Dave's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 07 May 2025 11:26:49 -0700 60 Dave's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy―and Why It Failed]]> 211004064
Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, is often ranked among Americans� most well-liked presidents. Yet what most Americans don’t know is that JFK’s historic presidency almost ended before it began—at the hands of a disgruntled sociopathic loner armed with dynamite.

On December 11, 1960, shortly after Kennedy’s election and before his inauguration, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick waited in his car—a parked Buick—on a quiet street in Palm Beach, Florida. Pavlick knew the president-elect’s schedule. He knew when Kennedy would leave his house. He knew where Kennedy was going. From there, Pavlick had a simple plan—one that could’ve changed the course of history.

Written in the gripping, page-turning style that is the hallmark of Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch’s bestselling series, this is a slice of history vividly brought to life. Meltzer and Mensch are at the top of their game with this brilliant exploration of what could’ve been for one of the most compelling leaders of the 20th century.]]> 304 Brad Meltzer 1250790573 Dave 0 to-read 4.08 2025 The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy―and Why It Failed
author: Brad Meltzer
name: Dave
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880]]> 184612 ]]> 746 W.E.B. Du Bois 0684856573 Dave 0 to-read 4.50 1935 Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
author: W.E.B. Du Bois
name: Dave
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1935
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America]]> 214537764 A poignant memoir exploring smalltown baseball as a lens into what’s right and wrong with modern America � written by an acclaimed journalist who went from Princeton to Army Ranger School to Iraq in search of the core values he ended up finding in a minor league stadium in Batavia, New York.

What happens when a minor league team � that has been the heart and soul of a modest upstate NY town � is shut down by the billionaires who run Major League Baseball?

Batavia, New York � between Rochester and Buffalo � was a bastion of smalltown baseball where the professional game had been played uninterrupted since 1897. Many jobs have evaporated or gone overseas but its good families haven’t, and one remaining jewel of Batavia is the Muckdogs� quirky ballpark that attracts a hefty portion of the local population from June to August every year.

In HOMESTAND, acclaimed author and journalist WillBardenwerperexplores the question of 'What is baseball,' and uses that as a lens to explore 'What is America today.' Introducing a vibrant and unforgettable cast of characters, Bardenwerper exposes the beating heart of smalltown America and its love of baseball � even as Major League Baseball is on a little-disguised mission to control the sport from the very top, closing down many minor league teams across the country.The Batavia Muckdogs were one of the victims of MLB contraction � shut down unceremoniously in 2021. But the town fought back and a new version of the Muckdogs arose, playing in a summer league comprised of mostly college players and prospects. The town rallied, and the sounds and sights of local baseball on summer nights continued. Tickets and draft beer and hot dogs were still affordable. Kids were still starry eyed and seeking autographs before games.

Meanwhile, in other minor leagues, the mom-and-pop advertisements in center field are replaced by corporate ad sales controlled by NY marketing managers, and locally printed game programs and neighborhood teens working the ticket windows are replaced by convenient 'scan your ticket through the app at the kiosk and click the link to see today's lineup and pop-up advertisements from Google'� But at the heart of HOMESTAND, Bardenwerper searches the back roads of America for things that are still good and pure, for the crack of a bat in a small town under the summer stars � and he finds it.]]> 320 Will Bardenwerper 0385549652 Dave 0 to-read 4.19 Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
author: Will Bardenwerper
name: Dave
average rating: 4.19
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/04
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]]> Educated 35133922
Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.]]> 352 Tara Westover 0399590501 Dave 0 currently-reading 4.46 2018 Educated
author: Tara Westover
name: Dave
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World: A History]]> 59228212 New York Times bestselling author William Alexander takes readers on the surprisingly twisty journey of the beloved tomato in this fascinating and erudite microhistory.

The tomato gets no respect. Never has. Lost in the dustbin of history for centuries, accused of being vile and poisonous, subjected to being picked hard-green and gassed, even used as a projectile, the poor tomato has become the avatar for our disaffection with industrial foods � while becoming the most popular vegetable in America (and, in fact, the world). Each summer, tomato festivals crop up across the country; the Heinz ketchup bottle, instantly recognizable, has earned a spot in the Smithsonian; and now the tomato is redefining the very nature of farming, moving from fields into climate-controlled mega-greenhouses the size of New England villages.

Supported by meticulous research and told in a lively, accessible voice, Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World seamlessly weaves travel, history, humor, and a little adventure (and misadventure) to follow the tomato's trail through history. A fascinating story complete with heroes, con artists, conquistadors, and—no surprise—the Mafia, this book is a mouth-watering, informative, and entertaining guide to the food that has captured our hearts for generations.]]> 320 William Alexander 1538753324 Dave 5 3.97 2022 Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World: A History
author: William Alexander
name: Dave
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/03
date added: 2025/05/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games―A Comedian's Memoir of Gaming and Comedy, From Nintendo to The Tonight Show]]> 210827800
You may know Mike Drucker for his Emmy®-nominated comedy writing or his hilarious skits on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live. Perhaps his riotous social media feed or his jokes online had you laughing out loud. But at the heart and soul of his career in comedy are the video games he grew up playing as a kid.

At the ripe age of three, Mike got his very first Nintendo console, and it was love at first Duck Hunt. As video games evolved, so did Mike, each new game expanding his worldview and teaching him all about football through NFL Blitz, how to dance (kind of) with Dance Dance Revolution and much more. Mike knew he wanted a career in gaming and eventually took a job at Nintendo, but after opening for Patton Oswalt and writing freelance for SNL, he realized his true calling was comedy.

Mike combines his love of both gaming and writing in a rollicking tribute to the wonderful history of games and how electronic entertainment deeply influences our lives. Nostalgic and revealing, caustic and biting, yet most of all, unabashedly funny, Good Game, No Rematch is a love letter to video games and on writing, dedicated to the people who were born to hold a controller and to just about anybody looking to laugh.]]> 304 Mike Drucker 1335012699 Dave 0 to-read 4.16 2025 Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games―A Comedian's Memoir of Gaming and Comedy, From Nintendo to The Tonight Show
author: Mike Drucker
name: Dave
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/09
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]]> A History of Burning 62315839 An epic, sweeping historical debut novel spanning continents and a century, and how one act of survival can reverberate through generations.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor on the East African Railway for the British. One day Pirbhai commits an act to ensure his survival that will haunt him forever and reverberate across his family's future for years to come.

Pirbhai's children are born and raised under the jacaranda trees and searing sun of Kampala during the waning days of British colonial rule. As Uganda moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai's granddaughters, Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya, are three sisters coming of age in a divided nation. As they each forge their own path for a future, they must carry the silence of the history they've inherited. In 1972, under Idi Amin's brutal regime and the South Asian expulsion, the family has no choice but to flee, and in the chaos, they leave something devastating behind.

As Pirbhai's grandchildren, scattered across the world, find their way back to each other in exile in Toronto, a letter arrives that stokes the flames of the fire that haunts the family. It makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy to secure their own place in the world.

A History of Burning is an unforgettable tour de force, an intimate family saga of complicity and resistance, about the stories we share, the ones that remain unspoken, and the eternal search for home.]]> 400 Janika Oza 1538724243 Dave 0 to-read 4.11 2023 A History of Burning
author: Janika Oza
name: Dave
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> The East Indian 62919367 Inspired by a historical figure, an exhilarating debut novel about the first native of the Indian subcontinent to arrive in Colonial America—for readers of Esi Edugyan and Yaa Gyasi.

Meet Tony: insatiably curious, deeply compassionate, with a unique perspective on every scene he encounters. Kidnapped and transported to the New World after traveling from the British East India Company’s outpost on the Coromandel Coast to the teeming streets of London, young Tony finds himself in Jamestown, Virginia, where he and his fellow indentured servants—boys like himself, men from Africa, a mad woman from London—must work the tobacco plantations. Orphaned and afraid, Tony initially longs for home. But as he adjusts to his new environment, finding companionship and even love, he can envision a life for himself after servitude. His dream: to become a medicine man, or a physician’s assistant, an expert on roots and herbs, a dispenser of healing compounds.

Like the play that captivates him—Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Tony’s life is rich with oddities and hijinks, humor and tragedy. Set during the early days of English colonization in Jamestown, before servitude calcified into racialized slavery, The East Indian gives authentic voice to an otherwise unknown historic figure and brings the world he would have encountered to vivid life. In this coming-of-age tale, narrated by a most memorable literary rascal, Charry conjures a young character sure to be beloved by readers for years to come.]]> 272 Brinda Charry 1668004526 Dave 0 to-read 3.76 2023 The East Indian
author: Brinda Charry
name: Dave
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> The Air Raid Book Club 63017306
In Germany, Hitler is on the rise, and Jewish families are making the heart-wrenching decision to send their children away from the growing turmoil. After a nudge from her dear friend Charles, Gertie decides to take in one of these refugees, a headstrong teenage girl named Hedy. Willful and fearless, Hedy reminds Gertie of herself at the same age, and shows her that she can’t give up just yet. With the terrible threat of war on the horizon, the world needs people like Gertie Bingham and her bookshop.

When the Blitz begins and bombs whistle overhead, Gertie and Hedy come up with the idea to start an air raid book club. Together with neighbors and bookstore customers, they hold lively discussions of everything from Winnie the Pooh to Wuthering Heights. After all, a good book can do wonders to bolster people’s spirits, even in the most trying times. But even the best book can only provide a temporary escape, and as the tragic reality of the war hits home, the book club faces unimaginable losses. They will need all the strength of their stories and the bonds they’ve formed to see them through to brighter days.]]> 336 Annie Lyons 0063296195 Dave 0 to-read 4.01 2023 The Air Raid Book Club
author: Annie Lyons
name: Dave
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Dave 4 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Dave
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
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review:

]]> My Friends 217163697 #1New York Timesbestselling author Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier. There’s Joar, who never backs down from a fight; quiet and bookish Ted who is mourning his father; Ali, the daughter of a man who never stays in one place for long; and finally, there’s the artist, a boy who hoards sleeping pills and shuns attention, but who possesses an extraordinary gift that might be his ticket to a better life. These four lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art.]]> 448 Fredrik Backman 1982112824 Dave 0 to-read 4.59 2025 My Friends
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Dave
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> Perspective(s) 211934923 A pulse-quickening murder mystery set in Renaissance Florence by the renowned author of HHhH.

