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Shalom in my heart, salaam on my lips : a Jewish woman in modern Morocco
Marchick, Gloria Becker.
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2003; vi, 159 p. ; 22 cm.
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The shape of water
Camilleri, Andrea.
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2002; 224 p. ; 20 cm.
Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano has become an international sensation whose adventures have been translated from Italian into eight languages, from Dutch to Japanese. The Shape of Water is the first book in this sly, witty, engaging series with its sardonic take on Sicilian life. The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn, sirocco-swept site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavor. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendor Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Lupanello, one of the local movers and shakers-apparently deceased in flagrante-at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes-refreshingly unusual for Sicily. But Inspector Salvo Montalbano, as honest as he is streetwise and as scathing to fools and villains as he is compassionate to their victims, is not ready to close the case-even though he's being pressured by Vigata's police chief, judge, and bishop. Picking his way nimbly through a labyrinth of high-comedy corruption, delicious meals, vendetta fire-power, and carefully planted false clues, Montalbano can be relied on, whatever the cost, to get to the heart of the matter.
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She walks these hills
McCrumb, Sharyn, 1948-
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1995; 447 p. ; 18 cm.
Historian Jeremy Cobb is backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, attempting to retrace the tragic journey of eighteen-year-old Katie Wyler, who was captured by the Shawnee after the massacre of her pioneer family in Mitchell County, North Carolina. In late summer, Katie escaped from a Shawnee village on the banks of the Ohio, and followed the rivers through the wilderness to find her way home - a brave journey that ended in sorrow. Jeremy, a city-bred graduate student with no trail experience, is determined to complete his scholarly quest, unaware that his journey will be both a trial of hardships and a mystical experience. He does not know that the spirit of Katie Wyler is still seen wandering the hills, trying to get home. Mountain wise woman Nora Bonesteel sees her every autumn "when the air is crisp and the light is slanted and the birds are still." Hiram Sorley, known as Harm, is also at large in the Appalachian wilderness. Sorely, who has escaped from the Northeast Correctional Center in Mountain City, Tennessee, is the focus of a wide-spread manhunt involving most of the area's law enforcement officers. There's just one problem: nobody wants him caught. Harm has become a folk hero. Sheriff Spencer Arrowood feels sorry for Harm, imprisoned for life for killing a hated local bureaucrat. There is even some doubt about Harm's guilt. Besides, the elderly convict has Korsakoff's syndrome, a disease that robs its sufferers of their recent memories. To Harm, it is always 1967. Harm doesn't even remember the crime. For Martha Ayers, who wants the job of deputy, catching Harm Sorely would be the best way to prove her fitness for the position. Harm, an Appalachian Don Quixote on the edge of reality, meets both Jeremy and the still-wandering Katie Wyler on his journey back to a home that isn't there anymore. He is the "last moonshiner," holding the dream of an unspoiled wilderness in the fragile web of his delusions. When he goes, it will be lost forever.
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A short history of tractors in Ukrainian
Lewycka, Marina, 1946-
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2005; 294 p. ; 24 cm.
"When their recently widowed father announces that he plans to remarry, sisters Vera and Nadezhda realize that they must learn to put aside a lifetime of bitter rivalry in order to save him. The new woman in his life is a voluptuous gold digger from Ukraine, fifty years his junior, with fabulous breasts and a proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, who will stop at nothing in her single-minded pursuit of the luxurious Western lifestyle she dreams of. But separating their addled and annoyingly lecherous dad from his new love will prove to be no easy feat - in terms of sheer cold-eyed ruthlessness, the two sisters swiftly realize they have just entered the major leagues. As Hurricane Valentia turns the old family house upside down, all the old secrets come falling out, including the most deeply buried one, from the war, the one that explains much about why Nadezhda and Vera are so different. In the meantime, oblivious to it all, their father carries on with the great work of his dotage - a grand history of the tractor and its role in human progress, giving due credit to the crucial Ukrainian contribution. The story carries us back to prerevolutionary Ukraine, through wartime Germany, to contemporary England, taking in love and suffering, tanks and tractors, bitchiness, sibling rivalry, and, above all, the joys of growing old disgracefully."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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Le soleil des Scorta : roman
Gaudé, Laurent.
