Ken's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 01 Jul 2024 03:58:48 -0700 60 Ken's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment]]> 34805848
Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world. And it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain.

But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly—and proposes that seeing the world more clearly, through meditation, will make us better, happier people.

In Why Buddhism is True, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. At once excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible, this is the first book to combine evolutionary psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom, it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is true—which is to say, a way out of our delusion—but that it can ultimately save us from ourselves, as individuals and as a species.]]>
332 Robert Wright Ken 0 currently-reading 4.17 2017 Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
author: Robert Wright
name: Ken
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/01
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The Shanghai Factor 39937570 Ěý
The young American spy was sent to China simply to absorb what he could about the language and culture. But as his dalliance with the mysterious Mei blossoms into a full-blown affair, his bosses at HQ demand he use his connections to uncover the truth about a powerful CEO suspected to be a Chinese intelligence operative. Now he’s caught in a game of cat-and-mouse with lethal consequences—not only for him, but also for the global balance of power.]]>
299 Charles McCarry Ken 0 4.20 2013 The Shanghai Factor
author: Charles McCarry
name: Ken
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/12
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<![CDATA[The French Mind: A Cultural History of an Exceptional People]]> 58581850
Journalist and historian Peter Watson sets out to answer these questions in The French Mind, a dazzling cultural history of France that takes us from the 17th century to the present day through the nation’s most innovative and influential thinkers. He opens the doors to the Renaissance salons that acted as a breeding ground for poets, philosophers and scientists, and tells the extraordinary forgotten stories of the women who ran these vibrant and definitively French institutions, fostering a culture of intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in the word. On the way we witness the rise of café and restaurants, the changing relationship between the bourgeoisie and the French monarchy, and the bloody birth of a republic. From the French revolution to the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany, Watson argues that a series of devastating military defeats played a key role in shaping the resilient character of a nation, as well as its exceptionalism.

The French Mind is a history of breathtaking scope, propelled forward by the characters Watson brings to vivid life: the artists, revolutionaries and writers who loved, inspired and competed with one another over four hundred years. It documents the shaping of a nation whose global influence, in art and culture, politics and philosophy, cannot be overestimated.
Ěý]]>
31 Peter Watson 1398513946 Ken 0 to-read 3.00 2022 The French Mind: A Cultural History of an Exceptional People
author: Peter Watson
name: Ken
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/12
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The Cold Millions 50358038
The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.


Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?


An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, it is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors� (Boston Globe]]>
342 Jess Walter 006286808X Ken 4
Walters is a captivating narrator, casting his story through the perspective of the Dolan brothers - 16 y.o. Ryan who is skeptical of his older brother's involvement with the "Wobblies" (the International Workers of the World), an anti-capitalist labor organization that wanted to turn the means of production - often mining or forestry - over to workers. Ryan meets Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, early 20th c. labor activist, feminist, and Wobbly.

The novel offers a Dickensian display of characters - cops, politicians, union activists, thugs and ordinary people, all caught up in the early labor wars, especially those involved in mining. In other hands this might have been a novel hopelessly freighted with political themes, but Walters understands that stories are told through characters about whom readers care, a madam who performs a stage routine with a mountain lion, a young man experiencing his first love while wondering where his next meal is coming from, policemen working to enforce the will of local politicians. I couldn't put it down.
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3.89 2020 The Cold Millions
author: Jess Walter
name: Ken
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2023/02/14
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I almost didn't read this book; the opening scene and first chapter were so depressing - early 20th c. Spokane cops invading a park and beating the sleeping itinerant workers to drive them out of town - - that I almost put it down. Reflection on me, not Jess Walters. It's worth considering that class divisions have been far worse than they are now, life much more precarious, and yet there were people who nevertheless fought for social justice, community, economic equality and the right to a life of dignity and freedom.

