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My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More): A Memoir
by Dario FoAn extraordinary coming-of-age memoir by the Nobel-Prize-winning playwrightMy First Seven Years is Dario Fo's fantastic, enchanting memoir of his youth spent in Northern Italy on the shores of Lago Maggiore. As a child, Fo grew up in a picturesque village teeming with glass-blowers, smugglers and storytellers. Of his teenage years, Fo recounts the struggles of the Fascists and Partisans, the years of World War II, and his own tragicomic experience trying to desert the Fascist army. In a series of colorful vignettes, Fo draws us into a remarkable early life filled with characters and anecdotes that would become the inspiration for his own creative genius.
Plus One
by Elizabeth FamaDivided by day and night and on the run from authorities, star-crossed young lovers unearth a sinister conspiracy in this compelling romantic thriller.Seventeen-year-old Soleil Le Coeur is a Smudge—a night dweller prohibited by law from going out during the day. When she fakes an injury in order to get access to and kidnap her newborn niece—a day dweller, or Ray—she sets in motion a fast-paced adventure that will bring her into conflict with the powerful lawmakers who order her world, and draw her together with the boy she was destined to fall in love with, but who is also a Ray. Set in a vivid alternate reality and peopled with complex, deeply human characters on both sides of the day-night divide, Elizabeth Fama's Plus One is a brilliantly imagined drama of individual liberty and civil rights, and a fast-paced romantic adventure story.
The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People
by Michael Schmicker Sally Rhine FeatherCan some people see the future? Do some dreams contain warnings? Can we observe events unfolding thousands of miles away? Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, a director of one of the world's most respected institutes for paranormal studies, says yes—and she provides dozens of examples of how ESP appears in real life. Referring to decades of research of hard facts and data as proof that ESP is real, Dr. Feather now reveals breakthrough discoveries which include: what circumstances trigger ESP experiences, why some people have more of this gift than others, and whether the fate revealed in a dream or vision can be changed. Don't miss:· The dream that prevented a fatal heart attack of a stranger· Children's visions of dead people bringing messages for the living· A letter written and mailed that precisely predicted a nephew's injury in war· The stolen car recovered in Cleveland with the help of a vision· …and more!
I'm Fascinated by Sacrifice Flies: Inside the Game We All Love
by Tim KurkjianHilarious and insightful tales from the world of professional baseball by ESPN baseball analyst Tim KurkjianThe New York Times Bestseller!In the aftermath of the Steroid Era that stained the game of baseball, at a time when so many players are so rich and therefore have a sense of entitlement that they haven't earned, ESPN baseball commentator Tim Kurkjian shows readers how to love the game more than ever, with incredible insight and stories that are hilarious, heartbreaking, and revealing.From what Pete Rose was doing in the batting cage a few minutes after getting out of prison, to why everyone strikes out these days and why no one seems to care, I'm Fascinated By Sacrifice Flies will surprise even longtime baseball fans. Tim explains the fear factor in the game, and what it feels like to get hit by a pitch; Adam LaRoche wanted to throw up in the batter's box. He examines the game's superstitions: Eliot Johnson's choice of bubble gum, a poker chip in Sean Burnett's back pocket. He unearths the unwritten rules of the game, takes readers inside ESPN, and reveals how Tony Gwynn made baseball so much more fun to watch.And, of course, Tim will explain to readers why he is fascinated by sacrifice flies.
