December 23, 2008
New Books - Fiction
Widows of Eastwick - John Updike
Motivated by advancing age, loneliness, latent guilt and a sense of unfinished business, the erstwhile Witches of Eastwick return to their former Rhode Island coastal town in this tepid sequel to the 1984 novel. Alexandra, the fleshy Earth Mother; Jane, the wasp-tongued snob; and Sukie, a would-be a sexpot operating beyond her expiration date, have each survived the second marriages that took place following their flight from Eastwick in the early '70s, after a rival, Jenny Gabriel, died as a result of their spell. Where before they were strong, sassy, lusty and empowered, now in late middle-age they are vulnerable, fearful and in thrall to their aging bodies. Witchcraft is now beyond them; when they try to resurrect their supernatural powers to atone for their guilt, an inadvertent death ensues.
Fractured - Karin Slaughter
“Heart-pounding…. Slaughter brings the same raw energy and brutal violence that distinguishes her Grant County Series (Beyond Reach, etc) to this new series with chilling results, while Trent an Mitchell, a pair of complex and deeply flawed heroes, will leave fans clamoring for the next installment.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
The Mercedes Coffin - Faye Kellerman
Billionaire genius Genoa Greeves never got over the shocking death of her favorite teacher, Bennett "Dr. Ben" Alston Little, murdered execution-style and stuffed into the trunk of his Mercedes-Benz. No arrests were ever made, no killer charged for the brutal crime. Fifteen years later, the high-tech CEO reads about another execution-style murder; this time the victim is a Hollywood music producer named Primo Ekerling. There is no obvious connection, but the case is eerily similar to Little's and Genoa feels the time is right to close Dr. Ben's case once and for all—offering the L.A.P.D. a substantial financial "incentive" if justice is finally served for Little.
Burn Out - Marcia Muller
Sharon McCone fights depression. Nine months after escaping death by a mere five seconds (The Ever-Running Man, 2007, etc.), San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone retreats to the ranch her husband Hy Ripinsky owns in the high Sierras and contemplates closing her agency. A glimmer of her usual peskiness shows through when she spies Boz Sheppard tossing Amy Perez, the ranch manager's niece, out of his pickup shortly before Amy disappears. Offering to help look for her, McCone wanders into a series of Perez tragedies. From Kircus Review
One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell
Sex in the City goes middle-aged, mordant and slapstick in Bushnell's chronicle of writers, actors and Wall Street whizzes clashing at One Fifth Avenue, a Greenwich Village art deco jewel crammed with regal rich, tarty upstarts and misguided lovers. When a Queen of Society dies, a vicious scramble for her penthouse apartment ensues, and its attorney Annalisa and her hedge-funder husband, Paul Rice, who land the palatial pad, roiling the building's rivalries. –Publishers Weekly
Damage Control - J. A. Jance
Sheriff Joanna Brady and her staff face a host of challenges while her husband, Butch, tends their infant son in bestseller Jance's solid 13th novel to feature the Cochise County, Ariz., cop (after Dead Wrong). A woman shoots a home intruder, an elderly couple drives their car off a cliff and a mysterious fire kills an older man and leaves three homeless. Were these accidents or something more sinister? –Publishers Weekly
New Books - Non-Fiction
The Secret of the Great Pyramid - Bob Brier
The Secret of the Great Pyramid moves between the ancient and the modern. The ancient story chronicles, step-by-step, how a nation of farmers only recently emerged from the Stone Age could construct one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. To execute something as complex and massive as the Great Pyramid, Egypt needed architects, mathematicians, boat builders, stone masons, and metallurgists. It took twenty years to build the Great Pyramid. By the time its capstone was laid in 2560 B.C., the innovations born of the building quest had transformed agrarian Egypt into the world's most modern, most powerful nation.
