author: Susan Mulcahy
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:
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But when Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should no longer exist. Something has gone wrong, and someone out there knows far too much about her late brother, her late husband, and possibly about Anna herself. What does this person want, and what are they prepared to do? She has come too far and worked too hard to lose what she values most: the sole and uncontested right to her own story鈥攁nd she is, by any standard, a master storyteller.]]>
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:
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Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he鈥檚 teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what鈥檚 left of his self-respect; he hasn鈥檛 written鈥攍et alone published鈥攁nything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn鈥檛 need Jake鈥檚 help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.
Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker鈥檚 first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that鈥攁 story that absolutely needs to be told.
In a few short years, all of Evan Parker鈥檚 predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.
As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his 鈥渟ure thing鈥� of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?]]>
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
A fun page turner.
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Beginning in January 2009, THE PAYOFF lays bare Washington鈥檚 culture of power and plutocracy. It鈥檚 the story of the twenty-month struggle by Senator Ted Kaufman and Jeff Connaughton, his chief of staff, to hold Wall Street executives accountable for securities fraud, to stop stock manipulation by high-frequency traders, and to break up too-big-to-fail megabanks.
This book takes us inside their dogged crusade against institutional inertia and industry influence as they encounter an outright reluctance by the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to treat Wall Street crimes with the gravity they deserve. On financial reforms, Connaughton criticizes Democrats for relying on the very Wall Street technocrats who had failed to prevent the crisis and Republicans for staunchly opposing real reforms primarily to enjoy a golden opportunity to siphon fundraising dollars from the Wall Street executives who had raised millions to elect Barack Obama president.
Connaughton, a former lawyer in the Clinton White House, illuminates the pivotal moments and key decisions in the fight for financial reform that have gone largely unreported. His arch, nonpartisan account chronicles the reasons why Wall Street鈥檚 worst offenses were left unpunished, and why it鈥檚 likely that the 2008 debacle will happen again.]]>
author: Jeff Connaughton
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:
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And when she walks out into the corridor, all the cabin doors are open. To her horror, she soon realizes that the ship is completely empty. No passengers, no crew, nobody but her. The Atlantica is steaming into the mid-Atlantic and Caz is the only person on board. But that鈥檚 just the beginning of the terrifying journey she finds herself trapped on in this white-knuckled mystery.]]>
author: Will Dean
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:
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There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard.
What you don't know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot's family was kidnapped.
For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die.
The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane.
Enjoy the flight.]]>
author: T.J. Newman
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:
The second of Newman's books that I read in one day! Both page-turners (clearly!).
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When a pilot suffers a heart attack at 35,000 feet, a commercial airliner filled with passengers crashes into a nuclear power plant in the small town of Waketa, Minnesota, which becomes ground zero for a catastrophic national crisis with global implications.
The International Nuclear Event Scale tracks nuclear disasters. It has seven levels. Level 7 is a Major Accident, with only two on record: Fukushima and Chernobyl. There has never been a Level 8. Until now.
In this heart-stopping thriller, ordinary people鈥攑ower plant employees, firefighters, teachers, families, neighbors, and friends鈥� are thrust into an extraordinary situation as they face the ultimate test of their lives. It will take the combined courage, ingenuity, and determination of a brave few to save not only their community and loved ones, but the fate of humanity at large.]]>
author: T.J. Newman
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/18
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:
Great page-turner, finish it in one setting kind of book.
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author: Jane Austen
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
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鈥淲hat looks like magic is simply a part of life we don鈥檛 understand yet鈥︹€�
When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.
Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend鈥檚 life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.]]>
author: Matt Haig
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/02
shelves: to-read
review:
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The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth.
The crew of the Six-Thousand ship consists of those who were born, and those who were created. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike find themselves longing for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.
Gradually, the crew members come to see themselves in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether their work can carry on as before 鈥� and what it means to be truly alive.
Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn鈥檚 crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.]]>
author: Olga Ravn
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/07/14
shelves:
review:
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Except that right now, he doesn鈥檛 know that. He can鈥檛 even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he鈥檚 been asleep for a very, very long time. And he鈥檚 just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it鈥檚 up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery鈥攁nd conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he鈥檚 got to do it all alone.
Or does he?]]>
author: Andy Weir
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2024/06/09
shelves:
review:
There was a lot I found frustrating about reading this, but in the end I loved it.
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When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street鈥攆or sale at a surprisingly reasonable price鈥攖hey couldn鈥檛 believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.
Margaret is not most people.
Margaret is staying. It鈥檚 her house. But after four years Hal can鈥檛 take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he鈥檚 not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine鈥攚ho knows nothing about the hauntings鈥攁rrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.]]>
author: Carissa Orlando
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/14
date added: 2024/05/15
shelves:
review:
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Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it's time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat鈥攂lindfolded鈥攚ith nothing to rely on but her wits and the children's trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?
Interweaving past and present, Bird Box is a snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.]]>
author: Josh Malerman
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves:
review:
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But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department鈥攁 mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith鈥攚hen she sees him locking eyes with a superior from the Inner Party at the Two Minutes Hate. And when one day, finding herself walking toward Winston, she impulsively hands him a note鈥攁 potentially suicidal gesture鈥攕he comes to realise that she's losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.
Seventy-five years after Orwell finished writing his iconic novel, Sandra Newman has tackled the world of Big Brother in a truly convincing way, offering a dramatically different, feminist narrative that is true to and stands alongside the original. For the millions of readers who have been brought up with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, here, finally, is a provocative, vital and utterly satisfying companion novel.]]>
author: Sandra Newman
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/04
date added: 2024/05/04
shelves:
review:
Review to come. I'm processing! But I'm blown away. It took me a little while to get into because I tried to read 1984 before reading Julia, and I thought 1984 was such a slog. I'd never read it, and to me it was like reading a comic book. So I started off totally uninterested in revisiting the world Orwell created. But then it got very interesting, and the opposite of a comic book. It felt so much more real and a hell of a lot darker. I was glad I'd read enough of 1984 to see what Sandra Newman had done. The ending was perfection.
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Christopher Bonastia shows how the Nixon years were ripe for federal action to foster residential desegregation. The period was marked by new legislative protections against housing discrimination, unprecedented federal involvement in housing construction, and frequent judicial backing for the actions of civil rights agencies.
By comparing housing desegregation policies to civil rights enforcement in employment and education, Bonastia offers an unrivaled account of why civil rights policies diverge so sharply in their ambition and effectiveness.]]>
author: Christopher Bonastia
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2020/06/01
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves:
review:
If you want to understand housing in this country, this is a must read. I've read it about a half a dozen times now.
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From the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Murder Rule comes an emotional novel of suspense about two families at war.
Nina and Simon are the perfect couple. Young, fun and deeply in love. Until they leave for a weekend at his family鈥檚 cabin in Vermont, and only Simon comes home.
