Marc's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:47:53 -0700 60 Marc's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)]]> 210367505 TOP SECRET: A clear and present threat exists. Open-ended. Existential. Confirmation via uncanny op. Nature of same: Unknown. Initiating entity: Unknown. Priority: High.

Ten years after the publication of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance � award winners and international bestsellers all, the first the basis for a now-classic film � Jeff VanderMeer brings us back for a surprise fourth and final foray into Area X.

Absolution opens decades before Area X forms, with a science expedition whose mysterious end suggests terrifying consequences for the future � and marks the Forgotten Coast as a high-priority area of interest for Central, the shadowy government agency responsible for monitoring extraordinary threats.

Many years later, the Forgotten Coast files wind up in the hands of a washed-up Central operative known as Old Jim. He starts pulling a thread that reveals a long and troubling record of government agents meddling with forces they clearly cannot comprehend. Soon, Old Jim is back out in the field, grappling with personal demons and now partnered with an unproven young agent, the two of them tasked with solving what may be an unsolvable mystery. With every turn, the stakes get higher: Central agents are being liquidated by an unknown rogue entity and Old Jim’s life is on the line.

Old Jim’s investigation culminates in the first Central expedition into what has now been labeled Area X. A border has come down, and a full team � well trained but eccentric � has been assembled to find Area X’s “off switch� somewhere in the volatile, dangerous terrain that has mysteriously defied all attempts to be explored, mapped, or controlled. A landscape that, one way or another, seems to consume all who enter it.

Sweeping in scope and rich with ideas, iconic characters, and unpredictable adventure, Absolution converges the past, present, and future in terrifying, ecstatic, and mind-bending ways. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.]]> 441 Jeff VanderMeer 0374616590 Marc 0 currently-reading 3.62 2024 Absolution (Southern Reach, #4)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Marc
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> You Dreamed of Empires 127938747 From a visionary Mexican author, a hallucinatory, revelatory, colonial revenge story that reimagines the fall of Tenochtitlan.

One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés entered the city of Tenochtitlan � today's Mexico City. Later that day, he would meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.

Cortés was accompanied by his nine captains, his troops, and his two translators: Friar Aguilar, a taciturn, former slave, and Malinalli, a strategic, former princess. Greeted at a ceremonial welcome meal by the steely princess Atotoxli, sister and wife of Moctezuma, the Spanish nearly bungle their entrance to the city. As they await their meeting with Moctezuma � who is at a political, spiritual, and physical crossroads, and relies on hallucinogens to get himself through the day and in quest for any kind of answer from the gods � the Spanish are ensconced in the labyrinthine palace. Soon, one of Cortés’s captains, Jazmín Caldera, overwhelmed by the grandeur of the city, begins to question the ease with which they were welcomed into the city, and wonders at the risks of getting out alive, much less conquering the empire.

You Dreamed of Empires brings to life Tenochtitlan at its height, and reimagines its destiny. The incomparably original Alvaro Enrigue sets afire the moment of conquest and turns it into a moment of revolution, a restitutive, fantastical counter-attack, in a novel so electric and so unique that it feels like a dream.]]> 220 Álvaro Enrigue 059354479X Marc 3 3.76 2022 You Dreamed of Empires
author: Álvaro Enrigue
name: Marc
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> <![CDATA[A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life]]> 53487237 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?� He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.]]> 403 George Saunders 1984856049 Marc 0 currently-reading 4.55 2021 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
author: George Saunders
name: Marc
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)]]> 9533361
Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, "The Scopuli," they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to "The Scopuli" and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations - and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.]]> 572 James S.A. Corey 0316129089 Marc 4 4.28 2011 Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)
author: James S.A. Corey
name: Marc
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Real Tigers (Slough House, #3)]]> 83743974 When one of their own is kidnapped, the washed-up MI5 operatives of Slough House--the Slow Horses, as they're known--outwit rogue agents at the very highest levels of British Intelligence, and even to Downing Street itself.

London: Slough House is the MI5 branch where disgraced operatives are reassigned after they've messed up too badly to be trusted with real intelligence work. The -Slow Horses, - as the failed spies of Slough House are called, are doomed to spend the rest of their careers pushing paper, but they all want back in on the action.
When one of their own is kidnapped and held for ransom, the agents of Slough House must defeat the odds, overturning all expectations of their competence, to breach the top-notch security of MI5's intelligence headquarters, Regent's Park, and steal valuable intel in exchange for their comrade's safety. The kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg, however--the agents uncover a larger web of intrigue that involves not only a group of private mercenaries but the highest authorities in the Secret Service. After years spent as the lowest on the totem pole, the Slow Horses suddenly find themselves caught in the midst of a conspiracy that threatens not only the future of Slough House, but of MI5 itself.]]> 308 Mick Herron 1616957980 Marc 4 4.22 2016 Real Tigers (Slough House, #3)
author: Mick Herron
name: Marc
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> 1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3) 10357575 The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.� A world that bears a question.� Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s � 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.]]> 944 Haruki Murakami 0307593312 Marc 3 3.94 2009 1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3)
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Marc
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Lives Other Than My Own: A Memoir]]> 13513461
“You begin this memoir thinking it will be about one thing, and it turns into something else altogether―a book at once more ordinary and more extraordinary than any first impressions might allow.”� The New York Times

“Moving…Carrère’s prose is precise and measured…Through interviews with friends and relatives of both families, he creates powerful portraits that celebrate ordinary lives.”� The New Yorker

Award-winning author Emmanuel Carrère's, Lives Other Than My Own is an act of generous imagination that unflinchingly records devastating loss and, equally vividly, the wealth of human solace that follows in its wake.

In Sri Lanka, a tsunami sweeps a child out to sea, her grandfather helpless against the onrushing water. In France, a young woman succumbs to illness, leaving her husband and small children bereft. Present at both events, Emmanuel Carrère sets out to tell the story of two families―shattered and ultimately restored. What he accomplishes is nothing short of a literary a heartrending narrative of endless love, a meditation on courage and decency in the face of adversity, an intimate and reverent look at the extraordinary beauty and nobility of ordinary lives.

Precise, sober, and suspenseful, as full of twists and turns as any novel, Lives Other Than My Own confronts terrifying catastrophes to illuminate the astonishing richness of human a grandfather who thought he had found paradise―too soon―and now devotes himself to helping his neighbors rebuild their village; a husband so in love with his ailing wife that he carries her in his arms like a knight does his princess; and finally, Carrère himself, longtime chronicler of the tormented self, who unexpectedly finds consolation and even joy as he immerses himself in the lives of others.]]> 256 Emmanuel Carrère 1250013771 Marc 5 4.21 2009 Lives Other Than My Own: A Memoir
author: Emmanuel Carrère
name: Marc
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Lost Journals of Sacajewea]]> 59891745 From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea

In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.

Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.

Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive�: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper.

Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.

Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.]]> 264 Debra Magpie Earling 1571311459 Marc 4 3.59 2010 The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
author: Debra Magpie Earling
name: Marc
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)]]> 21504315 It is winter in Area X. A new team embarks across the border on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind.

As they press deeper into the unknown � navigating new terrain and new challenges � the threat to the outside world becomes more daunting.

In Acceptance, the last installment of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may have been solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound � or terrifying.]]> 354 Jeff VanderMeer 0374710791 Marc 4 3.73 2014 Acceptance (Southern Reach, #3)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Marc
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2015/01/10
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980]]> 50403757
After chronicling America’s transformation from a center-left to center-right nation for two decades, Rick Perlstein now focuses on the tumultuous life of President Ronald Reagan from 1976�1980. Within the book’s four-year time frame, Perlstein touches on themes of confluence as he discusses the four stories that define American politics up to the age of Trump.

There is the rise of a newly aggressive corporate America diligently organizing to turn back the liberal tide: powerful unions, environmentalism, and unprecedentedly suffusing regulation. There is the movement of political mobilized conservative Christians, organizing to reverse the cultural institutionalization of the 1960s insurgencies. Third, there is the war for the Democratic Party, transformed under Jimmy Carter as a vehicle promoting “austerity� and “sacrifice”—a turn that spurs a counter-reaction from liberal forces who go to war with Carter to return the party to its populist New Deal patrimony. And finally, there is the ascendency of Ronald Reagan, considered washed up after his 1976 defeat for the Republican nomination and too old to run for president in any event, who nonetheless dramatically emerges as the heroic embodiment of America’s longing to transcend the 1970s dark storms—from Love Canal to Jonestown, John Wayne Gacy to the hostages in Iran.

