The gap year : a novel

 by Sarah Bird. With her daughter in the throes of senior-year jitters, Cam Lightsey reflects on the events of the previous 12 months that catapulted the abnormally headstrong Aubrey into a downward spiral of disrespect and deception. As a single mother, Cam had always prided herself on the open camaraderie that had existed between them, but as Aubrey's attitude continues to deteriorate, Cam begins second-guessing the choices she made, from moving into a pretentious suburb to dissolving her marriage to Martin some 16 years ago. For her part, Aubrey pinpoints her transition from Marching Band Geek Girl to Miss Popularity to the day when Parkhaven High's football hero, Tyler Moldenhauer, singled her out for special attention. When Aubrey's involvement with Tyler begins to jeopardize her departure for college, Cam desperately wishes for help in handling her wayward daughter, only to receive guidance from an unexpected source. The novel is told from alternating points of view, and Bird's handling of the familiar parent-teen clash of wills is accomplished with memorable, memorably realistic poignancy. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Tolstoy and the purple chair : my year of magical reading

 by Nina Sankovitch. Reading was paramount in Sankovitch's Evanston, Illinois, home, so she turned to books for solace in the wake of her oldest sister's cruel death at age 46. While Sankovitch knew she could rely on books for wisdom, for succor, and for escape, she realized that as the mother of four sons, and as an attorney on hiatus, she needed structure to cope with her grief. Hence the book-a-day project. Nestled in her beloved old purple chair, Sankovitch read a book each day, primarily novels, then reviewed each title on her book-exchange website, Read All Day. She now recounts the year of magical reading in a beautifully fluid, reflective, and astute memoir that gracefully combines affecting family history--her parents immigrated to America after surviving WWII in Belgium and Poland with expert testimony about how books open our minds to the complexity and entirety of the human experience. Sankovitch's reading list in all its dazzling variety is top-notch, and every ardent reader will find her perceptive thoughts about stories, remembrance, resilience, and book bliss incisive and affirming. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

What Alice forgot

 by Liane Moriarty. Twenty-nine-year-old Alice Love is pregnant with her first child, adores her husband, Nick, and has never set foot inside a spinning studio. Thirty-nine-year-old Alice Love suffers a sudden fall in her Friday spin class, wakes up with a splitting headache, and finds out she has three children and is in the middle of custody proceedings. Without any concrete memories of the past 10 years, Alice tries to figure out how her free-spirited 29-year-old self became a volunteer-coordinating, spin-class-attending 39-year-old woman. Like Sophie Kinsella's Remember Me? (2008), What Alice Forgot is an often funny, sometimes heartrending, deeply personal portrait of a woman attempting to unravel her own mystery. Moriarty is an admirably versatile author, using various characters to offer readers a full picture of Alice's life even when Alice isn't entirely sure of her own surroundings. Before your friends are talking about it, before Hollywood casts the inevitable screen adaptation, pick up What Alice Forgot and enjoy a thoroughly rewarding, deftly executed walk through the last decade of Alice Love's life. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

A tiger in the kitchen : a memoir of food and family

 by Cheryl Lu-lien Tan. Tan embraced the rebelliousness associated with the Year of the Tiger, leaving her native Singapore first to study and then to work in the United States-not as a lawyer as her father had hoped but as a journalist. A desire to reconnect with her family and culture led her on a yearlong project to learn to cook the food of her childhood, commuting between her homeland and her chosen home, taking "lessons" in Singaporean cooking from her aunts. In this humorous and heartfelt memoir, she charts her progress with a deft hand, whether focusing on cooking, negotiating family dynamics, or what she thinks of herself. Tan, who also maintains a blog of the same name (www.-atigerinthekitchen.com), includes ten recipes. VERDICT Those wishing to school themselves in the dishes of Singapore are better off with a cookbook, but this warm, witty chronicle of growing up and finding one's place between cultures will be widely enjoyed. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

