Marty's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 19 Mar 2025 20:48:48 -0700 60 Marty's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)]]> 61812836 Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.]]> 336 Colson Whitehead 0385545150 Marty 5 fiction, noir 3.82 2023 Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2)
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Marty
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld]]> 59571998 From T. J. English, the New York Times bestselling author of Havana Nocturne, comes the epic, scintillating narrative of the interconnected worlds of jazz and organized crime in 20th century America.

Dangerous Rhythms tells the symbiotic story of jazz and the underworld: a relationship fostered in some of 20th century America's most notorious vice districts. For the first half of the century mobsters and musicians enjoyed a mutually beneficial partnership. By offering artists like Louis Armstrong, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Ella Fitzgerald a stage, the mob, including major players Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and Charlie "Lucky" Luciano, provided opportunities that would not otherwise have existed.

Even so, at the heart of this relationship was a festering racial inequity. The musicians were mostly African American, and the clubs and means of production were owned by white men. It was a glorified plantation system that, over time, would find itself out of tune with an emerging Civil Rights movement. Some artists, including Louis Armstrong, believed they were safer and more likely to be paid fairly if they worked in "protected" joints. Others believed that playing in venues outside mob rule would make it easier to have control over their careers.

Through English's voluminous research and keen narrative skills, Dangerous Rhythms reveals this deeply fascinating slice of American history in all its sordid glory.


]]> 448 T.J. English 0063031418 Marty 4 non-fiction 4.12 2022 Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld
author: T.J. English
name: Marty
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> Dope Thief 5974786
But it can’t last forever. Eventually, they choose the wrong mark and walk out with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a heavy hitter, who is more than willing to kill to get his money back, is coming after them. Now Ray couldn’t care less about the score. He wants out—out of the scam, out of a life he feels like he never chose. Whether the victim of his latest job—not to mention his partner—will let him is another question entirely.

Dennis Tafoya brings a rich, passionate, and accomplished new voice to the explosive story of a small-time crook with everything to lose in Dope Thief, his outstanding hardboiled debut.]]> 291 Dennis Tafoya 031253115X Marty 4 fiction, noir 3.77 2009 Dope Thief
author: Dennis Tafoya
name: Marty
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Double Barrel Bluff (Shake Bouchon, #3)]]> 27064318 Edgar Award-nominated and USA Today-bestselling crime writer Lou Berney returns to his critically acclaimed thriller series starring former mob wheelman Shake Bouchon, who finds himself reluctantly involved in a high-stakes hostage rescue, among the mighty temples and shadowy underground of Cambodia.

During his years as a wheelman for the Armenian mob in Las Vegas, Shake Bouchon didn’t think of himself as the settling-down type. But now he’s happily married to Gina, the love of his life—and former adversary—in Indiana, of all places.

The great thing about Bloomington, for two people with exceptionally checkered pasts, is that everyone is nice and no one knows them. Until the day a brutal Armenian thug who has always hated Shake shows up in his backyard. He demands that Shake help him find the missing mob boss, the pakhan—the dangerous and beautiful Alexandra “Lexy� Ilandryan, who also happens to be Shake’s ex-girlfriend.

Shake’s got a lot of history with Lexy, so he reluctantly agrees to travel to Siem Reap, Cambodia, where she was last seen. Once there, he finds himself in a predatory underworld of Cambodian gangsters, mob politics, and opportunistic expats, where the stakes aren’t clear and everyone is looking to gain. With only the help of a clairvoyant hippie and the Armenian thug, Shake becomes involved in a high-stakes negotiation for Lexy that might cost him his own life. But perhaps most threatening of all is Gina’s wrath when she arrives in Cambodia intent on saving Shake from himself—and from all the people trying to kill him.

With Lou Berney’s trademark wit, flawless plotting, vibrant locale, and memorable characters, Double Barrel Bluff is another unputdownable, globetrotting adventure.]]> 320 Lou Berney 006229248X Marty 0 to-read 3.94 2016 Double Barrel Bluff (Shake Bouchon, #3)
author: Lou Berney
name: Marty
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Riot Baby 43719523
Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.]]> 167 Tochi Onyebuchi 1250214769 Marty 4 dystopian 3.72 2020 Riot Baby
author: Tochi Onyebuchi
name: Marty
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: dystopian
review:
This book made me realize that the most frightening dystopian novels aren’t set in the faraway future, but in a time we recognize as just around the corner. What a powerful vision this book delivers.
]]> Southern Man (Penn Cage, #7) 58884700
As the stunned cities of Natchez and Bienville reel, antebellum plantation homes continue to burn and the deadly attacks are claimed by a Black radical group as historic acts of justice. Panic sweeps through the tourist communities, driving them inexorably toward a race war.

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

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

In Southern Man, Greg Iles returns to the riveting style and historic depth that made the Natchez Burning trilogy a searing masterpiece and hurls the narrative fifteen years forward into our current moment—where America itself teeters on the brink of anarchy.]]> 966 Greg Iles 0062824694 Marty 4 fiction, noir 3.92 2024 Southern Man (Penn Cage, #7)
author: Greg Iles
name: Marty
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism]]> 205478771
This engrossing deep dive exposes how the shadowy global system of offshore finance fuels economic crises and austerity while also undermining democracy and the rule of law. Sociologist Brooke Harrington trained as an offshore wealth manager then spent years immersed in tax havens around the world, observing and interviewing the experts who keep the secrets and protect the fortunes of the global ultra-rich. She shows what offshore finance costs all of us, and how it has colonized the world—not on behalf of any one country, but to benefit a largely invisible empire of a few thousand billionaires who help themselves to the best society has to offer while sticking us with the bill. As politicians struggle to address the deepening economic and political inequality destabilizing the world, Harrington’s exposé of the offshore system is a vital resource for understanding the most pressing crises of our time.]]> 176 Brooke Harrington 1324064943 Marty 0 to-read 3.94 2024 Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism
author: Brooke Harrington
name: Marty
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> On Grand Strategy 35746278
John Lewis Gaddis, the distinguished historian of the Cold War, has for almost two decades co-taught grand strategy at Yale University with his colleagues Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy. Now, in On Grand Strategy, Gaddis reflects on what he has learned. In chapters extending from the ancient world through World War II, Gaddis assesses grand strategic theory and practice in Herodotus, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Octavian/Augustus, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Philip II, the American Founding Fathers, Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Isaiah Berlin. On Grand Strategy applies the sharp insights and wit readers have come to expect from Gaddis to times, places, and people he's never written about before. For anyone interested in the art of leadership, On Grand Strategy is, in every way, a master class.]]> 368 John Lewis Gaddis 1594203512 Marty 4 non-fiction, tradecraft 3.74 2018 On Grand Strategy
author: John Lewis Gaddis
name: Marty
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: non-fiction, tradecraft
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party]]> 123852108
Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol provide timely insight into the relationship between the decline of unions and the shift of working-class voters away from Democrats. Drawing on interviews, union newsletters, and ethnographic analysis, they pinpoint the significance of eroding local community ties and identities. Using western Pennsylvania as a case study, Newman and Skocpol argue that union members� loyalty to Democratic candidates was as much a product of the group identity that unions fostered as it was a response to the Democratic Party’s economic policies. As the social world around organized labor dissipated, conservative institutions like gun clubs, megachurches, and other Republican-leaning groups took its place.

Rust Belt Union Blues sheds new light on why so many union members have dramatically changed their party politics. It makes a compelling case that Democrats are unlikely to rebuild credibility in places like western Pennsylvania unless they find new ways to weave themselves into the daily lives of workers and their families.]]> 328 Lainey Newman 0231208820 Marty 0 to-read 4.20 Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party
author: Lainey Newman
name: Marty
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Politics of Public Pensions: Parties, State Governments, and Unions]]> 221502932
Carolyn Abott examines the historical development of public sector pensions, emphasizing the sociopolitical factors that have shaped their evolution and the ongoing debates about their sustainability. She uncovers the political and economic considerations that influence pension policy, highlighting the tensions among public employees, governments, and taxpayers. Abott also addresses the broader implications for economic inequality and intergenerational equity, offering a distinctive perspective on the intersection of public finance and political power.

