Book News and New Book Reviews
Just a sampling of our new materials (right side)!
by Iris Johansen (Get the Book)
When someone tries to poison Jane MacGuire's beloved dog, Toby, no one suspects a plot to distract Jane from the tragedy about to befall her mother, forensic sculptor Eve Duncan. Yet that's just what happens as Jane and Toby fly to the mysterious Summer Island, where an old friend of Eve's breeds and rehabilitates dogs with heightened powers of empathy and longevity. With Toby in good hands, Jane plans to fly home to Georgia to see Eve and her father, Joe Quinn, until a sniper's bullet leaves her in mortal danger. Distraction firmly set in place, Jim Doane can finally complete his diabolic plan to kidnap Eve and force her to reconstruct the skull of his son Kevin, a sadistic child killer once involved with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Launching yet another spin-off trilogy featuring her intrepid heroine Duncan, with installments planned for July and October of this year, Johansen weaves a complicated plot laden with repeat performers from her best-selling past thrillers. Prior knowledge of earlier works is required for full appreciation. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With a 300,000-copy print run and a seven-figure, yearlong major marketing blitz, the launch of the first book in Johansen's new trilogy will pull in fans. --Booklist
by Michael Pollan (Get the Book)
Pollan's newest treatise on how food reaches the world's tables delves into the history of how humankind turns raw ingredients into palatable and nutritious food. To bring some sense of order to this vast subject, he resurrects classical categories of fire, water, air, and earth. Pollan visits pit masters to learn what constitutes authentic barbecue. An Italian-trained Iranian American teaches him the subtleties of proper cooking in pots, how to coax maximum flavor from humble vegetables, herbs, meats, and water. Baking trains Pollan to watch, listen, and feel the action of living yeasts in doughs. The harnessing of fungi and molds to ferment sauerkraut and beer and produce cheeses illuminates the fine and ever-shifting boundaries between tastiness and rot and how the human palate can be trained. Four recipes accompany the text, and an extensive bibliography offers much deeper exploration. Pollan's peerless reputation as one of America's most compelling expositors of food and human sustainability will boost demand. --Booklist
by Kristin Hannah (Get the Book)
Hannah's Firefly Lane (2008), which centered on best-friends-forever Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey, is arguably her most popular work. Her follow-up gives readers an idea of what life is like for Tully and Kate's daughter Marah in the wake of Kate's death from cancer. It's not a pretty picture. Tully, who walked away from her successful talk show after Kate got sick, finds that her career isn't waiting for her when she is ready to come back. Overwhelmed by grief and shunned by Johnny, Kate's grieving husband who wants Tully to stay away from him and Kate's children, Tully turns to prescription drugs and alcohol. Teenage Marah, once popular and brash, retreats into herself. Then hope comes from the most unlikely of sources: Tully's wayward mother, finally sober and now, on the cusp of 70, possibly ready to be the mother Tully has always craved. Readers will be reaching for tissues as they watch the characters they grew to love in Firefly Lane struggle to make peace with Kate's death and find happiness and love. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: So popular is Firefly Lane that Hannah's highly anticipated sequel will be launched with a 500,000 print run, a national author tour, and an enormous promotional campaign. --Booklist
by Amy Stewart (Get the Book)
Stewart's (Wicked Bugs; Wicked Plants) new book explores the botanical beginnings of our favorite drinks. Like her previous books, it is so rich in details, little-known facts, and actual science, that readers won't even notice they are reading an encyclopedia. Each plant description includes history, propagation, and usage details. Stewart includes sidebars with recipes, field guides, planting instructions, a description of the role of bugs in getting from seed to plant to table, and in-depth historical details. She includes archaeological finds such as the presence of barley beer on clay pot fragments dated to 3400 B.C.E. and the legal details that changed the course of birch beer, which started as a mildly alcoholic beer, morphed into a soft drink during Prohibition, and recently began to be produced as a liqueur. -Verdict With more than 50 drink recipes, and growing tips, this highly entertaining book will please both cocktail enthusiasts and backyard gardeners. The inclusion of rich history throughout will delight armchair historians and the naturally curious.