WHAT HAPPENED TO NINA?
Nobody knows. Simon鈥檚 explanation about what happened in their last hours together doesn鈥檛 add up. Nina鈥檚 parents push the police for answers, and Simon鈥檚 parents rush to protect him. They hire expensive lawyers and a PR firm that quickly ramps up a vicious, nothing-is-off-limits media campaign.
HOW FAR WILL HIS FAMILY GO TO KEEP HIM SAFE?
Soon, facts are lost in a swirl of accusation and counter-accusation. Everyone chooses a side, and the story goes viral, fueled by armchair investigators and wild conspiracy theories and illustrated with pretty pictures taken from Nina鈥檚 social media accounts. Journalists descend on their small Vermont town, followed by a few obsessive "fans."
HOW FAR WILL HER FAMILY GO TO GET TO THE TRUTH?
Nina鈥檚 family is under siege, but they never lose sight of the only thing that really matters鈥攆inding their daughter. Out-gunned by Simon鈥檚 wealthy, powerful family, Nina鈥檚 parents recognize that if playing by the rules won鈥檛 get them anywhere, it鈥檚 time to break them.]]>
author: Dervla McTiernan
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves:
review:
A true page turner! Thank you Dervila McTiernan!
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Now I want to visit all the memorials.]]>
author: Claude Rust
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves:
review:
A devastating read. I wish the author was still alive so I could ask him questions. I have known about this story for a long time, but not a lot of detail. This line killed me: "The tinderbox, created by a thousand acts of negligence, was ready to ignite."
Now I want to visit all the memorials.
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Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix鈥檚 children鈥檚 school. Josie has been listening to Alix鈥檚 podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie鈥檚 life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can鈥檛 quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix鈥檚 life鈥攁nd into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family鈥檚 lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?]]>
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/03
date added: 2024/04/04
shelves:
review:
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author: Marlen Haushofer
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/19
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves:
review:
It's one of the best books I've ever read, but it broke my heart. I was sobbing at the end and I don't remember the last time I've done that. I've teared up many times, but sobbing??
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There is only one Guinevere Beck in New York City. She has a public Facebook account and Tweets incessantly, telling Joe everything he needs to know: she is simply Beck to her friends, she went to Brown University, she lives on Bank Street, and she鈥檒l be at a bar in Brooklyn tonight鈥攖he perfect place for a 鈥渃hance鈥� meeting.
As Joe invisibly and obsessively takes control of Beck鈥檚 life, he orchestrates a series of events to ensure Beck finds herself in his waiting arms. Moving from stalker to boyfriend, Joe transforms himself into Beck鈥檚 perfect man, all while quietly removing the obstacles that stand in their way鈥攅ven if it means murder.
A terrifying exploration of how vulnerable we all are to stalking and manipulation.]]>
author: Caroline Kepnes
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/04
date added: 2023/11/04
shelves:
review:
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Candace won鈥檛 be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They鈥檙e traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?
A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma鈥檚 Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]>
author: Ling Ma
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/25
shelves:
review:
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In 2011, Jake Epping, an English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, sets out on an insane 鈥� and insanely possible 鈥� mission to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
Leaving behind a world of computers and mobile phones, he goes back to a time of big American cars and diners, of Lindy Hopping, the sound of Elvis, and the taste of root beer.
In this haunting world, Jake falls in love with Sadie, a beautiful high school librarian. And, as the ominous date of 11/22/63 approaches, he encounters a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald...]]>
author: Stephen King
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/18
date added: 2023/10/15
shelves:
review:
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Combining elements of neo-noir, speculative fiction, and '80s detective shows, FLUX is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.
In FLUX, a brilliant debut in the vein of William Gibson鈥檚 Neuromancer and Ling Ma鈥檚 Severance, Jinwoo Chong introduces us to three characters 鈥擝o, Brandon and Blue鈥� who are tortured by these questions as their lives spin out of control.
* After 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, his white father, attempting to hold their lives together, begins to gradually retreat from the family.
* 28-year-old Brandon loses his job at a legacy magazine publisher and is offered a new position. Confused to find himself in an apartment he does not recognize, and an office he sometimes cannot remember leaving, he comes to suspect that something far more sinister is happening behind the walls.
* 48-year-old Blue participates in a television expos茅 of Flux, a failed bioelectric tech startup whose fraudulent activity eventually claimed the lives of three people and nearly killed him. Blue, who can only speak with the aid of cybernetic implants, stalks his old manager while holding his estranged family at arms-length.
Intertwined with the saga of a once-iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star has fallen after decades of concealed abuse, the lives of Bo, Brandon and Blue intersect with each other, to the extent that it becomes clear that their lives are more interconnected and interdependent than the reader could have ever imagined.
Can we ever really change the past, or the future? What truth do we owe our families? What truth do we owe ourselves?]]>
author: Jinwoo Chong
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/21
date added: 2023/10/15
shelves:
review:
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Jon thought he had all the time in the world to respond to his wife鈥檚 text message: I miss you so much. I feel bad about how we left it. Love you. But as he鈥檚 waiting in the lobby of the L鈥橦otel Sixieme in Switzerland after an academic conference, still mulling over how to respond to his wife, he receives a string of horrifying push notifications. Washington, DC has been hit with a nuclear bomb, then New York, then London, and finally Berlin. That鈥檚 all he knows before news outlets and social media goes black鈥攁nd before the clouds on the horizon turn orange.
Now, two months later, there are twenty survivors holed up at the hotel, a place already tainted by its strange history of suicides and murders. Those who can鈥檛 bear to stay commit suicide or wander off into the woods. Jon and the others try to maintain some semblance of civilization. But when the water pressure disappears, and Jon and a crew of survivors investigate the hotel鈥檚 water tanks, they are shocked to discover the body of a young girl.
As supplies dwindle and tensions rise, Jon becomes obsessed with investigating the death of the little girl as a way to cling to his own humanity. Yet the real question remains: can he afford to lose his mind in this hotel, or should he take his chances in the outside world?]]>
author: Hanna Jameson
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/30
date added: 2023/10/15
shelves:
review:
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Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren鈥檚 father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren鈥檚 family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]>
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/07
date added: 2023/10/15
shelves:
review:
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As Hannah鈥檚 increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen鈥檚 boss, as a U.S. marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn鈥檛 who he said he was. Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen鈥檚 true identity鈥攁nd why he really disappeared.]]>
author: Laura Dave
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/07
date added: 2023/01/07
shelves:
review:
Great beach read.
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At first, Logan Ramsay isn鈥檛 sure if anything鈥檚 different. He just feels a little . . . sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep.
But before long, he can鈥檛 deny it: Something鈥檚 happening to his brain. To his body. He鈥檚 starting to see the world, and those around him鈥攅ven those he loves most鈥攊n whole new ways.
The truth is, Logan鈥檚 genome has been hacked. And there鈥檚 a reason he鈥檚 been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy.
