Blue Back Book Break group recommendations (alphabetical by title)
March 3, 2008
1) The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death
by
Jean-Dominique Bauby
2) The
Double Bind: A Novel
by
Chris Bohjalian
3)
Exile
by
Richard North Patterson
4) The
Final Solution: A Story Of Detection
by
Michael Chabon
5) In an
Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing (fiction)
by Lee
Woodruff & Bob Woodruff
6) The
Invention of Hugo Cabret
by
Brian Selznick
7) The
Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
by
Joyce Carol Oates
8)
Loving Frank: A Novel
by
Nancy Horan
9) The
Middle Place
by
Kelly Corrigan
10)
Pretty Birds: A Novel
by
Scott Simon
11) Sex
Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York
by Marge Piercy
12)
Those Who Save Us
by
Jenna Blum
13)
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One
School at a Time
by Greg
Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
14)
Water for Elephants: A Novel
by Sara
Gruen
1) The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death
by
Jean-Dominique Bauby
Recommended by Joseph Cadieux
From
Booklist. On December 8, 1995, at the very beginning of a weekend with his
10-year-old son, Bauby, editor-in-chief of the world's most famous fashion
magazine, Elle, suffered a massive stroke. When he emerged from coma more than
a month later, his mind was perfectly clear, but he could move only his left
eyelid. So he remained until his death on March 9, 1997. In the interim,
however, with the help of an alphabet arranged in the order of the letters'
frequency in French (e occurs most frequently and so appears first) and recited
until Bauby signaled the desired letter with a blink, Bauby dictated, letter by
letter, the 28 tiny personal essays of this book. They demonstrate indisputably
Bauby's irrepressible love of life. Although trapped as if in a diving bell by
his situation, "my mind takes flight like a butterfly," he says, and
he ranges through memories, dreams, and reflections, keeping his wits sharp.
Never maudlin or religiose, his observations become inspirational, in the
manner of much literature about enduring physical adversity, only after they
have impressed us--just like good "regular" literature--with their
author's strength, affability, curiosity, and gusto.
Hardcover:
131 pages
Publisher:
Knopf, 1997
ISBN-10: 0375401156
2) The
Double Bind: A Novel
by
Chris Bohjalian
Recommended by Ann Marie Naples
From
Library Journal, Starred Review. Laurel Estabrook, a young social worker living
in Vermont, becomes obsessed with a box of photographs that belonged to a
deceased homeless man, Bobbie Crocker. An amateur photographer herself, Laurel
wonders how someone as destitute as Crocker came to possess such high-quality
photos, many of them featuring famous people and, bizarrely, Laurel's childhood
town. As she devotes more and more time to researching Crocker's past, her
friends and family become concerned for her mental well-being. Six years
previously, Laurel was attacked by two men in the woods while riding her bike,
and though she recovered enough to finish college and get a job, she remains
fragile. Bohjalian, whose Midwives was an Oprah Book Club selection, adds
original and creative elements to this tale by blending the story of The Great
Gatsby with Laurel's story and including photographs by a real-life homeless
man named Bob Campbell. Far from being simply a mystery story, this is a
complex exploration of the human psyche and its efforts to heal and survive in
whatever manner possible. Recommended for all fiction collections.
Hardcover:
384 pages
Publisher:
Shaye Areheart Books, 2007
ISBN-10: 1400047463
3)
Exile
by
Richard North Patterson
Recommended
by Myron Gubitz
Book
Description. From one of America's most compelling novelists comes the
mesmerizing story of a lawyer who must defend the woman he loves against a
charge of conspiring to assassinate the prime minister of IsraelDavid Wolfe's
life is approaching an exhilarating peak: he's a successful San Francisco
lawyer, he's about to get married, and he's being primed for a run for Congress.
