en-US Tue, 08 Jan 2019 10:13:15 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 9021 Long Walk to Freedom: Volume 1 tells the beginnings of the story of an epic life, a story of hardship, resilience and ultimate triumph conveyed with the clarity and eloquence of the outstanding moral and political leader of the twentieth century.]]> 497 Nelson Mandela 0349116024 Peter 4 4.37 1994
author: Nelson Mandela
name: Peter
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1994
rating: 4
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date added: 2019/01/08
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]]> 12477 In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. The book that made Capote's name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.

An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found here.]]> 336 Truman Capote 0141182571 Peter 4 4.17 1966
author: Truman Capote
name: Peter
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1966
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/06/03
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]]> 259028 447 Erik Larson 0375725601 Peter 4 3.97 2003
author: Erik Larson
name: Peter
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2003
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/03/09
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]]> 16681
A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, Heart of Darkness is considered one of the most influential works ever written.]]> 104 Joseph Conrad 1599869500 Peter 4 3.34 1899
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Peter
average rating: 3.34
book published: 1899
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/09/27
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]]> 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Peter 4 4.10 1967
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Peter
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2011/08/29
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review:

]]> 26121 416 Joseph Heller 0684865130 Peter 5 4.08 1961
author: Joseph Heller
name: Peter
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1961
rating: 5
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date added: 2011/07/11
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]]> 407
Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band mid-tour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling force he is trying to escape.

DeLillo’s third novel is more than a musical satire: it probes the rights of the individual, foreshadows the struggle of the artist within a capitalist world and delivers a scathing portrait of our culture’s obsession with the lives of the few.]]> 272 Don DeLillo 0140179178 Peter 0 currently-reading 3.50 1973
author: Don DeLillo
name: Peter
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/06/08
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 33365
A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.]]> 192 Sigrid Nunez 0312422733 Peter 0 to-read 4.01 1995
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Peter
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/05/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 180931 400 John O'Hara 0786718722 Peter 0 currently-reading 3.81 2003
author: John O'Hara
name: Peter
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/05/15
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 31072
Under the Volcano remains one of literature's most powerful and lyrical statements on the human condition, and a brilliant portrayal of one man's constant struggle against the elemental forces that threaten to destroy him.]]> 423 Malcolm Lowry 0060955228 Peter 0 to-read 3.78 1947
author: Malcolm Lowry
name: Peter
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1947
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/04/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 126583 251 John O'Hara 0375719202 Peter 0 to-read 3.82 1934
author: John O'Hara
name: Peter
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/04/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 701228 500 John O'Hara 0786713623 Peter 0 to-read 4.52 1974
author: John O'Hara
name: Peter
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1974
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/04/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 608287 Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.

Contains:
Car Crash While Hitchhiking
Two Men
Out on Bail
Dundun
Work
Emergency
Dirty Wedding
The Other Man
Happy Hour
Steady Hands at Seattle General
Beverly Home']]> 160 Denis Johnson 0060975776 Peter 0 to-read 4.16 1992
author: Denis Johnson
name: Peter
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/04/14
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]]> 284996 ISBN: 0374515360 (ISBN13: 9780374515362

Winner of the National Book Award

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime - Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day" - sent to her publisher shortly before her death - is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.