Worse still, what鈥檚 happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large鈥攁t a terrifying cost.
Because of his new abilities, Logan鈥檚 the one person in the world capable of stopping what鈥檚 been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he鈥檒l have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.
And even as he鈥檚 fighting, he can鈥檛 help wondering: what if humanity鈥檚 only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution?
Intimate in scale yet epic in scope, Upgrade is an intricately plotted, lightning-fast tale that charts one man鈥檚 thrilling transformation, even as it asks us to ponder the limits of our humanity鈥攁nd our boundless potential.]]>
author: Blake Crouch
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/07
date added: 2022/08/08
shelves:
review:
Read it practically in one sitting, which is one of my favorite things in a book. Fun summer read.
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In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here]]>
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/10
date added: 2022/07/10
shelves:
review:
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In a world reeling from an unusual plague, monsters lurk in the streets while terrified survivors arm themselves and roam the countryside in packs. Or perhaps something very different is happening. When a disease affects how reality is perceived, it鈥檚 hard to be certain of anything鈥�
Spence is one of the 鈥渃ured鈥� living at the Ironside rehabilitation facility. Haunted by guilt, he refuses to face the changed world until a new inmate challenges him to help her find her old crew. But if he can鈥檛 tell the truth from the lies, how will he know if he has earned the redemption he dreams of? How will he know he hasn鈥檛 just made things worse?]]>
author: Malcolm Devlin
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2022/06/17
shelves:
review:
A fun read, I gobbled it right up.
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Deep in the California woods on an evening in late August, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband Leo and their five-year-old son Benjamin. As dusk sets in, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. At that moment, every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world, disappearing from operating theaters mid-surgery, from behind the wheels of cars, from arguments and acts of love. Children, adults, even fetuses are gone in an instant. Leo and Benjamin are gone. No one knows why, how, or where.
After the Disappearance, Jane forces herself to enter a world she barely recognizes, one where women must create new ways of living while coping with devastating grief. As people come together to rebuild depopulated industries and distribute scarce resources, Jane focuses on reuniting with an old college girlfriend, Evangelyne Moreau, leader of the Commensalist Party of America, a rising political force in this new world. Meanwhile, strange video footage called 鈥淭he Men鈥� is being broadcast online showing images of the vanished men marching through barren, otherworldly landscapes. Is this just a hoax, or could it hold the key to the Disappearance?
From the author of The Heavens, The Men is a gripping, beautiful, and disquieting novel of feminist utopias and impossible sacrifices that interrogates the dream of a perfect society and the conflict between individual desire and the good of the community.]]>
But I will say that The Men is the kind of book you finish in one sitting if you can, and you close the book saying something along the lines of, "Holy shit." But a good holy shit. It took my breath away it was so exquisite. And comforting, but not a false comfort. Still, I feel like I can rest easier now, even in the face of terrible times.]]>
author: Sandra Newman
name: Stacy
average rating: 2.96
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/31
date added: 2022/05/31
shelves:
review:
I know Sandra, but her new book unexpectedly fits into a category of book I've been reading lately and I had no idea that it would. (I've been so caught up in my own research I haven't talked to her about what she was working on.) I don't have a name for the category yet, but the best examples of it are The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel and Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. I'm not talking about structure, I hope I remember to come back here to explain just what it is I am talking about when I can speak about it more coherently.
But I will say that The Men is the kind of book you finish in one sitting if you can, and you close the book saying something along the lines of, "Holy shit." But a good holy shit. It took my breath away it was so exquisite. And comforting, but not a false comfort. Still, I feel like I can rest easier now, even in the face of terrible times.
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London, 1593. Kate wakes as Emilia - the mistress of a nobleman - and finds the plague at her door. Afflicted by premonitions of a burnt and lifeless city, she sets out to save the world. Each decision she makes will change her life with Ben for ever.
A story of love and alternate universes, madness and time travel, The Heavens is a dream bound up in a strange awakening; it is a novel of what we have lost, and what we might yet be able to save.]]>
author: Sandra Newman
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/05/01
date added: 2022/05/28
shelves:
review:
I was mesmerized. The Heavens is a page turner, which I haven't experienced in a long time and usually only get from thrillers and beach reads. This was more intense and dazzling (and honest) and if this doesn't get made into a movie I quit.
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Nora Kelly, a young but successful curator with a series of important excavations already under her belt, is approached by the handsome Historian, Clive Benton, to lead an expedition unlike any other. Clive tells his story--one involving the ill-fated Donner Party, who became permanently lodged in the American consciousness in the winter of 1847, when the first skeletonized survivors of the party stumbled out of the California mountains, replete with tales of courage, resourcefulness, bad luck, murder, barbarism--and, finally, starvation and cannibalism.
Captivated by the Donner Party, Nora agrees and they venture into the Sierra Nevada in search of the camp. Quickly, they learn that the discovery of the missing starvation camp is just the tip of the iceberg--and that the real truth behind those long-dead pioneers is not only far more complex and surprising than they could have imagined...but it is one that puts them both in mortal danger from a very real, present-day threat in which the search for the lost party, and its fabled fortune in gold, are merely means to a horrifying end.
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author: Douglas Preston
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/17
date added: 2022/04/18
shelves:
review:
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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.]]>
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/14
date added: 2022/04/14
shelves:
review:
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Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed 鈥淭oo Big to Fail鈥� to almost every large corporation in America鈥攖o pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club鈥攁n inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs鈥攅xplains why in 鈥渁n absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism鈥 first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy鈥� (Bloomberg Businessweek).
Jesse Eisigner begins the story in the 1970s, when the government pioneered the notion that top corporate executives, not just seedy crooks, could commit heinous crimes and go to prison. He brings us to trading desks on Wall Street, to corporate boardrooms and the offices of prosecutors and FBI agents. These revealing looks provide context for the evolution of the Justice Department鈥檚 approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early 2000s and into the Justice Department鈥檚 approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early 2000s and into the Justice Department of today, including the prosecutorial fiascos, corporate lobbying, trial losses, and culture shifts that have stripped the government of the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives.
鈥淏rave and elegant鈥�.a fearless reporter鈥isinger鈥檚 important and profound book takes no prisoners (The Washington Post). Exposing one of the most important scandals of our time, The Chickenshit Club provides a clear, detailed explanation as to how our Justice Department has come to avoid, bungle, and mismanage the fight to bring these alleged criminals to justice. 鈥淭his book is a wakeup call鈥 chilling read, and a needed one鈥� (NPR.org).]]>
author: Jesse Eisinger
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2022/03/14
date added: 2022/03/15
shelves:
review:
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To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors鈥攁nd any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.
Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton鈥檚 sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot.
Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions鈥攅xplosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post鈥揓im Crow United States no longer holds.
Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the 鈥淲ar on Crime,鈥� sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.
The central lesson from these eruptions鈥攖hat police violence invariably leads to community violence鈥攃ontinues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today.
Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation鈥檚 enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.]]>
author: Elizabeth Hinton
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/17
date added: 2022/01/17
shelves:
review:
Just finished America on Fire and now I'm sitting here thinking how I can get people I know who will be resistant to the idea of reading it to read it. I've been reading a lot of books for research for a book I hope to write and this is one that is written in a way that I think might reach people I know who don't understand the history.
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WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?
The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age鈥攁 world terraformed and prepared for human life.
But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.
Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?]]>
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/06
date added: 2022/01/06
shelves:
review:
A page turner. Is there anything more delicious and fun than a true page turner??
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There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you're rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you're likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election). When caught and convicted, such as for bribing their kids' way into college, high-class criminals make brief stops in minimum security "Club Fed" camps. Operate the scam from the executive suite of a giant corporation, and you can prosper with impunity. Consider Wells Fargo & Co. Pressured by management, employees at the bank opened more than three million bank and credit card accounts without customer consent, and charged late fees and penalties to account holders. When CEO John Stumpf resigned in "shame," the board of directors granted him a $134 million golden parachute.
This is not victimless crime. Big Dirty Money details the scandalously common and concrete ways that ordinary Americans suffer when the well-heeled use white collar crime to gain and sustain wealth, social status, and political influence. Profiteers caused the mortgage meltdown and the prescription opioid crisis, they've evaded taxes and deprived communities of public funds for education, public health, and infrastructure. Taub goes beyond the headlines (of which there is no shortage) to track how we got here (essentially a post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle, the growth of "too big to jail" syndrome, and a developing implicit immunity of the upper class) and pose solutions that can help catch and convict offenders.]]>
author: Jennifer Taub
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/11/06
date added: 2021/11/07
shelves:
review:
I'm reading this for research, and it was a page turner (most of the books I've read so far on this subject have not been so easy to read).
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New York City, 1945. Marjorie Jacobson and her best friend, Marty Garrett, arrive fresh from the Kappa house at the University of Iowa hoping to find summer positions as shopgirls. Turned away from the top department stores, they miraculously find jobs as pages at Tiffany & Co., becoming the first women to ever work on the sales floor--a diamond-filled day job replete with Tiffany blue shirtwaist dresses from Bonwit Teller's--and the envy of all their friends.
Hart takes us back to the magical time when she and Marty rubbed elbows with the rich and famous; pinched pennies to eat at the Automat; experienced nightlife at La Martinique; and danced away their weekends with dashing midshipmen. Between being dazzled by Judy Garland's honeymoon visit to Tiffany, celebrating VJ Day in Times Square, and mingling with Cafe society, she fell in love, learned unforgettable lessons, made important decisions that would change her future, and created the remarkable memories she now shares with all of us.]]>
author: Marjorie Hart
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/13
date added: 2021/09/14
shelves:
review:
I ate this one right up, it was delicious. I love New York memoirs, and because I was a temp a Tiffany's many years ago this one was especially delightful, to read what it was like to work there in 1945 (some things were very much the same!).
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author: Brian D. Boyer
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.57
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2021/08/26
date added: 2021/08/26
shelves:
review:
A great overview of financial crimes from the 196s and 1970s. Good explanations for a lot of mortgage practices I have struggled to understand completely.
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Dr. Ramola "Rams" Sherman, a soft-spoken pediatrician in her mid-thirties, receives a frantic phone call from Natalie, a friend who is eight months pregnant. Natalie's husband has been killed鈥攙iciously attacked by an infected neighbor鈥攁nd in a failed attempt to save him, Natalie, too, was bitten. Natalie's only chance of survival is to get to a hospital as quickly as possible to receive a rabies vaccine. The clock is ticking for her and for her unborn child.
Natalie鈥檚 fight for life becomes a desperate odyssey as she and Rams make their way through a hostile landscape filled with dangers beyond their worst nightmares鈥攖errifying, strange, and sometimes deadly challenges that push them to the brink.听
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author: Paul Tremblay
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/13
date added: 2021/08/13
shelves:
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Beginning with the absolutely critical first moments of the outbreak in China, and ending with an epilogue on the vaccine rollout and the unprecedented events between the election of Joseph Biden and his inauguration, Lawrence Wright's The Plague Year surges forward with essential information--and fascinating historical parallels--examining the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wright takes us inside the CDC, where the first round of faulty test kits cost America precious time; inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger's early alarm about the virus was met with great skepticism; into a COVID ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from Little Africa, South Carolina; into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs; and even inside the human body, diving deep into the science of just how the virus and vaccines function, with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaxxer movement.
In turns steely eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, comical, and always precise, Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew. His full accounting does honor to the medical professionals around the country who've risked their lives to fight the virus, revealing America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential.]]>
author: Lawrence Wright
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/30
date added: 2021/07/30
shelves:
review:
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After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and well鈥攖hough fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband鈥ut will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress.
In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?]]>
author: Andrew Sean Greer
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2021/07/05
date added: 2021/07/05
shelves:
review:
I go back and forth on this one. Something things I loved, some I didn't. I'm torn. I would definitely recommend it, especially if, like me, you're on a multiple-lives tear. It's a worthy addition.
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September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries 鈥nd finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the assumptions she鈥檚 made. Will what she learns devastate her or free her?听
September 2011. On Manhattan鈥檚 Upper West Side, widow Taryn Michaels has convinced herself that she is living fully, working in a charming specialty fabric store and raising her daughter alone. Then a long-lost photograph appears in a national magazine, and she is forced to relive the terrible day her husband died in the collapse of the World Trade Towers 鈥he same day a stranger reached out and saved her. Will a chance reconnection and a century-old scarf open Taryn鈥檚 eyes to the larger forces at work in her life?
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author: Susan Meissner
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/28
date added: 2021/06/28
shelves:
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author: Matthew Desmond
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/24
date added: 2021/06/24
shelves:
review:
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And when he woke and he was 18 again, with all his memories of the next 25 years intact. He could live his life again, avoiding the mistakes, making money from his knowledge of the future, seeking happiness.
Until he dies at 43 and wakes up back in college again...]]>
author: Ken Grimwood
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1987
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/31
date added: 2021/06/01
shelves:
review:
It may seem like I give every book I read five stars, but that's because if I don't love a book within a few chapters, I stop reading it and move on. I didn't used to do that. It used to be if I started a book I felt I must finish it. But now I want to be carried away within a few chapters. This book carried me away pretty much from the beginning.
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In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]>
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/04
date added: 2021/04/26
shelves:
review:
Kazuo Ishiguro is my new favorite writer. And I'm going to be haunted by the end of Klara and the Sun for a while.
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When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.
Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]>
author: Matt Haig
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/04/26
date added: 2021/04/26
shelves:
review:
A sweet, uplifting, and engaging book. Perfect pandemic reading, or any time you need a lift. You will feel better after reading this book.
