts.
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Although reviews have been mixed, Rubenfeld's novel has been among the most-hyped for fall, drawing comparisons to The Da Vinci Code and The Alienist. And it started as, of all things, a vacation. |
The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First superhero was released on Halloween - the anniversary of Houdini's untimely death at age 52. Chasing new information on the elusive superstar eventually led authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman to create a database of more than 700,000 pages.
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Marisha Pessl's novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, has drawn comparisons with Jonathan Safran Foer, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers. Now in its fifth printing, it has sold some 100,000 copies and debuted at No. 6 on The New York Times best-seller list, staying there for several weeks. "My goal is to be published, and if I had even a small audience I would have been happy," she says. |
"Marie Roget" was based on a real murder victim, Mary Rogers, a young woman who beguiled the men she served from behind the counter of a New York cigar shop. Rogers disappeared on July 25, 1841. Three days later, her body was found floating in the Hudson River with a lace cord tied around her neck.
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The 66-year-old Cahill has become a million seller by telling more thoughtful, and thought-provoking stories - the Irish preservation of ancient texts, how the Jews changed our sense of destiny, the egalitarianism of early Christianity, and now, the achievements of the Middle Ages.
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His readers approach him at airports, stores and on the street.
"And within a couple seconds, they're telling me some of the saddest stories of their lives," he said. Those tales helped shape the idea for Albom's latest book, For One More Day, the story of a suicidal ex-baseball player who is given one final chance to spend time with his dead mother.
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The refreshing snap of autumn air, the abundance of pumpkins on the door-stoop and the annual visitation of ghosts, goblins and witches are part of the fun this month, along with a couple of books that literally jump to life from the pages.
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The 1998 accident that almost killed King muddied the waters even further. His works after that horrific experience - everything from the short-lived TV series "Kingdom Hospital" (which featured a comatose hit-and-run victim) to his most recent novel, the problematic and uneven "Cell" - pointed toward an admirable reach that exceeded his already formidable grasp. |
The publisher hopes the buzz over the Sofia Coppola movie, "Marie Antoinette," will help Abundance, which had a first-run print of 100,000 copies. The movie starring Kirsten Dunst drew boos from French critics at the Cannes Film Festival and opened Oct. 20 in U.S. theaters.
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The result is another tepid, thinly-plotted novel by Robert B. Parker in a series that has been running on fumes since the mid-1980s.
There is nothing inevitable about the demise of a long-running series. After all, the late Ed McBain kept Steve Carella and his 87th Precinct going strong for 55 books and more than 3 million words. |
n his novel, The Known World, Jones hints at the hardships that littered his mother's life, lamenting that she "could have done much more in a better world." In his new book, All Aunt Hagar's Children, Jones briefly recounts how his mother, like some of the characters in his fiction, migrated North and "found far less than even the little she dared to hope for."
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Two qualities remained constant in all of O'Donnell's journalistic endeavors:
"I was curious," O'Donnell says, "and I was tenacious."
O'Donnell, who worked at newspapers for 58 years, including 22 at the Tribune-Review, has just published "Front Page Girl" (Kent State University Press, $22.95). A memoir, it recounts a career that began when women were the exception, not the rule, in newsrooms at the Cleveland News and later, the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
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At age 77 he continues as a standup with the same refreshing insight that, in his 20s, made this Chicago-born ex-accountant the hottest comedian in the land. "I've always likened what I do to the man who is convinced that he is the last sane man on Earth," Newhart writes, "... the Paul Revere of psychotics running through the town and yelling 'This is crazy.' But no one pays attention to him."
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During the dozen years her brother was behind bars for a brutal murder he didn't commit, Annette Hudson steadfastly defended him to her neighbors.
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Author, Brad Meltzer asked to meet the former president and spent nearly a week with George and Barbara Bush in Houston where he had almost unlimited access to their daily lives. He also spent time at Bill Clinton's New York offices, which, combined with Bush, gave him a remarkable view into the lives of former presidents.
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Harris, who ascended to a $1 million Masters Tournament on the game show hosted by Alex Trebek, details his experiences in "Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!", a book that is a combination of how-to primer, autobiography and musings on life and love.
Like "Jeopardy!" itself, it covers a lot of ground and in snappy and informative fashion.
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Soon after its U.S. publication on Sept. 12, the book had seized the No. 1 spot on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly charts.
Judith Curr, executive vice-president and publisher of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, said that on the strength of The Thirteenth Tale, the publishing house paid Setterfield more than $1 million for a two-book deal. "We never doubted that this book was special," she said. "We have just ordered another 30,000 copies," bringing the number of copies printed in the United States alone to 420,000.
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Ensler is best known as the playwright who created The Vagina Monologues, a humorous, often unsettling work that celebrates women's sexuality and their strength. Since it debuted off-Broadway in 1996, it has become something of a worldwide phenomenon. It has been translated into more than 45 languages and parked V-Day celebrations that have raised more than $35 million to stop violence against women.
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Powell is one of our most respected political figures and certainly the most esteemed military figure of our time - a man many people believe would have made a great president - and he gets his due in DeYoung's Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell.
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There is no scatheless rapture." Thus begins Charles Frazier's second novel, leaving no doubt what readers are in for over the next 422 pages. Now is the time, according to the dictates of personal taste, to gratefully turn back or gleefully plunge ahead, deep into the land of historical romance. |
As George Washington's ward Nelly Custis wrote "Doubting his Christian faith was as absurd as doubting his patriotism." The greater issue may be an examination of why there is such a reluctance on the part of historians to integrate the Christian persona of Washington with all his other known attributes as patriot, warrior, statesman, farmer and, yes, slaveholder."
