Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity, and the Perfect Knuckleball

by R.A. Dickey      (Find the Book)
Most professional baseball players pen a memoir after they retire. But pitcher R.A. Dickey-who spent four seasons with four different Major League Baseball teams and is MLB's only active knuckleballer-boasts a story compelling enough to be told forthwith. A heralded 1996 first-round draft choice, Dickey's $810,000 signing bonus with the Texas Rangers was yanked after doctors discovered the right-handed pitcher was missing an ligament in his right elbow. Thus began a dramatic up-and-down journey through the professional ranks, sustained by Dickey's determination, as evidenced by the book's proverbial Latin epigraph, "Dum spiro, spero"-"While I breath, I hope." He and co-author Coffey (The Boys of Winter) write with startling candor not only about the game-Dickey's fellow players, steroids in baseball, his disdain for rookie hazing-, but also about his tumultuous upbringing-being a victim of sexual abuse as an 8-year-old at the hands of his babysitter, growing up in Nashville with an alcoholic mother, sleeping in vacant houses as a teenager, and becoming a Christian. Dickey credits his faith with overcoming myriad trials both personal and professional, but it never feels as if he's preaching. Once an English-lit major and now a starting pitcher for the New York Mets, the author emerges as one of baseball's good guys, and someone who can write as well as he pitches. Dickey has set a new standard for athlete autobiographies. -- Publisher's Weekly

The family Corleone

by Edward Falco.       (Find the Book)
Opinion remains divided on Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969). Was it a pulp masterpiece or did it merely benefit from the glow cast by Francis Coppola's films? Falco's prequel provides ample opportunity for reevaluation. Based on an unproduced screenplay by Puzo, it channels the original so well that readers will be vividly reminded of Puzo's strengths (family politics, abrupt violence) and weaknesses (important characters who never evolve beyond plot pawns). Set in 1933, the story finds all of the New York families, including the relatively humble Corleones, bracing for the end of Prohibition. That means power shifts and that means blood. Falco's populous, chatty, gory novel focuses on two characters, Don Corleone's hotheaded 17-year-old son, Sonny, who longs to break into his father's business, and Luca Brasi, a loose-cannon psychopath who throws the entire crime world into chaos. For better or worse, Falco follows every esoteric character with the same steadicam curiosity. His moments of blam-blam-blam, though, are ace. Best of all, he supplies a grand set-piece finale a parade that will have readers dreaming of just one more movie. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Over 21 million copies of Puzo's original are in print, and legions of Puzo and Coppola fans are still out there, making this an offer they can't refuse. --Booklist 

No time to lose : a life in pursuit of deadly viruses

by Peter Piot.               (Find the Book)
Belgian physician Piot has been on the front lines of infectious disease research for the last three and one-half decades, and he details the battle against Ebola and AIDS in his timely and accessible memoir. In 1976, Piot and his colleagues received a blood sample from Kinshasa, Zaire, taken from a patient suffering from a new, terrifying syndrome. Though the virulent disease, christened Ebola after a nearby river, flamed out quickly due to its high mortality rate, Piot was saddened to discover that unsanitary conditions in the missionary hospital operated by Flemish nuns contributed to its spread. Piot next turned his attention to sexually transmitted diseases in Africa, a specialty that put him in a key position when the world witnessed the rise of a deadly virus that attacks the immune system. As new AIDS cases cropped up in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Africa, sprung from unprotected sex, blood transfusions, and intravenous-drug use, Piot realized that there was not going to be one AIDS epidemic in the world but many different ones, depending on behavior and culture, and that any kinds of solutions . . . were going to have to be tailor-made. Piot's race to make a difference in the face of this overwhelming epidemic makes for enthralling reading, and his determination, efforts, and accomplishments are inspiring. --Booklist

The lower river

by Paul Theroux.             (Find the Book)
Ellis Hock runs a men's clothing store in Massachusetts. A dutiful husband, father, and boss, he's spent his life going through the motions. The only time he felt truly alive was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi. When his marriage and the store both fail, Hock returns to the small village of Malabo on the Lower River with a bag of cash and the hope of starting again. But he finds the villagers don't want to rebuild the schoolhouse, they want his money. Caught between their need and his naivete, Hock soon finds himself trapped in a slow-moving nightmare. There is striking resonance here with Dark Star Safari (2003), in which Theroux recounts his own return to Africa (he taught in Malawi in the 1960s) and his discovery that, despite decades of well-intentioned foreign aid, most countries are even poorer than before. In this hypnotically compelling fiction, he wrestles with questions of good intentions and harsh reality, addressing what may be the central conundrum of Africa: our own influence is the very thing that makes it impossible for us to save it. And what does saving it mean, anyway? A gripping and vital novel that reads like Conrad or Greene in short, a classic. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Publisher plans for considerable publicity to accompany the release of Theroux's new book reflect his status as a major international writer. --Booklist 

