Nine parts of desire : the hidden world of Islamic women

 by Geraldine Brooks. During her six years covering the Middle East for the Wall Street Journal, Brooks sought to find out how Muslim women feel about their societies' attitudes toward women. What she discovered is sometimes astonishing, sometimes shocking, but always fascinating. Taking on the hijab (the Muslim woman's black veil) herself, Brooks talked with women throughout the Islamic world, reexamined the Koran, spent time with fundamentalist and feminist alike, and emerged with a deeper understanding of the religion as one that once empowered but now cripples women. She found, for instance, that Iran is one of the better Islamic countries for women, Saudi Arabia the worst; that the hijab can be ~strangely liberating; that enjoyment of their sexuality is an inherent right for Muslim women; and that to be a feminist under Islam calls for a daily form of courage almost incomprehensible to the Western mind. Brooks is a wonderful writer and thinker; the observations she makes and the conclusions she reaches open both our eyes and our minds to understanding Muslim women anew. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

More church folk

 by Michele Andrea Bowen. After three ambitious and morally bankrupt bishops discover Watermelon Power 21, they enter into partnerships with criminal elements to raise enough money for a takeover of the next Triennial General Conference of the Gospel United Church in Durham, North Carolina. But WP21 is not just a potent male-enhancement supplement; it's seriously addictive and can be fatal if not taken properly. Reverend Denzelle Flowers (who's also an FBI agent) and the other decent preachers who want to end the corruption rampant throughout the church have their work cut out for them. Picking up in 1986, 23 years after the events detailed in Bowen's best-seller Church Folk (2001), this inspirational novel uses humor, local color, and vividly descriptive, if startling, language to good effect, ably demonstrating once again why Bowen is the queen of African American Christian fiction. An entertaining and timely look at the politics of religion, Bowen's latest sounds a call to action for members of all faiths. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Proofiness : the dark arts of mathematical deception

 by Charles Seife. Following in the footsteps of John Allen Paulos (Innumeracy, 1989) and Michael Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things, 1997), Seife conducts a thorough investigation into why so many of us find it so easy to believe things that are patently ridiculous. Why, for example, does anyone take seriously the idea that some vaccines can cause autism, or that athletes who wear red have a competitive advantage? It's all comes down to numbers, the author argues, and the ways they can be used to make people believe things that are not true. He introduces us to the concepts of Potemkin numbers (deliberately deceptive statistics), disestimation (turning a number into a falsehood by taking it too literally), fruit-packing (a variety of deceptive techniques including cherry-picking data and comparing apples to oranges), and randumbness (finding causality in random events). He explores the many ways we misunderstand simple mathematical terms confusing average, for example, with typical and our natural tendency to treat numbers as truth and to see patterns where none exist. Despite its serious and frequently complex subject, the book is written in a light, often humorous tone (the title is a riff on Stephen Colbert's truthiness, although proofiness has been in circulation for a while, with a variety of meanings). A delightful and remarkably revealing book that should be required reading for . . . well, for everyone. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

A special place : the heart of a dark matter

 by Peter Straub. Straub's fandom will soon feel a frisson of déjà vu reading this, his first singly published novella. It's an extract from Skylark (2009), the limited-edition long version of A Dark Matter (2010), which relates the backstory of the college student, Keith Hayward, sensationally killed at the novel's climax. By then, Keith is a sociopath on the verge of following his uncle's lead into serial murder. The novella lays out the course of his education for the trade by Uncle Till, right up to his Keith's first murder. To Keith, beginning at least at age 12, Till is utterly fascinating, but when the handsome, apparently footloose man returns the interest in the wake of a neighbor's suspicion that Keith has killed her cat and suggests that the boy find and use a special place for his possibly compromising pleasures, fascination becomes enthrallment. A lowering aura like that of the high-school scenes involving the hero's son in David Cronenberg's film A History of Violence broods over this immaculately written portrait of a maculate-to-the-max character in formation. --Booklist. (Check Catalog)

