Library Loot is hosted by Eva at
A Striped Armchair and Marg at
Reading Adventures. Marg is the hostess this week.
This week is my week of reduced check-out times - it seems I got all the popular books this week and a wide variety of reading too:
Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin
On September 3, 2008 Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gave a speech at
the Republican National Convention that electrified the nation and
instantly made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.
As chief executive of America′s largest state, she had built a record
as a reformer who cast aside politics-as-usual and pushed through
changes other politicians only talked about: Energy independence.
Ethics reform. And the biggest private sector infrastructure project in
U.S. history. While revitalizing public school funding and ensuring the
state met its responsibilities to seniors and Alaska Native
populations, Palin also beat the political "good ol′ boys club" at
their own game and brought Big Oil to heel.
Like her GOP
running mate, John McCain, Palin wasn′t a packaged and over-produced
"candidate." She was a Main Street American woman: a working mom, wife
of a blue collar union man, and mother of five children, the eldest of
whom was serving his country in a yearlong deployment in Iraq and the
youngest, an infant with special needs. Palin′s hometown story touched
a populist nerve, rallying hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans
to the GOP ticket.
But as the campaign unfolded, Palin became a
lightning rod for both praise and criticism. Supporters called her
"refreshing," "honest," a kitchen-table public servant they felt would
fight for their interests. Opponents derided her as a wide-eyed
Pollyanna unprepared for national leadership. But none of them knew the
real Sarah Palin.
In this eagerly anticipated memoir, Palin
paints an intimate portrait of growing up in the wilds of Alaska;
meeting her lifelong love; her decision to enter politics; the
importance of faith and family; and the unique joys and trials of life
as a high-profile working mother. She also opens up for the first time
about the 2008 presidential race, providing a rare, mom′s-eye view of
high-stakes national politics - from patriots dedicated to "Country
First" to slick politicos bent on winning at any cost.
Going
Rogue traces one ordinary citizen′s extraordinary journey, and imparts
Palin′s vision of a way forward for America and her unfailing hope in
the greatest nation on earth.
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America (“[it]
will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of
human love and vulnerability” —James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review),
Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about
the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.
Now,
in her dazzling new novel—her first in more than a decade—Moore turns
her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the
insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the
recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.
As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter
of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes” are justifiably
famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on
fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.
Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny.
The
family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and
although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for,
and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.
As
the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her
own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are
frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates
joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the
stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel
dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.
This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date—textured, beguiling, and wise.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an
epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida
Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.
Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households
in Mexico—from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City—Harrison
Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling
odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to
work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful
day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He
discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious
artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes
to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his
life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution,
newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible
violence.
Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will
soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II.
There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake
himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He
finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs.
Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever
know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him
between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the
unspeakable breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption.
With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear
grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara
Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of
art itself. The Lacuna is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.
The Paris Vendetta by Steve Berry
When Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile in 1821, he took to the grave a
powerful secret. As general and emperor, he had stolen immeasurable
riches from palaces, national treasuries, and even the Knights of Malta
and the Vatican. In his final days, his British captors hoped to learn
where the loot lay hidden. But he told them nothing, and in his will he
made no mention of the treasure. Or did he?
Former Justice
Department operative Cotton Malone isn't looking for trouble when it
comes knocking at his Copenhagen bookshop. Actually, it breaks and
enters in the form of an American Secret Service agent with a pair of
assassins on his heels. Malone has his doubts about the anxious young
man, but narrowly surviving a ferocious firefight convinces him to
follow his unexpected new ally.
Their first stop is the secluded
estate of Malone's good friend, Henrik Thorvaldsen. The wily Danish
tycoon has uncovered the insidious plans of the Paris Club, a cabal of
multimillionaires bent on manipulating the global economy. Only by
matching wits with a terrorist-for-hire, foiling a catastrophic attack,
and plunging into a desperate hunt for Napoleon's legendary lost
treasure can Malone hope to avert international financial anarchy.
But
Thorvaldsen's real objective is much more personal: to avenge the
murder of his son by the larcenous aristocrat at the heart of the
conspiracy. Thorvaldsen's vendetta places Malone in an impossible
quandary—one that forces him to choose between friend and country, past
and present. Starting in Denmark, moving to England, and ending up in
the storied streets and cathedrals of Paris, Malone plays a breathless
game of duplicity and death, all to claim a prize of untold value. But
at what cost?
Still Life by Joy Fielding (Audiobook)
Beautiful, happily married, and the owner of a successful interior
design business, Casey Marshall couldn't be more content with her life,
until a car slams into her at almost fifty miles an hour, breaking
nearly every bone in her body and plunging her into a coma. Lying in
her hospital bed, Casey realizes that although she is unable to see or
communicate, she can hear everything. She quickly discovers that her
friends aren't necessarily the people she thought them to be -- and
that her accident might not have been an accident at all. As she
struggles to break free from her living death, she begins to wonder if
what lies ahead could be even worse.
Columbine by Dave Cullen
On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American
psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma-City
style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs
failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school
violence-irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting "another
Columbine."
When we think of Columbine, we think of the
Trench Coat Mafia; we think of Cassie Bernall, the girl we thought
professed her faith before she was shot; and we think of the boy
pulling himself out of a school window -- the whole world was watching
him. Now, in a riveting piece of journalism nearly ten years in the
making, comes the story none of us knew. In this revelatory book, Dave
Cullen has delivered a profile of teenage killers that goes to the
heart of psychopathology. He lays bare the callous brutality of
mastermind Eric Harris, and the quavering, suicidal Dylan Klebold, who
went to prom three days earlier and obsessed about love in his journal.
The result is an astonishing account of two good students
with lots of friends, who came to stockpile a basement cache of
weapons, to record their raging hatred, and to manipulate every adult
who got in their way. They left signs everywhere, described by Cullen
with a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen. Drawing on
hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of police files, FBI
psychologists, and the boy's tapes and diaries, he gives the first
complete account of the Columbine tragedy.
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