The Politics of Public Pensions concludes with recommendations for reform that balance the needs of retirees with the fiscal realities faced by governments, providing a roadmap for a sustainable and equitable future. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this rigorous book delivers essential insights for policy makers, scholars, and anyone interested in public finance.]]> 304 Carolyn Abott 0231214227 Marty 0 to-read 0.0 The Politics of Public Pensions: Parties, State Governments, and Unions
author: Carolyn Abott
name: Marty
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Small Mercies 61812308 The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River —an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston’s history.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,� the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.]]> 303 Dennis Lehane 0062129481 Marty 4 fiction, noir 4.22 2023 Small Mercies
author: Dennis Lehane
name: Marty
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/06
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

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

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

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Marty 5 non-fiction 4.52 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Marty
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/13
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> Dark Ride 86033989
Twenty-one-year-old Hardy “Hardly� Reed—good-natured, easygoing, usually stoned—is drifting through life. A minimum-wage scare actor at an amusement park, he avoids unnecessary effort and unrealistic ambitions.

Then one day he notices two children, around six or seven, sitting all alone on a bench. Hardly checks if they’re okay and sees injuries on both children. Someone is hurting these kids.

He reports the incident to Child Protective Service.

That should be the end of it. After all, Hardly's not even good at looking out for himself so the last thing he wants to do is look out for anyone else. But he's haunted by the two kids, his heart breaking for them. And the more research he does the less he trusts that Child Protective Services —understaffed and overworked—will do anything about it.

That leaves…Hardly. He is probably the last person you’d ever want to count on. But those two kids have nobody else but him. Hardly has to do what's right and help them.

For the first time in his life, Hardly decides to fight for something. This might be the one point in his entire life, he realizes, that is the entire point of his life. He will help those kids.

At first, trying to gather evidence that will force the proper authorities to intervene, Hardly is a total disaster. Gradually, with assistance from unexpected allies, he develops investigative skills and discovers he’s smarter and more capable than he ever imagined.

But Hardly also discovers that the situation is more dangerous than he ever expected. The abusive father who has been hurting these children isn’t just a lawyer—he also runs a violent drug-dealing operation. The mother claims she wants to escape with the kids—but Hardly isn't sure he can trust her.

Faced with a different version of himself than he has ever known, Hardly refuses to give up. But his commitment to saving these kids from further harm might end up getting the kids, and Hardly himself, killed.]]> 244 Lou Berney 0062663860 Marty 4 fiction, noir 3.78 2023 Dark Ride
author: Lou Berney
name: Marty
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/05
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> Cahokia Jazz 75584918 Golden Hill.

In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.

It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on—a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city's secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.

The multiple-award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly created, richly pleasure-giving, epically scaled tale set in the golden age of wicked entertainments.]]> 496 Francis Spufford 0571336876 Marty 4 fiction, noir 3.92 2023 Cahokia Jazz
author: Francis Spufford
name: Marty
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/27
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> Comrade Koba 53929997 A tight, captivating story of a naive child’s encounters with a Soviet dictator, the 20th novel by Robert Littell Leon Rozental—ten and a half, intellectually precocious, and possessing a disarming candor—is suddenly alone after the death of his nuclear physicist father and the arrest of his mother during the Stalinist purge of Jewish doctors. Now on his own and hiding from the NKVD in the secret rooms of the House on the Embankment, the massive building in Moscow where many Soviet officials and apparatchiks live and work, Leon starts to explore. One day, after following a passageway, Leon meets Koba, an old man whose apartment is protected by several guards. Koba is a high-ranking Soviet official with troubling insight into the thoughts and machinations of Comrade Stalin. In this taut and layered novel, New York Times bestselling author Robert Littell deploys his deep knowledge of this complex period in Russian history and masterful talent for captivating storytelling to create a nuanced portrayal of the Soviet dictator, showing Stalin’s human side and his simultaneous total disregard for and ignorance of the suffering he inflicted on the Russian people. The charm and spontaneity of young Leon make him an irresistible narrator—and not unlike Holden Caulfield, whom he admits to identifying with—caught in the spider’s web of the story woven by this enigmatic old man.]]> 176 Robert Littell 1647000033 Marty 4 fiction 3.88 2020 Comrade Koba
author: Robert Littell
name: Marty
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/15
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Wandering Stars 174147294
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.]]> 315 Tommy Orange 0593318250 Marty 4 fiction 3.83 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Marty
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/21
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Marty 5 fiction 4.23 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Marty
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Music of What Happens (Cecil Younger, #3)]]> 914416
Younger's got the child custody case from hell, and a client to match.Shrill, confrontational, and obsessed, Priscilla DeAngelo is sure her ex is conspiring
with a state senator to wrest her son from her.When she storms off to Juneau for a showdown, Younger's custody case swiftly turns into a murder.Fired from her defense team, Younger stays with the investigation.He's not sure what keeps him bulldogging the case--Priscilla's sister, his lost love; his regard
for truth as a rare commodity; or the head injury Priscilla's ex gave him--but he won't let go until it's solved.

But this time, the truth is less likely to set him free than to get him
killed....]]> 272 John Straley 0553572059 Marty 4 fiction, noir 3.66 1996 The Music of What Happens (Cecil Younger, #3)
author: John Straley
name: Marty
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Damsel (Alan Grofield, #1)]]> 447208 183 Richard Stark 0881501565 Marty 2 noir Not his best 3.61 1967 The Damsel (Alan Grofield, #1)
author: Richard Stark
name: Marty
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1967
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves: noir
review:
Not his best
]]> One-Shot Harry 58658349 274 Gary Phillips 1641292911 Marty 0 noir 3.36 One-Shot Harry
author: Gary Phillips
name: Marty
average rating: 3.36
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves: noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gangsterland (Gangsterland, #1)]]> 24402503
A few surgeries and some intensive training later, and Sal Cupertine is gone, disappeared into the identity of Rabbi David Cohen. Leading his growing congregation in Las Vegas, overseeing the population and the temple and the new cemetery, Rabbi Cohen feels his wicked past slipping away from him, surprising even himself as he spouts quotes from the Torah or the Old Testament. Yet, as it turns out, the Mafia isn't quite done with him yet. Soon the new cemetery is being used as both a money and body-laundering scheme for the Chicago family. And that rogue FBI agent on his trail, seeking vengeance for the murder of his three fellow agents, isn't going to let Sal fade so easily into the desert.

Gangsterland is the wickedly dark and funny new novel by a writer at the height of his power � a morality tale set in a desert landscape as ruthless and barren as those who inhabit it.]]> 400 Tod Goldberg 1619025787 Marty 0 to-read 3.90 2014 Gangsterland (Gangsterland, #1)
author: Tod Goldberg
name: Marty
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Winter Counts 48678117 A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx.

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.]]> 325 David Heska Wanbli Weiden 0062968947 Marty 0 to-read 3.81 2020 Winter Counts
author: David Heska Wanbli Weiden
name: Marty
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Cemetery Road 6879697 224 Gar Anthony Haywood 0727868519 Marty 0 to-read 3.74 2009 Cemetery Road
author: Gar Anthony Haywood
name: Marty
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All the Sinners Bleed 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction� (The Washington Post).]]> 338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 Marty 4 fiction, noir 4.19 2023 All the Sinners Bleed
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Marty
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/11
date added: 2024/03/10
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis]]> 60141696 From award-winning, New York Times bestselling historian Adam Hochschild, a fast-paced, revelatory new account of a pivotal but neglected period in American history: World War I and its stormy aftermath, when bloodshed and repression on the home front nearly doomed American democracy.

The nation was on the brink. Angry mobs burned Black churches to the ground and chased down pacifists and immigrants. Well over a thousand men and women were jailed solely for what they had written or said, even in private. An astonishing 250,000 people joined a nationwide vigilante group—sponsored by the Department of Justice.

This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by torture, censorship, and killings. Adam Hochschild brings to life this troubled period, which stretched from 1917 to 1921, through the interwoven tales of a colorful cast of characters: some well-known, among them the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson and the ambitious young bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover; others less familiar, such as the fiery antiwar advocate Kate Richards O’Hare and the outspoken Leo Wendell, a labor radical who was frequently arrested and wholly trusted by his comrades—but who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent.