Prague winter [large print] : a personal story of remembrance and war, 1937-1948

By Madeleine Albright.        (Find the Book)
Albright learned, when secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, that her ancestry was Jewish and that many of her relatives perished in the Holocaust. Impelled to research her family history, she here integrates her discoveries and a historical narrative of Czechoslovakian politics in the WWII era, focusing on why we make the choices we do. Born in 1937 to a Czech diplomat, Albright recalls her earliest memories of German-bombed England, to which her family had escaped from their Nazi-conquered homeland. She fondly remembers her elder cousin, Daaa, but wonders why Daaa's younger sister, Milena, had been left behind in Prague. A prewar picture of the three girls poignantly depicts the stakes of Albright's core concern, which she applies to numerous political crises that afflicted Czechoslovakia. Should the country have fought in 1938? Should its exiled leaders have assassinated Reinhard Heydrich in 1942? Could Democrats have staved off the Communists in 1948? Through the connection of her father to Czechoslovak leaders, Albright shows the impact on individuals of such historical questions, accessing political history for a wide readership, which she seals with her powerfully somber accounting of the fates of her extended family, Milena included. No reader will close her memoir unmoved. --Booklist

Stolen prey

by John Sandford.           (Find the Book)
A horrific crime-the torture murders of Patrick Brooks, his wife, son, daughter, and three dogs at their palatial lakeside home in Wayzata, Minn.-propels bestseller Sandford's solid 22nd novel featuring Lucas Davenport of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (after 2011's Buried Prey). That DEA officials believe the killings to be the work of Los Criminales del Norte brings Mexican detective David Rivera and assistant Ana Martinez to the Twin Cities area, though Brooks's Spanish-language company, Sunnie Software, which peddled its product in Mexico, appears to have been an unlikely money laundry. Since the author makes it clear who the bad guys are early on, the slow revelation of what they've done and how they've done it gives the story its kick. Meanwhile, Lucas, after a couple of meth addicts rob him at an ATM, turns for help to series regular Virgil Flowers, who gets surprising results. Once again, Sandford smoothly blends action and suspense with a soupcon of humor. --Publishers Weekly

Pakistan on the brink : the future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan

by Ahmed Rashid.           (Find the Book)
With the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 and the U.S. scheduled to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in 2014, growing attention is focused on Afghanistan's far more populous and politically volatile eastern neighbor. Native son and journalist Rashid-who has written four previous books on Pakistan and on radical Islam in the region (including Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia) takes a closer look at his country's prospects and finds them extremely tenuous, given high illiteracy and poverty rates, as well as disputes between a weak civilian government and the military and intelligence service (ISI). Rashid maintains that Pakistan's approach to militant Islam is contradictory; it fights some Jihadists that directly threaten the country's interests, while utilizing others as proxies against India in Kashmir. Meanwhile, relations with the U.S. have sharply deteriorated since the assassination of bin Laden, which gave rise to differing accounts from Washington and Islamabad regarding Pakistani intelligence concerning bin Laden's whereabouts. Rashid unsparingly details Pakistan's multiple problems, along with those of the American-Pakistani relationship. His tone is too dire at times, but generally, this is a clear-headed, sobering look at a country whose ties with the U.S. are becoming ever more frayed. --Publishers Weekly

Comeback love : a novel

by Peter Golden.       (Find the Book)
Award-winning journalist Golden's first novel resonates with the great experiences typical of a life love, sorrow, loss, lessons, resolutions. Gordon Meyers has 50-plus years of living to reflect on when we meet him struggling through deep snow drifts as he tries to reach his family's New Jersey cemetery plot. The first-person narrative weaves between the past and the present, depicting a young, idealistic Gordon and the present-day Gordon filled with fears, regrets, and the tiniest possibility of hope. Glenna Rising was a med student in the 1960s when Gordon met her and fell irrevocably in love with her wit, passion, and drive. But those qualities later served to break them apart. The sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic emotional dancing Gordon and Glenna engage in reads as honestly and accurately as any love story between two people who come together, come apart, then reconnect decades later. The repositioning of the characters between past and present never jars and should suit those who enjoy love stories along the lines of those by Nicholas Sparks and Sarah Pekkanen. --Booklist

Crossing the borders of time : a true story of war, exile, and love reclaimed

by Leslie Maitland.       (Find the Book)
Former New York Times reporter Maitland grew up listening to her mother Janine's romantic tales of her first love. Janine fell in love with Roland, a French Catholic, and they planned to marry when the impending Nazi invasion of France in 1942 forced Janine's German Jewish family to flee. Janine journeyed with her family from Marseilles to Casablanca to a Cuban detention camp before they finally reached New York. The war and family secrets prevented Janine from reuniting with her fiance. Janine eventually married Maitland's father and settled into a sometimes acrimonious family life, and she never forgot Roland. Maitland, haunted by her mother's romantic story of first love, set out to find out what happened to Roland and to trace her family's long history in Germany and perilous flight to avoid Nazi persecution. This is a fascinating story of thwarted love, longing, and the travails of one woman and one family within the broader context of war and persecution. Maitland includes a treasury of old family photographs and documents to enhance this incredible story of the gauzy intersection of memory and fact. --Booklist