To Punish and Protect: One DA's Fight Against a System That Coddles Criminals
by Catherine Whitney Jeanine PirroFormer prosecutor Jeanine Pirro's To Punish and Protect challenges us to have the will and the courage to wage war on the predators roaming our streets, and to avenge their victims. "The office of the district attorney is a battleground, where the fight between good and evil unfolds each day. We see the ugliest side of life, the pain that people go through for no reason. They didn't do anything. They didn't ask for it. Yet here they are, living their personal nightmares. We cannot take away their pain, or turn back time to undo the damage, but we can be the avengers. We can seek justice on their behalf."So begins this riveting account by the former Westchester County District Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, as she takes us inside the violent world of modern crime fighting. Before Pirro was elected DA in 1993, the job was always considered a man's domain, demanding a macho toughness. Pirro can be as tough as any man, and yet she adds an important new dimension to the role. She believes that being tough on crime means much more than just filling the jails. She goes beyond her role to punish criminals, to be a passionate advocate for the victims of crime.In To Punish and Protect, Pirro brings readers face to face with the gruesome realities of her daily battles, and tells the true, heartbreaking stories of the victims - the slaughter of a young woman and her two children by a jealous, enraged boyfriend; a teenage girl forced to assume wifely duties after her father murdered her stepmother; a nine-year-old boy chained to a radiator in a dark room and nearly starved to death, as the rest of the family went about its business; a gentle, hardworking man shot fatally in a dispute over a parking place, because he was black; an eighty-year-old woman, savagely beaten by her son and left for two days on the cold floor of her apartment; a beautiful woman whose wealth and privilege could not prevent her murder at the hands of a violent husband; and a group of young girls lured into a sexual nightmare by a cunning predator posing as a trustworthy youth counselor.Pirro presents hard truths about the ways in which parents, communities, and the justice system share complicity in fostering an environment of danger to our children. She describes the dark world of Internet pedophiles and hate mongers, who are allowed to hide behind First Amendment protections to gain access to kids in their own bedrooms. She offers a harsh judgment on parents who fail to address the deadly consequences of teen drinking, and even host keg parties in their homes, while alcohol continues to take young lives and destroy families.Pirro delivers a bold indictment of the criminal justice system, and asks whether we as a nation are truly committed to justice. Increasingly, she warns, our laws, attitudes, and behaviors seem to be veering away from what we say is our moral core as a nation. We say that we exalt good and punish evil, yet we do the opposite. We turn criminals into celebrities, and view victims with suspicion. If we're going to make our communities safer and our society less violent, we need to do more than just pay lip service to our ideals.
The Beauty of the Moment
by Tanaz BhathenaSusan is the new girl—she’s sharp and driven, and strives to meet her parents’ expectations of excellence. Malcolm is the bad boy—he started raising hell at age fifteen, after his mom died of cancer, and has had a reputation ever since. Susan’s parents are on the verge of divorce. Malcolm’s dad is a known adulterer.Susan hasn’t told anyone, but she wants to be an artist. Malcolm doesn’t know what he wants—until he meets her.Love is messy and families are messier, but in spite of their burdens, Susan and Malcolm fall for each other. The ways they drift apart and come back together are testaments to family, culture, and being true to who you are.
In the Light of What We Know: A Novel
by Zia Haider RahmanA bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our centuryOne September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope--from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton--and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world--and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.
The Glass Wall (Superintendent Mike Yeadings Mysteries)
by Clare CurzonOne freezing February evening, a Filipino barman named Ramon witnesses someone plunging from the seventh story of a luxury penthouse. Instead of calling the police, he heads straight for the apartment from which the body has fallen. It belongs to an old woman with a mysterious past, who could not get out of bed by herself.Superintendent Mike Yeadings and Sergeant Rosemary Zycynski lead the investigation. Searching for a link between a teenage drug victim, a missing care assistant, and an unidentified corpse, they discover further mysteries behind the glass wall of the penthouse. Other lives are threatened and the circle of menace widens to involve the dead woman's unhappily married doctor and estranged granddaughter. Clare Curzon's latest mystery masterfully unpicks the events and motives that lead toward the apparent murder of a woman already mortally frail. Her brilliantly fast-paced style keeps the pages turning as the chilling truth is gradually revealed.
The Fun Parts: Stories
by Sam LipsyteThe Fun Parts is Sam Lipsyte at his very best—a far-ranging exploration of new voices and vistas from "the most consistently funny fiction writer working today" (Time). A boy eats his way to self-discovery, while another must battle the reality-brandishing monster preying on his fantasy realm. Elsewhere, an aerobics instructor—the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—makes the most shocking leap imaginable to save her soul. These are just a few of the characters you'll encounter in Sam Lipsyte's richly imagined world.Featuring a grizzled and possibly deranged male doula, a doomsday hustler who must face the multi-universal truth of "the real-ass jumbo," and a tawdry glimpse of a high school shot-putting circuit in northern New Jersey, circa 1986, Lipsyte's short stories combine the tragicomic brilliance of his beloved novels with the compressed vitality of Venus Drive.
