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La première gorgée de bière et autres plaisirs minuscules : récits
Delerm, Philippe, 1950-
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1997; 91 p. ; 19 cm.
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Prodigal summer : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara.
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2000; 444 p.
Barbara Kingsolver, a writer praised for her "extravagantly gifted narrative voice" (New York Times Book Review), has created with this novel a hymn to wildness that celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself. Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth. With the richness that characterizes Barbara Kingsolver's finest work, Prodigal Summer embraces pure thematic originality and demonstrates a balance of narrative and ideas that only an accomplished novelist could render so beautifully.
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Rambam's ladder : a meditation on generosity and why it is necessary to give
Salamon, Julie.
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2003; 183 p. ; 20 cm.
Salamon examines the rules of giving that were set out by Maimonides (also known as Rambam) as a ladder the thoughtful giver could climb. The result is a thoughtful book that will encourage readers to live better by giving better.
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The reader
Schlink, Bernhard.
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1997; 218 p. ; 20 cm.
Already an acclaimed & best-selling work of fiction in Europe (currently being translated into fourteen different languages worldwide), The Reader is both a literary surprise & a moral challenge: a riveting, provocative, & deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening in a passionate, clandestine love affair with an older woman, & what happens to them both when the secrets in her past are revealed. Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg becomes ill on the way home from school. A woman takes care of him. Later, the boy arrives at her home with a bunch of flowers to thank her. And then comes back again. Hanna is the first woman he has ever desired. But there is something slightly off-key about her. His questions about her family & her life go unanswered. One day Hanna simply disappears. Michael's life goes on, but he can't forget her. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved so passionately is a criminal. Much about her behavior during the trial makes no sense. But then, suddenly & terribly, it does--Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret. As the past erupts into the present--both Michael's past with Hanna, & the past of Germany itself--Michael must accept that he will never be free of either of them.
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Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Nafisi, Azar.
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2003; 347 p. ; 22 cm.
Everyone has a dream -- something she fantasizes about doing and generally never gets around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream, and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, a small circle of seven young women gathered together every Thursday in secret at her home to read and discuss great books of Western literature. At first they were suspicious of one another, reticent and afraid to speak their minds. But soon they began to share their dreams and disappointments, as their stories entwined with those they were reading: The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita -- their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is the breathtakingly moving story of these young women and their clandestine meetings, and of Azar Nafisi's experiences teaching English literature in Iran. It is a tale of courage and heartache, an unforgettable story of seven remarkable women, and of the triumph of imagination.
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Reflecting the sky
Rozan, S. J.
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2001; 312 p.
-- This is Rozan's breakout book: the setting moves beyond New York state; the relationships between the two main characters reaches a critical point and, most importantly, her sales and reputation are near critical mass to reach the next sales level.
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Rocket boys : a memoir
Hickam, Homer H., 1943-
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1998; xii, 368 p. ; 25 cm.
"Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my home town was at war with itself over its children, and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives. I didn't know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn't know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine." So begins Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr.'s extraordinary memoir of life in Coalwood, West Virginia-a hard-scrabble little company town where the only things that mattered were coal mining and high school football. But in 1957, after the Soviet satellite Sputnik shot across the Appalachian sky, Sonny and his teenaged friends decided to do their bit for the U.S. space race by building their own rockets---and Coalwood, Sonny and A powerful story of growing up and of getting out, of a mother's love and a father's fears, Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys proves, like Angela's Ashes and Russell Baker's Growing Up before it, that the right storyteller and the right story can touch readers' hearts and enchant their souls. In a town where the only things that mattered were coal-mining and high-school football, where the future was regarded with more fear than hope, a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik race across the West Virginia sky--and soon found his future in the stars. In 1957, Homer H. "Sonny" Hickam, Jr., and a handful of his friends were inspired to start designing and launching the home-made rockets that would change their lives and their town forever. Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams. Step by step, with the help (and occasional hindrance) of a collection of unforgettable characters, the boys learn not only how to turn scrap into sophisticated rockets that fly miles into the sky, but how to sustain their dreams as they dared to imagine a life beyond its borders in a town that the postwar boom was passing by. Rocket Boys has already caught the eye of Hollywood: The producer of Field of Dreams is now working to produce a major motion picture in time for next year's Academy Awards. A uniquely endearing story with universal themes of class, family, coming of age, and the thrill of discovery, Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys is evocative, vivid storytelling at its most magical.
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Sammy's hill : a novel
Gore, Kristin, 1977-
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2004; 387 p. ; 24 cm.
"Idealistic, dedicated to her job, and a bit of a hypochondriac, Samantha Joyce has a very busy life. Working a seventy-hour week and mastering the details of the latest health care reform bill, while making time to celebrate obscure but significant holidays such as the twenty-ninth anniversary of The Partridge Family series finale, leaves little time for romance. But then she meets Aaron Driver, the handsome speechwriter for a rival senator. Sammy falls for him hard, despite the fact that his ambitious boss is the emblem of everything she hates about congressional hardball. When you work on Capitol Hill, even dating becomes a political act." "Try as she might, Sammy isn't the sort of person who can keep from speaking her mind, no matter how much trouble it causes. Whether she's trying to thwart a filibuster, detox a constituent, or recover from mistakenly emailing a racy message to over two hundred of Capitol Hill's political elite, Sammy stays true to herself, foibles and all. And before she knows it, she finds herself at the heart of a romantic tangle, a major showdown over health care reform, and the highest-stakes contest of all - a presidential election campaign."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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Saturday
McEwan, Ian.
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2005; 289p. ; 25 cm.
Saturday is a novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children, who are young adults. Henry wakes to the relative comfort of his home on this, his day off. He is almost as comfortable here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before and his children are now grown and making their way into this world as adults. On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne’s day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary: from an unusual sighting in the early morning sky to his usual squash game, and from trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of war protestors filling the streets of London, to a seemingly minor car accident. Ian McEwan has written a masterful novel that keeps you balanced on the edge of your seat as Perowne’s happy safe world is unexpectedly shattered. At the heart of this extraordinary novel is the acute awareness of the details of our relationships, of life and of love, and the unforeseen violence that can threaten our peace.
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Un secret sans importance : roman
Desarthe, Agnès, 1966-
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1996; 209 p. ; 18 cm.
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The selected political writings of John Locke : texts, background selections, sources, interpretations
Locke, John, 1632-1704.
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2005; xxxix, 404 p. ; 22 cm.
This reader compiled by Sigmund (Princeton U.) offers an introduction to the political philosophy of John Locke. It provides selections from The First Treatise on Government and the entirety of The Second Treatise, as well as background selections from Essays on the Law of Nature and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It also contains selections from other thinkers seen as sources of Locke's thought, including Richard Hooker, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, and Sir Robert Filmer, as well as modern scholarly commentary. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The sex lives of cannibals : adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
Troost, J. Maarten.
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2004; xiii, 272, [1] p. ; 21 cm.
Just in case you want to exercise your inner Gauguin, Troost here presents about a hundred reasons why you should stay in the 'burbs. He spent two years on a tropical isle, only to discover that it was a lot like hell, minus the toilets. While contending with putrifying heat, seas so polluted even those of limited divinity could walk on them, diseases never encountered in the relatively calm environs of an ER, and (shudder) no coffee or beer, Troost also found the only music to be had for miles was "La Macarena." To this case study of the absurd, Troost actually adds a bibliography. He does not include an index, which is a pity because readers may actually want to find out how many times Troost had to put up with "Half-Dead Fred" and outbreaks of hepatitis A, B, and C. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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