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Mellon: An American Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 779 pages, $35) took a decade to complete and spans an exhaustive and exhausting 779 pages.The outcome: a book that delivers on the dignity and the achievements of Mellon, but falls short when it comes to his philosophy.
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As the Giants Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Huff points out in Tom Callahan's book Johnny U: The Life and Times of Johnny Unitas (Crown, 304 pages, $25), 15 Hall of Famers were on the same field during the televised era's first great game, the 1958 sudden death clash between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts. "From last year's Super Bowl," says Huff, '"can you name fifteen players? Today you don't know who's playing for who." And of all the players on the field, "Unitas was the master."
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Smolin concludes that we must do two things: "We must recognize and fight the symptoms of groupthink, and we must open the doors to a wide range of independent thinkers, being sure to make room for the peculiar characters needed to make a revolution." |
To put it another way, McGreevey is still a politician and his book has to be regarded as a political act. |
It mattered not that Benedict didn't endorse this indictment, or that the quote was marginal to his lecture. The Muslim reaction was swift and violent. Inflamed crowds took to the streets in many countries to protest the supposed defamation. In Gaza and the West Bank, a number of churches were attacked, fired at or set on fire; in Somalia, gunmen shot dead an elderly Italian nun, while in Kashmir, mobs burnt an effigy of the pontiff. |
So far, the only sure things are that Against the Day will be, like all Pynchon's books, huge (1,120 pages), ambitious (it begins with the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and ends after World War I), and wildly antic: "The sizable cast of characters," the publisher promises, "includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns."
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The Price of Admission is a liberal book, apparently inspired by criticism of affirmative action for minority students. That policy is under siege, Golden argues. Meanwhile, legacy admissions constitute affirmative action for the rich - America's "primogeniture," he writes. "Just as English peers hold hereditary seats in the House of Lords, so the American nobility reserves slots at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other august universities. |
Margaret Atwood's new collection, A Moral Disorder (Nan A. Talese, 225 pages, $23.95), continues this run of interesting but slight ventures. It does not approach the awardwinning heights of The Blind Assassin, nor is it one of Ms. Atwood's sci-fi social commentaries, such as The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake.
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In their new book, "Hubris" (Crown, 463 pages, $25.95), Michael Isikoff and David Corn implicitly ask the reader to indulge these counterfactuals. And in exhaustive reporting they seek to show that in these cases and a few others, where specific intelligence used in the buildup to Operation Iraqi Freedom was wrong, war could have been avoided if a stubborn president had only listened to the dissenters.
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Most biographers choose their subjects out of admiration, or curiosity, or a feeling of affinity. Carmen Callil is an exception. She regards the man at the center of Bad Faith (Alfred A. Knopf, 608 pages, $30) with a contempt that burns on every page.
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"The Wonga Coup" (Public Affairs, 304 pages, $26) by Adam Roberts, about a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea in which a bunch of incompetent British mercenaries took the lead, would likely not have found a publisher had it not promised to disclose Mark Thatcher's, son of Margaret Thatcher, part in the often comic shenanigans.
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The anecdote comes from a remarkable new book by a Harvard astronomer and historian of science, Owen Gingerich, titled God's Universe (Harvard University Press, 144 pages, $16.95). Based on his William Belden Noble Lectures, delivered in 2005, Gingerich's work is a survey of the conflicts - and confluences - between hard science and deep faith; along the way, he provides a brief but magisterial history of science that is as astute as it is original. He's a superb writer too, handling scientific and theological complexities with equal aplomb but enlivening his account throughout with poetry, dramatic anecdote and snippets of autobiography.
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The mythos of Edward P. Jones is about private creation. For 10 years after the publication of his first collection of stories, Lost in the City, little was heard from him. But in 2002, his agent learned that Jones had written a novel and another story collection. The novel, The Known World, was universally acclaimed as a real addition to American literature. It is followed now by the story collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children (Amistad Press, 400 pages, $25.95).
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Taraborrelli lets slip that this is an "unauthorized biography." Taylor gave the biographer no interviews, but she apparently did not oppose his work. Indeed, he claims "she actually encouraged members of her inner circle to speak for it." What? I'm not talking, but you talk? Evidently "one of Elizabeth's closest family members" who confirmed certain details for the biographer was not so sure about Elizabeth's feelings, since that relative requested that her name not appear in the source notes. |
Written at the depth and pace of an extended New Yorker magazine article, this book is a meandering account of how the Dutch have responded to the ritual slaying of the provocative filmmaker Theo van Gogh on November 2, 2004, by a young Muslim militant named Mohammed Bouyeri. |
Barrett and his co-author are clearly perturbed that Giuliani's performance on September 11, 2001, may propel him to the presidency, so they have written a brief for any person who may hope to slow his march to the White House.
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The often gripping narrative provided by Thomas Kean, a Republican and former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, a Democrat and forpanels on foreign affairs and intelligence, shows how tough it was for the nine-man, one woman panel to fulfill its ambitious, grim mandate and tell the heartbreaking saga of the attacks of September 11, in a "detailed, nonjudgmental way." |
Last week Robert Novak called Republican midterm prospects "pitiful" and could not list a single Democratic House seat as a likely Republican pickup. Unlesssomething changes drastically, Republicans will lose the House, lose ground in the Senate, and watch the remainder of President Bush's presidency unravel.