Contents:
The geranium --
The barber --
Wildcat --
The crop --
The turkey --
The train --
The peeler --
The heart of the park --
A stoke of good fortune --
Enoch and the gorilla --
A good man is hard to find --
A late encounter with the enemy --
The life you save may be your own --
The river --
A circle in the fire --
The displaced person --
A temple of the Holy Ghost --
The artificial nigger --
Good country people --
You can't be any poorer than dead --
Greenleaf --
A view of the woods --
The enduring chill --
The comforts of home --
Everything that rises must converge --
The partridge festival --
The lame shall enter first --
Why do the heathen rage? --
Revelation --
Parker's back --
Judgement Day.]]> 555 Flannery O'Connor Peter 0 to-read 4.41 1971
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Peter
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1971
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/04/14
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]]> 297673
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.]]> 335 Junot Díaz 1594489580 Peter 0 to-read 3.89 2007
author: Junot Díaz
name: Peter
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/02/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 10739
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Binx Bolling is adrift. He occupies himself dallying with his secretaries and going to movies, which provide him with the "treasurable moments" absent from his real life. But one fateful Mardi Gras, Binx embarks on a quest - a harebrained search for authenticity that outrages his family, endangers his fragile cousin Kate, and sends him reeling through the gaudy chaos of the French Quarter. Wry and wrenching, rich in irony and romance, "The Moviegoer" is a genuine American classic.]]> 242 Walker Percy 0375701966 Peter 0 currently-reading 3.66 1961
author: Walker Percy
name: Peter
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1961
rating: 0
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date added: 2008/02/22
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 46190 224 Rob Sheffield 1400083028 Peter 4 3.87 2007
author: Rob Sheffield
name: Peter
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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date added: 2008/02/22
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]]> 853201 B&W photos.]]> 672 Albert Speer 0684829495 Peter 3 4.09 1969
author: Albert Speer
name: Peter
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1969
rating: 3
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date added: 2008/02/04
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]]> 11908 586 Saul Bellow 0143039571 Peter 0 to-read 3.83 1953
author: Saul Bellow
name: Peter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/11/17
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]]> 117833 The first complete, annotated English Translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's comic masterpiece.

An audacious revision of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilate, The Master and Margarita is recognized as one of the essential classics of modern Russian literature. The novel's vision of Soviet life in the 1930s is so ferociously accurate that it could not be published during its author's lifetime and appeared only in a censored edition in the 1960s. Its truths are so enduring that its language has become part of the common Russian speech.

One hot spring, the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a retinue that includes a beautiful naked witch and an immense talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. The visitors quickly wreak havoc in a city that refuses to believe in either God or Satan. But they also bring peace to two unhappy Muscovites: one is the Master, a writer pilloried for daring to write a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate; the other is Margarita, who loves the Master so deeply that she is willing literally to go to hell for him. What ensues is a novel of inexhaustible energy, humor, and philosophical depth, a work whose nuances emerge for the first time in Diana Burgin's and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor's splendid English version.]]> 372 Mikhail Bulgakov 0679760806 Peter 0 currently-reading 4.31 1967
author: Mikhail Bulgakov
name: Peter
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/11/17
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 19374
The authoritative new edition of this beloved work includes all of the 174 first-edition illustrations by Edward Windsor Kemble, which the author called "rattling good." It also contains a new gathering of manuscript pages, photographically reproduced, and an appendix of passages from the manuscript, including the long-lost "ghost story," which illustrate how extensively Mark Twain revised his work. The editors have also revised and updated their explanatory notes, the maps of the Mississippi River valley, and the glossary of slang and dialect words.

The story of Huck and his companion Jim, a runaway slave, as they travel down the Mississippi to escape from slavery and "sivilization" has been delighting readers around the world since Twain first published it in 1885. Simply put, it is a revolutionary in its narrative method, surpassingly funny, and at the same time deeply perceptive about human nature. No other American novel of the nineteenth century still commands so vast an audience, and certainly no other retains the capacity to stir controversy with its sharp satire on American racism.

A Responsible Critical Text

To produce this authoritative critical text, the editors studied all aspects of Mark Twain's manuscript, working notes, proof sheets, and letters. To judge the authority of every variant, they created a unique electronic database that made it possible to analyze--by speaker and date of composition--every word in the manuscript and first edition.

An Inside View of How Mark Twain Wrote Huckleberry Finn

The new appendixes of "Three Passages" and "Manuscript Facsimiles" will give teachers and students as well as the general reader a close-up view of Mark Twain's writing process. They can follow the evolution of three key passages, as the author searched for the right word, the truest dialect, and the most telling description.]]> 535 Mark Twain 0520228383 Peter 0 to-read 3.92 1884
author: Mark Twain
name: Peter
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1884
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/11/17
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]]> 27502
Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting the most basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.