Prodigals: Stories
by Greg Jackson"People are bullets, fired," the narrator declares in one of the desperate, eerie stories that make up Greg Jackson's Prodigals. He's fleeing New York, with a woman who may be his therapist, as a storm bears down. Self-knowledge here is no safeguard against self-sabotage. A banker sees his artistic ambitions laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters. A midlife divorcée escapes to her seaside cottage only to find a girl living in it. A journalist is either the guest or the captive of a former tennis star at his country mansion in the Auvergne. Jackson's sharp debut drills into the spiritual longing of today's privileged elite. Adrift in lives of trumpeted possibility and hidden limitation, in thrall to secondhand notions of success, the flawed, sympathetic, struggling characters in these stories seek refuge from meaninglessness in love, art, drugs, and sex. Unflinching, funny, and profound, Prodigals maps the degradations of contemporary life with unusual insight and passion--from the obsession with celebrity, to the psychological debts of privilege, to the impotence of violence, to the loss of grand narratives.Prodigals is a fiercely honest and heartfelt look at what we have become, at the comedy of our foibles and the pathos of our longing for home.
The Brain Electric: The Dramatic High-Tech Race to Merge Minds and Machines
by Malcolm GayThe gripping and revelatory story of the dramatic race to merge the human brain with machinesLeading neuroscience researchers are racing to unlock the secrets of the mind. On the cusp of decoding brain signals that govern motor skills, they are developing miraculous technologies to enable paraplegics and wounded soldiers to move prosthetic limbs, and the rest of us to manipulate computers and other objects through thought alone. These fiercely competitive scientists are vying for Defense Department and venture capital funding, prestige, and great wealth. Part life-altering cure, part science fiction, part military dream, these cutting-edge brain-computer interfaces promise to improve lives—but also hold the potential to augment soldiers' combat capabilities. In The Brain Electric, Malcolm Gay follows the dramatic emergence of these technologies, taking us behind the scenes into the operating rooms, start-ups, and research labs where the future is unfolding. With access to many of the field's top scientists, Gay illuminates this extraordinary race—where science, medicine, profit, and war converge—for the first time. But this isn't just a story about technology. At the heart of this research is a group of brave, vulnerable patient-volunteers whose lives are given new meaning through participating in these experiments. The Brain Electric asks us to rethink our relationship to technology, our bodies, even consciousness itself—challenging our assumptions about what it means to be human.
The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game
by J. C. HallmanIn the tradition of The Professor and the Madman, Longitude, and The Orchid Thief, Hallman transforms an obsessive quest for obscure things into a compulsively readable and entertaining weaving of travelogue, journalism, and chess history. In the tiny Russian province of Kalmykia, obsession with chess has reached new heights. Its leader, a charismatic and eccentric millionaire/ex--car salesman named Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, is a former chess prodigy and the most recent president of FIDE, the world's controlling chess body. Despite credible allegations of his involvement in drug running, embezzlement, and murder, the impoverished Kalmykian people have rallied around their leader's obsession---chess is played on Kalmykian prime-time television and is compulsory in Kalmykian schools. In addition, Kalmyk women have been known to alter their traditional costumes of pillbox hats and satin gowns to include chessboard-patterned sashes.The Chess Artist is both an intellectual journey and first-rate travel writing dedicated to the love of chess and all of its related oddities, writer and chess enthusiast J. C. Hallman explores the obsessive hold chess exerts on its followers by examining the history and evolution of the game and the people who dedicate their lives to it. Together with his friend Glenn Umstead, an African-American chessmaster who is arguably as chess obsessed as Ilyumzhinov, Hallman tours New York City's legendary chess district, crashes a Princeton Math Department game party, challenges a convicted murderer to a chess match in prison, and travels to Kalmykia, where they are confronted with members of the Russian intelligence service, beautiful translators who may be spies, seven-year-old chess prodigies, and the sad blight of a land struggling toward capitalism.