December 9, 2008
New Books - Non-Fiction
Hyperborder - Fernando Romero
Fernando Romero's brilliant new book -- Metropolitan News-Enterprise, June 6, 2008
Romero's work transcends the usual debate on immigration issues...augmented by some of the most impressive charts and photographs this reviewer has ever seen in a text. The book is well written and fully footnoted. It should appeal to a wide variety of academics interested in the US-Mexico border area and the issues confronting this area. Summing up: Recommended. -- Choice, February 2008
The Clean Tech Revolution – Ron Pernick & Clint Wilder
In The Clean Tech Revolution, authors Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder identify the major forces that have pushed clean tech from back-to-the-earth utopian dream to its current revolution among the inner circles of corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street trading floors, and in government offices around the globe. By highlighting eight major clean-tech sectors—solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, the smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration—they uncover how investors, entrepreneurs, and individuals can profit from this next wave of technological innovation. Pernick and Wilder shine the spotlight on the winners among technologies, companies, and regions that are likely to reap the greatest benefits from clean tech—and they show you why the time to act is now.
When All Hell Breaks Loose – Cody Lundin, Russell L. Miller, and Christopher Marchetti
Survival expert Cody Lundin's new book, When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes is what every family needs to prepare and educate themselves about survival psychology and the skills necessary to negotiate a disaster whether you are at home, in the office, or in your car. 
The Natural Ways to a Good Night’s Sleep – Nikos Linardakis, M.D.
Ten Natural Ways to a Good Night's Sleep offers simple and natural solutions for achieving a lifetime of healthy sleep. Nearly half of all Americans say they suffer from insomnia or sleep-related disorders-yet most don't even know how much sleep they really need!
The Kitchens of Biro – Marcel biro and Shannon King Biro
Kitchens of Biro combine the elegant simplicity of Asian fare with the straightforward rusticity of Spanish cuisine. The second book from award- winning authors and hosts of the PBS program "The Kitchens of Biro" Marcel and Shannon Kring Biro, O combines earthy tapas and flavorful sushi with European cheeses, crispy tarte flambees and simply luxurious miso.
New Books - Fiction
The Winter Rose – Jennifer Donnley
"I loved this book. It is truly seductive, hard to put down, and filled with mystery, secret passions, unique locations, and a most engaging heroine. India Selwyn Jones is a new breed of woman in London in 1900, a doctor practicing in the grim East End, and she captivates from the first page to the last." -- --Barbara Taylor Bradford, author of The Ravenscar Dynasty and A Woman of Substance
Bridge of Sighs – Richard Russo
Richard Russo's first book since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs is a typically stunning portrait of three small town families struggling--like the town itself--to strike a balance between obsessively embracing their own history or shunning it entirely, with devastating consequences along both paths. Bridge of Sighs is pure Russo: funny, heartbreaking, and ringing completely true. --Jon Foro
Shadow Country – Peter Matthissen - 2008 National book Award Winner
Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.
Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."
Where the River Ends – Charles Martin
He was a fishing guide and struggling artist from a south George trailer park. She was the beautiful only child of South Carolina’s most powerful senator. Yet once Doss Michaels and Abigail Grace Coleman met by accident, they each felt they’d found their true soul mate.
Where the River Ends chronicles their love-filled, tragedy-tinged journey and a bond that transcends all.