Walters is a captivating narrator, casting his story through the perspective of the Dolan brothers - 16 y.o. Ryan who is skeptical of his older brother's involvement with the "Wobblies" (the International Workers of the World), an anti-capitalist labor organization that wanted to turn the means of production - often mining or forestry - over to workers. Ryan meets Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, early 20th c. labor activist, feminist, and Wobbly.

The novel offers a Dickensian display of characters - cops, politicians, union activists, thugs and ordinary people, all caught up in the early labor wars, especially those involved in mining. In other hands this might have been a novel hopelessly freighted with political themes, but Walters understands that stories are told through characters about whom readers care, a madam who performs a stage routine with a mountain lion, a young man experiencing his first love while wondering where his next meal is coming from, policemen working to enforce the will of local politicians. I couldn't put it down.

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The Son 16240761
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.

Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men-complicating his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong-a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.

Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and JA, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world.

Phillipp Meyer deftly explores how Eli's ruthlessness and steely pragmatism transform subsequent generations of McCulloughs. Love, honor, children are sacrificed in the name of ambition, as the family becomes one of the richest powers in Texas, a ranching-and-oil dynasty of unsurpassed wealth and privilege. Yet, like all empires, the McCoulloughs must eventually face the consequences of their choices.

Harrowing, panoramic, and vividly drawn, The Son is a masterful achievement from a sublime young talent.]]>
561 Philipp Meyer 0062120395 Ken 5 4.01 2013 The Son
author: Philipp Meyer
name: Ken
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2013
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Ocean at the End of the Lane]]> 15783514
Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.]]>
181 Neil Gaiman 0062255657 Ken 4 to-read 4.00 2013 The Ocean at the End of the Lane
author: Neil Gaiman
name: Ken
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]>
401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Ken 0 to-read 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Ken
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
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<![CDATA[The Angel of Rome and Other Stories]]> 59147716 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes--for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous--as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.

We all live like we're famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don't want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during "the year of my reinvention" finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams.

Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again "solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds" (Esquire).]]>
274 Jess Walter 006286811X Ken 5 4.05 2022 The Angel of Rome and Other Stories
author: Jess Walter
name: Ken
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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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 Ken 5 3.67 2012 Beautiful Ruins
author: Jess Walter
name: Ken
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Women of the Copper Country]]> 42201959 In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements had seen enough of the world to know that it was unfair. She’s spent her whole life in the copper-mining town of Calumet, Michigan where men risk their lives for meager salaries—and had barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man telling them their loved ones aren’t coming home. When Annie decides to stand up for herself, and the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle.

In Annie’s hands lie the miners� fortunes and their health, her husband’s wrath over her growing independence, and her own reputation as she faces the threat of prison and discovers a forbidden love. On her fierce quest for justice, Annie will discover just how much she is willing to sacrifice for her own independence and the families of Calumet.

From one of the most versatile writers in contemporary fiction, this novel is an authentic and moving historical portrait of the lives of the men and women of the early 20th century labor movement, and of a turbulent, violent political landscape that may feel startlingly relevant to today.]]>
352 Mary Doria Russell 1982109580 Ken 0 to-read 4.08 2019 The Women of the Copper Country
author: Mary Doria Russell
name: Ken
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/04/18
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MaddAddam (MaddAddam, #3) 17262203
Told with wit, dizzying imagination, and dark humour, Booker Prize-winning Margaret Atwood’s unpredictable, chilling and hilarious MaddAddam takes us further into a challenging dystopian world and holds up a skewed mirror to our own possible future.]]>
394 Margaret Atwood 0385528787 Ken 0 to-read 4.00 2013 MaddAddam (MaddAddam, #3)
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Ken
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/11/04
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The Ghost Bride 16248223 A startlingly original voice makes her literary debut with this wondrous coming-of-age story infused with Chinese folklore, romantic intrigue, adventure, and fascinating, dreamlike twists.

'One evening, my father asked me whether I would like to become a ghost bride...'