The Little Flower of East Orange: A Play
by Stephen Adly GuirgisWhen Therese Marie arrives in the emergency room of a small hospital in the Bronx, suffering from hypothermia and in shock, no one there knows her story. To the doctors and nurses, she is just another abandoned elderly woman who can't even tell them her name. But Therese Marie's dementia is not all that it seems. And when her prodigal son, Danny, returns to New York, Therese Marie must fight to maintain her dignity in light of her son's insistence on confronting the ugly secrets of their past.In this unconventional family drama, Stephen Adly Guirgis gives us a mother and son who must face a long family legacy of abuse in order to find the true meaning of grace.
The Undercover Billionaire: A Billionaire SEAL Romance (The Tate Brothers #3)
by Jackie AshendenThe Tate Brothers were raised to protect what is theirs…Navy SEAL Wolf Tate is on a mission of vengeance. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to infiltrate the lair of his arms-dealing enemy—and rescue the mother he never knew. To do this, he’ll need more than his father’s fortunes or his brothers-in-arms.He must find a way to kidnap his enemy’s daughter for leverage. There’s just one problem: She is also one of Wolf’s closest friends—and the only woman he’s ever loved…For years, Olivia de Santis has been waiting for Wolf to take her in his arms and make her dreams come true. But she never imagined that he’d sneak into her bedroom one night…and take her as his hostage. Olivia knows she should resist him—and stay loyal to her own family. But how can she deny the burning justice of Wolf’s mission, and the blazing desire in his eyes—even if giving into the heat of the moment can put her in grave danger? Jackie Ashenden’s novels are:“Sexy, emotional.” —Laurelin Paige, New YorkTimes bestselling author“Tantalizing . . . explosive.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Mine to Take
The More They Disappear: A Novel
by Jesse Donaldson"The More They Disappear delivers everything a reader could want. On one hand a compelling literary thriller, on the other a deep and generous meditation on life in a small town torn by addiction, poverty, and corruption." --Philipp Meyer, author of The SonWhen long-serving Kentucky sheriff Lew Mattock is murdered by a confused, drug-addicted teenager, chief deputy Harlan Dupee is tasked with solving the crime. But as Harlan soon discovers, his former boss wasn't exactly innocent.The investigation throws Harlan headlong into the burgeoning OxyContin trade, from the slanted steps of trailer parks to the manicured porches of prominent citizens, from ATV trails and tobacco farms to riverboat casinos and country clubs.As the evidence draws him closer to an unlikely suspect, Harlan comes to question whether the law can even right a wrong during the corrupt and violent years that followed the release of OxyContin.The More They Disappear takes us to the front lines of the battle against small-town drug abuse in an unnerving tale of addiction, loss, and the battle to overcome the darkest parts of ourselves.
The Bicycle Runner: A Memoir of Love, Loyalty, and the Italian Resistance
by G. Franco RomagnoliG. Franco Romagnoli'sThe Bicycle Runner is an irresistible memoir of coming of age, friendship, love, and war during the perils of Fascist Italy.Like all boys growing up in Rome during the 1930s and 1940s, the author was expected to join the Balilla—Italy's fascist Youth Organization. With political divisions running deep in the families within his palazzo, he and his motley group of friends were recruited into the underground Resistance. Racing around Rome on bicycles, they smuggled messages and weapons for the partisans. Later, the author fled to the Italian countryside and narrowly avoided German mop-up operations—despite being sold out by his most trusted of friends. But this is much more than a war story. Lyrical in language, rich in sentimentality, and possessing the magic of a classic Fellini film, Romagnoli's memoir is a charmingly told tale of the search for manhood and the bonds of family and friendship.