As dawn breaks over the city of Florence on New Year’s Day 1557, Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him are the frescoes he labored over for more than a decade—masterpieces all, rivaling the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When guards search his quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria de� Medici, the Duke of Florence’s oldest daughter. The city erupts in chaos.

Who could have committed these murder and lèse-majesté? Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation. Letters start to fly back and forth—between Maria and her aunt Catherine de� Medici, the queen of France; between Catherine and the scheming Piero Strozzi; and between Vasari and Michelangelo—carrying news of political plots and speculations about the identity of Pontormo’s killer. The truth, when it comes to light, is as shocking as the bold new artworks that have made Florence the red-hot center of European art and intrigue.

Bursting with characters and historical color, Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) is a whodunit like no other—a labyrinthine murder mystery that shows us Renaissance Florence as we’ve never seen it before. This is a dark, dazzling, unforgettable read.]]> 272 Laurent Binet 0374614601 Dave 0 to-read 3.89 2023 Perspective(s)
author: Laurent Binet
name: Dave
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect]]> 60018618
Essential lessons in hospitality for every business, from the former co-owner of legendary restaurant Eleven Madison Park.

Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world.

How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room—and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality. Guidara’s team surprised a family who had never seen snow with a magical sledding trip to Central Park after their dinner; they filled a private dining room with sand, complete with mai-tais and beach chairs, to console a couple with a cancelled vacation. And his hospitality extended beyond those dining at the restaurant to his own team, who learned to deliver praise and criticism with intention; why the answer to some of the most pernicious business dilemmas is to give more—not less; and the magic that can happen when a busser starts thinking like an owner.

Today, every business can choose to be a hospitality business—and we can all transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences. Featuring sparkling stories of his journey through restaurants, with the industry’s most famous players like Daniel Boulud and Danny Meyer, Guidara urges us all to find the magic in what we do—for ourselves, the people we work with, and the people we serve.]]> 288 Will Guidara 0593418573 Dave 0 to-read 4.42 Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
author: Will Guidara
name: Dave
average rating: 4.42
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress]]> 216818514 <b>--</b><br /><br />-- 320 Annie Karni 0593731263 Dave 0 to-read 4.01 Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress
author: Annie Karni
name: Dave
average rating: 4.01
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/25
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]]> <![CDATA[The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play]]> 203169714 The sweeping story of the American stadium—from the first wooden ballparks to today’s glass and steel mega-arenas—revealing how it has made, and remade, American life

Stadiums are monuments to recreation, sports, and pleasure. Yet from the earliest ballparks to the present, stadiums have also functioned as public squares. Politicians have used them to cultivate loyalty to the status quo, while activists and athletes have used them for anti-fascist rallies, Black Power demonstrations, feminist protests, and much more.

In this book, historian Frank Guridy recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, they also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today’s athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much an arena of protest as a palace of pleasure.

Moving between the field, the press box, and the locker room, this book recovers the hidden history of the stadium and its important role in the struggle for justice in America.]]> 309 Frank Andre Guridy 1541601475 Dave 3 4.25 The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play
author: Frank Andre Guridy
name: Dave
average rating: 4.25
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: american-history, current-events, history, politics, sports-history
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)]]> 30241301 When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? And what is the true nature of evil?

Gregory Maguire creates a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to be the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, a smart, prickly and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.

]]> 406 Gregory Maguire Dave 5 3.51 1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)
author: Gregory Maguire
name: Dave
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: adaptations, adult-fiction, fantasy, favorites, fiction
review:

]]> James 179550498
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin�), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon� (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.]]> 304 Percival Everett 0385550375 Dave 5 4.60 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Dave
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: adult-fiction, favorites, fiction, historical-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Americanaland: Where Country & Western Met Rock 'n' Roll (Volume 1) (Music in American Life)]]> 55466161 A musical genre forever outside the lines

With a claim on artists from Jimmie Rodgers to Jason Isbell, Americana can be hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. John Milward’s Americanaland is filled with the enduring performers and vivid stories that are at the heart of Americana. At base a hybrid of rock and country, Americana is also infused with folk, blues, R&B, bluegrass, and other types of roots music. Performers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Gram Parsons used these ingredients to create influential music that took well-established genres down exciting new roads. The name Americana was coined in the 1990s to describe similarly inclined artists like Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, and Wilco. Today, Brandi Carlile and I’m With Her are among the musicians carrying the genre into the twenty-first century.

Essential and engaging, Americanaland chronicles the evolution and resonance of this ever-changing amalgam of American music. Margie Greve’s hand-embroidered color portraits offer a portfolio of the pioneers and contemporary practitioners of Americana.]]> 304 John Milward 025204391X Dave 0 to-read 3.95 2021 Americanaland: Where Country & Western Met Rock 'n' Roll (Volume 1) (Music in American Life)
author: John Milward
name: Dave
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> See Friendship 214283609 “A sharp and affecting meditation on the contours of friendship, the seams of our digital lives, and the elasticity of memory. Both wickedly funny and deeply impactful, Gordon has written a novel that dazzles and from aging, to dying, to living and loving, See Friendship illuminates and explores the impossibility and joy of navigating modern life. It's a literal triumph.”—Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and Lot

Culture critic Jeremy Gordon makes his literary debut with this whip-smart novel about a young man who learns the devastating truth behind his friend's death, propelling him on an odyssey of discovery into the nature of grief in the digital age, the limits of memory, and the meaning of friendship.

Ahead of looming layoffs within the ongoing decimation of media, Jacob Goldberg, a culture writer in New York, knows what will save a podcast.Not just any podcast, but something that will demonstrate his singular thoughtfulness in an oversaturated, competitive market.When Jacob learns the true, tragic circumstances behind the mysterious death of Seth, one of his best friends from high school, his world is turned completely upside down. But when the dust settles, he realizeshas an idea worth digging into.

Of course, it’s not so simple. Learning the truth—or at least, the beginning of it—sends Jacob spiraling. His increasing obsession ultimately leads him back home to Chicago, where he tracks down Lee, a once up-and-coming musician who probably knew Seth best at the end of his life. As his investigation deepens, Jacob's drive to find out the truth—and whether there’s a deeper story to be told about the fault lines of our memories, life and death on the internet, and the people we never forget—grows into a desperation to discover whether it even matters. If not, can he make it?

A poignant and funny novel about grief, loneliness, memory, and the unique existential questions inherent to the digital age,See Friendshipintroduces a new voice in fiction—a writer known for his pitch-perfect cultural criticism, with a depth of literary talent.]]> 288 Jeremy Gordon 0063375095 Dave 0 to-read 3.43 2025 See Friendship
author: Jeremy Gordon
name: Dave
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Your Brain on Altruism: The Power of Connection and Community during Times of Crisis]]> 218725780 In an era when "self-care" often revolves around consumption and profit, a health and science journalist emphasizes the genuine health advantages of a culture of caring.

Helping others can enhance our physical and mental well-being, boost resilience, and nurture a sense of fulfillment and connection beyond crises. In Your Brain on Altruism, health and science journalist Nicole Karlis delves into the science behind generosity and the benefits of fostering a culture of care for our health. She explores cutting-edge research on the sociology and psychology of altruism, revealing how acts of kindness during crises—such as COVID-19, recessions, natural disasters, and wars—inspire people to set aside differences and help one another.

Through interviews with innovators creating infrastructures for social connection—from a former entrepreneur leading a social prescribing movement, to doctors prescribing volunteer work and acts of kindness—Karlis shows how we all can contribute to cultivating kindness. A powerful call for a culture of caring, this book urges us to see taking care of one another as a social strength. By embracing this mindset and viewing ourselves as stewards of kindness, we can combat the epidemic of loneliness and build a more compassionate and resilient society.]]> 238 Karlis 0520397606 Dave 0 to-read 4.75 Your Brain on Altruism: The Power of Connection and Community during Times of Crisis
author: Karlis
name: Dave
average rating: 4.75
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Killers of a Certain Age (Killers of a Certain Age, #1)]]> 60149532 Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon.

They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.]]> 368 Deanna Raybourn 0593200683 Dave 0 to-read 3.82 2022 Killers of a Certain Age (Killers of a Certain Age, #1)
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Dave
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service]]> 219551344 Who works for the government and what do they do? A timely and absorbing civics lessons from an all-star team of writers and storytellers.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these workers are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. The vivid profiles in On Duty blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.]]> 272 Michael Lewis Dave 0 to-read 4.21 2025 Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service
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]]> The Heart in Winter 199795387 Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.]]> 256 Kevin Barry 0385550596 Dave 0 to-read 3.79 2024 The Heart in Winter
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]]> <![CDATA[Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream]]> 218671853 A damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.

Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives.Private equity controls hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prison service providers. The industry manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.

Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but also modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. Yet their firms have to disclose almost nothing about how they operate, leaving workers and communities on the hook when a company begins to flounder without warning. Twenty percent of companies acquired through private equity buyouts go bankrupt within ten years, accounting for forty percent of all U.S. bankruptcies and putting millions� of workers jobs at risk. How did private equity firms become so good at making money for themselves and so damaging for the rest of society?

Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company tells the hidden story of private equity through the experiences of four American workers who watched as private equity upended their employers and a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and a public housing organizer.

In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar companies like Apollo Global Management, Bain Capital, and KKR, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America’s most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.]]> 320 Megan Greenwell 0063299356 Dave 0 to-read 4.87 Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
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]]> Mark Twain 219158874 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain

Ron Chernow, the highly lauded biographer of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Ulysses S. Grant, brings his considerable powers to bear on America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity, Mark Twain. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, under Halley’s Comet, the rambunctious Twain was an early teller of tall tales. He left his home in Missouri at an early age, piloted steamboats on the Mississippi, and arrived in the Nevada Territory during the silver-mining boom. Before long, he had accepted a job at the local newspaper, where he barged into vigorous discourse and debate, hoaxes and hijinks. After moving to San Francisco, he published stories that attracted national attention for their brashness and humor, writing under a pen name soon to be immortalized.