War is not over when it's over : women speak out from the ruins of war

 by Ann Jones. While hoping to document postwar violence against women in war-torn regions like Afghanistan, parts of Africa, and the Middle East, the International Relief Committee project unexpectedly provoked a loaded question about the injustice of their lives: "Why can't a man bathe a child?" With this question, and armed with IRC cameras, a group of African women started the dialogue in the hope of ending their abuse by and harsh subservience to men. A shy young girl in Sierra Leone elicits cheers from her schoolmates when she tells elders that teachers "should stop impregnating schoolgirls." Jones (Kabul in Winter) recounts her observations of the Global Crescendo Project in this concise travelogue praising women's fortitude in the direst of circumstances while decrying the continuing "post-conflict zone" of violence against women, including in the American-bombed ruins of Iraq, which cracks her sense of detachment. Underfunded and doubted in First and Third World countries, the project reveals the link between misplaced rage by depressed former soldiers and the women who suffer culturally sanctioned violence, while the U.N.'s antirape resolutions are ignored. In spite of the graphically grim material, Jones provides glimpses of hard-won triumphs, including separate bathing areas in Burmese refugee camps and the promise of peace for women by a thoughtful local chief. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Hypothermia

 Arnaldur Indriðason. Indridason, Iceland's most widely read novelist, once told an interviewer that crime fiction is about so much more than just crime. In his latest mystery, as if to prove his point, Indridason has his series hero, Reykjavik police detective Erlendur, investigate what appears to be the suicide of a young woman. There is no evidence of foul play, and there are numerous indications that the woman suffered from depression due to the death of her mother and the drowning of her father when she was a child. At the same time, Erlendur is trying to solve two cold cases, the disappearances of two young people three decades earlier. For Erlendur, all three investigations resonate like Proust's madaleines, compelling him to continue. Hypothermia is defiantly unconventional crime fiction. No shoot-outs, no car chases, no monstrous villains; only tragedies and the pain they inflict on ordinary people like Erlendur. As he interviews a lengthy succession of people who might shed light on the suicide and the disappearances, the gloomy Icelandic cop continues to wrestle with the tragedies in his own life: his eight-year-old brother's disappearance in a blizzard and the impact of his disastrous marriage on his children. Some crime fans might be puzzled by this novel's dearth of action, but it is psychologically astute, beautifully told, and filled with insight into matters of life and death. --Booklist. (Check Catalog)

Stalling for time : my life as an FBI hostage negotiator

 by Gary Noesner. Noesner, a former FBI hostage negotiator for 23 years, was the first person to run the bureau's Crisis Negotiation Unit. Looking back, he recalls some major standoffs along with his efforts to understand and interpret the behavior of hostage takers, sometimes finding negotiations thwarted by the actions of his own colleagues. The compelling centerpiece of the book is Noesner's analysis of "what went wrong at Waco" with the Branch Davidians when negotiation and tactical teams were working at cross purposes. After opening with a dramatic account of a man who abducted his estranged common-law wife and their son and was holding a gun to her head, Noesner describes his own "quintessentially American childhood," when he got the idea for his life's work from a segment about the FBI on The Mickey Mouse Club. Drawing on official reports, personal notes, memos, and memories of conversations, he writes with a simple style that nevertheless generates much suspense, recreating past events with a vivid intensity certain to fascinate true crime readers. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

Ape house : a novel

 by Sara Gruen. Gruen's respect and love for animals fuel her fiction, most famously her best-selling novel Water for Elephants (2006). Her fourth ensnaring tale features our close relatives, bonobos exceptionally intelligent and casually sensual great apes. When we first meet the mischievous Bonzi, Sam, Mbongo, Makena, Lola, and Jelani, they are happily ensconced in a cheerful research facility where they request their favorite foods, romp, use computers, watch movies, and converse with humans using American Sign Language. Scientist Isabel considers the bonobos her family and would do anything for them, even after she is nearly when the lab is bombed. The fate of the bonobos is a brilliantly satirical surprise. Suffice it to say that Isabel's harrowing battle to rescue the apes involves a porn king and is interlaced with the hilarious misadventures of a once A-list newspaper reporter now reduced to working for a tabloid, while his thwarted novelist wife endures insulting inanities as she attempts to launch a sitcom. Rooted in true horror stories of the abuse of research animals and the astonishing discoveries made at the real-life Great Ape Trust, Gruen's astute, wildly entertaining tale of interspecies connection is a novel of verve and conscience. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Starting & running a successful newsletter or magazine

 by Cheryl Woodard. Woodard, co-founder of PC Magazine, Macworld, and PC World, shows how to turn an idea for a special-interest publication into a successful and possibly sellable business. She includes information about raising capital, managing employees, building readership, adding spin-off products, subscription budgeting and profitability, finding good advertising salespeople, using financial information to make business decisions, Internet publishing, and fixing common problems. --Summary (Check Catalog)

