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There are Jews in my house
Vapnyar, Laura, 1971-
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2003; 149 p. ; 20 cm.
"Innocence rounds the bend to experience in these beautifully shaped stories of Moscow and Brooklyn, which take up the worldview of the young and overlooked. The Second World War story that opens the book is a masterpiece of ambivalence - about the simultaneous generosity and hypocrisy of Galina, a gentile Russian woman who offers safe harbor to a Jewish friend and her daughter during the German occupation. In "Love Lessons - Monday, 9 A.M.," a young math teacher is assigned to teach a girls' sex education class, even though she herself is still awaiting her first kiss. And in "Mistress," a boy newly arrived in this country bears witness to the intimate details of his grandparents' new and diverging lives: his grandmother's doctors' appointments, where he is charged with translating her myriad complaints into English, and his grandfather's clandestine courtship of another woman."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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Three Junes
Glass, Julia, 1956-
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2002; 353 p. ; 25 cm.
Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Paul’s death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his family’s future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglements—until a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love. Love in its limitless forms—between husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and children—is the force that moves these characters’ lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the heart—how family ties, both those we’re born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy.
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To kill a mockingbird
Lee, Harper.
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1999; 323 p. ; 21 cm.
"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much. One of the best-loved classics of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It has won the Pulitzer Prize, been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recent, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the century (Library Journal). HarperCollins is proud to celebrate the anniversary of the book's publication with this special hardcover edition.
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To kill a mockingbird
Lee, Harper.
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1960; 281 p. ; 18 cm.
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior-to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 15 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.
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The tortilla curtain
Boyle, T. Coraghessan.
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1995; 355 p. cm.
Winner of the Prix Medicis Etranger Topanga Canyon is home to two couples on a collision course. Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. Mexican illegals Candido and America Rincon desperately cling to their vision of the American Dream as they fight off starvation in a makeshift camp deep in the ravine. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, these four and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding.
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Track of the cat
Barr, Nevada.
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2003; 263 p. ; 18 cm.
The first novel featuring park ranger Anna Pigeon is reissued. When a fellow ranger is killed and his death is ruled a mountain lion attack, Anna's suspicions are raised. It's up to her to save the protected cats from the prejudiced locals--and prove the kill was the work of a species far less rare.
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True notebooks
Salzman, Mark.
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2003; 330 p. ; 22 cm.
Chronicles the author's first years teaching at Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for Los Angeles's most violent teenage offenders.
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Vernon God Little
Pierre, D. B. C.
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2003; 279 p. ; 22 cm.
"In the town jail of Martirio - the barbecue sauce capital of Central Texas - sits fifteen-year-old Vernon Little, dressed only in New Jack trainers and underpants. He is in trouble." "His friend Jesus has just blown away sixteen of his classmates before turning the gun on himself. And Vernon, as his only buddy, has become the focus of the town's need for vengeance." "The news of the tragedy has resulted in the quirky backwater being flooded with wannabe CNN hacks all-too-keen to claim their fifteen minutes and lay the blame for the killings at Vernon's feet. In particular Eulalio Ledesma, who begins manipulating matters so that Vernon becomes the centre for the bizarre and vengeful impulses of the townspeople of Martirio." "But Vernon is sure he'll be ok. "Why do movies end happy? Because they imitate life. You know it, I know it."" "Peopled by a cast of grotesques, freaks, cold-blooded chattering housewives (who are all mysteriously, recently widowed), and one very special adolescent with an unfortunate talent for being in the wrong place at the right time, Vernon God Little is riotously funny and puts lust for vengeance, materialism, and trial by media squarely in the dock."--BOOK JACKET.
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Voices of freedom : English and civics
Bliss, Bill.
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2002; x, 213 p. : ill. ; 28 cm.
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Waiting for snow in Havana : confessions of a Cuban boy
Eire, Carlos M. N.
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2003; 383 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Narrated with the urgency of a confession, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died -- and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.
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A walk in the woods : rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Bryson, Bill.
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1998; 276 p. : map
Stretching from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail offers some of America's most breathtaking scenery. After living for many years in England, Bill Bryson moved back to the United States and decided to reacquaint himself with his country by taking to this uninterrupted "hiker's highway." Before long, Bryson and his infamous walking companion, Stephen Katz, are stocking up on insulated long johns, noodles and manuals for avoiding bear attacks as they prepare to set off on a walk that is both amusingly ill-conceived and surprisingly adventurous. John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Peter Jenkins never took a hike like this. A Walk in the Woods showcases Bryson at the height of his comic powers. Meeting up with characters such as Beulah and her fearsome husband, "Bubba T. Flubba," readers risk snakebite and hantavirus to trudge through swollen rivers, traipse up mountainsteps, and develop a new reverence for cream sodas and hot showers. But Bryson also uses his acute powers of observation to conjure a poignant backdrop of silent forests and sparkling lakes, thereby making a gentle but unforgettable plea for the ecological treasures we are in danger of losing. Fresh, illuminating, and uproariously funny, A Walk in the Woods is travel writing at its very best.
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The way home : a German childhood, an American life
Bradley, Ernestine, 1935-
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2005; 259 p. : ill., map ; 22 cm.
"In this candid memoir we meet Ernestine Bradley, the wife of former senator and presidential hopeful Bill Bradley. She stood out among Senate wives: a German-born lover of languages and a transplant to America, Ernestine had a full-time career in New Jersey as a professor of comparative literature, commuted weekly to Washington, D.C., and ran two households - she was in constant motion." "As the book opens, Ernestine takes us to the small town of Passau, Germany, her childhood home, offering a vivid picture of ordinary German life during the Nazi period and just after World War II. As kids on the loose while the fathers were away at war and the mothers were working, Ernestine and her pals explored the town's winding alleys and its three rivers, experiencing a sense of adventure and freedom (despite the privations of war) that would be a touchstone throughout her life. Ernestine describes how she came to see opportunity in defeat as she watched the American troops roll through her little town; this was a primal moment that helped her to face everything that was to come. We follow her as she leaves West Germany, lands a glamorous job as an airline stewardess, and arrives in America, where she marries unhappily and divorces before finally meeting the basketball star and future senator. We watch their romance become an inspiring marriage of equals, his steadiness the perfect complement to her passionate, sometimes flaring nature, as their lives are soon crowded with family, the demands of their individual careers, politics, and, finally, Ernestine's fight with breast cancer."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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