Chernow draws a richly nuanced portrait of the man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune and crafted his celebrity persona with meticulous care. Twain eventually settled with his wife and three daughters in Hartford, where he wrote some of his most well-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, earning him further acclaim. He threw himself into American politics, emerging as the nation’s most notable pundit. While his talents as a writer and speaker flourished, his madcap business ventures eventually forced him into bankruptcy; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.

Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including his fifty notebooks, thousands of letters, and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures a man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars. No other white author of his generation grappled so fully with the legacy of slavery after the Civil War or showed such keen interest in African American culture. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history.]]> 1200 Ron Chernow 0525561722 Dave 0 to-read 4.19 2025 Mark Twain
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]]> Red Clay 215003781
In 1943, when a frail old white woman shows up in Red Clay, Alabama, at the home of a Black former slave—on the morning following his funeral—his family hardly knows what to expect after she utters the words “� a lifetime ago, my family owned yours.� Adelaide Parker has a story to tell—one of ambition, betrayal, violence, and redemption—that shaped both the fate of her family and that of the late Felix H. Parker.

But there are gaps in her knowledge, and she’s come to Red Clay seeking answers from a family with whom she shares a name and a history that neither knows in full. In an epic saga that takes us from Red Clay to Paris, to the Côte d’Azur and New Orleans, human frailties are pushed to their limits as secrets are exposed and the line between good and evil becomes ever more difficult to discern. Red Clay is a tale that deftly lays bare the ugliness of slavery, the uncertainty of the final months of the Civil War, the optimism of Reconstruction, and the pain and frustration of Jim Crow.

With a vivid sense of place and a cast of memorable characters, Charles B. Fancher draws upon his own family history to weave a riveting tale of triumph over adversity, set against a backdrop of societal change and racial animus that reverberates in contemporary America. Through seasons of joy and unspeakable pain, Fancher delivers rich moments as allies become enemies, and enemies—to their great surprise—find new respect for each other.]]> 336 Charles B. Fancher Dave 0 to-read 4.43 Red Clay
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]]> Harlem Rhapsody 212806640 The extraordinary story of Jessie Redmon Fauset whose exhilarating world of friends, rivals, and passions all combined to create the magic that was the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.

In 1919, as civil and social unrest grips the country, there is a little corner of America, a place called Harlem where something special is stirring. Here, the New Negro is rising and Black pride is evident everywhere…in music, theatre, fashion and the arts. And there on stage in the center of this renaissance is Jessie Redmon Fauset, the new literary editor ofthe preeminent Negro magazine The Crisis.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder and editor of The Crisis, has charged her with discovering young writers whose words will change the world. Jessie attacks the challenge with fervor, quickly finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends.Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives, the writers become notable and magazine subscriptions soar. Every Negro writer in the country wants their work published in the magazine now known for its groundbreaking poetry and short stories.

Jessie’s rising star is shining bright�.but her relationship with W.E.B. could jeopardize all that she’s built. The man, considered by most to be the leader of Black America, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Their torrid and tumultuous affair is complicated by a secret desire that Jessie harbors � to someday, herself, become the editor of the magazine, a position that only W.E.B. Du Bois has held.

In the face of overwhelming sexism and racism, Jessie must balance her drive with her desires. However, as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.]]> 400 Victoria Christopher Murray 0593638484 Dave 0 to-read 4.09 2025 Harlem Rhapsody
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average rating: 4.09
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]]> <![CDATA[Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game]]> 150247428 A radical, urgent plan for how the Democratic Party and its supporters can maintain power at one of the most pivotal moments in the history of our nation’s democracy

Why do Democrats fail to win voters to their side, and what can they do to develop new winning political strategies—especially as the very fate of democracy hangs in the balance in 2024? Too often the carefully constructed, rationally minded arguments of the Left meet a grisly fate at the polls, where voters are instead swayed by Republican candidates hawking anger, fear, and resentment. Only when Democrats are handed an overwhelming motivational issue—like the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade>/i> —have they found a way to counter this effect.

Political scientist and strategist Rachel Bitecofer came to prominence after predicting to the seat the size of the Democrats' rare Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms. At the heart of her prediction lay a powerful concept—negative partisanship, or the idea that voters, even most so-called independents, don’t vote for their candidate so much as they vote against their candidate’s opponent. Seen through this lens, Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts is a deep dive into the Republicans� own playbook, sharing how Democrats can turn the Right’s own tactics against them. The way for Democrats to wage—and win—electoral war, Bitecofer writes, is to present themselves as “brand ambassadors for freedom, health, wealth, safety, and common sense,� the very opposite of the extremist, freedom-fearing Right. This is a last-ditch effort to armor democracy while there is still time to save it and strengthen it so it can never again be hijacked by a small minority of ideologues.

As America careens into the election cycle that determines its democratic future Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts is the book for any Democrat who has ever banged their head against a wall when obvious rational arguments failed to sway voters over to their side. This guide is a lifeline to save American democracy in its own darkest hour.]]> 288 Rachel Bitecofer 0593727142 Dave 0 to-read 4.20 Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource]]> 217869789 An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.� �New York Times

“Brilliant book� Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.”—Rachel Maddow

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.� Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens� Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.� The Sirens� Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.]]> 336 Christopher L. Hayes 0593653114 Dave 0 to-read 4.04 2025 The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
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]]> Abundance 176444106 Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in systemic from climate change to housing, education to healthcare.

To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions in matters of education and healthcare have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.]]> 304 Ezra Klein 1668023482 Dave 0 to-read 4.10 2025 Abundance
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]]> <![CDATA[A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution]]> 214339569 From the nationally bestselling author of The Secret Token, the largely untold story of rebellion in Virginia that will forever change one’s understanding of the American Revolution

At the same time as the American Revolution gathered momentum in 1775 in Massachusetts at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, a series of dramatic events in Virginia proved just as important in uniting the colonies against Britain—albeit for very different reasons. As redcoats squared off against New England farmers, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore—close friend to George Washington and other Virginia elites, but feeling the heat of revolutionary fervor in his colony—publicly threatened, unless the rebellion abated, to offer freedom to any Black enslaved people who came to his side in the leading port city of Norfolk.

The Virginia elite, especially Washington—until then still desirous of peace with Britain—was outraged at the potential theft of their human property. By November, with rebellion growing, Dunmore made his emancipation formal and sent Black men into battle against their former owners. “Lord Dunmore has commenced hostilities in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Randolph. “It has raised our countrymen into a perfect frenzy.� Dunmore’s actions aimed to snuff out the rebellion in the wealthiest and most populous colony, without whose backing independence from Britain would have been unlikely. At Jefferson’s insistence, on the night of January 1, 1776, the Virginia militia burned Norfolk to the ground—and blamed it on Dunmore—a false accusation that finally persuaded Virginia’s delegation to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Chronicling these stunning events in full for the first time, revealing the vastly different motivations that drove Virginia into rebellion, A Perfect Frenzy offers striking new perspective on the American Revolution that reorients our understanding of its causes and reveals the seeds of racial tensions we feel to this day.]]> 544 Andrew Lawler 0802164137 Dave 0 to-read 4.41 A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution
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]]> <![CDATA[Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite]]> 20685373
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.

Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues - evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. She is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. To them, everything in North Korea is the best, the tallest, the most delicious, the envy of all nations. Still, she cannot help but love them - their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished.

As the weeks pass, she begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own - at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. The students in turn offer Suki tantalizing glimpses into their lives, from their thoughts on how to impress girls to their disappointment that soccer games are only televised when the North Korean team wins. Then Kim Jong-il dies, leaving the students devastated, and leading Suki to question whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.

Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."]]> 291 Suki Kim 0307720659 Dave 0 to-read 3.92 2014 Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite
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average rating: 3.92
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]]> The Message 211050274
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 237 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230396 Dave 5 4.61 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Dave
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> Rednecks 198111988 A historical drama based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the United States government in the largest labor uprising in American history.

Rednecks is a tour de force, big canvas historical novel that dramatizes the 1920 to 1921 events of the West Virginia Mine Wars—from the Matewan Massacre through the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, when some one million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on Appalachia, and the term “redneck� would come to have an unexpected origin story.

Brimming with the high stakes drama of America’s buried history, Rednecks tells a powerful story of rebellion against oppression. In a land where the coal companies use violence and intimidation to keep miners from organizing, “Doc Moo" Muhanna, a Lebanese-American doctor (inspired by the author’s own great-grandfather), toils amid the blood and injustice of the mining camps. When Frank Hugham, a Black World War One veteran and coal miner, takes dramatic steps to lead a miners' revolt with a band of fellow veterans, Doc Moo risks his life and career to treat sick and wounded miners, while Frank's grandmother, Beulah, fights her own battle to save her home and grandson.

Real-life historical figures burn bright among the hills: the fiery Mother Jones, an Irish-born labor organizer once known as "The Most Dangerous Woman in America," struggles to maintain the ear of the miners ("her boys") amid the tide of rebellion, while the sharp-shooting police chief "Smilin" Sid Hatfield dares to stand up to the "gun thugs" of the coal companies, becoming a folk hero of the mine wars.

Award-winning novelist Taylor Brown brings to life one of the most compelling events in 20th century American history, reminding us of the hard-won origins of today's unions. Rednecks is a propulsive, character-driven tale that’s both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against all odds.]]> 320 Taylor Brown Dave 4 4.05 2024 Rednecks
author: Taylor Brown
name: Dave
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: american-history, historical-fiction, history
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]]> <![CDATA[The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi]]> 204491545 �The Barn is the most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read…Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this.�
—Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and An American Memoir

“An incredible history of a crime that changed America.� —John Grisham

"With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi—baring, sweat, soil, and heart all the way through.”—Imani Perry

A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long

Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.

In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi.After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved.In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least eight people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation.

