Mitch's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:06:27 -0700 60 Mitch's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Max in the House of Spies: A Tale of World War II (Operation Kinderspion)]]> 198220734 An instant New York Times bestseller!

�Max in the House of Spies is everything you could hope for in a book,� -R. J. Palacio, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wonder, White Bird, and Pony

“Espionage! Secrets! Suspense! If you’ve ever dreamed of being a spy, this book is for you.� -Alan Gratz, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Refugee and Projekt 1065

Max Bretzfeld doesn’t want to move to London.

Leaving home is hard and Max is alone for the first time in his life. But not for long. Max is surprised to discover that he’s been joined by two unexpected traveling companions, one on each shoulder, a kobold and a dybbuk named Berg and Stein.

Germany is becoming more and more dangerous for Jewish families, but Max is determined to find a way back home, and back to his parents. He has a plan to return to Berlin. It merely involves accomplishing the becoming a British spy.

The first book in a duology, Max in the House of Spies is a thought-provoking World War II story as only acclaimed storyteller Adam Gidwitz can tell it—fast-paced and hilarious, with a dash of magic and a lot of heart.]]>
333 Adam Gidwitz 0593112091 Mitch 0 currently-reading 4.35 2024 Max in the House of Spies: A Tale of World War II (Operation Kinderspion)
author: Adam Gidwitz
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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Horse 59560942 413 Geraldine Brooks 0399562982 Mitch 5 4.53 2022 Horse
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/20
date added: 2025/04/20
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<![CDATA[Testimony (Kindle County Legal Thriller, #10)]]> 32480883 In the bestselling tradition of Presumed Innocent--the 1987 debut novel that made him "one of the major writers in America" (NPR)--comes what may be Scott Turow's best thriller yet.

Bill ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to him: his career, his wife, Kindle County, even his country. Still, when he is tapped to examine the disappearance of an entire Gypsy refugee camp--unsolved for ten years--he feels drawn to what will become the most elusive case of his career.

In order to uncover what happened during the apocalyptic chaos after the Bosnian War, Boom must navigate a host of suspects ranging from Serb paramilitaries to organized crime gangs to the U.S. government, while also maneuvering among the alliances and treacheries of those connected to the case: Morgan Merriwell, a disgraced U.S. Major General; Ferko Rincic, the massacre's sole survivor; and Esma Czarni, an alluring barrister with secrets to protect.

A master of the legal thriller, Scott Turow has returned with his most irresistibly confounding and satisfying novel yet.]]>
497 Scott Turow Mitch 3 3.81 2008 Testimony (Kindle County Legal Thriller, #10)
author: Scott Turow
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2017/08/29
date added: 2025/04/04
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Lord of the Flies 31133566 William Golding’s unforgettable classic of boyhood adventure and the savagery of humanity comes to Penguin Classics in a stunning Graphic Deluxe Edition with a new foreword by Lois Lowry

As provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, Lord of the Fliescontinues to ignite passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. William Golding’s compelling story about a group of very ordinary boys marooned on a coral island has been labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, and even a vision of the apocalypse. But above all, it has earned its place as one of the indisputable classics of the twentieth century for readers of any age.

This Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition features an array of special features to supplement the novel, including a foreword by Lois Lowry, an introduction by Stephen King, an essay by E. M. Forster, an essay on teaching and reading the novel and suggestions for further exploration by scholar Jennifer Buehler, and an extended note by E. L. Epstein, the publisher of the first American paperback edition of Lord of the Flies.]]>
336 William Golding 1101993227 Mitch 5 3.96 1954 Lord of the Flies
author: William Golding
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/21
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<![CDATA[Presumed Guilty (Presumed Innocent)]]> 214229517 Read Scott Turow’s new “unputdownableâ€� courtroom drama from the #1 New York Times bestselling author ofĚýPresumed Innocent, the phenomenon that redefined the legal thriller and is the basis for Apple TV+’s most-watched drama series ever (Kristin Hannah, #1 NYT bestselling author).Ěý

“No one does it better.”�David Baldacci, #1 NYT Bestselling Author
“The truth is, Turow is just better at this than the rest of us.”�Greg Iles, #1 NYT Bestselling Author
“This is manna for legal-thriller fans."�Booklist, starred review
“This easily ranks among Turow’s best."�Publishers Weekly, starred review
“An absorbing and entertaining read.”Ěýâ€� Kirkus

Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that’s taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea’s young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail.
Ěý
Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn’t returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first-degree murder.
Ěý
Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent—it’s whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty.]]>
542 Scott Turow 1538706393 Mitch 5 4.53 2025 Presumed Guilty (Presumed Innocent)
author: Scott Turow
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2025
rating: 5
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Bel Canto 4906348
"Bel Canto is its own universe. A marvel of a book."Ěý—Washington Post Book World

New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s spellbindingĚýnovel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn to communicate across cultural barriers in times of crisis

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Patchett's lyrical prose and lucid imagination makeĚýBel CantoĚýa captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.]]>
336 Ann Patchett 0061738883 Mitch 4 4.11 2001 Bel Canto
author: Ann Patchett
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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Yellowface 62060532
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]>
329 R.F. Kuang Mitch 4 3.77 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis]]> 145621074 Ěý
“[A] searing, gut-wrenching, and masterfully reported account.� � Jill Lepore

An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer

Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. An overwhelming share of them come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, although many migrants come from farther away. Some are fleeing persecution, others crime or hunger. Very often it will not be their first attempt to cross. They may have already been deported from the United States, but it remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. Their homes have become uninhabitable. They will take their chances.

This vast and unremitting crisis did not spring up overnight. Indeed, as Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, it is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture for the first time.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is an odyssey of struggle and resilience. With astonishing nuance and detail, Blitzer tells an epic story about the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, and in doing so, he delves into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.]]>
540 Jonathan Blitzer 1984880810 Mitch 2 4.50 2024 Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
author: Jonathan Blitzer
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2024
rating: 2
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Remarkably Bright Creatures 59710157 For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]>
362 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204177 Mitch 0 currently-reading 4.51 2022 Remarkably Bright Creatures
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.51
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The Tree Where Man Was Born 23310460 A timeless and majestic portrait of Africa by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard and the new novel In Paradise A finalist for the National Book Award when it was released in 1972, this vivid portrait of East Africa remains as fresh and revelatory now as on the day it was first published. Peter Matthiessen exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to portray the sights, scenes, and people he observed firsthand in several trips over the course of a dozen years. From the daily lives of wild herdsmen and the drama of predator kills to the field biologists investigating wild creatures and the anthropologists seeking humanity's origins in the rift valley,ĚýThe Tree Where Man Was BornĚýis a classic of journalistic observation. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by groundbreaking British primatologist Jane Goodall.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700Ěýtitles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theĚýseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-dateĚýtranslations by award-winning translators.]]> 299 Peter Matthiessen 1101663197 Mitch 0 currently-reading 4.04 1972 The Tree Where Man Was Born
author: Peter Matthiessen
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1972
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The Frozen River 56699106
Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.]]>
432 Ariel Lawhon 0385546882 Mitch 5 4.52 2023 The Frozen River
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (L'amica geniale #1)]]> 38457091 New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends growing up in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted family epic by Italy’s most beloved and acclaimed writer, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time.� (Roxana Robinson, The New York Times)
Ěý
Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflictual friendship. Book one in the series follows Lila and Elena from their first fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.Ěý

Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends,� writes Entertainment Weekly. “Spectacular,� says Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air. “A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman,� writes James Wood in The New Yorker

Ferrante is one of the world’s great storytellers. With My Brilliant Friend she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.]]>
387 Elena Ferrante Mitch 5 4.06 2011 My Brilliant Friend (L'amica geniale #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Reversible Errors (Kindle County #6)]]> 6575375 453 Scott Turow Mitch 0 4.20 2002 Reversible Errors (Kindle County #6)
author: Scott Turow
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings]]> 34845395 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide.

Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.� At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare�) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned.

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.]]>
317 Maya Angelou Mitch 5 4.43 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
author: Maya Angelou
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1969
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/10/21
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I Know Why Angelou is regarded as a great author
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The Investment Answer 8897734
This book cuts through the Wall Street hype to give you just what you need to know. Joe Grundfest, Stanford Law School Professor and former SEC Commissioner, says that "Gordon Murray and Dan Goldie share secrets that Wall Street would rather you not know. Read this book and prosper."

The book teaches you to take advantage of how markets really work and how to benefit from the wisdom that Nobel Prize winners have acquired over the last 60 years. Nobel Laureate and Father of Modern Portfolio Theory, Harry Markowitz, remarks that the book "offers sound advice, which you will rarely if ever get from a daily financial newscast." Gene Fama, widely recognized as the father of modern finance, says that the book is "an excellent primer for the investor who is not a finance specialist."

You probably know the important measures of your physical your weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels. But do you know the important measures about your investment health? Is your advisor is a fiduciary who really works for you or for his firm? What is your percentage mix of stocks, bonds, and cash? How much you are paying in fees and investment-related taxes?

Most of us can't answer these important financial questions...but we must. This book will help you become a smarter investor and a better steward of your money.]]>
89 Daniel C. Goldie 0982894716 Mitch 0 to-read 3.81 2010 The Investment Answer
author: Daniel C. Goldie
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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Father Goriot 19009927 723 Honoré de Balzac Mitch 0 to-read 3.77 1835 Father Goriot
author: Honoré de Balzac
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1835
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series)]]> 33395538 The #1 New York Times Bestseller: The essential universe, from our most celebrated and beloved astrophysicist.

What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.

But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.

While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.

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222 Neil deGrasse Tyson Mitch 0 to-read 4.27 2017 Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series)
author: Neil deGrasse Tyson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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The Psychology of Money 41881472 242 Morgan Housel 0857197681 Mitch 0 4.28 2020 The Psychology of Money
author: Morgan Housel
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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The Women 126918788 From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

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.]]>
472 Kristin Hannah Mitch 5 4.71 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City]]> 39829507 244 Antero Pietila 1538116049 Mitch 2 3.66 The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City
author: Antero Pietila
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.66
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rating: 2
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Tom Lake 63256933 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.]]>
310 Ann Patchett 0063327546 Mitch 5 4.13 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/14
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<![CDATA[The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War]]> 195607632
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.
Ěý
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.�
Ěý
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.
Ěý
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.]]>
559 Erik Larson 0385348754 Mitch 5 4.37 2024 The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
author: Erik Larson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War]]> 59235119 The celebrated author ofĚýDouble CrossĚýandĚýRogue HeroesĚýreturns with his greatest spy story yet, a thrillingĚýAmericans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War.

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.Ěý

Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.]]>
415 Ben Macintyre Mitch 5 4.64 2018 The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays]]> 211081098
After going viral “reading� the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas finally knew who he was and where he was going. He was living his best life.

But then everything changed.

In this collection of insightful and hilarious essays, Thomas moves back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore (a place he never wanted to return, even to be buried) and behaves completely out of character. They say you can’t go home again, but what if you and home have changed beyond recognition? From attending his twenty-year high school reunion and discovering another person’s face on his name badge, to splattering an urgent care room with blood à la The Shining, to being terrorized by a plague of gay frogs who’ve overtaken his backyard, Thomas provides the nitty, and sometimes the gritty, details of wrestling with the life he thought he’d left behind while trying to establish a new one.

With wit, heart, and hope for the future, Congratulations, The Best Is Over! is the not-so-gentle reminder we all need that even when life doesn’t go according to plan, we can still find our way back home.]]>
256 R. Eric Thomas 0593496280 Mitch 0 to-read 3.97 2023 Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays
author: R. Eric Thomas
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions]]> 74834636 PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST •ĚýĚýNamed a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, and People

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023

“Brave and nuanced . . . an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.� �The New York Times

“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.â€� —Tłó±đ Wall Street Journal

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.
Ěý
Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn’t as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.
Ěý
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still battling delu­sions when he traded his halfway house for Yale Law School. Featured in The New York Times as a role model genius, he sold a memoir, with film rights to Ron Howard. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed his girlfriend Carrie to death and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.
Ěý
Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen’s magnificent and heartbreaking account of good intentions and tragic outcomes whose significance will echo widely.]]>
575 Jonathan Rosen 069819652X Mitch 5 4.20 2023 The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
author: Jonathan Rosen
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays]]> 122408636 The beloved bestselling author of Here for It presents a collection of heartening, thoughtful, and laugh-out-loud essays about the lifelong search for community and returning home.

After going viral "reading" the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas is ready to live his best life--or, if not, at least his best-ish life.

Now, in this collection of insightful and hilarious essays, Thomas finds himself doing things completely out of character, starting with moving back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore. They say you can't go home again, but what if you and home have changed beyond recognition? From attending his twenty-year high school reunion and discovering another person's face on his name badge, to splattering an urgent care room with blood Ă  la The Shining, to being terrorized by a plague of gay frogs who've overtaken his backyard, Thomas shares the nitty, and sometimes gritty, details of wrestling with your past life while in the middle of a new one. With wit, heart, and hope for the future, Congratulations, The Best Is Over! is the not-so-gentle reminder we all need that even when life doesn't go according to plan, we can still find our way back home.]]>
241 R. Eric Thomas 0593496272 Mitch 0 to-read 4.10 2023 Congratulations, The Best Is Over!: Essays
author: R. Eric Thomas
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.10
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The Winners (Beartown, #3) 60318890
As the locals of Beartown struggle to overcome the past, great change is on the horizon. Someone is coming home after a long time away. Someone will be laid to rest. Someone will fall in love, someone will try to fix their marriage, and someone will do anything to save their children. Someone will submit to hate, someone will fight, and someone will grab a gun and walk towards the ice rink.

So what are the residents of Beartown willing to sacrifice for their home?]]>
671 Fredrik Backman Mitch 5 4.45 2022 The Winners (Beartown, #3)
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/14
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<![CDATA[Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country]]> 122769179 INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Adam KinzingerĚýcaptures one of the most transformative periods in recent political history in aĚýriveting, personal account from inside Congress, including the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol and his vote to impeach Donald Trump.

AN OPEN FIELD PUBLICATION FROM MARIA SHRIVER

On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump incited a violent mob to storm the US Capitol in attempts to overturn the presidential election. It was a betrayal of our Constitution, and one of the darkest days in recent history. Yet to former congressman Adam Kinzinger it was also the culmination of a cultural and political rupture he’d long seen coming. Constructive criticism from within the Republican Party was no longer enough. It was time to stand up, even if it meant betraying his own party.

In Renegade, Kinzinger tells his story of faith, service, and political duty in a democracy under siege. From the small Illinois county board where he got his start, to his years in the Air Force flying tanker missions over Iraq, to his final tumultuous term in Congress as one of the few Republican members to vote to impeach Trump and join the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Kinzinger takes readers inside the most critical moments and pivotal decisions of the last years. The result is both a searing examination of the rise of extremism and the GOP’s subsequent descent into a dysfunctional and destructive force, and a rousing call to return to unity.