The Spellman Files – Lisa Lutz
In a family of private investigators, privacy is nonexistent. The Spellman parents spy on the kids just as much as the kids spy on the parents. But after 28 years of this, middle child Isabelle wants out of the family business. Her parents agree, but only if she solves the 10-year-old cold case of a missing teenage. Amusing and entertaining, Lutz's tale of investigation, family and love is given an additional bemusing touch by Ari Graynor. She grasps the material and Isabelle's resigned disposition of both loving and loathing her family. She captures Isabelle's more emotional responses and the youthful tone of her younger sister, Rae. However, she is occasionally too breathy, literally blowing into the microphone. While these come off as sighs, they still seem to cross that line between narration and interpretation. The abridgment of some of the book's various subplots increases the speed of this already fast paced comedy-mystery. – Publishers Weekly
The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
In this darkly comic début novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur." In a series of letters to the Premier of China, in anticipation of the leader’s upcoming visit to Balram’s homeland, the chauffeur recounts his transformation from an honest, hardworking boy growing up in "the Darkness"—those areas of rural India where education and electricity are equally scarce, and where villagers banter about local elections "like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra"—to a determined killer. He places the blame for his rage squarely on the avarice of the Indian élite, among whom bribes are commonplace, and who perpetuate a system in which many are sacrificed to the whims of a few. Adiga’s message isn’t subtle or novel, but Balram’s appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling. –The New Yorker
December 2, 2008
New Books - Fiction
Knit Two – Kate Jacobs
The sequel to the number-one New York Times bestseller The Friday Night Knitting Club, Knit Two, returns to Walker and Daughter, the Manhattan knitting store founded by Georgia Walker and her young daughter, Dakota. Dakota is now an eighteen-year-old freshman at NYU, running the little yarn shop part-time with help from the members of the Friday Night Knitting Club.
Drawn together by the sense of family the club has created, the knitters rely on one another as they struggle with new challenges: for Catherine, finding love after divorce; for Darwin, the hope for a family; for Lucie, being both a single mom and a caregiver for her elderly mother; and for seventy something Anita, a proposal of marriage from her sweetheart, Marty, that provokes the objections of her grown children.
A Mercy – Toni Morrison
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Ron Charles Toni Morrison's new novel, A Mercy, makes a spellbinding companion to Beloved, her 1987 tour de force that transformed our understanding of slavery and won the Pulitzer Prize. Her old themes rise up in A Mercy like a fever dream: the horrible sacrifice a mother makes to protect her child, the deadly vanity of benevolent slaveholders, and the abandonment of a past too painful to remember. But this is a smaller, more delicate novel, a fusion of mystery, history and longing that stands alongside Beloved as a unique triumph in Morrison's body of work.
The Brass Verdict – Michael Connelly
Bestseller Connelly delivers one of his most intricate plots to date in his 20th book, a beautifully executed crime thriller. When L.A. lawyer Mickey Haller, last seen in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005), inherits the practice and caseload of a fellow defense attorney, Jerry Vincent, who's been murdered, the high-profile double-homicide case against famed Hollywood producer Walter Elliot, accused of shooting his wife and her alleged lover, takes top priority. – Publishers Weekly
The Other – David Guterson
When John William Barry and Neil Countryman meet at a high school track meet in the early 1970s, they are two sides of the same coin: John is a trust fund baby and student of a prestigious private school while Neil is solidly working class, but they share an affinity for the outdoors and apprehension over impending changes in their lives. After an unintentionally challenging week lost in the wilds of the North Cascades, John is compelled to an ascetic path: life in a remote river valley in the Olympic Peninsula rainforest, where he chips a shelter from a granite wall and immerses himself in the esoterica of Gnostic dualism --a philosophy that holds that the material world is illusional and destructive. Neil meanwhile chooses a traditional path as a father and school teacher, despite his troubled friend's exhortations to eschew "hamburger world" and find truth in a simpler, stripped-down existence. Nothing is that simple, of course, and the Other compellingly explores the compromises we make to balance meaning and security in our lives through the choices (and their subsequent consequences) of these two men. --Jon Foro
New Books - Non-Fiction
The Post American World – Fareed Zakaria
This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering.
The Audacity of Deceit – Brad O’Leary
In The Audacity of Deceit, Brad O'Leary takes you deep inside Obama's plans to dismantle the Second Amendment and destroy our economy while putting us in thrall to the United Nations and laying waste to all that millions of Americans hold dear. You’ll learn: How Obama's fatherless childhood mirrors that of Bill Clinton's and fuels his obsession with fame and power at any cost.How his tax plan would raise rates to a Hoover-like 60% and eviscerate America's economy.How the U.S. Treasury will become the United Nations' ATM.Why Obama wants to keep fuel prices high and Americans immobilized.The '0 to 5' initiative designed to transfer child-rearing from parents to the state.Here are the ugly facts about Barack Obama.