But when the phone rings and he hears the voice of Hana Arif-the Palestinian
woman with whom he had a secret affair in law school-he begins a completely
unexpected journey. The next day, the prime minister of Israel is assassinated
by a suicide bomber while visiting San Francisco; soon, Hana herself is accused
of being the mastermind behind the murder. Now David faces an agonizing choice:
Will he, a Jew, represent Hana-who may well be guilty-or will he turn away the
one woman he can never forget? The most challenging case of David's career
requires that he delve deep into the lives of Hana Arif and her militant
Palestinian husband, both of whom have always lived in exile. Ultimately,
David's quest takes him to Israel and the West Bank, where, in a series of
harrowing encounters, he learns that appearances are not at all what they seem.
Culminating in a tense and startling trial with international ramifications,
Exile is that rare novel that both entertains and enlightens. At once an
intricate tale of betrayal and deception, a moving love story, and a
fascinating journey into the lethal politics of the Middle East, this is
Richard North Patterson at his most brilliant and engrossing.
Hardcover:
576 pages
Publisher:
Henry Holt and Co., 2007
ISBN-10: 0805079475
4) The
Final Solution: A Story Of Detection
by
Michael Chabon
Recommended by Aileen Sperber
Book
Description. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured up the golden age of
comic books -- intertwining history, legend, and storytelling verve. In The
Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to craft a short,
suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic
nineteenth-century detective story. In deep retirement in the English
country-side, an eighty-nine-year-old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a
once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his
fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who
has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot.
What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews
out -- a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts
perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case -- the
real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot -- beyond even the reach
of the once-famed sleuth? Subtle revelations lead the reader to a wrenching
resolution. This brilliant homage, which won the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for
fiction, is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.
Hardcover:
131 pages
ISBN-10:
006076340X
5) In
an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing
by Lee
Woodruff & Bob Woodruff
Recommended by Joyce K. Millikin
From
Janet Maslin, New York Times. Thus humanized - in ways that would violate the
cheer of the talk-show circuit on which they have lately been appearing - the
Woodruffs reveal both the strengths and weaknesses that they brought to coping
with Bob's crisis. Their frankness heightens the book's impact, as does its
wider subject: the increasing frequency in Iraq of explosion-induced head
injuries like those Bob suffered. This book means to draw compassion and
attention to those casualties, and it surely will.
Hardcover:
304 pages
Publisher:
Random House, 2007
ISBN-10:
1400066670
6) The
Invention of Hugo Cabret
by
Brian Selznick
Recommended by Sharron Freeman
Book
Description. Here is a true masterpiece-an artful blending of narrative,
illustration and cinematic technique, for a story as tantalizing as it is
touching. Twelve-year-old orphan Hugo lives in the walls of a Paris train
station at the turn of the 20th century, where he tends to the clocks and
filches what he needs to survive. Hugo's recently deceased father, a
clockmaker, worked in a museum where he discovered an automaton: a human-like
figure seated at a desk, pen in hand, as if ready to deliver a message. After
his father showed Hugo the robot, the boy became just as obsessed with getting
the automaton to function as his father had been, and the man gave his son one
of the notebooks he used to record the automaton's inner workings. The plot
grows as intricate as the robot's gears and mechanisms [...] To Selznick's
credit, the coincidences all feel carefully orchestrated; epiphany after
epiphany occurs before the book comes to its sumptuous, glorious end. Selznick
hints at the toymaker's hidden identity [...] through impressive use of
meticulous charcoal drawings that grow or shrink against black backdrops, in
pages-long sequences. They display the same item in increasingly tight focus or
pan across scenes the way a camera might. The plot ultimately has much to do
with the history of the movies, and Selznick's genius lies in his expert use of
such a visual style to spotlight the role of this highly visual media. A
standout achievement.
Hardcover:
544 pages
Publisher:
Scholastic Press, 2007
ISBN-10: 0439813786
7) The
Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
by
Joyce Carol Oates
Recommended by Ruth Schoppert
From
Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Writing is... a drug, sweet, irresistible,
and exhausting, writes Oates in this fascinating and significant record of an
artist's life. She was 34 when she began this experiment in consciousness,
which follows the gestation and writing of many of her most important works.