The widower's tale

 by Julia Glass. Glass' fourth novel is a capacious family drama with as many brimming rooms and secret nooks and crannies as the historic Massachusetts home of Percy Darling, an acerbic patriarch, penitential widower, and former librarian at Harvard's Widener Library. Percy's coveted property includes a large pond and a spacious old barn, once his late wife's dance studio, now an upscale preschool. A mischievous and erudite curmudgeon, Percy only agrees to this intrusion in the hope that his floundering daughter, Clover, will finally secure a job that makes her happy. Not that she'll ever catch up to her sister, a legendary oncologist. Masterfully omniscient and spellbinding, National Book Award winner Glass creates glimmering descriptions, escalating conflicts, and intriguing characters, such as Percy's oldest grandson, Robert, a premed student at Harvard, and his ecowarrior roommate, Arturo; Sarah, a stained-glass artist and uninsured adoptive single mother; Ira, a preschool teacher who lost a previous position when parents objected to his being gay; and Celestino, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant with high ideals and ambitions. Elaborately plotted and luxuriously paced, Glass' inquisitive, compassionate, funny, and suspenseful saga addresses significant and thorny social issues with emotional veracity, artistic nuance, and a profound perception of the grand interconnectivity of life. --Booklist. (Check Catalog)

The company town : the industrial Edens and satanic mills that shaped the American economy

 by Hardy Green. From the cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, in the late 1800s, to Google's Project 02 facility in Oregon, the U.S. has had a long and complicated history of companies attempting to balance efficiency and profitability with utopian ideals. Company towns, virtually owned and operated by storied names in U.S. business Pullman, Hershey, Ford, U.S. Steel, Corning, Kaiser have offered housing, education, health care, and other benefits in exchange for unquestioned loyalty and control over the lives of workers. Green, a former associate editor of BusinessWeek, offers a completely fascinating look at how American business titans motivated by a combination of practicality, greed, and philanthropy have established company towns. These towns were at the heart of labor issues from the Industrial Revolution, Great Depression, and decline of the manufacturing sector through the digital revolution. The landscape of company towns is littered with paternalism, failed utopian ideals, corporate takeovers, and enduring legacies in capitalism and philanthropy. Green explores utopian ideals gone awry and the changes in labor/management tensions across geography, time, and increasing globalization, and offers cogent insight on the need to balance divergent interests. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Freedom

 by Jonathan Franzen. Patty, a Westchester County high-school basketball star, should have been a golden girl. Instead, her ambitious parents betray her, doing her grievous psychic harm. Hardworking Minnesotan Walter wants to be Patty's hero, and she tries to be a stellar wife and a supermom to Joey and Jessica, their alarmingly self-possessed children, but all goes poisonously wrong. Patty longs for Richard, Walter's savagely sexy musician friend. Walter's environmental convictions turn perverse once he gets involved in a diabolical scheme that ties protection of the imperiled cerulean warbler to mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia. Richard is traumatized by both obscurity and fame. Joey runs amok in his erotic attachment to the intense girl-next-door and in a corrupt entrepreneurial venture connected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The intricacies of sexual desire, marriage, and ethnic and family inheritance as well as competition and envy, beauty and greed, nature and art versus profit and status, truth and lies all are perceptively, generously, and boldly dramatized in Franzen's first novel since the National Book Award-winning The Corrections (2001). Passionately imagined, psychologically exacting, and shrewdly satirical, Franzen's spiraling epic exposes the toxic ironies embedded in American middle-class life and reveals just how destructive our muddled notions of entitlement and freedom are and how obliviously we squander life and love. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Higher education? : how colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids, and what we can do about it