A groundbreaking work of narrative history, American Midnight recalls these horrifying yet inspiring four years, when some brave Americans strove to keep their fractured country democratic, while ruthless others stimulated toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law—poisons that feel ominously familiar today.]]> 422 Adam Hochschild 0358455464 Marty 4 labor, non-fiction 4.16 2022 American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis
author: Adam Hochschild
name: Marty
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/24
date added: 2024/02/24
shelves: labor, non-fiction
review:

]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Marty 4 dystopian, fiction 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Marty
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/20
date added: 2024/02/20
shelves: dystopian, fiction
review:

]]> Two Boys at Breakwater 14949627 308 Boston Teran 1567030165 Marty 0 to-read 4.31 2021 Two Boys at Breakwater
author: Boston Teran
name: Marty
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> crippled jack 61401701
But the boy did not die. Fate and history merged in his will to live. He was found by a horseman, known as The Coffin Maker, who was at war with the profiteers of the day, the Czars of business, the lords of industry. The Coffin Maker becomes the star on the boy's horizon, and the boy will grow to become an expert marksman known as Crippled Jack who comes of age during the labor wars consuming the West and whose friends will be enemies of the state. He will come to love a woman who escaped the orphan trains and is a reporter covering the bloodshed sweeping the nation. Together they will usher in a new America. An America that has every intention of turning the country upside down, so that it may stand right side up.]]> 280 Boston Teran 1567031013 Marty 0 to-read 4.08 2022 crippled jack
author: Boston Teran
name: Marty
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies]]> 7907138 384 Judith Stein 030011818X Marty 4 financial, non-fiction 3.72 2010 Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies
author: Judith Stein
name: Marty
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: financial, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them]]> 61423989
The Roaring Twenties--the Jazz Age--has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows � their message endorsed from the pulpits of local churches, spread at family picnics and town celebrations. Judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman � Madge Oberholtzer � who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history.]]> 432 Timothy Egan 0735225265 Marty 0 to-read 4.33 2023 A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
author: Timothy Egan
name: Marty
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism]]> 62952278 How the Clinton administration betrayed its progressive principles and capitulated to the right

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he ended twelve years of Republican rule and seemed poised to enact a progressive transformation of the US economy, touching everything from health care to trade to labor relations. Yet by the time he left office, the nation’s economic and social policies had instead lurched dramatically rightward, exacerbating the inequalities so troubling in our own time. This book reveals why Clinton’s expansive agenda was a fabulous failure, and why its demise still haunts us today.

Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein show how the administration’s progressive reformers―people like Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, Laura Tyson, and Joseph Stiglitz―were stymied by a new world of global capitalism that heightened Wall Street influence, undermined domestic manufacturing, and eviscerated the labor movement. Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Al Gore proved champions of this financialized world. Meanwhile, Clinton divided his own party when he relied on Republican votes to overhaul welfare, liberalize trade, and deregulate the banking and telecommunications industries. Even the economic boom Clinton ushered in―which tamed unemployment and sent the stock market soaring in what Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen termed a ”fabulous decade”―ended with a series of exploding asset bubbles that his neoliberal economic advisors neither foresaw nor prevented.

A Fabulous Failure is a study of ideas in action, some powerfully persuasive, others illusionary and self-defeating. It explains why and how the Clinton presidency’s progressive statecraft floundered in a world where the labor movement was weak, civil rights forces quiescent, and corporate America ever more powerful.]]> 504 Nelson Lichtenstein 0691245509 Marty 0 to-read 4.13 2023 A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
author: Nelson Lichtenstein
name: Marty
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/20
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 29496076
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

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

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

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 359 David Grann 0385534256 Marty 0 to-read 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Marty
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/16
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Myth of Private Equity: An Inside Look at Wall Street’s Transformative Investments]]> 57880106 242 Jeffrey Hooke 0231552823 Marty 0 to-read 3.93 The Myth of Private Equity: An Inside Look at Wall Street’s Transformative Investments
author: Jeffrey Hooke
name: Marty
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Liberation Day 60471573 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 perfectly tuned--Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply 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 future, that reminds us of our obligations to our ideals, ourselves, and each other. 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. And 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.

Together, these nine subversive, profound, and essential stories coalesce into a case for viewing the world with the same generosity and clear-eyed attention as Saunders does, even in the most absurd of circumstances.]]> 256 George Saunders 0525509593 Marty 4 fiction, shortstories 3.99 2022 Liberation Day
author: George Saunders
name: Marty
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/21
date added: 2023/11/21
shelves: fiction, shortstories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America]]> 63068853 A Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize­­­–winning and New York Times bestselling financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson and financial policy analyst Joshua Rosner investigate the insidious world of private equity in this “masterpiece of investigative journalism� (Christopher Leonard, bestselling author of Kochland)—revealing how it puts our entire economy and us at risk.

Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor and how our style of capitalism has failed to provide a living wage for so many Americans. But nothing has fully detailed the outsized role a small cohort of elite financiers has played in this inequality. Pulitzer Prize­–winning journalist and bestselling author Gretchen Morgenson, with coauthor Joshua Rosner, unmask the small group of celebrated Wall Street financiers, and their government enablers, who use excessive debt and dubious practices to undermine our nation’s economy for their own private equity.

These Are the Plunderers traces the thirty-year history of corporate takeovers in America and private equity’s increasing dominance. Morgenson and Rosner investigate some of the biggest names in private equity, exposing how they buy companies, load them with debt, and then bleed them of assets and profits. All while prosecutors and regulators stand idly by.

The authors show how companies absorbed by private equity have worse outcomes for everyone but the employees are more likely to lose their jobs or their benefits; companies are more likely to go bankrupt; patients are more likely to have higher healthcare costs; residents of nursing homes are more likely to die faster; towns struggle when private equity buys their main businesses, crippling the local economy; and school teachers, firefighters, medical technicians, and other public workers are more likely to have lower returns on their pensions because of the fees private equity extracts from their investments. In other we are all worse off because of private equity.

These Are the Plunderers is a “meticulous and devastating takedown of a powerful force in Western capitalism� (Brad Stone, bestselling author of Amazon Unbound) that exposes the greed and pillaging in private equity, revealing the many ways these billionaires have bled the economy, and, in turn, us.]]> 391 Gretchen Morgenson 1982191309 Marty 0 to-read 3.65 These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America
author: Gretchen Morgenson
name: Marty
average rating: 3.65
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America]]> 62874267
Private equity surrounds us. Firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR are among the largest employers in America and hold assets that rival those of small countries. Yet few understand what these firms are or how they work.

In Plunder , Brendan Ballou explains how private equity has reshaped American business by raising prices, reducing quality, cutting jobs, and shifting resources from productive to unproductive parts of the economy. Ballou vividly illustrates how many private equity firms buy up retailers, medical practices, prison services, nursing-home chains, and mobile-home parks, among other businesses, using little of their own money to do it and avoiding debt and liability for their actions. Forced to take on huge debts and pay extractive fees, companies purchased by private equity firms are often left bankrupt, or shells of their former selves, with consequences to communities that long depended on them.

Perhaps most startling is Ballou’s insight into how this is happening with the active support of various arms of the government. But, as Ballou reveals in an agenda for reining in the industry, private equity can be stopped from wreaking further havoc.
]]> 368 Brendan Ballou 1541702107 Marty 0 to-read 4.08 2023 Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America
author: Brendan Ballou
name: Marty
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/25
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]]> Hamnet 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Marty 4 4.16 2020 Hamnet
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Marty
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/25
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review:

]]> Moonrise Over New Jessup 60831915 Winner of the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, a thought-provoking and enchanting debut about a Black woman doing whatever it takes to protect all she loves at the beginning of the civil rights movement in Alabama.

It’s 1957, and after leaving the only home she has ever known, Alice Young steps off the bus into the all-Black town of New Jessup, Alabama, where residents have largely rejected integration as the means for Black social advancement. Instead, they seek to maintain, and fortify, the community they cherish on their “side of the woods.� In this place, Alice falls in love with Raymond Campbell, whose clandestine organizing activities challenge New Jessup’s longstanding status quo and could lead to the young couple’s expulsion—or worse—from the home they both hold dear. But as Raymond continues to push alternatives for enhancing New Jessup’s political power, Alice must find a way to balance her undying support for his underground work with her desire to protect New Jessup from the rising pressure of upheaval from inside, and outside, their side of town.

Jamila Minnicks’s debut novel is both a celebration of Black joy and a timely examination of the opposing viewpoints that attended desegregation in America. Readers of Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Robert Jones, Jr.’s The Prophets will love Moonrise Over New Jessup.]]> 336 Jamila Minnicks 1643752464 Marty 0 to-read 3.80 2023 Moonrise Over New Jessup
author: Jamila Minnicks
name: Marty
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/23
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]]> Anywhere You Run 60254209 All Her Little Secrets comes yet another gripping, suspenseful novel where, after the murder of a white man in Jim Crow Mississippi, two Black sisters run away to different parts of the country . . . but can they escape the secrets they left behind?

It's the summer of 1964 and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-two year old Violet Richards finds herself in more trouble than she's ever been in her life. Suffering a brutal attack of her own, she kills the man responsible. But with the color of Violet's skin, there is no way she can escape Jim Crow justice in Jackson, Mississippi. Before anyone can find the body or finger her as the killer, she decides to run. With the help of her white beau, Violet escapes. But desperation and fear leads her to hide out in the small rural town of Chillicothe, Georgia, unaware that danger may be closer than she thinks.