Oates, readers come to realize, is intensely disciplined, exquisitely
sensitive, unflaggingly-almost morbidly-introspective, concerned with
philosophical issues, attuned to mysticism and acutely responsive to the
natural world. Although she abhors being described as prolific, she writes
daily, with feverish energy; she herself uses the word obsessed. If a day or
two passes when she isn't writing, she feels profound worthlessness. Teaching,
she reveals, is a vital component of her well-being, although it often leaves
her exhausted. The journal records her relationships with contemporary authors,
including Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Gail Godwin, Stanley Elkin,
John Gardner and Donald Barthelme. She is candid about her intensely intimate
marriage to Raymond Smith, her lack of maternal instinct and the hours she
spends at the piano, an obsession almost equal to her writing. Overall, this
journal immerses the reader in a complex, searching, imaginative personality-an
artist who continues to refine her search for literary expression.
Hardcover:
528 pages
Publisher:
Ecco, 2007
ISBN-10:
0061227986
8) Loving
Frank: A Novel
by
Nancy Horan
Recommended by Martha Church
Book
Description. It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is
at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a
story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and
Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have
noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful
hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely,
irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait,
and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence
in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and,
ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is
particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her
little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned.
Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and
even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut
from a writer to watch.
Paperback:
400 pages
Publisher:
Ballantine Books, 2007
ISBN-10: 0345495004
9) The
Middle Place
by Kelly
Corrigan
Recommended by Laurie Wicko
From
Publishers Weekly
Newspaper
columnist Corrigan was a happily married mother of two young daughters when she
discovered a cancerous lump in her breast. She was still undergoing treatment
when she learned that her beloved father, who'd already survived prostate
cancer, now had bladder cancer. Corrigan's story could have been unbearably
depressing had she not made it clear from the start that she came from sturdy
stock. Growing up, she loved hearing her father boom out his morning HELLO WORLD
dialogue with the universe, so his kids would feel like the world wasn't just a
safe place but was even rooting for you. As Corrigan reports on her cancer
treatment-the chemo, the surgery, the radiation-she weaves in the story of how
it felt growing up in a big, suburban Philadelphia family with her
larger-than-life father and her steady-loving mother and brothers. She tells
how she met her husband, how she gave birth to her daughters. All these stories
lead up to where she is now, in that middle place, being someone's child, but
also having children of her own. Those learning to accept their own adulthood
might find strength-and humor-in Corrigan's feisty memoir.
Hardcover:
272 pages
Publisher:
Hyperion, 2008
ISBN-10: 1401303366
10) Pretty
Birds: A Novel
by Scott
Simon
Recommended
by Carol Matzke
From
Publishers Weekly. Young women served as snipers for both Bosnian and Serbian
forces during the siege of Sarajevo; Simon, a prize-winning correspondent and
NPR Weekend Edition host, interviewed one of them and has masterfully imagined
her life. The book begins with half-Muslim Irena, 17, perched on a rooftop,
wearing a black ski mask, sighting down a rifle and listening to a sneering
Serbian propagandist on the radio ("The Yanks send you food Americans
wouldn't give to their dogs") before she pulls the trigger. Simon then
flashes back to the spring of 1992, when Irena, her parents and her parrot,
Pretty Bird, must flee their home on the mostly Serb side of the city. When
they make it (barely) to her grandmother's apartment, they find her slain on
the staircase. Simon's account of the family's refugee life-sans water,
electricity and supplies, they eat snail-and-grass soup-is full of brilliant
details ranging from the comic to the heartbreaking. When a former assistant
principal spots Irena, once a high school basketball star, he offers her a job
that quickly has her recruited, indoctrinated and trained in deception and
weaponry. That's when the action really begins to move along. Pretty Bird is
released for mercy's sake, flies to his old home and is caught by Amela-a
Christian and Irena's former classmate and teammate-who concocts a devious and
difficult plan to return him to her friend. A deeply felt, boldly told story
and clean, forceful prose distinguish this striking first novel.