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Most books on Bryant's life and career focus on his unmatched record of six national titles at Alabama, but two new books find great stories in years when Bryant's Crimson Tide didn't win. Keith Dunnavant's The Missing Ring (Thomas Dunne, 336 pages, $24.95) recalls the legendary 1966 season, when the Tide was gunning for its third straight national championship and failed in perhaps the most controversial finish the college game has ever seen. The story told in Don Yaeger's Turning of the Tide (Center Street, 254 pages, $24.99) is that of the game played four years later between the all-white Tide and John McKay's largely black Trojans in what was the first racially integrated football game in Alabama.
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he book Three Cups of Tea is an adventure book. K2 and Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary, the Taliban, crazy clerics, the Pakistan/India war, raging rivers, impassable topography, 9/11, heroes and villains, wisdom from illiterates - it's all here. But what burns brightest for the reader is the hope this story inspires. |
Nietzsche wrote, "When we talk in company we lose our unique tone of voice, and this leads us to make statements which in no way correspond to our real thoughts." But this is only part of the truth. Do we know our "real thoughts" before we've voiced them?
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It was one of the most difficult times in his life, Holtz now admits. And when he was fired a few years later, despite never having had a losing season, he was downcast. But if that had not happened, he now realizes, there would not have been the next job at Minnesota, which led to Notre Dame. |
Thomson is a mesmerizing writer who knows how to build to a climax and make every detail count. For Welles aficionados, Callow is essential.For the rest of us, Thomson is the ticket.
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Such a country makes it all the more difficult to live anonymously, which is perhaps why an unidentified victim of a suicide bomber becomes a source of fascination for the man charged with returning the dead woman's corpse to her family in Yehoshua's new novel, "A Woman in Jerusalem" (Harcourt, 237 pages, $25).
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The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (University of Chicago Press, 233 pages, $27.50). Mr. Dear, a historian of science at Cornell, provides a succinct history of modern science from the 17th century to the present by drawing on two complementary but conflicting aspects of the scientific method. The first involves the search for "intelligibility," or the truth about nature; the second concerns "instrumentality," or the practical uses scientists make of their discoveries. |
The resulting book is an excellent introduction to the subject, helping to make sense of the incredibly complex military and diplomatic maneuvers that determined the war's outcome. Bagnall divides the war into four major theaters: the Central Theater of mainland Greece, where Athens and Sparta began the war in 431 B.C.; the Western Theater of Sicily, where the Athenians mounted a disastrous expedition in 415 B.C.; the Eastern Theater of Asia Minor, where the mighty presence of the Persian Empire helped to alter the balance of forces in Sparta's favor; and the largely peripheral Northern Theater of Thrace and Macedonia. |
What I was really interested in, what I was consciously interested in, is that; it's kind of an updated Bible story to me. Smonk and Evavangeline are almost angels to me. They're the ones on the ground doing the dirty work to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah."
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Freudenberger has clearly done her research. The details of her description of the East Village - the artists' masochistic performances, the physical grimness of the neighborhood - are believable. |
The story at the heart of Giraffe (Penguin Press, 298 pages, $24.95), the flawed but striking new novel by J.M. Ledgard, falls into the category of truths that are stranger than fiction. |
Alissa Quart's new book Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (Penguin Press, 272 pages, $24.95) provides a thought-provoking but ultimately flawed exploration into what Ms. Quart calls the Icarus effect, the psychic damage that results if children are forced into adult levels of achievement too early. Icarus, of course, flew too near the sun on wings his father crafted for him and plunged into the sea. |
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two: Dance and Dream (New Directions, 288 pages, $24.95) continues the story from last year's volume, "Fever and Spear." In that book, Deza, a middleaged madrileño who loves Henry Mancini, found himself in London, having left his wife for unexplained reasons. |
But the best evidence so far that Iraq has indeed marked a revival of imperial traditions - the good as well as the bad - may be The Prince of the Marshes (Harcourt, 396 pages, $25), the new memoir by Rory Stewart. Mr. Stewart's career and sensibility have such a late-Victorian flavor that he seems like a character from one of Kipling's Indian stories, or perhaps a John Buchan spy novel. |
When the body of an a U.S. Army reservist washes up on the Cuban side of Guantanamo Bay, Revere Falk, an FBI agent who has been interrogating prisoners, is called on to investigate the death. What initially appears to be an accident turns into an internecine rivalry among various factions. |
George Washington Appo resurfaced in Luc Sante's 1991 best seller, Low Life, which briefly presents him as a buffoon, incompetent even as a crook. If Timothy J. Gilfoyle's A Pickpocket's Tale (W.W. Norton, 460 pages,$27.95) serves any purpose, it corrects this slur on Appo's reputation. Appo practiced pickpocketing as others practice dentistry or law: He was a thorough professional who picked thousands, if not tens of thousands, of pockets during his career, usually making as much money in a day as the average workingman then made in a year. |
The controversial East German writer Christa Wolf, thinking about dire predictions of nuclear war, retold the story of Cassandra. Alessandro Baricco, in the afterward of his new novelization of the Iliad, titled An Iliad (Alfred A. Knopf, 160 pages, $21), wonders what it means, "at a time like this," to be drawn to a text that "is a monument to war." |
Reviewers have labeled Woodrell's books, most of them set in his native Ozarks, "country noir," but they defy categorization. He has been compared to writers as stylistically diverse as William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler, Flannery O'Conner and Jim Thompson, Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard.
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Rukla believes teenage boredom has changed since he began teaching 25 years ago. He remembers being bored, in a sleepy way, in secondary school.
But today's teenagers are offended at being bored. "They quite simply felt victimized," Rukla realizes, "and that was not to be disposed of lightly."