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Ninety-seven years later, Chauncey Loomis headed an expedition to Hall's grave in northwestern Greenland. He exhumed Hall's frozen body and performed an autopsy. His findings suggest that the investigators of Hall's death nervously sidestepped the damning evidence. Loomis has written a masterful biography-cum-mystery that brilliantly evokes the lure of the Arctic and the brutal contest between man and nature.
听听听听听听听听
With a new Introduction by Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal]]>
author: Chauncey Loomis
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/15
date added: 2021/04/15
shelves:
review:
I love a good Arctic expedition story, and Chauncey Loomis does a great job. I wish he was a live so I could talk to him about it.
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An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer鈥檚 stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon鈥檚 lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. But when the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders鈥攖heir fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape.
Macabre, fiendishly clever, and with a touch of the supernatural, Yoko Ogawa鈥檚 Revenge creates a haunting tapestry of death鈥攁nd the afterlife of the living.]]>
author: Y艒ko Ogawa
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/03/30
shelves:
review:
I was afraid to read it, because I thought it was going to be too haunting for me in some way, too gruesome, too sad, too something. It was actually all of those things, and O can't put my finger on why I was entranced. I guess I like to be haunted.
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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?]]>
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/23
date added: 2021/01/24
shelves:
review:
For whatever reason, my book picks for the pandemic have been so perfect. This book was so absorbing, and I loved the characters so much. I would have finished it in one sitting if life hadn't intervened.
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author: Gore Vidal
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/14
date added: 2021/01/14
shelves:
review:
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鈥淚t contains truth that cannot be denied.鈥� 鈥� The Atlantic Monthly
In this stunningly personal document, James Baldwin remembers in vivid details the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness and the later events that scored his heart with pain鈥攖he murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.]]>
author: James Baldwin
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/12
date added: 2021/01/12
shelves:
review:
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芦Nos cap铆tulos iniciais de Anna Kar茅nina, somos conduzidos, uma e outra vez, a um sentido de analogia musical. H谩 efeitos de contraponto e harmonia no desenvolvimento das principais tramas do 鈥減rel煤dio Oblonski鈥� (o acidente na esta莽茫o ferrovi谩ria, a zombadora discuss茫o sobre o div贸rcio entre Vronski e a baronesa Chilton, o deslumbramento do fogo vermelho diante dos olhos de Anna). O m茅todo de Tolstoi 茅 polif贸nico; mas as harmonias principais desen- volvem-se com uma tremenda for莽a e amplitude. As t茅cnicas musicais e lingu铆sticas n茫o podem comparar-se de um modo exato. Mas como poder铆amos elucidar de outro modo o sentimento de que as novelas de Tolstoi surgem de um princ铆pio interior de ordem e vitalidade, enquanto as dos escritores menos importantes parecem alinhavadas?禄
芦Anna Kar茅nina morre no mundo do romance; mas cada vez que lemos o livro ela ressuscita, e mesmo depois de o termos acabado adquire outra vida na nossa recorda莽茫o. Em cada personagem liter谩ria existe algo da F茅nix imortal. Atrav茅s das vidas perdur谩veis das suas personagens, a pr贸pria exist锚ncia de Tolstoi teve a sua eternidade.禄 [George Steiner, Tolstoi ou Dostoievski]]]>
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1878
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2020/11/29
shelves:
review:
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Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned.
Just Mercy tells the story of EJI, from the early days with a small staff facing the nation鈥檚 highest death sentencing and execution rates, through a successful campaign to challenge the cruel practice of sentencing children to die in prison, to revolutionary projects designed to confront Americans with our history of racial injustice.
One of EJI鈥檚 first clients was Walter McMillian, a young Black man who was sentenced to die for the murder of a young white woman that he didn鈥檛 commit. The case exemplifies how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching 鈥� a system that treats the rich and guilty better than the poor and innocent.]]>
author: Bryan Stevenson
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2020/10/08
date added: 2020/10/08
shelves:
review:
I've wanted to read this for a while and I'm sorry I took so long. I'll be the billionth person to say this, but it should be required reading for every American.
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When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]>
author: Y艒ko Ogawa
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at: 2020/09/07
date added: 2020/09/07
shelves:
review:
Just finished The Memory Police. Having a panic attack. Reading people describing it as beautiful, dreamy and haunting. Yes. It鈥檚 all that. And HORRIFYING. You all forgot horrifying, ffs. Great Book. Need valium. Onto every other book Yoko Ogawa has written.
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Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it鈥檚 only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]>
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/17
date added: 2020/08/18
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Ishiguro now joins my pantheon of favorite writers. This book absolutely broke my heart though. I can't get over how real all his characters are, such a true to life combination of imperfections and depiction of what it is to be human. I'm not explaining this well.
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Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something鈥攆astidiousness or integrity鈥攑revents her from making a 'suitable' match.]]>
I just this minute finished The House of Mirth and I'm a wreck. I think I'll need another decade before reading The Age of Innocence. It's a great novel, but good god. Wharton masterfully wrapped several dozen nooses around Lily Bart's neck and then took 300 pages to slowly tighten them. Wait, even worse. Sometimes she loosened one here and there and you think, "Oh, maybe she'll be okay," but NO. Sob. How am I going to recover? I feel like I need to write a novel where Lily Bart works it all out. The Jane Austen version of Lily Bart. ]]>
author: Edith Wharton
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1905
rating: 5
read at: 2020/07/25
date added: 2020/07/25
shelves:
review:
SPOILER ALERT: DON'T READ FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE BOOK AND PLAN TO.
I just this minute finished The House of Mirth and I'm a wreck. I think I'll need another decade before reading The Age of Innocence. It's a great novel, but good god. Wharton masterfully wrapped several dozen nooses around Lily Bart's neck and then took 300 pages to slowly tighten them. Wait, even worse. Sometimes she loosened one here and there and you think, "Oh, maybe she'll be okay," but NO. Sob. How am I going to recover? I feel like I need to write a novel where Lily Bart works it all out. The Jane Austen version of Lily Bart.
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There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.
Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it; the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins.
This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift鈥攐f a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.]]>
author: Alastair Gee
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2020/06/13
date added: 2020/06/13
shelves:
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I devoured this book. I would have finished it in one sitting, but I started it late last night and eventually passed out. I picked it up again this morning and finished it. It's a devastating story, so it feels weird to talk about how great this book is, but it's a page turner.
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Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind.
Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.]]>
author: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2020/06/09
date added: 2020/06/09
shelves:
review:
I've been researching this topic for a book proposal I'm working on. I'd been piecing together the story myself when I came upon this book. Thank you Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for this astoundingly well-researched book. It's a long and complicated story and I now feel like I have a handle on it.
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author: Anthony Accetta
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2020/02/20
date added: 2020/05/17
shelves:
review:
Interesting, and would have loved even more details.
