COSBY Excerpts "Giving commencement speeches is a hobby of mine...I like to give
young people a chance to hear the important ideas they plan to ignore." "When I
was in college, I never tried to find myself, no matter how many people kept telling me to
get lost."
Patricia Cornwell fans, get ready! Dr. Kay Scarpetta is back with another
heart-arresting thriller of medical mischief and mayhem. When a half-decomposed body is
discovered on a cargo ship arriving from Belgium, and the autopsy uncovers nothing, Kay is
right back in the mix. Now she's off to Europe, and she'll soon be faced with her most
career-threatening -- not to mention life-threatening -- case yet. This juicy read will be
available on July 19th.
Dr. Hannibal Lecter has swallowed the most succulent morsel of all: the
genius of the man who imagined him. Like other great fictive
creatures--Holmes, Dracula, Bond--Lecter has ascended from private character
to public icon: America's favorite man-eater, Hannibal the Cannibal, the
ultimate fiend. This is not necessarily bad, for it has forced Harris, after
publishing three novels in 13 years--Black Sunday; Red Dragon, The Silence of
the Lambs--to spend an astonishing 11 years gnawing on the question that
trumped Conan Doyle, Fleming, Stoker: How to repossess public property? Eleven
years have yielded an audacious answer: celebrate the icon, not the character,
and in an unexpected way.
And so the most anticipated novel of the year unfolds as one of the
strangest of the year. Although celebrated for his mastery of suspense, terror
and dread, Harris saturates these pages with a surprising elixir: a fierce
irony. But not without flashing his classic stuff: The novel opens with the
sort of crackle that made his name in Black Sunday, as FBI agent Clarice
Starling sweats out a take-down of drug-dealers that goes terribly wrong,
including five dead by her own gun. This catches the attention of Lecter, who,
seven years after Lambs, is living high in Florence, pursuing not crime but
fine art and music. His idyll will end, however, for a bounty lies on his
head, placed by a mortal enemy, Mason Verger, long ago turned by Lecter into a
subhuman thing strapped to machines and now consumed by thoughts of revenge.
Into Mason's pocket plop two influential law officers, Florentine chief
investigator Rinaldo Pazzi and Starling's FBI nemesis, weaselly Paul Krendler.
The plot gears largely around attempts by these two to capture Lecter for
Mason, who plans to feed him alive to wild pig--and, as necessary, to use
Starling as bait. There are scenes of exquisite tension, fright and violence,
including the stalking of Lecter by Pazzi in Florence and Starling's attempt
to rescue Lecter, who, having fled to the States, is snatched by Mason's
minions.
This narrative roils fitfully along a herky-jerky vector but remains always
mesmerizing, as Harris's prose and insights, particularly his reveries about
Hannibal, boast power and an overripe beauty. If at times the suspense
slackens and the story slips into silliness, it becomes clear that this is a
post-suspense novel, as much sardonic philosophical jest as grand-guignol
thriller. Hannibal, "we" learn--"we" because Harris
seduces reader complicity with third-person-plural narration-is not as we
presumed. The monster's aim is not chaos, but order. Through his devotion to
manners and the connoisseur's life, in fact to form itself, he
hopes--consciously--to reverse entropy and thus the flow of time, to allow a
dead sister to live again. He is not Dionysius but Apollo, and it is the
barbarians who oppose him who are to be despised. Hannibal may be mad, but in
this brilliant, bizarre, absurd novel--as in the public eye--he is also hero;
and so, at novel's end, in blackest humor, Harris bestows upon him a hero's
rewards, outrageously, mockingly.
In this book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of
individual men and women the story of a generation, America's citizen heroes and heroines
who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build
modern America. This generation was united not only by a common purpose, but also by
common values -- duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and,
above all, responsibility for oneself. In this book, you will meet people whose everyday
lives reveal how a generation persevered through war, and were trained by it, and then
went on to create interesting and useful lives and the America we have today.