Even in the context of the racist caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a Black boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map.As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power, and white supremacy.It implicates all of us.In The Barn, Thompsonbrings to life the small group of dedicated people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light. Putting the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a way of mapping the road this country must travel if we are to heal our oldest, deepest wound.

]]> 448 Wright Thompson 0593299833 Dave 5 4.42 2024 The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
author: Wright Thompson
name: Dave
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War]]> 195608683 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War—a slow-burning crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston: Fort Sumter.

Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.�

At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable—one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.

Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink—a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.]]> 565 Erik Larson 0385348746 Dave 4 4.13 2024 The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
author: Erik Larson
name: Dave
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: american-history, history, southern-history
review:

]]> A Love Song for Ricki Wilde 173404023
Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.

When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.

One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.]]> 352 Tia Williams 153872670X Dave 0 to-read 3.97 2024 A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
author: Tia Williams
name: Dave
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World]]> 205062721 Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist’s riveting account exposes a parallel universe that has become a haven for the rich and powerful.

A globe shows the world we think we neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens� rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise�The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.]]> 333 Atossa Araxia Abrahamian 0593329872 Dave 0 to-read 3.60 2024 The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World
author: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
name: Dave
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Women 127305853
Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm's way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]> 471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 Dave 0 to-read 4.58 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Dave
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Speech Team 62649030 A propulsive, witty, and moving novel starring four precocious Gen X teens–turned–twenty-first-century middle-agers who are seeking . . . well, if not exactly justice from a long-ago hurtful teacher, then at least some kind of long-desired reckoning and closure

Late one morning, parked in a desk chair at his humdrum job, Tip Murray finds himself reading the suicide note of his long-lost high school friend Pete Stroman. Mentioned in the note as a root cause of Pete’s despair? A disparaging comment made to him about his developmental disability by none other than their high school speech team coach, Gary Gold.

As more thorny memories surface from their eighties adolescence, Tip and his best friend, fellow speech team alum Nat Farb-Miola, decide to reconnect with their other teammates, and they discover an unsettling thread: all were quietly wounded by Mr. Gold’s deeply cutting remarks. The silver lining? Gary Gold is still alive, and a quick Google search tells the quartet that he has retired to Florida. There’s only one thing left to do: confront him.

By turns incisive and sweet, alive with the sting of wounds past and the hopeful possibility of the present, Speech Team explores what it means to take account of the pain that can suffuse a life and what it means, years on, to move forward.]]> 288 Tim Murphy 059365384X Dave 0 to-read 3.61 2023 Speech Team
author: Tim Murphy
name: Dave
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Anthropologists 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 Aysegül Savas 163973306X Dave 0 to-read 3.88 2024 The Anthropologists
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Dave
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Dave 5
All that being said, I did not know what to expect out of this book and I was not particularly excited when I started it because the premise to me sounded kinda wonky. However, after reading it, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is essentially a series of like newsletter entries/blog articles on various topics. JUst like everything he does, John not only gave me some new information I had never known before as well as his refreshing transparency and outlook on the various parts of our world.

This was also an easy read and I would definitely recommend it.]]> 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Dave
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/08/11
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: american-history, history, politics, religion, current-events, favorites
review:
Similar to my previous review of Roger Bennett's book, you can somewhat take my review of John Green's "The Anthropocene Reviewed" with a grain of salt because John is also one of my favorite people that I have started reading and following since he released Crash Course US History and I read The Fault in Our Stars.

All that being said, I did not know what to expect out of this book and I was not particularly excited when I started it because the premise to me sounded kinda wonky. However, after reading it, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It is essentially a series of like newsletter entries/blog articles on various topics. JUst like everything he does, John not only gave me some new information I had never known before as well as his refreshing transparency and outlook on the various parts of our world.

This was also an easy read and I would definitely recommend it.
]]> <![CDATA[When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s]]> 195790601
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.� Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con� right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk� took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals� whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.]]> 432 John Ganz 0374605440 Dave 0 to-read 4.08 2024 When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
author: John Ganz
name: Dave
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> College Sports: A History 208283431 A bold and foundational history of the inception and evolution of intercollegiate athletics in the United States.

In College Sports, historians Eric A. Moyen and John R. Thelin tell the intriguing story of the success—and excess—of American college sports from their inception to today. Arguing that the modern American university's structure spurred the growth of big-time sports, Moyen and Thelin also highlight the treatment of marginalized groups in athletics and the role that commercialization and the media have played in shaping college sports.

Using a wealth of secondary resources, archival records, newspaper articles, and oral histories, Moyen and Thelin offer a chronological account of the popularity, success, and continued challenges of college sports. Most scholarship has portrayed athletics as an anomaly within higher education, but history reveals that college sports enjoy a symbiotic relationship with universities. Reform and a return to a purely amateur model have rarely been a compelling option for those institutions that are successful in commercialized big-time college sports. At the same time, the majority of student-athletes compete in a very different model. And despite their progressive posturing, colleges have been slow to fully adopt civil rights and social justice issues. When full participation was finally extended to women and minorities, it generally meant a move away from the amateur model into a commercial enterprise.

By examining key events at specific universities, athletic conferences, and the NCAA, Moyen and Thelin trace how the media and sports marketing have created an incredibly successful financial model for schools in big-time conferences. Yet this model has also created a precarious fiscal situation for hundreds of other institutions. This provocative and refreshing take on sports in American universities provides the context in which to understand—and improve upon—the current landscape of intercollegiate athletics.]]> 496 Eric A. Moyen 1421450097 Dave 0 to-read 3.71 College Sports: A History
author: Eric A. Moyen
name: Dave
average rating: 3.71
book published:
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date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> The Children 715192 The Children is Halberstam's moving evocation of the early days of the civil rights movement, as seen thru the story of the young people--the Children--who met in the 60s & went on to lead the revolution. Magisterial in scope, with a strong you-are-there quality, The Children is a story one of America's preeminent journalists has waited years to write, a powerful book about one of the most dramatic movements in American history. They came together as part of Rev. James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence, eight idealistic black students whose families had sacrificed much so that they could go to college. They risked it all, & their lives besides, when they joined the growing civil rights movement. Halberstam shows how Martin Luther King Jr recruited Lawson to come to Nashville to train students in Gandhian techniques of nonviolence. We see the strength of the families the Children came from, moving portraits of several generations of the black experience in America. We feel Diane Nash's fear before the first sit-in to protest segregation of Nashville lunch counters. Then we see how Diane Nash & others--John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, Rodney Powell--persevered until they ultimately accomplished that goal. After the sit-ins, when the Freedom Rides to desegregate interstate buses were in danger of being stopped because of violence, it was these same young people who led the bitter battle into the Deep South. Halberstam takes us into those buses, lets us witness the violence the students encountered in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma. He shows what has happened to the Children since the 60s, as they have gone on with their lives.]]> 785 David Halberstam 0449004392 Dave 0 to-read 4.50 1998 The Children
author: David Halberstam
name: Dave
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America]]> 36743029 From a Pulitzer Prize winner, a new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump's border wall.

Ever since this nation's inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States' belief in itself as an exceptional nation--democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America has a new symbol: the border wall.

In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history--from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America's constant expansion--fighting wars and opening markets--served as a "gate of escape," helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country's problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home.

It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarization that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism.]]> 369 Greg Grandin 1250179823 Dave 0 to-read 4.28 2019 The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
author: Greg Grandin
name: Dave
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland]]> 56769525 Angela’s Ashes, Fintan O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, continues the narrative of modern Ireland into our own time. O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity.


Weaving his own experiences into this account of Irish social, cultural, and economic change, O’Toole shows how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a Catholic “backwater� to an almost totally open society. A sympathetic-yet-exacting observer, O’Toole shrewdly weighs more than sixty years of globalization, delving into the violence of the Troubles and depicting, in biting detail, the astonishing collapse of the once-supreme Irish Catholic Church. The result is a stunning work of memoir and national history that reveals how the two modes are inextricable for all of us.]]> 616 Fintan O'Toole 1631496530 Dave 0 to-read 4.31 2021 We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
author: Fintan O'Toole
name: Dave
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin]]> 9938498
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.]]> 448 Erik Larson 0307408841 Dave 0 to-read 3.87 2011 In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
author: Erik Larson
name: Dave
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Empire of Cotton: A Global History]]> 20758057
Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and how this force transformed the world.

The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.

]]> 640 Sven Beckert 0375414142 Dave 0 to-read 3.88 2014 Empire of Cotton: A Global History
author: Sven Beckert
name: Dave
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> North Towards Home 125194874 0 Willie Morris Dave 0 to-read 3.25 North Towards Home
author: Willie Morris
name: Dave
average rating: 3.25
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
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]]> Providence 3147829 292 Will D. Campbell 1563520249 Dave 0 to-read 4.18 1992 Providence
author: Will D. Campbell
name: Dave
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)]]> 17740321
"After smashing our illusions about the Pilgrims, Ott continues her pumpkin iconoclasm. The pumpkin as symbol comes full circle." --Nina C. Ayoub, "The Chronicle of Higher Education"

"An extraordinary scholar and storyteller, Cindy Ott tracks the culture that altered the very nature of the pumpkin--and in doing so, tells us a revealing story about ourselves. Not to be missed." --Philip J. Deloria, author of "Playing Indian "]]> 336 Cindy Ott 0295993324 Dave 0 to-read 3.65 2012 Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
author: Cindy Ott
name: Dave
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Love Can't Feed You 204640558
A beautiful, tender yet searing debut novel about intergenerational fractures and coming of age, following a young woman who immigrates to the United States from the Philippines and finds herself adrift between familial expectations and her own burning desires Love Can't Feed You is a stunning, heartbreaking, and compressed look at coming of age, shifting notions of home, and the disintegration of the American dream. It asks What does it mean to be of multiple cultures without a road map for how to belong?]]> 336 Cherry Lou Sy 0593474546 Dave 0 to-read 3.25 2024 Love Can't Feed You
author: Cherry Lou Sy
name: Dave
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage]]> 206742142 From Just Between Us cohost and bestselling author Allison Raskin comes a witty, incisivetake on modern marriageand how a new generation can navigate its uncertainties andquestions.