Perlstein explores the complex years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency offering new and timely insights to issues that still remain relevant today.]]> 1107 Rick Perlstein 1476793050 Marc 0 currently-reading 4.33 2020 Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
author: Rick Perlstein
name: Marc
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Liberation Day 175740962
Booker Prize winner George Saunders returns with his first collection of short stories since the New York Times bestseller Tenth of December.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, NPR, Time, USA Today, The Guardian, Esquire, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal

The “best short-story writer in English� ( Time ) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and Here is a collection of prismatic, resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.

“Love Letter� is a tender missive from grandfather to grandson, in the midst of a dystopian political situation in the (not too distant, all too believable) future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and one another. “Ghoul� is set in a Hell-themed section of an underground amusement park in Colorado and follows the exploits of a lonely, morally complex character named Brian, who comes to question everything he takes for granted about his reality. In “Mother’s Day,� two women who loved the same man come to an existential reckoning in the middle of a hailstorm. In “Elliott Spencer,� our eighty-nine-year-old protagonist finds himself brainwashed, his memory “scraped”—a victim of a scheme in which poor, vulnerable people are reprogrammed and deployed as political protesters. And “My House”—in a mere seven pages—comes to terms with the haunting nature of unfulfilled dreams and the inevitability of decay.

Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.]]> 256 George Saunders 0525509615 Marc 4 4.02 2022 Liberation Day
author: George Saunders
name: Marc
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/26
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]]> <![CDATA[This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century]]> 50358096 A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020
"In this brilliant book,Steven Hydengoes deep into why Kid A matters—it's the fascinating saga of how the music turned into the symbol of a new cultural era." � Rolling Stone



THE MAKING AND MEANING OF RADIOHEAD'S GROUNDBREAKING, CONTROVERSIAL, EPOCHDEFINING ALBUM, KID A.

In 1999, as the end of an old century loomed, five musicians entered a recording studio in Paris without a deadline. Their band was widely recognized as the best and most forward-thinking in rock, a rarefied status granting them the time, money, and space to make a masterpiece. But Radiohead didn't want to make another rock record. Instead, they set out to create the future.

For more than a year, they battled writer's block, intra-band disagreements, and crippling self-doubt. In the end, however, they produced an album that was not only a complete departure from their prior guitar-based rock sound, it was the sound of a new era-and it embodied widespread changes catalyzed by emerging technologies just beginning to take hold of the culture. What they created was Kid A.

Upon its release in 2000, Radiohead's fourth album divided critics. Some called it an instant classic; others, such as the UK music magazine Melody Maker, deemed it "tubby, ostentatious, self-congratulatory... whiny old rubbish." But two decades later, Kid A sounds like nothing less than an overture for the chaos and confusion of the twenty-first century.

Acclaimed rock critic Steven Hyden digs deep into the songs, history, legacy, and mystique of Kid A, outlining the album's pervasive influence and impact on culture in time for its twentieth anniversary in 2020. Deploying a mix of criticism, journalism, and personal memoir, Hyden skillfully revisits this enigmatic, alluring LP and investigates the many ways in which Kid A shaped and foreshadowed our world.]]> 244 Steven Hyden 0306845687 Marc 3 3.68 2020 This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century
author: Steven Hyden
name: Marc
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief]]> 17227566
At the book’s center, two men whom Wright brings vividly to life, showing how they have made Scientology what it is today: The darkly brilliant science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, whose restless, expansive mind invented a new religion. And his successor, David Miscavige—tough and driven, with the unenviable task of preserving the church after the death of Hubbard.

We learn about Scientology’s complicated cosmology and special language. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and how such stars are used to advance the church’s goals. And we meet the young idealists who have joined the Sea Org, the church’s clergy, signing up with a billion-year contract.

In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of this constitutional protection. Employing all his exceptional journalistic skills of observation, understanding, and shaping a story into a compelling narrative, Lawrence Wright has given us an evenhanded yet keenly incisive book that reveals the very essence of what makes Scientology the institution it is.]]> 450 Lawrence Wright Marc 3 4.15 2013 Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
author: Lawrence Wright
name: Marc
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:
Wow, this book is a total mess. The history of Hubbard and the organization is fascinating and well-told. The analysis of cults (ok, "religions") is often interesting. The reportage of Paul Haggis's odyssey is not nearly interesting enough to justify the attention it receives, and the three parts are really poorly integrated. The whole winds up less than the sum of its parts, but given the quality of two of the three parts, the whole is still worthwhile.
]]> Authority (Southern Reach #2) 20410190 In the second volume of the Southern Reach Trilogy, questions are answered, stakes are raised, and mysteries aredeepened . . .

In Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer introducedArea X—a remote and lush terrain mysteriously sequestered from civilization.This was the first volume of a projected trilogy; well in advance of publication, translation rights had alreadysold around the world and a major movie deal had been struck.
Just months later, Authority, the second volume, is here. For thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X has taken the form of a series of expeditions monitored by a secret agency called the Southern Reach. After the disastrous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the Southern Reach is in disarray, and John Rodriguez, aka “Control,� is the team’s newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves—and what they expose pushes Control to confront disturbing truths about both himself and the agency he’s promised to serve. And the consequences willspread much further than that.
The Southern Reach trilogy will conclude in fall 2014 with Acceptance.

]]> 353 Jeff VanderMeer 0374710783 Marc 4 3.74 2014 Authority (Southern Reach #2)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Marc
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road]]> 33390368 New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the online black market Silk Road.

In Hatching Twitter, Nick Bilton gave readers an astonishingly reported, riveting, and impeccably crafted story of the politics and power struggles behind the founding of Twitter. Now Bilton turns his investigative journalism to the story of Ross Ulbricht, the notorious and enigmatic founder of a drug empire called Silk Road.

In 2011, Ulbricht, a 26-year-old libertarian idealist and former Boy Scout, launched "a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them." He called it Silk Road, opened for business on the Dark Web, and christened himself the Dread Pirate Roberts (after the Princess Bride character). The site grew at a tremendous pace, quickly becoming a $1.2 billion enterprise where you could buy or sell drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, guns, grenades, and poisons.

The Silk Road soon caught the attention of the Feds, who embarked on an epic two-year manhunt for the site's proprietor. Ulbricht, in the meantime, struggled to maintain control of his double life and his marketplace, which he originally started to prove that legalizing drugs could make society safer. He gradually abandoned his libertarian ideals to rule Silk Road with increasingly authoritarian force. At one point, he engaged the services of hired hit men to take out employees he felt had wronged him. Soon, some of the Federal agents who were supposed to be hunting for Ulbricht were lured into the dark world and switched sides to join him.

This is a true-life thriller about ambition gone awry, spurred on by the defining clash of our time: the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Bilton's dazzling rendering and gift for narrative make for an endlessly fascinating drama.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 343 Nick Bilton 0698405730 Marc 4 4.51 2017 American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
author: Nick Bilton
name: Marc
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2017/11/01
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves:
review:
I'm not quite sure why I enjoyed this book so much, but I just had tons of fun reading it.
]]> <![CDATA[We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland]]> 61089555 NEW YORK TIMES � 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The Atlantic : 10 Best Books of 2022
Best Books of the Washington Post, New Yorker , Salon, Foreign Affairs, New Statesman , Chicago Public Library, Vroman's
“[L]ike reading a great tragicomic Irish novel.� ―James Wood, The New Yorker
“Masterful . . . astonishing.� ―Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic
"A landmark history . . . Leavened by the brilliance of O'Toole's insights and wit.� ―Claire Messud, Harper’s

Winner � 2021 An Post Irish Book Award � Nonfiction Book of the Year � from the “The most remarkable Irish nonfiction book I’ve read in the last 10 years�; “[A] book for the ages.�

A celebrated Irish writer’s magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government―in despair, because all the young people were leaving―opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don’t Know Ourselves , O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary “backwater� to an almost totally open society―perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O’Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland’s main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin’s streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O’Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O’Toole’s telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O’Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of “deliberate unknowing,� which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don’t Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us. 16 pages of illustrations]]> 656 Fintan O'Toole 1324092874 Marc 4 4.20 2021 We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
author: Fintan O'Toole
name: Marc
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves:
review:

]]> Travels in Siberia 10825572

A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains

In Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier trains his eye for unforgettable detail on Siberia, that vast expanse of Asiatic Russia. He explores many aspects of this storied, often grim region, which takes up one-seventh of the land on earth. He writes about the geography, the resources, the native peoples, the history, the forty-below midwinter afternoons, the bugs.