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The sheer size of "The Novel" (Princeton University Press, $99.50 per volume), a new two-volume compendium of scholarly essays on every aspect of the history and nature of the genre, makes a sort of claim. Clearly, a literary form that requires some 1,700 pages of examination must be inherently problematic: Its origins, its techniques, its effects on readers readers must cry out for expert investigation. |
It's a fascinating book about a fascinating life. Lorenzo Da Ponte is known to us as the librettist of three Mozart operas: "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Così fan tutte." Together they are known as "the Da Ponte operas." That's immortality. When you've hitched your wagon to Mozart, you've really hitched your wagon to a star.
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In George Washington's Sacred Fire, Dr. Peter A. Lillback accepts his own sacred trust - correcting the historical record about Washington's Christian faith.
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Why is it that democracy is now the sole legitimate form of government throughout the world? John Dunn, the distinguished political theorist at Cambridge University, answers this question with learning and sophistication in Democracy: A History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 248 pages, $24). |
The "Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn" (Henry Holt, 532 pages, $32.50) exposes close friendships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, H.G. Wells, and a host of other important literary and cultural figures.
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Fans of the reclusive postmodernist author Thomas Pynchon were presented with a puzzle last week: A description, purportedly by the author himself, of Pynchon's untitled forthcoming novel - his first since 1997's Mason & Dixon - appeared briefly on Amazon, then disappeared.
Followers of Mr. Pynchon's pointed this out on Amazon immediately, and the blog Pynchonoid reported on the mysterious disappearance. |
The best reviews are reserved for writers who excel at both plot and style, but a writer who can spin a yarn the way Frost does can sell a lot of books despite a pedestrian writing style. |
David Standish writes, astutely, in the introduction to his very casual but well-researched "Hollow Earth" (Da Capo, 304 pages, $24.95). His book, he boasts, "traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing - but which nevertheless had an ongoing appeal."
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Above all, and most important for readers today, Borchardt addresses the concerns of what we now would call environmentalism. Ideally, the garden is the site where man engages nature without defeating it, an encounter Borchardt expresses as "the eternal tension between the flower and the garden. The order within the flower is prehuman, and governs the flower itself. The garden speaks of human modes of order, where man is master, subduer, and transformer." The key to a successful garden, he insists, is to maintain "the wealth of this tension," allowing the gardener and the garden, nature and humanity, to work in partnership.
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As a jazz critic (and he is, before he is anything else, a jazz critic), Crouch is the heir of Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, the two best and most important theoreticians and exponents of America's greatest art form. Crouch also is, along with Wynton Marsalis, one of the key figures involved with turning their vision of the music into the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, which, no matter its flaws, is the most significant development in the music's history in decades - probably since the advent of bop. |
For some reason, he gets it in his head that the answer to these milestone events is to rent two RVs and bring his parents and the rest of his children along for a cross-country, see-America-in-all-its-glory tour. Then, the final leg is to make it back in time so he and his family can be there for the birth of his first granddaughter.
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George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is perhaps the leading analyst of how the right has out-punched the left in the verbal sparring. His 2004 book, Don't Think of an Elephant, became a must-read for Democratic Party operatives by showing how conservatives supposedly captured the political debate by framing issues in terms of a conservative agenda. |
As Bryson chronicles his arduous journey with his sidekick, Little Debbie cakes addict Stephen Katz, the repartee between the two reads like a Neil Simon script. Woods should come with a warning: The book will make you laugh out loud.
As a reader, you're invested in Bryson's quest to hike the entire Appalachian trail. You want to see him and Katz succeed. As the Hundred Mile Wildnerness puts the amateur hikers to the test, the ability to put down A Walk In The Woods is impossible.
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Scissors and Dry were apt mileage for separate memoirs. However, today's Burroughs is nothing more than local-boy-makes-good material. |
"Grant: A Biography" (Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pages,. $21.95) is written with such verve and directness that it is rather like the subject he so admires. Grant shared with Napoleon an affinity for mathematics, an ability to "compute precisely all the quantitative data required to make correct decisions on the battlefield." This was not a matter of formal education. In fact, Grant taught himself algebra, an indication, Mr. Mosier suggests, of a highly developed "capacity for abstract thought." |
The duo of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, responsible for a dozen books, including the just released The Book of the Dead formed their collaborative partnership two decades ago, during a midnight tour of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. |
According to James Green, author of Death in The Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America, the blast's still-reverberating echoes are far more important than the question of who lit the fuse.
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In the days before political correctness, Brooklyn was nicknamed "the city of churches." And in the most upscale residential neighborhood of Brooklyn, today's Brooklyn Heights, Henry Ward Beecher built the fledgling pre-Civil War Plymouth Church into America's first mega-church, thanks to his opposition to slavery combined with his oratorical skills and his knack for publicity.
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Juliet Barker writes in Agincourt (Little Brown, 445 pages, $27.95), her fastpaced and extremely readable new history, anyone who saw the opposing armies that morning would have noticed the stark contrast: the French in "row upon numberless row ... clad from head to foot in burnished armour ... well fed, well armed, secure in their superior numbers," facing Englishmen who had been on the march for three weeks, "unable to wash or shave, their armour tarnished and their surcoats and banners grimy and tattered by the constant exposure to the elements." |
Vizzini questions how successful he really is.
At one point, in an awkward, almost unconscious way, he describes how he still looks at future book sales as one way to predict if he'll be happy. Later, he acknowledges that's perhaps not the most healthy attitude.
He still deals with depression, and continues to take meds.