Marriage rates may be on the decline, but that doesn’t mean marriage is disappearing from society. In fact, as modern relationship norms and structures continue to evolve, the public discourse about marriage has never been louder—or more conflicted. Divorce rates, the appeal of cohabitation, seemingly infinite options for futurepartners, the patriarchal roots of marriage and gender roles, and economic uncertainty are just a few factors that leave a new generation of single and dating adults wondering. What doesmarriage even look like now? Why do people still do it? And, most importantly, is it “for me�?

With conversational wit and compassion, bestselling author Allison Raskin draws on new research, interviews with licensed experts, and the stories of real-life couples to break down the many pieces of today’s “marriage conversation”—and to make the leap of faith a little less scary for Gen Z and millennial adults like herself. What emerges is a thoughtful investigation into our cultural assumptions about commitment, compatibility, divorce, meaningful partnership, the future of marriage—and what it really means to join your bank accounts.]]> 304 Allison Raskin 1335012516 Dave 0 to-read 3.84 I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage
author: Allison Raskin
name: Dave
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food]]> 199566953 336 Michelle T. King 1324021284 Dave 0 to-read 3.82 Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food
author: Michelle T. King
name: Dave
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3.1)]]> 768889
The Seven Kingdoms are divided by revolt and blood feud. In the northern wastes, a horde of hungry, savage people steeped in the dark magic of the wilderness is poised to invade the Kingdom of the North where Robb Stark wears his new-forged crown. And Robb's defences are ranged against the South, the land of the cunning and cruel Lannisters, who have his young sisters in their power.

Throughout Westeros, the war for the Iron Throne rages more fiercely than ever, but if the wall is breached, no king will live to claim it.]]> 663 George R.R. Martin 0006479901 Dave 5 4.47 2000 A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3.1)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Dave
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2013/12/08
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: fantasy, fiction, favorites, adult-fiction, adaptations
review:

]]> <![CDATA[LFC 125: The Alternative History: Official Liverpool Football Club Anniversary Book]]> 36477195
A birthday cake with 125 candles on it would light up Anfield, but not as much as the players, managers and supporters of Liverpool FC have done over the last century-and-a-quarter. Such a milestone should be marked and in ‘LFC 125: THE ALTERNATIVE HISTORY� you’ll discover a celebration of LFC like no other.

If you’re thinking this is a drab trawl through 125 years of history then think again. You’ll be taken on a rather different journey through time. It’s about people. It’s about moments. Places. Managers. Trophies. Tragedies. Medals. Away days. Forgotten nights. Banners. Goals. Goalies. Hat-tricks. Heroes. Villains. Secret missions. Kits. Songs. Legends. Legacies. Derbies. Pubs. Liver Birds. Celebrations. Mosaics. Memorabilia. Memories. Kopites.

It’s about 125 varied things that made Liverpool FC the successful, iconic, fabled football club that is loved by supporters around the globe, but told in a completely different way as this official anniversary book brings to life the unique story of one of the game’s most famous, successful clubs.]]> 464 Liverpool FC 1911613065 Dave 0 4.57 LFC 125: The Alternative History: Official Liverpool Football Club Anniversary Book
author: Liverpool FC
name: Dave
average rating: 4.57
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Out of History]]> 128130332
We all know how the Civil War was by courageous Yankees who triumphed over the South. But as veteran journalist Howell Raines shows, it was not only soldiers from Northern states who helped General William Tecumseh Sherman burn Atlanta to the ground, but also an unsung regiment of 2,066 Alabamian yeoman farmers—including at least one member of Raines’s own family.

Called the First Alabama Cavalry, USA, these “Mountain Unionists� were the point of the spear that Sherman drove through the heart of the Confederacy. The famed general hailed their skills and courage. So why don’t we know anything about them?

Silent Cavalry is one part epic American history, one part family saga, and one part scholarly detective story. Drawing on the lore of his native Alabama, and investigative skills honed by six decades in journalism, Raines brings to light a conspiracy that sought to undermine the accomplishments of these renegade Southerners—part of the “Lost Cause� effort to restore glory to white Southerners after the war, no matter the facts.

Raines exposes this tangled web, implicating everyone from a former Confederate general, a gaggle of Lost Cause historians in the Ivy League, and a sanctimonious former keeper of the Alabama State Archives. By reversing the erasure of the First Alabama, Silent Cavalry is a testament to the immense power of historians to destroy, as well as to redeem.]]> 576 Howell Raines Dave 0 to-read 3.50 2023 Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta--and Then Got Written Out of History
author: Howell Raines
name: Dave
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest]]> 208971054
Set against the backdrop of Lynchburg, Tennessee, this narrative weaves together a thrilling blend of personal discovery, historical investigation, and the revelation of a story long overshadowed by time. Through extensive research, personal interviews, and the uncovering of long-buried documents, Weaver brings to light not only the remarkable bond between Nearest Green and Jack Daniel but also Daniel’s concerted efforts during his lifetime to ensure Green’s legacy would not be forgotten. This deep respect for his teacher, mentor, and friend was mirrored in Jack's dedication to ensuring that the stories and achievements of Nearest Green's descendants, who continued the tradition of working side by side with Jack and his descendants, would also not be forgotten.

Love & Whiskey is more than just a recounting of historical facts; it's a live journey into the heart of storytelling, where every discovery adds a layer to the rich tapestry of American history. Weaver's pursuit highlights the importance of acknowledging those who have shaped our cultural landscape; yet remained in the shadows.]]> 376 Fawn Weaver 1595911340 Dave 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Love & Whiskey: The Remarkable True Story of Jack Daniel, His Master Distiller Nearest Green, and the Improbable Rise of Uncle Nearest
author: Fawn Weaver
name: Dave
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/10
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]]> This Is a Love Story 216426697 An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both

For fifty years Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.]]> 304 Jessica Soffer 0593851269 Dave 0 to-read 3.20 This Is a Love Story
author: Jessica Soffer
name: Dave
average rating: 3.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/07
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]]> <![CDATA[If We Are Brave: A Thought-Provoking Examination of Race, Democracy, and the American Identity in a Pivotal Election Year]]> 199793615 The popular Washington Post contributing opinion columnist challenges readers to have uncomfortable conversations about race, drawing on the first-person perspectives of the author and Americans from diverse viewpoints and walks of life.

“The United States claims to be a nation founded on an idea,� writes Theodore R. Johnson, “but Americans—even though we nod our heads to that assertion—do not agree on what that idea is, what it should do, or who it is for.� The reality is that America is facing an existential quandary. Its citizens do not share a common vision for a democratic system in action, and even worse, do not share a common vision for what the country should be. We use the same words, but do not speak the same language.

If We Are Brave is a keen-eyed and sobering examination of this rift and how race exposes and challenges traditional conceptions of national identity, national mythology, and American democracy. It is both a cultural exploration and a consideration of the American experiment through the eyes and experiences of Americans of different generations that cuts across race, ethnicity, gender, region, religion, and class. Johnson reveals the subtle ways that racialized conceptions of the American identity and the imperfect culture of democracy have hindered our ability to connect with one another, carefully piecing together first-person accounts ranging from a Rust Belt diner to the back of a police car to a jail cell.

A beautiful but harsh indictment of a nation that aspires to be a more perfect union yet has consistently and painfully fallen short, If We Were Brave is a portrait of a nation at the precipice. It is an eye-opening, essential resource in a pivotal election year which will define America’s future, and a much-needed beacon of truth that sheds a bright light on who we are.]]> 208 Theodore Johnson 0063346451 Dave 0 to-read 4.57 If We Are Brave: A Thought-Provoking Examination of Race, Democracy, and the American Identity in a Pivotal Election Year
author: Theodore Johnson
name: Dave
average rating: 4.57
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II]]> 210246743 An incredible true story of murder in a utopian community established on a remote Galápagos island by European refugees and the American industrialist who became embroiled in the investigation—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.
As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and three others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.
Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.]]> 352 Abbott Kahler 0451498658 Dave 0 to-read 3.77 2024 Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
author: Abbott Kahler
name: Dave
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Black Bottom Saints 54740008
From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy� Johnson, has been the pulse of Detroit’s famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city’s African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he’s rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats.

As he lays dying in the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Ziggy reflects on his life, the community that was the center of his world, and the remarkable people who helped shape it.

Inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Books, Ziggy curates his own list of Black Bottom’s venerable "52 Saints." Among them are a vulnerable Dinah Washington, a defiant Joe Louis, and a raucous Bricktop. Randall balances the stories of these larger-than-life "Saints" with local heroes who became household names, enthralling men and women whose unstoppable ambition, love of style, and faith in community made this black Midwestern neighborhood the rival of New York City’s Harlem.

Accompanying these “tributes� are thoughtfully paired cocktails—special drinks that capture the essence of each of Ziggy’s saints—libations as strong and satisfying as Alice Randall’s wholly original view of a place and time unlike any other.]]> 362 Alice Randall 0062968653 Dave 0 to-read 4.10 2020 Black Bottom Saints
author: Alice Randall
name: Dave
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Farenheit 451 56302573 208 Ray Bradbury Dave 0 to-read 3.77 1953 Farenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Dave
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> North Woods 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Dave 0 to-read 4.11 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Dave
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Factory Girls 62876074 A funny, fierce, and unforgettable read about a young woman working a summer job in a shirt factory in Northern Ireland, while tensions rise both inside and outside the factory walls.

Winner of the Comedy Women in Print 2022-23 Published Novel Award

It’s the summer of 1994, and all smart-mouthed Maeve Murray wants are good final exam results so she can earn her ticket out of the wee Northern Irish town she has grown up in during the Troubles. She hopes she will soon be in London studying journalism—away from her crowded home, the silence and sadness surrounding her sister’s death, and most of all, away from the violence of her divided community.

