Cross-country adventures

Wordsmithery

Perhaps the subtitle says it best: the energies, gists and spirits of letters, words and combinations thereof : their roots, bones, innards, piths, pips and secret parts, tinctures,tonics and essences, with examples of their usage foul and savory in media current and ancient, offered in the joy of their perusal for the juicing up of gentle folk and rude.

Secret between us

Kirkus: Delinsky offers a polished drama featuring an otherwise responsible mother lying to police to protect her daughter... Delinsky does a fine job creating sympathetic characters with personal problems. Well-crafted and satisfying.

Louise Erdrich

Kirkus: Erdrich requires a degree of commitment not every reader will make, but fans will find that these stories distill her body of work to its essence.

It's a wonderful death

Boy meets girl. Girl is dead. Can love survive? The prolific de Lint (Dingo, 2008, etc.) has an easy but authoritative style that should draw readers into his subtly stylized worlds, where questions of existence and other realms are provocatively pondered.

Cairo modern

Published in Arabic in the 1940s, this cautionary morality tale about self-defeating egoism and ill-digested foreign philosophies comes from the same period as one of the writer's best-known works, Midaq Alley. Both novels are comic and heartfelt indictments not so much of Egyptian society between the world wars as of human nature and our paltry attempts to establish just societies.
Published in 1945, states book-a-day calendar, calling it an early work worthy of the masterpieces to come.

"I don't believe in God, but I miss him"

 Nothing to be frightened of

by Julian Barnes. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

 

A late arrival on the scene of English writers pondering and arguing the existence or nonexistence of God. Barnes inclines toward the golden mean: "I don't believe in God," he writes, "but I miss Him." He was once more inclined to the atheism of Hitchens, Dawkins et al., but now, 62 years on, he admits to less certainty and "more awareness of ignorance," to say nothing of a growing understanding that the good times on this side of the grass are finite. Gentle and lucid—a welcome change from the polemical tone of so many books on the matter (or antimatter, if you like) of the big guy upstairs.

Inspector Darko Dawson

Wife of the gods : a novel

by Kwei J Quartey. New York : Random House, 2009.

Kirkus liked it (thought, for Kirkus, these are tame words): Move over Alexander McCall Smith. Ghana has joined Botswana on the map of mystery. Quartey's approach to detective work is less charming and more sociological than McCall Smith's, his setting more rural and susceptible to the ways of magicians. There's plenty of room for them both, and the newcomer is most welcome.

13 women buy a $37,000 diamond necklace

The necklace : thirteen women and the experiment that transformed their lives

by Cheryl Jarvis. New York : Ballantine Books, 2008.

BookPage reviews: Overall, though, this is a feel-good and thought-provoking book that will challenge your assumptions about the value of luxury goods.

Kirkus: Why would diamonds, of all things, inspire this unusual openness? Does modern life have so few vehicles for sisterhood that shopping is the one thing we have left? Jarvis avoids wrestling with such ideas, preferring to fawn and overstate.As frivolous as its centerpiece.

Border songs

Lynch, Jim. (2009).Border songs. New York : Alfred A. Knopf.

Kirkus: Tensions on the U.S.-Canadian border disrupt a neighborhood in Lynch's entertaining second novel. Forget the shaky plot. What's memorable is the masterful use of Brandon as a bridge between the human world, foolish and chaotic, and the more ordered universe of birds.

California wine country

Sosnowski, Vivienne. (2009). When the rivers ran red. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kirkus: How the Napa and Sonoma Valley wineries survived Prohibition.California's wine country is an oft-romanticized region, and newspaper executive Sosnowski, a first-time author, seems to have fallen sway to its well-advertised charms in her attempt to showcase the region's fortitude during Prohibition. While it is true that many families suffered mightily during that period (1919–33), as the entire region's economy was centered around winemaking, the author's narrative lacks the cohesive direction necessary to give the wineries' plight sufficient dramatic tension. Copiously researched, but this particular vintage lacks complexity and depth.

Postsecret

One in a series of books about postcards. An aside: interestingly, some libraries have it at 155.6 (Differential and developmental psychology), others at 741.683 (Drawing & drawings).

World War II writings

A J Liebling. A collection of World War II accounts by the influential journalist and author includes "The Road Back to Paris," "Mollie and Other War Pieces," and "Normandy Revisited," in a volume that also features twenty-nine previously uncollected New Yorker articles.

Catch-22

Heller's classic. Book-a-day calendar states that today, 10 November, is the 50th anniversary of the book's publication. It adds that "The Modern Library ranked Catch-22 number seven in its list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century."

Hemingway's boat

First I heard of it was a patron asking for it today.

Kirkus: Seven years in the making, this vivid portrait allows us to see Hemingway on the Pilar once again, standing on the flying bridge and guiding her out of the harbor at sunrise. Appearing on the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death, this beautifully written, nuanced meditation deserves a wide audience. High praise, indeed.

An unpredictable selection of subjects

The universe in a single atom

Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV. (2005). The universe in a single atom: the convergence of science and spirituality. New York: Morgan Road Books.

Book-a-day calendar: He "draws interesting parallels between the methods and aims of science and of Buddhism (both are grounded in empiricism and reality; they share a desire to "understand" the world; and they perceive similar cycles, systems and patterns) and addresses the role of ethics in science and the place of science in society."

Mississippi masters

Roman à clef

in book-a-day calendar; Trocchi described as a Beat writer. This book is from 1960

Borges and the eternal ornagutangs

Not sure how I came across this; I'd guess Book-a-day calendar.