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The virtue of Mr. Wilmut's book lies in the extent to which he engages in this de bate without demonizing his opposition or backing off from his own convictions. He takes great care to distinguish reproductive cloning from either therapeutic cloning or the use of cloning with genetic modification, and he is prepared to argue the question of the status of the human embryo. |
Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome: The Correspondence (W.W. Norton, 424 pages, $39.95) is immensely readable and the book is a significant piece of scholarship.
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From the Gulag to the Killing Fields (ISI Books, 760 pages, $35) is an anthology of memoirs from around the world and across the century, including famous writers and anonymous prisoners, ardent revolutionaries and innocent bystanders. |
The Organization Man ($21.95, University of Pennsylvania Press) s one of those books that helped to both define and explain the era of the 1950s. We could be forgiven if we mix things up now and confuse "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" with "The Organization Man who, when not participating in "The Power Elite", was part of "The Lonely Crowd". As Joseph Nocera, a New York Times columnist and formerly executive editor of Fortune magazine, says in a foreword to this edition, the real subject of The Organization Man is 1950s values.
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Broken Genius (Macmillan, 298 pages, $27.95) manages to convey the excitement of scientific inquiry and invention. Mr. Shurkin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who knows his way around a laboratory. And while Broken Genius is hardly Science for Dummies, it does expose the scientific process in effective and entertaining language for the layman. In a society that is increasingly divided between people who can do the math and the rest of us, this is a valuable contribution.
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Can She Be Stopped? (Crown Forum, 254 pages, $26.95) is clearly the definitive brief for conservatives on Mrs. Clinton's outlook for 2008 and shows that she will not just be a force to reckon with, but the odds-on favorite. |
Anthony Arthur's Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (Random House, 380 pages, $27.95) and Kevin Mattson's Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (Wiley, 304 pages, $25.95) showcase the genre's different propensities and the authors' different styles. As his subtitle suggests, Mr. Mattson traces the trajectory of his subject's interaction with sociopolitical trends. Mr. Arthur, on the other hand, attends to the idiosyncratic and to the particulars of Sinclair's affairs.
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Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America (W.W. Norton, 272 pages, $24.95) addresses the subject of American power and its use and possible misuse from the point of view of a friendly outsider who wishes us well and believes we can, and possibly will, do better.
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Notes of a Pianist (Princeton University Press, 433 pages, $24.95) chrinicles Louis Moreau Gottschalk's charming and fascinating diaries, which are now back in print for the first time in decades. Gottschalk enjoyed the kind of popularity that today we associate with rock stars.
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Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York University Press, 411 pages, $34.95) was unquestionably the dominant journalist, and one of the leading politicians, of the Civil War era. And his story has never been better told than it is here.
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Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books, 385 pages, $27.50), is a strikingly uncultured book. "In most cases," Mr. Kinzer believes, "[the United States] acted mainly for economic reasons - specifically, to establish, promote, and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference." That sort of pidgin Marxism hardly passes muster outside Noam Chomsky's classroom, and Mr. Kinzer isn't even skilled at the inner workings of the dialectic. |
Man in the Shadows (St. Martin's, 292 pages, $24.95) spotlights the most pressing and controversial areas where foreign and defense policy making, intelligence gathering, and political ambitions collide.
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Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Schocken/Nextbook, 304 pages, $19.95) relays the story of "Baruch" Spinoza, a Dutch Jew of Portuguese Marrano extraction, who was excommunicated permanently by the Amsterdam community for denying the immortal soul and questioning the disclosed character of the Bible (i.e. inventing modern biblical criticism). |
The Good Fight (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25.95, is a strong plea that liberals, for the nation's good, assert a new version of the old liberalism as a meaningful alternative to a flawed conservative hegemony. Conservative thinkers, Beinart argues, hold to a strong vision of American strength, but also espouse a new doctrine of American infallibility. |
The Whole World Over (Pantheon, 528 pages, $25.95) has this air of careful completeness; like a tapestry, it hangs together. Greenie uproots herself and moves to New Mexico, abruptly, to serve as a Republican governor's personal chef. But later we learn that Greenie was wanting this kind of diversion long ago, as she explained to Alan during their courtship:
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What's going to be the top read of the season? Publishers, agents and booksellers were contacted to get their predictions (and, of course, hopes) about what will be the summer's big books in several genres.
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The One That Got Away (Scribner, 336 pages, $25) is the sequel to his best-selling memoir, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, after a professional career in newspapers that ended very publicly and dramatically three years ago when Times reporter Jayson Blair was accused and found guilty of plagiarizing material in a number of prominent stories over the course of his short career. |
Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island (Alfred A. Knopf, 340 pages, $24.95) relies on this vision of the future to do much fictional work. While its mechanics are sketched out in the literal-minded way typical of science fiction. |
Matthew Levitt's Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (Yale University Press, 334 pages, $26 states that the FBI has investigated Hamas's links to drug trafficking, credit card fraud, sale of counterfeit products, and cigarette tax fraud. Such operations provide between $20 million and $30 million annually to Middle Eastern terrorist groups like Hamas.
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Seven Fires (Public Affairs Press, 480 pages, $27.50) points out that the cost of fire protection is more than the taxes spent on firefighters and fire trucks: It's hidden in the expenses of enforcing compliance with fire, building, and zoning laws. What rents will we pay to live in truly fireproof housing? What restrictions on development are acceptable to create neighborhoods safe from fires?
