Twelve year old Miranda lives in a shabby apartment with her single Mom. It is 1979. Keeping safe on the streets of her New York City neighborhood seems easier than understanding the friends around her, even though she and her best friend Sal have to avoid a crazy man on their way to school. She is caught up in the confusions of shifting friendships – why won’t Sal play with her after he gets punched by a kid for no apparent reason and why has Julia turned cold to Annemarie?
Miranda is also worried about a note hidden under her bed. It seems to have foretold the invitation for Miranda’s mom to be a contestant on a game show. A number of notes written by an unknown person have appeared in odd places. In these tiny mysterious notes the writer seems to know more than she does about upcoming events. They imply that Miranda must help prevent a tragic death. Who is the victim and how can Miranda do anything about it? In this taut novel, every word, every sentence, has meaning and substance. The Newbery award committee called it finely crafted, exceptionally conceived, and highly original. I couldn’t agree more. ~Gretchen Echols
Like many people interested in the history of New York City, I’d heard about the Collyer brothers–Homer and Langley–long before E.L. Doctorow decided to fictionalize the peculiar but (in his hands, anyway) poignant story of their lives. They were born to a Manhattan physician and his wife, who had deep roots in American history. Well educated (Homer trained in admiralty law, his younger brother studied engineering), the two sons moved with their family into a Harlem brownstone in 1909. After their parents died, the brothers remained in that Fifth Avenue residence, becoming hoarders and paranoid recluses, with Homer slowly going blind. They eventually died in that house, both of them in March 1947. But so filled was the brownstone with newspapers and broken bicycles, specimen jars and old beds, skeletal Christmas trees and rotting food and surplus pianos, that police had to break in through a second-story window, just to see if anyone was still alive inside. Over the bare bones of the Collyers’ bizarre tale, Doctorow has stitched a quilt of details–partially true, partly fictional–that lend the brothers personalities beyond their eccentricities. What’s most moving in these pages is the love those brothers show one another, despite their escalating mental infirmities. Extending the lives of his main characters well past their actual obituary dates, Doctorow takes the opportunity to revisit high and low points of the 20th century through their eyes–the rise of speakeasies and gangsters, the emergence of “hippies” (with one of whom Homer finds something approaching affection), the Vietnam War, President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal and more. Homer & Langley is an enviable achievement of fictionalized history, presented with such human warmth, humor and compassion that you’ll feel compelled to start re-reading it soon after you’ve turned its final page.
~ Jeff Pierce
Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
by Martha A. Sandweiss
Clarence King was a famous 19th-century geologist and mountaineer, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and the man who exposed the notorious (and, really, incredible) Great Diamond Hoax of 1872. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1842, a confidante of the privileged, a friend of onetime presidential aide and future U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, and a bestselling author to boot–”the best and the brightest of his generation,” as Hay pronounced–King also led a secret life. For 13 years, while his real name was featured in newspapers and rode the lips of government officials in need of scientific expertise, the unmarried King engaged in a parallel existence as “James Todd,” a supposedly light-skinned black Pullman porter with a much younger common-law spouse, Ada Copeland, the daughter of former Georgia slaves, and a home and family in Brooklyn, New York. Feeling confined by the upper-class life into which he’d been born, King first studied and toured, and then daringly leapt the border between white and African America–but never told his closest friends, or even his aged mother, what he’d done. Only after his death in 1901 were the facts of his double life revealed, thanks to a court case brought against his dubious estate by his black wife. Author Sandweiss, a Princeton University history professor, uses the story of Clarence King and Ada Copeland to explore the bigotry, economic disparities and racial “passing” pervasive in post-Civil War America, and raise the question of whether even King–for all of his intelligence–could admit “the paradoxes of his life.” She presents here a haunting tale, made all the more intriguing by a mystery raised in its later pages: Who was responsible for maintaining the payments on Ada King’s residence even after husband Clarence/James died? In other words, who knew about his secret life before the newspapers made it a sensation?