Anatomy of a disappearance : a novel

 by Hisham Matar. The author of In the Country of Men (2007) limns a boy's complex relationship with his father. Nuri El-Alfi is 10 when his mother dies, leaving him in the care of his remote father, Kamal, a former minister in an unnamed Arab country's regime who is now a dissident living in exile in Cairo. It is Nuri who first catches sight of Mona, a beautiful young woman who captivates him when he is 12. Kamal romances and then marries Mona, inciting deep jealousy in Nuri, who is sent off to boarding school soon after. Two years later, Nuri travels to Geneva to meet Mona and his father for a holiday. Mona arrives first, but his father never shows up, and the pair discovers in the newspaper that Kamal has been abducted from a Swiss woman's apartment. Over the next decade, Nuri is left to patch together the truth about his father's political and amorous activities, leading him to a startling revelation. A subtle and graceful character study. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Precious objects : a story of diamonds, family and a way of life

 by Alicia Oltuski. Oltuski's fascinating look at the diamond industry weaves together an intricate, comprehensive study of the origins and future of the trade and a family narrative. Oltuski's father is a veteran jeweler in New York's Forty-Seventh Street Diamond District, one of the major centers of the industry. Here deals based on reputation and connection are haggled over, and transactions closed by spoken word. Oltuski explores the intricacy of such negotiations as well as the nature of the industry, from its deep history to such more current controversies as those concerning conflict or blood diamonds and the effect of list pricing in the marketplace. Oltuski also covers basic diamond science and how emerging technologies are changing the way the precious gems are manufactured. Throughout, she highlights a variety of persons who rely on diamonds for income, including her father, and how the ever-changing industry, rooted in old traditions, poses threats to their livelihoods. An inclusive, intimate account of a complex business. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The accident : a novel

 by Linwood Barclay. Building contractor Glen Barber is shattered to learn that his wife, Sheila, has died in an automobile accident that she caused, apparently the result of drinking and driving. Desperately searching for answers (his wife, he knows, would never have driven if she had been drinking, and she was not a habitual drinker), he soon discovers that the mother of his young daughter was not the woman he believed she was. Thematically, the novel is similar to Barclay's Never Look Away (in which a man also discovers that his wife has a hidden past), but this one is not a retread but rather an exploration of the theme from a different angle. Fans of the author's previous novels will find The Accident just as tightly plotted and economically written as its predecessors. Barclay definitely belongs in the company of Harlan Coben, Lisa Gardner, and Gregg Hurwitz. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The takedown : a suburban mom, a coal miner's son, and the unlikely demise of Colombia's brutal Norte Valle Cartel

 by Jeffrey Robinson. Organized crime expert Robinson (The Sink) tells the dramatic saga of an assistant U.S. attorney and a federal agent who bring down the violent drug lords of the largest drug empire since the heady days of Pablo Escobar. Bonnie Klapper, a hard-nosed prosecutor (not your run-of-the-mill "suburban mom"), with Agent Romedio "Rooney" Viola, plows ahead with her dogged 12-year campaign against the Colombian bosses and couriers, isolating their U.S.-based operatives and turning them to provide state's evidence against their superiors. Robinson writes candidly of the national appetite for illegal drugs: "Organized crime is the planet's biggest business and North America is its most lucrative market." Klapper and Viola wage war with the corrupt Colombian authorities and the joint American law enforcement agencies, trapping the top killers Guzman, Monsalve, and Bustamente, into snitching on the overlords of the Norte Valle Cartel. Impressive from start to finish, the book is a tribute to Robinson's storytelling and the courage of the crime-fighting duo. 8 pages of b&w photos. --Publishers Weekly (Check Catalog)

