|
|
 ORDER ANY OF THESE TITLES DIRECTLY FROM HERE Through our Affiliation with Barnes & Noble Booksellers The
following book reviews are currently available:
A writer alerted to the story by a newspaper article befriends the priest and the rabbis, and finds that their own struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. In fact, as the narrative advances, and the story broadens, more and more people are implicated in what may be the elusive prophecy of a new American culture. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and profane the book opens into a multi-voiced narrative that finally incorporates the monumental historical events and predominating ideas of our age. Filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and with a cast of vividly drawn characters that includes scientists, war veterans, prelates, holocaust survivors, cabinet members, theologians, New York Times reporters, film actors, and crooners, this dazzlingly inventive, mordantly funny masterwork emerges as the American novel readers have been thirsting for, a defining document of our times, a narrative of the 20th Century written for the 21st.
What Scheck, Neufeld and Pulitzer-winning Daily News columnist Dwyer offer here is a report on the many ways justice can go astray and an innocent person be convicted. Perhaps one of the more shocking of their revelations is the unreliability of eyewitness testimony; in addition to studies and statistics, they present a case in which three eyewitnesses separately identified the defendant as a rapist/robber: evidence uncovered by Scheck and Neufeld eventually exonerated him. Scheck and Neufeld offer a litany of such errors, along with detailed case histories: false "confessions," fraudulent lab results, junk science (particularly the use of hair typing as evidence), prosecutorial misconduct and inadequate defense lawyering have all led to convictions of the innocent. The authors offer concrete advice on how these dangers can be minimized (e.g., videotaping all police interrogations to ensure confessions aren't forced). This is an alarming wake-up call to those who administer our justice system that serious flaws must be addressed to protect the innocent.
Rails Under My Back is a daring work of art that reveals its family
theme in a stunning depiction of its paradoxically opposite:
abandonment. In this multifaceted, brilliantly colored, intensely
musical novel, Jeffery Renard Allen tracks the interwoven lives of two
brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie
and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is
always full of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving
the remaining family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic
consequences. The multiple effects of the comings and goings are Rails Under My Back ranges, as the characters do, from the City, which is somewhat like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many "inner" and "outer" locales. One image that holds the family together is that of the railroads taking them from place to place-from the South to the North, from their living to their working quarters, from one form of bondage or freedom to another. The McShans and the Joneses somehow prevail, in their bigger-than-life way, and their story has extraordinary literary, religious, and historical power. Allen's voice is unforgettable. Posing nude as an artist's model, and toiling as an au pair and poet's helper cum nurse, she discovers that the foibles of her employers make even the simplest tasks complicated. She feels most free when she is a thief, stealing coins from fountains and graduating to minor theft after hooking up with a nurturing West Indian woman, Lucienne. Luce introduces Eden to many of the hidden pleasures of the city, and when she tells Eden that she's about to move on, Eden realizes that she loves her. Meanwhile, the difficulties of day-to-day life make it nearly impossible for the would-be writer to work on a novel. For inspiration, she navigates the underbelly of Paris, trying to find her literary muse, James Baldwin (rumored to be staying in the city). Many people she meets--including Ving, an androgynous American jazz musician, with whom she has an ambiguous, sexually charged relationship--have anecdotal information about Baldwin, but an introduction to the man proves to be as hard to come by as a warm, clean, cheap apartment. Loose in structure and punctuated with lists of tongue-in-cheek advice for young expatriates, the novel does gradually build momentum, though Youngblood's heavy-handed cultural references weigh it down. Nevertheless, the author tackles well-worn themes with refreshing directness and infuses the novel with unabashed, sometimes unsettling sexuality.
On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold sets out tea,
just so, for her unpredictable, ever-moody mother, and sits down to
wait, certain that this will do it: her mother will drink the tea Isabel
has made and recover from her mysterious sadness. But the tea goes
untouched. Isabel's mother remains out of reach, a kind of melancholy
stranger Isabel struggles to understand. Then, her mother kills herself. Funny, poignant, and sexy, Tea speaks to those who grew up listening to the Monkees and Peter Frampton, culling marijuana seeds on album covers, but who fled the suburbs for the glamorous squalor of the city. It speaks to those who discovered they were gay and had to find a way to tell the rest of the world. And it speaks to anyone who has struggled to carve out a space for themselves against a tragic family history.
