Feed on
Posts
Comments

I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

Aug 28th, 2010 by Festus

A trembling scared girl, a little girl, works her way across town in a bus, scared that someone will see her fleeing. At the end of the line, she hurries out of the bus, unsure of what to do next. She know her destination in name only, not how to get there. The girl climbs into a taxi, the first time she has taken one alone. The cab drops her at her destination,.

She is so small, almost invisible in the chaos surrounding her. Overwhelming for a child of 10. It is so noise that she cannot find anyone to listen to her. Finally, someone leads her to a court room. There, she waits and finally dozes off.

Finally she woken by a question, “And what can I do for you?”

The crowd is gone, and the room is almost empty.

“What do you want?”

Nujood, the little girl, replies, “I want a divorce”

I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced is the autobiography of a brave little girl in Yemen, who finds in her the fight to get back to her childhood, and away from the husband who is abusing her. A look at a way of life must of us never think about, and bringing international exposure to the practice of robbing girls of their childhood.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews | No Comments »

Star Island

Aug 21st, 2010 by Festus

I love satire. I love novels. I must love Carl Hiaasen.

Cherry Pye is a 22 year old no talent singing superstar, whose life is out of control. Spending her time wasted or in rehabs, she has likeness to some real life famous for being out of control celebs. As Hiaasen says in his FAQ “You could fill a dump truck with all the hot young singers who can’t yodel their way out of a grocery sack”

Former Pulitzer Prize winner turned paparazzi, Bang Abbott, missed “the” shot of the decade, the body of Michael Jackson. It’s not going to happen again. He decides to stalk the next most likely candidate to kill herself due to her out of control lifestyle, Cherry Pye.

Naughty excess, a road-kill feasting ex-governor and a bodyguard with a weed whacker prosthesis all mix it up together in South Beach for a book that is best described as “Perfectly Hiaasen”.

Tags: , , , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews | No Comments »

Hitler’s Holy Relics

Jul 30th, 2010 by Ukazoo Books

From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. In Hitler’s Holy Relics, bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.

Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nürnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christ’s side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nürnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called “the soul of the Nazi Party,” five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the war’s end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures.

To accomplish his mission, Horn revisits the now rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delves into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted on his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmler’s private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi “Teutonic Knights” charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn confronts his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitler’s theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report remains secret for decades.

Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail. He reveals—for the first time—how a failed Vienna art-student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history (From Simon & Schuster)

Tags: , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews | No Comments »

Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Jul 30th, 2010 by Ukazoo Books

In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his daughter an astounding story—of a schoolboy friendship turned ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the school’s tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is innocent of murder—but protecting her and her sisters from something even worse….

An enthralling mystery, a piercing depiction of class and society, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a masterfully told tale of deceptions—and a rich literary delight. (From Random House)

Winner: Agatha Christie Award, Arthur Ellis Award, Spotted Owl, Dilys Award (Independent Mystery Bookstores), Debut Dagger Award.

Why read this: because the book, like it’s main character, is fun.

Tags: , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews | No Comments »

New at the ‘zoo July 14

Jul 14th, 2010 by Festus

New at the ‘zoo for July 13

Go Mutants! by Larry Doyle is just a sweet story of a smart nerd and his outcast dealing with the bullies and hormones that come along with high school. If that is not bad enough to be in high school, try being an alien, mutant or other freak and in high school. Our hero is J!m, a teenage alien with problems – and not just of the typical high school variety. He’s got blue skin, a massive cranium with a protruding brain, and, worst of all, he’s going through puberty. For J!m, puberty involves spontaneous combustion. Larry Doyle wrote for the Simpsons and the novel, I Love You, Beth Cooper.

The Thousands Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. Mitchell’s newest creation is being acclaimed from all over. Having been nominated twice for the Man Booker Prize, could the third time be a charm? The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.

But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.  As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”

A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author. (from Random House)

The Obama Diaries by Laura Ingraham. If you love or hate this book will come down to what do you think of Laura Ingraham and her politics. If you listen to her radio show, you will love this book.  The premise of this book is Ingraham found “Obama’s Diaries” in a manila envelope on her car while it was parked at the Watergate.  She felt she had to publish them.