The lantern : a novel

 by Deborah Lawrenson.  Eve and Dom meet and instantly fall deeply in love. So when Dom decides to move to Provence to a ramshackle farmhouse, Les Genevriers, Eve can do nothing but follow. Once there, mysterious scents waft through the house, a party guest raises disturbing questions about Dom's former wife, Rachel, and Dom vehemently refuses to talk about her. Add to that the isolation of the house and mysterious bones found under an old concrete pool, and you have all the makings of a modern gothic novel with plenty of shadows, figures in the night, and a ghostly lantern that appears on the path to the house. The story unfolds in Eve's modern voice and the diary of Benedicte, former owner of Les Genevriers. The two stories move slowly together, revealing just enough to keep the reader on edge. Lawrenson builds characters and suspense with a deft hand, creating an atmospheric and moody story, with the beauty of Provence and its culture, past and present, as backdrop. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Incognito : the secret lives of the brain

 by David Eagleman. Neuroscientist Eagleman wants us to take a look inside our own heads. We know there's a brain there, and we know some things about what it does, but there's a lot of unexplored territory, too. We know we think and imagine, but how do we do these things? Why will we perceive things photographs, say, or events one way under a certain set of circumstances but a different way in different circumstances? What is the unconscious mind, and how does it work? You might as well know up front that there aren't any concrete answers here; this is one of those books where the exploration is the adventure and the journey its own reward. Written in clear, precise language (even when the author is tackling some seriously complicated stuff), the book is sure to appeal to readers with an interest in psychology and the human mind, but it will also please people who just want to know, with a little more clarity, what is going on inside their own skulls. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Sex on the Moon

A promising NASA recruit throws everything away for a girl, illustrating the fascinating consequences when science, ambition, and starry-eyed love collide. In bestselling author Mezrich's telling, Thad Roberts, while at the University of Utah, became determined to be an astronaut and threw himself into science courses, He left his wife behind when he was accepted to the elite Johnson Space Center Cooperative Program in Houston, the training ground for NASA scientists. Despite his lack of an engineering background, Roberts excelled in the life sciences department. While cataloguing samples, he noticed the moon rocks NASA categorized as "trash"samples returned after experiments. Then Roberts met and fell in love with a new recruit, Rebecca, and planned to give her the moon, or at least its profits, by stealing the "used" moon rocks. Roberts devised the heist and arranged an online sale with a mineral collector in Belgium. The suspicious buyer alerted the FBI, which set up a sting, and Roberts was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Mezrich (The Accidental Billionaires, from which The Social Network was adapted) has perfected his intensely readable brand of nonfiction: talented, often unscrupulous, young people skyrocketing to the top only to tumble back to earth. (July) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information. - Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Fallen

Still more proof, if any were needed, that the most monstrous demons in Grant County, Ga., are lurking in the master bedroom.
Faith Mitchell, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, returns home late from a training seminar to find her house trashed, her baby daughter locked in the shed, a man lying dead on the laundry-room floor—Faith herself will kill two other intruders before they can escape, and a third corpse will turn up in the trunk of the family car—and her mother gone. Capt. Evelyn Mitchell was eased into retirement from the Atlanta PD years ago after her narcotics squad was implicated in a web of corruption. Two of her former colleagues are doing time; a third, former Det. Boyd Spivey, is on death row for murder. So it's not all that surprising that gang-bangers would have broken into her house looking for a big score. But why are their surviving colleagues in Los Texicanos and the Yellow Rebels suddenly so determined to annihilate each other, and how does Evelyn's abduction fit into the picture? "I think we must be caught in the middle of some kind of war," Faith's boss, GBI deputy director Amanda Wagner, tells Faith's partner, endlessly troubled Will Trent. The mounting body count, however, pales beside the ferocious conflicts among regulars in this high-octane series (Broken, 2010, etc.). Faith's brother Zeke, returning from an Air Force posting, instantly resumes his long feud with her. Will is alternately abused by Amanda Wagner and his spiteful wife Angie. And Faith's climactic showdown with her mother's abductor will reveal far more personal motives for the runaway mayhem than she ever could have imagined.
Ex–County Coroner Dr. Sara Linton does seem to be managing a break from her own Job-like sufferings, at least for this installment. - Kirkus Reviews (Check Catalog)

