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Summer 2009
Selected titles for summer reading pleasure
Fiction | Nonfiction | Teens, Tweens and All Ages
Nonfiction
Nonfiction
All Stars
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Author: Barra, Allen
- The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana
Author: Bass, Rick
$ 26 ISBN: 9780547055169 Date: 2009
Booklist LJ PW
In his account of life in Montana, Bass emerges not just as a writer but as a father, a neighbor, and a gifted observer, ensuring that though the wilderness is increasingly at risk, the voice of the wilderness will not disappear.
Updated 6.17.09 - Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution
Author: Beeman, Richard
$ 30 ISBN: 9781400065707 Date: 2009
Kirkus LJ PW
Plain, Honest Men is a full-scale narrative account of the deliberations of the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention. Beeman takes readers behind the scenes and into the streets, taverns, and mansions of Philadelphia to show how the Constitution was forged.
Updated 6.18.09
- Why Evolution Is True
Author: Coyne, Jerry A.
$ 27.95 ISBN: 9780670020539 Date: 2009
Booklist LJ PW
In crisp, lucid prose accessible to a wide audience, Why Evolution Is True dispels common misunderstandings and fears about evolution and clearly confirms that this amazing process of change has been firmly established as a scientific truth.
Updated 6.17.09 - The Third Reich at War
Author: Evans, Richard J.
$ 40 ISBN: 9781594202063 Date: 2009
Booklist Kirkus PW
The final volume in Evans's masterly trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany traces the rise and fall of German military might, the mobilization of a people's community to serve a war of conquest, and Hitler's campaign of racial subjugation and genocide.
Updated 6.17.09 - The Photographer
Author: Guibert, Emmanuel
$ 29.95 ISBN: 9781596433755 Date: 2009
Booklist LJ PW
In 1986, Afghanistan was torn apart by a war with the Soviet Union. This graphic novel/photo-journal is a record of one reporter's arduous and dangerous journey through Afghanistan, accompanying the Doctors Without Borders. Didier Lefevre's photography, paired with the art of Emmanuel Guibert, tells the powerful story of a mission undertaken by men and women dedicated to mending the wounds of war.
Updated 6.17.09 - Summerworld: A Season of Bounty
Author: Heinrich, Bernd
$ 26.99 ISBN: 9780060742171 Date: 2009
Booklist Kirkus LJ
From the bestselling author of Winter World comes this highly anticipated, accessible, and eloquent illumination of animal survival during the summer season.
Updated 6.18.09
- My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century
Author: Hoffman, Adina
$ 27.50 ISBN: 9780300141504 Date: 2009
Booklist LJ PW
Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist's eye for detail, " "this book" "tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged. Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed "perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today." As it places Muhammad Ali's life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, My Happiness offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as "among the five 'must read' books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy." In an era when talk of the "Clash of Civilizations" dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and, above all else, deeply human. - Publisher Marketing
Updated 6.17.09 - Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
Author: Martin, Gerald
$ 37.50 ISBN: 9780307271778 Date: 2009
Booklist Kirkus LJ PW
The biography of the 1982 Nobel Laureate in Literature tells the story of Marquez, a young man who rose from obscure provincial journalist to progenitor of a new literature.
Updated 6.17.09 - Rocket Men
Author: Nelson, Craig
$ 27.50 ISBN: 9780670021031 Date: 2009
Booklist Kirkus PW
The thrilling story of the Apollo Moon mission restores the mystery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar for most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represented in planning, technology, and execution.
Updated 6.17.09 - You are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
Author: Potter, Christopher
$ 26.99 ISBN: 9780061137860 Date: 2009
Booklist Kirkus PW
You Are Here shows the cosmos as it has never been seen before. With wisdom and wonder, Potter traverses the universe from its formation to its eventual end--while exploring everything in between.
Updated 5.21.09
- Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America
Author: Werth, Barry
$ 27 ISBN: 9781400067787 Date: 2009
Booklist LJ PW
A grand and sweeping history of ideas, Banquet at Delmonico's tells the intimate and dramatic story of how Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and a group of influential American allies together made evolution the guiding spirit of the Gilded Age.
Updated 6.17.09
$ 28 ISBN: 9780393062335 Date: 2009
Booklist Kirkus LJYogi Berra is one of the most popular former athletes in American history, and the most-quoted American since Abraham Lincoln. The gripping biography of the legendary Hall-of-Famer is replete with n early 100 photos and countless Yogi-isms, offering hilarious insights into many of baseball's greatest moments.
Updated 6.17.09
Travel Tales & The Natural World
- Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees
Author: Deakin, Roger ISBN: 9781416593621 Date: 2009
Kirkus PW
In the late British nature writer's glorious meditation on what he has called the fifth element, or wood--as it exists in nature, in the soul, in culture, and in life--the reader is swept along on a quest through the woods in search of what lies behind humankind's profound and enduring connection with trees.
