Revolution

 by Jennifer Donnely. Donnelly follows her Printz Honor Book, A Northern Light (2003), with another gripping, sophisticated story, but this time she pairs historical fiction with a wrenching contemporary plotline. After her little brother's murder and her mother's subsequent breakdown, high-school-senior Andi feels like a ghost. She is furious at her father, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist with a 25-year-old pregnant girlfriend, when he arranges for Andi to join him in Paris: Sure. My brother's dead. My mother's insane. Hey, let's have a crepe. In France though, Andi, a passionate musician, discovers a diary written during the French Revolution by a young woman with whom Andi develops an increasing fascination. Donnelly links past and present with distracting contrivances culminating in time travel that work against the novel's great strengths. But the ambitious story, narrated in Andi's grief-soaked, sardonic voice, will wholly capture patient readers with its sharply articulated, raw emotions and insights into science and art; ambition and love; history's ever-present influence; and music's immediate, astonishing power: It gets inside of you . . . and changes the beat of your heart. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Playing the game

 by Barbara Taylor Bradford. Bradford's latest is set in the London art scene, where 39-year-old Annette Remmington has just made her first huge sale: a Rembrandt painting discovered by a young man who inherited an estate from his eccentric uncle. Suddenly Annette is the darling of the art world, and her husband, Marius, is determined to make sure she manages her success properly. Two decades older than Annette and very controlling, he hand-selects one journalist out of the many who want to interview Annette for a profile.The journalist Marius picks is Jack Chalmers, a dashing up-and-comer who is 10 years younger than Annette. Despite the age difference, sparks fly the minute they meet, and it isn't long before Annette and Jack give in to their powerful mutual attraction. But Annette is tied to Marius not just by marriage but also by a secret that she fears could destroy her if it ever came to light. There is plenty of intrigue, secrets, and steamy encounters in Taylor's scintillating novel. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Awarded the OBE by the Queen, Taylor writes international bestsellers of substance and glamor. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The facebook effect

*Starred Review* The greatest measure of the appeal of a business narrative is its story-ability, that is, the ways in which the tale of a corporation's ups and downs grabs its readers. Such is the case with Fortune magazine journalist Kirkpatrick's look at Facebook and its growth. The reason? In part because its co-founder now CEO Mark Zuckerberg allowed almost unprecedented access to the author--not one but several times. The results seems to mirror Zuckerberg's insistence on an open and transparent dialogue with itself and with its customers. Starting from a 2003 Harvard campus Web site created to keep track of schoolmates, Facebook has grown in less than a decade to nearly a half billion users and multimillions in revenues, a growth trajectory credited to its C-suite's unwavering vision and its continual innovations--including News Feed, multiple applications, and self-service advertising. Talented people, too, add to the explosion that is Facebook; Kirkpatrick's pages are populated with names like Steve Ballmer, Lawrence Summers, Larry Brin, and lesser-known others who've contributed to this social networking phenomenon. Kirkpatrick also keeps his superlatives in check, weaving stories about Zuckerberg and his cadre while clearly showing the warts as well. An intriguing, almost participatory, read.--by David Kirkpatrick

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The dirty life : on farming, food, and love

by Kristin Kimball
Journalist Kimball accepts an assignment to interview a lanky, determined Pennsylvania farmer who runs a community farm supplying subscribers with beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, and grains. He may look a rustic, but he has a college degree and a burning passion for natural living and initiating a barter economy. The interview very quickly turns into something of a date. His visit to her on the Lower East Side of Manhattan only intensifies these two disparate characters' mutual attraction, and they soon launch a dream farm in the Adirondacks. She proves an eager, but inept, partner who must quickly shed her urban inhibitions and learn to slop pigs and slaughter chickens. Planning a wedding that will satisfy both the couple's rustic friends as well as her urbane family proves daunting. Kimball has a gift for throwing into high relief contemporary Americans' disconnect between farm-life realities and city ambitions.

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Nannies and au pairs : hiring in-home childcare

by Ilona Bray
Whether you've got a new baby, toddler, or grade-schooler, turning your child over to someone else is a big transition. What's the difference between a nanny and an au pair? How will you find a care giver you trust? How much will in-home care cost? Will you feel forced to pay under the table?

