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The 9/11 Commission report : final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
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2004; xviii, 567 p. : ill., maps ; 21 cm.
This authorized edition of the Commission's final report on the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 traces the rise of the new global terrorism, as well as detailing the meetings and recommendations made by the bipartisan panel established in 2002. Appendices include names of US officials and others involved, and summaries of the dozen public hearings. This provocative historical record includes chronologies of the doomed flights and substantial reference notes, but lacks an index. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The alchemist
Coelho, Paulo.
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2002; xiv, 174 p. ; 21 cm.
Paulo Coelho's enchanting novel has inspired a devoted following around the world, and this tenth anniversary edition, with a new introduction from the author, will only increase that following. This story, dazzling in its powerful simplicity and inspiring wisdom, is about an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago who travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of a treasure buried in the Pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. No one knows what the treasure is, or if Santiago will be able to surmount the obstacles along the way. But what starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a discovery of the treasures found within. Lush, evocative, and deeply humane, the story of Santiago is an eternal testament to the transforming power of our dreams and the importance of listening to our hearts.
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Alexander Hamilton
Chernow, Ron.
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2004; 818 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
"Alexander Hamilton was arguably the most important figure in American history who never attained the presidency, but he had a far more lasting impact than many who did." "An illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, Hamilton rose with stunning speed to become George Washington's aide-de-camp, a battlefield hero, a member of the Constitutional Convention, the leading author of The Federalist Papers, and head of the Federalist party. As the first treasury secretary, he forged America's tax and budget systems, customs service, coast guard, and central bank. Chernow offers the whole sweep of Hamilton's turbulent life: his exotic, brutal upbringing; his brilliant military, legal, and financial exploits; his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Monroe; his shocking illicit romances; his enlightened abolitionism; and his famous death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804." "Throughout, Chernow blends Hamilton's public and private selves to present a fully rounded portrait of this handsome, witty, controversial genius and his poignant relations with his wife, Eliza, and their eight children. Hamilton's countless exploits never cramped his prolific literary labors. Chernow brings to light nearly fifty previously undiscovered essays as he explores Hamilton's fiery journalism, his youthful poetry, his magisterial state papers, and his revealing missives to colleagues and friends. Moreover, he conjures up portraits of Hamilton's celebrated peers, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Burr with all their shortcomings as well as their oft-sung triumphs."--BOOK JACKET.
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All is vanity : a novel
Schwarz, Christina.
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2002; ix, 368 p. ; 25 cm.
At once darkly comedic and moving, this witty exploration of female friendship, envy, and misguided ambition by the author of the number-one bestseller Drowning Ruth, deliciously satirizes the desire to shine in the world. In All is Vanity, Margaret and Letty, best friends since childhood and now living on opposite coasts, reach their mid-thirties and begin to chafe at their sense that they are not where they ought to be in life. Margaret, driven and overconfident, decides the best way to rectify this is to quit her job and whip out a literary tour de force. Frustrated almost immediately and humiliated at every turn, Margaret turns to Letty for support. But as Letty, a stay-at-home mother of four, begins to feel pressured to make a good showing in the upper-middle-class Los Angeles society into which her husband's new job has thrust her, Margaret sees a plot unfolding that's better than anything she could make up. Desperate to finish her book and against her better nature, she pushes Letty to take greater and greater risks, and secretly steals her friend's stories as fast as she can live them. Hungry for the world's regard, Margaret rashly sacrifices one of the things most precious to her, until the novel's suspenseful conclusion shows her the terrible consequences of her betrayal. Widely celebrated for her debut novel, Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz once again proves herself to be a writer of remarkable depth and range. Like Drowning Ruth, All is Vanity probes into the mysteries of the human heart and uncovers the passions that drive ordinary people to break the rules in pursuit of their own desires.
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Aloft
Lee, Chang-rae.
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2004; 369 p. ; 24 cm.
Lee's third novel (after "Native Speaker" and "A Gesture Life") "approaches the problems of race and belonging in America from a new angle--the perspective of Jerry Battle, the semiretired patriarch of a well-off (and mostly white) Long Island family" ("Publishers Weekly").
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The amateur marriage : a novel
Tyler, Anne.
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2004; 306 p. ; 25 cm.
"They seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother's grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married." "Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable."--BOOK JACKET.
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American woman : a novel
Choi, Susan, 1969-
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2003; 369 p. ; 24 cm.
"When twenty-five-year-old Jenny Shimada steps out of the Rhinecliff train station in New York's Hudson Valley, the last person she expects to see is Rob Frazer, a shadowy figure from her previous life. On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, Jenny agrees to take on the job of caring for three younger fugitives whom Frazer has spirited out of California. One of them, the granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity. Kidnapped by a homegrown revolutionary group, Pauline shocked America when she embraced her captors' ideology, denouncing family and class to enlist in their radical cell."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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Angry housewives eating bon bons
Landvik, Lorna, 1954-
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2003; viii, 404 p. ; 25 cm.
