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Post by sadie on Jan 6, 2011 14:46:01 GMT -5
#1 on the Hardcover Fiction this week...
TOM CLANCY - GRANT BLACKWOOD - DEAD OR ALIVE
For years, Jack Ryan, Jr. and his colleagues at the Campus have waged an unofficial and highly effective campaign against the terrorists who threaten western civilization. The most dangerous of these is the Emir. This sadistic killer has masterminded the most vicious attacks on the west and has eluded capture by the world’s law enforcement agencies. Now the Campus is on his trail. Joined by their latest recruits, John Clark and Ding Chavez, Jack Ryan, Jr. and his cousins, Dominick and Brian Caruso, are determined to catch the Emir and they will bring him in . . . dead or alive.
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Post by sadie on Jan 19, 2011 11:21:53 GMT -5
#1 - Hardcover - Non-Fiction
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
The Story of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Eight years ago, an old man told me a story that took my breath away. His name was Louie Zamperini, and from the day I first spoke to him, his almost incomprehensibly dramatic life was my obsession.
It was a horse--the subject of my first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend--who led me to Louie. As I researched the Depression-era racehorse, I kept coming across stories about Louie, a 1930s track star who endured an amazing odyssey in World War II. I knew only a little about him then, but I couldn’t shake him from my mind. After I finished Seabiscuit, I tracked Louie down, called him and asked about his life. For the next hour, he had me transfixed.
Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry, staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling the local police. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance, crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off the Reich Chancellery. He was preparing for the 1940 Olympics, and closing in on the fabled four-minute mile, when World War II began. Louie joined the Army Air Corps, becoming a bombardier. Stationed on Oahu, he survived harrowing combat, including an epic air battle that ended when his plane crash-landed, some six hundred holes in its fuselage and half the crew seriously wounded.
On a May afternoon in 1943, Louie took off on a search mission for a lost plane. Somewhere over the Pacific, the engines on his bomber failed. The plane plummeted into the sea, leaving Louie and two other men stranded on a tiny raft. Drifting for weeks and thousands of miles, they endured starvation and desperate thirst, sharks that leapt aboard the raft, trying to drag them off, a machine-gun attack from a Japanese bomber, and a typhoon with waves some forty feet high. At last, they spotted an island. As they rowed toward it, unbeknownst to them, a Japanese military boat was lurking nearby. Louie’s journey had only just begun.
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Post by sadie on Feb 3, 2011 14:19:54 GMT -5
This is not on the NY Times Best Sellers List.......but rather on the Suspense and Thrillers List.....
Treachery in Death J.D. Robb
Lt. Eve Dallas and her squad take on corrupt cops in Robb's 33rd full-length novel featuring the New York Police and Security Dept. homicide detective (after Indulgence in Death), a fast-paced, intricate, and deadly dance of well-matched opponents. When Dallas's partner, Det. Delia Peabody, overhears an angry exchange between Lt. Rene Oberman and Det. William Garnet that reveals an unlawful killing and ongoing skimming, Dallas's reaction to this news is decisive: "the blue line breaks for wrong cops." The setting may be slightly futuristic, but the procedures are familiar: Dallas puts together a solid team that meets in her home to avoid leaks as they compile evidence. At the same time, she initiates confrontations with the dangerous Oberman, whom she begins pushing toward a trap. From this pure good guys versus bad guys scenario, Robb (aka Nora Roberts) wrings plenty of exciting strokes and counterstrokes before reaching the satisfying climax.
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Post by sadie on Feb 8, 2011 18:18:21 GMT -5
Water for Elephants: A Novel Sara Gruen
Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison. Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea.
The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena's and Rosie's pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it--and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. --Valerie Ryan
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Post by beth on Feb 8, 2011 23:33:59 GMT -5
Sadie, I'm enjoying the reviews. This sounds like something my brother would like. Do you think the female author keeps it from being a "guy book". I notice he reads very few books written by women. There must be a reason for that. And, on the same thought (sort of), Nora Roberts should stick with Robb ... those are Ok ... a little gritty but readable. I dislike her romance suspense books more than I can say and still be polite. ugh
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Post by sadie on Feb 9, 2011 0:25:17 GMT -5
Yeah.....Nora Roberts romance books don't do it for me either.
I don't know what to think about the Sara Gruen book......it sounded interesting. I get tired of the #1 books being the same old authors so I've been trying to highlight some of the other authors.