This book will help you define your needs, and how a nanny might help fill them. Covers-- Sharing care with another family.  Tax and other legal obligations -- Advertising-- Prescreening, interviewing, and background checks -- Making an offer -- Developing and adjusting a routine -- How to keep a nanny you like -- Ending the relationship.

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Tales from the sausage factory

 by Daniel J. Feldman. "...an unusual collaboration between Daniel L. Feldman, a Democrat who represented southern Brooklyn in the Assembly from 1981 through 1998, and Gerald Benjamin, a Republican and a political scientist ... Both are pragmatists, preaching that the perfect is the enemy of the good." ---New York Times ------- "Tales from the Sausage Factory is a must read for anyone interested in the Byzantine workings of the New York State government. Two of the most knowledgeable authorities on New York State government, Gerald Benjamin and Daniel Feldman, have taken on the task of telling us how it relly works. Feldman, a former state legislator, and Benjamin, who has done it all and seen it all as a practitioner, professor, and pundit, really help bring it into perspective. The case studies in the book make it all accessible and understandable. I recommend this book, without reservation." ---Alan Chartock, President and CEO, WAMC/Northeast Public Radio. -------  "Those of us who have watched New York State government up close for many years often wonder how so many good ideas wind up on the scrap heap, and why so many well-intentioned legislators lose hope for meaningful progress. Two of the state's most insightful analysts of the legislature, Dan Feldman and Jerry Benjamin, answer those questions in this book. Throught revealing anecdotes and careful research, they open a window into the way things go in Albany. What we see often isn't pretty, but it's fascinating---and it's important to know." ---Rex Smith, Editor and Vice President, Albany Times Union (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)

A small furry prayer : dog rescue and the meaning of life

 Steven Kotler. Dog rescuers remove dogs from shelters and care for them until they are ready for adoption, focusing on those most likely to be overlooked and sometimes ending up with them as "lifers." Kotler (West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief) became involved with dog rescue when he became involved with novelist Joy Nicholson, a committed rescuer; in a matter of weeks, they were compelled to move their dogs ("One dog is a pet, eight is a pack") from California to Chimayo, NM, a rough neighborhood but the only place they could afford that offered enough room. As he recounts their life in Chimayo (the pack at times approaches 50, all entertainingly delineated), Kotler seamlessly blends a history of Chimayo, a well-articulated understanding of how humans and dogs coevolved, and background on animal welfare efforts in this country with his witty, sharp-edged, and rewarding reflections on life. Verdict Kotler defiantly proclaims his love of Chihuahuas (he's hilarious), then shatters our hearts and ends by laying down a real ethical challenge. Highly recommended not only for dog lovers but for readers of memoir, biology, and anthropology and seekers generally. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Four freedoms

 by John Crowley.  Although nominally about life at an American aircraft factory during World War II, Crowley's complex and subtle novel is much grander. He explores the minds and hearts of people compelled by history to radically change their lives. Unaccountably optimistic Prosper Olander, orphaned as a child and crippled by a failed surgery, discovers that even he can find important work at a distant aircraft company in rural Oklahoma. Connie Wrobleski, frightened of nearly everything except her infant son, also travels to Oklahoma to reunite with her domineering husband, only to see him desert his family by enlisting. Prosper, Connie, and half a dozen other characters are developed in intricate detail and used as lenses on the massive relocation, dislocation, and societal change caused by the war. Crowley's characters offer depth, nuance, and pathos to the traditional image of Rosie the Riveter. Four Freedoms is also a triumph of both research and imagination. Crowley's aircraft company is an invention, but his detailed descriptions of sights, smells, and sounds in the plant, and his evocation of everyday life at home during WWII, are compelling. A wonderful novel that readers won't soon forget