~ Jeff Pierce
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved AmericaUntil reading New York Times writer Timothy Egan’s latest work, I had never even heard of the Great Fire of 1910, which consumed 3 million acres of Pacific Northwest timberlands (an area slightly smaller than Connecticut) in only two days, and killed more than 80 people. But the drama and humanity Egan brings to that history make it hard to forget. The best-recognized players here are recently retired U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and his friend and sparring partner, Yale-educated forester Gifford Pinchot, who together created the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and fought to strengthen its authority after Egan’s “big burn.” And the villains are embodied in U.S. Senator Weldon Heyburn, an Idaho Republican who “stood in the way of nearly all Roosevelt’s progressive initiatives,” and who sought to defund and destroy the Forest Service and turn all of the forests it managed back to industrial use. However, the real heroes in The Big Burn have to be the Forest Service rangers who, outmanned and outgunned at very turn, nonetheless fought valiantly to stop a disastrous blaze that had een wind-whipped and stampeded across acreage grown dry after months of sunny summer. While thousands of residents fled the danger zone, racing away on trains that threatened to tumble from charred and wrecked trestles, the rangers found help from prisoners released for the onerous duty of firefighting and a black U.S. Army unit that, against tremendous odds, saved one town and safely evacuated another. Although the final chapter of this book is a bit too reportorial, not quite matching the pace of what precedes it, Egan (best known until now for his 2006 book, The Worst Hard Time) shows that he has mastered the fine art of fetching new color and life even from history that never lacked for vividness. The Big Burn is nothing if not a scorcher. ~ Jeff Pierce
Historians use the word “lacuna” to indicate a crucial missing piece in a manuscript. Kingsolver expertly weaves many threads of story to reveal the lacuna in Harrison Shepherd’s life. Taken to Mexico as a boy by his Mexican mother fleeing an American father, he is befriended by the cook in the hacienda and learns much about Mexico and its Aztec history. Eventually he ends up working for the famous artistic couple: Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. In their household he observes revolutionary ideals and becomes acquainted with Leon Trotsky, on the run from a murderous Stalin. Shepherd eventually flees Mexico and settles in Asheville, North Carolina and becomes a popular novelist of ancient Mexico. Again, he is on the periphery of WWII and events of the Fifties. This powerful story shows how a person’s life can be caught up in political events without an active participation in their ideologies. Frieda Kahlo’s character says that to be a good artist you have to know something that is true; that knowledge about life has to go into art. Kingsolver knows many true things and has written a gem of a book. ~Gretchen Echols
Book 1:The Alchemyst - Book 2: The Magician - Book 3: The Sorceress
Are 15 year-old Sophie and Josh Newman the legendary twins who will save the world for humans or are they just pawns in a mythical battle between the alchemist Nicholas Flamel and the magician John Dee? Sophie and Josh are working at boring summer jobs in a coffee shop and a book store when their lives are changed forever. The books feature characters from legend such as Machiavelli, Joan of Arc and William Shakespeare as well as gods such as Hekate, the Witch of Endor and the stag-headed god Curnunnos. Michael Scott is adept at introducing modern magical technology such as cell phones and GPS tracking into the ancient world that includes auras and ley lines. This is a classic quest story deftly handled with exciting battles and clever escapes - it seems that magic has its weak points. This is a fun entry into the young adult world of Harry Potter and the Golden Compass suitable for the fantasy lover of any age. ~Gretchen Echols
Lucie de la Tour du Pin was a survivor and witness to an era of terrifying and dangerous political mood swings – the French Revolution. As a member of the minor nobility, she witnessed major intellectual debates in the salon of her stern and domineering grandmother. Her mother, who died young, was a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette. Her stepmother was a first cousin to the Empress Josephine. Her husband fought alongside Lafayette in the American Revolution. Her half-sister Fanny married a faithful follower of Napoleon and followed him into exile. She was a refugee émigré in Regency England and upstate New York and lost and regained a fortune.