by Sebastian Faulks (Get the Book)
Geoffrey Talbot, a skilled British cricket player with a gift for languages, has taught at a boys' prep school for just one year before World War II breaks out and he signs up. Billy is seven years old in 1859 when his poverty-stricken parents choose him from among their five children to be sent to a British workhouse. In 2029, nine-year-old Elena Duranti is isolated from her peers by her brilliant mind and all-consuming curiosity; when her father brings home the orphan Bruno, the two soon bond as inseparable siblings. Jeanne is an uneducated, incurious, deeply religious peasant in 19th-century France who has been in service to the same family for as long as she can remember. And finally, in 1971, Brit Jack narrates the story of Anya, a troubled young hippie with a singing voice that stuns her listeners, captures hearts, and derails lives. VERDICT Faulks's (Birdsong) literary artistry is on gorgeous display as he brings to life five wildly disparate protagonists in stories linked by the strength of their characters, all challenged by the horrors of war, of abandonment, of the struggle between trust and faith, and of romance gone shockingly wrong. --Library Journal
by Marina Chapman (Get the Book)
Torn from her family at the tender age of four and abandoned in the Colombian jungle, Chapman must fight to survive. This remarkable memoir, coauthored by Barrett-Lee, is based on years of Chapman's conversations about her brutal childhood with her daughter. Her first few, horrifying days in the jungle are presented in vivid detail, as is the troop of capuchin monkeys with which she found refuge and a sense of community over the years. When she casts her lot with hunters who sell her into slavery, her unfamiliarity with basic human concepts is heartbreaking in its entirety. Fortunately, her monkey upbringing has surprising intersections with the talents of a street kid. A well-paced, cliffhanger approach to telling the story makes for a riveting narrative. Chapman's struggles, no matter how outrageous, are made relatable through the deft descriptions of her thoughts and feelings. A constant theme throughout is her strong desire to be someone. Thrilling, upsetting, and powerful, this memoir is a coming-of-age tale like no other. --Booklist
by Elizabeth Berg (Get the Book)
Any woman who has ever longed to shake off her life and embark on a road trip with female companions will love Tapestry of Fortunes. Cecilia Ross, a motivational speaker who teaches others to live their truth, is unable to follow her own advice. When she receives a postcard out of the blue from the one man she never got over, she realizes it's time to turn her regrets around. She seeks guidance from the fortune-telling devices that she stores in a box in the bedroom closet. Acting on their messages, Cece puts her house on the market, moves in with three women who are equally restless, and takes off with this newfound pack of friends, each on a mission to find the people and opportunities they missed. This book has all the ingredients for a highly satisfying read: a backroads journey, a testament to the power of female friendships, and the possibility of second chances. Berg strips her writing down to what is essential and takes an unflinching look at lifelong regrets. The characters are so completely realized, even the bit players will settle in your heart. High-Demand Backstory: The latest from the best-selling Berg, the author of more than 20 novels, will receive the full array of marketing support from the publisher. --Booklist
by Sonya Sotomayer (Get the Book)
When Sotomayor joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009, she made history as the first Hispanic on the high court. She'd also achieved the highest dream of a Puerto Rican girl growing up in a Bronx housing project longing to someday become a judge. In this amazingly candid memoir, Sotomayor recalls a tumultuous childhood: alcoholic father, emotionally distant mother, aggravating little brother, and a host of aunts, uncles, and cousins, all overseen by her loving, domineering paternal grandmother. When she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at eight years of age, she knew she had to learn to give herself the insulin shots. That determination saw her through Catholic high school, Princeton, and Yale Law School, at each step struggling to reconcile the poverty of her childhood with the privileges she was beginning to enjoy. No rabble-rouser, she nonetheless was active in student groups supporting minorities. At Yale, she learned how to think about jurisprudence, but readers looking for clues to her judicial thinking will be disappointed as she deliberately demurs. She recounts complicated feelings toward her parents and her failed marriage as she advanced to the DA's office, private practice, the district court, and, triumphantly, the Supreme Court. Sotomayor offers an intimate and honest look at her extraordinary life and the support and blessings that propelled her forward. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A media blitz will attend the release of this already newsworthy memoir by the Supreme Court's first Hispanic justice. --Booklist