The book brims with Mongols, half-crazed Orthodox archpriests, fur seekers, ambassadors of the czar bound for Peking, tea caravans, German scientists, American prospectors, intrepid English nurses, and prisoners and exiles of every kind—from Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the czarina for copying her dresses; to the noble Decembrist revolutionaries of the 1820s; to the young men and women of the People’s Will movement whose fondest hope was to blow up the czar; to those who met still-ungraspable suffering and death in the Siberian camps during Soviet times.

More than just a historical travelogue, Travels in Siberia is also an account of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union and a personal reflection on the all-around amazingness of Russia, a country that still somehow manages to be funny. Siberian travel books have been popular since the thirteenth century, when monks sent by the pope went east to find the Great Khan and wrote about their journeys. Travels in Siberia will take its place as the twenty-first century’s indispensable contribution to the genre.

]]> 529 Ian Frazier 0312610602 Marc 4 4.06 2010 Travels in Siberia
author: Ian Frazier
name: Marc
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2013/12/01
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
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This is just great travel writing--deeply researched, beautifully observed. I can't wait to take the train to Lake Baikal.
]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Stories]]> 53063 304 Thomas Mann 0451526090 Marc 4 3.83 Death in Venice and Other Stories
author: Thomas Mann
name: Marc
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/18
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]]> <![CDATA[The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories]]> 99300
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant; "Cottagette," concerning the romance of a young artist and a man who's apparently too good to be true; "Mr. Peebles' Heart," a liberating tale of a fiftyish shopkeeper whose sister-in-law, a doctor, persuades him to take a solo trip to Europe, with revivifying results; "The Yellow Wallpaper"; and three other outstanding stories.

These charming tales are not only highly readable and full of humor and invention, but also offer ample food for thought about the social, economic, and personal relationship of men and women � and how they might be improved.

Collects:
—The Yellow Wallpaper
—Three Thanksgivings
—The Cottagette
—TܰԱ
—Making a Change
—If I Were a Man
—Mr. Peebles' Heart]]> 129 Charlotte Perkins Gilman 0486298574 Marc 2 4.05 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
name: Marc
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1892
rating: 2
read at: 1998/03/01
date added: 2024/08/07
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This is one of those books that I appreciated without enjoying very much. It is clearly important from a lit-historical perspective, and interesting sociologically, but it's sooooo dated. Maybe that's not a fair criticism, but I remember that as my overwhelming reaction.
]]> <![CDATA[Millennium Approaches (Angels in America, #1)]]> 92250
The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.]]> 119 Tony Kushner 1559360615 Marc 5 4.27 1993 Millennium Approaches (Angels in America, #1)
author: Tony Kushner
name: Marc
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1993
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits]]> 20203140 337 Kevin Roose 1455572322 Marc 3 3.79 2014 Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits
author: Kevin Roose
name: Marc
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2024/07/31
shelves:
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Reporting>analysis. Read if you like well-executed set pieces and appreciate an eye for detail; skip if you're looking to learn much..
]]> <![CDATA[Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance]]> 63946826
In 1785, when the great German poet Friedrich Schiller penned his immortal “Ode to Joy,� he crystallized the deepest hopes and dreams of the European Enlightenment for a new era of peace and freedom, a time when millions would be embraced as equals. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony then gave wing to Schiller’s words, but barely a century later these same words were claimed by Nazi propagandists and twisted by a barbarism so complete that it ruptured, as one philosopher put it, “the deep layer of solidarity among all who wear a human face.�

When it comes to how societies remember these increasingly distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of history books, archives, documentaries, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time’s Echo, the award-winning critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler makes a passionate and revelatory case for the power of music as culture’s memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past.

With a critic’s ear, a scholar’s erudition, and a novelist’s eye for detail, Eichler shows how four towering composers—Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten—lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving, transcendent works of music, scores that echo lost time. Summoning the supporting testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians, and everyday citizens, Eichler reveals how the essence of an entire epoch has been inscribed in these sounds and stories. Along the way, he visits key locations central to the music’s creation, from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral to the site of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv.

As the living memory of the Second World War fades, Time’s Echo proposes new ways of listening to history, and learning to hear between its notes the resonances of what another era has written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned. A lyrical narrative full of insight and compassion, this book deepens how we think about the legacies of war, the presence of the past, and the renewed promise of art for our lives today.]]> 400 Jeremy Eichler 0525521712 Marc 4 4.47 2023 Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance
author: Jeremy Eichler
name: Marc
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2024/07/28
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]]> Dead Lions (Slough House, #2) 61677576
Now the slow horses have a chance at redemption. An old Cold War-era spy is found dead on a bus outside Oxford, far from his usual haunts. The despicable, irascible Jackson Lamb is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?

]]> 347 Mick Herron 1616953675 Marc 4 4.09 2013 Dead Lions (Slough House, #2)
author: Mick Herron
name: Marc
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family]]> 832484
Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain.

In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 731 Thomas Mann 0679752609 Marc 5 4.25 1901 Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
author: Thomas Mann
name: Marc
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1901
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/01
date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> Pompeii 880
But the carefree lifestyle and gorgeous weather belie an impending cataclysm, and only one man is worried. The young engineer Marcus Attilius Primus has just taken charge of the Aqua Augusta, the enormous aqueduct that brings fresh water to a quarter of a million people in nine towns around the Bay of Naples. His predecessor has disappeared. Springs are failing for the first time in generations. And now there is a crisis on the Augusta's sixty-mile main line—somewhere to the north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius.

Attilius—decent, practical, and incorruptible—promises Pliny, the famous scholar who commands the navy, that he can repair the aqueduct before the reservoir runs dry. His plan is to travel to Pompeii and put together an expedition, then head out to the place where he believes the fault lies. But Pompeii proves to be a corrupt and violent town, and Attilius soon discovers that there are powerful forces at work—both natural and man-made—threatening to destroy him.

With his trademark elegance and intelligence, Robert Harris, bestselling author of Archangel and Fatherland, re-creates a world on the brink of disaster.]]> 274 Robert Harris 0812974611 Marc 3 3.85 2003 Pompeii
author: Robert Harris
name: Marc
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/01
date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> J R 52142022 A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis.

At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is a running a massive Ponzi scheme out a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player piano company to the titans of Wall Street and the politicians in Washington will be caught up in the J R Company, an endlessly ballooning bubble that encompasses shaky mineral claims and gas leases, defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, matchbooks, marijuana, prostheses, publishing, and even a formula for frozen music.

First published in 1975, J R is an appallingly funny and all-too-prophetic depiction of America's romance with finance and its disastrous consequences. It is also a book about suburban development and urban decay, divorce proceedings and disputed wills, the crumbling facade of Western civilization and the impossible demands of love and art, with characters ranging from the earnest young composer Edward Bast, who inadvertently finds himself the public face of the J R company, to the berserk publicist Davidoff, whose unceasing output of hype and spin and buzz make him one of the great grotesques of modern fiction. Told almost entirely through dialogue, Gaddis's novel is a story of compounding misunderstandings, at once absurd and desperate. It is both a literary tour-de-force and an unsurpassed reckoning with the way we live now.]]> 770 William Gaddis 1681374684 Marc 4 4.52 1975 J R
author: William Gaddis
name: Marc
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/01
date added: 2024/04/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Cartel (Power of the Dog, #2)]]> 23602561 The Power of the Dog comes The Cartel, a gripping, true-to-life, ripped-from-the-headlines epic story of power, corruption, revenge, and justice spanning the past decade of the Mexican-American drug wars.

It’s 2004. DEA agent Art Keller has been fighting the war on drugs for thirty years in a blood feud against Adán Barrera, the head of El Federación, the world’s most powerful cartel, and the man who brutally murdered Keller’s partner. Finally putting Barrera away cost Keller dearly—the woman he loves, the beliefs he cherishes, the life he wants to lead.

Then Barrera gets out, determined to rebuild the empire that Keller shattered. Unwilling to live in a world with Barrera in it, Keller goes on a ten-year odyssey to take him down. His obsession with justice—or is it revenge?—becomes a ruthless struggle that stretches from the cities, mountains, and deserts of Mexico to Washington’s corridors of power to the streets of Berlin and Barcelona.