Listening Length: 6 hours and 27 minutes]]> 224 Chris Hedges 1400034639 Peter 0 currently-reading 4.12 2002
author: Chris Hedges
name: Peter
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/11/17
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]]> 12781
From the back cover.]]> 561 Salman Rushdie 0312270828 Peter 0 currently-reading 3.73 1988
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Peter
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2007/11/17
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 394535 Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.]]> 351 Cormac McCarthy Peter 4 4.18 1985
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1985
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/11/08
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]]> 381960
George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is composed of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures of Dubai; and to join the exploits of the minutemen at the Mexican border. Saunders expertly navigates the works of Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Esther Forbes, and leads the reader across the rocky political landscape of modern America. Emblazoned with his trademark wit and singular vision, Saunders's endeavor into the art of the essay is testament to his exceptional range and ability as a writer and thinker.]]> 257 George Saunders 159448256X Peter 4 3.99 2007
author: George Saunders
name: Peter
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2007
rating: 4
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]]> 1111 The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.]]> 1246 Robert A. Caro 0394720245 Peter 0 4.51 1974
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Peter
average rating: 4.51
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at: 2007/11/08
date added: 2007/06/12
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]]> 11275
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami 0965341984 Peter 4 4.16 1994
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Peter
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1994
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/06/12
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]]> 12497 Alternate Cover Edition for ISBN 9780375706677

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones.

One day, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.

As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
No Country for Old Men is a triumph.]]> 309 Cormac McCarthy Peter 4 4.15 2005
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Peter
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/06/12
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]]> 25
Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.]]> 304 Bill Bryson 076790382X Peter 4 3.90 1998
author: Bill Bryson
name: Peter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/05/06
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]]> 9791 A Walk in the Woods will make you long for the great outdoors (or at least a comfortable chair to sit and read in).]]> 397 Bill Bryson 0307279464 Peter 3 4.07 1998
author: Bill Bryson
name: Peter
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/05/06
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]]> 6748 Infinite Jest.]]> 353 David Foster Wallace 0316925284 Peter 4 4.24 1996
author: David Foster Wallace
name: Peter
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1996
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 54666
The New York Times bestseller, praised as "hilariously funny . . . the only way to understand why so many Americans have decided to vote against their own economic and political interests" (Molly Ivins)

Hailed as "dazzlingly insightful and wonderfully sardonic" (Chicago Tribune), "very funny and very painful" (San Francisco Chronicle), and "in a different league from most political books" (The New York Observer), What's the Matter with Kansas? unravels the great political mystery of our day: Why do so many Americans vote against their economic and social interests? With his acclaimed wit and acuity, Thomas Frank answers the riddle by examining his home state, Kansas-a place once famous for its radicalism that now ranks among the nation's most eager participants in the culture wars. Charting what he calls the "thirty-year backlash"-the popular revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment-Frank reveals how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans.

A brilliant analysis-and funny to boot-What's the Matter with Kansas? is a vivid portrait of an upside-down world where blue-collar patriots recite the Pledge while they strangle their life chances; where small farmers cast their votes for a Wall Street order that will eventually push them off their land; and where a group of frat boys, lawyers, and CEOs has managed to convince the country that it speaks on behalf of the People.
]]> 332 Thomas Frank 080507774X Peter 3 3.84 2004
author: Thomas Frank
name: Peter
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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]]> 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 Peter 2 3.94 1970
author: Joan Didion
name: Peter
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1970
rating: 2
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 1202
These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter.

Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world.
(front flap)]]> 268 Steven D. Levitt 0061234001 Peter 3 4.01 2005
author: Steven D. Levitt
name: Peter
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2005
rating: 3
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]]> 31240 288 Charles Dickens 0140620443 Peter 1 3.36 1854
author: Charles Dickens
name: Peter
average rating: 3.36
book published: 1854
rating: 1
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]]> 1540 259 Sophocles 015602764X Peter 4 3.97 -450
author: Sophocles
name: Peter
average rating: 3.97
book published: -450
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 11334 338 Toni Morrison 140003342X Peter 5 4.15 1977
author: Toni Morrison
name: Peter
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1977
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 175849 261 Ethan Coen 0385334389 Peter 3 3.58 1998
author: Ethan Coen
name: Peter
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1998
rating: 3
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 11650 Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998)