Liberation Square: Inside the Egyptian Revolution and the Rebirth of a Nation
by Ashraf KhalilA definitive, absorbing account of the Egyptian revolution, written by a Cairo-based Egyptian-American reporter for Foreign Policy and The Times (London), who witnessed firsthand Mubarak's demise and the country's efforts to build a democracyIn early 2011, the world's attention was riveted on Cairo, where after three decades of supremacy, Hosni Mubarak was driven from power. It was a revolution as swift as it was explosive. For eighteen days, anger, defiance, and resurgent national pride reigned in the streets---protestors of all ages struck back against police and state security, united toward the common goal of liberation.But the revolution was more than a spontaneous uprising. It was the end result of years of mounting tension, brought on by a state that shamelessly abused its authority, rigging elections, silencing opposition, and violently attacking its citizens. When revolution bloomed in the region in January 2011, Egypt was a country whose patience had expired---with a people suddenly primed for liberation.As a journalist based in Cairo, Ashraf Khalil was an eyewitness to the perfect storm that brought down Mubarak and his regime. Khalil was subjected to tear gas alongside protestors in Tahrir Square, barely escaped an enraged mob, and witnessed the day-to-day developments from the frontlines. From the halls of power to the back alleys of Cairo, he offers a one-of-a-kind look at a nation in the throes of an uprising.Liberation Square is a revealing and dramatic look at the revolution that transformed the modern history of one of the world's oldest civilizations.
The Great Death
by John SmelcerThe Great Death arrived with the man from downriver, the one who came with the light-colored strangers and had little red spots covering his body. Thirteen-year-old Millie and her younger sister, Maura, are fascinated by the guests, but soon sickness takes over their village. As they watch the people they know and love die, the sisters remain unaffected and begin to realize that they will have to find a new home. Alone in the cold Alaskan winter of 1917, struggling to overcome the obstacles nature throws their way, the girls discover that their true strength lies in their love for each other. John Smelcer's spare and beautiful prose shapes the sisters' story with tenderness and skill, presenting a powerful tale of determination, survival, and family.
Accepting the Disaster: Poems
by Joshua MehiganOne of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014An astonishing new collection from one of our finest emerging poetsA shark's tooth, the shape-shifting cloud drifting from a smokestack, the smoke detectors that hang, ominous but disregarded, overhead—very little escapes the watchful eye of Joshua Mehigan. The poems in Accepting the Disaster range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication. Mehigan blends the naturalistic milieu of such great chroniclers of American life as Stephen Crane and Studs Terkel with the cinematic menace and wonder of Fritz Lang. Balanced by the music of his verse, this unusual combination brings an eerie resonance to the real lives and institutions it evokes. These poems capture with equal tact the sinister quiet of a deserted Main Street, the tragic grandiosity of Michael Jackson, the loneliness of a self-loathing professor, the din of a cement factory, and the saving grandeur of the natural world. This much-anticipated second collection is the work of a nearly unrivaled craftsman, whose first book was called by Poetry "a work of some poise and finish, by turns delicate and robust."
Hazy Bloom and the Pet Project (Hazy Bloom Ser. #2)
by Jennifer HamburgAfter wacky third grader Hazy Bloom starts seeing visions of things that will happen one day in the future, she hopes her "tomorrow power" will help her get the pet she's always dreamed of in this hilarious book by Jennifer Hamburg with illustrations by Jenn Harney. It's the annual Third Grade Leadership Challenge, where each third-grade class plans and hosts a fundraiser. Hazel "Hazy" Bloom, however, has other things on her mind—like proving to her parents she’s responsible enough to get a pet iguana. But when Hazy's "tomorrow power"—her ability to see visual clues about things that will happen one day in the future—mistakenly causes her to have a brilliant idea for a Pet Day fundraiser, her classmates put her in charge. Hazy's annoyed, until she realizes that if she helps the class win, her parents will finally see that she's responsible enough to get the iguana she's dreaming of. Soon, Hazy’s determined to make sure her team ends up on top—but it’s not so easy when her tomorrow visions keep throwing her plans into disarray!