Keller fights his personal battle against the devastated backdrop of Mexico’s drug war, a conflict of unprecedented scale and viciousness, as cartels vie for power and he comes to the final reckoning with Barrera—and himself—that he always knew must happen.

The Cartel is a story of revenge, honor, and sacrifice, as one man tries to face down the devil without losing his soul. It is the story of the war on drugs and the men—and women—who wage it.]]> 616 Don Winslow 1101874996 Marc 4 4.33 2015 The Cartel (Power of the Dog, #2)
author: Don Winslow
name: Marc
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2024/03/06
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]]> Dalva 41434406 324 Jim Harrison Marc 4 3.89 1988 Dalva
author: Jim Harrison
name: Marc
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1988
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/06
date added: 2024/03/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (World War II Liberation Trilogy, #3)]]> 16044941 The magnificent conclusion to Rick Atkinson’s acclaimed Liberation Trilogy about the Allied triumph in Europe during World War II

It is the twentieth century’s unrivaled epic: at a staggering price, the United States and its allies liberated Europe and vanquished Hitler. In the first two volumes of his bestselling Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson recounted how the American-led coalition fought through North Africa and Italy to the threshold of victory. Now he tells the most dramatic story of all—the titanic battle for Western Europe.

D-Day marked the commencement of the final campaign of the European war, and Atkinson’s riveting account of that bold gamble sets the pace for the masterly narrative that follows. The brutal fight in Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the disaster that was Operation Market Garden, the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and finally the thrust to the heart of the Third Reich—all these historic events and more come alive with a wealth of new material and a mesmerizing cast of characters. Atkinson tells the tale from the perspective of participants at every level, from presidents and generals to war-weary lieutenants and terrified teenage riflemen. When Germany at last surrenders, we understand anew both the devastating cost of this global conflagration and the enormous effort required to win the Allied victory.

With the stirring final volume of this monumental trilogy, Atkinson’s accomplishment is manifest. He has produced the definitive chronicle of the war that unshackled a continent and preserved freedom in the West.

]]> 877 Rick Atkinson 0805062904 Marc 4 4.44 2013 The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (World War II Liberation Trilogy, #3)
author: Rick Atkinson
name: Marc
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/20
date added: 2023/12/25
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]]> Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Marc 4 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood
author: Eleanor Catton
name: Marc
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/20
date added: 2023/11/23
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]]> The Looking Glass War 18857680 Librarian's An alternate cover edition can be found [|36163280]

A "NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER
It would have been an easy job for the a can of film couriered from Helsinki to London. In the past the Circus handled all things political, while the Department dealt with matters military. But the Department has been moribund since the War, its resources siphoned away. Now, one of their agents is dead, and vital evidence verifying the presence of Soviet missiles near the West German border is gone. John Avery is the Department's younger member and its last hope. Charged with handling Fred Leiser, a German-speaking Pole left over from the War, Avery must infiltrate the East and restore his masters' former glory.
Darkly compelling and brutally Machiavellian, "The Looking Glass War" is a stunning accomplishment by one of today's most remarkable and enduring literary writers.
]]> 288 John Le Carré 1101603038 Marc 3 3.86 1965 The Looking Glass War
author: John Le Carré
name: Marc
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1965
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/11
date added: 2023/11/23
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]]> <![CDATA[The Custom of the Country (Vintage Classics)]]> 13151615
Undine Spragg is an exquisitely beautiful but ferociously acquisitive young woman from the Midwest who comes to New York to seek her fortune. She achieves her social ambitions—but only at the highest cost to her family, her admirers, and her several husbands. Wharton lavished on Undine an imaginative energy that suggests she was as fascinated as she was appalled by the alluring monster she had created. It is the complexity of her attitude that makes The Custom of the Country —with its rich social and emotional detail and its headlong narrative power—one of the most fully realized and resonant of her works.]]> 432 Edith Wharton 0307949540 Marc 5 4.16 1913 The Custom of the Country (Vintage Classics)
author: Edith Wharton
name: Marc
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2023/10/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art]]> 137926
The book distinguishes what belongs to artistic theory from what has traditionally been confused with it, namely aesthetic theory and offers as well a systematic account of metaphor, expression, and style, together with an original account of artistic representation. A wealth of examples, drawn especially from recent and contemporary art, illuminate the argument.]]> 224 Arthur C. Danto 0674903463 Marc 4 4.17 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art
author: Arthur C. Danto
name: Marc
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2023/08/01
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]]> Brown Dog 17707989 New York Times best-selling author Jim Harrison is one of America’s most beloved writers, and of all his creations, Brown Dog, a bawdy, reckless, down-on-his-luck Michigan Indian, has earned cult status with readers in the more than two decades since his first appearance. For the first time, Brown Dog gathers all the Brown Dog novellas, including one never-published one, into one volume—the ideal introduction (or reintroduction) to Harrison’s irresistible Everyman.

In these novellas, BD rescues the preserved body of an Indian from Lake Superior’s cold waters; overindulges in food, drink, and women while just scraping by in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; wanders Los Angeles in search of an ersatz Native activist who stole his bearskin; adopts two Native children; and flees the authorities, then returns across the Canadian border aboard an Indian rock band’s tour bus. The collection culminates with He Dog, never before published, which finds BD marginally employed and still looking for love (or sometimes just a few beers and a roll in the hay), as he goes on a road trip from Michigan to Montana and back, arriving home to the prospect of family stability and, perhaps, a chance at redemption.

Brown Dog underscores Harrison’s place as one of America’s most irrepressible writers, and one of the finest practitioners of the novella form.]]> 525 Jim Harrison 0802120113 Marc 4 4.15 2013 Brown Dog
author: Jim Harrison
name: Marc
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2023/07/30
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]]> Stormy Weather (Skink #3) 13061
"Hysterically funny...Hiaasen at his satirical best." - USA Today

Two honeymooners wake up early, make love twice, and brace themselves for a spectacle they won't be watching from the sidelines. A seductive con artiste stumbles into a scam that promises more cool cash than the lottery. A shotgun-toting mobile home salesman is about to close a deal with disaster. A law school dropout will be chasing one Gaboon viper, a troop of storm-shocked monkeys, and a newfound love life, while tourists by the thousands bail from the Florida Keys. We're now entering the hurricane zone, where hell and hilarity rule. And in the hands of the masterful, merciless Carl Hiaasen, we're going to have some weather.]]> 388 Carl Hiaasen 0446677167 Marc 3 3.94 1995 Stormy Weather (Skink #3)
author: Carl Hiaasen
name: Marc
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2003/06/01
date added: 2023/07/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)]]> 56534999 Welcome to the thrilling and unnervingly prescient world of the slow horses. This team of MI5 agents is united by one common bond: They've screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves.

This special tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of a modern classic includes a foreword by the author, discussion questions for book clubs, and an exclusive short story featuring the slow horses.

London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what’s left of their failed careers. The “slow horses,� as they’re called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can’t be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there─even if it means having to collaborate with one another.

When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, the slow horses see an opportunity to redeem themselves. But is the victim really who he appears to be?]]> 334 Mick Herron 1641292970 Marc 4 4.05 2010 Slow Horses (Slough House, #1)
author: Mick Herron
name: Marc
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/27
date added: 2023/06/27
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]]> Train Dreams 12991188 Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West, this novella captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.]]> 116 Denis Johnson 1250007658 Marc 4 3.91 2002 Train Dreams
author: Denis Johnson
name: Marc
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/20
date added: 2023/06/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing]]> 43205240
For the first time in his long career, Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written, personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses; what it felt like to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses� Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ’s mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of loneliness, he found a writers� community at the New York Public Library’s Frederick Lewis Allen Room and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books.
Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences–some previously published, some written expressly for this book–bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.]]> 231 Robert A. Caro 0525656340 Marc 3 4.42 2019 Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Marc
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/01
date added: 2023/06/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem #2)]]> 26114141 The Dark Forest, the stunning sequel to Cixin Liu's award-winning and bestselling masterpiece The Three-Body Problem.

Earth is still reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion. The aliens' human collaborators may have been defeated, but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are totally exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret. This is the motivation for the Wallfacer Project, a daring plan that grants four people enormous resources to design secret strategies, hidden through deceit and misdirection from Earth and Trisolaris alike. Three of the Wallfacers are influential statesmen and scientists, but the fourth is a total unknown. Luo Ji, an unambitious Chinese astronomer and sociologist, is baffled by his new status. All he knows is that he's the one Wallfacer that Trisolaris wants dead.