Absolute Monarchs

From the disciple Peter to the reigning Benedict, accomplished British historian Norwich (The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean, 2006, etc.) fashions a spirited, concise chronicle of the accomplishments of the most noteworthy popes.
The author is comfortable navigating this vast terrain, which is essentially the history of Christianity—and he even manages to make the numbing litany of events palatable. Moreover, Norwich is not above questioning historical interpretation, such as over the controversy over John Paul I's death in 1978—was he murdered? With Jesus' pronouncement to his disciple Simon, that "Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church," the leaders of the fledgling Christian church began to organize themselves. Norwich doesn't dwell on St. Paul, but subsequent church elders in the first two centuries CE were Levantines—centered in the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean—working to establish churches despite Roman persecution and mostly in Asia. The emperor Constantine's adoption of Christianity in the fourth century, and construction of a basilica dedicated to St. Peter on the Vatican Hill, boosted Christianity's profile enormously. However, marauding hordes laid waste to Rome over the centuries, and early popes had to solidify doctrine and orthodoxy, notably in the time of Gregory the Great and Leo II (who crowned Charlemagne). Norwich lingers over the schism between the Western and Eastern churches, the leaders of the Crusades, the seven popes who resided in Avignon, the rebuilding of the Roman Church during the Renaissance beginning under Nicholas V, the "monsters" (Alexander, Julius), the patrons of the arts (Leo X) and the rulers during the Counter-Reformation, who checked the tide of Protestantism. The author gracefully navigates through the challenges of the Age of Reason, revolution, the Risorgimento and the World Wars, examining the papal responses—e.g., Pius XII's silence in the face of the persecution of the Jews.
Norwich doesn't skirt controversies, ancient and present, in this broad, clear-eyed assessment. - Kirkus Reviews (Check Catalog)

Silver Sparrow

In her third novel set in Atlanta, Jones (The Untelling, 2005, etc.) writes about two African-American half sisters, only one of whom knows that the other exists until their father's double life starts to unravel.
When James Witherspoon, the owner of a successful limousine service, and Gwendolyn Yarboro have their marriage ceremony in 1969 four months after the birth of their baby Dana, Gwen knows that James already has a wife and an even younger baby. While James, who visits regularly if never often enough, and Gwen, a practical nurse, make sure Dana has every middle-class advantage, Dana grows up aware that her parents' "marriage" is a secret and that she cannot openly claim her father; James' devoted stepbrother Raleigh is listed on her birth certificate. Gwen and Dana habitually spy on James' legitimate wife Laverne and daughter Chaurisse, who live in blissful ignorance of James's bigamy. By adolescence, Dana, who attends a prestigious magnate high school and wants to attend Mount Holyoke, increasingly resents the plainer, less gifted Chaurisse, whose needs always seem to come first for James. After meeting Chaurisse by accident at a science fair, Dana finds ways for their paths to intersect. When she finally "befriends" Chaurisse, Chaurisse is thrilled that a popular girl likes her enough to visit her at home. Visits happen during hours Dana knows James will not be there. Dana's adolescent plans, for acceptance as much as revenge, inevitably go awry, but this is less a tragedy than a case of survival and making do. While Dana is at the novel's center, Jones gives both girls' points of view, allowing readers to empathize with each of James's families. Chaurisse may not know about Dana, but she is far from blissful in her ignorance, and her mother Laverne has endured more than her fair share of suffering. James is harder to fathom but also hard to hate.
Jones beautifully evokes Atlanta in the 1980s while creating gritty, imperfect characters whose pain lingers in the reader's heart. - Kirkus Reviews (Check Catalog)

Haiti after the Earthquake

From the UN Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and members of his team, a searing firsthand account of the earthquake and its aftermath.
Farmer (Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader, 2010, etc.) presents consequences of the outrage that U.S. law—e.g., the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961—makes it impossible to do what needs to be done in a country like Haiti. Relief and reconstruction funds cannot go to government agencies or to rebuild government infrastructure; instead, they must be funneled into NGOs. Haiti's government, writes the author, is operating out of a small police station on a shoestring budget. More than 40 percent of government employees were killed, and 28 out of 29 ministries were leveled. Yet, under the ruling law, because of Haiti's history of human-rights violations, the United States cannot contribute to rebuilding government infrastructure or paying public employees, including doctors, nurses and medical technicians. The NGOs and volunteers who receive the funds can't discuss policy priorities, make laws or coordinate the scale of activity required, and they siphon funds into overhead and operating costs. Farmer has been involved in Haiti for 25 years, during which time he has warned policy makers about the country's precarious position. Unfortunately, the results have been very close to what he was predicted for years—at least 2 million people are still displaced, one-third of the population is directly affected and cholera has become a major problem. Other contributors to this book include Edwidge Danticat, Evan Lyon and Dubique Kobel.
An eye-opener of a report and a wake-up call that change is needed. - Kirkus Reviews (Check Catalog)

