Glock : the rise of America's gun

 by Paul Barrett,  As most people probably know, America's gun, so called here because it is the sidearm most favored by law enforcement, the criminal element, and the entertainment industry, is not an American weapon. It's Austrian, designed 30-odd years ago by a radiator-factory manager who didn't know enough about guns to know he was breaking all kinds of rules when he built the thing. The Glock, named for its inventor, was a lame-duck entry in an open competition to design a new sidearm for the army. To the surprise of everyone, the Glock was named the winner. A handful of years later, the FBI, reeling from the massacre of several of its agents by better-armed criminals, was in the market for a new, more effective sidearm. They, like the Austrian army, chose the Glock for its simplicity of design, its near-perfect performance, and its ability to hold more ammunition than the standard revolver. This was the jumping-off point for a marketing blitz that catapulted Glock to international superstardom. The book is an informative, frequently surprising account of the evolution of America's gun culture and the gun that helped define it. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The orphan master's son : a novel

 by Adam Johnson.  Pak Jun Do lives with his father at a North Korean work camp for orphans. In a nation in which every citizen serves the state, orphans routinely get the most dangerous jobs. So it is for Jun Do, who becomes a tunnel soldier, trained to fight in complete darkness in the tunnels beneath the DMZ. But he is reassigned as a kidnapper, snatching Japanese citizens with special skills, such as a particular opera singer or sushi chef. Failure as a kidnapper could lead directly to the prison mines. But in Johnson's fantastical, careening tale, Jun Do manages to impersonate Commander Ga, the country's greatest military hero, rival of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and husband of Sun Moon, North Korea's only movie star. Informed by extensive research and travel to perhaps the most secretive nation on earth, Johnson has created a remarkable novel that encourages the willing suspension of disbelief. As Jun Do, speaking as Ga, puts it, people have been trained to accept any reality presented to them. Johnson winningly employs different voices, with the propagandizing national radio station serving as a mad Greek chorus. Descriptions of everyday privations and barbarities are matter of fact, and Jun Do's love for Sun Moon reads like a fairy tale. Part adventure, part coming-of-age tale, and part romance, The Orphan Master's Son is a triumph on every level. --Booklist (Check catalog)

Invisible men : men's inner lives and the consequences of silence

 by Michael E. Addis Drawing from decades of research and clinical practice focused on men's mental health, Addis (psychology, Clark University) offers ample evidence of the negative consequences of socializing men to ignore or repress their feelings. The damage to men's physical and mental well-being, to their relationships, and to society as a whole, he argues, compels us to change how boys and men are raised and treated. Social learning and systems theories underlie the easy, nonthreatening strategies for addressing men's silence, and are designed for men as well as those who care about them. Each chapter is augmented by reference notes and an excellent summarization of the main points. The book concludes by making the case for addressing men's emotional invisibility as a public health issue with statistical links to school and societal violence, suicide and divorce rates, and addictions to drugs and alcohol. The volume could have been improved by a list of recommended readings. VERDICT Highly recommended for general readers and mental health professionals alike. Provides accessible rationales and strategies, based on extensive research and experience, for addressing this set of personal and societal issues. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

The last nude

 by Ellis Avery. Those eyes! Those lips! That hair! Tamara de Lempicka's iconic Jazz Age paintings that immortalize Rafaela Fano in her nude glory (especially The Dream and La Belle Rafaela) now see glittering, luminescent life in Avery's novel, a riveting lesbian love story of heart-stopping passion, rapture, and stunning duplicity. In 1920s Paris, Tamara, her world lost to WWI, is painting for anyone who'd lost a world, too . . . making our heaven myself, stroke by stroke. Avery (The Teahouse Fire, 2007) places lovers Tamara and Rafaela within a richly portrayed circle of cultural touchstones, including Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney, Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Sylvia Beach, the American expat who published James Joyce's Ulysses and founded Shakespeare & Co., a bookstore-haven for artistic souls. Against that brightly pigmented background, this artist-model lovers' tale is as subtle and seductive as the silk Rafaela listens to with her hands as she designs a slip for her beloved, as stirring as Rafaela (whose survival depends on her beauty), radiant after her first sex for pleasure, seeing Paris, a rose-windowed city, and thinking, This always. Just this. Avery's breathtaking shimmer of first love and its aftermath will turn heads. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Learning to live out loud : a memoir