Dr. Emerson Eggerichs’ book, Love & Respect: The Love She Most Desires, the Respect He Desperately Needs, is based on the biblical passage from Ephesians 5:33. His premise is that communication between a husband and wife is often frustrated because of the vastly different ways in which men and women perceive love. Women are wired to need unconditional love and men need to feel unconditionally respected. Revitalize the love in your marriage!

Posted in New Arrivals | No Comments »

Summer Reading and Tinkers

Jul 5th, 2010 by shenkoshenkoshenko

Concentration.  It just declines during these few hot months.  It’s perfectly natural and cannot be helped.  Dank humidity and specious outdoorsy activity hamper our typically more ambitious natures, and what begins as motions toward self-improvement and deep, recharging relaxation fizzle into mosquito bites, sunburn and profound afternoon napping.  Summer reading, too, becomes dominated by read-it-once paperback thriller-dillers concerning vengeful ladies with unusual body art, or, if you’re not into that kind of thing, the vampirish undead.  Drop it by the poolside mid-chapter, pick it up later.  No biggie.

Sometimes, I want it to be winter again.  Or powerfully air-conditioned.

Item:  Paul Harding’s Tinkers (it won the Pulitzer)

Prose that is distilled, word by word, into the pastoral recollections of the dying George Crosby, husband, father, hobby-horologist, who, eight days before his death, begins hallucinating family history in a very readable 3rd person.  The story focuses, for the most part, on his father and the home in which George had been raised.  “Mornings began in the dark.  They began with setting the home in order for the day, so that it might already be industrious when the sun climbed first the invisible horizon and then the branches of the dark trees.”

George’s father, Howard Crosby, after a self-induced water accident leaves him prone to epileptic seizures, feels that “the quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breeze might part and [I’d] be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose.  The weaver might have made one bad loop in the foliage of a sugar maple by the road and that one loop of whatever the thread might be wound from –light, gravity, dark from stars –had somehow been worked loose by the wind…which I was lucky enough to spot…”  Plying household wares from a homemade mule-cart, Howard is part mystic and half-hero to the yokels of the surrounding county who rely on his laundry soap and secret moonshine.  At one strange turn, he even serves as dentist to a local hermit, an ancient, once-respected intellectual and old schoolfellow of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  To his family, however, Howard is a poor provider; an enigmatic, taciturn creature given to ruining family meals with his absent-mindedness and fits that leave him “baffled by his diet of lightning”.  Nobody (save, perhaps, his mother), feels this more than George.

Tinkers is not a generously-poured, ice-cold summer beverage to be slugged down between innings.  It is a piping-hot cup of tea, to be savored, steeped, and sipped slowly.  It is compelling as any savvy thriller, but without the encumbrance of some rigor-mortis plotline being marched out in a new dust-jacket.  At just under 200 pages, Tinkers will satisfy your intellect without consuming your entire weekend.  Do yourself a favor:  turn up the A/C and set aside some quality time for yourself and this deceptively light little paperback.

Tags: , , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews, New Release Books | No Comments »

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell

Jun 1st, 2010 by Festus

One cold January day the police are called to a sleepy little hamlet in the north of Sweden where they find the victim of a savage murder lying in the snow. As they begin their investigation they notice that the village seems eerily quiet and deserted. Going from house to house, looking for witnesses, they uncover a crime unprecedented in Swedish history.

When judge Birgitta Roslin reads about the massacre she realizes that she has a family connection to one of the couples involved and decides to investigate. A nineteenth-century diary and a red ribbon found in the forest nearby are her only clues.

What Birigtta eventually uncovers leads her into an international web of corruption and a story of vengeance that stretches back over a hundred years.

In The Man from Beijing, Mankell’s approach is different then most mystery’s. Answers in life are not always easy, neat or predictable. Mankell’s web spins in themes of globalization, east versus west, legacy, and prejudice while taking us from 1860’s to modern day, as well as covering Sweden, China, USA, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This mystery covers a lot of ground, and does it well.