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Roger Angell's Let Me Finish (Harcourt, 304 pages, $25) leaps from subject to subjject, each constructed around a single mental snapshot that stands in the author's mind as the defining moment in that period of his life. |
Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton (Alfred A. Knopf, 480 pages, $29.95) is best in this generally excellent book are Ms. Hughes Interludes, which address specific aspects of the Book of Household Management itself. |
Reading Leo Strauss (Chicago, 256 pages, $32.50), a sober new study by Yale professor Steven Smith, leaves nothing to the Strauss caricature except the ignorance and malice that fathered it.
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Absent Minds, a new study of intellectuals in Britain, is sympathetic to Harold Laski, a leading Left-wing intellectual who counted President Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter among his friends So much so that he omits to mention Attlee's immortal rebuke: "A period of silence from you would be welcome."
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The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (William Morrow, 736 pages, $29.95) turns out to be a book worthy of its title. It just goes on and on and on, a veritable Mississippi of sludgy, sophomoric, rebarbative prose, with gimmicky human-interest stories, transcriptions of press releases, gratuitous quotations from great writers about hurricanes, and potted history. This author may feel the gravity of his subject, but he does not manage to convey it.
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Theft: A Love Story (Alfred A. Knopf, 274 pages, $24) has valuable things to say about the dilemmas and temptations of the provincial artist. It is too bad that, in Theft, he has chosen such an awkward way of saying them.
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Ludmila's Broken English (Norton, 326 pages, $24.95), Mr. Pierre's second novel, confirms DBC Pierre's talent. It's clear that he reads poetry and believes in his bad-boy writerly genius. He overwrites on purpose, yet his overwriting is not enough in itself - he only scores when he scores in traditional literary terms, with straight wit and grace, boyish as it may be. |
Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (Public Affairs, 305 pages, $26), is full of examples of "how things go wrong when a college gets lazy." The college is, in important senses, a "failure." It has lost its soul.
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he Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera (Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $25.95) provides a real sense of the atmosphere that the audience never knows about. For those of us who do not venture backstage, the details in this book can be absorbing. Rehearsals for new productions and revivals take place on the main stage; they begin at 11 a.m. and end at 2 or 2:30 p.m. When the rehearsal is over, the set is removed and the set for the opera that will be presented that evening is brought in.
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Joe Klein's Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized By People Who Think You're Stupid (Doubleday, 272 pages, $23.95) is a book that mixes so many funny and revealing stories of past presidential campaigns with such an utterly wrongheaded premise.
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In The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (Simon & Schuster, 432 pages, $29.95), Jonathan Alter covers Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election and first legislative season as if they were not history but a story for Newsweek, the magazine for which he works. |
The Din in the Head (Houghton Mifflin, 244 pages, $24) ike all essay collections, is something of a miscellany: Its subjects range from Sylvia Plath to Gershom Scholem, and from John Updike to Helen Keller. Readers of the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the American Scholar will be happy to recognize Ms. Ozick's major essays of the last few years: her consideration of Lionel Trilling's frustrated ambitions, her grappling with Tolstoy's idealized picture of the Cossacks, her comical "interview" with the reticent ghost of Henry James.
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ondon journalist Melanie Phillips has written an impassioned and well-argued book, Londonistan (Encounter Books, 213 pages, $25.95) asks why British authorities have been so slow to respond to the radical Islamists in their midst. |
The Party of Death (Regnery, 320 pages, $29.95) is a minor classic about one of the central moral issues of our age, suffers from a flaw characteristic of the movement that opposes legalized abortion.
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Eric Burns's Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism ($27.50, hardcover, 384 pages, Perseus Books Group) is a highly entertaining history of the seamier side of the birth of American newspapers.
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Stuart Kelly's new book, The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Will Never Read (Random House, 368 pages,$24.95) is a compilation of the equivalent of a large library of books that cannot be read. Many of them were written and lost, like the works of Shakespeare and Homer |
Gary Shteyngart's sophomore novel, Absurdistan (Random House, 333 pages, $24.95) is ostensibly a tour de force of Russian-American flavor, it reads like a straight New York novel, a downtown survey a la McInerney. The Russian element was simply a handy lens through which to view the mixed-up 1990s. |
When Philip Roth named his new novel Everyman (Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages, $24) he had no quarrel with the first part of Everyman's ordeal, the emptying-out and stripping-down in preparation for death. |
Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, published in March by Little, Brown and Company, was the first of a two-book deal reportedly worth six figures. But on Sunday, the Harvard Crimson cited seven passages in Viswanathan's book that closely resemble the style and language of the novels of Megan McCafferty.
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As Francis Fukuyama writes in America at the Crossroads (Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25), he has worked or studied with most of the leading neoconservatives, both in and out of government: Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, William Kristol, Albert Wohlstetter. Most important, he is the author of The End of History and the Last Man, a book both celebrated and reviled as the classic neoconservative verdict on the Cold War.
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A new book, Writings on Art (Yale University Press, 192 pages, $25), edited by Miguel Lopez-Remiro, brings Rothko's genius into full and more personal light. Comprising some 90 documents - essays, lectures, statements, letters, and interviews from 1934-69 - this compilation uncovers a deeply passionate mind seriously grappling with the meaning of art and life. |
In the introduction to My Battle of Algiers (Collins, 284 pages, $24.95) Mr. Morgan tells us he was inspired to write this book by the current U.S. involvement in Iraq, which - though he admits differences in context and even in intent - must likewise end in an inglorious withdrawal. |
Gay Talese's slightly manic garrulity, no less than Tom Wolfe's neon garishness, provided the DNA of the New Journalism. Mr. Talese's 1966 Esquire profile, which is one of the urtexts of the New Journalism, shows how much today's journalists owe him. |
Getting America Right (Crown Forum, 231 pages, $26.95) by Heritage Foundation don Edwin Feulner and Townhall. comfounder Doug Wilson, is entertainingly written, well researched, and less ethereal. The book's defining feature, though, is its dozens of pages amounting to a veritable porno stash of big-government boondoggles and bridges to nowhere, all presented to make average Joe conservatives' eyes pop.
