Check Availability Along with many superior science fiction novels (like Cryptonomicon), Neal Stephenson co-authored a few splendid suspense novels with J. Frederick George. Originally published in the 1990s under the name of Stephen Bury, they’ve been reissued with the real names of the two authors. You don’t have be a conspiracy theorist to enjoy Interface – just liking fast-paced, more-or-less plausible political thrillers is enough – but it certainly helps in the requisite suspension of disbelief. A powerful group of financiers (i.e., sophisticated bad guys) from around the world decide they need to elect a U.S. president who will answer only to them. When genuinely likeable Illinois governor (and potential presidential candidate) William A. Cozzano has a stroke and is hospitalized, they seize their opportunity and have a microchip implanted in his brain that places him under their control. Will these miscreants get away with it? Will Cozzano be elected president? It’s basically up to three people - Cozzano’s daughter Mary Catherine, his best friend, Mel, and Eleanor Richmond, a spunky, plain speaking, down on her luck former bank teller - to foil their Manchurian Candidate-like plot. Or not.
Check Availability I have a distinct memory of reading about Dolly Madison in one of those orange covered books in the “Childhood of Famous Americans” series when I was a child. I remember being totally fascinated with her romance and marriage to the much older James Madison, as well as her thrilling experiences during the War of 1812, in which she saved a portrait of George Washington from the burning White House. (I didn’t know then that it was the famous portrait of Washington by Gilbert Stuart.) So I was thrilled to reacquaint myself with her life and times in A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation by Catherine Allgor. Madison was loved and admired by all (with the exception of her husband’s political enemies) for the three decades she spent in the public spotlight; she was the first First Lady to carve out an important role for herself in the everyday workings of the new nation. Collaborating with her husband to bring the still fractious states (and their leaders) together, Dolley turned the White House into a salon, where men from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as foreign diplomats, kings, and potentates, could come together and, mellowed by good food and wine and an attractive and charming hostess, begin to work out their differences. She was a true partner to her husband – one political opponent believed that Madison never would have won the presidency without Dolley at his side. Allgor’s lively biography brings this vivacious and intelligent woman back into the spotlight she so deserves.
Check Availability Reading any one of Donna Leon’s uniformly excellent mysteries – all set in contemporary Venice (Italy, not California) and all starring Commissario Guido Brunetti - will get you hooked. But one of my favorites is Uniform Justice, in which Brunetti is called in to a military school to investigate the apparent suicide of a young cadet. He discovers that young Ernesto Moro, rather than killing himself, was in fact brutally murdered. Was it payback for his doctor-turned-politician father’s whistleblowing about the details of a military procurement scandal? Who knows more than they’re telling? Who’s covering for whom, and why? In this series of mysteries, Leon gives us a good cop working in a flawed, even corrupt, system, and offers American readers a view of Italy they’re not likely to get elsewhere. There’s also a wonderful cast of supporting characters, including both Brunetti’s family (his wife Paola is interesting enough to warrant a book or two of her own), as well as his colleagues on the police force, such as the divine Signorina Elettra (who also deserves her own books). Fans of police procedurals will not want to miss getting acquainted with Donna Leon’s mysteries. Incidentally, you don’t need to read these books in any particular order.
Check Availability Awwww. Sweet but definitely not sappy is the best way to describe Guess How Much I Love You. According to the publisher, Sam McBratney’s picture book has already sold more than 13 million copies worldwide. It’s easy to see why this lovely tale of the game a father and son play before bedtime resonates with families everywhere. Anita Jeram’s engagingly tender watercolor illustrations lovingly depict Little Nutbrown Hare and his father, Big Nutbrown Hare, as they take turns telling each other how much they love each other. This is a perfect choice to read just before you tuck that little one into bed and turn out the light.
Check Availability Most of Richard Powers’s nine brilliant and meticulously constructed novels weave issues of contemporary science into the lives of his characters. (In The Gold Bug Variations, it was DNA; in Galatea 2.2, it was artificial intelligence.) In his newest novel, The Echo Maker, winner of the 2006 National Book Award, it’s neurology and the mysteries of the brain. 27-year-old Mark Schluter (described by his sister, Karin, as someone who’d “long ago taken every wrong turn you could take in life, and from the wrong lane”) wakes up from a coma with no memory of the automobile accident that caused it. He is also suffering from Capgras syndrome, which causes him to believe that Karin is a stranger impersonating his sister. In desperation, Karin turns for help to an Oliver Sacks-like neurologist whose fame rests on the popular books he’s written about patients with brain injuries. Powers effectively communicates the pain and bewilderment she feels – how can you prove to someone you are who you say you are, when everything you give as evidence is construed as a more elaborate and insidious plot? As the story unfolds around these three main characters, plus a nurse’s aide who probably knows more than she’s telling, we are asked to consider just what a “self” is, and to what extent who we think we are is simply a creation of our minds. Book groups looking for a meaty, thought-provoking selection will have a stimulating time with Powers’s latest work.
Check Availability Three different storylines are interwoven in Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese. They include the story of the over-reaching Chinese folk hero, the Monkey King; the story of Jin Wang, the American born Chinese of the title, a typical middle-school student except that he’s one of the few non-Caucasians in his class; and the story of Danny, a white kid who’s terribly embarrassed by his Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee (presented here as a racial stereotype, in both appearance, speech, and behavior, that’s both painful to read and view). Yang uses his sensitivity to the difficulties of adolescence (he’s a high school teacher in San Francisco) and his consummate skill as an illustrator – the drawings are sharp and distinctive – to bring these different strands together in a satisfying way. His book conveys an important message – be satisfied with who you are – in a sufficiently subtle and authentic way that teen readers won’t be put off or feel they’re being preached to. Yang’s book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature from the American Librarian Association.
Check Availability Once I started Curtis Sittenfeld’s Man of My Dreams, I was so charmed by the narrative voice that I could barely put the novel down. We first meet Hannah Gavener when she’s 14, at the point in time when her mother has just decided to stand up to her controlling and unpredictable father. (Throughout the novel Hannah shares with the reader her observations about the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional family. She says, for example, “Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you...you have never believed you live under the shelter of some essential benevolence." I think anyone who’s ever lived with a father anything like Hannah’s will see the truth in that statement.) We follow Hannah through four years of college and beyond, watching as she struggles to figure who, exactly, she is, and what it is she wants. It’s clear to her that she’s not like Allison, her beautiful and intelligent older sister, or her boy-crazy, wildly attractive cousin, Fig. Why is she so dissatisfied with Mike, a young man who adores her? Why does she hold herself so aloof from her classmates and would-be dates, and why does she - it sometimes seems deliberately – choose to remain basically the same lonely, self-doubting kid she was at age fourteen? That the book ends with no satisfyingly complete resolution shows, I think, the author’s respect for her readers.