by Kate Atkinson (Get the Book)
In a radical departure from her Jackson Brodie mystery series, Atkinson delivers a wildly inventive novel about Ursula Todd, born in 1910 and doomed to die and be reborn over and over again. She drowns, falls off a roof, and is beaten to death by an abusive husband but is always reborn back into the same loving family, sometimes with the knowledge that allows her to escape past poor decisions, sometimes not. As Atkinson subtly delineates all the pathways a life or a country might take, she also delivers a harrowing set piece on the Blitz as Ursula, working as a warden on a rescue team, encounters horrifying tableaux encompassing mangled bodies and whole families covered in ash, preserved just like the victims of Pompeii. Alternately mournful and celebratory, deeply empathic and scathingly funny, Atkinson shows what it is like to face the horrors of war and yet still find the determination to go on, with her wholly British characters often reducing the Third Reich to a fuss. From her deeply human characters to her comical dialogue to her meticulous plotting, Atkinson is working at the very top of her game. An audacious, thought-provoking novel from one of our most talented writers. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atkinson's publisher is pulling out all the stops in marketing her latest, which will no doubt draw in many new readers in addition to her Jackson Brodie fans. --Booklist
by Matthew Carr (Get the Book)
Tens of thousands of men, women, and children have undertaken perilous journeys to Europe during the last two decades, traveling dangerous routes across oceans and vast deserts without travel documents, stowed away in packed boats that often capsize, hanging upside down underneath trucks and trains, hidden in the wheel carriages of jet planes. The power of this stirring, authentic account comes from Carr's ability to capture the refugee experience through his face-to-face interviews and his passionate observation of the current scene, including human trafficking, in which women and minors are forced to choose between deportation and exploitation. Now there is electronic technology to screen asylum seekers, but, as always, racism emerges in the form of xenophobia masked as patriotism (even in countries with a history of racial mixing) directed against scum of the earth foreigners who are blamed for crime and unemployment. From today's headlines, there is the bleak irony that the same governments bombing Libya to protect its people were refusing to protect the migrants displaced by the war. Carr quotes pro-refugee groups such as Doctors without Borders and Human Rights Watch on the brutal holding conditions: They aren't allowed to come; they're not allowed to stay; and they're not allowed to leave. A final chapter makes connections with the U.S. The hot issues are sure to spark debate on all sides. --Booklist
by Debbie Macomber (Get the Book)
There is a reason that legions of Macomber fans ask for more Blossom Street books. They fully engage her readers as her characters discover happiness, purpose, and meaning in life. The ninth title, which stands well alone, focuses on Libby Morgan, a driven attorney who has eschewed everything and everybody in her pursuit of a partnership. Summoned to the managing partner's office expecting a well-deserved promotion, she is devastated to be laid off and told to enjoy life. After fruitless months looking for a new job in a bad economy, she joins a gym and reconnects with an old law-school friend. At A Good Yarn, she reconnects with the love of knitting she had learned from her mother, who died when Libby was 13, and makes friends, including 13-year-old Ava, who recently lost her mother. An errand takes Libby to the hospital, where she is recruited to rock newborn babies and where she meets heart-of-stone Dr. Phillip Stone, who has also seen his devotion to work wipe out any personal life. Macomber's feel-good novel, emphasizing interpersonal relationships and putting people above status and objects, is truly satisfying. --Booklist
by David Roberts (Get the Book)
Douglas Mawson is not as well known as Amundsen, Scott, or Shakleton, but as this intense and thrilling epic shows, he deserves a place on the pedestal next to these other great explorers of the Antarctic. Trained as a geologist, the Australian-born Mawson launched an expedition to a largely unexplored region of Antarctica in 1912. The effort soon turned into a grim struggle of endurance and survival against an unforgiving environment. Mawson and his team had to cope with the unpredictability of severe weather, hidden crevices in ice that could easily swallow a man, the loss of their food and other supplies, and their slow physical deterioration. Roberts attributes their survival in no small measure to the guts and determination of Mawson. He is portrayed here as a fascinating combination of reticence and aggressiveness, with an ability to both command and inspire his men. This fast-moving account earns for Mawson and his team a well-deserved place of honor in the so-called heroic age of Antarctic exploration. --Booklist
