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Fascinated by the Arctic? Then read this true story of two men who went hunting, on and off for several years. for the elusive Greenland shark, which can live to be over 400 years old, has poisonous flesh, and can weigh up to a ton. The two return over several seasons to troll the icy waters of the Norwegian sea above the Arctic Circle, in a rubber dinghy, searching for their prey, Along with tales from their trips, you will pick up fascinating bits of knowledge about such topics as the merits of Scottish bull carcasses vs rotten cod liver oil for bait, whether sharks have much of an emotional life, and how brief man's time on earth has been when compared with these mysterious creatures.
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A pretty teenage girl dies mysteriously. The police are suspicious. Among the people of interest are a boy who has been stalking her and a jealous female friend. This is no ordinary "who-killed-the girl" however, because of the author's patient way of revealing the characters through their actions and thoughts, and her compellingly literary voice. This is a page-turner you won't feel guilty about loving
This book could be subtitled "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished". Our heroine is a gifted, successful author from a very young age, who knows her own mind, and who has no interest in marriage or motherhood. However, events conspire, and she ends up with both. She is exemplary in these roles too, bending over backwards to make sure she is the only one who has to make sacrifices, writing in secret to keep her core alive while she waits until the day when she can resume her career openly. A completely unexpected betrayal threatens to undo this carefully preserved dream. The author has made this a very suspenseful story about the choices women must make.
A quiet yet suspenseful book about an unraveling marriage, with both spouses carrying secrets they are reluctant to share with each other. I cared about these characters, and their young twin daughters, and I kept wishing they would just come clean with each other already! My anxiety grew as I got closer to the ending, which could have easily descended into cliche, but fortunately did not. Tom Perrotta fans would enjoy this one.
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I've never read Ulysses but this book seems Joycean. It is written in one lovely unbroken sentence, as the narrator moves backward and forward in time, remembering his life in County Mayo Ireland. The political side of Irish life, the rugged Western Irish countryside, his family and how he has both failed them and helped elevate their lives are compellingly rendered.
Since this book is part of the saga of Indians vs. Cowboys, I read it knowing my heart would be broken, and was not disappointed. Each of the main protagonists was his own kind of tragic figure: Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe never stopped his tireless, ultimately fruitless advocacy for the return of his ancestral lands in northeast Oregon, petitioning officials in the Army, Congress and the White House, and General Oliver Otis Howard, a former Civil War commander, who had led unsuccessful Reconstruction efforts in the South. Of the two, Howard was the most misguided, by his rigid spirituality and the need to repair his broken reputation by forcing Native Americans out of their nomadic lifestyle and onto reservations where they would become docile Christian farmers. The author's style is to set these events into intriguing set pieces, so this is not dry history.
Written by his daughter, this World War II/family memoir follows the career of Major Tom Carew, A brilliant special forces paratrooper for the British army who led teams that were dropped into France, then later Burma, to prepare guerilla forces to resist Axis powers. Weaving together fascinating family history with carefully researched wartime records, the author's narrative has a special poignancy because her father is rapidly descending into Alzheimer's, and her relationship with him, worshipful in her youth, was fractured for many years by tensions within the family, Major Carew, like many born soldiers, did not adjust well to peacetime or family life. The portrait of him that she draws is clear-eyed and loving.
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Read how the CIA changed from being merely an intelligence gathering organization after the end of World War II, to its present form as our nation's favored way of keeping our ground forces out of harm's way while still pursuing military objectives without the need for messy congressional oversight. First using, then shamefully abandoning, the Laotian Hmong hill tribesmen as soldiers under the command of CIA trainers, this completely clandestine part of America's involvement in Indochina in the 1960's was a virtual playbook for how covert operations in Latin America, Somalia and eventually the middle east would be run. A useful perspective on how little has changed since the war in Vietnam.
