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La nuit sacrée : roman
Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 1944-
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1995; 188 p. ; 18 cm.
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Old men at midnight
Potok, Chaim, 1929-2002.
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2001; 273 p. ; 21 cm.
From the celebrated author of The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, a trilogy of related novellas about a woman whose life touches three very different men-stories that encompass some of the profoundest themes of the twentieth century. Ilana Davita Dinn is the listener to whom three men relate their lives. As a young girl, she offers English lessons to a teenage survivor of the camps. In "The Ark Builder," he shares with her the story of his friendship with a proud old builder of synagogue arks, and what happened when the German army invaded their Polish town. As a graduate student, she finds herself escorting a guest lecturer from the Soviet Union, and in "The War Doctor," her sympathy moves him to put his painful past to paper recounting his experiences as a Soviet NKVD agent who was saved by an idealistic doctor during the Russian civil war, only to encounter him again during the terrifying period of the Kremlin doctors' plot. And, finally, we meet her in "The Trope Teacher," in which a distinguished professor of military history, trying to write his memoirs, is distracted by his wife's illness and by the arrival next door of a new neighbor, the famous writer I. D. (Ilana Davita) Chandal. Poignant and profound, Chaim Potok's newest fiction is a major addition to his remarkable-and remarkably loved-body of work. From the Hardcover edition.
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Oranges are not the only fruit
Winterson, Jeanette, 1959-
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1985; 176 p. ; 23 cm.
Winner of the prestigious Whitbread Prize for best first novel and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best writer under 35, this modern classic has sold 100,000 copies in the United States. The novel chronicles the life of a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an Evangelical household in the dour, industrial Midlands. Her insistence on listening to the truths of her own heart and mind makes for an unforgettable chronicle of an eccentric, moving rite of passage into adulthood.
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The Orientalist : solving the mystery of a strange and dangerous life
Reiss, Tom.
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2005; xxvii, 433 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Said is acknowledged to be the pen name of the author of books in German about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution that were celebrated throughout fascist Europe. Reiss, a political and cultural in New York City, argues that he was Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born in 1905 to a rich family in Baku, who escaped the Russian Revolution, found refuge in Germany, wrote his books, married an international heiress, was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer, then put under house arrest when his identity became known, where he wrote his last book. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The other Boleyn girl : a novel
Gregory, Philippa.
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2002; 664 p. ; 21 cm.
Two sisters competing for the greatest prize: the love of a king When Mary Boleyn comes to court as an innocent girl of fourteen, she catches the eye of Henry VIII. Dazzled by the king, Mary falls in love with both her golden prince and her growing role as unofficial queen. However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn in her family?s ambitious plots as the king?s interest begins to wane and she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. Then Mary knows that she must defy her family and her king, and take her fate into her own hands. A rich and compelling tale of love, sex, ambition, and intrigue, The Other Boleyn Girl introduces a woman of extraordinary determination and desire who lived at the heart of the most exciting and glamorous court in Europe and survived by following her own heart.
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Palace walk
Mahfouz, Naguib, 1912-
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1989; 498p. cm.
Volume I of the masterful Cairo Trilogy. A national best-seller in both hardcover and paperback, it introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.
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Perilous times : free speech in wartime : from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the war on terrorism
Stone, Geoffrey R.
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2004; xx, 730 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
During times of war, says Stone (law, U. of Chicago), "the line between dissent and disloyalty is elusive, and often ignored." Throughout American history, it has been especially at such times that the First Amendment right to free speech has been most challenged and, not infrequently, completely abrogated. Stone surveys these challenges, discussing the Sedition Act of 1798, President Lincoln's imprisonment of vocal opponents of his policies, the Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I, McCarthyism, and repression of dissent during the Vietnam War. He explores the choices of presidents facing dissent, the judges called on to rule on First Amendment cases, and the dissenters determined to speak out. He also considers the parallels between his historical examples and the current "War on Terror." Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The piano tuner
Mason, Daniel Philippe.
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2002; 317 p. : map ; 25 cm.
An extraordinary first novel that tells the story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the nineteenth century. In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. The piano belongs to an army surgeon-major whose unorthodox peacemaking methodspoetry, medicine, and now musichave brought a tentative quiet to the southern Shan States but have elicited questions from his superiors. On his journey through Europe, the Red Sea, India, and into Burma, Edgar meets soldiers, mystics, bandits, and tale-spinners, as well as an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major. And at the doctors fort on a remote Burmese river, Edgar encounters a world more mysterious and dangerous than he ever could have imagined. Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel.
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The pickup
Gordimer, Nadine.
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2001; 270 p. ; 22 cm.
The Nobel Laureate's psychologically penetrating story of the love affair between a rich South African and the illegal alien she "picks up" on a whim Who picked up whom? Is the pickup the illegal immigrant desperate to evade deportation to his impoverished desert country? Or is the pickup the powerful businessman's daughter trying to escape a priveleged background she despises? When Julie Summers' car breaks down in a sleazy street, at a garage a young Arab emerges from beneath the chassis of a vehicle to aid her. The consequences develop as a story of unpredictably relentless emotions that overturn each one's notion of the other, and of the solutions life demands for different circumstances. She insists on leaving the country with him. The love affair becomes a marriage-that state she regards as a social convention appropriate to her father's set and her mother remarried in California, but decreed by her 'grease monkey' in order to present her respectably to his family. In the Arab village, while he is dedicated to escaping, again, to what he believes is a fulfilling life in the West, she is drawn by a counter-magnet of new affinities in his close family and the omnipresence of the desert. A novel of great power and concision, psychological surprises and unexpected developments, The Pickup is a story of the rites of passage that are emigration/immigration, where love can survive only if stripped of all certainties outside itself.
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The plot against America
Roth, Philip.
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2004; 391 p. ; 24 cm.
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family-and for a million such families all over the country-during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst. Book jacket.
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Poison
Harrison, Kathryn.
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1995; 317 p. ; 24 cm.
Francisca de Luarac, the daughter of a poor Spanish silk grower, is a dreamer of fabulous dreams. Marie Louise de Bourbon, the niece of Louis XIV, dances in slippers of fine Spanish silk in the French Court of the Sun King and imagines her own enchanted future. Born on the same day--in an age when superstition, repression, and the Inquisition reign--the lives of these two young women unfold in tandem, barely touching. Each hoards the memory of her adored lost mother like an amulet. Francica's obsession with her lover, a Catholick priest, will shaper her fate. Marie Loouise is yoked by political expediency to the mad, imptoent Carlos II of Spain. But even as their twin destinies spiral inexorably toward disaster, both Queen and commoner cultivate a dangerous, secret life dedicated to resistance, transcendence, and love. Written in gorgeous prose that has the sheen of silk, Kathryn Harrison's POISON vividlyreminds us of the persistence of desire, the passion that exists between mothers and daughters, and the sorcery of dreams.
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Pour un oui ou pour un non
Sarraute, Nathalie.
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1982; 83 p. ; 18 cm.
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