Raw, provocative, and clear-eyed, Renegade captures one of the most transformative periods in recent American history.]]>
316 Adam Kinzinger 0593654161 Mitch 0 4.16 Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country
author: Adam Kinzinger
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.16
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<![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58916147 A newer cover edition can be found here.

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends--often in love, but never lovers--come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]>
418 Gabrielle Zevin Mitch 3 4.26 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/15
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Us Against You (Beartown, #2) 60732496 New York Times bestselling author of Beartown and A Man Called Ove, hailed as “a writer of astonishing depth [with] the remarkable ability to make you understand the feelings of each of a dozen different characters� (The Washington Times), a heart-wrenching story of how loyalty, friendship, and love carry a town through its darkest days.

After everything that the citizens of Beartown have gone through, they are struck yet another blow when they hear that their beloved local hockey team will soon be disbanded. What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for a rival team in Hed, take in that fact. Amidst the mounting tension between the two rivals, a surprising newcomer is handpicked to be Beartown’s new hockey coach.

Soon a new team starts to take shape around Amat, the fastest player you’ll ever see; Benji, the intense lone wolf; and Vidar, a born-to-be-bad troublemaker. But bringing this team together proves to be a challenge as old bonds are broken, new ones are formed, and the enmity with Hed grows more and more acute.

As the big match approaches, the not-so-innocent pranks and incidents between the communities pile up and their mutual contempt grows deeper. By the time the last game is finally played, a resident of Beartown will be dead, and the people of both towns will be forced to wonder if, after all they’ve been through, the game they love can ever return to something simple and innocent.

Us Against You is a declaration of love for all the big and small, bright and dark stories that form and color our communities. Compelling and heartbreaking, it’s a roller-coaster ride of emotions and a showcase for “Fredrik Backman’s pitch-perfect dialogue and unparalleled understanding of human nature� (Shelf Awareness).]]>
443 Fredrik Backman Mitch 5 4.46 2017 Us Against You (Beartown, #2)
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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Beartown (Beartown, #1) 60732483 Alternate cover editions for ASIN B01KG5GQDS can be found here and here.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove returns with a dazzling, profound novel about a small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true.

People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.]]>
430 Fredrik Backman Mitch 5 4.37 2016 Beartown (Beartown, #1)
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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The Book of Charlie 74892245 One of our nation’s most prominent writers finds the truth about how to live a long and happy life in the centenarian next door.

When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship—and a profound lesson in the meaning of life. Charlie White was no ordinary neighbor. Born before radio, Charlie lived long enough to use a smartphone. When a shocking tragedy interrupted his idyllic boyhood, Charlie mastered survival strategies that reflect thousands of years of human wisdom. Thus armored, Charlie’s sense of adventure carried him on an epic journey across the continent, and later found him swinging across bandstands of the Jazz Age, racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars, improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery, and cruising the Amazon as a guest of Peru’s president.

David Von Drehle came to understand that Charlie’s resilience and willingness to grow made this remarkable neighbor a master in the art of thriving through times of dramatic change. As a gift to his children, he set out to tell Charlie’s secrets. The Book of Charlie is a gospel of grit—the inspiring story of one man’s journey through a century of upheaval. The history that unfolds through Charlie’s story reminds you that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation, an inventive nation—a nation of Charlies in the rollercoaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.]]>
204 David von Drehle Mitch 5 4.36 2023 The Book of Charlie
author: David von Drehle
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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Nightwatching 150246483 Sekunda za reakciju.
Trenutak od kojeg im zavisi ceo Ĺľivot.

„Jedan od najstrašnijih i najbriljantnijih trilera koji ćete pročitati.�
� Guardian

Napolju besni snežna mećava. Ona je kod kuće sama sa decom. Spremaju se za spavanje. Čuje nešto � škripa naizgled uobičajena za stare kuće, ili bar tako umiruje sebe. Međutim, zvuci deluju poznato i uznemirujuće dok odjekuju hodnikom. Koraci neobično teški i spori.

Obris muškarca pomalja se kroz hodnik. Preplašena budi decu i požuruje ih ka najstarijem delu kuće, majušnoj tajnoj sobi sakrivenoj iza zida. Do dece dopire njegov reski glas pun pretnji dok ih čeka da mu razotkriju skrovište.

U zaglušujućoj tami, bori se da ostane pribrana. Da li da potraži neko oružje ili da pokuša da pobegnu? Ugledala ga je opet. To lice. Taj glas. Istog trena njenim telom prostrujali su strah i nemoć. Ona tačno zna ko je on i šta želi. I ne zna da li će izbaviti sebe i decu iz ove opasnosti.

„Čitalac je gurnut u scenario nepatvorenog straha. Opisati ovaj roman kao noćnu moru u suprotnosti je sa živopisnošću te noći. Sama u noći je zastrašujući triler igre mačke i miša u kojem je škripa na stepenicama samo blaga uvertira u borbu za opstanak.�
� Washington Post

„Izvanredan. Šlag na torti je sjajan završetak, koji deluje i iznenađujuće i neizbežno.�
� Publishers Weekly

„Ovim romanom trijumfuje ekstremna napetost. Fantastično, ali rizično za one slabog srca.�
� Daily Mail

„Čitate Samu u noći na sopstveni rizik.�
� Kris Vitaker

„Zastrašujuće i neodoljivo.�
� Karin Sloter]]>
368 Tracy Sierra Mitch 5 4.04 2024 Nightwatching
author: Tracy Sierra
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average rating: 4.04
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<![CDATA[It Takes What It Takes: How to Think Neutrally and Gain Control of Your Life]]> 49567330 Foreword by Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson
From a top mental conditioning coach—”the world’s best brain trainer� (Sports Illustrated)—who has transformed the lives and careers of elite athletes, business leaders, and military personnel, battle-tested strategies that will give you tools to manage and overcome negativity and achieve any goal.

Trevor Moawad is a mental conditioning coach who has helped professionals from all walks of life, from Ft. Bragg to Harvard Business School, the NFL to Fortune 500 companies. Moawad’s mission is clear: motivate the motivated.

Now, for the first time ever, Moawad shares the formula he has exclusively used to help these elites with everyone. It Takes What It Takes shows you how to deal with even the most challenging circumstances—and thrive. Moawad reveals how top performers hone their competitive edge by effectively managing both negativity and failure as well as positivity and success: Neutral thinking is the key.

Neutral thinking is a high-performance strategy that emphasizes judgment-free thinking, especially in pressure situations. It acknowledges that the past happened. However, the past isn’t predictive. If you can absorb and embrace that belief, everything can change.

Down-shifting your brain into neutral takes practice. But once you get the hang of it, you can go to the truth on a dime. You can deal with the facts at hand. You’ll feel calmer, more aware of the situation as it unfolds, moment to moment. And the athlete—or employee, or spouse, or parent—who’s calmer and more aware succeeds.

]]>
272 Trevor Moawad 0062947141 Mitch 0 currently-reading 4.25 2020 It Takes What It Takes: How to Think Neutrally and Gain Control of Your Life
author: Trevor Moawad
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average rating: 4.25
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The Precious Jules 61033585
After nearly two hundred years of housing retardants, as they were once known, the Beechwood Institute is closing the doors on its dark history, and the complicated task of reassigning residents has begun. Ella Jules, having arrived at Beechwood at the tender age of eight, must now rely on the state to decide her future. Ella's aging parents have requested that she be returned to her childhood home, much to the distress of Ella's siblings, but more so to Lynetta, her beloved caretaker who has been by her side for decades. The five adult Jules children, haunted by their early memories of their sister, and each dealing with the trauma of her banishment in their own flawed way, are converging on the family home, arriving from the far corners of the country--secrets in tow--to talk some sense into their aging parents and get to the root of this inexplicable change of heart.