When 10 year-old Elvis loses her mother, it seems accidental: the body is found washed up on a river bank after the woman has been sleep-swimming, a not infrequent occurrence for her. Elvis is not convinced, her sister starts sleepwalking too, and finally her father confesses a marital secret that surprises both girls. These characters deal with loss in very different ways but the author weaves their characters and actions together with incredible skill and beauty. Teaser: there is baking involved!
This book does not contain good news for those of us (like me) who have a sweet tooth. Sugar, it turns out, is most likely the culprit behind our ever-increasing rates of diabetes, obesity, probably heart disease and quite possibly cancer and Alzheimer's disease too. Saturated fats have been falsely accused, the author argues. and he has excellent science backing him up, which he presents in a very readable style. Why haven't we been told all this before? The reasons have to do, unsurprisingly, with suppression of information by the "sugar lobby". Yes, it's a thing!
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This is not an easy book to read, even for a former physician, yet most of us SHOULD read it. It discusses end of life issues from the point of view of an intensive care physician who has slowly become a specialist in palliative care as well. Many of us think we don't want to be placed on life support if our existence would always be dependent on it, but there are many ways for our wishes to end up being ignored, as the fascinating and heartbreaking cases in this book make clear. Physicians and patients alike need to understand the complexities standing in the way.
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The title character in this novel might not seem so lucky, born as he is to an impoverished young Mexican adolescent who dares to cross the border into this country illegally. Her story is interwoven with that of another young woman, struggling with infertility, whose family isn't from around here either, but who have nevertheless been able to bring HER up in considerable privilege.The boy is their link, in this timely, seamless narrative that touches on immigration, parenthood, and our often flawed social service system .
At last! A graphic novel for Baby Boomers!! Roz Chast, renowned New Yorker cartoonist, takes a hilarious crack at a very sobering subject: her aging and very-much-in-denial parents, and how she navigates, with varying degrees of success, the tricky task of keeping them safe while keeping herself sane. Her relationship with her mother is complicated, with her father things were easier. But both of them have always lived in Brooklyn, "not the Brooklyn of artists..." but "DEEP Brooklyn... people who have been left behind by everyone and everything." Chast's more sophisticated cultural milieu is a source of mystery and dismay to her parents. Seeing their history through Chast's eyes makes this very understandable. Chast is brutally honest, laugh-out-loud funny, and deeply human in this memoir.
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The iconic photograph of the heiress Patty Hearst posed with an automatic rifle in front of the 7-headed cobra symbolic of the Symbionese Liberation Army always mystified Jeffrey Toobin: is she bemused, frightened or just staring into space? Her kidnapping by the SLA, an often-feckless but always-vicious group of self-styled radicals in the 1970's, and her subsequent participation in their deadly crimes, led eventually to her capture, trial, and conviction. The question of whether she participated willingly, or was too traumatized to refuse, remains unclear, and is central to Toobin's marvelously fine-grained,compellingly readable book. Not at all debatable, he concludes, is the fact that the eventual commutation of her sentence, and later presidential pardon, were a product of her families wealth and power. We all understand the unfairness of that.
I don't often read whole collections of poetry. It is a writing form I love, but one which often disappoints me after I've read more than a selection or two from an author. This poetry, though, kept pulling me along. Ocean Vuong's words would NOT let me go. How could a 27 year-old gay, Vietnamese-born immigrant speak directly to the heart of a 68 year-old, straight, Iowa-born Boomer woman about what it is like to be all the things she is not? How could he make her care so deeply? Read his words and see. Read 'em and weep, laugh, marvel.
Isn't the end of an Olympic summer just the BEST time to read a new murder mystery involving the family of an elite 16 year-old gymnast? There has to be a lot of obsessiveness, and probably a fair amount of resentment in the dynamics of any family deeply involved in this very demanding sport. This particular family seems healthy enough at first, and we almost don't notice the inflection point in the story when things first stop fitting together. They steadily make less and less sense until the very end....