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At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons--microbiologist, epidemiologist--travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city... A Russian 茅migr茅, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare... already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic... Henry's wife Jill and their children face diminishing odds of survival in Atlanta... and the disease slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions--scientific, religious, governmental--and decimating the population.]]>
author: Lawrence Wright
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/16
date added: 2020/05/17
shelves:
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At the book's center, two men whom Wright brings vividly to life, showing how they have made Scientology what it is today: The darkly brilliant L. Ron Hubbard--whose restless, expansive mind invented a new religion tailor-made to prosper in the spiritually troubled post-World War II era. And his successor, David Miscavige--tough and driven, with the unenviable task of preserving the church in the face of ongoing scandals and continual legal assaults.
We learn about Scientology's esoteric cosmology; about the auditing process that determines an inductee's state of being; about the Bridge to Total Freedom, through which members gain eternal life. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and how young idealists who joined the Sea Org, the church's clergy, whose members often enter as children, signing up with a billion-year contract and working with little pay in poor conditions. We meet men and women "disconnected" from friends and family by the church's policy of shunning critical voices. And we discover, through many firsthand stories, the violence that has long permeated the inner sanctum of the church.
In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of the constitutional protections achieved in its victory over the IRS. Employing all his exceptional journalistic skills of observations, understanding, and synthesis, and his ability to shape a story into a compelling narrative, Lawrence Wright has given us an evenhanded yet keenly incisive book that goes far beyond an immediate expos茅 and uncovers the very essence of what makes Scientology the institution it is.]]>
author: Lawrence Wright
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/07/12
date added: 2020/05/17
shelves:
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author: Frederick J. Heidenreich
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2020/05/08
shelves:
review:
Another book I read because I'm researching East New York. The book was published in 1948, and he describes an East New York which no longer exists (which was fascinating).
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author: Walter Thabit
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2020/05/08
shelves:
review:
I read this for research, and I'm in the process of re-reading it. I wish the author was alive, I have so many questions. But it's great for what I'm trying to learn (how East New York became what it is today).
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In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.]]>
Update: I've now finished it and it is one of my top ten favorite books ever. It's magnificent.]]>
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/25
date added: 2020/04/25
shelves:
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Just started, and I love it. I can also say the movie truly honors the book. It was a wonderful adaption.
Update: I've now finished it and it is one of my top ten favorite books ever. It's magnificent.
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Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby鈥檚 glass wall: Why don鈥檛 you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients鈥� accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan鈥檚 wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.
In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.]]>
Update: This book is breathtaking. I loved it even more than Station Eleven. I was just speechless when I finished it. I still don't feel like I can do it justice when I try to describe it.]]>
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/16
date added: 2020/04/16
shelves:
review:
I am reading this book because I loved Station Eleven, but as it happens, I'm working on a proposal for a book about a financial crime and now I'm even more interested in this book. My book, if I get to write it, will be non-fiction, but I hope to be inspired by what she does!
Update: This book is breathtaking. I loved it even more than Station Eleven. I was just speechless when I finished it. I still don't feel like I can do it justice when I try to describe it.
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Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother and their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn鈥檛, her world begins to crumble and its shocking secrets are laid bare.
What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one鈥攁nd nothing鈥攊s what it seems.]]>
author: A.J. Finn
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/05
date added: 2020/04/05
shelves:
review:
Perfect sheltering-in-place reading. Just fun, easy reading.
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Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie鈥攚hen his reality shatters.
"Are you happy with your life?"
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.
Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.
Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."
In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
Is it this world or the other that's the dream?
And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined鈥攐ne that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.
Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.]]>
author: Blake Crouch
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/12/25
shelves:
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Read this after finishing Recursion. Also great!
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That's what NYC cop Barry Sutton is learning, as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome鈥攁 mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.
That's what neuroscientist Helena Smith believes. It's why she's dedicated her life to creating a technology that will let us preserve our most precious memories. If she succeeds, anyone will be able to re-experience a first kiss, the birth of a child, the final moment with a dying parent.
As Barry searches for the truth, he comes face to face with an opponent more terrifying than any disease鈥攁 force that attacks not just our minds, but the very fabric of the past. And as its effects begin to unmake the world as we know it, only he and Helena, working together, will stand a chance at defeating it.
But how can they make a stand when reality itself is shifting and crumbling all around them?
At once a relentless pageturner and an intricate science-fiction puzzlebox about time, identity, and memory, Recursion is a thriller as only Blake Crouch could imagine it鈥攁nd his most ambitious, mind-boggling, irresistible work to date.]]>
author: Blake Crouch
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/12/25
date added: 2019/12/25
shelves:
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I've just started this book and I'm pretty sure I won't be getting any sleep tonight. It's so engrossing!
I forgot to add that I finished this. I think I finished it by the next day. Such a fun read, a true page-turner.
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author: George R. Stewart
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2019/08/25
date added: 2019/08/27
shelves:
review:
I didn't love this book, although I loved some things about it. I was drawn into it because it was so old school, it has the cultural mentality of the time period in which it was written and for some reason I wanted to re-visit that.
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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鈥檚 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.]]>
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2019/07/21
date added: 2019/07/21
shelves:
review:
I'm almost done and I don't want it to end.
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author: Joe Bernardini
name: Stacy
average rating: 2.50
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2019/07/08
shelves:
review:
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I've now got my list of what to try. I love how in each review Cords cuts to the chase, and I quickly get a sense of what the show is about, why it's so good and why it might be for me (or not). Cords is a true lover of television and I trust her assessments.
And what is better than a new great show to love?]]>
author: Sarah Cords
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/06/16
shelves:
review:
Except for the big hits, like Downton Abbey, I haven't really watched a lot of British tv. I know I'm missing so much, I know there's a lot of great tv over there, but where to begin??
I've now got my list of what to try. I love how in each review Cords cuts to the chase, and I quickly get a sense of what the show is about, why it's so good and why it might be for me (or not). Cords is a true lover of television and I trust her assessments.
And what is better than a new great show to love?
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New York鈥檚 Lower East Side was said to be the most densely populated square mile on earth in the 1890s. Health inspectors called the neighborhood 鈥渢he suicide ward.鈥� Diarrhea epidemics raged each summer, killing thousands of children. Sweatshop babies with smallpox and typhus dozed in garment heaps destined for fashionable shops. Desperate mothers paced the streets to soothe their feverish children and white mourning cloths hung from every building. A third of the children living there died before their fifth birthday.
By 1911, the child death rate had fallen sharply and The New York Times hailed the city as the healthiest on earth. In this witty and highly personal autobiography, public health crusader Dr. S. Josephine Baker explains how this transformation was achieved. By the time she retired in 1923, Baker was famous worldwide for saving the lives of 90,000 children. The programs she developed, many still in use today, have saved the lives of millions more. She fought for women鈥檚 suffrage, toured Russia in the 1930s, and captured 鈥淭yphoid鈥� Mary Mallon, twice. She was also an astute observer of her times, and Fighting for Life is one of the most honest, compassionate memoirs of American medicine ever written.]]>
author: S. Josephine Baker
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/15
date added: 2019/02/24
shelves:
review:
I read this for research, and I hope I get to write the book I'm planning. Sara Josephine Baker will be a leading character and her autobiography will be an enormous, and endlessly entertaining and enlightening help.