The Precious Jules examines the thin line between selfishness and what passes for love. This family story asks what is best for one child in light of what is perceived as the greater good, and just what is the collective legacy of buried family secrets, shame, and helplessness. The Precious Jules is a deeply felt family narrative that will make you fall in love with these flawed and imperfect characters standing on the threshold of an awakening they never expected.]]>
350 Shawn Nocher 1094058319 Mitch 4 4.36 The Precious Jules
author: Shawn Nocher
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average rating: 4.36
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<![CDATA[My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry]]> 23604559 A charming, warmhearted novel from the author of the New York Times bestseller A Man Called Ove.

Elsa is seven years old and different. Her grandmother is seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. She is also Elsa’s best, and only, friend. At night Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.

When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure begins. Her grandmother’s instructions lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and old crones but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is told with the same comic accuracy and beating heart as Fredrik Backman’s bestselling debut novel, A Man Called Ove. It is a story about life and death and one of the most important human rights: the right to be different.]]>
372 Fredrik Backman 1501115065 Mitch 5 4.04 2013 My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2013
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are]]> 34909073
Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions.

By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.

Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?

Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.]]>
357 Seth Stephens-Davidowitz 0062390872 Mitch 5 4.12 2017 Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
author: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration]]> 8171378
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration� within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.]]>
622 Isabel Wilkerson 0679444327 Mitch 5 4.45 2010 The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
author: Isabel Wilkerson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human]]> 61115607 Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauqua Prize!

N amed a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more!

In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gene “blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner� (Oprah Daily).

Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves—hearts, blood, brains—are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them �cells.�

The discovery of cells—and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem—announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia—all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies.

Filled with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, The Song of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate—a masterpiece on what it means to be human.

“In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes� (The New Yorker).]]>
484 Siddhartha Mukherjee 1982117370 Mitch 2 4.45 2022 The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 2
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date added: 2023/12/07
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While parts of the book were fascinating, it was a tough read�
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<![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 54102733 Alternative cover edition for ASIN B01CWZFBZ4

A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history
Ěý
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,� roamed � virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]>
347 David Grann Mitch 5 4.28 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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A Gentleman in Moscow 61161251 Alternate cover editions for this ASIN can be found here, here and here.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility, a novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel—a beautifully transporting novel.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.]]>
465 Amor Towles Mitch 5 4.46 2016 A Gentleman in Moscow
author: Amor Towles
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/30
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The Nightingale 51851348 The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France—a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.]]> 593 Kristin Hannah Mitch 5 4.78 2015 The Nightingale
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.78
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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The Silent Patient 40396699 Promising to be the debut novel of the season The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive�

Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word.

Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.

Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....]]>
362 Alex Michaelides Mitch 5 4.18 2019 The Silent Patient
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/25
date added: 2023/07/29
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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand 8049561 Mutual grief allies him with Mrs. Ali, a widowed local shopkeeper of Pakistani descent who has also resigned herself to dignified, if solitary, last years. The carefully suppressed passion between these two spawns twitters of disapproval in their provincial village, but Pettigrew hasn't time for such real estate developers are plotting to carpet the fields outside his back door with mansionettes and his sister-in-law plans to auction off a prized family firearm. Meanwhile, Mrs. Ali's late husband's Muslim family expects her to hand over her hard-won business to her sullen, fundamentalist nephew, a notion she finds repellant and chauvinistic.

It's a testament to Simonson that in this delightful novel, Pettigrew
must navigate the tragic, the absurd, and the transcendentally joyful aspects of a familiar life turned upside down by an unfamiliar and unexpected late-life love affair. That two people from opposing and mutually distrusting worlds are able to bridge every gap with unerring respect and decorum serves as a quiet suggestion that larger conflicts might be avoided or resolved in much the same way. Finally, a way forward that Major Pettigrew would approve.

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343 Helen Simonson 158836965X Mitch 5 4.04 2010 Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
author: Helen Simonson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/29
date added: 2023/07/25
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Lessons in Chemistry 57684325
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride�) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.]]>
400 Bonnie Garmus Mitch 5 4.47 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin]]> 10445007 Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power.
Ěý
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.
Ěý
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 suprisingly 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.
Ěý
Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring 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.


From the Hardcover edition.]]>
466 Erik Larson Mitch 5 4.08 2011 In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
author: Erik Larson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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The Maid (Molly the Maid, #1) 57690123 A charmingly eccentric hotel maid discovers a guest murdered in his bed. Solving the mystery will turn her once orderly world upside down in this utterly original debut.

Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misinterprets the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by.

Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has had to navigate life’s complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection.

But Molly’s orderly life is turned on its head the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself very dead in his bed. Before she knows what’s happening, Molly’s unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black—but will they be able to find the real killer before it’s too late?

A Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.]]>
385 Nita Prose Mitch 3 4.03 2022 The Maid (Molly the Maid, #1)
author: Nita Prose
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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<![CDATA[When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm]]> 60824200
In When McKinsey Comes to Town, two prizewinning investigative journalists have written a portrait of the company sharply at odds with its public image. Often McKinsey’s advice boils down to major cost-cutting, including layoffs and maintenance reductions, to drive up short-term profits, thereby boosting a company’s stock price and the wealth of its executives who hire it, at the expense of workers and safety measures. McKinsey collects millions of dollars advising government agencies that also regulate McKinsey’s corporate clients. And the firm frequently advises competitors in the same industries, but denies that this presents any conflict of interest.

In one telling example, McKinsey advised a Chinese engineering company allied with the communist government which constructed artificial islands, now used as staging grounds for the Chinese Navy—while at the same time taking tens of millions of dollars from the Pentagon, whose chief aim is to counter Chinese aggression.

Shielded by NDAs, McKinsey has escaped public scrutiny despite its role in advising tobacco and vaping companies, purveyors of opioids, repressive governments, and oil companies. McKinsey helped insurance companies� boost their profits by making it incredibly difficult for accident victims to get payments; worked its U.S. government contacts to let Wall Street firms evade scrutiny; enabled corruption in developing countries such as South Africa; undermined health-care programs in states across the country. And much more.

Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule #1 of investigative Follow the money.
When McKinsey Comes to Town is a landmark work of investigative reporting that amounts to a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt, and more dangerous.]]>
353 Walt Bogdanich 0385546246 Mitch 0 currently-reading 3.93 2022 When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
author: Walt Bogdanich
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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The Nickel Boys 54102531 This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner's conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.

Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.]]>
210 Colson Whitehead Mitch 5 4.46 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes]]> 18626857 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the series of short stories that made the fortunes of the Strand magazine, in which they were first published, and won immense popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The detective is at the height of his powers and the volume is full of famous cases, including 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Blue Carbuncle', and 'The Speckled Band'.
The editor of this volume, Richard Lancelyn Green is editor of The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes and The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. With John Michael Gibson, he compiled the Soho Series Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle.
1. A Scandal In Bohemia
2. The Red-Headed League
3. A Case Of Identity
4. The Boscombe Valley Mystery
5. The Five Orange Pips
6. The Man With The Twisted Lip
7. The Adventure Of The Blue Carbuncle
8. The Adventure Of The Speckled Band
9. The Adventure Of The Engineer's Thumb
10. The Adventure Of The Noble Bachelor
11. The Adventure Of The Beryl Coronet
12. The Adventure Of The Copper Beaches]]>
104 Arthur Conan Doyle Mitch 5 4.35 1892 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
author: Arthur Conan Doyle
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1892
rating: 5
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Where the Crawdads Sing 61204210
But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world–until the unthinkable happens.