 by Piper Laurie.  The author is probably familiar to most readers as Carrie White's mother in 1976's Carrie (for which she received the second of her three Oscar nominations) and for her role in the television series Twin Peaks (for which she was nominated twice for an Emmy Award). But Laurie has been acting since she was a girl, securing a contract with Universal-International when she was 17 years old and appearing in such films as The Hustler (which brought her first Oscar nomination) and Children of a Lesser God (her third nomination). Although the story she tells is clearly weighted toward her professional life, she does touch on personal details: her antagonistic relationship with Tony Curtis; her brief romantic dalliance with Ronald Reagan (in which the future president is portrayed as cold, cruel, and egotistical); her marriage; her 15-year hiatus from movie roles; and her rather unusual childhood (which saw Laurie and her sister being sent to live at the Reslocks sanitarium, described as an institutional home for children ). All in all, an involving and occasionally moving life story. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Hope : a tragedy : a novel

 by Shalom Auslander.  Given his audaciously funny memoir, Foreskin's Lament (2007), it isn't surprising that Auslander's first novel is defiantly hilarious, but its riotous and downright sacrilegious satire wildly exceeds expectations. Solomon Kugel has moved his family out of the city and into an old upstate farmhouse. All should be idyllic, but Kugel's mother has delusions of being a Holocaust survivor, and the house is plagued with a terrible smell. Once Kugel, a champion worrier, whose psychoanalyst tells him that hope is a malady, discovers that a veritable Holocaust saint is living in his attic, life becomes antic and impossibly complicated. As his hapless hero tries to do right, Auslander orchestrates a mission of desecration. Spouting painfully nervy puns ( Auschwitz happens ) and cracking bad jokes about gluten intolerance and how he wouldn't even have made it to head shaving in the camps, Kugel mocks the Misery Olympics of Jewish laments and demolishes the entire concept of remembrance. Along with its lacerating irreverence and tonic comedy of angst, Auslander's devilishly cunning, sure-to-be controversial novel poses profound questions about meaning, justice, truth, and responsibility. --Boooklist (Check catalog)

In our prime : the invention of middle age

 by Patricia Cohen. As those at the tail of the baby boom approach age 50, New York Times culture reporter Cohen lays out the history and current conditions of midlife, from the mid-19th century to the present. Framed by the large-scale, ongoing research project Midlife in the United States, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, her book addresses the "midlife crisis" (largely fictitious or misidentified), the boom of anti-aging "self-improvement" industries, and gaps between myth and media portrayals and everyday reality regarding health, sexuality, and economic power. Our concept of middle age is persistent but ill-defined (Cohen notes that those who learned of her research topic inevitably asked, "When is it?"). Today's adults make choices that belie age-based descriptions of life stages. The digital revolution, multiplication of media outlets, and diversification of the population guarantee that contemporary Americans' midlife experiences will be heterogeneous. From generation to generation, middle age less defines its constituents than is defined by them. VERDICT This is an illuminating social history for students, social scientists, and all those who wonder whether they are middle-aged. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

American dervish : a novel

 by Ayad Akhtar Haunted by guilt, Hayat Shah remembers growing up in Milwaukee in the early 1980s, dazzled by Mina, gifted and gorgeous, his mother's beloved friend from Pakistan, who fled abuse back home for being too smart. When she moves into Hayat's home with her small son, Hayat is smitten by Mina's beauty and by all that she teaches him (and the reader) about the richness of the Qur'an: for Mina, faith is about personal interpretation, not about the outer forms; she does not wear a headscarf. But when she falls in love with physician Nathan Wolfson, Hayat's dad's Jewish partner, and plans to marry him, Hayat is wildly jealous. Many readers will recognize the extremist rants by and about Christians, Muslims, and Jews, from all sides. But the people at home move beyond the stereotypes, including Hayat's atheist womanizer dad, who hates the racist extremists. The young teen's personal story about growing up in Muslim America is both particular and universal, with intense connections of faith, sorrow, tenderness, anger, betrayal, questioning, and love. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

The magic room : a story about the love we wish for our daughters

 by Jeffrey Zaslow. In the small town of Fowler, MI, Becker's Bridal has served over 100,000 brides-to-be since the mid-1930s. Along the way, fashions and customs have changed as brides have visited the store's so-called Magic Room to gaze at endless mirrored images of themselves in their wedding gown, an apt metaphor for Zaslow (columnist, Wall Street Journal; The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship) as they reflect on their lives, relationships, and dreams for the future. Zaslow shadows half a dozen of the women who go to Becker's Bridal, listening to their stories and writing a compelling and sincere chronology of the experiences, tragedies, and love that led them to the shop. His narrative is sprinkled with fascinating statistical information concerning marriage and divorce, as well as his cultural analysis and observations concerning family and spousal relationships and insights into the lives and relationships of the four generations of Becker women who have worked at the store. VERDICT Not an examination of today's marriage industry but a study of individual lives and dreams, this is recommended for casual readers and those with an interest in cultural and social customs concerning marriage, women's roles, and parent-child relationships. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)