For the past seven years, researchers, reporters, and producers for ABC News have
searched the world's archives for the rarest and most stunning photographs and images,
consulted eminent twentieth-century historians, and discovered and interviewed hundreds of
eyewitnesses and participants in the significant moments of the most eventful one hundred
years in human history. The result is this book, the independent companion volume to the
landmark ABC News and The History Channel television series The Century. Co-written by ABC
News Anchor Peter Jennings and Senior Editorial Producer Todd Brewster, The Century
features a narrative of extraordinary quality that tracks major themes -- the impact of
technology, the soaring of the imagination, the ghastly violence, the joy of entertainment
-- through chronological chapters recounting the signal moments of each era in the
century.
As the year 2000 progresses, George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, ten years married,
are caught up in the whirl of their centrifugally accelerating lives. George is a TV
producer for the upstart network MBC, launching a truly and weirdly groundbreaking new
show that blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Lizzie is a software entrepreneur
dealing with the breakneck pleasures and pains of running her own company in an industry
where the rules are rewritten daily. However, after Lizzie, recovering from a Microsoft
deal gone awry, becomes a confidante and advisor to George's boss, billionaire media mogul
Harold Mose, the couple discovers that no amount of sophisticated spin can obscure basic
instincts: envy, greed, suspicion, sexual temptation - and, maybe, love. When they and
their children are finally drawn into a thrilling, high-tech corporate hoax that sends
Wall Street reeling (and makes one person very, very rich), George and Lizzie can only
marvel at life's oversized surprises and hold on for dear life.
The new novel by the author of the acclaimed Regeneration trilogy.
Suppose time can slow down. Suppose it's not an ever rolling stream, but something
altogether more viscous and unpredictable, like blood. Suppose it coagulates around
terrible events, clots them over, stops the flow . . .
During the hazy Newcastle summer, Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. A proud and
resilient man, he has long outlived his peers but not the memories of his youth. As Nick
watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors that surrounded his brother's death in the
painful days before his own.
Meanwhile, at Lob's Hill, on the other side of the city, Nick and his pregnant wife,
Fran, are failing to keep the peace in their increasingly fractious home. In an attempt to
unite the family, Fran organizes the children into decorating the living room. As the old
wallpaper is peeled away, a vigorous and obscene drawing of an Edwardian family is
revealed. The portrait it reveals is the history of their home, casting a terrifying
shadow over the family.
Another World is an extraordinarily powerful study of memory, and of the various ways
in which the violent past returns to haunt and distort the present
At the heart of Mary Higgins Clark's new novel of suspense is a brutal murder: that of
Gary Lasch, a respected and successful young Greenwich, Connecticut, doctor and hospital
and HMO head. The news strikes Greenwich society like a thunderbolt — as does the
news that Molly Carpenter Lasch, the beautiful young wife of the slain doctor, has been
arrested for her husband's murder. Nobody believes Molly's claim to have no memory of the
events of the night of the crime — not her parents, not her friends, not even her own
lawyer — and evidence against her is overwhelming. To escape an inevitable murder
conviction, she accepts a plea bargain, and subsequently her lawyer wins her early parole.
A few years later, on Molly's release from prison, she reasserts her innocence in front of
TV cameras and reporters gathered at the prison gate. Among them is an old acquaintance
and schoolmate, Fran Simmons, currently working as investigative reporter for the True
Crime television series. Determined to prove her innocence, Molly convinces Fran to
research and present a program on Gary's death. Despite her skepticism, Fran agrees to go
ahead. Fran, intent on assuaging Molly's doubts about her husband's death and her own
gnawing questions about her father's suicide, soon finds herself enmeshed in a tangled web
of intrigue and menace — more deaths and more unanswered questions about Gary Lasch's
murder.
Astrid is the only child of single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who
wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother
and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery — but their idyll is
shattered when Astrid's mother falls apart over a lover. Deranged by rejection, Ingrid
murders the man, is sentenced to life in prison.