From her sensational sleeper hit Patty Jane's House of Curl to her heartwarming novel Welcome to the Great Mysterious, Lorna Landvik has won the hearts of readers everywhere by skillfully balancing hilarity with pathos, and bittersweet insights with heartwarming truths. Now she returns to her beloved, eccentric stomping ground of small-town Minnesota where the most eclectic, and engaging group of women you'll ever meet share love, loss, and laughter. Sometimes life is like a bad waiter-it serves you exactly what you don't want. The women of Freesia Court have come together at life's table, fully convinced that there is nothing good coffee, delectable desserts, and a strong shoulder can't fix. Laughter is the glue that holds them together-the foundation of a book group they call AWEB-Angry Wives Eating Bon Bons-an unofficial "club" that becomes much more. It becomes a lifeline. The five women each have a story of their own to tell. There's Faith, the newcomer, a lonely housewife and mother of twins, a woman who harbors a terrible secret that has condemned her to living a lie; big, beautiful Audrey, the resident sex queen who knows that good posture and an attitude can let you get away with anything; Merit, the shy, quiet doctor's wife with the face of an angel and the private hell of an abusive husband; Kari, a thoughtful, wise woman with a wonderful laugh as "deep as Santa Claus's with a cold" who knows the greatest gifts appear after life's fiercest storms; and finally, Slip, activist, adventurer, social changer, a tiny, spitfire of a woman who looks trouble straight in the eye and challenges it to arm wrestle. Holding on through forty eventful years-through the swinging Sixties, the turbulent Seventies, the anything-goes Eighties, the nothing's-impossible Nineties-the women will take the plunge into the chaos that inevitably comes to those with the temerity to be alive and kicking. Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons depicts a special slice of American life, of stay-at-home days and new careers, children and grandchildren, bold beginnings and second chances, in which the power of forgiveness, understanding, and the perfectly timed giggle fit is the CPR that mends broken hearts and shattered dreams. Once again Lorna Landvik leaves you laughing and crying, as she reveals perhaps the greatest truth: that there is nothing like the saving grace of best friends.
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Ash Wednesday : a novel
Hawke, Ethan, 1970-
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2002; 221 p. ; 25 cm.
From the actor and writer Ethan Hawke: a piercing novel of love, marriage, and renewal.Jimmy is AWOL from the army, but -- with characteristic fierceness and terror -- he's about to embark on the biggest commitment of his life. Christy is pregnant with Jimmy's child, and she's determined to head home, with or without Jimmy, to face up to her past and prepare for the future. Somehow, barreling across America from Albany to New Orleans to Ohio and Texas in a souped-up Chevy Nova, Christy and Jimmy are transformed from passionate but conflicted lovers into a young family on a magnificent journey. Ash Wednesday is a novel of blazing emotion and remarkable grace, a tale that captures the intensity -- the excitement, fear, and joy -- of being on the threshold of the mysterious country of marriage and parenthood. Powerful, assured, large of heart, and punctuated by moments of tremendous humor, it represents, for Hawke the novelist, a major leap forward. Book jacket.
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Atonement : a novel
McEwan, Ian.
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2002; 351 p.
In this rich novel by the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel "Amsterdam, " a young girl unwittingly tells a tale that turns her family upside down. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, "Atonement" is at its center a profound--and profoundly moving--exploration of shame and forgiveness, of atonement and the difficulty of absolution.
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Back when we were grownups : a novel
Tyler, Anne, 1941-
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2001; 273 p. ; 24 cm.
"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person." So Anne Tyler opens this irresistible new novel. The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else's? On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation-something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family's crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms. Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it-how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been-is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel. As always with Anne Tyler's novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave. But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed and delighted, but also infinitely wiser.
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Becoming Justice Blackmun : Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court journey
Greenhouse, Linda.
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2005; xiii, 268 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
"From 1970 to 1994, Justice Harry A. Blackmun (1908-1999) wrote numerous landmark Supreme Court decisions, including Roe v. Wade, and participated in the most contentious debates of his era - all behind closed doors. In Becoming Justice Blackmun, Linda Greenhouse reveals the backstage story of the Supreme Court through the eyes and writings of this extraordinary justice." "Greenhouse was the first print reporter to have access to Harry Blackmun's extensive archive and private and public papers, and from this trove she has crafted a narrative of Blackmun's life and of his years on the Court, showing how he never lost sight of the human beings behind the legal cases and how he was not afraid to question his own views on such controversial issues as abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, and sex discrimination. She shows us the Court as a human institution, where nine very smart and very opinionated lawyers seek to make decisions and bring others around to their point of view, especially during Blackmun's twenty-four years on the bench, as the justices repeatedly tussled with one another over the contentious cases - the Pentagon Papers, Roe v. Wade, the Nixon tapes, Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, Planned Parenthood v. Casey - that came their way. And most affectingly of all, Greenhouse recounts the story of how Harry Blackmun's lifelong friendship with Chief Justice Warren E. Burger withered in the crucible of life on the high court, revealing how political differences became personal, even for the country's most respected jurists."--BOOK JACKET.
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