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4/17/06 From Invasion To Occupation How refreshing it is then to read Michael Gordon and Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor's Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (Pantheon, 603 pages, $27.95). Well-written, -documented, and cogent, it provokes thought, even if not always agreement. Mr. Gordon, chief military correspondent for the New York Times, and General Trainor, a retired Marine Corps general, combine their talents to weave a narrative of the Iraq campaign. |
An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago, 292 pages, $27.50), Hofstadter's life and times prepared him to be the kind of historian he was. Indeed, the sometimes unsettling insight that drives Brown's book is that each generation of historians reads their own experience into the American past, turning historiography into a kind of biography. |
"In becoming Catholic ... one enters a wondrously and sometimes confusingly capacious universe of faith, prayer, piety, and forms of discipleship. As G.K. Chesterton observed, the Catholic Church is so much larger from the inside than from the outside. |
Journalists have also produced a slew of books on the Founding Fathers. A HarperCollins executive, James Atlas, who is himself a respected biographer and whose Eminent Lives imprint began with biographies of Jefferson by the journalist Christopher Hitchens and of Washington by the polymath Paul Johnson, said another new book on the founders "seems to be coming out every day."
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Suite Francaise (Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $25), by the French novelist Irene Nemirovsky, a writer killed in the Holocaust, is historical since one of the first crimes of the Nazis was the obliteration of Jewish voices and words, through book-burning, |
Sheila Heti's debut novel, Ticknor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 128 pages, $18), has many appeals, all of them literary. It is one of this year's most enjoyable and formally impressive books. |
I confess that when I picked up Jeremy Lewis's biography of Allen Lane (Viking, 416 pages, $30), the founder of Penguin Books, the same thought crossed my mind, and indeed, after reading all 416 pages of it, I was on the same side as the little girl in the story.
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Joshua Zeitz details it all in the first book-length study of the Jazz Age figure, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown, 352 pages, $24.95): the Prohibition-era speakeasies, the petting parties, the drink-fueled antics.
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Baseball Between the Numbers (Workman Publishing, 554 pages, $18.95), is a collection of essays that purports, according to its subtitle, to prove Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong. |
Jon Meacham's wonderful new book, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (Random House, 399 pages, $23.95) is a lively, accessible, and persuasive rebuttal to the popular left-wing misconception that in America religion and politics are not supposed to mix. |
In The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times (ISI Books, 394 pages, $28), Mr. Hart writes from memory recollected in pleasure. |
Is there any government program that could wipe out poverty once and for all? No, Charles Murray argues in his new book, In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace the Welfare State (AEI Press, 214 pages, $20). Failure of the welfare state is inevitable because it "degrades the traditions of work, thrift, and neighborliness" and then spawns new problems of its own.
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| | | | | | | Wynnewood-based author and illustrator Gene Barretta poses here in Revolutionary Era garb with his son, Ben. Barretta is the author and illustrator of the children’s book Now and Ben. The book, like his son’s name, was inspired by Benjamin Franklin. | |
Now & Ben has a timeless quality that charms the reader with wit and simplicity. Youngsters of all ages should add this book to their libraries, which were started, incidentally, by the sensible Ben Franklin. As a man who encouraged others to read, the pensive author of Poor Richard's Almanack would likely approve of the thoughtful approach of the illustrator Barretta.
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Go-Between: "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." We can't understand late-19th-century Chicago without re-creating its context. Happily, in Death in the Haymarket (Pantheon Books, 383 pages, $26.95), the historian James Green skillfully shows us the time and place without padding. |
The sheer scope of the subject poses important challenges for Ms. Armstrong. She has set out to explain the most profound texts and ideas of four extremely different civilizations, along with the political and cultural history that helped to give rise to them. |
In Rousseau's Dog (Ecco, 340 pages, $25.95), Messrs. Edmonds and Eidinow have produced another charming essay in pop intellectual history.The recipe is that of Wittgenstein's Poker, right down to the odd title; but where the poker was real and central to the story of the last book, the dog in the new one is mostly metaphorical. |
Andrew Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College and author of several books on sports economics, provides valuable ammunition to armchair experts with his detailed yet largely dispassionate In the Best Interests of Baseball?: The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig (Wiley, 256 pages, $24.95), a study of Mr. Selig and his eight predecessors. |
The years immediately following Balanchine's death in 1983 saw a dearth of apparent successors within ballet itself. As a result, many thought modern dance choreographers would save the balletic genre. |
| | | | | | | Kaavya Viswanathan, a sophomore at Harvard University, poses in front of her dormitory at the university in Cambridge, Mass. The 19-year old signed a hefty two-book deal with Little, Brown and Co., when she was 17, and before her first novel hit stores this month DreamWorks had already bought the movie rights. Photo by Chitose Suzuki/AP. | |
Such is the life of an author who signed a hefty two-book deal when she was 17, and has already sold the movie rights of her first novel to DreamWorks.
The 320-page book is titled How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. |
With hardcover sales down 10% so far this year, publishers are counting on memoirs to prop up sagging sales. Indeed, the genre has posted some recent smashes such as Teacher Man by Frank McCourt and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. New potential best-sellers are on the way, including Possible Side Effects, by Augusten Burroughs, which is due out in May, and Dispatches From the Edge, by newsman Anderson Cooper, a memoir about his experiences leading up to, during and after last year's Hurricane Katrina. That book is set for release in June.
