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Abide with me : a novel
Elizabeth Strout.
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294 p. ; 25 cm.
In her luminous and long-awaited new novel, bestselling author Elizabeth Strout welcomes readers back to the archetypal, lovely landscape of northern New England, where the events of her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, unfolded. In the late 1950s, in the small town of West Annett, Maine, a minister struggles to regain his calling, his family, and his happiness in the wake of profound loss. At the same time, the community he has served so charismatically must come to terms with its own strengths and failings-faith and hypocrisy, loyalty and abandonment-when a dark secret is revealed. Tyler Caskey has come to love West Annett, "just up the road" from where he was born. The short, brilliant summers and the sharp, piercing winters fill him with awe-as does his congregation, full of good people who seek his guidance and listen earnestly as he preaches. But after suffering a terrible loss, Tyler finds it hard to return to himself as he once was. He hasn't had The Feeling-that God is all around him, in the beauty of the world-for quite some time. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family's tragedy. A congregation that had once been patient and kind during Tyler's grief now questions his leadership and propriety. In the kitchens, classrooms, offices, and stores of the village, anger and gossip have started to swirl. And in Tyler's darkest hour, a startling discovery will test his congregation's humanity-and his own will to endure the kinds of trials that sooner or later test us all. In prose incandescent and artful, Elizabeth Strout draws readers into the details of ordinary life in a way that makes it extraordinary. All is considered-life, love, God, and community-within these pages, and all is made new by this writer's boundless compassion and graceful prose.
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About Alice
Calvin Trillin.
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78 p. ; 21 cm.
In Calvin Trillin's antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had "a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day" and the mother who thought that if you didn't go to every performance of your child's school play, "the county would come and take the child." Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page-his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page-an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, "managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in." Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who "seemed to glow." "You have never again been as funny as you were that night," Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later. "You mean I peaked in December of 1963?" "I'm afraid so." But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, "I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice." In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, withAbout Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers. From the Hardcover edition.
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Adiós, Hemingway
Leonardo Padura.
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190 p. ; 21 cm.
La historia gira en torno a los últimos días del desaparecido escritor norteamericano Ernest Hemingway. El cuerpo de un hombre sin vida yace en la ex casa del novelista en la Finca Vigía, Cuba, ahora casa museo. Es este suceso el que une dos tiempos anacrónicos, el de Mario Conde, un hombre individualista que cae en un problema alcohólico por su extremo gusto al ron y a un Hemingway desarraigado, con una vida amorosa destruida por su falta de compromiso, desesperanzado, desilusionado, alcohólico y con un gusto desmedido por las armas, único medio por el cual puede demostrar su virilidad. En este juego de tiempos, entonces, los dos personajes se van mostrando con sus defectos y van creando una historia que los une a ambos.
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The adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain ; with an introduction by John Seelye ; notes by Guy Cardwell.
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xxxiii, 327 p. : map ; 20 cm.
Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . More than a century after its publication it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of American humor. Introduction by John Seelye and Notes by Guy Cardwell
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Affliction
Russell Banks.
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355 p ; 24 cm.
Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of Russell Banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.
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After this
Alice McDermott.
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279 p. ; 22 cm.
Alice McDermott's powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother, Jacob, lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of their aging parents, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence.After This, alive with the passions and tragedies of a determining era in our history, portrays the clash of traditional, faith-bound life and modern freedom, while also capturing, with McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, the joy, sorrow, anger, and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.
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Aftershock : the next economy and America's future
Robert B. Reich.
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x, 174 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
Celebrated economic policy maker and political theorist Robert B. Reich argues that the nation's 2008 economic collapse is the result of an increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top--and a middle class that had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living. To ensure that prosperity is widely shared, he continues, requires the implementation of a much broader safety net for the middle class financed by higher marginal tax rates on the very wealthy.
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The age of American unreason
Susan Jacoby.
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xx, 356 p. ; 25 cm.
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public. Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion. At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation. From the Hardcover edition.
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The age of innocence
Edith Wharton ; introduction by Louis Auchincloss.
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xxiii, 270 p. ; 21 cm.
Wharton scholars spearheaded by Waid (English, U. of California, Santa Barbara) provide a chronology, background, sources, and reviews of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1920 novel depicting New York society in transition. Illustrations relate to the book's dramatization and sites of interest. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The agony and the ecstasy : a biographical novel of Michelangelo
Irving Stone.
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776 p. ; 18 cm.
Fictional depiction of Michelangelo. Includes bibliography, glossary and a list of the artist's works.
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The air we breathe : a novel
Andrea Barrett.
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297 p. : ill., geneal. table ; 24 cm.
Detached from the rest of the country on the eve of World War I, the tuberculosis-stricken residents of an Adirondack lakeside sanatorium are housed in accordance with their economic status and languish in their isolation before an enterprising patient initiates a weekly discussion group.
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All other nights : a novel
Dara Horn.
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363 p. ; 25 cm.
How is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army, it is a question his commanders have answered for him: on Passover in 1862 he is ordered to murder his own uncle, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln.After that night, will Jacob ever speak for himself? The answer comes when his commanders send him on another mission-this time not to murder a spy but to marry one.A page-turner rich with romance and the history of America (North and South), this is a book only Dara Horn could have written. Full of insight and surprise, layered with meaning, it is a brilliant parable of the moral divide that still haunts us: between those who value family first and those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.
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