An exact replica of a figment of my imagination

From Book-a-day calendar. tried reading her The giant's house : a romance and didn't like it.

Why do we drive as we do?

"insight into the whys and wherefores of American drivers," writes book-a-day calendar

intense, compelling and, for the most part, expertly paced

Kirkus rather liked it.

Edward Humes

Eco barons : the dreamers, schemers, and millionaires who are saving our planet

A hard-boiled genre exercise

Kirkus sort of liked it, but not completely: There are no good guys, or gals, in this novel. And there's no mystery, with police peripheral to the plot. Instead, Johnson seems to be paying homage to and subverting the conventions of the era of pulp fiction at its seediest. There's some dirty fun here, but plenty of authors are better at this sort of novel.

Book-a-day calendar liked it more (breezy, enjoyable read), and called Johnson "one of our contemporary masters."

Both mentioned Johnson's Tree of smoke, a Vietnam work (Kirkus: After his award-winning Vietnam epic, Johnson takes a busman's holiday with this hard-boiled genre exercise.While his previous novel Tree of Smoke (2007) elevated Johnson to a new level of renown

A forty-year quest

Stalin terror

Montefiore, Simon. (2008). Sashenka. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Kirkus: deft fiction debut: Inspired by a true story, historian Montefiore turns novelist to profile a young revolutionary who leads an exemplary Marxist life until a romantic misadventure puts her in Stalin's sights.Sashenka, teenage daughter of a Jewish oil magnate, is exiting an exclusive prep school for daughters of the Russian nobility in 1916 when, instead of being picked up by her father's chauffeur, she's arrested by the Tsarist police, who have gotten wind of her subversive activities as "Comrade Snowfox."

Naming nature

Gay lawyer

Another romantic comedy from the always clever Lipman: Kirkus.

Jack and Jill

Witness to History

In notes of "Traitor to his class"

The bad and the beautiful

Biting drama that tells the story of a ruthless, manipulative movie producer who lets nothing and nobody stand in his way. Now he's broke and needs the help of the very people he used and betrayed on his climb to the top.

 Perhaps I came across it by looking for other films that Barry Sullivan was in, after seeing Man in the middle. (And I think I have already seen it.)

Deadly obsession

Countdwon to extinction

Moonwalking with Einstein

Hisham Matar

His new book,‘Anatomy of a Disappearance’, was reviewed in the book section of the Sunday Times.His first book was In the country of men.

Dignity

Dignity: in honor of the rights of indigenous peoples: photographs. by Dana Glickstein ; foreword by Desmond Tutu ; introduction by Oren R. Lyons. New York: PowerHouse, 2010.


Stunning photography.

Amost Archers

Kirkus: She's a welcome new member to the short list of authors with the power to fully inhabit her characters (think Bobbie Ann Mason or Jane Smiley), leaving the chick-lit purveyors in the dust.A richly crafted tale of redemption and reinvention that stands out from the crowd.

Book-a-day calendar: Like George Cukor's film Rich and Famous, this novel succeeds brilliantly as fun and also on a deeper level as an exploration of identity and family.

Lost in China

Our kind of people

Found it after reading The Help, and our book discussion upstate: Alice talked about jack and Jill clubs.

Boston police strike 1919

Library Journal Reviews Shamus Award winner Lehane's first historical novel is a clear winner, displaying all the virtues the author (Mystic River ) has shown in his exceptional series of crime novels: narrative verve, sensitivity to setting, the interweaving of complicated story lines, an apt and emotionally satisfying denouement—and, above all, the author's abiding love for his characters and the human condition

Bible salesman

Kirkus: The Lord works in humorously mysterious ways in this Southern picaresque teaming a jaded car thief and a young, impressionable Bible salesman.

Borges e os orangotangos eternos

Whiskey

http://goo.gl/3FnIy

Desilu

Lucy's birthday: 6 August 1911. Desi's birthday: 2 March 1917.

A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Life stories

Kirkus: A collection of savvy, witty essays, more personal than political, from a feminist known for her social and cultural commentary. Thoroughly enjoyable reading for anyone, feminist or not, who likes bright, funny, opinionated writing.

Korean War era fiction

Kirkus did not particularly praise in (as usual Phillips writes up a storm (this time literally), but without a convincing story, readers may find themselves sinking into a marsh of sensory overload), though Book-a-Day calendar quotes fulsome praise from WashPost Book World.

Scientist and theologian, protege of Benjamin Franklin

Johnson, Steven. (2008). Invention of air: a story of science, faith, revolution, and the birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books.

How we decide

153.83 L

John Turner, deputy sheriff of a small town near Memphis, confronts trouble in the persons of the sheriff's long-lost son, who arrives in what appears to be a stolen car, and old friend Eldon Brown, who is a suspect in a murder he does not know if he committed.

A reliable wife

Set in rural Wisconsin in 1909, Ralph Truitt stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife." But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting.

The devil's company

Liss, David. (2009). The Devil's company. New York: Random House.

Fundamentalist politics

Sharlet, Jeff. (2008). The family : the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power. NY : HarperCollins.

Stone's fall

Kirkus: A learned, witty and splendidly entertaining descent into the demimondes of international espionage, arms dealing, financial hanky-panky and other favorite pastimes of those without conscience.

Hippies saved physics

Perennial classic

Book-a-Day calendar praises this Defoe book.

World without us

Weisman, Alan. (2007). The world without us. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press

France discovered

Shakespeare wrote for money

A tale of the American Revolution

Kirkus: A crackling good epic, both comic and bawdy

Nathan Englander

Louisiana rambles