A wonderfully imaginative and surprising debut novel about the inexorable approach of modernity. "Imagine the time of my grandfather's grandfather, when the darkness was newly separated from the light. Society was only a shadowy image of what it would soon become. This was Mandragora before my invention and all that it set in motion."-from The Testament of Yves Gundron So begins Yves Gundron's account of the strange events to befall
Mandragora. It is a desperate, primitive place-plowing was only recently
introduced, candles do not exist, and the inhabitants know no Yves's manuscript, which bears witness to these changes, appears to have been prepared for publication by an academic named Ruth Blum. But what at first seems a historical document proves to be something else entirely. Yves's brother, Mandrik le Chouchou, the town mystic, regales his fellow villagers with exotic tales of his travels to "Indochina." And when Yves recalls the words of a song that is recognizably a blues lyric, we know that either Ruth Blum is up to something or Mandragora is not what it seems. In this playful and adventurous debut, Emily Barton explores the two-edged sword of technology, asking what is lost in our fervent pursuit of modernity.
Well, this was when Bill was sighing a lot. He had decided that after our parents died he just didn't want any more fighting between what was left of us. He was twenty-four, Beth was twenty-three, I was twenty-one, Toph was eight, and all of us were so tried already, from that winter. So when something world come up, any little thing, some bill to pay or decision to make, he would just sigh, his eyes tired, his mouth in a sorry kind of smile. But Beth and I...Jesus, we were fighting with everyone, anyone, each other, with strangers at bars, anywhere -- we were angry people wanting to exact revenge. We came to California and we wanted everything, would take what was ours, anything within reach. And I decided that little Toph and I, he with his backward hat and long hair, living together in our little house in Berkeley, would be world-destroyers. We inherited each other and, we felt, a responsibility to reinvent everything, to scoff and re-create and drive fast while singing loudly and pounding the windows. It was a hopeless sort of exhilaration, a kind of arrogance born of fatalism, I guess, of the feeling that if you could lose a couple of parents in a month, then basically anything could happen, at any time -- all bullets bear your name, all cars are there to crush you, any balcony could give way; more disaster seemed only logical. And then, as in Dorothy's dream, all these people I grew up with were there, too, some of them orphans also, most but not all of us believing that what we had been given was extraordinary, that it was time to tear or break down, ruin, remake, take and devour. This was San Francisco, you know, and everyone had some dumb idea -- I mean, wicca? -- and no one there would tell you yours was doomed. Thus the public nudity, and this ridiculous magazine, and the Real World tryout, all this need, most of it disguised by sneering, but all driven by a hyper-awareness of this window, I guess, a few years when your muscles are taut, coiled up and vibrating. But what to do with the energy? I mean, when we drive, Toph and I, and we drive past people, standing on top of all these hills, part of me wants to stop the car and turn up the radio and have us all dance in formation, and part of me wants to run them all over. Tigers in the Snow No more than a few thousand tigers now survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little-populated Russian Far East. Nearly extirpated before World War 11, Panthera tigris altaica made a comeback in subsequent decades. When poaching and habitat depredation following the implosion of the Soviet Union once again threatened extinction, a group of American wildlife biologists led by Maurice Hornocker joined with their Russian counterparts in founding the Siberian Tiger Project to study and protect this besieged race. Peter Matthiessen journeyed to the Russian Far Fast and other remaining tiger territory to witness for himself the species' present condition and to understand its possible fates. Bringing to his subject his deep knowledge and the instinct for the natural world that have made classics of his previous books, he allows us to participate in the battle for the future of one of the earth's most awesome creatures. Along the way, he tells the story of the species' origin and evolution, evoking as well its crucial, often totemic role in the cultures and mythologies of the peoples who came in contact with it. He has made of the tiger's dilemma not a manifesto but a drama - underscored by Hornocker's stirring photographs - that conveys powerfully what a loss to our collective imagination the disappearance of these great cats would be.