by Ruth L. Ozeki (Get the Book)
Ozeki has shown herself, in the novels My Year of Meats (1998) and All over Creation (2003), to be a careful, considerate writer who obviously insists on writing what she wants to write and in the fashion she prefers. That special care and concern are also detectable in her latest novel, an intriguing, even beautiful narrative remarkable for its unusual but attentively structured plot. Ruth the character Ruth is a writer living in a remote corner of the Pacific coast of British Columbia who is currently thwarted by writer's block as she attempts to compose a memoir. One day she finds a collection of materials contained in a lunchbox that has washed up on the beach. As if she has unleashed a magical mist, the items she finds inside, namely a journal and a collection of letters, envelop her in the details the dramas of someone else's life. The life she has stumbled into is that of a Japanese teenager, who, believing suicide is the only relief for her teenage angst, nevertheless is determined, before she commits that final act, to write down the story of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun. We go from one story line to the other, back and forth across the Pacific, but the reader never loses place or interest. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The publisher is in love with this novel and will do everything from providing an author tour to presenting extensive radio and online publicity campaigns to bring its virtues to a wide reading audience. --Booklist
Daniel H. Pink (Get the Book)
Pink (A Whole New Mind) has a new message and it is one most people may not want to hear: "We're all in sales now." Like discovering your favorite professor in a box, his fast-moving screed is packed with information, reasons to care about his message, how and why to execute his suggestions, and it's all accentuated with meaningful examples. He introduces a number of key concepts, such as "social cartography" and an update of Robert Cialdini's "contrast principle", to illustrate the importance of sales. Pink then discusses "how to's" via "motivational interviewing" and doles out specific tasks, such as learning how to obtain crucial information by asking better questions. His citations of relevant research studies, quizzes, exercises, and admonitions keep readers involved, active, and ready to reach for additional resources. For those tempted to turn away, Pink's examples of companies that didn't remain current, like Encyclopedia Britannica (remember them?), are a wakeup call and really drive his point home. Even if readers only absorb Pink's section on types of sales pitches, they'll understand why this book deserves a good, long look. --Publishers Weekly
by Joyce Carol Oates (Get the Book)
Soon after arriving at Princeton University, where she continues to teach, Oates completed Bellefleur (1980), launching a series of sly gothic novels. One manuscript, The Crosswicks Horror, was left unfinished, and Oates has now resurrected it as a lush, arch, and blistering fusion of historical fact, supernatural mystery, and devilish social commentary. High-strung and ambitious Woodrow Wilson is the president of Princeton. Anxious over festering conflicts and appalled by what he learns about his distant relative and protege after the nearby lynching of an African American man and his pregnant sister, Wilson seeks advice from retired Reverend Winslow Slade, who would rather think about the upcoming wedding of his granddaughter, Annabel. But this fair maiden is in danger of falling under the spell of a handsome stranger with otherworldly eyes. As an elite WASP enclave finds itself caught in the grip of inexplicable terror, readers will be bewitched by a fantastically dramatic, supremely imaginative plot rife with ghosts, vampires, demons, and human folly. Oates brings her nightshade humor and extraordinary fluency in eroticism and violence, American history and literature (her magnetizing characters include Mark Twain, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair) to this piercing novel of the devastating toll of repression and prejudice, sexism and class warfare. A diabolically enthralling and subversive literary mash-up. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Propelled by a lavish national tour and multimedia campaign, The Accursed is destined to be one of Oates' most widely appealing and avidly read novels. --Booklist
John Mullan (Get the Book)