Based on Lucie’s memoirs and numerous letters to her goddaughter, this lucid biography is a fascinating page-turner. It clearly recounts the various political factions and fast paced power changes during and as a result of the Revolution. This is a woman born in privilege but at the mercy of a cruel grandmother and treacherous political change. Throughout she kept her spirits up and valiantly made the best of circumstances presented to her.
~Gretchen Echols
T.R. Reid begins The Healing of America with the premise that a nation’s health care system is a reflection of it’s basic moral values. Instead of dry lists of statistics or muddled ranting he offers an insightful journey through the four basic models of health care delivery and how they are practiced around the world. He uses an old shoulder injury causing pain and limited range of motion as the vehicle to compare how health care is provided in Europe, Asia and the United States. He not only talks with the doctors he sees, but other patients, people in government and related health care fields. He suggests possible alternatives to the current state of American health care in a well reasoned, organized manner. By offering examples that include the things that are satisfactory as well as those that are not, he shows how other systems change and adjust over time. No system is perfect, but other systems deliver more and better care for less money than the American system, and leave no one at risk of death or financial ruin due to lack of insurance. It is a pleasure to read this book, both for style and content. ~Marla Vandewater
Beginning in the waning years of Victorian England, following the lives and intermingling of five families and many acquaintances through the end of the first World War, The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt is a sprawling novel of people in a world of art and social upheaval. Olive Wellwood is a very successful writer of children’s literature. In addition to her published works, she keeps an ongoing fairy tale, the center of their relationship, for each of her seven children. She and her husband Humphrey consider themselves freethinkers. They associate with artists, writers and intellectuals. While Olive’s sister Violet lives with them and manages the household, the children are mostly left to raise themselves. Through the lives of her characters, Byatt paints a picture of a society in a swirl of creative and intellectual ferment, of stories and beautiful objects and cafes full of intellectual exchange. Below this surface of energy and creativity are many uncomfortable and ugly secrets and nothing is left out as the world of the parents overlaps the world of the children with complex and sometimes devastating consequences. As always with A.S Byatt, the writing is superb, the scope impressive. I loved this novel. ~Marla Vandewater
One French critic called it “an inartistic … scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron” with a “hideously unfinished” appearance. Another denounced it as an “odious column of bolted metal.” Hard as it is to believe, the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower–built as the centerpiece of Paris’ 1889 Exposition Universelle–was considerably less appreciated at the time of its raising than it is nowadays.
In her entertaining new history, Eiffel’s Tower (Viking, $27.95), Jill Jonnes recounts the myriad difficulties that engineer Gustave Eiffel faced in finishing his monumental erection. But she also offers a three-ring circus of contemporaneous characters. Prominent among those is Buffalo Bill Cody, who brought his Wild West Show–complete with stampeding Indians and sharpshooter Annie Oakley–to the Paris world’s fair at the start of what would be a highly profitable European tour. Appearing here, too, is bad-boy newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., who lorded over what had been his father’s New York Herald, while also establishing a Paris edition of that broadsheet, which promoted the ’89 expo–and eventually became part of today’s International Herald Tribune. Further animating this volume’s narrative are artists (including the tortured Vincent van Gogh and the mercurial James McNeill Whistler), and inventor extraordinaire Thomas Edison, who delighted Parisian dignitaries with his new talking phonographs.
Jonnes notes here, as well, that the Paris fair was important in educating the French about their colonial empire’s foreign acquisitions. Quoting from one newspaper account, she writes that “Fairgoers were lured by the ‘smell of Oriental spices and north African couscous, the sound of Senegalese tom-toms, Polynesian flutes and Annamite [Vietnamese] gongs, the sight of Moslem minarets and Cambodian temples. In the bazaars of the large Algerian and Tunisian pavilions craftsmen fashioned jewelry, finely tooled leather and brightly colored tapestries.’” Amid such exotic enticements, it’s a wonder that anyone found time to scale Eiffel’s tower–then the tallest manmade structure in the world. ~ Jeff Pierce