In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.]]> 432 Philip Roth Peter 4 3.93 1997
author: Philip Roth
name: Peter
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1997
rating: 4
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]]> 11734
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."]]> 361 Philip Roth Peter 4 3.89 2000
author: Philip Roth
name: Peter
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2000
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 11762 310 Don DeLillo 0140283307 Peter 4 3.86 1985
author: Don DeLillo
name: Peter
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1985
rating: 4
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 3766 Howl. While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road, Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject—the search for a place as an outsider in America.On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.]]> 293 Jack Kerouac Peter 3 3.56 1957
author: Jack Kerouac
name: Peter
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1957
rating: 3
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]]> 7745 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.]]> 204 Hunter S. Thompson 0679785892 Peter 5 4.08 1971
author: Hunter S. Thompson
name: Peter
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1971
rating: 5
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date added: 2007/04/19
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]]> 86147 Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, Jay McInerney became a literary sensation, heralded as the voice of a generation. The novel follows a young man, living in Manhattan as if he owned it, through nightclubs, fashion shows, editorial offices, and loft parties as he attempts to outstrip mortality and the recurring approach of dawn. With nothing but goodwill, controlled substances, and wit to sustain him in this anti-quest, he runs until he reaches his reckoning point, where he is forced to acknowledge loss and, possibly, to rediscover his better instincts. This remarkable novel of youth and New York remains one of the most beloved, imitated, and iconic novels in America.]]> 208 Jay McInerney Peter 4 3.80 1984
author: Jay McInerney
name: Peter
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1984
rating: 4
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]]> 50043 ‘It’s confession time, fellow alumni. Ever since Principal Fontana found me and commenced to bless my mail slot, monthly, with the Eastern Valley High School Alumni Newsletter, I've been meaning to pen my update. Sad to say, vanity slowed my hand. Let a fever for the truth speed it now. Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not pan out.��

The Eastern Valley High School alumni newsletter, ‘Catamount Notes��, is bursting with tales of success: we've got a bankable politician and a famous baseball star, not to mention a major label recording artist. And then there is the appalling, somewhat bitter and yet entirely loveable Lewis Miner, class of ��89 �� who did not pan out. From perhaps the most gifted of the younger generation of US satirical novelists, ‘Home Land�� is a marvel of playful prose and sustained invention �� and very, very funny.]]> Sam Lipsyte 0007170378 Peter 3 3.52 2004
author: Sam Lipsyte
name: Peter
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2004
rating: 3
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]]> 599
Whether deconstructing Saved by the Bell episodes or the artistic legacy of Billy Joel, the symbolic importance of The Empire Strikes Back or the Celtics/Lakers rivalry, Chuck will make you think, he'll make you laugh, and he'll drive you insane -- usually all at once. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is ostensibly about art, entertainment, infotainment, sports, politics, and kittens, but -- really -- it's about us. All of us. As Klosterman realizes late at night, in the moment before he falls asleep, "In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever 'in and of itself.'" Read to believe.]]> 272 Chuck Klosterman 0743236017 Peter 3 3.74 2003
author: Chuck Klosterman
name: Peter
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2003
rating: 3
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]]> 24476 Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn't quite ready to rock -- his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet -- but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N' Roses. C'mon and feel his noize.]]> 320 Chuck Klosterman 0743406567 Peter 3 3.82 2001
author: Chuck Klosterman
name: Peter
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2001
rating: 3
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]]> 232431 Dancer from the Dance is truthful, provocative, outrageous fiction told in a voice as close to laughter as to tears.]]> 250 Andrew Holleran 0060937068 Peter 4 3.99 1978
author: Andrew Holleran
name: Peter
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1978
rating: 4
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]]> 9915
Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs, and into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.]]> 208 Bret Easton Ellis Peter 3 3.62 1985
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Peter
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1985
rating: 3
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]]> 129910
In this work, Okada gives the perspective of a no-no boy, a Japanese-American man who would neither denounce his Japanese heritage nor fight for the U.S. Army during WWII. This novel takes place after the main character spent two years in a Japanese internment camp, and two years in prison after saying no when asked to join the U.S. Army. Okada's novel No-No Boy shows the internal and external struggles fought by Japanese-Americans in that time period, be they no-no boys or not.]]> 260 John Okada 0295955252 Peter 4 3.90 1956
author: John Okada
name: Peter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1956
rating: 4
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]]> 131790 Why Are We in Vietnam? was published in 1967, almost twenty years after The Naked and the Dead, the critical response was ecstatic. The novel fully confirmed Mailer's stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality.