White Oleander is the unforgettable story of Astrid's journey through a series of
foster homes and her efforts to find a place for herself in impossible circumstances. Each
home is its own universe, with a new set of laws and lessons to be learned. With
determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and
strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become. Tough,
irrepressible, funny, and warm, Astrid is one of the most indelible characters in recent
fiction.
White Oleander is an unforgettable story of mothers and daughters, burgeoning
sexuality, the redemptive powers of art, and the unstoppable force of the emergent self.
Written with exquisite beauty and grace, this is a compelling debut by an author poised to
join the ranks of today's most gifted novelists.
About the Author:
: Janet Fitch is a third-generation resident of Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared
in a A Room of One's Own, Black Warrior Review, and Rain City Review, among other
publications. An excerpt from White Oleander was selected as a notable story in Best
American Short Stories 1994.
When her passionate poet mother, Ingrid, is jailed for killing her ex-lover (with
poison brewed partly from white oleander flowers), Astrid Magnussen navigates her way to
adulthood through a series of Los Angeles foster families and juevenile homes. Astrid's
strength and resilience makes this compelling novel an inspiration.
From Judith Kicinski - Library Journal : This novel will surely be hailed as one of the
best novels of the year and is likely the best debut this reviewer has ever read. When
beautiful, egotistical poet Ingrid murders the lover who dumped her, 12-year-old daughter
Astrid descends into the hells of foster care, where she is sustained only by a fierce
intelligence and great artistic talent.
Heartbreaking, but without a trace of sentimentality, this novel provokes the amazement
that children like Astrid can emerge whole and capable after what we know are even worse
childhoods than hers.
Required reading to fully understand today's war in the Balkans. To purchase this book or
any other on this page, go to the link for Barnes & Noble above. We have added this as
a convenience to our readers.
From Publisher's Weekly - In this elegant work, British author Goodwin (On Foot
to the Golden Horn) combines deft historical summary with the buoyant prose and
idiosyncratic focus of the best travel writing. The combination enables him to take the
full measure of a realm riddled with paradox. The Ottoman Empire was a Turkish empire most
of whose shock troops were Balkan Slavs; a bellicose state that expanded by war, it often
governed its conquests with a light hand--a necessary approach given the many cultures and
nationalities that fell under Ottoman rule. Ottoman society at its best was civilized and
tolerant, observes Goodwin. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were warmly received in
Salonika, Constantinople, Belgrade and Sofia. While war and superstition ruled Christian
Europe, the Islamic Ottoman Empire thrived and glittered with mathematical, architectural
and artistic accomplishment. Goodwin is marvelous at describing how, for three hundred
years before its final collapse after WWI, the empire survived even though it was
perpetually on the verge of collapse. He attributes the calcified empire's decline not
only to corruption and the rise of France and Russia but to the Turks' prideful ignorance
of the West, a vanity that eventually deprived the empire of the fruits of modernity. As
good as Goodwin is at blending political, cultural and military affairs, his work is
distinguished by stylish writing and a sharp eye for just the right anecdote. His
epilogue, which is built around the fate of the empire's famous stray dogs, is at once
amusing and strangely, beautifully moving.
"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted" is
the first sentence of this extraordinary new novel.
Eager to escape the bickering of her recently-divorced mother and her older brother,
Pete, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland wanders off the main path of the Appalachian Trail
between Maine and New Hampshire, where they have embarked on a weekend outing. As she
tries to take a short-cut to catch up to her family, she strays further from the trail and
deeper into the second-growth, untrodden woods, where she has no means of navigation and
little defense against the elements.
Bruised, battered, and riddled with wasp and mosquito bites, Trisha elevates her
spirits and preserves her connection with civilization by tuning into the radio station
that broadcasts the Boston Red Sox games. She spends her first night alone, listening as
her hero — #36, the closing pitcher Tom Gordon, whose jersey and baseball cap she
wears on her hiking trip — strikes out the Yankees. She imagines him as her
companion, and tunes into his games sporadically, as she braves treacherous slopes and
fetid swamps, bacteria-ridden (and vomit-inducing) water, insatiable insects, extremes of
New England weather, and many, many, lonely, uncomfortable, terrifying nights. Stalked by
an unidentified creature that leaves slaughtered animals and mangled trees in its wake,
Trisha bravely follows the river — and her instincts — in the hope of surviving.