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.]]>
379 Delia Owens Mitch 5 4.60 2018 Where the Crawdads Sing
author: Delia Owens
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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The Personal Librarian 55556786 The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian--who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray.

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. Pierpont Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps build a world-class collection.

But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and well-known advocate for equality. Belle's complexion isn't dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white--her complexion is dark because she is African American.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go--for the protection of her family and her legacy--to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.]]>
347 Marie Benedict 0593101553 Mitch 3 4.31 2021 The Personal Librarian
author: Marie Benedict
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 3
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The Underground Railroad 54102715
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.]]>
306 Colson Whitehead Mitch 5 4.35 2016 The Underground Railroad
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Boogie: Life on a Merry-Go-Round]]> 60841775 Now, in Life on A Merry-Go-Round, veteran journalist Michael Olesker tells the life story of the rise from youthful poverty and street fighting, from the pool halls and the late-night Hilltop Diner of Baltimore, to multi-millionare businessman and philanthropist.
Or, as Fortune Magazine once said, “Human history has produced exactly one Johann Sebastian Bach, one Sir Isaac Newton, and—for better or worse—one Leonard “Boogie� Weinglass…a true original, a streetwise Baltimore bad boy who grew up to be, by turns, hippie, founder of a successful retail chain, multi-millionaire, jet-setting Florida playboy�
“What a ride…a $1 billion nationwide chain with nearly 1,500 stores and 15,000 employees, Merry-Go-Round became a Wall Street darling, and big-time players like Fidelity Investments, Bear Stearns, and Donald Trump tried to horn in on the action.�
It’s an only-in-America tale about a once-in-a-lifetime character.]]>
260 Michael Olesker 1627203710 Mitch 5 4.22 Boogie: Life on a Merry-Go-Round
author: Michael Olesker
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.22
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<![CDATA[Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America]]> 17860697 Devil in the GroveĚýis the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in an explosive and deadly case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.

In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor. To maintain order and profits, they turned to Willis V. McCall, a violent sheriff who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves beyond the citrus groves. By day’s end, the Ku Klux Klan had rolled into town, burning the homes of blacks to the ground and chasing hundreds into the swamps, hell-bent on lynching the young men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys.�

And so began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as “Mr. Civil Rights,� into the deadly fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the “Florida Terror� at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight—not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall’s NAACP associates involved with the case and Marshall had endured continual threats that he would be next.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”]]>
464 Gilbert King Mitch 5 4.47 2012 Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
author: Gilbert King
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking]]> 6259977 From the #1 bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia, the landmark book that has revolutionized the way we understand leadership and decision making.ĚýIn his breakthrough bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within.ĚýBlink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant--in the blink of an eye--that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work--in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?ĚýIn Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police.ĚýBlink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"--filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.]]> 482 Malcolm Gladwell Mitch 0 4.14 2005 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
author: Malcolm Gladwell
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel]]> 57184249
Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel’s famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true—yet never provable—continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life.

Stephen Budiansky’s Journey to the Edge of Reason is the first biography to fully draw upon Gödel’s voluminous letters and writings—including a never-before-transcribed shorthand diary of his most intimate thoughts—to explore Gödel’s profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. It also offers an intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna, a haunting account of Gödel’s and Jewish intellectuals� flight from Austria and Germany at the start of the Second World War, and a vivid re-creation of the early days of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where Gödel and Einstein both worked.

Eloquent and insightful, Journey to the Edge of Reason is a fully realized portrait of the odd, brilliant, and tormented man who has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, and illuminates the far-reaching implications of Gödel’s revolutionary ideas for philosophy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and man’s place in the cosmos.]]>
368 Stephen Budiansky 1324005459 Mitch 3 4.36 Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
author: Stephen Budiansky
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.36
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The Sweetness of Water 57818648 A profound debut about the unlikely bond between two freedmen who are brothers and the Georgia farmer whose alliance will alter their lives, and his, forever.

In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry—freed by the Emancipation Proclamation—seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother, who was sold away when they were boys.
Ěý
Parallel to their story runs a forbidden romance between two Confederate soldiers. The young men, recently returned from the war to the town of Old Ox, hold their trysts in the woods. But when their secret is discovered, the resulting chaos, including a murder, unleashes convulsive repercussions on the entire community. In the aftermath of so much turmoil, it is Isabelle who emerges as an unlikely leader, proffering a healing vision for the land and for the newly free citizens of Old Ox.
Ěý
With candor and sympathy, debut novelist Nathan Harris creates an unforgettable cast of characters, depicting Georgia in the violent crucible of Reconstruction. Equal parts beauty and terror, as gripping as it is moving, The Sweetness of Water is an epic whose grandeur locates humanity and love amid the most harrowing circumstances.]]>
368 Nathan Harris 0316461261 Mitch 5 4.31 2021 The Sweetness of Water
author: Nathan Harris
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson]]> 58745479
When Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the country was on the precipice of radical change. Johnson, seemingly more progressive than Lincoln, looked like the ideal person to lead the country. He had already cast himself as a “Moses� for the Black community, and African Americans were optimistic that he would pursue aggressive federal policies for Black equality.

Despite this early promise, Frederick Douglass, the country’s most influential Black leader, soon grew disillusioned with Johnson’s policies and increasingly doubted the president was sincere in supporting Black citizenship. In a dramatic and pivotal meeting between Johnson and a Black delegation at the White House, the president and Douglass came to verbal blows over the course of Reconstruction.

As he lectured across the country, Douglass continued to attack Johnson’s policies, while raising questions about the Radical Republicans� hesitancy to grant African Americans the vote. Johnson meanwhile kept his eye on Douglass, eventually making a surprising effort to appoint him to a key position in his administration.

Levine grippingly portrays the conflicts that brought Douglass and the wider Black community to reject Johnson and call for a guilty verdict in his impeachment trial. He brings fresh insight by turning to letters between Douglass and his sons, speeches by Douglass and other major Black figures like Frances E. W. Harper, and articles and letters in the Christian Recorder, the most important African American newspaper of the time. In counterpointing the lives and careers of Douglass and Johnson, Levine offers a distinctive vision of the lost promise and dire failure of Reconstruction, the effects of which still reverberate today.]]>
336 Robert S. Levine 1324004762 Mitch 4 4.22 The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson
author: Robert S. Levine
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.22
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A Slow Fire Burning 56145179 The scorching new thriller from the number-one 'New York Times' best-selling author of 'The Girl on the Train'.

When a young man is found gruesomely murdered in a London houseboat, it triggers questions about three women who knew him. Laura is the troubled one-night-stand last seen in the victim’s home. Carla is his grief-stricken aunt, already mourning the recent death of yet another family member. And Miriam is the nosy neighbor clearly keeping secrets from the police. Three women with separate connections to the victim. Three women who are � for different reasons � simmering with resentment. Who are, whether they know it or not, burning to right the wrongs done to them. When it comes to revenge, even good people might be capable of terrible deeds. How far might any one of them go to find peace? How long can secrets smolder before they explode into flame?

Look what you started.]]>
320 Paula Hawkins 0735211256 Mitch 4 3.67 2021 A Slow Fire Burning
author: Paula Hawkins
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/26
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<![CDATA[Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think]]> 36185940 Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.

When asked simple questions about global trends�what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.

In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.

It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.

Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. ]]>
341 Hans Rosling 125012381X Mitch 0 4.48 2018 Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
author: Hans Rosling
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2018
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Anxious People 49534036
Viewing an apartment normally doesn’t turn into a life-or-death situation, but this particular open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage. As the pressure mounts, the eight strangers slowly begin opening up to one another and reveal long-hidden truths.

As police surround the premises and television channels broadcast the hostage situation live, the tension mounts and even deeper secrets are slowly revealed. Before long, the robber must decide which is the more terrifying prospect: going out to face the police, or staying in the apartment with this group of impossible people.]]>
346 Fredrik Backman 1501160850 Mitch 5 4.22 2019 Anxious People
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/05/14
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The Midnight Library 53568397
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.]]>
288 Matt Haig 0525559485 Mitch 4 4.16 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/18
date added: 2021/03/18
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The Vanishing Half 52195151 From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.]]>
350 Brit Bennett Mitch 3 4.25 2020 The Vanishing Half
author: Brit Bennett
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/06
date added: 2021/03/06
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<![CDATA[The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide]]> 41718285
Mark Lange and Nicole Smith have never met, but if they make the moves they are contemplating—Mark, a white suburbanite, to West Baltimore, and Nicole, a black woman from a poor city neighborhood, to a prosperous suburb—it will defy the way the Baltimore region has been programmed for a century. It is one region, but separate worlds. And it was designed to be that way.

In this deeply reported, revelatory story, duPont Award–winning journalist Lawrence Lanahan chronicles how the region became so highly segregated and why its fault lines persist today. Mark and Nicole personify the enormous disparities in access to safe housing, educational opportunities, and decent jobs. As they eventually pack up their lives and change places, bold advocates and activists—in the courts and in the streets—struggle to figure out what it will take to save our cities and Put money into poor, segregated neighborhoods? Make it possible for families to move into areas with more opportunity?

The Lines Between Us is a riveting narrative that compels reflection on America's entrenched inequality—and on where the rubber meets the road not in the abstract, but in our own backyards. Taking readers from church sermons to community meetings to public hearings to protests to the Supreme Court to the death of Freddie Gray, Lanahan deftly exposes the intricacy of Baltimore's hypersegregation through the stories of ordinary people living it, shaping it, and fighting it, day in and day out.

This eye-opening account of how a city creates its black and white places, its rich and poor spaces, reveals that these problems are not intractable; but they are designed to endure until each of us—despite living in separate worlds—understands we have something at stake.]]>
404 Lawrence Lanahan 1620973456 Mitch 0 3.73 The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide
author: Lawrence Lanahan
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.73
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American Dirt 45721673
Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable.

Even though she knows they’ll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy—two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia—trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier’s reach doesn’t extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?]]>
389 Jeanine Cummins Mitch 5 4.52 2020 American Dirt
author: Jeanine Cummins
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/10
date added: 2021/02/10
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Go Tell It on the Mountain 18920654 In one of the greatest American classics,ĚýBaldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity.ĚýBaldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story ofĚýthe stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.ĚýOriginally published in 1953,ĚýBaldwin said of his first novel, "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."Ěý]]>
242 James Baldwin 0345806557 Mitch 5 4.11 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain
author: James Baldwin
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1953
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Workbook for How to Be an Antiracist]]> 54801569
#1 New York Times bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi tackles racism in his book, How to Be an Antiracist. Kendi combined his experiences with concepts from history, society, and even biology to create a current picture of racism and what he wants that picture to be in the future.

This workbook

Chapter by chapter summary and analysis; Goals that you can aim for; Questions to help you absorb the information and help you self-reflect.In today’s digital age, we can access millions of information within our fingertips. But how do you know which ones are relevant to you? That is why we have carefully curated all the essential points from How to Be an Antiracist into an easy-to-read, short but concise workbook.

This workbook can

your sneak peek before you buy the original book; your reading companion while reading the original book; your supplementary material after you read the original book.Dive in, discover, and be aware of what is happening in the world today.



*This is an unofficial workbook for Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. This book only serves as a guide, is not the original book, and is not endorsed by Ibram X. Kendi or his publisher.]]>
117 Intensive Life Publishing Mitch 1 2.27 Workbook for How to Be an Antiracist
author: Intensive Life Publishing
name: Mitch
average rating: 2.27
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<![CDATA[How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)]]> 40815366 How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.]]>
307 Ibram X. Kendi Mitch 5 4.44 2019 How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)
author: Ibram X. Kendi
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2019
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials)]]> 31948742 The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of a young man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed
Ěý
Trevor Noah is one of the comedy world’s brightest new voices, a light-footed but sharp-minded observer of the absurdities of politics, race, and identity, sharing jokes and insights drawn from the wealth of experience acquired in his relatively young life. As host of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, he provides viewers in America and around the globe with their nightly dose of biting satire, but here Noah turns his focus inward, giving readers a deeply personal, heartfelt, and humorous look at the world that shaped him.
Ěý
Noah was born a crime, the son of a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents� indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the first years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, take him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.
Ěý
A collection of eighteen personal essays, Born a Crime tells the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. Born a Crime is equally the story of that young man’s fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that ultimately threatens her own life.
Ěý
Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Noah illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and an unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a lovable delinquent making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed with only a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.]]>
264 Trevor Noah Mitch 5 4.59 2016 Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials)
author: Trevor Noah
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Last Trial (Kindle County Legal Thriller, #11)]]> 51897368 In this explosive legal thriller from New York Times bestselling author Scott Turow, two formidable men collide: a celebrated criminal defense lawyer at the end of his career and his lifelong friend, a renowned doctor accused of murder.
At eighty-five years old, Alejandro "Sandy" Stern, a brilliant defense lawyer with his health failing but spirit intact, is on the brink of retirement. But when his old friend Dr. Kiril Pafko, a former Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, is faced with charges of insider trading, fraud, and murder, his entire life's work is put in jeopardy, and Stern decides to take on one last trial.
In a case that will be the defining coda to both men's accomplished lives, Stern probes beneath the surface of his friend's dazzling veneer as a distinguished cancer researcher. As the trial progresses, he will question everything he thought he knew about his friend. Despite Pafko's many failings, is he innocent of the terrible charges laid against him? How far will Stern go to save his friend, and -- no matter the trial's outcome -- will he ever know the truth?
Stern's duty to defend his client and his belief in the power of the judicial system both face a final, terrible test in the courtroom, where the evidence and reality are sometimes worlds apart.
Full of the deep insights into the spaces where the fragility of human nature and the justice system collide, Scott Turow's The Last Trial is a masterful legal thriller that unfolds in page-turning suspense -- and questions how we measure a life.]]>
464 Scott Turow 1538748088 Mitch 3 3.94 2020 The Last Trial (Kindle County Legal Thriller, #11)
author: Scott Turow
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/05/14
date added: 2020/06/14
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<![CDATA[The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz]]> 51187948
On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold the country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally-and willing to fight to the end.

In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London.

Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports-some released only recently-Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the cadre of close advisers who comprised Churchill's "Secret Circle," including his lovestruck private secretary, John Colville; newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook; and the Rasputin-like Frederick Lindemann.

The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today's political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when-in the face of unrelenting horror-Churchill's eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together."--]]>
546 Erik Larson 038534872X Mitch 5 4.30 2020 The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
author: Erik Larson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know]]> 43854293
Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland---throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.