The Dark Forest continues Cixin Liu's ground-breaking saga of incredible scope and vision.]]> 518 Liu Cixin 0765386690 Marc 3 4.40 2008 The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem #2)
author: Liu Cixin
name: Marc
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/06
date added: 2023/06/11
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]]> Venomous Lumpsucker 59593576
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.

Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat.

Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?]]> 336 Ned Beauman 1641294124 Marc 3 3.77 Venomous Lumpsucker
author: Ned Beauman
name: Marc
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/18
date added: 2023/03/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Hilda and the Troll (Hildafolk, #1)]]> 60095479
Hilda sits in her tent listening to the thunder passing overhead when she hears a bell. As she hurtles towards the vanishing tinkling sound, Hilda unwittingly embarks on an adventure into strange worlds ruled by magical forces. Luke Pearson tells this exciting tale for kids and adults alike.


]]> 45 Luke Pearson 1838741089 Marc 4 4.51 2010 Hilda and the Troll (Hildafolk, #1)
author: Luke Pearson
name: Marc
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/01
date added: 2023/02/08
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]]> <![CDATA[They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us]]> 33947154
In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car.

In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.]]> 291 Hanif Abdurraqib Marc 4 4.57 2017 They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Marc
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/28
date added: 2023/01/28
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]]> Watchmen 472331 Watchmen, the groundbreaking series from award-winning author Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, presents a world where the mere presence of American superheroes changed history—the U.S. won the Vietnam War, Nixon is still president, and the Cold War is in full effect.

Considered the greatest graphic novel in the history of the medium, the Hugo Award-winning story chronicles the fall from grace of a group of superheroes plagued by all-too-human failings. Along the way, the concept of the superhero is dissected as an unknown assassin stalks the erstwhile heroes.]]> 416 Alan Moore 0930289234 Marc 5 4.38 1987 Watchmen
author: Alan Moore
name: Marc
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/24
date added: 2023/01/25
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]]> Masters of Atlantis 60870989
Taking us through the publication of Jimmerson's own Gnomic texts, to the schism that rocks the Gnomic community, to Jimmerson's disastrous bid to become the governor of Indiana, and finally to the fateful gathering of the Gnomons in a mobile-home park in East Texas, Masters of Atlantis is a cockeyed journey into an America of misfits, con men, and innocents.]]> 313 Charles Portis Marc 4 3.50 1985 Masters of Atlantis
author: Charles Portis
name: Marc
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/16
date added: 2023/01/16
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]]> Dune (Dune, #1) 39776179
Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad’Dib—and of a great family’s ambition to bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.]]> 704 Frank Herbert 0441013597 Marc 4 4.23 1965 Dune (Dune, #1)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Marc
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/07
date added: 2023/01/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)]]> 20518872 472 Liu Cixin Marc 4 4.08 2006 The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)
author: Liu Cixin
name: Marc
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/01
date added: 2022/12/31
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]]> The Stand 5864120
And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abigail and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the Dark Man.]]> 1348 Stephen King Marc 3 4.43 1978 The Stand
author: Stephen King
name: Marc
average rating: 4.43
book published: 1978
rating: 3
read at: 2022/10/01
date added: 2022/12/31
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]]> The Nickel Boys 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Marc 4 4.25 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Marc
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/01
date added: 2022/07/03
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]]> Phase Six 55198795 A spare and gripping novel about the next pandemic--completed by the award-winning Jim Shepard before COVID-19 even emerged--that reads like a fictional sequel to our current crisis.

In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, 11-year-old Aleq and his best friend, frequent trespassers at a mining site exposed to mountains of long-buried and thawing permafrost, carry what they pick up back into their village, and from there Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification and radical isolation as the likely index patient. While he shoulders both a crushing guilt for what he may have done and the hopes of a world looking for answers, we also meet two Epidemic Intelligence Service investigators dispatched from the CDC--Jeannine, an epidemiologist and daughter of Algerian immigrants, and Danice, an M.D. and lab wonk. As they attempt to head off the cataclysm, Jeannine--moving from the Greenland hospital overwhelmed with the first patients to a Level 4 high-security facility in the Rocky Mountains--does what she can to sustain Aleq. Both a chamber piece of multiple intimate perspectives and a more omniscient glimpse into the megastructures (political, cultural, and biological) that inform such a disaster, the novel reminds us of the crucial bonds that form in the midst of catastrophe, as a child and several hypereducated adults learn what it means to provide adequate support for those they love. In the process, they celebrate the precious worlds they might lose, and help to shape others that may survive.]]> 256 Jim Shepard 052565545X Marc 4 3.44 2021 Phase Six
author: Jim Shepard
name: Marc
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/01
date added: 2022/07/03
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]]> Devil House 57693663
Now, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success--and movie adaptation--to his name, along with a series of subsequent lesser efforts that have paid the bills but not much more. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: To move into the house--what the locals call "The Devil House"--in which a briefly notorious pair of murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected 1980s teens. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected--back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.]]> 403 John Darnielle 0374212236 Marc 4 3.21 2022 Devil House
author: John Darnielle
name: Marc
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/01
date added: 2022/07/03
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]]> The Aeneid 18309679 ISBN 9780143105138

Fleeing the ashes of Troy, Aeneas, Achilles's mighty foe in the Iliad, begins an incredible journey to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His voyage will take him through stormy seas, entangle him in a tragic love affair, and lure him into the world of the dead itself—all the way tormented by the vengeful Juno, Queen of the Gods. Ultimately, he reaches the promised land of Italy where, after bloody battles and with high hopes, he founds what will become the Roman empire. An unsparing portrait of a man caught between love, duty, and fate, the Aeneid redefines passion, nobility, and courage for our times.

Robert Fagles, whose acclaimed translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were welcomed as major publishing events, brings the Aeneid to a new generation of readers, retaining all of the gravitas and humanity of the original Latin as well as its powerful blend of poetry and myth. Featuring an illuminating introduction to Virgil's world by esteemed scholar Bernard Knox, this volume lends a vibrant new voice to one of the seminal literary achievements of the ancient world.]]> 484 Virgil Marc 5 4.03 -19 The Aeneid
author: Virgil
name: Marc
average rating: 4.03
book published: -19
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/01
date added: 2022/05/08
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]]> Smiley's People 10114342 Featuring George Smiley, this New York Times bestseller is the third and final installment in the Karla Trilogy, from the author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman� A very junior agent answers Vladimir’s call, but it could have been the Chief of the Circus himself. No one at the British Secret Service considers the old spy to be anything except a senile has-been who can’t give up the game—until he’s shot in the face at point-blank range. Although George Smiley (code name: Max) is officially retired, he’s summoned to identify the body now bearing Moscow Centre’s bloody imprimatur. As he works to unearth his friend’s fatal secrets, Smiley heads inexorably toward one final reckoning with Karla—his dark “grail.� In Smiley’s People, master storyteller and New York Times bestselling author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Our Kind of Traitor John le Carré brings his acclaimed Karla Trilogy, to its unforgettable, spellbinding conclusion.
With an introduction by the author.]]> 398 John Le Carré 014311977X Marc 0 4.35 1979 Smiley's People
author: John Le Carré
name: Marc
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/01
date added: 2022/05/08
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]]> The Dog of the South 938212 246 Charles Portis 0879519312 Marc 4 3.83 1979 The Dog of the South
author: Charles Portis
name: Marc
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/01
date added: 2022/05/08
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]]> The Song of Achilles 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]> 408 Madeline Miller Marc 3 4.30 2011 The Song of Achilles
author: Madeline Miller
name: Marc
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/01
date added: 2022/03/27
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]]> <![CDATA[Creative Types and Other Stories]]> 50699225 "Tom Bissell is one of America's best and most interesting writers." --Stephen King, in the anthology Flight or Fright

From the best-selling author of The Disaster Artist , a new collection of stories that range from laugh-out-loud funny to disturbingly dark--unflinching portraits of women and men struggling to bridge the gap between art and life.

A young and ingratiating assistant to a movie star makes a blunder that puts his boss and a major studio at grave risk. A couple hires a partner for a threesome to rejuvenate their relationship after the birth of their child. An assistant at a prestigious literary journal reconnects with a middle school frenemy and finds his carefully constructed world of refinement cannot protect him from his past.
In these and other stories, Tom Bissell vividly renders the complex worlds of characters on the brink of artistic and personal crisis--writers, actors, and other creative types who see things slightly differently from the rest of us. Surreal, poignant, squirmingly awkward--and always just a little bit off--this collection is a brilliant new offering from one of the most versatile and talented writers in America today.