What makes a happy person, a happy life? In this remarkable book, George Dawson, a 101-year-old man who learned to read when he was 98, reflects on the philosophy he learned from his father--a belief that "life is so good"--as he offers valuable lessons in living and a fresh, firsthand view of America during the twentieth century. Born in 1898 in Marshall, Texas, the grandson of slaves, George Dawson tells how his father, despite hardships, always believed in seeing the richness in life and trained his children to do the same. As a boy, George had to go to work to help support the family, and so he did not attend school or learn to read; yet he describes how he learned to read the world and survive in it. "We make our own way," he says. "Trouble is out there, but a person can leave it alone and just do the right thing. Then, if double still finds you, you've done the best you can." At ninety-eight, George decided to learn to read and enrolled in a literacy program, becoming a celebrated student. "Every morning I get up and I wonder what I might learn that day. You just never know." In Life Is So Good , he shares wisdom on everything from parenting ("With children, you got to raise them. Some parents these days are growing children, not raising them") to attitude ("People worry too much. Life is good, just the way it is").
John Updikes's nineteenth novel tells the story of Claudius and Gertrude, King and Queen of Denmark, before the action of Shakespeare's Hamlet begins. Employing the nomenclature and certain details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that first describe the prince who feigns madness to achieve revenge upon his father's slayer, Updike brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair with her husband's younger brother. A dark-eyed dreamer with a taste for foreign adventure, he for decades has sought to quell his love for Gertrude, and at last returns to an Elsinore whose prince is generally elsewhere. Gaps and inconsistencies within the immortal play are to an extent filled and explained in this prequel; the figure of Polonius, especially, takes on a larger significance. Beginning in the aura of pagan barbarism, and anticipating Renaissance humanism and empiricism, this modern retelling of a medieval tale presents the case for its royal couple that Shakespeare only hinted at. Gertrude and Claudius are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and familial dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen, disaffected prince.
SICK PUPPY by CARL HIAASEN
From
Publisher's Weekly SHRUB by MOLLY IVINS and LOU DUBOSE
From
The Publisher A candidate of vague speeches and an ambiguous platform, Bush leads the pack of GOP 2000 presidential hopefuls; "Dubya" could very well be our next president. What voters need now is an original, smart, and accessible analysis of Bush-one that leaves the "youthful indiscretions" to the tabloids and gets to the heart of his policies and motivations. Ivins is the perfect woman for the job. With her trademark wit and down-home wisdom, Molly Ivins shares three pieces of advice on judging a politician: "The first is to look at the record. The second is to look at the record. And third, look at the record." In this book, Ivins takes a good, hard look at the record of the man who could be the leader of the free world. Beginning with his post-college military career, Ivins tracks Dubya's winding, sometimes unlikely path from a failed congressional bid to a two-term governorship. Bush has made plenty of friends and supporters along the way, including Texas oil barons, evangelist Billy Graham, and co-investors in the Texas Rangers baseball team. "You would have to work at it to dislike the man," she writes. But for all of Bush's likeability, Ivins points to a disconcerting lack of political passion from this ascending presidential candidate. In her words, "If you think his daddy had trouble with 'the vision thing,' wait till you meet this one." Witty, trenchant, and on target, Ivins gives a singularly perceptive and entertaining analysis of George W. Bush. To head to the voting booth without it would be downright un-American. OUTFOXED
|
Jim Webb is an Ordained
Metaphysical Minister and has put together a book of what he calls
"Life-saving processes for Healing the Heart, Mind and Soul."
As chief spiritual leader of the 
CITY OF GOD begins in mystery: in the autumn of 1999 the large brass
cross behind the altar of St. Timothy's Episcopal church in lower
Manhattan disappears....and even more mysteriously reappears on the roof
of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the upper westside. The
church's maverick rector, and the young rabbinical couple who lead the
synagogue, set about attempting to learn who the vandals are who have
committed this strange double act of desecration and to what purpose,
but their joint clerical investigation only deepens the mystery. 
Actual Innocence:
Rails under My Back
Black Girl in Paris
Tea
The Testament of Yves Gundron
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius
Life Is so Good
Gertrude and Claudius|
|
|
|
|
|