Nearly 200 years after her death, Jane Austen continues to inspire a publishing boomlet. Books in the nonfiction column range from the lightweight to the academic. This entry from the author of How Novels Work (2006)is just right. Mullan poses 20 questions related to strategies Austen employs to reveal character or advance plot. Chapters examine, for example, How Much Does Age Matter?, Is There Any Sex in Jane Austen?, and Why Do Her Plots Rely on Blunders? Some chapters deal with matters related to the characters' milieu, such as the games they play and the books they read. Mullan isn't concerned with explaining Regency-era customs, however, except to make clear to the modern reader what would have been apparent to a reader in Austen's time. The focus is always on showing how Austen puts various devices to work in the service of a story's arc or a character's psychology. Mullan's close reading will provide serious fans with plenty of new insights for the next time they pick up one of Austen's books. --Booklist
by Alexander Söderberg (Get the Book)
Get ready for another round of hype in which one more heavily promoted Scandinavian thriller will be touted as the next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It's a shame, really, because this gripping crime novel, the first in a trilogy, deserves to stand completely on its own. Yes, it's set largely in Stockholm, and, yes, it stars a woman of remarkable strength and resiliency, but Soderberg, a veteran screenwriter, is a very different kind of writer than investigative journalist Larsson; this novel is much faster paced than Dragon Tattoo, and while the multiple characters are richly complex, the narrative rumbles ever forward without Larsson's emphasis on backstory and research techniques. When we first meet Sophie Brinkman, an unassuming nurse and single mother, she seems the polar opposite of Lisbeth Salander. That changes slowly but inexorably after Sophie gets to know one of her patients, the suave Hector Guzman, a charming family man but also as Sophie eventually discovers the head of an international crime ring. (Comparisons to the Corleone family are also inevitable and not entirely unjustified.) Soon enough, Sophie finds herself in the middle of a gang war as Guzman's family battles a rival Russian contingent. Throw in a gaggle of rogue cops and Sophie's old boyfriend, who turns up out of nowhere with a history of his own, and you have a multistranded plot that holds together as exquisitely as finely wound silk. But, as with the Larsson trilogy, it's the woman at the center who sparks the engine. By novel's end, Sophie has realized that she was bigger than she had dared to see. We see it, too, and are ready to follow her anywhere. --Booklist
This valuable collection includes five case studies focused on suicide missions. These are followed by three papers aimed at understanding motivation, from the viewpoints of both the individuals who kill themselves and the organizations that usually send them on their way. Mia Bloom, Robert Pape, and Ami Pedahzur are among the authors who have written first-rate books about suicide terrorism, i.e., terrorist attacks that can only be successfully completed if the perpetrators die in the course of their operations, and attacks directed against noncombatants on behalf of such insurgent organizations as Hezbollah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and al Qaeda. This volume departs from this format by including essays about the Japanese Kamikaze in the last two years of WW II and the self-immolations of Buddhist priests during the Vietnam War. The Kamikazes, of course, were instruments of official government policy, while the Vietnamese priests chose to make a point by killing themselves, not others. The three interpretive essays offer insightful comments on individual motivation as well as on the goals of the various organizations that promote the killings. --Choice (Get the Book)
by Erin kelly (Get the Book)
The MacBride family has only known privilege and success father Rowan is headmaster at the elite Saxby School, matriarch Lydia is a respected magistrate, and their grown children have been afforded the luxury of being able to do as they please in life. When Lydia dies from cancer, a sinister chill takes over the family, and not just because they are in mourning Darcy, a mysterious figure from their past, has decided to exact revenge against the entire clan. Born in poverty to a deranged mother, Darcy was denied a scholarship to Saxby and has vowed revenge on the MacBrides, holding them responsible for every little thing that's gone wrong since then. As the family gathers at their rural vacation home to spread Lydia's ashes, they are unaware that their tormentor has put mechanisms in place to bring them down one by one. As with her previous psychological thrillers, Kelly (The Dark Rose, 2011) shows a knack for creating realistic, creepy characters that make readers squirm. Fans of Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Ruth Rendell will be lining up to read this one. --Booklist
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Get the Book)