In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.]]>
401 Malcolm Gladwell Mitch 5 4.05 2019 Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
author: Malcolm Gladwell
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/28
date added: 2020/04/25
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<![CDATA[Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland]]> 49771934
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.
--penguinrandomhousehighereducation.com]]>
464 Patrick Radden Keefe Mitch 0 4.39 2018 Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2020/04/12
date added: 2020/04/12
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Spanish for Tax Preparers 22306787 At last, the nationally-acclaimed occupational language programs from Command Spanish® that are used by the U.S. Government, Fortune 500 companies, and professional associations are now available to the general public! NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF SPANISH NEEDED!!!

Spanish for Tax PreparersOffice allows tax preparers and their staff to communicate with and better assist their Spanish-speaking clients, allowing for a more advanced and wider reaching practice. With over 300 Spanish language commands, statements, and questions, this is the most thoroughly researched and used training book of its kind. Using the input of licensed tax preparers and native Spanish-speakers you can be sure of the material contained in this book.

SPANISH FOR ADULT PROFESSIONALS!!!

This book and two CDs help tax preparers and their staff; communicate with Spanish-speaking clients; introduce oneself and others; conduct generic interviews with clients; utilize, receive, and give numbers; describe and complete routine tax forms; obtain information about the client and his/her dependents; collect information about income and expenses; offer E-filing or loan-based refunds; and much more.

NO GRAMMAR!!!]]>
50 Command Spanish 1888467541 Mitch 0 to-read 3.00 2006 Spanish for Tax Preparers
author: Command Spanish
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City]]> 20488992 337 Antero Pietila Mitch 5 4.13 2010 Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City
author: Antero Pietila
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/10
date added: 2020/02/10
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<![CDATA[A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II]]> 40644988 414 Sonia Purnell 0735225303 Mitch 5 4.35 2019 A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
author: Sonia Purnell
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/11/10
date added: 2019/11/10
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<![CDATA[Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3)]]> 18886735 Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion.

In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll.

East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.]]>
1104 Ken Follett Mitch 5 4.39 2014 Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3)
author: Ken Follett
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Winter of the World (The Century Trilogy #2)]]> 16008171 Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life engulfed by the Nazi tide until she commits a deed of great courage and heartbreak. . . . American brothers Woody and Chuck Dewar, each with a secret, take separate paths to momentous events, one in Washington, the other in the bloody jungles of the Pacific. . . . English student Lloyd Williams discovers in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War that he must fight Communism just as hard as Fascism. . . . Daisy Peshkov, a driven American social climber, cares only for popularity and the fast set, until the war transforms her life, not just once but twice, while her cousin Volodya carves out a position in Soviet intelligence that will affect not only this war—but the war to come.

These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as their experiences illuminate the cataclysms that marked the century. From the drawing rooms of the rich to the blood and smoke of battle, their lives intertwine, propelling the reader into dramas of ever-increasing complexity.

]]>
960 Ken Follett Mitch 5 4.42 2012 Winter of the World (The Century Trilogy #2)
author: Ken Follett
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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The Witch Elm 39788660
A spellbinding standalone from one of the best suspense writers working today, The Witch Elm asks what we become, and what we're capable of, when we no longer know who we are.]]>
528 Tana French Mitch 5 3.72 2018 The Witch Elm
author: Tana French
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/22
date added: 2019/06/22
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<![CDATA[Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy #1)]]> 12512234 Ken Follett’s magnificent new historical epic begins, as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage.

A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits.…An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House.� A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy.…And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution.

From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again...]]>
865 Ken Follett Mitch 5 4.34 2010 Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy #1)
author: Ken Follett
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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Truman 5647213 The Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri� who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.]]> 1690 David McCullough Mitch 5 4.63 1992 Truman
author: David McCullough
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.63
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2018/10/19
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<![CDATA[The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It]]> 33275151 With cutting-edge sleep science and time-tested techniques, The Sleep Solution will help anyone achieve healthy sleep and eliminate pills, pain, and fatigue.
Ěý
If you want to fix your sleep problems, Internet tips and tricks aren’t going to do it for you. You need to really understand what’s going on with your sleep—both what your problems are and how to solve them.
Ěý
The Sleep Solution is an exciting journey of sleep self-discovery and understanding that will help you custom design specific interventions to fit your lifestyle. Drawing on his twenty-four years of experience within the field, neurologist and sleep expert W. Chris Winter will help you�
Ěý
* Understand how sleep works and the ways in which food, light, and other activities act to help or hurt the process
Ěý
* Learn why sleeping pills are so often misunderstood and used incorrectly—and how you can achieve your best sleep without them
Ěý
* Incorporate sleep and napping into your life—whether you are a shift worker, student, or overcommitted parent
Ěý
* Think outside the box to better understand ways to treat a multitude of
conditions—from insomnia to sleep apnea to restless leg syndrome and circadian sleep disorders
Ěý
* Wade through the ever-changing sea of sleep technology and understand its value as it relates to your own sleep struggles
Ěý
Dubbed the “Sleep Whisperer� by Arianna Huffington, Dr. Winter is an international expert on sleep and has helped more than 10,000 patients rest better at night, including countless professional athletes. Now, he’s bringing his experiences out from under the covers—redefining what it means to have optimal sleep and get the ZZZs you really need�

INCLUDES TIPS, TRICKS, EXERCISES, AND ILLUSTRATIONSĚý


From the Hardcover edition.]]>
266 W. Chris Winter 0399583629 Mitch 5 4.13 2017 The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It
author: W. Chris Winter
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/05/22
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<![CDATA[Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941�1945]]> 19957039 "Masterly. . . . A triumph of vivid description, telling anecdotes, and informed analysis.�
�The New York Review of Books

"Britain's finest contemporary military historian."
� The Economist

An epic joint biography of four titanic figures—a President, a Prime Minister, and two Generals—who shaped the grand strategy of the Allies during World War II.

]]>
736 Andrew Roberts 0061874493 Mitch 5 4.29 2008 Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945
author: Andrew Roberts
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2018/04/01
date added: 2018/04/01
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<![CDATA[All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor]]> 32813632
“An unforgettable story of unfathomable courage.� —Reader’s Digest

In this, the first memoir by a USSĚýArizonaĚýsailor, Donald Stratton delivers an inspiring and unforgettable eyewitnessĚýaccount of theĚýPearl Harbor attack andĚýhisĚýremarkable return to the fight.Ěý

At 8:10 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Seaman First Class Donald Stratton was consumed by an inferno. A million pounds of explosives had detonated beneath his battle station aboard the USS Arizona, barely fifteen minutes into Japan’s surprise attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor. Near death and burned across two thirds of his body, Don, a nineteen-year-old Nebraskan who had been steeled by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, summoned the will to haul himself hand over hand across a rope tethered to a neighboring vessel. Forty-five feet below, the harbor’s flaming, oil-slick water boiled with enemy bullets; all around him the world tore itself apart.

In this extraordinary, never-before-told eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack—the only memoir ever written by a survivor of theĚýUSS Arizona—ninety-four-year-old veteran Donald Stratton finally shares his unforgettable personal tale of bravery and survival on December 7, 1941, his harrowing recovery, and his inspiring determination to return to the fight.

Don and four other sailors made it safely across the same line that morning, a small miracle on a day that claimed the lives of 1,177 of their Arizona shipmates—approximately half the American fatalaties at Pearl Harbor. Sent to military hospitals for a year, Don refused doctors� advice to amputate his limbs and battled to relearn how to walk. The U.S. Navy gave him a medical discharge, believing he would never again be fit for service, but Don had unfinished business. In June 1944, he sailed back into the teeth of the Pacific War on a destroyer, destined for combat in the crucial battles of Leyte Gulf, Luzon, and Okinawa, thus earning the distinction of having been present for the opening shots and the final major battle of America’s Second World War.