A bridge under water
My interview with the Avenger
Punishment
Love story, with cocaine
The fifth category
Creative types
The hack]]> 224 Tom Bissell 152474915X Marc 5 3.35 2021 Creative Types and Other Stories
author: Tom Bissell
name: Marc
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/01
date added: 2022/03/27
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]]> <![CDATA[The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)]]> 45992717 If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?�

England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves.

Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to the breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?

With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion, and courage.]]> 757 Hilary Mantel 0805096604 Marc 4 4.36 2020 The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Marc
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/01
date added: 2022/03/27
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]]> The American Confidence Man 1537029
A study of con artists by the author of The Big Con, a professor of linguistics.

Chapter 11 is a 32 page dictionary of con man lingo.]]> 300 David W. Maurer 0398029741 Marc 0 booksidliketoknowmoreabout 4.33 1940 The American Confidence Man
author: David W. Maurer
name: Marc
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/11
shelves: booksidliketoknowmoreabout
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]]> <![CDATA[On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present]]> 13812171 1152 Alan Ryan 0871404656 Marc 0 currently-reading 4.19 2012 On Politics: A History of Political Thought From Herodotus to the Present
author: Alan Ryan
name: Marc
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/17
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> <![CDATA[A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton]]> 243707
When John McPhee met Bill Bradley, both were at the beginning of their careers. In A Sense of Where You Are ,
McPhee delineates for the reader the training and techniques that made Bradley the extraordinary athlete he was, and this part of the book is a blueprint of superlative basketball. But athletic prowess alone would not explain Bradley's magnetism, which is in the quality of the man himself―his self-discipline, his rationality, and his sense of responsibility.

Here is a portrait of Bradley as he was in college, before his time with the New York Knicks and his election to the U.S. Senate―a story that suggests the abundant beginnings of his professional careers in sport and politics.]]> 240 John McPhee 0374526893 Marc 3 4.09 1965 A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton
author: John McPhee
name: Marc
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1965
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/01/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War]]> 53317422 In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years
The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense--economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of "freedom" applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime?

With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residences at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.

Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.]]> 880 Louis Menand 0374158452 Marc 4 4.20 2021 The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
author: Louis Menand
name: Marc
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/12/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy, 2)]]> 4332080
In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy

In An Army at Dawn ―winner of the Pulitzer Prize―Rick Atkinson provided an authoritative history of the Allied triumph in North Africa during World War II. Now, in The Day of Battle , he follows the strengthening American and British armies as they invade Sicily in July 1943 and then, mile by bloody mile, fight their way north toward Rome.

The decision to invade the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was controversial, but once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, the Rapido River, and Monte Cassino were particularly lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. And with the liberation of Rome in June 1944, ultimate victory at last began to seem inevitable.

Drawing on a wide array of primary source material, written with great drama and flair, The Day of Battle is a masterly account of one of history's most compelling military campaigns.]]> 848 Rick Atkinson 080508861X Marc 4 4.42 2007 The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy, 2)
author: Rick Atkinson
name: Marc
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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date added: 2021/12/30
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]]> A Farewell to Arms 17978811
Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield—weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion—this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.

Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. This edition collects all of the alternative endings together for the first time, along with early drafts of other essential passages, offering new insight into Hemingway’s craft and creative process and the evolution of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Featuring Hemingway’s own 1948 introduction to an illustrated reissue of the novel, a personal foreword by the author’s son Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the author’s grandson Seán Hemingway, this edition of A Farewell to Arms is truly a celebration.]]> 324 Ernest Hemingway Marc 4 3.98 1929 A Farewell to Arms
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Marc
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/12/30
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]]> Hummingbird Salamander 53359447 Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things.

Security consultant “Jane Smith� receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit that holds a taxidermied hummingbird and clues leading her to a taxidermied salamander. Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.

Soon, Jane and her family are in danger, with few allies to help her make sense of the true scope of the peril. Is the only way to safety to follow in Silvina’s footsteps? Is it too late to stop? As she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, time is running out—for her and possibly for the world.

Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his brilliant, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions about climate change, identity, and the world we live in into a tightly plotted thriller full of unexpected twists and elaborate conspiracy.]]> 351 Jeff VanderMeer 0374173540 Marc 3 3.23 2021 Hummingbird Salamander
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: Marc
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/09/16
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]]> The Dry (Aaron Falk, #1) 35697187 A small town hides big secrets in this atmospheric, page-turning debut mystery by award-winning author Jane Harper.

In the grip of the worst drought in a century, the farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily when three members of a local family are found brutally slain.
Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk reluctantly returns to his hometown for the funeral of his childhood friend, loath to face the townsfolk who turned their backs on him twenty years earlier.
But as questions mount, Falk is forced to probe deeper into the deaths of the Hadler family. Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret. A secret Falk thought was long buried. A secret Luke's death now threatens to bring to the surface in this small Australian town, as old wounds in bleed into new ones.

]]> 331 Jane Harper 1250105625 Marc 4 4.03 2016 The Dry (Aaron Falk, #1)
author: Jane Harper
name: Marc
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/01
date added: 2021/09/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made]]> 22609404 The Making of the Atomic Bomb the remarkable story of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of the reporters, writers, artists, doctors, and nurses who witnessed it. The Spanish Civil War inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. The idealism of the cause&#8212;defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war&#8212;and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia, The Spanish Earth.

The war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology as well. New aircraft, new weapons, new tactics and strategy all emerged in the intense Spanish conflict. Indiscriminate destruction raining from the sky became a dreaded reality for the first time. Progress also arose from the horror: the doctors and nurses who volunteered to serve with the Spanish defenders devised major advances in battlefield surgery and front-line blood transfusion. In those ways, and in many others, the Spanish Civil War served as a test bed for World War II, and for the entire twentieth century.

From the life of John James Audubon to the invention of the atomic bomb, readers have long relied on Richard Rhodes to explain, distill, and dramatize crucial moments in history. Now, he takes us into battlefields and bomb shelters, into the studios of artists, into the crowded wards of war hospitals, and into the hearts and minds of a rich cast of characters to show how the ideological, aesthetic, and technological developments that emerged in Spain changed the world forever.]]> 320 Richard Rhodes 1451696213 Marc 3 3.55 2015 Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made
author: Richard Rhodes
name: Marc
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/01
date added: 2021/09/16
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]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Marc 3 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Marc
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/09/16
date added: 2021/09/16
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]]> <![CDATA[At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68]]> 95777 Canaan's Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.]]> 1039 Taylor Branch 0684857138 Marc 5 4.41 2006 At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68
author: Taylor Branch
name: Marc
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/07/26
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]]> Jack (Gilead, #4) 50403478 Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the latest in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction.

Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the beloved, erratic, and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African American high school teacher who is also the daughter of a preacher―discerning, generous, and independent. Their fraught, beautiful romance is one of Robinson’s greatest achievements.

The Gilead novels are about the dilemmas and promise of American history―about the ongoing legacy of the Civil War and the enduring impact of both racial inequality and deep-rooted religious belief. They touch the deepest chords in our national character and resonate with our deepest feelings.]]> 309 Marilynne Robinson 0374279306 Marc 3 3.85 2020 Jack (Gilead, #4)
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Marc
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/07/26
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]]> Killer on the Road 383685 280 James Ellroy 0380899345 Marc 3 3.48 1986 Killer on the Road
author: James Ellroy
name: Marc
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1986
rating: 3
read at: 2020/11/01
date added: 2021/07/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music]]> 50403493 New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics--an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.

For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism saturated European and American culture. Such colossal creations as The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were models of formal daring, mythmaking, erotic freedom, and mystical speculation. A mighty procession of artists, including Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Paul Cézanne, Isadora Duncan, and Luis Buñuel, felt his impact. Anarchists, occultists, feminists, and gay-rights pioneers saw him as a kindred spirit. Then Adolf Hitler incorporated Wagner into the soundtrack of Nazi Germany, and the composer came to be defined by his ferocious antisemitism. For many, his name is now almost synonymous with artistic evil.