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2004; 246 p. ; 22 cm.
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The spirit catches you and you fall down : a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures
Fadiman, Anne, 1953-
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1997; xi, 339 p.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.
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A spiritual life : a Jewish feminist journey
Feld, Merle, 1947-
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1999; x, 264 p. ; 24 cm.
A unique memoir that interweaves poetry, narrative, meditation, and social history, A Spiritual Life explores the complex facets of a Jewish woman's spiritual coming-of-age, capturing the emotional and spiritual reality of contemporary Jews as well as religious seekers of all types.
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Staying on : a novel
Scott, Paul, 1920-
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1998; 215 p. ; 22 cm.
In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage. Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979. "Staying On far transcends the events of its central action. . . . [The work] should help win for Scott . . . the reputation he deserves--as one of the best novelists to emerge from Britain's silver age."--Robert Towers, Newsweek "Scott's vision is both precise and painterly. Like an engraver cross-hatching in the illusion of fullness, he selects nuances that will make his characters take on depth and poignancy."--Jean G. Zorn, New York Times Book Review "A graceful comic coda to the earlier song of India. . . . No one writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott."--Paul Gray, Time "Staying On provides a sort of postscript to [Scott's] deservedly acclaimed The Raj Quartet. . . . He has, as it were, summoned up the Raj's ghost in Staying On. . . . It is the story of the living death, in retirement, and the final end of a walk-on character from the quartet. . . . Scott has completed the task of covering in the form of a fictional narrative the events leading up to India's partition and the achievement of independence in 1947. It is, on any showing, a creditable achievement."--Malcolm Muggeridge, New York Times Book Review
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Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers
Roach, Mary.
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2003; 303 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.
ACHMARY|STIFFTHECURIOUS
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The strange files of Fremont Jones
Day, Dianne.
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1996; 243 p. ; 18 cm.
Brave, resourceful, adventurous Fremont (née Caroline) Jones is a woman ahead of her time. Hungry for independence, she's traded in her conventional life in Boston for a career as a "type-writer" in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. But Fremont soon discovers that her clients aren't always what they appear to be, and that in doing her job she's transcribing her way into a wealth of mystery--and mortal danger.... Dashing lawyer Justin Cameron well-nigh sweeps Fremont Jones off her feet--and into a situation ripe with perilous intrigue. A client meets an untimely death that Fremant suspects is linked to the paper she typed for him, of which she can recall but one small fragment. And her attempts to disentangle reality and imagination in the gothic tales penned by Edgar Allan Partridge--whose demeanor is one of terror under the barest restraint--send her up the rocky California coast on a mission of discovery from which she may not return.... A riveting, atmospheric mix of intrigue and humor introduces a new investigator as cultivated as Sherlock Holmes and as spunky as Kinsey Millhone.
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Sunday Jews
Calisher, Hortense.
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2003; 699 p. ; 23 cm.
Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "stand[ing] vividly with Cather and Fitzgerald" (Cynthia Ozick). In this, her latest and most lauded novel, she explores a family united in blood yet divided by ideas. Son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice; family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; art expert Erika has a nose job; and artist Zach has two wives. Their mother, infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no longer rich, is bound to a past that never quite dies. The buried history of this extraordinary--and very American--family comes to light unexpectedly when grandson Bert brings home as a wife the woman who, years ago, joined the family circle, then mysteriously disappeared.Told with wit and deep acuity, Sunday Jews is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has justly been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.
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Their eyes were watching God
Hurston, Zora Neale.
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1998; xvii, 219 p. ; 21 cm.
Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
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