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Post by sadie on Mar 3, 2011 21:30:58 GMT -5
A Discovery of Witches: A Novel Deborah E. Harkness
Amazon Best of the Month, February 2011: It all begins with a lost manuscript, a reluctant witch, and 1,500-year-old vampire. Dr. Diana Bishop has a really good reason for refusing to do magic: she is a direct descendant of the first woman executed in the Salem Witch Trials, and her parents cautioned her be discreet about her talents before they were murdered, presumably for having "too much power." So it is purely by accident that Diana unlocks an enchanted long-lost manuscript (a book that all manner of supernatural creatures believe to hold the story of all origins and the secret of immortality) at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and finds herself in a race to prevent an interspecies war. A sparkling debut written by a historian and self-proclaimed oenophile, A Discovery of Witches is heady mix of history and magic, mythology and love (cue the aforementioned vampire!), making for a luxurious, intoxicating, one-sitting read. --Daphne Durham
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Post by sadie on Mar 14, 2011 16:59:17 GMT -5
Sing You Home: A Novel
Jodi Picoult (Author)
Popular author Picoult tackles the controversial topic of gay rights in her latest powerful tale. When music therapist Zoe Baxter’s latest pregnancy ends in a stillbirth, her husband Max decides he can’t handle any more heartbreak and leaves her. As she picks up the pieces of her life, Zoe is surprised to find herself falling for a school counselor who happens to be a woman. While Zoe is finding happiness with Vanessa, Max falls off the wagon and is helped by a pastor from his brother’s evangelical church. Vanessa and Zoe wed in Massachusetts, and Vanessa offers to carry one of the fertilized embryos Zoe and Max stored. Excited by the prospect of being a mother, Zoe goes to Max to get him to release the embryos to her and is shocked when he instead sues her for custody of them, backed by his church. Told from the perspectives of all three major characters, Picoult’s gripping novel explores all sides of the hot-button issue and offers a CD of folk songs that reflect Zoe’s feelings throughout the novel. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The always topical Picoult plans a multimedia tour to more than two dozen cities with Ellen Wilber, who will perform the songs she and Picoult wrote together. --Kristine Huntley
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Post by dewey on Mar 21, 2011 8:07:14 GMT -5
Anyone read THE WALK by Richard Paul Evans? I enjoyed it and it's my understanding that this is the first book of a series. Can't wait until the next one is out.
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Post by beth on Mar 24, 2011 0:10:37 GMT -5
What kind of book is it, Dewey?
Suspense? thriller?
tell
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Post by dewey on Mar 24, 2011 7:31:01 GMT -5
What kind of book is it, Dewey? Suspense? thriller? tell It's about one man's journey though a life altering event. When you are reading it you can see how fate is going to play a large role in reshaping his life. It just struck a chord with me because I often think the things that shape our lives are often right under our nose and we fail to see them.
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Post by beth on Mar 24, 2011 15:19:45 GMT -5
Now you have intrigued me, Dewey . Fate is an interesting concept. My ks and I discuss this from time to time and never arrive at a firm opinion but .... wonder. Off to find a review to add.
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Post by beth on Mar 24, 2011 15:27:27 GMT -5
Here's the review I found (Booklist).
This seems a little like the "When one door closes, another opens", concept.
Evans’ latest inspirational novel is the first in a planned series about a man who sets out to walk across the country in the wake of a personal tragedy. At 28, Alan Christoffersen is the head of his own successful ad company, and madly in love with his wife, McKale. His life seems truly charmed, until McKale has an accident while horseback riding. She is left paralyzed, and to stay by her side, Alan leaves his business in the hands of his partner, Kyle, which proves to be a terrible misstep when Kyle cruelly betrays him. Then McKale dies. Bereft, Alan throws off the trappings of his old life and, with little more than a backpack and a tent, sets out to walk from his home in Bellevue, Washington, all the way to Key West, Florida. The idea of a man leaving on a soul-searching cross-country trek is an intriguing one, and the pages turn quickly. Future installments will prove whether Evans’ concept holds up, but this initial offering is definitely a journey worth taking. --Kristine Huntley
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Post by dewey on Mar 25, 2011 7:31:30 GMT -5
I would highly recommend this one. It was a little slow at first but once I got into it I didn't want it to end. So I am really glad it is going to be a series.
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aubrey
Journeyman
There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance
Posts: 385
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Post by aubrey on Apr 2, 2011 13:04:56 GMT -5
I think Janet Evanovich is great. Very funny, but also exciting.
I don't know how anyone with kids could read Pet Semetary, but I thought it was really good. The treatment of the death of children is not exploitative, as it is in some books. I usually get more upset about cats and other animals being mistreated in books that I do with children, as hurting animals tends to be just an aside, before the real stuff starts.
Anyway.
The Dome is OK. Not his best, but not his worst either. There's a kind of inevitability about it that makes it a bit of a slog. I'd say it's about the level of The Regulators, if you know that one.
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