In Wagnerism, Alex Ross restores the magnificent confusion of what it means to be a Wagnerian. A pandemonium of geniuses, madmen, charlatans, and prophets do battle over Wagner's many-sided legacy. As readers of his brilliant articles for The New Yorker have come to expect, Ross ranges thrillingly across artistic disciplines, from the architecture of Louis Sullivan to the novels of Philip K. Dick, from the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl to the civil-rights essays of WEB Du Bois, from O Pioneers! to Apocalypse Now.

In many ways, Wagnerism tells a tragic tale. An artist who might have rivaled Shakespeare in universal reach is undone by an ideology of hate. Still, his shadow lingers over twenty-first century culture, his mythic motifs coursing through superhero films and fantasy fiction. Neither apologia nor condemnation, Wagnerism is a work of passionate discovery, urging us toward a more honest idea of how art acts in the world.]]> 784 Alex Ross 0374285934 Marc 4 4.20 2020 Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
author: Alex Ross
name: Marc
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/26
date added: 2021/07/26
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]]> The Misanthrope / Tartuffe 18484262 Librarian Note: This is an alternate edition for ISBN: 0156605171.]]> 326 ѴDZè Marc 5 4.38 1666 The Misanthrope / Tartuffe
author: ѴDZè
name: Marc
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1666
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/07/26
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]]> <![CDATA[American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt]]> 17883917
From the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Americans have defied their stodgy rules and hierarchies with pranks, dances, stunts, and wild parties, shaping the national character in profound and lasting ways. In the nation’s earlier eras, revelers flouted Puritans, Patriots pranked Redcoats, slaves lampooned masters, and forty-niners bucked the saddles of an increasingly uptight middle class. In the twentieth century, fun-loving Americans celebrated this heritage and pushed it even flappers “barney-mugged� in “petting pantries,� Yippies showered the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills, and B-boys invented hip-hop in a war zone in the Bronx.

This is the surprising and revelatory history that John Beckman recounts in American Fun . Tying together captivating stories of Americans� “pursuit of happiness”—and distinguishing between real, risky fun and the bland amusements that paved the way for Hollywood, Disneyland, and Xbox—Beckman redefines American culture with a delightful and provocative thesis.

(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)]]> 432 John Beckman 0307908178 Marc 5 3.08 2014 American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt
author: John Beckman
name: Marc
average rating: 3.08
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2014/08/01
date added: 2021/02/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Lazarus Files: A Cold Case Investigation]]> 38122480 A deeply-reported, riveting account of a cold case murder in Los Angeles, unsolved until DNA evidence implicated a shocking suspect - a female detective within the LAPD's own ranks.

On February 24, 1986, 29-year-old newlywed Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in the home she shared with her husband, John. The crime scene suggested a ferocious struggle, and police initially assumed it was a burglary gone awry. Before her death, Sherri had confided to her parents that an ex-girlfriend of John's, a Los Angeles police officer, had threatened her. The Rasmussens urged the LAPD to investigate the ex-girlfriend, but the original detectives only pursued burglary suspects, and the case went cold.

DNA analysis did not exist when Sherri was murdered. Decades later, a swab from a bite mark on Sherri's arm revealed her killer was in fact female, not male. A DNA match led to the arrest and conviction of veteran LAPD Detective Stephanie Lazarus, John's onetime girlfriend.

The Lazarus Files delivers the visceral experience of being inside a real-life murder mystery. McGough reconstructs the lives of Sherri, John and Stephanie; the love triangle that led to Sherri's murder; and the homicide investigation that followed. Was Stephanie protected by her fellow officers? What did the LAPD know, and when did they know it? Are there other LAPD cold cases with a police connection that remain unsolved?]]> 448 Matthew McGough 0805095594 Marc 5 3.43 2019 The Lazarus Files: A Cold Case Investigation
author: Matthew McGough
name: Marc
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2020/02/01
date added: 2021/02/28
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]]> Slouching Towards Bethlehem 7816 Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, forty years after its first publication, the essential portrait of America� particularly California—in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.]]> 207 Joan Didion 0007115229 Marc 4 4.02 1968 Slouching Towards Bethlehem
author: Joan Didion
name: Marc
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1968
rating: 4
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date added: 2021/01/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads]]> 28503628
Tim Wu argues that this condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebritypower brandslike Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness, from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature--cognitive, social, political and otherwise--in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.
]]> 403 Tim Wu 0385352018 Marc 3 4.06 2016 The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
author: Tim Wu
name: Marc
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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date added: 2021/01/01
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]]> Circe 35959740
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from or with the mortals she has come to love.]]> 393 Madeline Miller 0316556343 Marc 4 4.22 2018 Circe
author: Madeline Miller
name: Marc
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/01
date added: 2021/01/01
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]]> Les Misérables 22571706 The Novel of the Century by David Bellos—published in a stunning Deluxe edition. Winner of the French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation’s 29th Annual Translation Prize in Fiction.

The subject of the world’s longest-running musical and the award-winning film, Les Misérables is a genuine literary treasure. Victor Hugo’s tale of injustice, heroism, and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him, and has been a perennial favorite since it first appeared over 150 years ago. This exciting new translation with Jillian Tamaki’s brilliant cover art will be a gift both to readers who have already fallen for its timeless story and to new readers discovering it for the first time.]]> 1416 Victor Hugo 0143107569 Marc 4 4.52 1862 Les Misérables
author: Victor Hugo
name: Marc
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1862
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/01
date added: 2021/01/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (Open Yale Courses)]]> 44310210 A wide-ranging study that illuminates the connection between epidemic diseases and societal change, from the Black Death to Ebola

This sweeping exploration of the impact of epidemic diseases looks at how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped society, from the Black Death to today. In a clear and accessible style, Frank M. Snowden reveals the ways that diseases have not only influenced medical science and public health, but also transformed the arts, religion, intellectual history, and warfare.

A multidisciplinary and comparative investigation of the medical and social history of the major epidemics, this volume touches on themes such as the evolution of medical therapy, plague literature, poverty, the environment, and mass hysteria. In addition to providing historical perspective on diseases such as smallpox, cholera, and tuberculosis, Snowden examines the fallout from recent epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola and the question of the world’s preparedness for the next generation of diseases.]]> 600 Frank M. Snowden III 0300192215 Marc 4 4.40 2019 Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (Open Yale Courses)
author: Frank M. Snowden III
name: Marc
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/01
date added: 2021/01/01
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]]> Anna Karenina 151
«Nos capítulos iniciais de Anna Karénina, somos conduzidos, uma e outra vez, a um sentido de analogia musical. Há efeitos de contraponto e harmonia no desenvolvimento das principais tramas do “prelúdio Oblonski� (o acidente na estação ferroviária, a zombadora discussão sobre o divórcio entre Vronski e a baronesa Chilton, o deslumbramento do fogo vermelho diante dos olhos de Anna). O método de Tolstoi é polifónico; mas as harmonias principais desen- volvem-se com uma tremenda força e amplitude. As técnicas musicais e linguísticas não podem comparar-se de um modo exato. Mas como poderíamos elucidar de outro modo o sentimento de que as novelas de Tolstoi surgem de um princípio interior de ordem e vitalidade, enquanto as dos escritores menos importantes parecem alinhavadas?»

«Anna Karénina morre no mundo do romance; mas cada vez que lemos o livro ela ressuscita, e mesmo depois de o termos acabado adquire outra vida na nossa recordação. Em cada personagem literária existe algo da Fénix imortal. Através das vidas perduráveis das suas personagens, a própria existência de Tolstoi teve a sua eternidade.» [George Steiner, Tolstoi ou Dostoievski]]]> 838 Leo Tolstoy 0143035002 Marc 3 4.10 1878 Anna Karenina
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Marc
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1878
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/01
date added: 2020/11/29
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Fun for about 700 pages, then it kind of went off the rails for me.
]]> Middlemarch 271276 853 George Eliot 0141439548 Marc 5 4.19 1872 Middlemarch
author: George Eliot
name: Marc
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1872
rating: 5
read at: 2002/10/01
date added: 2020/11/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65]]> 79356
In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage.]]> 768 Taylor Branch 0684848090 Marc 4 4.34 1998 Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65
author: Taylor Branch
name: Marc
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/01
date added: 2020/09/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)]]> 43877506 The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands , acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America.

At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences -- ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political -- divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive.

These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change -- technological, cultural, and political -- proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country.

In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.
]]> 968 Richard White 0190053763 Marc 4 4.11 2017 The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)
author: Richard White
name: Marc
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/01
date added: 2020/09/07
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]]> <![CDATA[This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War]]> 3421633
An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering , Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.