 by Andrew Hacker. Hacker (political science, Queens Coll.; Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal) and Dreifus (Sch. of International & Public Affairs, Columbia Univ.) make it their mission to blow the lid off the current state of colleges and universities in the United States. Although both authors are professors, neither shies away from breaking down the disheartening facts behind the state of higher education. They ask tough questions like what a student gets from having a four-year degree, whether distance education is teaching anything, how necessary tenure is, and why schools spend so much on athletics when they get only a modest return. Good suggestions are included, but even the authors seem to have a sense that little will change in academia anytime soon. Verdict: Anyone who has been to college or has children about to enroll should read this sometimes shocking and endlessly interesting account of the true state of academic affairs. Professors and those climbing the academic ladder should also use this to think about how they teach and how they fit into the giant academic system. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Juliet : a novel

 by Anne Fortier. Fortier's debut offers a beguiling mix of romance, intrigue, history, and Shakespeare. Twenty-five-year-old Julie Jacobs is stunned to find the aunt who raised her has left everything to her self-involved twin, Janice, save for the key to a safe-deposit box in Siena, Italy. Hoping to get some answers about the suspicious deaths of her parents over two decades ago, Julie travels to Siena and learns she's actually a member of the Tolomeis, a powerful Sienese family. Her first acquaintances in Siena are a vibrant woman and her handsome godson Alessandro, who happen to be members of a rival family, the Salimbenis. Julie can't figure out why Alessandro seems to dislike her almost instantly, but she's soon embroiled in the mystery opened up by the safe-deposit box, which contains notebooks and letters belonging to her mother. Soon Julie is engrossed in the historical story of Romeo and his love, Giulietta, and on the trail of a legendary treasure. Lovers of adventurous fiction will lose themselves in Fortier's exciting, intricately woven tale. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

There is power in a union : the epic story of labor in America

 by Philip Dray. This stirring study situates one of the most subversive yet profoundly American of social movements at the heart of the nation's history. Historian Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown) follows organized labor from the struggles of early 19th-century female textile workers to the present-day retreat of organized labor following the failed 1981 air trafic controllers' strike. His episodic narrative, structured around major strikes, shows labor's heroic age as an era of naked class warfare: strikers died by the dozens in pitched battles with police, soldiers, and Pinkerton agents, and such charismatic organizers as Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn braved prison and worse. The post-WWII period, by contrast, is a story of union conservatism, corruption scandals, and one rout after another at the hands of union-busting corporations abetted by government indifference. Organized labor's legacy, the author argues, is as much political as economic; it challenges bedrock American values of self-reliance while championing civil liberties-IWW speakers faced mass arrest for their public square orating-and bringing rights to the workplace. Packed with vivid characters and dramatic scenes, Dray's fine recap of a neglected but vital tradition has much to say about labor's current straits. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

61 hours : a Reacher novel

 by Lee Child.  Coming off Gone Tomorrow (2009), one of the very best among his 13 high-octane thrillers, Child keeps his foot hard on the throttle. There's always a ticking clock in the background whenever our off-the-grid hero, Jack Reacher, finds a wrong that needs righting, but this time the clock drives the narrative. When a lawyer arrives at a South Dakota prison to visit a client, we're told that it's five minutes to three in the afternoon, exactly 61 hours before it happened. Meanwhile, Reacher wakes up from a nap to discover that the tour bus on which he's cadged a ride is spinning out of control on an icy bridge. By the time he helps the injured senior citizens aboard the bus, there are 59 hours left. But we still don't know what we're waiting for. The clock continues to tick as Reacher, now without a ride, lands in Boulton, South Dakota, and finds himself helping out the local police as they attempt to protect a key witness in an upcoming drug trial. Then there's the matter of the peculiar underground installation outside of town, formerly a military outpost but now apparently housing a meth lab. As the hours fall away and the tension builds, we learn more about the installation, the local cops, and a Mexican drug lord whose own clock is ticking in sync with Reacher's, but we're still not prepared for what happens when the sixty-first hour arrives. One expects a novel organized around a clock to be plot driven, and that's certainly true here. But, as always, Child delivers enough juicy details about the landscape, the characters, and Reacher's idiosyncrasies to give the story texture and to lower our pulse rates, if only momentarily. Even without the apparently game-changing finale, this is Child in top form, but isn't he always? --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Through the language glass : why the world looks different in other languages