Though ruled by British overlords, the Chinese of colonial Malaya still cling to ancient customs. And in the sleepy port town of Malacca, ghosts and superstitions abound.

Li Lan, the daughter of a genteel but bankrupt family, has few prospects. But fate intervenes when she receives an unusual proposal from the wealthy and powerful Lim family. They want her to become a ghost bride for the family's only son, who recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, traditional ghost marriages are used to placate restless spirits. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at a terrible price.

After an ominous visit to the opulent Lim mansion, Li Lan finds herself haunted not only by her ghostly would-be suitor, but also by her desire for the Lims' handsome new heir, Tian Bai. Night after night, she is drawn into the shadowy parallel world of the Chinese afterlife, with its ghost cities, paper funeral offerings, vengeful spirits, and monstrous bureaucracy—including the mysterious Er Lang, a charming but unpredictable guardian spirit. Li Lan must uncover the Lim family's darkest secrets—and the truth about her own family—before she is trapped in this ghostly world forever.]]>
368 Yangsze Choo 0062227327 Ken 0 to-read 3.79 2013 The Ghost Bride
author: Yangsze Choo
name: Ken
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/11/04
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<![CDATA[Life After Life (Todd Family, #1)]]> 15790842
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can - will she?]]>
544 Kate Atkinson 0316176486 Ken 0 to-read 3.76 2013 Life After Life (Todd Family, #1)
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Ken
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2013/11/04
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<![CDATA[The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso]]> 6656 This Everyman’s Library edition–containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize—winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli’s marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations.

Translated in this edition by Allen Mandelbaum, The Divine Comedy begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.

Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets.]]>
798 Dante Alighieri 0679433139 Ken 4 4.08 1320 The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso
author: Dante Alighieri
name: Ken
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1320
rating: 4
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A Brief History of Time 3869
Told in language we all can understand, A Brief History of Time plunges into the exotic realms of black holes and quarks, of antimatter and “arrows of time,� of the big bang and a bigger God—where the possibilities are wondrous and unexpected. With exciting images and profound imagination, Stephen Hawking brings us closer to the ultimate secrets at the very heart of creation.]]>
226 Stephen Hawking 0553380168 Ken 3 4.22 1988 A Brief History of Time
author: Stephen Hawking
name: Ken
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1988
rating: 3
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Chaos: Making a New Science 64582 Chaos introduces a whole new readership to chaos theory, one of the most significant waves of scientific knowledge in our time. From Edward Lorenz’s discovery of the Butterfly Effect, to Mitchell Feigenbaum’s calculation of a universal constant, to Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept of fractals, which created a new geometry of nature, Gleick’s engaging narrative focuses on the key figures whose genius converged to chart an innovative direction for science. In Chaos, Gleick makes the story of chaos theory not only fascinating but also accessible to beginners, and opens our eyes to a surprising new view of the universe.]]> 352 James Gleick 0140092501 Ken 5 4.04 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science
author: James Gleick
name: Ken
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1987
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy]]> 10672848 336 Sharon Bertsch McGrayne 0300169698 Ken 0 to-read 3.69 2011 The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
author: Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
name: Ken
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2012/12/15
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Ritual (Jack Caffery, #3) 2714797 415 Mo Hayder 0593056426 Ken 3 3.74 2008 Ritual (Jack Caffery, #3)
author: Mo Hayder
name: Ken
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2008
rating: 3
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Pig Island 197514 The Devil of Nanking returns with a riveting, disturbing thriller of religious fanatics, hoax debunkers, and the dark side of belief. Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes, but when he visits a secretive religious community on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned.ĚýOn the trail of a strange creature caught briefly on film, so deformed it can hardly be human, Oakes crosses a border of electrical fencing, toxin-filled oil drums, and pigsâ€� skulls to infiltrate the territory of the groupsâ€� isolated founder, Malachi Dove. Their confrontation, and its violent aftermath, is so catastrophic that it forces Oakes to question the nature of evil—and whether he might be responsible for the heinous crime about to unfold. Startling and uncompromising, Pig Island confirms Mo Hayder as one of the most talented, compelling thriller writers now working.]]> 352 Mo Hayder 0871139529 Ken 3 3.38 2006 Pig Island
author: Mo Hayder
name: Ken
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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The Devil of Nanking 366787
The solitary Englishwoman Grey comes to Japan looking for a rare piece of footage that is said to document a particularly monstrous episode of the 1937 Nanking Massacre. Her quest will take her to a reclusive scholar and a wheelchair-bound gangster who clings to life with the aid of a mysterious elixir, and to a handsome American whose interest in Grey may be more sinister than romantic.