With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.]]> 346 Drew Gilpin Faust 0375703837 Marc 4 4.13 2008 This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
author: Drew Gilpin Faust
name: Marc
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/01
date added: 2020/07/21
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]]> The Crofter and the Laird 531206 160 John McPhee 0374131929 Marc 4 3.93 1970 The Crofter and the Laird
author: John McPhee
name: Marc
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/01
date added: 2020/07/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World]]> 6025160 With penetrating insights for today, this vital history of the world economic collapse of the late 1920s offers unforgettable portraits of the four men whose personal and professional actions as heads of their respective central banks changed the course of the twentieth century

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person’s or government’s control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.

In Lords of Finance, we meet the neurotic and enigmatic Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, the xenophobic and suspicious Émile Moreau of the Banque de France, the arrogant yet brilliant Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose façade of energy and drive masked a deeply wounded and overburdened man. After the First World War, these central bankers attempted to reconstruct the world of international finance. Despite their differences, they were united by a common fear—that the greatest threat to capitalism was inflation� and by a common vision that the solution was to turn back the clock and return the world to the gold standard.

For a brief period in the mid-1920s they appeared to have succeeded. The world’s currencies were stabilized and capital began flowing freely across the globe. But beneath the veneer of boom-town prosperity, cracks started to appear in the financial system. The gold standard that all had believed would provide an umbrella of stability proved to be a straitjacket, and the world economy began that terrible downward spiral known as the Great Depression.

As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmark for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.]]> 564 Liaquat Ahamed 159420182X Marc 4 4.01 2009 Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
author: Liaquat Ahamed
name: Marc
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/01
date added: 2020/04/17
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]]> The Overstory 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X Marc 3 4.10 2018 The Overstory
author: Richard Powers
name: Marc
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2020/04/01
date added: 2020/04/17
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]]> Berlin 37941619 "If there was ever any doubt of a graphic novel’s ability to achieve a high level of storytelling, this book blows it away."�Newsday

"Astonishing in its scope, breadth and execution."�The Independent

Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazism

During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism.

Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens—Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters� lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart.

The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes� masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.]]> 580 Jason Lutes 1770463267 Marc 4 4.45 2018 Berlin
author: Jason Lutes
name: Marc
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/03/01
date added: 2020/04/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century]]> 918674
In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city.

Belonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization.]]> 219 Wolfgang Schivelbusch 0520059298 Marc 3 4.15 1977 The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
name: Marc
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2020/03/01
date added: 2020/04/17
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]]> The Topeka School 43565369 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of �97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys� to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart―who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient―into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.]]> 282 Ben Lerner 0374277788 Marc 4 3.51 2019 The Topeka School
author: Ben Lerner
name: Marc
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2020/02/08
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]]> <![CDATA[William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism]]> 1862555
Pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, eldest sibling in the extraordinary James family, William emerges here as an immensely complex and curious man.

William James, ten years in the making, draws on a vast number of unpublished letters, journals, and family records to illuminate what James himself called the "buzzing blooming confusion" of his life. Richardson shows James struggling to achieve amid the domestic chaos and intellectual brilliance of his father, his brother Henry, and his sister Alice. There are portraits of James's early years as a student at the appallingly hidebound Harvard of the 1860s. And there are the harrowing suicidal episodes, after which James, still a young man, turns from depression to action with "a heave of will." Through impassioned scholarship, Richardson illuminates James's hugely influential the Varieties, Principles of Psychology, Talks to Teachers, and Pragmatism.

As a longtime professor James taught courage and risk-taking. He was W.E.B. Du Bois's adviser and teacher, and he told another of his students, Gertrude Stein, to reject nothing -- that rejecting anything was the beginning of the end for an intellectual. One of the great figures in mysticism, James coined the phrase "stream of consciousness."]]> 656 Robert D. Richardson Jr. 0618919899 Marc 4 4.33 2006 William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
author: Robert D. Richardson Jr.
name: Marc
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2020/01/01
date added: 2020/02/08
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]]> 2312 11830394
The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.]]> 561 Kim Stanley Robinson 0316098124 Marc 3 3.50 2012 2312
author: Kim Stanley Robinson
name: Marc
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2019/12/31
date added: 2019/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63]]> 99199 Parting the Waters is more than a biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the decade preceding his emergence as a national figure. This 1000-page effort, which won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, profiles the key players & events that helped shape the American social landscape following WWII but before the civil-rights movement of the 60s reached its climax. Branch then goes a step further, endeavoring to explain how the struggles evolved as they did by probing the influences of the main actors while discussing the manner in which events conspired to create fertile ground for change. Also analyzing the beginnings of black self-consciousness, this book maps the structure of segregation & bigotry in America between '54 & '63. The author considers the constantly changing behavior of those in Washington with regard to the injustice of offical racism operating in many states at this time.
Forerunner: Vernon Johns
Rockefeller and Ebenezer
Niebuhr and the Pool Tables
First Trombone
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
A Taste of the World
The Quickening
Shades of Politics
A Pawn of History
The Kennedy Transition
Baptism on Wheels
The Summer of Freedom Rides
Moses in McComb, King in Kansas City
Almost Christmas in Albany
Hoover's Triangle and King's Machine
The Fireman's Last Reprieve
The Fall of Ole Miss
To Birmingham
Greenwood and Birmingham Jail
The Children's Miracle
Firestorm
The March on Washington
Crossing Over: Nightmares and Dreams]]> 1062 Taylor Branch 0333529456 Marc 5 4.33 1988 Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63
author: Taylor Branch
name: Marc
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/01
date added: 2019/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[We Have Always Lived in the Castle]]> 89724 Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.]]> 152 Shirley Jackson 0143039970 Marc 4 3.93 1962 We Have Always Lived in the Castle
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Marc
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2019/11/01
date added: 2019/12/31
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]]> The Tiger's Wife 11784464 The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.� But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her—the legend of the tiger’s wife.]]> 338 Téa Obreht 0385343841 Marc 3 3.47 2011 The Tiger's Wife
author: Téa Obreht
name: Marc
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2014/03/01
date added: 2019/11/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety]]> 6452798 A myth-shattering exposé of America’s nuclear weapons

Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved—and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten.

Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.

Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America’s nuclear age.]]> 656 Eric Schlosser 1594202273 Marc 4 4.24 2013 Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
author: Eric Schlosser
name: Marc
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2019/09/01
date added: 2019/11/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Swerve: How the World Became Modern]]> 13707734
Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book—the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age—fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.]]> 356 Stephen Greenblatt 0393343405 Marc 3 3.88 2011 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
author: Stephen Greenblatt
name: Marc
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2019/08/01
date added: 2019/08/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man]]> 29435 640 Garry Wills 0618134328 Marc 5 4.22 1969 Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man
author: Garry Wills
name: Marc
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/01
date added: 2019/08/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Magician’s Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #6)]]> 65605
Narnia... a land where the woods are thick and cold, where Talking Beasts come to life—an entirely new world where adventure begins.

One cold, wet summer in London, Digory and Polly meet and become fast friends. Their lives take a sudden turn when Digory’s Uncle Andrew, who fancies himself a magician, sends them hurtling to... somewhere else. They arrive in Narnia, just as it is born from the song of the great Lion, Aslan. Along the way, they encounter the evil sorceress Jadis, whose dark magic threatens everything. After a whirlwind adventure, they finally find their way back home.]]> 221 C.S. Lewis 0060764902 Marc 5 4.06 1955 The Magician’s Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #6)
author: C.S. Lewis
name: Marc
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/01
date added: 2019/08/04
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]]> London Fields 401248
First published in 1989, LONDON FIELDS is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded millennium approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole� of sex and self-loathing, attempts to orchestrate her own extinction, choosing her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young—a writer suffering from a long bout of writer’s block—stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, LONDON FIELDS is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)]]> 470 Martin Amis 0679730346 Marc 4 3.66 1989 London Fields
author: Martin Amis
name: Marc
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1989
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/07/29
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]]> Sabrina 37533587 How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Rate your overall mood from 1 to 5, 1 being poor. Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?

When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and the boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina’s grieving sister, Sandra, struggles to fill her days as she waits in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation shown through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.

The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. Presenting an indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake-news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.]]> 204 Nick Drnaso 177046316X Marc 4 3.83 2018 Sabrina
author: Nick Drnaso
name: Marc
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/06/29
date added: 2019/06/29
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