Back in Jackson, Marigold, Violet's older sister, has dreams of attending law school. Working for the Mississippi Summer Project, she has been trying to use her smarts to further the cause of the Black vote. But Marigold is in a different kind of trouble: she's pregnant and unmarried. After news of the murder brings the police to her door, Marigold sees no choice but to flee Jackson too. She heads North seeking the promise of a better life and no more segregation. But has she made a terrible choice that threatens her life and that of her unborn child?

Two sisters on the run--one from the law, the other from social shame. What they don't realize is that there's a man hot on their trail. This man has his own brand of dark secrets and a disturbing motive for finding the sisters that is unknown to everyone but him . . .]]> 400 Wanda M. Morris 0063082500 Marty 0 to-read 4.00 2022 Anywhere You Run
author: Wanda M. Morris
name: Marty
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Red as Blood (An Áróra Investigation, #2)]]> 60818033 Áróra becomes involved in the search for an Icelandic woman who disappeared from her home while making dinner, as she continues to hunt for her missing sister. The second breathtaking instalment in the chilling, addictive An Áróra Investigation series�

When entrepreneur Flosi arrives home for dinner one night, he discovers that his house has been ransacked, and his wife Gudrun missing. A letter on the kitchen table confirms that she has been kidnapped. If Flosi doesn’t agree to pay an enormous ransom, Gudrun will be killed.

Forbidden from contacting the police, he gets in touch with Áróra, who specialises in finding hidden assets, and she, alongside her detective friend Daniel, try to get to the bottom of the case without anyone catching on.

Meanwhile, Áróra and Daniel continue the puzzling, devastating search for Áróra’s sister Ísafold, who disappeared without trace. As fog descends, in a cold and rainy Icelandic autumn, the investigation becomes increasingly dangerous, and confusing.


Chilling, twisty and unbearably tense, Red as Blood is the second instalment in the riveting, addictive An Áróra Investigation series, and everything is at stake…]]> 315 Lilja Sigurðardóttir Marty 3 4.06 2020 Red as Blood (An Áróra Investigation, #2)
author: Lilja Sigurðardóttir
name: Marty
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/15
date added: 2023/08/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Titanium Noir (Titanium Noir #1)]]> 62052321 A virtuosic mashup of Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler by way of Marvel—the story of a detective investigating the murder of a Titan, one of society's most powerful, medically-enhanced elites.

"Cross-genre brilliance from the superbly talented Nick Harkaway." —William Gibson, New York Times best-selling author of Agency.

Cal Sounder is a detective working for the police on certain very sensitive cases. So when he's called in to investigate a homicide at a local apartment, he's surprised by the routineness of it all. But when he arrives on scene, Cal soon learns that the victim—Roddy Tebbit, an otherwise milquetoast techie—is well over seven feet tall. And although he doesn't look a day over thirty, he is ninety-one years old. Tebbit is a Titan—one of this dystopian, near-future society's genetically altered elites. And this case is definitely Cal's thing.

There are only a few thousand Titans worldwide, thanks to Stefan Tonfamecasca's discovery of the controversial T7 genetic therapy, which elevated his family to godlike status. T7 turns average humans into near-immortal distortions of themselves—with immense physical proportions to match their ostentatious, unreachable lifestyles. A dead Titan is big news . . . amurderedTitan is unimaginable. But these modified magnates are Cal's specialty. In fact, his own ex-girlfriend, Athena, is a Titan. And not justany—she is Stefan's daughter, heir to the massive Tonfamecasca empire.

As the murder investigation intensifies, Cal begins to unravel the complicated threads of what should have been a straightforward case, and it becomes clear he's on the trail of a crime whose roots run deep into the dark heart of the world.]]> 236 Nick Harkaway 0593535367 Marty 4 3.90 2023 Titanium Noir (Titanium Noir #1)
author: Nick Harkaway
name: Marty
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/03
date added: 2023/08/03
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]]> Another Country 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Marty 4 fiction 4.32 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: Marty
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2018/08/24
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: fiction
review:
It is hard to believe this novel was written in 1961. Baldwin was so far ahead of his contemporaries. In terms of their self-awareness and self-doubt, his characters would be believable as representatives of 1990s angst.
]]> How High We Go in the Dark 57850265
Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbours who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible.]]> 293 Sequoia Nagamatsu 0063072645 Marty 1 3.81 2022 How High We Go in the Dark
author: Sequoia Nagamatsu
name: Marty
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 1
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date added: 2023/07/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy]]> 57866205 The story of how economic reasoning came to dominate Washington between the 1960s and 1980s--and why it continues to constrain progressive ambitions today

For decades, Democratic politicians have frustrated progressives by tinkering around the margins of policy while shying away from truly ambitious change. What happened to bold political vision on the left, and what shrunk the very horizons of possibility? In Thinking like an Economist, Elizabeth Popp Berman tells the story of how a distinctive way of thinking--an "economic style of reasoning"--became dominant in Washington between the 1960s and the 1980s and how it continues to dramatically narrow debates over public policy today.

Introduced by liberal technocrats who hoped to improve government, this way of thinking was grounded in economics but also transformed law and policy. At its core was an economic understanding of efficiency, and its advocates often found themselves allied with Republicans and in conflict with liberal Democrats who argued for rights, equality, and limits on corporate power. By the Carter administration, economic reasoning had spread throughout government policy and laws affecting poverty, healthcare, antitrust, transportation, and the environment. Fearing waste and overspending, liberals reined in their ambitions for decades to come, even as Reagan and his Republican successors argued for economic efficiency only when it helped their own goals.

A compelling account that illuminates what brought American politics to its current state, Thinking like an Economist also offers critical lessons for the future. With the political left resurgent today, Democrats seem poised to break with the past--but doing so will require abandoning the shibboleth of economic efficiency and successfully advocating new ways of thinking about policy.]]> 344 Elizabeth Popp Berman 0691167389 Marty 0 to-read 3.93 2022 Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy
author: Elizabeth Popp Berman
name: Marty
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Station Eleven 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Marty 4 dystopian, fiction 4.05 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Marty
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/28
date added: 2022/12/28
shelves: dystopian, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capturing Finance: Arbitrage and Social Domination]]> 55161443 176 Carolyn Hardin 1478014296 Marty 0 to-read 4.50 Capturing Finance: Arbitrage and Social Domination
author: Carolyn Hardin
name: Marty
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Our Man in Havana 133394 Graham Greene's classic Cuban spy story, now with a new package and a new introduction

First published in 1959, Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates to this day. Conceived as one of Graham Greene's 'entertainments,' it tells of MI6's man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true.

]]> 220 Graham Greene 0140184937 Marty 4 fiction 3.94 1958 Our Man in Havana
author: Graham Greene
name: Marty
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/11
date added: 2022/12/11
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era]]> 58986869
The epochal shift toward neoliberalism--a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces--that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world. Today, the word "neoliberal" is often used to condemn a broad swath of policies, from prizing free market principles over people to advancing privatization programs in developing nations around the world.

To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order , these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades. As he shows, the neoliberal order that emerged in America in the 1970s fused ideas of deregulation with personal freedoms, open borders with cosmopolitanism, and globalization with the promise of increased prosperity for all. Along with tracing how this worldview emerged in America and grew to dominate the world, Gerstle explores the previously unrecognized extent to which its triumph was facilitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist allies. He is also the first to chart the story of the neoliberal order's fall, originating in the failed reconstruction of
Iraq and Great Recession of the Bush years and culminating in the rise of Trump and a reinvigorated Bernie Sanders-led American left in the 2010s.

An indispensable and sweeping re-interpretation of the last fifty years, this book illuminates how the ideology of neoliberalism became so infused in the daily life of an era, while probing what remains of that ideology and its political programs as America enters an uncertain future.]]> 432 Gary Gerstle 0197519644 Marty 4 non-fiction 4.18 The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
author: Gary Gerstle
name: Marty
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/04
date added: 2022/12/04
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism]]> 58885931 A powerful case that the economic shocks of the 1970s hastened both the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism by forcing governments to impose austerity on their own people.



Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century? In this pathbreaking study, Fritz Bartel argues that the answer to these questions is one and the same. The Cold War began as a competition between capitalist and communist governments to expand their social contracts as they raced to deliver their people a better life. But the economic shocks of the 1970s made promises of better living untenable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Energy and financial markets placed immense pressure on governments to discipline their social contracts. Rather than make promises, political leaders were forced to break them.