The Kid

Fifteen years and an Oscar-nominated movie adaptation have passed by since Push, and, with Precious long dead, Sapphire unfurls the story of her son, Jamal Abdul Louis Jones. Orphan Jamal winds up at a foster home where he's mocked and beaten to the point of having to be hospitalized. Fast forward, and Abdul, going by the name J.J., is at the St. Ailanthus School for boys, where he's sexually abused by priests and in turn sexually abuses a couple of boys at the school. When J.J. is thrown out of the school, he struggles to handle his own conflicting desires and the rigors of getting by in a tough world by himself, often with very little comprehension of consequences. J.J. is a great creation, if a sometimes frustrating one: Sapphire excels at getting readers into the head of a frightened, enraged, and frustrated wild child, but that isn't always the best vantage point from which to watch this heartbreaking story unfold. This is a sobering and unflinching study of the legacy of abuse, and while the narration can leave readers more puzzled than piqued, it's a harrowing story. (July) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information. - Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

Of Thee I Zing

While Laura Ingraham was walking through a Northern Virginia shopping mall one Saturday afternoon, it all became clear to her. Everywhere she turned, she saw signs of the impending disaster: zombie teens texting each other across a cafe table; a man having his eyebrows threaded at a kiosk; a fiftyish woman shoe-horned into a tube top and skinny jeans; and a storefront ad featuring a Victoria's Secret model spilling out of her push-up bra and into the faces of young passersby. Ingraham wondered to herself, "Is this it? Is this what our forefathers fought for? What my parents struggled for? I wonder if Victoria's Secret is still having that two-for-one sale?" A menacing force surrounds us. We see it, we feel it, we know it. The country we love is in grave peril. While politicians and "experts" prattle on about the debt crisis at home, and terrorism abroad, a more insidious homegrown threat is emerging. It endangers our future and undermines our present. The uncomfortable truth is: We have become our own worst enemy. The culture we have created is now turning on us. We're on the verge of drowning in our ignorance, arrogance, gluttony . . . can you believe there are only three shots of vanilla in a Caramel Macchiato?!?
Now in an act of patriotic intervention the most-listened-to woman in talk radio casts her satirical eye upon all that ails American society. In this sharp-witted, comic romp, Laura Ingraham takes you on a guided tour through ten levels of our cultural hell.
You know we're in trouble when . . .
- Airplane seats shrink--just as the passengers expand.
- Celebrity baby names go from the peculiar (Apple, Stetson, and Daisy Boo) to the pathetic (Bamboo, Blanket, and Bronx).
- People meticulously tend their virtual crops on Farmville, while their children eat takeout.
- "Breaking News" usually means it happened yesterday.
- The weddings last longer than the marriages.
- Facebook has become a verb and reading has become an ancient art form.
"Of Thee I Zing "is cultural commentary too funny to ignore, igniting a national conversation long past due. America, your cultural recovery begins here. - Publisher Marketing (Check catalog)

Adrenaline

Edgar-finalist Abbott's outstanding tale of high intrigue set primarily in London and Amsterdam, the first in a series, introduces Sam Capra, a London-based CIA agent. When a terrorist group bombs the agency's British headquarters, killing 20 people, the authorities believe that Sam's pregnant wife, Lucy, also a U.S. spy, helped the terrorists and disappeared with them. Immediately suspected of being part of the bombing plot, Sam winds up in secret CIA custody and tortured. Refusing to believe Lucy has turned traitor, Sam finally escapes and begins his headlong search for her and his son, whom he believes has now been born. Sam offs terrorists, cracks wise, and shows a genuinely moving concern for his wife and son. Abbott (Panic), displaying a greater mastery of the genre than in previous books, hits full stride early on and never lets up. Readers who thrive on a relentless narrative pace and a straight line to the finish won't be disappointed. (July) Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information. - Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