As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack approaches, Don, a great-grandfather of five and one of six living survivors of the Arizona, offers an unprecedentedly intimate reflection on the tragedy that drew America into the greatest armed conflict in history. All the Gallant Men is a book for the ages, one of the most remarkable—and remarkably inspiring—memoirs of any kind to appear in recent years.

*Library Journal]]>
339 Donald Stratton Mitch 5 4.63 2016 All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor
author: Donald Stratton
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl]]> 6556577 In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.



The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect� (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet� (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature.

This e-book includes a sample chapter of SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER.]]>
352 Timothy Egan Mitch 5 4.10 2005 The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
author: Timothy Egan
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2017/12/08
date added: 2017/12/08
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<![CDATA[Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission]]> 6562581
In Ghost Soldiers Hampton Sides vividly re-creates this daring raid, offering a minute-by-minute narration that unfolds alongside intimate portraits of the prisoners and their lives in the camp. Sides shows how the POWs banded together to survive, defying the Japanese authorities even as they endured starvation, tropical diseases, and torture. Harrowing, poignant, and inspiring, Ghost Soldiers is the mesmerizing story of a remarkable mission. It is also a testament to the human spirit, an account of enormous bravery and self-sacrifice amid the most trying conditions.]]>
384 Hampton Sides Mitch 5 4.58 2001 Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission
author: Hampton Sides
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2017/11/08
date added: 2017/11/08
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A Higher Call 18668488 the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.
Ěý
This is the true story of the two pilots whose lives collided in the skies that day—the American�2nd Lieutenant Charlie Brown, a former farm boy from West Virginia who came to captain a B-17—and the German�2nd Lieutenant Franz Stigler, a former airline pilot from Bavaria who sought to avoid fighting in World War II.
Ěý
A Higher Call follows both Charlie and Franz’s harrowing missions. Charlie would face takeoffs in English fog over the flaming wreckage of his buddies� planes, flak bursts so close they would light his cockpit, and packs of enemy fighters that would circle his plane like sharks. Franz would face sandstorms in the desert, a crash alone at sea, and the spectacle of 1,000 bombers each with eleven guns, waiting for his attack.
Ěý
Ultimately, Charlie and Franz would stare across the frozen skies at one another. What happened between them, the American 8th Air Force would later classify as “top secret.� It was an act that Franz could never mention or else face a firing squad. It was the encounter that would haunt both Charlie and Franz for forty years until, as old men, they would search for one another, a last mission that could change their lives forever.
Ěý
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407 Adam Makos 1101618957 Mitch 5 4.59 2012 A Higher Call
author: Adam Makos
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2017/10/19
date added: 2017/10/19
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<![CDATA[Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis]]> 35503141 273 J.D. Vance Mitch 4 4.09 2016 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
author: J.D. Vance
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/09/20
date added: 2017/09/20
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<![CDATA[Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State]]> 35049496
To eliminate the scourge of terrorism, we must first know who the enemy actually is, and what his motivations are. In Anatomy of Terror, former FBI special agent and New York Times best-selling author Ali Soufan dissects Osama bin Laden’s brand of jihadi terrorism and its major offshoots, revealing how these organizations were formed, how they operate, their strengths, and—crucially—their weaknesses. This riveting account examines the new Islamic radicalism through the stories of its flag-bearers, including a U.S. Air Force colonel who once served Saddam Hussein, a provincial bookworm who declared himself caliph of all Muslims, and bin Laden’s own beloved son Hamza, a prime candidate to lead the organization his late father founded.

Anatomy of Terror lays bare the psychology and inner workings of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their spawn, and shows how the spread of terror can be stopped.

Winner of the Airey Neave Memorial Book Prize]]>
379 Ali H. Soufan 039324203X Mitch 4 4.32 2017 Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State
author: Ali H. Soufan
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2017/07/24
date added: 2017/07/24
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Where'd You Go, Bernadette 13526165
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.]]>
330 Maria Semple 0316204277 Mitch 0 3.87 2012 Where'd You Go, Bernadette
author: Maria Semple
name: Mitch
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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Gone Girl 21480930 560 Gillian Flynn 0553418351 Mitch 0 4.05 2012 Gone Girl
author: Gillian Flynn
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)]]> 15507958 Discover the love story that captured over 20 million hearts in Me Before You, After You, and Still Me.

They had nothing in common until love gave them everything to lose . . .

Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is.

Will is acerbic, moody, bossy—but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.

A Love Story for this generation and perfect for fans of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common—a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart?]]>
369 Jojo Moyes Mitch 0 4.24 2012 Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)
author: Jojo Moyes
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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Memoirs of a Geisha 930
In "Memoirs of a Geisha," we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction - at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful - and completely unforgettable.]]>
434 Arthur Golden 0739326228 Mitch 0 4.07 1997 Memoirs of a Geisha
author: Arthur Golden
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1)]]> 2429135
An international publishing sensation, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.]]>
480 Stieg Larsson 0670069019 Mitch 0 4.17 2005 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1)
author: Stieg Larsson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II]]> 6643077 769 Doris Kearns Goodwin 1439126194 Mitch 5 4.55 1994 No ordinary time : Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt : the home front in World War II
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2016/11/06
date added: 2016/11/22
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<![CDATA[Shakespeare: The World as Stage]]> 5986735 210 Bill Bryson Mitch 4 4.03 2007 Shakespeare: The World as Stage
author: Bill Bryson
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2016/07/19
date added: 2016/07/19
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Alexander Hamilton 5647399 The #1ĚýNew York TimesĚýbestseller, andĚýthe inspiration for the hit Broadway musicalĚýHamilton!Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation."Grand-scale biography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book." —David McCullough“A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all."Ěý—Joseph Ellis

Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,â€� Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.â€� Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots,ĚýAlexander HamiltonĚýwill remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans.

9780143034759]]>
818 Ron Chernow Mitch 0 4.53 2004 Alexander Hamilton
author: Ron Chernow
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2016/04/11
date added: 2016/04/11
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<![CDATA[The Last Days of Jesus: His Life and Times]]> 21806672 320 Bill O'Reilly Mitch 4 4.39 2014 The Last Days of Jesus: His Life and Times
author: Bill O'Reilly
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2015/11/16
date added: 2015/11/16
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<![CDATA[Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever]]> 12495095 A riveting historical narrative of the heart-stopping events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the first work of history from mega-bestselling author Bill O'Reilly

The anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts one of the most dramatic stories in American history—how one gunshot changed the country forever. In the spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America's Civil War finally comes to an end after a series of increasingly harrowing battles. President Abraham Lincoln's generous terms for Robert E. Lee's surrender are devised to fulfill Lincoln's dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to reintegrate into American society. But one man and his band of murderous accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, are not appeased.

In the midst of the patriotic celebrations in Washington D.C., John Wilkes Booth—charismatic ladies' man and impenitent racist—murders Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. A furious manhunt ensues and Booth immediately becomes the country's most wanted fugitive. Lafayette C. Baker, a smart but shifty New York detective and former Union spy, unravels the string of clues leading to Booth, while federal forces track his accomplices. The thrilling chase ends in a fiery shootout and a series of court-ordered executions—including that of the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government, Mary Surratt. Featuring some of history's most remarkable figures, vivid detail, and page-turning action, Killing Lincoln is history that reads like a thriller.

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282 Bill O'Reilly Mitch 5 4.33 2011 Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever
author: Bill O'Reilly
name: Mitch
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2015/10/30
date added: 2015/10/30
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