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All souls' rising
Madison Smartt Bell.
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530 p. : map ; 21 cm.
The 1791 revolt against the French in Haiti through the eyes of the parties in the conflict: mulattos, blacks and whites. The protagonists include its tragic leader, the aristocratic Toussaint L'Ouverture who refused to declare independence from France. A tale of burning plantations, massacres and Byzantine politics.
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The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
Michael Chabon.
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659 p. ; 25 cm.
With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers. It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun. The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys--and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century.
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America, 1908 : the dawn of flight, the race to the Pole, the invention of the Model T, and the making of a modern nation
Jim Rasenberger.
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vii, 307 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
A breathtaking ride through the highs and lows of one spectacular, pivotal year in American history. As the earth turned toward the sun on the first morning of 1908, human flight remained, for most Americans, in the realm of myth and dream. But before the darkness fell on New Year's Eve at the end of the year, the Wright brothers would be worldwide celebrities, heralded as the first people in all of human history to conquer the sky. It was the year Teddy Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet on a voyage around the globe, Robert Peary began his courageous dash to the North Pole, six automobiles left Times Square on an epic twenty-thousand-mile race to Paris, and Henry Ford introduced an oddly shaped new automobile called the Model T. It was a time of seemingly boundless innovation - everything was bigger, better, fast, and greater than ever before. In New York and Chicago, banks of high-speed elevators zipped through vertical shafts in the tallest buildings on earth. Pneumatic tubes whisked mail between far-flung post offices in minutes. Women cleaned their homes with amazing new devices called vacuums. And as American engineers cut a fifty-mile canal through the Isthmus of Panama, the very air buzzed with the imagined potential of new technology, including a "portable wireless telephone" that would someday allow people to talk while they walked. Meanwhile, the New York Giants battled the Chicago Cubs in one of the most thrilling seasons in baseball history, and a reluctant William Howard Taft was elected twenty-seventh president of the United States. By turns gripping and humorous, shocking and delightful, Jim Rasenberger's America, 1908 brings to life our nation as it was one hundred years ago, at a moment of delirious optimism and pride, a time when Americans believed that even the most intractable problems would soon be solved and that the future was bound to be better than the past. "What will the year 2008 bring us?" pondered the New York World on New Year's Day of 1908. "What marvels of development await the youth of tomorrow?" As Thomas Edison said later that year, "Anything, everything, is possible." Shedding new light on stories we thought we knew and telling fresh stories we can't believe we've never heard, American, 1908 is a rousing chronicle of a country on the brink of greatness - and a timely, thought-provoking glimpse at a younger America, even as we wonder what awaits us in the century ahead.
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American Indian stories
Zitkala-Ša.
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v, 89 p. ; 22 cm.
Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux woman who left her reservation at the age of 8 to attend a harsh Quaker school, struggled to find a balance between her heritage and American culture. This important collection of wistful autobiographical tales, traditional short stories, and pointed political writings is a powerful testimony to her triumph over hatred and disillusionment.
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American lion : Andrew Jackson in the White House
Jon Meacham.
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xxiv, 483 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.
A thought-provoking study of Andrew Jackson chronicles the life and career of a self-made man who went on to become a military hero and seventh president of the United States, critically analyzing Jackson's seminal role during a turbulent era in history, the political crises and personal upheaval that surrounded him, and his legacy for the modern presidency.
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American uprising : the untold story of America's largest slave revolt
Daniel Rasmussen.
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288 p. ; 23 cm.
Rasmussen presents a gripping and deeply revealing history of the 1811 New Orleans slave rebellion that provides new insight into American expansionism and the path to the Civil War.
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Amsterdam
Ian McEwan.
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193 p. ; 21 cm.
In the affairs of his dead wife, a British publisher discovers compromising pictures of the foreign secretary who was her lover. An opportunity for revenge on both the political and personal level.
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Animal, vegetable, miracle : a year of food life
Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver ; original drawings by Richard A. Houser.
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370 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
When Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. "Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals, and enough sense to refrain from naming them." Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. American citizens spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but pay dearly in other ways -- losing the flavors, diversity and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Believing that most of us have better options available, Kingsolver and her family set out to prove for themselves that a local diet is not just better for the economy and environment but also better on the table. Their search leads them through a season of planting, pulling weeds, expanding their kitchen skills, harvesting their own animals, joining the effort to save heritage crops from extinction, and learning the time-honored rural art of getting rid of zucchini. Inspired by the flavors and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore farmers' markets and diversified organic farms at home and across the country, discovering a booming movement with devotees from the Deep South to Alaska. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, and complete with original recipes, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
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Arabian nights and days
Naguib Mahfouz ; translated by Denys Johnson-Davies.
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227 p.
Published in Arabic in 1982, this imaginative and magical novel is a retelling of the tales of the Arabian Nights. Shaharazad, Maarouf the Cobbler, Aladdin, Sinbad, and even genies people the 17 different sections, set in an Islamic city during medieval times. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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Art
Yasmina Reza ; présentation, notes, questions et après-texte établis par Jocelyne Hubert.
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122 p. ; 18 cm.
Their friendship is put to the test when Serge and Marc's theoretical discussions on modern art turn into personal attacks.
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El arte de la resurrección
Hernán Rivera Letelier.
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254 p. ; 24 cm.
"Domingo Zárate Vega comenzó a advertir formas apocalípticas en las nubes y a acertar en la predicción de pequeños desastres. Tras la muerte de su madre, se hace ermitaño en el valle ed Elqui, donde descubre, a través de una visión, que él es nada menos que la reencarnación de Jesucristo. Cuando en 1942 se entera de que en la oficina Providencia vive una prostituta que venera a la Virgen del Carmen y que además se llama Magdalena, sale a buscarla con el propósito de que sea su discípula y amante, y juntos divulgar la inminente llegada del fin del mundo. El desierto chileno y las oficinas salitreras castigadas por el sol son los hostiles parajes donde el iluminado, más conocido como el Cristo de Elqui, causará revuelo entre los lugareños con sus prédicas santas."--Publisher's description.
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Arthur & George
Julian Barnes.
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385 p. ; 24 cm.
As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later-one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world's most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife-their fates become inextricably connected. In Arthur & George , Julian Barnes explores the grand tapestry of late-Victorian Britain to create his most intriguing and engrossing novel yet.
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