As a first step, Maeve’s taken a job in a shirt factory working alongside Protestants with her best friends. But getting the right exam results is only part of Maeve’s problem—she’s got to survive a tit-for-tat paramilitary campaign, iron 100 shirts an hour all day every day, and deal with the attentions of Handy Andy Strawbridge, her slick and untrustworthy English boss. Then, as the British loyalist marching season raises tensions among the Catholic and Protestant workforce, Maeve realizes something is going on behind the scenes at the factory. What seems to be a great opportunity to earn money turns out to be a crucible in which Maeve faces the test of a lifetime. Seeking justice for herself and her fellow workers may just be Maeve’s one-way ticket out of town.

Bitingly hilarious, clear-eyed, and steeped in the vernacular of its time and place, Factory Girls tackles questions of wealth and power, religion and nationalism, and how young women maintain hope for themselves and the future during divided, violent times.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Royal Society of Literature Encore Award (for second novels) and the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize
]]> 302 Michelle Gallen Dave 4 adult-fiction
After the first couple of chapters, I felt that I had gotten myself into some fairly stereotypical chick lit and I was ready to pull the escape hatch. However, while a history nerd, I am also a compulsive reader and have a really hard time putting down anything until I finish it (even if it is bad). So, I soldiered on and picked it up here and there over the last couple of weeks as I really hit my busy season at work.

I am so glad that I did not put it down. The story continues to grow and add depth throughout the book and whatever superficial vibes I was getting at the beginning were replaced with a ton of cultural, societal, and coming of age depth that I was not expecting.

The historical setting of the Troubles is definitely part of the book, but I appreciated that Gallen did not treat the book as a history lesson, but instead the events are happening in the background of what is happening in the lives of the characters much like many historical events today are to us.

Overall, it was a pleasurable read and I am glad that I got out of my comfort zone and finished it.]]> 3.83 2022 Factory Girls
author: Michelle Gallen
name: Dave
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: adult-fiction
review:
Never judge a book by its cover or the first few chapters. If I had not heeded that advice, I would have both never picked up this book nor would I have finished it. Why I initially picked this book up was because Kendra read it for a book club she was planning on going to, but eventually had to cancel and I felt it would be fun to have a book discussion. The setting of Ireland during the Troubles also tickled my history nerd fancy.

After the first couple of chapters, I felt that I had gotten myself into some fairly stereotypical chick lit and I was ready to pull the escape hatch. However, while a history nerd, I am also a compulsive reader and have a really hard time putting down anything until I finish it (even if it is bad). So, I soldiered on and picked it up here and there over the last couple of weeks as I really hit my busy season at work.

I am so glad that I did not put it down. The story continues to grow and add depth throughout the book and whatever superficial vibes I was getting at the beginning were replaced with a ton of cultural, societal, and coming of age depth that I was not expecting.

The historical setting of the Troubles is definitely part of the book, but I appreciated that Gallen did not treat the book as a history lesson, but instead the events are happening in the background of what is happening in the lives of the characters much like many historical events today are to us.

Overall, it was a pleasurable read and I am glad that I got out of my comfort zone and finished it.
]]> <![CDATA[The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife]]> 204158999 For readers of Remarkably Bright Creatures and A Man Called Ove, a warm, life-affirming debut about a zany case of mistaken identity that allows a lonely old man one last chance to be part of a family.

‘Would you mind terribly, old boy, if I borrowed the rest of your life? I promise I’ll take excellent care of it.'

Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head—as long as his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.

Denise Simms is stuck breathing the same disappointing air again and again. A middle-aged mom and caregiver at Bernard's facility, her crumbling marriage and daughter's health concerns are suffocating her joy for life. Wounded by her two-faced husband, she vows never to let a man deceive her again.

As Fred walks in Bernard’s shoes, he leaves a trail of kindness behind him, fueling Denise's suspicions about his true identity. When unexpected truths are revealed, Fred and Denise rediscover their sense of purpose and learn how to return a broken life to mint condition.

Bittersweet and remarkably perceptive, The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife is a hilarious, feel-good, clever novel about grief, forgiveness, redemption, and finding family.]]> 336 Anna Johnston 0063397293 Dave 0 to-read 4.28 2024 The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife
author: Anna Johnston
name: Dave
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil (Chicago Visions and Revisions)]]> 209050320 The first book to lay bare the life of a Nazi camp guard who settled in a Chicago suburb and to explore how his community and others responded to discoveries of Nazis in their midst.

Reinhold Kulle seemed like the perfect school employee.

But in 1982, as his retirement neared, his long-concealed secret came to light. The chief custodian at Oak Park and River Forest High School outside Chicago had been a Nazi, a member of the SS, and a guard at a brutal slave labor camp during World War II.

Similar revelations stunned communities across the country. Hundreds of Reinhold Kulles were gradually men who had patrolled concentration camps, selected Jews for execution, and participated in mass shootings—and who were now living ordinary suburban lives.

As the Office of Special Investigations raced to uncover Hitler’s men in the United States, neighbors had to reconcile horrific accusations with the helpful, kind, and soft-spoken neighbors they thought they knew.

Though Nazis loomed in the American consciousness as evil epitomized, in Oak Park—a Chicago suburb renowned for its liberalism—people rose to defend Reinhold Kulle, a war criminal.

Drawing on archival research and insider interviews, Oak Park and River Forest High School teacher Michael Soffer digs into his community’s tumultuous response to the Kulle affair.

He explores the uncomfortable truths of how and why onetime Nazis found allies in American communities after their gruesome pasts were uncovered.]]> 296 Michael Soffer 0226835545 Dave 0 to-read 4.37 2024 Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil (Chicago Visions and Revisions)
author: Michael Soffer
name: Dave
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Secret Chord 218356489 220 Anthony Kim Dave 0 to-read 4.43 The Secret Chord
author: Anthony Kim
name: Dave
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> Once in the Blue Moon 125046056 224 Virginia Reeves 1646053028 Dave 0 to-read 3.96 Once in the Blue Moon
author: Virginia Reeves
name: Dave
average rating: 3.96
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 34466958 From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.

Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.� It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.

There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.

Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.]]> 335 David Graeber 150114331X Dave 0 to-read 4.03 2018 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
author: David Graeber
name: Dave
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> <![CDATA[This Love Is Not For Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez]]> 12159292 272 Robert Andrew Powell 1608197166 Dave 0 to-read 4.17 2012 This Love Is Not For Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez
author: Robert Andrew Powell
name: Dave
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory]]> 201751384 New York Times reporter and San Francisco Bureau Chief, Thomas Fuller.

In November 2021, an obscure email from the California Department of Education landed in New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller’s inbox. The football team at the California School for the Deaf in Riverside, a state-run school with only 168 high school students, was having an undefeated season. After years of covering wildfires, war, pandemic, and mass shootings, Fuller was captivated by the story about this deaf football team. It was uplifting. During the pandemic’s gloom, it was a happy story. It was a sports story but not an ordinary one, built on the chemistry between a group of underestimated boys and their superhero advocate coach, Keith Adams, a deaf former athlete himself. The team, and Adams, tackled the many stereotypes and seemed to be succeeding. Fuller packed his bags and drove seven hours to the Riverside campus just in time to see them trounce their opponent in the second game of the playoffs.

The Boys of Riverside looks back at the historic 2021 and 2022 seasons in which the California School for the Deaf chased history, following the personal journeys of Keith Adams (their dynamic deaf head coach), a student who spent the majority of the season sleeping in his father’s car parked in the Target lot, a fiercely committed player who literally played through a broken leg in order not to miss a crucial game, and myriad heart-wrenching and uplifting stories of the players who had found common purpose. Through their eyes, Fuller reveals a portrait of high school athletics, and deafness in America.]]> 256 Thomas Fuller 0385549873 Dave 0 to-read 3.90 2024 The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory
author: Thomas Fuller
name: Dave
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Murder of Mr. Wickham (Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney, #1)]]> 59089898 A summer house party turns into a whodunit when Mr. Wickham, one of literature’s most notorious villains, meets a sudden and suspicious end in this mystery featuring Jane Austen’s leading literary characters.

The happily married Mr. Knightley and Emma are throwing a house party, bringing together distant relatives and new acquaintances—characters beloved by Jane Austen fans. Definitely not invited is Mr. Wickham, whose latest financial scheme has netted him an even broader array of enemies. As tempers flare and secrets are revealed, it’s clear that everyone would be happier if Mr. Wickham got his comeuppance. Yet they’re all shocked when Wickham turns up murdered—except, of course, for the killer hidden in their midst.

Nearly everyone at the house party is a suspect, so it falls to the party’s two youngest guests to solve the mystery: Juliet Tilney, the smart and resourceful daughter of Catherine and Henry, eager for adventure beyond Northanger Abbey; and Jonathan Darcy, the Darcys� eldest son, whose adherence to propriety makes his father seem almost relaxed. The unlikely pair must put aside their own poor first impressions and uncover the guilty party—before an innocent person is sentenced to hang.]]> 386 Claudia Gray 059331381X Dave 0 to-read 3.65 2022 The Murder of Mr. Wickham (Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney, #1)
author: Claudia Gray
name: Dave
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Dave 0 to-read 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Dave
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France]]> 200634843
Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to a small, rural, scratchy-hot village in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he's made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the cafe and pulling off the trick of pretending to be French, it's getting into fights with your wife because you won't break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.

But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker's apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he'd held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.

It’s a story told in transporting writing, humor, and delicious detail.]]> 368 Steve Hoffman 0593240286 Dave 0 to-read 4.17 A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France
author: Steve Hoffman
name: Dave
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Glory Days: Stories 201626923 The new collection of stories capturing the travails of aging Millennials from “one of the funniest writers in America� (NPR) From the author ofNew Teeth, hailed as "a triumph of sustained humor" (Sarah Lyall, New York Times Book Review), comes a hilarious new collection of short stories chronicling modern mayhem. Glory Days takesa close look at life in the twenty-first century as only Simon Rich can, unearthing irony and humor at every turn. Learn what life was like back in 2023 before humans had to leave earth in “History Report.� Cope with student debt and a midlife crisis with Ant and Grasshopper in a “Millennial Edition� of the classic tale. Commiserate with New York City as she deals with the hoards of Warby Parker-clad newcomers claiming her streets, bike lanes and apartments in “The City Speaks.� And help the King of Nigeria finallyrecover his lost son in “The Mission.� Humorous and deeply heartfelt,Glory Dayscaptures the highs, lows, and laugh-out-loud ridiculousness of life these days. ]]> 224 Simon Rich 0316569003 Dave 0 to-read 4.09 2024 Glory Days: Stories
author: Simon Rich
name: Dave
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created a President]]> 199797865
Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his senior thesis for Harvard in 1880 that women ought to be paid equal to men and have the option of keeping their maiden names upon marriage. It’s little surprise he’d be a feminist, given the women he grew up with.