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From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change.
By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by "embalmed milk" every year. Citizens--activists, journalists, scientists, and women's groups--began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically investigating food and drink fraud, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, "The Poison Squad."
Over the next thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, with the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. Together with a gallant cast, including the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction revealed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most famous cookbook author in the country; and Henry J. Heinz, one of the few food producers who actively advocated for pure food, Dr. Wiley changed history. When the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was finally passed, it was known across the land, as "Dr. Wiley's Law."
Blum brings to life this timeless and hugely satisfying "David and Goliath" tale with righteous verve and style, driving home the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clarity, which speaks resoundingly to the enormous social and political challenges we face today.]]>
author: Deborah Blum
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2019/02/24
date added: 2019/02/24
shelves:
review:
The kind of history I just love and as good as it gets. Gripping, relevant (sadly) and inspiring.
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Fans fell in love with Eliza Hamilton鈥擜lexander Hamilton鈥檚 devoted wife鈥攊n Lin-Manuel Miranda鈥檚 phenomenal musical Hamilton . But they don鈥檛 know her full story. A strong pioneer woman, a loving sister, a caring mother, and in her later years, a generous philanthropist, Eliza had many sides鈥攁nd this fascinating biography brings her multi-faceted personality to vivid life.
Eliza The Extraordinary Life and Times of The Wife of Alexander Hamilton follows Eliza through her early years in New York, into the ups and downs of her married life with Alexander, beyond the aftermath of his tragic murder, and finally to her involvement in many projects that cemented her legacy as one of the unsung heroes of our nation鈥檚 early days. Featuring Mazzeo鈥檚 鈥渋mpeccable research and crafting鈥� ( Library Journal ), and perfect for fans of the richly detailed historical books by Ron Chernow and Erik Larson, Eliza Hamilton is the captivating account of the woman behind the famous man.]]>
author: Tilar J. Mazzeo
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/07/01
date added: 2019/01/09
shelves:
review:
Unputdownable! I had so much fun reading this biography. The author is one of those writers who makes everything so fascinating you're constantly going to back and forth to Google to learn even more about some cool thing you just read in the book. I have to look up what else Tilar Mazzeo has written.
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author: Lewis Carroll
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1871
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2018/12/01
shelves:
review:
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author: Liu Cixin
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2017/12/31
date added: 2018/01/01
shelves:
review:
I loved it, although some sections were beyond my education. Should I read the next two?
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author: Margaret Atwood
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2017/09/23
date added: 2017/09/23
shelves:
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author: Helene Hanff
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2017/07/02
shelves:
review:
For fans of Helene Hanff, this book is like getting to visit with Helene again, to see New York through her eyes. I especially enjoyed it because I moved to the City in the years she's describing, although a little sad because so much has changed since then.
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In the late 1930s, in asylums and hospitals across America, a group of renowned neurosurgeons embarked on a campaign to develop and refine a new class of brain operation鈥攖he lobotomy鈥攖hat they hoped would eradicate everything from schizophrenia to homosexuality. These "psychosurgeons," as they called themselves, occupied a gray zone between medical research and medical practice, and ended up subjecting untold numbers of people to the types of surgical experiments once limited to chimpanzees.
The most important test subject to emerge from this largely untold chapter in American history was a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison. In 1953, Henry鈥攚ho suffered from severe epilepsy鈥攔eceived a radical new version of the lobotomy, one that targeted the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry's seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry left the operating room profoundly amnesic, unable to create new long-term memories. Over the next sixty years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.
Luke Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes readers inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Throughout, Dittrich delves into the enduring mysteries of the mind while exposing troubling stories of just how far we've gone in our pursuit of knowledge.
It is also, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich's grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison鈥攁nd thousands of other patients. The author's investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history, and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather's relentless experimentation鈥攅xperimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.
Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide.]]>
author: Luke Dittrich
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/04/12
date added: 2017/04/12
shelves:
review:
At first the book was rough going, only because I'm a bit squeamish and reading about lobotomies made me very uneasy. But I hung in there and found this history fascinating, although ultimately very sad.
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author: Bill Bryson
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2017/01/19
date added: 2017/01/19
shelves:
review:
A perfect vacation of a book. Fun, enlightening, even moving. Loved what I learned, loved spending time with Bryson and Katz.
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In the early 1970s, American correctional officers began to experiment with a seemingly new reform: sexual integration of the prisons. In truth, this "new" system began to dissolve a much earlier reform. The very prisons that are now being integrated were built--after a hard fought campaign by nineteenth-century feminists--as separate prisons run by and for women only.
In the mid-nineteenth century, reformers rejected the belief that "fallen women" could not be redeemed. Instead they argued that only sympathetic care provided by another woman might rehabilitate the female prisoner. The ultimate result was a sexually segregated penal system that is still the norm today.
Their Sisters' Keepers traces the growth and change of the women's prison reform movement throughout a crucial century. It points out the successes and failures of the movement while underscoring an irony of history: the prisons that existed to transform inmates into traditional women provided a base for the emancipation of the keepers, women who built professional careers when few of their sex were allowed to do so.]]>
author: Estelle B. Freedman
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at: 2015/03/15
date added: 2017/01/03
shelves:
review:
Very meticulously researched and a big help to me as I begin to research this subject! Thanks, Estelle.
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author: Gunja Sengupta
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2016/04/24
date added: 2017/01/03
shelves:
review:
I read it for research, and it was just so illuminating. You can鈥檛 say you know American history without knowing the history SenGupta tells in this book. I know a lot of people think slavery happened so long ago, and no one today is still truly suffering its effects or from all the associated evils of slavery. This book connects the dots between then and now in the most meaningful way (although she stops in 1918, except for the epilogue). You see clearly how the consequences of slavery continue to ripple through from one generation and time period to the next and to destroy. Ta Nehisi Coates did this as well in his article The Case for Reparations. These two should be read together.
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In the ruins of a future America, fifteen-year-old Ice Cream Star and her nomadic tribe live off the detritus of a crumbled civilization. Theirs is a world of children; before reaching the age of twenty, they all die of a strange disease they call Posies--a plague that has killed for generations. There is no medicine, no treatment; only the mysterious rumor of a cure.
When her brother begins showing signs of the disease, Ice Cream Star sets off on a bold journey to find this cure. Led by a stranger, a captured prisoner named Pasha who becomes her devoted protector and friend, Ice Cream Star plunges into the unknown, risking her freedom and ultimately her life. Traveling hundreds of miles across treacherous, unfamiliar territory, she will experience love, heartbreak, cruelty, terror, and betrayal, fighting to protect the only world she has ever known.