Tags: , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews | No Comments »

Saddled by Susan Richards

May 21st, 2010 by Festus

From NY Times best selling Author Susan Richards, author of Chosen By a Horse comes the heart wrenching prequel, Saddled

In Sadddled, readers travel back to the time when Susan was at her worst, a time when she woke up and realized she was an alcoholic. That knowledge came hard – and inside Susan was a woman who didn’t want to be a prisoner to anything anymore, but she didn’t know how to pull herself out of her addiction.

Enter Georgia, Susan’s Morgan mare who fans first met in Chosen by a Horse. Daily rides, consistent care, and plenty of love give Susan the courage to forget about her demons and focus on an animal that makes no apologies. As Susan writes, “I wanted Georgia. I wanted the only horse who had made my heart jump at the first sight of her, who had made me want to find a safer, saner life. I needed a horse whom I loved enough to want to change myself, to stop lying to myself about my marriage, my drinking, and my pretend happiness.”

Saddled is available in hardback, Chosen by a Horse is available in paperback.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews, New Release Books | No Comments »

New at the ‘zoo May 13

May 15th, 2010 by Festus

New at the ‘zoo May 11

I am Nujood, Age 10 an Divorced by Nujood Ali

Nujood’s childhood came to an abrupt end in 2008 when her father arranged for her to be married to a man three time her age. Nujood tells of the abuse at her husbands hands and her daring escape in defiance of Yemeni customs and her own family.  This is one to read and pass on tell everyone knows this strength

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

In Decem­ber 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.

Two kids with the same name, living in the same city. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison for felony murder. Here is the story of two boys and the journey of a generation.

Fever Dream by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

At the old family manse in Louisiana, Special Agent Pendergast is putting to rest long-ignored possessions reminiscent of his wife Helen’s tragic death, only to make a stunning-and dreadful-discovery.

Helen had been mauled by an unusually large and vicious lion while they were big game hunting in Africa. But now, Pendergast learns that her rifle-her only protection from the beast-had been deliberately loaded with blanks. Who could have wanted Helen dead…and why?

Bite Me by Christopher Moore

Moore romp with the undead continue in Bite Me (Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck are the first two). The book starts with a narrative through the first two books to catch up new readers.

“The City of San Francisco is being stalked by a huge, shaved vampyre cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal, emergency backup mistress of the Greater Bay area night, and my manga-haired love monkey, Foo Dog, stand between the ravenous monster and a bloody massacre of the general public.”  is the first sentence. You either love it, or won’t go anywhere near it. As for me, I love it.

South of Broad by Pat Conroy (Trade paperback release)

“It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father’s ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life. His bloodstream lit up my own with a passion for the city that I’ve never lost nor ever will. I’m Charleston-born, and bred. The city’s two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, have flooded and shaped all the days of my life on this storied peninsula.”
So start Pat Conroy’s love letter to his home town. A NYT best-seller in hard back, and sure to be in paperback as well

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews, New Arrivals, New Release Books | No Comments »

A Reliable Wife

Apr 29th, 2010 by Festus

Twenty-four hours after completing A Reliable Wife, I don’t  know what think. It was amazing. A novel filled with rage, fear, pain, redemption and forgiveness. So much emotion poured into one book, so much to reflect upon.

Catherine Lands answers an ad: Country Businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical, not romantic reasons. Reply by letter. Ralph Truitt, Truiit, Wisconsin. Discreet. She writes back “I am a simple honest woman.” Thus the lies start.

Catherine is anything but simple, Ralph is much more then a country businessman. Truitt, Wisconsin is anything but hospitable in the winter of 1907. Goolrick examines the pain families can cause to each other, the rage dishonesty can bring, the fear of a life unsettled, and the redemption and forgiveness that can happen to anyone once they bring themselves to that point.

This book is sadly, believable. Dysfunction of individuals and families creep up daily. Forgiveness does not easy come easily or to everyone, but to those it comes to is sweet. I may not know what to think of A Reliable Wife because any dealing with family, in a certainly biographical story, is hard. That does not keep it from being wonderful.

Tags: , , , , ,

Posted in Book Reviews, New Arrivals | No Comments »

Older Posts »