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| | | | | | | Lee County Library director Claire Leavy, right, looks at a computer monitor showing her library’s strategic plan along with intern Leslie Partridge, left, in Leesburg, Ga. The south Georgia library, along with about 750 others in the United States and Canada, have hired a collection agency to recover fines and overdue materials.
Photo by Elliott Minor/Associated Press | |
Libraries Turn To Collection Agency To Retrieve Overdue Books |
We seem to be Ostrich-like, with our head in the sand, and blind to our enemy. We still think we are protected by two big oceans, which new technology, weapons of mass destruction, a porous border, and new forms of terrorism have evaporated for all practical purposes as protectie shields against our new enemy. |
It's like having to sit through a too-long travelogue from some visiting uncle. |
The "fear" of Gross's title, then, is not just the fear suffered by Jews in a Poland that wished they had never come back alive. It is also the fear of the Poles themselves, who saw in those survivors a reminder of their own wartime crimes. Even beyond Gross's exemplary historical research and analysis, it is this lesson that makes Fear such an important book. As Germany and Poland showed, and as Bosnia and Rwanda have confirmed, nothing makes people more willing to commit evil than consciousness of their own guilt.
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'Smoked' A Fast-Paced Thriller Set In Maine |
Katherine DeBrecht, a mother of three, points to books such as "King & King" (where a prince decides to marry another prince) and "Rainbow Fish" (where a beautiful fish is bullied into giving away his shiny scales so that all fish look the same) as examples of children's books with a liberal bias that have often been reported as being read in schools.
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Bill Carter's supposedly red-hot Desperate Networks (Doubleday, 384 pages, $26.95), due in bookstores next week, went on sale two weeks ago for $10 from the guy who sells books out of a shopping cart at 73rd and Broadway.That kind of distribution isn't a good sign for the book - or the networks.
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The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite (Viking, 304 pages, $27.95), Ann Finkbeiner tells the remarkable story of how this small cadre of brilliant American scientists provided vital technological support to our government over a period of 46 years following the end of World War II. |
Think modern-day, drug-smuggling pirates. In the hands of a lesser writer, the tale would drift into just plain silly. But Mitchard, whose debut novel The Deep End of the Ocean shot up best-seller lists in 1996 after Oprah Winfrey suggested it for her then-new book club, is a talented storyteller and a classy wordsmith.
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At its essence, this is a book about courage. Layered on top of that is a piece of work that takes the "Who Am I?" question and answers it with, "I Am Who . . . " Hunter informs us that you will be found, but first you have to walk away from the expectations of others. |
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J.K. Rowling’s seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday, and Borders Book Store on Broad and Chestnut streets is making sure its customers know. The store has posters to announce the release party, as well as displays of merchandise and previous books. | |
The final book in the Harry Potter series, the best-read children's series in publishing history, arrives this weekend. |
| | | | | | | A German written letter from Anne Frank to her grandmother is seen during a preview of an Anne Frank exhibition in Amsterdam, The Netherlands yesterday. The exhibition, “Anne Frank: Her life in Letters,” an exhibition of letters, postcards and family notes, some of them never displayed before, opens today at the Amsterdam Historical Museum and closes Sept. 3.
Photo by Bas Czerwinski/AP | |
"I want to go my own way, to follow the path that seems right to me. Don't think of me as a 14-year-old, since all these troubles have made me older. I won't regret my actions. I'll behave the way I think I should."
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When ordering wine, impress your date by saying, "Hmmm ... that's odd." When she asks what's odd, just point out that it's odd that they have such a top-flight bottle at the bottom of the price list. Now you don't look so cheap for picking it. |
It seems fitting then that DeLillo, a native New Yorker, should address the defining moment of American life six years after 9/11. His new novel, Falling Man, his 14th, begins and ends with terror, midair explosions and crumbled buildings. There have been many other Sept. 11 novels, but no other American writer seems as equipped to tell the story.
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What's So Funny? (Warner Books, 359 pages, $24.99) - the 14th book in the Dortmunder saga - begins with Dortmunder already in deep trouble courtesy of an ex-cop turned private detective by the name of Johnny Eppick. |
The Dangerous Book is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit.
It spent months on British best-seller lists, has sold more than half a million copies and took the book of the year prize at last month's British Book Awards. |
"If To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye were published today, they'd almost certainly be young-adult titles," 'The Simpsons' writer Larry Doyle says. |
Brian Groh's first job out of college sounds like something out of a novel - a summer spent mixing with society's upper crust in one of Maine's picture-postcard resort towns as he cared for an aging, sometimes erratic, matriarch. |
Jackie's big adventure: "Everybody wants to ask about the perils and dangers of it, but when you're on an adventure like that, the exhilaration is what you remember the most, and not the dangers," Eig says. |
The highest accolade their creators can receive is to be compared to these icons, which is why so many dust jacket blurbs ballyhoo lesser writers as the next Hammett or as the heir to Chandler's mantle. But few deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.
One who does is Loren D. Estleman. |
It's fleece as pink as Vogue: The side stories about finding Mr. Right feel like filler meant to transform a bit of gossip into a full-blooded novel. We do root for Magnolia, if only by default. She's a lamb surrounded by wolves. |
Leo Durocher actually said, "The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place."
If the Lip's remark doesn't remind you of a certain local baseball team, it should. |
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Now and Ben |