Narrated by Ranald ("D.J.") Jethroe, Texas's most precocious teenager, on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam, this story of a hunting trip in Alaska is both brilliantly entertaining and profoundly thoughtful.]]> 215 Norman Mailer 0312265069 Peter 4 3.30 1967
author: Norman Mailer
name: Peter
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1967
rating: 4
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]]> 3109 What should we have for dinner? For omnivore like ourselves, this simple question has always posed a dilemma. When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods on offer might shorten your life. Today, buffered by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is groundbreaking book, in which one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves?
To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.
The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, this is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, and Pollan contends that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.]]> 450 Michael Pollan 1594200823 Peter 4 4.18 2006
author: Michael Pollan
name: Peter
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2006
rating: 4
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]]> 46181 249 Jeffrey Eugenides 0446670251 Peter 3 3.78 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Peter
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1993
rating: 3
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]]> 45314 Kafka on the Shore, a tour de force of metaphysical reality, is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle—yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered, just as the entwined destinies of Kafka and Nakata are gradually revealed, with one escaping his fate entirely and the other given a fresh start on his own.]]> 436 Haruki Murakami 1400043662 Peter 4 4.00 2002
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Peter
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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]]> 57891 624 Koushun Takami 156931778X Peter 3 4.26 1999
author: Koushun Takami
name: Peter
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1999
rating: 3
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]]> 2187 Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.]]> 529 Jeffrey Eugenides 0312422156 Peter 4 4.03 2002
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Peter
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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]]> 7624 182 William Golding 0140283331 Peter 3 3.70 1954
author: William Golding
name: Peter
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1954
rating: 3
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]]> 7613
When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.

Animal Farm was one of George Orwell's most successful books - after its publication Orwell became one of the best-paid writers in England. Though the text continues to play a foundational role in the political education of young people across the world, its allegorical function has become more difficult to decode as the U.S.S.R recedes into the historical distance.]]> 129 George Orwell Peter 3 3.90 1945
author: George Orwell
name: Peter
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1945
rating: 3
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]]> 4472
A Prayer for Owen Meany was first published in 1989. This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by the author.]]> 641 John Irving 0679642595 Peter 5 4.21 1989
author: John Irving
name: Peter
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1989
rating: 5
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]]> 24923 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, a behemoth of fat, flatulence and furious suspicion of anything modern �� this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, noble crusader against a world of dunces. The ordinary folk of New Orleans seem to think he is unhinged. Ignatius ignores them, heaving his vast bulk through the city's fleshpots in a noble crusade against vice, modernity and ignorance. But his momma has a nasty surprise in store for him: Ignatius must get a job. Undaunted, he uses his new-found employment to further his mission �� and now he has a pirate costume and a hot-dog cart to do it with...]]> 338 John Kennedy Toole 0141182865 Peter 5 3.83 1980
author: John Kennedy Toole
name: Peter
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1980
rating: 5
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]]> 5470 328 George Orwell Peter 4 4.15 1949
author: George Orwell
name: Peter
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1949
rating: 4
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]]> 5107 It's Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school...

Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters—shooting the bull with strangers in dive hotels, wandering alone round Central Park, getting beaten up by pimps and cut down by erstwhile girlfriends. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.

The Catcher in the Rye is an all-time classic in coming-of-age literature- an elegy to teenage alienation, capturing the deeply human need for connection and the bewildering sense of loss as we leave childhood behind.

J.D. Salinger's (1919��2010) classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.]]> 277 J.D. Salinger 0316769177 Peter 4 3.81 1951
author: J.D. Salinger
name: Peter
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1951
rating: 4
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]]>