In a sweeping narrative, The Triumph of Broken Promises tells the story of how the pressure to break promises spurred the end of the Cold War. In the West, neoliberalism provided Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with the political and ideological tools to shut down industries, impose austerity, and favor the interests of capital over labor. But in Eastern Europe, revolutionaries like Lech Walesa in Poland resisted any attempt at imposing market discipline. Mikhail Gorbachev tried in vain to reform the Soviet system, but the necessary changes ultimately presented too great a challenge.

Faced with imposing economic discipline antithetical to communist ideals, Soviet-style governments found their legitimacy irreparably damaged. But in the West, politicians could promote austerity as an antidote to the excesses of ideological opponents, setting the stage for the rise of the neoliberal global economy.]]> 440 Fritz Bartel 0674976789 Marty 0 to-read 4.28 2022 The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism
author: Fritz Bartel
name: Marty
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/11/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> Five Decembers 57522883
This extraordinary novel is so much more than just a gripping crime story—it’s a story of survival against all odds, of love and loss and the human cost of war. Spanning the entirety of World War II, Five Decembers is a beautiful, masterful, powerful novel that will live in your memory forever.]]> 429 James Kestrel 1789096111 Marty 0 to-read 4.38 2021 Five Decembers
author: James Kestrel
name: Marty
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America]]> 60372655
The Economy of Promises is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitch together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debtors to repay money they have borrowed from lenders. Each promise poses a fundamental why does the lender trust the borrower?

The book tracks the dramatic shift from personal qualitative judgments to the impersonal quantitative measurements of credit scores and ratings, which make lending on a much greater scale possible. It discusses how lending is shaped by the shadow of failure, and the possibility that borrowers will break their promises and fail to repay their debts. It reveals how credit markets have been shaped by public policy, regulatory changes, and various political factors. And, crucially, it explains how credit interacts with economic inequality, contributing to vast and enduring racial and gender differences―which are only exacerbated by the widespread use of credit scores and ratings for “big data� and algorithmic decision-making.

Bringing to life the complicated and abstract terrain of human interaction we call the economy, The Economy of Promises is an important study of the tangle of indebtedness that, for better or worse, shapes and defines American lives.]]> 408 Bruce G. Carruthers 0691235384 Marty 0 to-read 4.33 The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America
author: Bruce G. Carruthers
name: Marty
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capital Wars: The Rise of Global Liquidity]]> 52779586 Michael J. Howell Marty 0 to-read 4.22 Capital Wars: The Rise of Global Liquidity
author: Michael J. Howell
name: Marty
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/08/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> City of Orange 58862873
City of Orange is a novel that is both harrowing and heartfelt, charged with a speculative energy but grounded in intimate character study. It is a novel about coming to grips with the worst that has befallen us and finding our way home again.

This imaginative and affecting new novel is beloved, bestselling, and award-winning author David Yoon at his finest: thought-provoking and heart-piercing, by turns funny and challenging, and at all times deeply human.]]> 352 David Yoon 0593422163 Marty 4 3.35 2022 City of Orange
author: David Yoon
name: Marty
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/02
date added: 2022/06/02
shelves:
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]]> The Silence 53879204
Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of Covid-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace.

It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them from what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in North-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.

Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed.

What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination, and language been more illuminating and essential.]]> 117 Don DeLillo 1982164557 Marty 4 fiction 2.67 2020 The Silence
author: Don DeLillo
name: Marty
average rating: 2.67
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/26
date added: 2022/05/26
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Stone Arabia 10647326
In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,� says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family’s first defense against the world’s fragility. Friends die, their mother’s memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities seem to escalate.

Dana Spiotta has established herself as a “singularly powerful and provocative writer� (The Boston Globe) whose work is fiercely original. Stone Arabia—riveting, unnerving, and strangely beautiful—reexamines what it means to be an artist and redefines the ties that bind.]]> 235 Dana Spiotta 1451617968 Marty 4 fiction 3.39 2011 Stone Arabia
author: Dana Spiotta
name: Marty
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/23
date added: 2022/05/23
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Very British Ending (Catesby #5)]]> 26084780
As a hungry Britain freezes in the winter of 1947, a young cabinet minister negotiates a deal with Moscow trading Rolls-Royce jet engines for cattle fodder and wood. Both have made powerful enemies with long memories. The fates of the two men become entwined as one rises through MI6 and the other to Downing Street. It is the mid-1970s and a coup d’état is imminent.

'A Very British Ending' is the Wolf Hall of power games in modern Britain. Senior MI6 officers, Catesby and Bone, try to outwit a cabal of plotters trying to overthrow the Prime Minister. The author once again reveals the dark underside of the Secret State on both sides of the Atlantic.]]> 368 Edward Wilson Marty 4 fiction 3.87 2015 A Very British Ending (Catesby #5)
author: Edward Wilson
name: Marty
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/15
date added: 2022/05/15
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Find Your Way in the Dark (Sheldon Horowitz #1)]]> 53968527 368 Derek B. Miller 0358269601 Marty 4 fiction 4.08 2021 How to Find Your Way in the Dark (Sheldon Horowitz #1)
author: Derek B. Miller
name: Marty
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/09
date added: 2022/05/09
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Beautiful Ruins 11447921
A #1 New York Times bestseller, this “absolute masterpiece� (Richard Russo) is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and resurfaces fifty years later in Hollywood. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, this is a dazzling, yet deeply human roller coaster of a novel.

The acclaimed author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, Beautiful Ruins is gloriously inventive and constantly surprising—a story of flawed yet fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.]]> 337 Jess Walter 0061928127 Marty 4 fiction 3.67 2012 Beautiful Ruins
author: Jess Walter
name: Marty
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/04
date added: 2022/05/04
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Sun Down Motel 45885644
Upstate NY, 1982. Every small town like Fell, New York, has a place like the Sun Down Motel. Some customers are from out of town, passing through on their way to someplace better. Some are locals, trying to hide their secrets. Viv Delaney works as the night clerk to pay for her move to New York City. But something isn't right at the Sun Down, and before long she's determined to uncover all of the secrets hidden…]]> 327 Simone St. James 0440000173 Marty 3 3.99 2020 The Sun Down Motel
author: Simone St. James
name: Marty
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/23
date added: 2022/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (Princeton Studies in American Politics)]]> 42585076 How the American government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities

Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but issues of government credit have been part of American life since the nation's founding. From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, American Bonds examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. Sarah Quinn shows that since the Westward expansion, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage America's complex social divides, and politicians and officials across the political spectrum have turned to land sales, home ownership, and credit to provide economic opportunity without the appearance of market intervention or direct wealth redistribution.

Highly technical systems, securitization, and credit programs have been fundamental to how Americans determined what they could and should owe one another. Over time, government officials embraced credit as a political tool that allowed them to navigate an increasingly complex and fractured political system, affirming the government's role as a consequential and creative market participant. Neither intermittent nor marginal, credit programs supported the growth of powerful industries, from railroads and farms to housing and finance; have been used for disaster relief, foreign policy, and military efforts; and were promoters of amortized mortgages, lending abroad, venture capital investment, and mortgage securitization.

Illuminating America's market-heavy social policies, American Bonds illustrates how political institutions became involved in the nation's lending practices.]]> 312 Sarah L. Quinn 0691156751 Marty 0 to-read 3.94 American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (Princeton Studies in American Politics)
author: Sarah L. Quinn
name: Marty
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy]]> 53491553 368 Adam Tooze 0241485878 Marty 4 3.80 2021 Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy
author: Adam Tooze
name: Marty
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/01
date added: 2022/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933]]> 8069653
The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the “roaring twenties� looked very different. Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and repression.

Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s.

"In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition.
—From the new introduction by Frances Fox Piven]]> 592 Irving Bernstein 1608460630 Marty 4 labor, non-fiction 3.91 1960 The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933
author: Irving Bernstein
name: Marty
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1960
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/01
date added: 2022/03/01
shelves: labor, non-fiction
review:

]]> When Ghosts Come Home 56382097
When the roar of a low-flying plane awakens him in the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes knows something strange is happening at the nearby airfield on the coast of North Carolina. But nothing can prepare him for what he finds: a large airplane has crash-landed and is now sitting sideways on the runway, and there are no signs of a pilot or cargo. When the body of a local man is discovered—shot dead and lying on the grass near the crash site—Winston begins a murder investigation that will change the course of his life and the fate of the community that he has sworn to protect.