His mother, Mittie, was witty and decisive, a Southern belle raising four young children in New York while her husband spent long stretches away with the Union Army. Theodore’s college sweetheart and first wife, Alice—so vivacious she was known as Sunshine—steered her beau away from science (he’d roam campus with taxidermy specimen in his pockets) and towards politics. Older sister Bamie would soon become her brother’s key political strategist and advisor; journalists called her Washington, DC, home “the little White House.� Younger sister Conie served as her brother’s press secretary before the role existed, slipping stories of his heroics in Cuba and his rambunctious home life to reporters to create the legend of the Rough Rider we remember today. And Edith—Theodore’s childhood playmate and second wife—would elevate the role of presidential spouse to an American institution, curating both the White House and her husband’s legacy.

A dazzling and lyrical look at one America’s most significant presidents as we’ve never seen him before, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt celebrates five extraordinary yet unsung women who opened the door to the American Century and pushed Theodore Roosevelt through it.]]> 464 Edward F. O'Keefe 1982145684 Dave 4 american-history, history
Unfortunately, the study of history can be reduced to self-important (mostly white) men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to build the country or their company or both. The study of Theodore Roosevelt is no different. That is why Edward O'Keefe's book was refreshing. It did the overview of the life of Teddy, but focused on the women in his life and how they impacted him from birth to death. We all have been shaped by our moms, sisters, wifes, daughters, and nieces. It was cool and significant to see those fingerprints on Teddy. It made him even more relatable.]]> 4.05 2024 The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created a President
author: Edward F. O'Keefe
name: Dave
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: american-history, history
review:
Anyone that knows me knows that I am no stranger to the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt. Outside of teaching him to 16 and 17 year-olds each year for 15 years, I have read about 10 books on my own about him. There's not a ton of ground that I haven't covered. As Julia Child is Julie's inspiration in one of my favorite movies, Teddy has become my person (much to my son, Theodore's, recent eyerolls).

Unfortunately, the study of history can be reduced to self-important (mostly white) men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to build the country or their company or both. The study of Theodore Roosevelt is no different. That is why Edward O'Keefe's book was refreshing. It did the overview of the life of Teddy, but focused on the women in his life and how they impacted him from birth to death. We all have been shaped by our moms, sisters, wifes, daughters, and nieces. It was cool and significant to see those fingerprints on Teddy. It made him even more relatable.
]]> <![CDATA[Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps]]> 196815514 From your friends atPod Save Americaand Crooked Media comes a useful and illustrated guide to saving American democracy just in time for the 2024 election and 2025 insurrection

If you’re looking to navigate the chaotic, dunce-infested waters of American politics,Democracy or Elseis here to help you tackle whatmight be thegreatestquestion of our How do you get involved in the political process and make a real difference without giving in to the sense of impending dread that hangs over our society like a nameless stench? Each chapter will take readers step-by-step through the perilous journeyof

Getting informed when you don’t know which influencer to trust (all of them!)Donating and volunteering where you can have the biggest impactOrganizing, protesting, and even running for office yourselfStaying engaged in politicswithout losing hope or your mind or all of your friends

Democracy or Elseis a resource foreveryone—from political junkies following every turn of the news cycle to young people getting ready to vote for the first time. And it'sfilled with practical advice from some of the smartest experts and least annoying politicians around.The stakes and average global temperatures have never been higher—but there have also never been so many opportunities to join the fight. It’s an age of contradictions!]]> 180 Jon Favreau 1638931445 Dave 5
There was not anything groundbreaking in there as a regular listener to Pod Save America; however, i think it would be best suited political-curious friends and it is a great, light overview of American politics in 2024.]]> 4.21 2024 Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps
author: Jon Favreau
name: Dave
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: current-events, politics, favorites
review:
The biggest divide in American politics is not liberal and conservative or Democrats and Republicans. The biggest divide in American politics is those who pay attention and those who don't. Jon, Jon, & Tommy's book is an attempt to bridge that divide. Democracy or Else does a great job of providing digestible bite-size summary of our political system and how we can all work towards a more perfect union.

There was not anything groundbreaking in there as a regular listener to Pod Save America; however, i think it would be best suited political-curious friends and it is a great, light overview of American politics in 2024.
]]> <![CDATA[Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today]]> 53785213 Culinary historian Anne Willan “has melded her passions for culinary history, writing, and teaching into her fascinating new book� (Chicago Tribune) that traces the origins of American cooking through profiles of twelve influential women—from Hannah Woolley in the mid-1600s to Fannie Farmer, Julia Child, and Alice Waters—whose recipes and ideas changed the way we eat.Anne Willan, multi-award-winning culinary historian, cookbook writer, teacher, and founder of La Varenne Cooking School in Paris, explores the lives and work of women cookbook authors whose essential books have defined cooking over the past three hundred years. Beginning with the first published cookbook by Hannah Woolley in 1661 to the early colonial days to the transformative popular works by Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, and up to Alice Waters working today. Willan offers a brief biography of each influential woman, highlighting her key contributions, seminal books, and representative dishes. The book features fifty original recipes—as well as updated versions Willan has tested and modernized for the contemporary kitchen. Women in the Kitchen is an engaging narrative that seamlessly moves through the centuries to help readers understand the ways cookbook authors inspire one another, that they in part owe their places in history to those who came before them, and how they forever change the culinary landscape. This “informative and inspiring book is a reminder that the love of delicious food and the care and preparation that goes into it can create a common bond� (Booklist).]]> 313 Anne Willan Dave 0 to-read 3.93 2020 Women in the Kitchen: Twelve Essential Cookbook Writers Who Defined the Way We Eat, from 1661 to Today
author: Anne Willan
name: Dave
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Real Americans 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Dave 0 to-read 3.93 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: Dave
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The History of Sound 199373354
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X Dave 0 to-read 4.37 2024 The History of Sound
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Dave
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Only Good Indians 52180399 The creeping horror of Paul Tremblay meets Tommy Orange’s There There in a dark novel of revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, Stephen Graham Jones.

Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.]]> 305 Stephen Graham Jones 1982136456 Dave 0 to-read 3.68 2020 The Only Good Indians
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Dave
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Dave 4
The story of the Wager itself is pretty extraordinary and unfathomable to read about sitting in a climate-controlled room with music playing in the background. Grann also does a good job of explaining and showing how unlikely it journey had to have been. While I enjoyed the book, I do wish there was more examination of larger forces/impacts in the time period as well as why it matters today. ]]> 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Dave
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/19
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves:
review:
This book has been everywhere and I was excited to get a chance to sit down and read it. Like in Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann does a great job of painting the historical background that the story takes place. Pre-American Revolution era history is not my forte, but especially the first couple chapters of the book I enjoyed learning more about the war of Jenkins' Ear and how it led us to the story in the book.

The story of the Wager itself is pretty extraordinary and unfathomable to read about sitting in a climate-controlled room with music playing in the background. Grann also does a good job of explaining and showing how unlikely it journey had to have been. While I enjoyed the book, I do wish there was more examination of larger forces/impacts in the time period as well as why it matters today.
]]> Horse 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]> 401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Dave 4 4.17 2022 Horse
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Dave
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/03
shelves: adult-fiction, historical-fiction
review:
To paraphrase and use a quote from Shrek, this book is like an onion, it is complex. It has layers. All of the layers center around a prolific real-life Antebellum racing horse, Lexington and its ripples throughout two more modern periods of American history. I enjoyed this multi-level historical fiction and Brooks did a great job of creating three well-written storylines. The one thing that I felt that was missing was a stronger tie between each of the three storylines. Sure, there was some connective tissue between each of the stories, but I kept waiting for an explicit reason why these three stories were intertwined. Overall though, the book is a great story and can be a way for non-history people to interact with history and some of its ripples in the present day.
]]> <![CDATA[Transformer: Klopp, the Revolution of a Club and Culture]]> 210162690
Jürgen Klopp’s announcement in January 2024 that he was to step down as Liverpool manager at the end of the season would see an unprecedented outpouring of grief from his adopted city. The Anfield Wrap has followed Liverpool through nine remarkable years, ten cup finals, and eight trophies, and now the ‘normal one� is finally set to return to a normal life.

But the story of Klopp and Liverpool is a special one. A city haunted by tragedy and economic hardship rapidly found itself reinvigorated and redrawn by one man's philosophy, and an approach to life and football that was driven by joy, passion and inclusivity. Klopp’s arrival led not only to spectacular footballing success, but also saw Liverpool itself becoming more culturally relevant than at any point since the height of Beatlemania.

Neil Atkinson, host of The Anfield Wrap, tells the story of this unique relationship with a passion, zeal and humour befitting of the man himself. Structured around eleven notable games in Klopp’s Liverpool career, Atkinson expertly weaves the personal and the political into this retelling of one of football's most improbable journeys, one that would change both the landscape of the sport and the city of Liverpool forever.]]> 288 Neil Atkinson 1837262934 Dave 0 to-read 4.18 Transformer: Klopp, the Revolution of a Club and Culture
author: Neil Atkinson
name: Dave
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Godwin 198563648
Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the UK, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, the novel is both a tale of family and migration and an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O'Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.]]> 288 Joseph O'Neill 0593701321 Dave 0 to-read 3.54 2024 Godwin
author: Joseph O'Neill
name: Dave
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Caledonian Road 199126293 A biting portrait of British class, politics, and money told through five interconnected families and their rising―and declining―fortunes.