The result is a work of spine-chilling suspense, masterful historical detail, and otherworldly beauty.
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471 Mo Hayder 0143036998 Ken 4 3.94 2004 The Devil of Nanking
author: Mo Hayder
name: Ken
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2004
rating: 4
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Ghostwritten 6819
A writer of pyrotechnic virtuosity and profound compassion, a mind to which nothing human is alien, David Mitchell spins genres, cultures, and ideas like gossamer threads around and through these nine linked stories. Many forces bind these lives, but at root all involve the same universal longing for connection and transcendence, an axis of commonality that leads in two directions—to creation and to destruction. In the end, as lives converge with a fearful symmetry, Ghostwritten comes full circle, to a point at which a familiar idea—that whether the planet is vast or small is merely a matter of perspective—strikes home with the force of a new revelation. It marks the debut novel of a writer with astonishing gifts.]]>
426 David Mitchell 0375724508 Ken 5 4.06 1999 Ghostwritten
author: David Mitchell
name: Ken
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1999
rating: 5
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The Second World War 13528287
Over the past two decades, Antony Beevor has established himself as one of the world's premier historians of WWII. His multi-award winning books have included Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 . Now, in his newest and most ambitious book, he turns his focus to one of the bloodiest and most tragic events of the twentieth century, the Second World War.

In this searing narrative that takes us from Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 to V-J day on August 14, 1945 and the war's aftermath, Beevor describes the conflict and its global reach -- one that included every major power. The result is a dramatic and breathtaking single-volume history that provides a remarkably intimate account of the war that, more than any other, still commands attention and an audience.

Thrillingly written and brilliantly researched, Beevor's grand and provocative account is destined to become the definitive work on this complex, tragic, and endlessly fascinating period in world history, and confirms once more that he is a military historian of the first rank.]]>
863 Antony Beevor 0316023744 Ken 0 to-read 4.37 2012 The Second World War
author: Antony Beevor
name: Ken
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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Birdman (Jack Caffery, #1) 130260
Detective Inspector Jack Caffery - young, driven, unshockable - finds himself facing both hostility within the force and echoes of his past in this, his first case with AMIP. Haunted by the memory of a death long ago, he employs every weapon forensic science can offer for he knows it is only a matter of time before this chaotic, sadistic killer strikes again.]]>
448 Mo Hayder 0440236169 Ken 4 3.89 1999 Birdman (Jack Caffery, #1)
author: Mo Hayder
name: Ken
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1999
rating: 4
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Cloud Atlas 49628
Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .

Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.

But the story doesn't end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.

As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.]]>
509 David Mitchell 0375507256 Ken 5 4.02 2004 Cloud Atlas
author: David Mitchell
name: Ken
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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The Dress Lodger 15807 She holds a glimmer of hope after meeting Dr. Henry Chiver, a prisoner of his own dark past. But in a world where suspicion of medicine runs rampant like a fever, these two lost souls will become irrevocably linked, as each crosses lines between rich and destitute, decorum and abandon, damnation and salvation. By turns tender and horrifying, The Dress Lodger is a captivating historical thriller charged with a distinctly modern voice. . . .]]> 291 Sheri Holman 0345436911 Ken 4 3.57 1998 The Dress Lodger
author: Sheri Holman
name: Ken
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1998
rating: 4
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