Hardcover:
368 pages
Publisher:
Random House, 2005
ISBN-10:
1400063108
11) Sex
Wars: A Novel of Gilded Age New York
by
Marge Piercy
Recommended
by Joan McNulty
From
Publishers Weekly Starred Review. This rich novel set in post-Civil War New
York stars a true-life cast of characters that includes Victoria Woodhull, the
spiritualist turned first woman to run for the U.S. presidency; passionate
suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the aged Cornelius Vanderbilt, who sits
atop a $100-million fortune as he tries to make contact with his dead son; and
Anthony Comstock, a crusading moralist who dedicates his life to outlawing
pornography and "obscene objects made of rubber." As they each vie
for different kinds of sex-based power, the consequences of their actions echo
from the halls of Congress to Manhattan's back alleys. Piercy (Gone to
Soldiers) powerfully dramatizes the early feminists' zeal and the high stakes
of the gender wars it set in motion, and offers a wealth of period detail,
including tips on using an outdoor latrine when living in a fifth-floor walk-up
and the cost to bathe (fully dressed, no soap) in the East River. Most poignant
among the invented characters is Freydeh Leibowitz, a young Russian-Jewish
widow, who, far from the scandalous headlines and saloon gossip of the times,
makes a living for herself and her adopted children, penny by penny, as a
manufacturer of reliable condoms.
Paperback:
432 pages
Publisher:
Harper Perennial, 2006
ISBN-10: 0060789875
12) Those
Who Save Us
by
Jenna Blum
Recommended by Brenda Lind
From
Publishers Weekly. Blum, who worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation,
takes a direct, unsentimental look at the Holocaust in her first novel. The
narrative alternates between the present-day story of Trudy, a history
professor at a Minneapolis university collecting oral histories of WWII
survivors (both German and Jewish), and that of her aged but once beautiful
German mother, Anna, who left her country when she married an American soldier.
Interspersed with Trudy's interviews with German immigrants, many of whom
reveal unabashed anti-Semitism, Anna's story flashes back to her hometown of
Weimar. As Nazi anti-Jewish edicts intensify in the 1930s, Anna hides her love
affair with a Jewish doctor, Max Stern. When Max is interned at nearby
Buchenwald and Anna's father dies, Anna, carrying Max's child, goes to live
with a baker who smuggles bread to prisoners at the camp. Anna assists with the
smuggling after Trudy's birth until the baker is caught and executed. Then Anna
catches the eye of the Obersturmführer, a high-ranking Nazi officer at
Buchenwald, who suspects her of also supplying the inmates with bread. He
coerces her into a torrid, abusive affair, in which she remains complicit to
ensure her survival and that of her baby daughter. Blum paints a subtle,
nuanced portrait of the Obersturmführer, complicating his sordid cruelty with
more delicate facets of his personality. Ultimately, present and past overlap
with a shocking yet believable coincidence. Blum's spare imagery is nightmarish
and intimate, imbuing familiar panoramas of Nazi atrocity with stark new power.
This is a poised, hair-raising debut.
Hardcover:
496 pages
Publisher:
Harcourt, 2004
ISBN-10:
0151010196
13) Three
Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations...One
School at a Time
by Greg
Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
Recommended
by Connie Gallagher
From
Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Some failures lead to phenomenal successes,
and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second
tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in
1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of
Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a
project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed
more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin
recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling
portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen,
Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met
along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin
argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through
collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education,
especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of
both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers'
hearts.
Hardcover:
352 pages
Publisher:
Viking Adult, 2006
ISBN-10:
0670034827
14) Water
for Elephants: A Novel
by Sara
Gruen
Recommended by Les Milch
From
Publishers Weekly. With its spotlight on elephants, Gruen's romantic
page-turner hinges on the human-animal bonds that drove her debut and its
sequel (Riding Lessons and Flying Changes). The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski,
recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most
Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great
Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed
in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary
school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where
he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures [...] He also falls in love with
Marlena, one of the show's star performers--a romance complicated by Marlena's
husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the
animals Jankowski cares for.
Paperback:
350 pages
Publisher:
Algonquin Books, 2007
ISBN-10:
1565125606