A postapocalyptic literary epic as imaginative as The Passage and as linguistically ambitious as Cloud Atlas, The Country of Ice Cream Star is a breathtaking work from a writer of rare and unconventional talent.]]>
author: Sandra Newman
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2016/06/17
date added: 2017/01/03
shelves:
review:
I am SO sad to leave the world of Ice Cream Star. I can't believe I'm not going to be spending any more time with these characters, that the stories are over. Sob. I never saw anything coming. The future New York and DC are not the stereotypical post-apocalyptic cities we always see (however well done). Everything about this book was entirely original, and I have to say, all the parts about fighting wars, not something at all interesting to me, were so compelling. A line I just loved: 鈥淭he worst thing about a war, senyora, is that it produces war heroes.鈥� I want to know what happens next for these characters.
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James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, who know the police world from the inside, throw today's headlines into vivid relief by taking us back more than 150 years through a succession of immigrant waves, long hot summers, and career-destroying crises and scandals. Fascinating as history, NYPD is also a telling look at the fears, the lore, the slang, the secrets, and the rituals of a chronically misunderstood profession.]]>
author: James Lardner
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2015/12/03
date added: 2017/01/03
shelves:
review:
This is another book I'm reading for research. I'm looking for information about the early NYPD, and by someone who isn't sugar-coating it. I'm writing a book about a period in 19th century NYC and I already know in the early NYPD days it was often hard to tell the cops from the criminals.
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From Scotland to Key West, from Brazil to Paris--even right next door--there is always something to learn about being human from a great garden.]]>
I鈥檓 trying to think of a way to explain what it鈥檚 like reading her writing. Her other book When Wanderers Cease to Roam has this same effect. I鈥檒l just go with explaining the after effect. When you put the book down you鈥檙e left with the feeling that everything is going to be okay, even if and when bad things happen. And there is beauty and mystery everywhere and remarkable moments can happen at any time.]]>
author: Vivian Swift
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/06/29
date added: 2017/01/03
shelves:
review:
God I love Vivian Swift鈥檚 books. They are enchanting. Later, just a few hours after finishing it, I was staring into a garden around City Hall and the Tweed Courthouse. It was night and fireflies came out. I never see fireflies, I was so thrilled, and it was all so magical and lovely and I thought, I鈥檓 having a Vivian Swift garden moment! Which was also a moment of saudade (she explains this in the book).
I鈥檓 trying to think of a way to explain what it鈥檚 like reading her writing. Her other book When Wanderers Cease to Roam has this same effect. I鈥檒l just go with explaining the after effect. When you put the book down you鈥檙e left with the feeling that everything is going to be okay, even if and when bad things happen. And there is beauty and mystery everywhere and remarkable moments can happen at any time.
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author: Richard K. Morgan
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2016/12/31
date added: 2017/01/03
shelves:
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author: E.L. Doctorow
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2015/11/16
date added: 2015/11/17
shelves:
review:
I read this as research for a book I'm writing now myself. My book is non-fiction and it begins at the time this book is set. It was great for that, and a very good story, but, and I can't put my finger on why, it doesn't hold up all the way through. I made myself finish the last ... say fifth of the book.
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author: Vivian Swift
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2015/10/21
shelves:
review:
This book is so charming, so moving, and so interesting it should be a best seller, and it does sell very well, thank you very much, but it should be on everyone鈥檚 bookshelf. It鈥檚 like wandering into an enchanting and secret garden (and she talks about secret gardens!) of heart and facts鈥攐f all the information there is in the world, she sprinkles the most perfect pieces of it throughout the book.
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"The time will come when she'll be ranked above Hemingway." -- Leon Edel]]>
author: Willa Cather
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1915
rating: 4
read at: 2015/10/21
date added: 2015/10/21
shelves:
review:
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author: Thomas Hardy
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1895
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/04/29
shelves:
review:
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Unlike his brother Sid, Tom receives "lickings" from his Aunt Polly; ever the mischief-maker, would rather play hooky than attend school and often sneaks out his bedroom window at night to adventure with his friend, Huckleberry Finn 颅 the town's social outcast. Tom, despite his dread of schooling, is extremely clever and would normally get away with his pranks if Sid were not such a "tattle-tale."
As punishment for skipping school to go swimming, Aunt Polly assigns Tom the chore of whitewashing the fence surrounding the house. In a brilliant scheme, Tom is able to con the neighborhood boys into completing the chore for him, managing to convince them of the joys of whitewashing. At school, Tom is equally as flamboyant, and attracts attention by chasing other boys, yelling, and running around. With his usual antics, Tom attempts to catch the eye of Becky Thatcher, a new girl in town, and persuades her to get "engaged" by kissing him. But their romance collapses when she learns Tom has been "engaged" previously to Amy Lawrence. Shortly after Becky shuns him, he accompanies Huckleberry Finn to the graveyard at night, where they witness the murder of Dr. Robinson.
Excerpt:
"TOM!"
No answer.
"TOM!"
No answer.
"What's gone with that boy, 听I wonder? You TOM!"
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked听through听them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service鈥攕he could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:
"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll鈥�"
She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.
"I never did see the beat of that boy!"]]>
author: Mark Twain
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1876
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/04/25
shelves:
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author: Willa Cather
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves: to-read
review:
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author: Oliver Sacks
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves:
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鈥� Are our musical preferences shaped in utero?
鈥� Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music?
鈥� What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain鈥檚 response to music?
鈥� Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?
This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession.]]>
author: Daniel J. Levitin
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves:
review:
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Helene鈥檚 time in London exceeds her wildest expectations. She visits landmarks like Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle; explores Shakespeare鈥檚 favorite pub, Dickens鈥檚 house, and the Oxford University courtyard where John Donne used to walk; and makes a host of new friends from all walks of life, who take her to the theater, introduce her to institutions like Harrod鈥檚, and share with her their favorite corners of countryside.
A love letter to England and its literary heritage, written by a Manhattanite who isn鈥檛 afraid to speak her mind (or tell a British barman how to make a real American martini), The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street is an endearing account of two wildly different worlds colliding; it鈥檚 an outsider鈥檚 witty, vibrant portrait of idiosyncratic British culture at its best, as well as a profound commentary about the written word鈥檚 power to sustain us, transport us, and unite us.]]>
author: Helene Hanff
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves:
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[text from the back cover of the book]]]>
author: Helene Hanff
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves:
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Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.
Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"
Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.]]>
author: Max Brooks
name: Stacy
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2013/12/30
shelves:
review:
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The Ophiuchi Hotline was John Varley's first novel, and it received nominations for both the Hugo and Nebula awards; he later won both for his book Persistence of Vision.]]>
author: John Varley
name: Stacy
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1977
rating: 5
read at: 2013/03/22
date added: 2013/03/22
shelves:
review:
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