Mindsight : the new science of personal transformation

 by Daniel Siegel. The concept of emotional intelligence, or EI, rather than IQ as the true barometer of social success has been a hot topic in psychological circles since Daniel Goleman's landmark Emotional Intelligence (1995). Yet, according to UCLA psychiatrist Siegel, Goleman's personal friend and fellow Harvard alum, the notion of mindsight, or the mind's knack for stepping back and analyzing its own thought processes, is just as critical. Drawing on cutting-edge neurobiological research and Eastern meditation practices as well as studies conducted by his own, L.A.-based Mindsight Institute, Siegel presents a convincing case that mindsight's dual focus on mindfulness and empathy can literally rewire the brain and catalyze greater personal fulfillment. In 12 lucid yet scientifically grounded chapters, he provides the evidence for mindsight's powerful effect on human behavior and then presents a guidebook for developing and applying mindsight in one's life. Unlike his earlier, more academic works, Mindsight is refreshingly accessible, offering solid practical advice while avoiding the naive optimism of many mainstream self-help books. -Booklist (Check catalog)

The fort : a novel of the Revolutionary War

 by Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell turns his key historical eye on the Penobscot Expedition, a little-known episode in the annals of the Revolutionary War that culminated in a resounding naval defeat for the fledgling U.S. Grounding his story in primary sources, including diaries, letters, and court transcripts, and animating a cast of real-life historical characters, he fleshes out the story of the vastly outmanned British infantry troops who stood their ground against a numerically superior naval fleet launched to summarily expel them. After establishing a shaky outpost in Penobscot, Maine then the eastern province of Massachusetts in 1779, the British forces and a band of loyalist colonists were beset by a large fleet and a sizable militia sent by the state of Massachusetts. Intent on establishing a siege, the American contingent, undermined by martial miscalculations and surprised by uncompromising resistance, was eventually thwarted by the enemy. Illuminating the battle from all angles and telling the story from both sides, Cornwell once again offers a fresh perspective on a stirring episode in martial history. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The grand design

 by Stephen Hawking. The idea of the multiverse that the observable universe in which we live doesn't exist independently, apart from anything else, but is one member of an enormous collection of physically real universes has been propagated to nonscientists by such physicist-authors as Michio Kaku (Parallel Worlds, 2004) and Leonard Susskind (The Cosmic Landscape, 2006). However laudable their popular-science efforts, Stephen Hawking's pitch of the multiverse concept likely will reach more readers not solely due to his world-wide fame but also because of the efficiently precise, understandable, and lightly jesting prose of Hawking and coauthor Mlodinow (also a physicist and author). Posing simple, fundamental questions such as, Why do we exist? the authors employ word pictures, analogies to everyday experience, but (blessedly) no equations to convey the physics that are involved in the answer this book ultimately offers. Sympathetically noting that quantum mechanics and general relativity remain as counterintuitive to experts as to laypeople, Hawking and Mlodinow alight on the probabilistic nature of energy and matter, frames of reference, string theory, and the incredibly finely-tuned values of physical forces and masses that permit life to exist, combining their presentations into the propositions of M-theory about what initiated the big bang. Repetition of the multi-mega-copy sales of A Brief History of Time (1988) can be safely predicted; expect queues in stores and libraries for Hawking's latest parting of the veil to far-out physics. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Nashville chrome

 by Rick Bass. Even though stand-out nature and fiction writer Bass mined history in his last novel, The Diezmo (2005), this fictionalized portrait of the top-of-the-charts country trio, Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed Brown, seems at first glance like a departure. But its acute insights into the living world and how human feelings mesh with nature is quintessential Bass. As is the novel's divining tone. Raised in the backwoods of Arkansas, where their hard-driving father runs a sawmill, the young, talented Browns are renowned for their perfect harmonies, even as their temperaments diverge. Pragmatic Jim Ed performs to survive. Gentle Bonnie cares more for family than applause. Maxine is addicted to the limelight, first as a homecoming queen unable to afford a prom dress, then as an aggressively ambitious star, and finally as a reclusive octogenarian cataloging her memories. The story of the trio's grueling and exciting lives, including their complex relationships with Elvis, is utterly compelling. But what makes this novel sing is Bass' sensuous evocations of the glory of sound and the cosmic resonance of music amid the beauty of the wild, and his mythic rendering of Maxine's conflagrations and rise from the ashes. An empathic, breath-catching, and profoundly American tale of creation, destruction, and renewal. --Booklist (Check catalog)