 by Guy Deutscher. Do the French have more esprit simply because they have a word for it? Or is it the other way round? Did Homer never describe the sea or sky as blue while mentioning violet sheep and green honey because he was colorblind? The explorations that Deutscher (former fellow, St. John's Coll., Cambridge; The Unfolding of Language) takes you on here are marvelous. He combines erudition, wry humor, and serious interpretation in this elegant and charmingly accessible study of the relation among language, culture, and thought and of how we have engaged in and reflected upon language over the years. Importantly, Deutscher takes issue with today's linguists who consider language as universally coded and inviolately distinct from culture. Deutscher's narrative introduces philologists, anthropologists, and linguists-beginning with William E. Gladstone. --Library Journal  (Check catalog)

Up Jim River

 by Michael F. Flynn. On the harper Mearana's home planet, up Jim River is a saying indicating a journey ever further into danger and the unknown. Mearana's mother, Bridget ban, has disappeared on mysterious business. Even the Kennel, her employer and one of the galaxy's two sources of secret agents, didn't know what she was looking for or where she went. Mearana is determined, though, to discover her mother's fate. She manages to convince the scarred man, the Fudir, who was once Donovan but became six or seven personalities after a botched experiment by Those of Name, to join her out of a sense of nostalgia. The worlds inhabited by these people are sufficient reason to read the novel. The extrapolations of linguistic drift and remnants of ancient history that Flynn conjures constitute a fascinating story in themselves. Adding to them a tense and thrilling search from the bar on Jehovah to the very Wild itself, through strange cultures and dangerous ports, just makes the book all the more engaging. A future history with serious punch. --Booklist. (Check Catalog)

The tenth parallel : dispatches from the fault line between Christianity and Islam

 by Eliza Griswald. Award-winning journalist Griswold chronicles her travels along the 10th parallel, the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator and home to many Christian-Muslim standoffs. Griswold does her best to counter the received wisdom of interfaith fighting by astutely pointing out where religion is simply used as a tactic in a nonreligious conflict over land, resources, or the like. As examples of war-rejecters, multifaith, and environmental advocates, the author introduces many organizations and individuals with hopes for peace, such as the Nigerian pastor, who, in addition to working with a Muslim imam to stop fighting between their communities, also distributes green stoves that burn less wood, thereby preventing further deforestation and possibly inter-religious fighting over land rights. The reader also meets Nigerian Christian warriors, quasi-military Filipino Catholic gangs, and Indonesian jihadis who sell herbal cures door-to-door to raise funds. Though not a scholar of Islam, Griswold has a profound grasp of the misinterpretation and manipulation of Islam. Her insight that no single, unified sharia (Islamic law) exists is a conclusion that has eluded more celebrated authors; among other perceptions, she notes that Islam was spread more by intermarriage than the sword. Always maintaining a journalist's objective view, Griswold, a published poet, nevertheless enchants the reader with her lush, flowing prose. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

My Hollywood : a novel

  by Mona Simpson. Novel by novel, Simpson takes fresh and disquieting approaches to fractured families. Her fifth book is a duet between Claire, a high-strung composer who has left New York for Hollywood to support her husband's television ambitions, and Lola, a Filipina in her fifties who becomes their nanny, caring with sensitivity and love for their precocious, moody son. Claire is ambivalent about motherhood. Lola is putting her children through college while continuing to support their household in the Philippines, where she is of the same class as the Hollywood women who hire her to care for their children. Claire's deepening loneliness as her workaholic husband becomes a stranger and her artistic struggle in a place she finds arid and alien are compelling, but compassionate, wise, and self-sacrificing Lola, with her mellifluous voice and wonderfully inventive English, rules. In her arresting portrayals of Lola and her nanny and housekeeper friends, Simpson explores a facet of American society rarely depicted with such insight and appreciation. As Lola and Claire tell their intertwined stories, Simpson subtly but powerfully traces the persistence of sexism and prejudice, the fear and injustice inherent in the predicaments of immigrants, and the complexity and essentiality of all domestic relationships. --Booklist (Check Catalog)