Oxford professor Mayer-Schonberger (Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Internet Age) and Economist data editor Cukier survey the changes to modern life created by our increased capacity to gather and process data. Arguing that the need for statistical sampling is now behind us due to modern computing capacity, the authors discuss how big data's capabilities supersede past methods in applications like tracking the spread of the flu or credit card fraud. Even the human body can be "datafied," with modern applications that use a person's walking gait as a password or monitor body tremors to track the progression of neurological disorders. The rise of big data has helped to create several types of companies: those that own data, those that analyze data, and those that know how to use data to find the answers to new problems. The authors review the risks of this new trend, from privacy concerns to over-reliance on numbers to changes in an individual's responsibility to society. They write with enthusiasm, call for new career paths for algorithmists, and close with a prediction that big data will change the world, from helping solve climate change to improving global health care accessibility. --Booklist
by Mohsin Hamid (Get the Book)
Ambition rules in this playful third novel from PEN/Hemingway Award finalist Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). The novel follows the unnamed narrator's journey from his village childhood to becoming a corporate superstar in the big city. The novel is told in the second person, the narrator ushering us through a life in an unidentified developing Asian country while elucidating the many conditions that must be met to become filthy rich. The hero seems to be on the right track; still, he must navigate the usual obstacles in life that could hinder the way to his final goal: family illness, bad luck, and most dangerously, love. The protagonist is merely a teenager when he meets his ideal woman, but this pretty girl's life has a similar arc as the hero's. Though readers may find it frustrating that they never overlap for long, the intermittent intersections provide them an anchor to the lives they left in desperation. The book takes its formal cues from the self-help genre, but the adopting of that form's unceasing optimism also nullifies any sense of depth or struggle. Fortunately, Hamid offers a subtle and rich look at the social realities of developing countries, including corruption, poverty, and how economic development affects daily life from top to bottom. --Publishers Weekly
by Bobby Knight (Get the Book)
Knight's success as a college basketball coach is unquestioned. He was college basketball's Coach of the Year five times and won three NCAA championships. He's currently a basketball analyst for ESPN. Knight's success was built on preparation. Recognizing that offensive success could be fleeting, he always emphasized defense, which he describes as making the appropriate response to the negativity one can encounter on offense. So negative thinking about offense leads one to focus, as coaches and players, on defense. See? It's a conceit that lends itself more to a catchy title than an application in sports, life, or business. What we're really left with here is solid, commonsensical advice on preparation how to move quickly from one success to the next challenge rather than basking in the afterglow, as well as how to use losses (failures) as inspiration while moving through life. Knight sprinkles personal anecdotes throughout to illustrate his points and concludes each chapter with a couple aphorisms he calls Knight's Nuggets. (For example: One more beer can't hurt . . . unless you're driving. ) This is an easily digestible self-help book by a very successful man. The advice is generally useful, except for the Nuggets. Hold the Nuggets, next time, Mr. Knight. There's a negative you can build on. --Booklist
by Therese Fowler (Get the Book)
Novelist Fowler (Exposure, 2011) considered it fate that she would write about Zelda, the wife of celebrated writer Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald: the author's mother and the famous flapper passed away on the same day. In this frothy offering, readers glimpse the glorious lives of the rich and famous of the Jazz Age. From the moment gorgeous Zelda laid eyes on her officer husband, her days were filled with magical moments, as Scott began to receive critical acclaim, and the pair navigated a social circuit graced by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Tallulah Bankhead, and Gertrude Stein. But the high life dropped low when Fitzgerald's good fortune began to fizzle, and his already excessive drinking increased. As her husband grew more distant and distracted, Zelda fell into the arms of a charming Frenchman, but she gave up the romance in hopes of saving her marriage. Could the dazzling literary It couple ever find its way back to bliss? Fowler renders rich period detail in this portrayal of a fascinating woman both blessed and cursed by fame.--booklist