A classic tale that combines elements of adventure and spiritual awe, The Girl Who Loved
Tom Gordon engages our hearts and minds at the most primal level.
LIKE A HAPPY NOSTALGIC PERIOD WITH MY SICIALIAN GRANDPARENTS! by Bob Scussel
I LAUGHED, I CRIED AND COULD NOT STOP READING 'A FAMILY OF SICILIANS'. BUTTACI'S
STORIES AND POEMS BROUGHT BACK FOND MEMORIES OF MY CHILDHOOD GROWING UP IN A SICILIAN
HOUSEHOLD. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND EVERYONE,ITALIAN OR NOT TO READ THIS BOOK. ROBERTO
MONTAGNINO SCUSSEL
Mr. Buttaci has finally written a book that dispels any Mafia based myth about the
Sicilian people. Meet all the wonderful characters, learn about the real life they lead.
No Godfathers here! Only Mommas, Poppas, Uncles and Aunts. People as they really
are; full of love and passion and fun. Buttaci has been a Poet since his days as an
undergraduate student at Seton Hall University. He was poetry editor of the Seton Hall
Bayley Review literary magazine. He was the Publisher of New Worlds for a number of
years, and has published numerous volumes of poetry.
from Barnes
& Noble or send a check for $12.95 plus $3.00 handling and shipping. Send
check to Salvatore Buttaci, P.O. Box 887, Saddle Brook, N.J. 07663or order by e-mail from the writer.
Reviewed by Richard Schiff
It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors,
and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the
department, is at the center of it. And rarely has a tale like this been told, except
through the words of Henry Miller, until now. The surreal seriousness of the story is
gripping. And , perhaps due to the mysterious unknown workings of something like a
Department of Elevator Safety, it has a strong similarity to Miller's Great American
Telegraph Company. Whitehead would have us believe there are two warring factions within
the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations
on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the
elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.
Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in
the entire department. Her character is flawlessy believable, and she has become a
permanent character reference point for me as a reader; a very credible accomplishment for
a first novel, hallmarking a debut that promises even greater futures.
When an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch,
chaos ensues. It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy
Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila
Mae is never wrong. The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of
Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The notebooks describe
Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator that could reinvent the
city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the
nineteenth century. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes
involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and
uncovers a secret that will change her life forever. But she will endure.
The Intuitionist is the best first novel I have read in many years, and I heartily
reccommend it to avid readers. You will be refreshed. And you will remember it! This is
not pulp. In Mr. Whitehead we have ourselves a real literist in the finest International
tradition.
Robert Clark's first novel, In The Deep Midwinter, brought him wide critical acclaim as
a gifted writer of important fiction. Now he gives us Mr. White's Confession, a flawlessly
crafted and suspenseful novel of mystery, murder, and two men's search for truth.
Full blown Noir! St. Paul, Minnesota, 1939. Police Lieutenant Wesley Horner is
struggling and alone after the recent death of his wife when he receives an assignment
that threatens his precarious stability. The body of a beautiful showgirl has been found
on a hillside, and Wesley must head an investigation into her murder. His chief suspect is
Herbert White, an eccentric recluse and hobby photographer who spends his days writing
gushing fan letters to Hollywood starlets and recording his life in detailed journal
entries and scrapbooks. But when the trail to White runs cold and other leads dry up,
Wesley faces the horrible possibility that the true murderer may remain at large.
Then another dancer is killed, and the clues once again point to Herbert White.
Wesley's cross-country pursuit of Mr. White takes both men on a journey that will link
them in complex ways for the rest of their lives.
In all his work, Robert Clark illuminates the complex relationships between truth and
fiction, past and present, faith and memory. Richly atmospheric, haunting and
many-layered, Mr. White's Confession fully confirms the promise of In The Deep Midwinter.
