Just a few of what our customers are reading…some brand new, some definitely “notable!!”
SOUTH OF BROAD, by Pat Conroy
The beloved best-selling author returns with a sprawling tale set mostlyin Charleston, South Carolina, where, after his brother’s suicide, Leopold Bloom King struggles along with the rest of his family until he beginsto gather an intimate circle of friends, whose ties endure for two decades until a final, unexpected test of friendship rears its ugly head in San Francisco. 750,000 first printing.
THATOLD CAPE MAGIC, by Richard Russo
A change of pace from Pulitzer-winning author Russo (Bridge of Sighs, 2007, etc.).In contrast to his acclaimed novels about dying towns in the Northeast, the author’s slapstick satire of academia (Straight Man, 1997) previously seemed like an anomaly. Now it has a companion of sorts, thoughRusso can’t seem to decide whether his protagonist is comic or tragic. Maybe both. The son of two professors who were unhappy with each other andtheir lot in life, Jack Griffin vowed not to follow in their footsteps, instead becoming a hack screenwriter in Los Angeles. Then he leaves that career to become a cinema professor and moves back East with his wife Joy. Most of the novel takes place during two weddings a year apart: one on Cape Cod, where Jack had endured annual summer vacations and convinced Joy to spend their honeymoon; the other in Maine, where Joy had wanted to honeymoon. Plenty of flashbacks concerning the families of each spouse seem on the surface to present very different models for marriage, and thereis an account of the year between the weddings that shows their relationship changing significantly. It isn’t enough that Jack feels trapped by his familial past; he carries his parents’ ashes in his trunk, can’t bear to scatter them and carries on conversations with his late mother that eventually become audible. Will Jack and Joy be able to sustain their marriage? Will their daughter succumb to the fate of her parents, just as Jackand Joy have? Observes Jack, “Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.” Readable, as always with this agreeable and gifted author. First printing of 200,000. Kirkus Review
ZEITOUN, by Dave Eggers
“In Zeitoun, what Dave Eggers has found in the Katrina mud is the full-fleshed story of a single family, and in telling that story he hits largertargets with more punch than those who have already attacked the thematic and historic giants of this disaster. It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction…imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina. 50 years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun.” New York Times Book Review, written by Timothy Egan.
SPEAKING OF TIMOTHY EGAN…
THE BIG BURN, by Timothy Egan
The epic forest fire of 1910 and how it kept massive business interests from strangling the nascent American conservation movement. New York Times columnist and National Book Award winner Egan (The Worst Hard Times: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, 2005, etc.) dissects the nation’s worst-ever forest fire and its aftermath. Erupting over two August days in the tinder-dry Bitterroot Mountains along the Idaho-Montana border, it consumed three million woodland acres, wiped out several railroad-junction towns and killed nearly 100 people, most ofthem temporary fire fighters and the U.S. Forest Service rangers who hadhired them. Egan focuses his probing tale on two men, Theodore Rooseveltand Gifford Pinchot, who had met two decades before, finding they had wealthy families and a deep love of the outdoors in common. A third, SierraClub founder John Muir, was a mentor and inspiration to both, but later broke away due to differences of opinion on policy matters. In the author’s accounting, the idea of conservation, as now generally accepted, was essentially launched from the relationship between Roosevelt and Pinchot. Roosevelt proved crucial in many endeavors. He set aside, as Egan writes,”an area roughly the size of France” as public-domain national forest inthe West and appointed Pinchot as founding director of the Forest Service, which was then an agency with no authority that faced nearly total public antipathy, including that of the powerful timber and railroad barons.The “Big Burn,” however, during which undermanned ranks of rangers were dying in the last line of defense, drastically changed public sentiment. Essential for any Green bookshelf.
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson
Tangled but worthy follow-up to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), also starring journo extraordinaire Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the Lara Crofts of the land of the midnight sun. That’s not quite right: Lisbeth is really a Baltic MacGyver with a highly developed sense of outrage, a sociopathic bent and brand-new breast implants, to say nothing of a well-stuffed bankbook. The late Larsson’s sequel does not absolutely require knowledge of its predecessor, but it helps, given the convoluted back story and the allusive, sometimes loopy structure of the present book. In all events, Lisbeth bears her trademark dragon tattoo still, but her wasp is gone, for a curious reason: “The wasp was too conspicuous and it made her too easy remember and identify. Salander did not want to be remembered or identified.” She cuts a fine figure all the same on the beachat Grenada, where she falls into a sticky skein of intrigue involving the usual suspects: self-righteous crusaders, bored Club Med types and somevery nasty characters on both sides of what used to be called the Iron Curtain. So sticky is the plot, in fact, that Lisbeth finds herself accused of committing murder. It’s a predicament that the utterly self-reliant but unworldly hacker (when we catch up with her, she’s reading a mathematics treatise picked up during one of her frequent visits to university bookshops) needs Blomkvist’s help to get out of. Some of the traditional elements of the espionage thriller turn up in Larsson’s pages, while othersare turned on their head—sometimes literally, at least where the romantic bits come in. Still, while endlessly complex, the plot has the requisite chases, cliffhangers and bloodshed. Not to mention Fermat’s theorem.Fans of postmodern mystery will revel in Larsson’s latest.
Stieg Larsson, who lived in Sweden, was the editor in chief of the magazine Expo and a leading expert on antidemocratic right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations. He died in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played withFire, and the third novel in the series.
By Greg Mortenson