by Erik Larson. Best-selling author Larson ("The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America") turns his considerable literary nonfiction skills to the experiences of U.S. ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd and his family in Berlin in the early years of Hitler's rule. Dodd had been teaching history at the University of Chicago when he was summoned by FDR to the German ambassadorship. Larson, using lots of archival as well as secondary-source research, focuses on Dodd's first year in Berlin and, using Dodd's diary, chillingly portrays the terror and oppression that slowly settled over Germany in 1933. Dodd quickly realized the Nazis' evil intentions; his daughter Martha, in her mid-20s, was initially smitten by the courteous SS soldiers surrounding her family, but over time she, too, became disenchanted with the brutality of the regime. Along the way Larson provides portraits based on primary-source impressions of Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hitler himself. He also traces the Dodds' lives after their time in Germany.
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Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World

by Robin Wright. To tell the story of the new world order forming in many Islamic nations, Wright begins in Tunisia, where the self-immolation of fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi inspired his angry fellow citizens to oust President Ben Ali in what is now referred to as "The Jasmine Revolution." Just a few weeks later, bloggers and activists in Egypt used Facebook and Twitter to organize protests against the government of Hosni Mubarak. Similar protests broke out in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and other countries. Wright posits that the Muslim world is currently experiencing a sentiment of counter-jihad, "a struggle within the faith itself to rescue Islam's central values from a small but virulent minority." In Part Two of the book, Wright examines the cultural significance of anti-extremism, from the lyrics of the Tunisian hip-hop artist El General, to the feminist interpretations of the Koran by Amina Wadud. Maz Jabroni and other comedians on the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour are "waging their own often quirky campaigns against extremism," and creating alliances across cultural and religious lines. Part Three sums up what is at stake for these nations in turmoil and questions the Obama administration's wavering policies in addressing these international uprisings. Wright is an expert on the subject and this book is an accessible and riveting account for readers looking to learn more about the post-9/11 Islamic world.
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For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics

by Walter Lewin. A pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy, the author has been teaching three core physics courses at MIT since 1966, when he first came to the United States from Holland. Lewin writers that physics is "fundamentally an experimental science." A skeptic about the claims of string-theory proponents, who, he writes, have "yet to come up with a single experiment, a single prediction," the author contrasts it to his approach as an experimentalist and as a teacher whose aim is to explain "the remarkable ways in which physics illuminates the workings of the world." This has led him to a unique style of teaching in which he uses dramatic demonstrations in order to engage students' interest and awaken their excitement, while de-emphasizing mathematical formulas. He tells how, in a lecture on Newton's laws, he shows the difference between mass and weight by having a student on a scale stand on tiptoe, causing the scale to register an apparent weight gain. The lecture material covered in the book—from Galileo to rainbows to sound waves to electromagnetism—is accompanied by online links to videos of his classroom lectures. In the last third of the narrative, he gives a fascinating account of his own experimental work.
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Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean

French and Ottoman historian Mansel ("Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453–1924") re-creates the daily life and political idiosyncrasies of the three jewels of the Levant: Smyrna (now Izmir, in Turkey); Alexandria, Egypt; and Beirut, Lebanon. Beginning at the start of the Ottoman Empire's relationship with France in the 16th century, Mansel examines thoroughly each city and its people as a study in contrasts. Although Europeans and Ottomans, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, lived and worked side by side in these Levantine ports, all was not cosmopolitan bliss. Mansel skillfully highlights the nationalist, religious, and cultural conflicts that plagued Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut well into the 20th century, while at the same time still acknowledging that the diversity of religion, nationalities, and ideas that coexisted in the Levant existed nowhere else in the world. VERDICT This is a rich piece of historical storytelling that will satisfy scholars, travelers, readers of travel literature, and everyone in between. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in this complicated region of the world.—Veronica Arellano, California, MD Copyright 2011 Reed Business Information.
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