Everyone is a suspect, including the dead man. As rumors and accusations fly, long-simmering racial tensions explode overnight, and Winston, whose own tragic past has followed him like a ghost, must do his duty while facing the painful repercussions of old decisions. Winston also knows that his days as sheriff may be numbered. He’s up for re-election against a corrupt and well-connected challenger, and his deputies are choosing sides. As if these events weren’t troubling enough, he must finally confront his daughter Colleen, who has come home grieving a shattering loss she cannot fully articulate.

As the suspense builds and this compelling mystery unfolds, Wiley Cash delves deep into the hearts of these richly drawn, achingly sympathetic characters to reveal the nobility of an ordinary man struggling amidst terrifying, extraordinary circumstances.]]> 290 Wiley Cash 0062312669 Marty 4 fiction 3.63 2021 When Ghosts Come Home
author: Wiley Cash
name: Marty
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/10
date added: 2022/02/10
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America]]> 55551871
Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions� actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.

Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.]]> 264 Caley Horan 022678438X Marty 0 to-read 4.14 Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America
author: Caley Horan
name: Marty
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/02/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States]]> 57679150 A leading economic historian traces the evolution of American capitalism from the colonial era through the 2008 crash--and argues that we've come to yet another turning point.

Inspired by the market crash and great recession of 2008, Jonathan Levy began teaching a course to help his students understand everything that had happened in the economy to get to that point. Working from the beginning of U.S. history to the present, he found that capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages, separated by dramatic cataclysms that each forced a major turn in how the economy operated. In an ambitious, single-volume history of the United States, he reveals how the country's economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life.

The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era, the founding of the United States, and up to the outbreak of t he Civil War, a period of history where economic growth and output was the result of the spread of trade, but also largely dependent on enslaved labor and severely limited by what could be drawn from the land beyond subsistence farming. The Age of Capital traces the impact of the first major leap in economic development following the Civil War: the Industrial Revolution, when capitalists set physical capital down in factories to produce commercial goods, fueled by labor moving into cities. But, investments in the new industrial economy led to great volatility, most dramatically with the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929. The Great Depression immediately sparked the Age of Control, when the government took on a more active role in the economy, first trying to jumpstart it and then funding military production in World War II. Skepticism of government intervention in the Cold War combined with recession and stagflation during the 1970s led to a crisis of industrial capitalism, and the withdrawal of political will for regulation. In the Age of Chaos that followed, the combination of deregulation and the growth of the finance industry created a booming economy for some but also striking inequalities and a lack of oversight that led directly to the crash of 2008.

Today, in the aftermath of the Age of Chaos and in the midst of severe political discord, the nature of capitalism in United States once again is at a crossroads. In Ages of American Capitalism, Jonathan Levy proves that, contrary to political dogma, capitalism in the United States has never been just one thing. Instead, it has morphed through the country's history--and it's likely changing again right now.]]> 944 Jonathan Levy 0812995023 Marty 5 financial, non-fiction 4.33 2021 Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States
author: Jonathan Levy
name: Marty
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/30
date added: 2022/01/30
shelves: financial, non-fiction
review:

]]> Velvet Was the Night 54746205
Mexico in the 1970s is a politically fraught land, even for Elvis, a goon with a passion for rock ’n� roll who knows more about kidney-smashing than intrigue. When Elvis is assigned to find Leonora, he begins a blood-soaked search for the woman—and his soul.

Swirling in parallel trajectories, Maite and Elvis attempt to discover the truth behind Leonora’s disappearance, encountering hitmen, government agents, and Russian spies. Because Mexico in the 1970s is a noir where life is cheap and the price of truth is high.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a simmering historical noir about a daydreaming secretary, a lonesome enforcer, and the mystery of the missing woman they’re both desperate to find.]]> 289 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593356829 Marty 4 fiction, noir 3.49 2021 Velvet Was the Night
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Marty
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/04
date added: 2022/01/04
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government under Capitalism]]> 17802038 256 Joshua Barkan 0816674272 Marty 0 to-read 4.08 2013 Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government under Capitalism
author: Joshua Barkan
name: Marty
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Lean on Pete 6713642
In Vlautin's third novel, Lean on Pete, he reveals the lives and choices of American youth like Charley Thompson who were failed by those meant to protect them and who were never allowed the chance to just be a kid.]]> 304 Willy Vlautin 0061456535 Marty 4 fiction, noir 4.06 2010 Lean on Pete
author: Willy Vlautin
name: Marty
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/30
date added: 2021/12/30
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America]]> 15861552
Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk s rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one s own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name financial services industry. Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system.

Amid the nineteenth-century s waning faith in God s providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. "Freaks of Fortune" is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.]]> 432 Jonathan Levy 0674047486 Marty 0 to-read 3.63 2012 Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America
author: Jonathan Levy
name: Marty
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street]]> 54696215
In the tradition of Barbarians at the Gate and The Big Short comes the riveting, multi-dimensional poker game between private equity firms and distressed debt hedge funds that played out from the Vegas Strip to Manhattan boardrooms to Chicago courthouses and even, for a moment, the halls of the United States Congress. On one side: relentless financial engineers Marc Rowan, David Sambur, and David Bonderman with their teams at Apollo Global Management and TPG Capital. On the other: superstar distressed debt investors Dave Miller and Ryan Mollett with their cohorts at the likes of Elliott Management, Oaktree Capital, and Appaloosa Management.

The Caesars bankruptcy put a twist on the old-fashioned casino heist. Through a $27 billion leveraged buyout and a dizzying string of financial engineering transactions, Apollo and TPG―in the midst of the post-Great Recession slump―had seemingly snatched every prime asset of the company from creditors, with the notable exception of Caesars Palace. But Caesars� hedge fund lenders and bondholders had scooped up the company’s paper for nickels and dimes. And with their own armies of lawyers and bankers, they were ready to do everything necessary to take back what they believed was theirs―if they could just stop their own infighting.

These modern financiers now dominate the scene in Corporate America as their fight-to-the-death mentality continues to shock workers, politicians, and broader society―and even each other.

In The Caesars Palace Coup, financial journalists Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap illuminate the brutal tactics of distressed debt mavens―vultures, as they are condemned―in the sale and purchase of even the biggest companies in the world with billions of dollars hanging in the balance.]]> 352 Sujeet Indap 163576677X Marty 4 financial, non-fiction 4.00 2021 The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street
author: Sujeet Indap
name: Marty
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/22
date added: 2021/12/22
shelves: financial, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Destroy All Monsters (Reckless, #3)]]> 57511004
Bestselling crime noir masters Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips bring us a new original graphic novel starring troublemaker-for-hire Ethan Reckless.

It's 1988 and Ethan has been hired for his strangest case yet: finding the secrets of a Los Angeles real estate mogul. How hard could that be, right? Only what starts as a deep dive into the life of a stranger will soon take a deadly turn, and find Ethan risking everything that still matters to him.

Another smash hit from the award-winning creators of RECKLESS, PULP, MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN JUNKIES, CRIMINAL, and KILL OR BE KILLED —and a must-have for all Brubaker and Phillips fans!]]> 144 Ed Brubaker 1534319247 Marty 0 to-read 4.29 2021 Destroy All Monsters (Reckless, #3)
author: Ed Brubaker
name: Marty
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Noor 57632292 From Africanfuturist luminary Okorafor comes a new science fiction novel of intense action and thoughtful rumination on biotechnology, destiny, and humanity in a near-future Nigeria.

Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was wrong. But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.

Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins. In a world where all things are streamed, everyone is watching the reckoning of the murderess and the terrorist and the saga of the wicked woman and mad man unfold. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn't so predictable. Expect the unaccepted.]]> 214 Nnedi Okorafor 0756416094 Marty 4 dystopian, fiction 3.76 2021 Noor
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Marty
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/18
date added: 2021/12/18
shelves: dystopian, fiction
review:

]]> The Talented Ribkins 32873790
What may or may not be useful to Johnny as he flees is that he comes from an African-American family that has been gifted with super powers that are a bit, well, odd. Okay, very odd. For example, Johnny's father could see colors no one else could see. His brother could scale perfectly flat walls. His cousin belches fire. And Johnny himself can make precise maps of any space you name, whether he's been there or not.

In the old days, the Ribkins family tried to apply their gifts to the civil rights effort, calling themselves The Justice Committee. But when their, eh, superpowers proved insufficient, the group fell apart. Out of frustration Johnny and his brother used their talents to stage a series of burglaries, each more daring than the last.

Fast forward a couple decades and Johnny’s on a race against the clock to dig up loot he's stashed all over Florida. His brother is gone, but he has an unexpected sidekick: his brother's daughter, Eloise, who has a special superpower of her own.

Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous essay “The Talented Tenth� and fuelled by Ladee Hubbard’s marvelously original imagination, The Talented Ribkins is a big-hearted debut novel about race, class, politics, and the unique gifts that, while they may cause some problems from time to time, bind a family together.

A big-hearted novel about a family with special gifts who sometimes stumble in their efforts to succeed in life, The Talented Ribkins draws on such novels as Toni Morrison’s SulaThe Intuitionist to weave themes of race, class, and politics into a wonderfully accomplished and engaging novel.]]> 292 Ladee Hubbard 1612196365 Marty 5 fiction 3.72 2017 The Talented Ribkins
author: Ladee Hubbard
name: Marty
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/13
date added: 2021/12/13
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Fire Next Time 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Marty 5 non-fiction 4.55 1963 The Fire Next Time
author: James Baldwin
name: Marty
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/21
date added: 2021/12/11
shelves: non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul]]> 24977591 It’s January 1967—and one of the worst snowstorms in decades is blanketing Detroit, Michigan. Berry Gordy, owner of Motown Records, is trapped in his home, unable to do anything about the internal war ravaging his most successful group, The Supremes. Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard are imploding as Ballard battles alcoholism and the aftermath of rape. But soon, even more chaos will descend on Detroit. As the year heats up, melting the snow, Gordy and his city face one of the most challenging periods of its existence.

Detroit 67 is the story of Detroit in the year that changed everything. Twelve monthly chapters take you on a turbulent year long journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967. Over a dramatic 12-month period, the Motor City was torn apart by personal, political and inter-racial disputes. It is the story of Motown, the breakup of The Supremes and the implosion of the most successful African-American music label ever.

Set against a backdrop of urban riots, escalating war in Vietnam and police corruption, the book weaves its way through a year when soul music came of age, and the underground counterculture flourished. LSD arrived in the city with hallucinogenic power and local guitar-band MC5 -self-styled "holy barbarians" of rock went to war with mainstream America. A summer of street-level rebellion turned Detroit into one of the most notorious cities on earth, known for its unique creativity, its unpredictability and self-lacerating crime rates.

1967 ended in social meltdown, personal bitterness and intense legal warfare as the complex threads that held Detroit together finally unraveled. Detroit 67 is the story of the year that changed everything.

]]> 575 Stuart Cosgrove 0993107524 Marty 4 music, non-fiction 4.08 2015 Detroit 67: The Year That Changed Soul
author: Stuart Cosgrove
name: Marty
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/10
date added: 2021/12/11
shelves: music, non-fiction
review:

]]> Wayward 55655108
� A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.� —The New York Times Book Review

“Riddledwith insights into aging, womanhood, and discontent, Wayward is as elegant as it is raw, and almost as funny as it is sad.� —Philadelphia Inquirer

“A comic, vital new novel.� � The New Yorker

Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into "the Mids" � that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.

When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life � and her family � as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams.

Dana Spiotta's Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.]]> 288 Dana Spiotta 0593318730 Marty 4 fiction 3.26 2021 Wayward
author: Dana Spiotta
name: Marty
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/30
date added: 2021/11/30
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> A Spy in the Struggle 54826485
Until an unexpected romance opens her heart—and a suspicious death opens her eyes. Menacing dark money forces will do anything to bury Yolanda and the movement. Fueled by memories of who she once was—and what once really mattered most—how can she tell those who’ve come to trust her that she’s been spying? As the stakes escalate, and one misstep could cost her life, Yolanda will have to choose between betraying the cause of her people or invoking the wrath of the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency.]]> 352 Aya de León 1496728599 Marty 4 noir 3.51 2020 A Spy in the Struggle
author: Aya de León
name: Marty
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/22
date added: 2021/11/22
shelves: noir
review:

]]> Music Is History 56969492
Focusing on the years 1971 to the present, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapestry, whether investigating how the blaxploitation era reshaped Black identity or considering the way disco took an assembly line approach to Black genius. And these critical inquiries are complemented by his own memories as a music fan, and the way his appetite for pop culture taught him about America.

A history of the last half-century and an intimate conversation with one of music’s most influential and original voices, Music Is History is a singular look at contemporary America.

“An entertaining, informative and far-reaching work, meticulously excavating American culture and history with the eye of a seasoned cratedigger.� � The Washington Post]]> 352 Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson 1419751433 Marty 4 music, non-fiction 3.86 2021 Music Is History
author: Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
name: Marty
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/13
date added: 2021/11/13
shelves: music, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality]]> 42585103 A compelling explanation of how the law shapes the distribution of wealth

Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.

In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital-and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations-assets that exist only in law.

A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it.]]> 320 Katharina Pistor 0691178976 Marty 5 financial, non-fiction 4.03 2019 The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
author: Katharina Pistor
name: Marty
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/02
date added: 2021/11/02
shelves: financial, non-fiction
review:

]]> Moon Lake (East Texas Gothic) 55643291 From an Edgar award-winning author comes the gripping and unexpected tale of a lost town and the dark secrets that lie beneath the glittering waters of an East Texas lake.

Daniel Russell was only thirteen years old when his father tried to kill them both by driving their car into Moon Lake. Miraculously surviving the crash—and growing into adulthood—Daniel returns to the site of this traumatic incident in the hopes of recovering his father's car and bones. As he attempts to finally put to rest the memories that have plagued him for years, he discovers something even more shocking among the wreckage that has ties to a twisted web of dark deeds, old grudges, and strange murders.

As Daniel diligently follows where the mysterious trail of vengeance leads, he unveils the heroic revelation at its core.
]]> 337 Joe R. Lansdale 0316540641 Marty 4 fiction 3.71 2021 Moon Lake (East Texas Gothic)
author: Joe R. Lansdale
name: Marty
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/26
date added: 2021/10/26
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Killy 1601464 191 Donald E. Westlake 0745186653 Marty 0 to-read 3.46 1963 Killy
author: Donald E. Westlake
name: Marty
average rating: 3.46
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hell of a Book 55964195 Hell of a Book, an African-American author sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Jason Mott's novel and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: since his novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

Throughout, these characters' stories build and build and as they converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art, and money, there always is the tragic story of a police shooting playing over and over on the news.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably powerful, an electrifying high-wire act, ideal for book clubs, and the book Mott says he has been writing in his head for ten years, Hell of a Book in its final twists truly becomes its title.]]> 323 Jason Mott 059333096X Marty 4 fiction 4.00 2021 Hell of a Book
author: Jason Mott
name: Marty
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/20
date added: 2021/08/20
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II]]> 6929098 373 Jason Berry 1887366873 Marty 0 to-read 4.29 1986 Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II
author: Jason Berry
name: Marty
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/08/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Good Lord Bird 16171272 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

From the bestselling author of The Color of Water and Song Yet Sung comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade—and who must pass as a girl to survive.

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry’s master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town—with Brown, who believes he’s a girl.

Over the ensuing months, Henry—whom Brown nicknames Little Onion—conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. Eventually Little Onion finds himself with Brown at the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—one of the great catalysts for the Civil War.

An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride’s meticulous eye for detail and character, The Good Lord Bird is both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival.]]> 417 James McBride 1594486344 Marty 4 fiction 3.90 2013 The Good Lord Bird
author: James McBride
name: Marty
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/10
date added: 2021/08/10
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Razorblade Tears 54860585 A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance.

Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid.

The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss.

Derek’s father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy.

Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250252708]]> 336 S.A. Cosby Marty 4 fiction, noir 4.08 2021 Razorblade Tears
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Marty
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/06
date added: 2021/08/06
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> Pronto (Raylan Givens, #1) 85211 Justified are in for a major treat. The unstoppable manhunter with the very itchy trigger finger stars in Pronto, a crime fiction gem from the one and only Elmore Leonard, "the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever" (New York Times Book Review).

The Grand Master justifies the overwhelming acclaim he has received over the course of his remarkable career with an electrifying thriller that sends the indomitable Raylan racing to Italy on the trail of a fugitive bookie who's hiding from the vengeful Miami mob. The legendary Leonard, whom the Seattle Times lauds as the "King Daddy of crime writers," proves that all comparisons to American noir icons John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain are well deserved with this tale of very dirty doings and extremely dangerous men coming together in the birthplace of Puccini, Garibaldi, and La Cosa Nostra.
]]> 400 Elmore Leonard 0060082178 Marty 4 fiction, noir 3.74 1993 Pronto (Raylan Givens, #1)
author: Elmore Leonard
name: Marty
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/25
date added: 2021/07/25
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter]]> 7948230 Now the Edgar Award-winning author returns with his most accomplished and resonant novel so far—an atmospheric drama set in rural Mississippi. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town.
More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.]]> 274 Tom Franklin 0060594667 Marty 5 fiction, noir 3.80 2010 Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
author: Tom Franklin
name: Marty
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/08
date added: 2021/07/08
shelves: fiction, noir
review:

]]> The Last Taxi Driver 46195205 280 Lee Durkee 194779339X Marty 4 fiction 3.67 2020 The Last Taxi Driver
author: Lee Durkee
name: Marty
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/28
date added: 2021/06/28
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing]]> 50998081
It covers old ground from new perspectives, offering deeply felt, masterful, and strikingly personal portraits of creative artists, both musicians and writers, at the height of their powers.