Updated 5.21.09
- The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obssesion in the Amazon
Author: Grann, David
$ 27.50 ISBN: 9780385513531 Date: 2009
PW
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed "New Yorker" writer Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th century: what happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?
Updated 6.17.09
- I Wouldn't Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong
Author: Mueller, Andrew
$ 16.95 ISBN: 9781593762186 Date: 2009
Booklist Kirkus
What is a jaded rock journalist doing dodging landmines to talk to mercenaries and terrorists? And what kind of conversation can a man who prefers hunting for perfect three-minute pop songs and tubes of beer have with devotees of fasting and ferocity? Sarajevo. Jerusalem. Kabul. Belfast. Kosovo. Gaza. Basra. New York City. Every place where recent history advertises the stubbornness, intolerance, bloodlust, and cowardice that sully our collective record, there the intrepid Andrew Mueller goes. With considerable skill, Mueller skids around the globe from failed state to ravaged war zone to desolate no-man's-land to try to unpick why we humans seem so prone to plucking war from the jaws of peace. En route, he meets various influential panjandrums (Al Gore, Gerry Adams, Bono, Paddy Ashdown), any number of assorted warlords and revolutionaries, and a sprinkling of peacemakers and do-gooders. He also manages to get shot at a couple of times, locked up once, and taken on a guided tour by one of the world's most infamous terrorist organizations. It's like a Bond film with much, much less sex, and might appear for that and other reasons to be substantially a story of disappointment. Yet it's a surprisingly sunny book given the mire in which he finds himself. And it is a notably entertaining and eye-opening tour of the world's moral basements in the vein of P. J. O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell. - Publisher Marketing
Updated 5.21.09
- Sand: The Never-Ending Story
Author: Welland, Michael
$24.95 ISBN: 9780520254374 Date: 2009
Booklist LJ
From individual grains to desert dunes, from the bottom of the sea to the landscapes of Mars, and from billions of years in the past to the future, this is the extraordinary story of one of nature's humblest, most powerful, and most ubiquitous materials. Told by a geologist with a novelist's sense of language and narrative, "Sand "examines the science--sand forensics, the physics of granular materials, sedimentology, paleontology and archaeology, planetary exploration--and at the same time explores the rich human context of sand. Interwoven with tales of artists, mathematicians, explorers, and even a vampire, the story of sand is an epic of environmental construction and destruction, an adventure in staggering scales of time and distance, yet a tale that encompasses the ordinary and everyday. Sand, in fact, is all around us--it has made possible our computers, buildings and windows, toothpaste, cosmetics, and paper, and it has played dramatic roles in human history, commerce, and imagination. In this luminous, kinetic, revelatory account, we do indeed find the world in a grain of sand. - Publisher Marketing
Updated 5.21.09
- A Comrade Lost and Found: A Beijing Story
Author: Wong, Jan
$ 25 ISBN: 9780151013425 Date: 2009
Kirkus PW
Hoping to make amends, Wong returns to Beijing to find the classmate she betrayed during the Cultural Revolution. As she traces her way from one former comrade to the next, Wong unearths not only the fate of the woman she is searching for but a web of fates that mirrors the dramatic journey of contemporary China.
Updated 6.18.09
For Fun
- K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude
Author: Carlson, Peter
$ 27 ISBN: 9781586484972 Date: 2009
Booklist
This hilarious account of Khrushchev's 1959 U.S. tour is also a supremely entertaining evocation of the history and atmosphere of Cold War America.
Updated 5.21.09
- The Well Dressed Ape: A Natural History of MySelf
Author: Holmes, Hannah
$ 25 ISBN: 9781400065417 Date: 2009
LJ PW
Stiff meets Your Inner Fish in this surprising, humorous, and edifying description of Homo sapiens, as if humans were a newly-discovered animal.
Updated 5.21.09
- Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting
Author: Perry, Michael
$ 26 ISBN: 9780061240430 Date: 2009
Kirkus PW
In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives readers a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.
Updated 5.21.09
Good Sports
- When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball
Author: Davis, Seth
$ 26 ISBN: 9780805088106 Date: 2009
Booklist
Davis recounts the dramatic story of how two legendary players--Earvin Magic Johnson and Larry Bird--burst on the scene in a 1979 NCAA championship that gave birth to modern basketball.
Updated 6.17.09 - Halfway to Heaven: My Knuckleed - and Knuckle-Headed Quest for the Rocky Mountain High
Author: Obmascik, Mark
$ 26 ISBN: 9781416566991 Date: 2009
Kirkus
The author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Big Year embarks on an outrageous midlife mountain-climbing adventure, in this work that shows how one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth and discovers that age--like summit height--is just a number.