Campbell Flynn, art historian and biographer of Vermeer, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public―yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. Entangled with a brilliant student, he begins to see trouble brewing for his family and friends. All his worlds collide―the art scene and academia, fashion and the English aristocracy, journalism and the internet―as dangerous forces enter his life and Caledonian Road gives up its secrets.
Andrew O’Hagan has written a social novel in the Victorian style, drawing a whole cast of characters into company with each other and revealing the inner energies of the way we live now.

“Not only a peerless chronicler of our times, O’Hagan has generosity, humour and tenderness, which make this novel an utter joy to read.”―Monica Ali, author of Love Marriage and Brick Lane]]> 614 Andrew O'Hagan 1324074876 Dave 0 to-read 3.73 2024 Caledonian Road
author: Andrew O'Hagan
name: Dave
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s]]> 196585876 An Unfinished Love A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.

The Goodwins� last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.

Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.]]> 480 Doris Kearns Goodwin 1982108665 Dave 0 to-read 4.53 2024 An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Dave
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2) 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Dave 0 to-read 3.68 2024 Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2)
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Dave
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Southern Man (Penn Cage, #7) 58884700
As the stunned cities of Natchez and Bienville reel, antebellum plantation homes continue to burn and the deadly attacks are claimed by a Black radical group as historic acts of justice. Panic sweeps through the tourist communities, driving them inexorably toward a race war.

But what might have been only a regional sideshow of the 2024 Presidential election explodes into national prominence, thanks to the stunning ascent of Robert E. Lee White, a Southern war hero who seizes the public imagination as a third-party candidate. Dubbed “the Tik-Tok Man,� and funded by an eccentric Mississippi billionaire, Bobby White rides the glory of his Special Forces record to an unprecedented run at the White House—one unseen since the campaign of H. Ross Perot.

To triumph over the national party machines, Bobby evolves a plan of unimaginable daring. One fateful autumn weekend, with White set to declare his candidacy in all fifty states, the forces polarizing America line up against one another: Black vs. white, states vs. the federal government, democracy vs. Fascism. Teaming with his fearless daughter (now a civil rights lawyer) and a former Black Panther who spent most of his life in Parchman Prison, Penn tears into Bobby White’s pursuit of the Presidency and ultimately risks a second Civil War to try to expose its motivation to the world, before the America of our Constitution slides into the abyss.

In Southern Man, Greg Iles returns to the riveting style and historic depth that made the Natchez Burning trilogy a searing masterpiece and hurls the narrative fifteen years forward into our current moment—where America itself teeters on the brink of anarchy.]]> 966 Greg Iles 0062824694 Dave 0 to-read 3.92 2024 Southern Man (Penn Cage, #7)
author: Greg Iles
name: Dave
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.� and the End of the Heartland]]> 199349233
On June 4, 1984, Columbia Records issued what would become one of the best-selling and most impactful rock albums of all time. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. would prove itself to be a landmark not only for the man who made it, but rock music in general and even the larger American culture over the next 40 years. Because this record ended up being much more than just an album—it is a document of what this country was in its moment, a dream of what it might become, and a prescient forecast of what it actually turned into decades later.

In There Was Nothing You Could Do, veteran rock critic Steven Hyden explores the essential questions that explain this classic album —what it means, why it was made, and how it changed the world. By mixing up his signature blend of personal memoir, criticism, and journalism, Hyden digs deep into the songs that made Born In The U.S.A. as well as the scores of tunes that didn’t, including the tracks that make up the album’s sister release, 1982’s Nebraska. He investigates how the records before Born In The U.S.A. set the table for the album’s tremendous success, following Springsteen as he tries to balance his commercial ambitions with his fear of losing artistic control and being co-opted by the machine. Hyden also takes a closer look how Springsteen’s work after Born In The U.S.A. reacted to that album, discussing how “The Boss� initially ran away from his most popular (and most misunderstood) LP until he learned to once again accept his role as a kind of living national monument.

But the book doesn’t stop there. Hyden also looks beyond Springsteen’s career, placing Born In The U.S.A. in a larger context in terms of how it affected rock music as well as America. Though he aspired to be as big as Elvis and as profound as Dylan, he was equally aware of his heroes� shortcomings and eager to avoid their mistakes—all while navigating the tumultuous aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, a time when America was coming apart at the seams. Born In The U.S.A. simultaneously chronicles that coming apart and pushes for a more united future, a duality that made him a hero to a younger generation of bands —from Arcade Fire to The Killers to The War On Drugs —who openly emulated the sound of Born In The U.S.A. in the hopes of somehow, in their own way, achieving a measure of that album’s impact in the 21stcentury. By the aughts, when Springsteen fan (and future podcast partner) Barack Obama entered the White House, it appeared that the hopeful promise of Born In The U.S.A. might be realized. But the election of Donald Trump seemed to confirm an opposite truth that was closer to the darkness of songs like “My Hometown� and “Born In The U.S.A.� than Springsteen’s revival-like shows. As Springsteen himself reluctantly conceded, the working-class middle American progressives he wrote about in 1984 had turned into the resentful and scored Trump voters of the 2010s.

How did we lose Springsteen’s heartland? And what can listening to these songs teach us about the American decline that Born In The U.S.A. forecasted? In There Was Nothing You Could Do, Hyden takes readers on a journey to find out.
]]> 272 Steven Hyden 0306832062 Dave 0 to-read 4.04 There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland
author: Steven Hyden
name: Dave
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Franchise: Atlanta Braves 199597435
This thoughtful and engaging collection of essays captures the astute fans� history of the franchise, going beyond well-worn narratives of yesteryear to uncover the less-discussed moments, decisions, people, and settings that fostered the Braves' one-of-a-kind identity.

Through wheeling and dealing, mythmaking and community building, explore where the organization has been, how it got to prominence in the modern major league landscape, and how it’ll continue to evolve and stay in contention for generations to come.

Braves fans in the know will enjoy this personal, local, in-depth look at baseball history.]]> 305 Mark Bowman 1637275684 Dave 0 to-read 3.91 2024 The Franchise: Atlanta Braves
author: Mark Bowman
name: Dave
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Come and Get It 127482608
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid 0593328205 Dave 0 to-read 3.32 2024 Come and Get It
author: Kiley Reid
name: Dave
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Caretaker 75500179 Told against the backdrop of the Korean War as a small Appalachian town sends its sons to battle, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash ("One of the great American authors at work today" --The New York Times) is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honor, and love.

It's 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Lampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob's wife, Naomi, as well.

Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clare is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town's most elegant hotel. When Naomi elopes with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalizes the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherit him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.

A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, page-turning novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.]]> 252 Ron Rash 0385544278 Dave 0 to-read 4.11 2023 The Caretaker
author: Ron Rash
name: Dave
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Dave 0 to-read 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Dave
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Monster of Florence 40603982 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) and Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City), New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston presents a gripping account of crime and punishment in the lush hills surrounding Florence, Italy.

In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy. Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14th century farmhouse had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more.

This is the true story of their search for—and identification of—the man they believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy's grim Capanne prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself. Like one of Preston's thrillers, The Monster of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story involving murder, mutilation, and suicide—and at the center of it, Preston and Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta.]]> 354 Douglas Preston Dave 0 to-read 3.83 2008 The Monster of Florence
author: Douglas Preston
name: Dave
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1)]]> 16085481
When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home, long drives to explore the island, and quality time with the man she might one day marry. What she doesn't know is that Nick's family home happens to look like a palace, that she'll ride in more private planes than cars, and that with one of Asia's most eligible bachelors on her arm, Rachel might as well have a target on her back.

Initiated into a world of dynastic splendor beyond imagination, Rachel meets Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore society; Eddie, whose family practically lives in the pages of the Hong Kong socialite magazines; and Eleanor, Nick's formidable mother, a woman who has very strong feelings about who her son should—and should not—marry.

Uproarious, addictive, and filled with jaw-dropping opulence, Crazy Rich Asians is an insider's look at the Asian JetSet; a perfect depiction of the clash between old money and new money; between Overseas Chinese and Mainland Chinese; and a fabulous novel about what it means to be young, in love, and gloriously, crazily rich.]]> 403 Kevin Kwan 0385536976 Dave 0 to-read 3.91 2013 Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1)
author: Kevin Kwan
name: Dave
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/21
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]]> <![CDATA[They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms]]> 196775540 288 Mike Hixenbaugh 0063307243 Dave 0 to-read 4.44 2024 They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms
author: Mike Hixenbaugh
name: Dave
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Evolution of Annabel Craig]]> 123286446
“Lisa Grunwald is a national treasure.. . .An essential American story from a master craftsman.”—Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone

I had never questioned a miracle, witnessed a gunfight, or seen a dead body. . . . I had thought I knew exactly what I wanted and what I didn't. Before the summer was over, all that and much more would change.

Annabel Hayes—born, baptized, and orphaned in the sleepy conservative town of Dayton, Tennessee—is thrilled to find herself falling quickly and deeply in love with George Craig, a sophisticated attorney newly arrived from Knoxville. But before the end of their first year of marriage, their lives are beset by losses. The strain on their relationship is only intensified when John T. Scopes is arrested for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution at the local high school.

Foreshadowing today’s culture wars, the trial against Scopes is a spectacle unlike any the country has seen. William Jennings Bryan—a revered Southern politician—joins the prosecution, pitting himself and his faith against the renowned defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Journalists descend in a frenzy, thrusting the town and its citizens into the national spotlight. And when George joins the team defending Scopes, Annabel begins to question both her beliefs and her vows.

As the ongoing trial divides neighbor against neighbor, it also divides the Craigs in unexpected ways. But in the midst of these conflicts—one waged in an open courtroom, the other behind closed doors—Annabel will discover that the path to her own evolution begins with the courage to think for herself.]]> 320 Lisa Grunwald 0593596153 Dave 0 to-read 3.81 2024 The Evolution of Annabel Craig
author: Lisa Grunwald
name: Dave
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/10
shelves: to-read
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