“You put the book down feeling that its sweep is vast, that you have read of giants who walked among us,� rock critic Lester Bangs wrote of Guralnick’s earlier work in words that could just as easily be applied to this new one. And yet, for all of the encomiums that Guralnick’s books have earned for their remarkable insights and depth of feeling, Looking to Get Lost is his most personal book yet. For readers who have grown up on Guralnick’s unique vision of the vast sweep of the American musical landscape, who have imbibed his loving and lively portraits and biographies of such titanic figures as Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, and Sam Phillips, there are multiple surprises and delights here, carrying on and extending all the themes, fascinations, and passions of his groundbreaking earlier work.

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2020
One of Kirkus Review/Rolling Stone ’s Top Music Books of 2020
One of No Depression ’s Best Books of 2020]]> 576 Peter Guralnick 0316412627 Marty 0 to-read 4.01 Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing
author: Peter Guralnick
name: Marty
average rating: 4.01
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Wolf and the Watchman 40539807 Best Debut, The Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award 2017

The year is 1793, Stockholm. King Gustav of Sweden has been assassinated, years of foreign wars have emptied the treasuries, and the realm is governed by a self-interested elite, leaving its citizens to suffer. On the streets, malcontent and paranoia abound.

A body is found in the city's swamp by a watchman, Mickel Cardell, and the case is handed over to investigator Cecil Winge, who is dying of consumption. Together, Winge and Cardell become embroiled in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams, and one death will expose a city rotten with corruption beneath its powdered and painted veneer.

The Wolf and the Watchman depicts the capacity for cruelty in the name of survival or greed - but also the capacity for love, friendship, and the desire for a better world.]]> 384 Niklas Natt och Dag 1501196774 Marty 4 fiction 3.86 2017 The Wolf and the Watchman
author: Niklas Natt och Dag
name: Marty
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/16
date added: 2021/06/16
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Committed (The Sympathizer, #2)]]> 52260627
Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters]]> 345 Viet Thanh Nguyen 0802157068 Marty 4 fiction 3.94 2021 The Committed (The Sympathizer, #2)
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: Marty
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/30
date added: 2021/05/30
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Field of Blood (Paddy Meehan, #1)]]> 94180
The vicious murder of a young child provides rookie journalist Paddy Meehan with her first big break when the suspect turns out to be her fiance's 11-year old cousin. Launching her own investigation into the horrific crime, Paddy uncovers lines of deception deep in Glasgow's past, with more horrific crimes in the future if she fails to solve the mystery.

Infused with Mina's unique blend of dark humor, personal insights and social injustice, the story grips the reader while challenging our perceptions of childhood innocence, crime and punishment, and right or wrong.]]> 456 Denise Mina 031615458X Marty 3 fiction 3.82 2005 Field of Blood (Paddy Meehan, #1)
author: Denise Mina
name: Marty
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2005
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/21
date added: 2021/05/21
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Washington Black 38140077
When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist.

He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human; and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash's head, Titch abandons everything to save him.

What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life, one which will propel him further across the globe.

From the sultry cane fields of the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, Washington Black tells a story of friendship and betrayal, love and redemption, of a world destroyed and made whole again--and asks the question, what is true freedom?]]> 334 Esi Edugyan 0525521429 Marty 4 fiction 3.93 2018 Washington Black
author: Esi Edugyan
name: Marty
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/12
date added: 2021/05/12
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> The Arrest 51179946 From the award-winning author of The Feral Detectiveand Motherless Brooklyn comes an utterly original post-apocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.

The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted—cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters—quits working. . . .

Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A.An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt.

Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was.Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine. There he assists the butcher and delivers the food grown by his sister, Maddy, at her organic farm. But then Todbaum shows up in an extraordinary vehicle: a retrofitted tunnel-digger powered by a nuclear reactor. Todbaum has spent the Arrest smashing his way across a fragmented and phantasmagorical United States, trailing enmities all the way.Plopping back into the siblings' life with his usual odious panache, his motives are entirely unclear. Can it be that Todbaum wants to produce one more extravaganza?Whatever he's up to, it may fall to Journeyman to stop him.

Written with unrepentant joy and shot through with just the right amount of contemporary dread,The Arrestis speculative fiction at its absolute finest.]]> 307 Jonathan Lethem 0062938789 Marty 3 dystopian, fiction 3.07 2020 The Arrest
author: Jonathan Lethem
name: Marty
average rating: 3.07
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/27
date added: 2021/05/06
shelves: dystopian, fiction
review:
Not his best, or at least not my favorite Lethem (which will probably always be Motherless Brooklyn) but extra points for being quite funny at times. Also for the reference to Ross Thomas, a nearly forgotten master.
]]> <![CDATA[Slough House (Slough House, #7)]]> 54005204 Brexit is in full swing. And due to mysterious accidents, the Slough Houses ranks continue to thin. The seventh entry to the Slough House series is as thrilling and bleeding-edge relevant as ever.

A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service's First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive—but she's had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she's fought for.

Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they've been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted? With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets, and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass.

But the slow horses aren't famed for making wise decisions. And with enemies on all sides, not even Jackson Lamb can keep his crew from harm.]]> 312 Mick Herron 1641292369 Marty 3 fiction 4.29 2021 Slough House (Slough House, #7)
author: Mick Herron
name: Marty
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/06
date added: 2021/05/06
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Dirtbags 21851349 200 Eryk Pruitt 1938750039 Marty 0 to-read 3.98 2014 Dirtbags
author: Eryk Pruitt
name: Marty
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/04/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blacktop Wasteland 51182571
After a series of financial calamities (worsened by the racial prejudices of the small town he lives in) Bug reluctantly takes part in a daring diamond heist to solve his money troubles - and to go straight once and for all. However, when it goes horrifically wrong, he's sucked into a grimy underworld which threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear . . .]]> 285 S.A. Cosby Marty 4 noir 4.06 2020 Blacktop Wasteland
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Marty
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/19
date added: 2021/04/19
shelves: noir
review:

]]> <![CDATA[One Day Stronger: How One Union Local Saved a Mill and Changed an Industry--and What It Means for American Manufacturing]]> 57000472 306 Thomas M. Nelson 1953943004 Marty 0 to-read 4.14 One Day Stronger: How One Union Local Saved a Mill and Changed an Industry--and What It Means for American Manufacturing
author: Thomas M. Nelson
name: Marty
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Homeland Elegies 50358133 Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque adventure -- at its heart, it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and our ideals have been sacrificed to the gods of finance, where a TV personality is president and immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds of 9/11 wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one -- least of all himself -- in the process.]]> 368 Ayad Akhtar 0316496421 Marty 4 fiction 4.11 2020 Homeland Elegies
author: Ayad Akhtar
name: Marty
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/12
date added: 2021/04/12
shelves: fiction
review:

]]> Lady Joker, Volume One 56572078 One of Japan’s great modern masters, Kaoru Takamura, makes her English-language debut with this two-volume publication of her magnum opus.

Tokyo, 1995. Five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday to bet on horses. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and griefs of post-War Japan: a poorly socialized genius stuck working as a welder; a demoted detective with a chip on his shoulder; a Zainichi Korean banker sick of being ostracized for his race; a struggling single dad of a teenage girl with Down syndrome. The fifth man bringing them all together is an elderly drugstore owner grieving his grandson, who has died suspiciously after the revelation of a family connection with the segregated buraku community, historically subjected to severe discrimination.

Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to carry out a heist: kidnap the CEO of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate and extract blood money from the company’s corrupt financiers.

Inspired by the unsolved true-crime kidnapping case perpetrated by "the Monster with 21 Faces", Lady Joker has become a cultural touchstone since its 1997 publication, acknowledged as the magnum opus by one of Japan’s literary masters, twice adapted for film and TV and often taught in high school and college classrooms.]]> 576 Kaoru Takamura 1616957018 Marty 0 to-read 3.59 1997 Lady Joker, Volume One
author: Kaoru Takamura
name: Marty
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

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