Updated 6.18.09
- Outcasts United: A Refugee Soccer Team, an American Town
Author: St. John, Warren
$ 25 ISBN: 9780385522038 Date: 2009
LJ
Memories of war, political crackdowns, revolutions, and ethnic cleansing are part of life in Clarkston, Georgia, turned into a refugee center by the federal government. This fast-paced account follows the story of Luma Mufleh, a bright-burning advocate, who started the Fugees soccer team and transformed the town.
Updated 6.18.09
- As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires
Author: Weber, Bruce
$ 26 ISBN: 9780743294119 Date: 2009
Booklist
In the bestselling tradition of George Plimpton's Paper Lion, As They See Em gets down, dirty, and loud with professional baseball umpires--granting readers unprecedented access to the hidden game inside America's favorite pastime.
Updated 6.17.09 - Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played
Author: Wertheim, L. Jon
$ 24 ISBN: 9780547232805 Date: 2009
Booklist
In the 2008 Wimbledon men's final, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal played an epic match. Wertheim deconstructs this defining moment in sport, which he calls a four-hour, forty-eight-minute infomercial for everything that is right about tennis.
Updated 6.17.09
Biography and Memoir
- The Sisters Antipodes
Author: Alison, Jane
$ 23 ISBN: 9780151012800 Date: 2009
Kirkus PW
The Sisters Antipodes is a unique window on the intimate devastations of family betrayal, in equal measure unsettling and engrossing. Two girls are thrown into a state of silent combat for the affections of their absent fathers--a contest that would prove tragic.
Updated 6.18.09
- Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood
Author: Campbell, Donovan
$ 26 ISBN: 9781400067732 Date: 2009
PW
In this thrilling and inspiring memoir, Campbell recounts his time as a commander of a 40-man infantry platoon and the unit of hard-pressed Marines defined by their leadership, loyalty, faith, and camaraderie.
Updated 6.17.09
- After Etan: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive
Author: Cohen, Lisa R.
$ 26 ISBN: 9780446582513 Date: 2009
Kirkus
A former "60 Minutes" producer unravels the full story of Etan Patz--a six-year-old boy who disappeared in 1979. Cohen reveals his family's desperate search, the heroic efforts to bring the kidnapper to justice, and the investigation into a decades-long mystery.
Updated 6.18.09
- Under Their Thumb: How a NIce Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (And Lived to Tell About It)
Author: German, Bill
$ 25 ISBN: 9781400066223 Date: 2009
Booklist
This coming-of-age memoir by a fan, friend, and journalist in The Rolling Stones's inner circle tells the unlikely story of how a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn befriended the most notorious rock band in the world and lived to tell about it. b&w photos throughout.
Updated 6.17.09 - Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
Author: Gwartney, Debra
$ 24 ISBN: 9780547054476 Date: 2009
Kirkus LJ
Live Through This--as emotionally wrenching and ultimately redemptive as David Sheff 's Beautiful Boy--follows Gwartney's frantic effort to recover her beautiful, intelligent daughters from their lives on the street.
Updated 6.18.09
- I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, WIfe, Mother and Friend to Man and Dog
Author: Joseph, Diana
$ 24 ISBN: 9780399155284 Date: 2009
LJ
Ostensibly organized around the various men in Joseph's life, this is really a memoir about what it's like to be a modern, smart woman making her way in the world.
Updated 6.18.09
- Triangular Road: A Memoir
Author: Marshall, Paule
$ 23 ISBN: 9780465013593 Date: 2009
PW
In this unflinchingly honest memoir, Marshall offers an indelible portrait of a young black woman coming of age as a novelist in a literary world dominated by white men.
Updated 6.17.09
- Corvus: A Life With Birds
Author: Woolfson, Esther
$ 25 ISBN: 9781582434773 Date: 2009
Booklist
Ever since her daughter rescued a fledgling rook years ago, Esther Woolfson has been fascinated with corvids, the bird group that includes crows, rooks, magpies, and ravens. Today, the rook, named Chicken, is a member of the Woolfson family, along with a talking magpie named Spike, a baby crow named Ziki, a starling, a parrot, and others. From their elaborate bathing rituals to their springtime broodiness and tendency to cache food in the most unlikely places, these corvids share a bond with humans that one might never have imagined before reading this book. Letting her experience speak for itself, Woolfson likens the fears and foibles of corvids to those of humans, taking into account the science of bird intelligence, evolution, song, and flight. She highlights their big personalities and capacity for affection: Chicken hates computers and machines, while she loves evening neck scratches on Woolfson's knee. It is through this intimate lens that Woolfson invites us to reconsider the kind of creature capable of being man's best friend. - Publisher Marketing
Updated 6.17.09