Freedom to Die: People, Politics and the Right-to-Die Movement
by Derek Humphrey Mary ClementThe strength of the right-to-die movement was underscored as early as 1991, when Derek Humphry published Final Exit, the movement's call to arms that inspired literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who wished to understand the concepts of assisted suicide and the right to die with dignity. Now Humphry has joined forces with attorney Mary Clement to write Freedom to Die, which places this civil rights story within the framework of American social history. More than a chronology of the movement, this book explores the inner motivations of an entire society. Reaching back to the years just after World War II, Freedom to Die explores the roots of the movement and answers the question: Why now, at the end of the twentieth century, has the right-to-die movement become part of the mainstream debate? In a reasoned voice, which stands out dramatically amid the vituperative clamoring of the religious right, the authors examine the potential dangers of assisted suicide - suggesting ways to avert the negative consequences of legalization - even as they argue why it should be legalized.
Ladies of the Lake: A Novel
by Haywood SmithFrom Haywood Smith, the New York Times bestselling author of THE RED HAT CLUB novels comes a pitch perfect story of four sisters who are forced to come together after years of silenceSisters Dahlia, Iris, Violet, and Rose—all with grown children of their own—have a complicated relationship, so when their grandmother's will requires them to spend the whole summer—without friends or family—"camping in" at her run-down lodge on re mote Lake Clare in order to inherit the valuable land, old rivalries and new understanding emerge, with plenty of laughs along the way. Desperate to save her Buckhead home from foreclosure after being left in the lurch, recent divorcee Dahlia must complete the summer and sell her share immediately. Practical, even-tempered Violet will be no problem, but Iris has been Dahlia's nemesis since she learned to say, "no" to her big sister. And super-sweet, quirky Garage Sale Queen Rose is so "green" she'd test the patience of a saint. As tempers flare and old secrets are revealed, four grown women discover that the past is never truly buried, in Haywood Smith's Ladies of the Lake.
White Pine & Blue Water: A State of Maine Reader (City and Country Reader Series)
by Henry BestonHere is a volume that is true Maine--as eloquent of "downeast" as a bough of fir balsam, as the thunder of a wave of a rocky shore, as the lonely splendor of the northern lights in the sky behind Katahdin. In WHITE PINE AND BLUE WATER has been collected the best of three centuries of fact and fiction written about the wonderful country that is Maine.The recorded history of this northern land starts in the troubled era when the French and English battled each other and the Indians for sovereignty, told here in the words of early travelers, missionaries, soldiers. Then came the bloody days of revolution when Benedict Arnold marched on Quebec. The volume records the strange tale of two forgotten heroines, Maine women who accompanied their husbands on the trek through the Maine wilderness.As America grew, prosperity came to Maine through her ports. Her seafaring days are described by such authors as Rachael Field and Edwin Arlington Robinson, while 19th century men and women--Longfellow, Henry Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe and James Russell Lowell among others--relate their own experiences in the Maine of that era. The inland Maine of tall trees and great rivers comes to life in the words of writers such as Stewart Holbrook and Ben Ames Williams.In telling of the Maine of living memory Robert P. Tristram Coffin describes the ice trade on the Kennebec and Sarah Orne Jewett writes of an old seacoast mansion. F. Marion Crawford notes the entrance of the summer visitor at Bar Harbor in the eighteen nineties.The farmlands and farmers of Maine command the attention of Elizabeth Coatsworth, Gladys Hastings Carroll and E. B. White, while Ruth Moore tells of Maine fishermen and Louise Dickinson Rich describes that imposing man, the Maine guide.Henry Beston is a student of things American, a distinguished naturalist, and a Maine farmer. In preparing this volume he has been able to draw on a knowledge both of Maine literature and of the land itself. His wife is Elizabeth Coatsworth, the poet. Mr. Beston has written a number of books, including NORTHERN FARM, which state-of-Mainers put at the top of their own list.
Kangaroo
by Yuz AleshkovskyKangaroo is a savage, cleansing satire in which Yuz Aleshkovsky confronts the hypocrisy, the cruelty, and the tragic failure of the Soviet regime. His phantasmagoria is faithful to reality, for--as Dostoevsky knew--it is impossible for "realism" to portray a society whose corruption is literally fantastic.One morning in 1949, Fan Fanych, alias Etcetera, is summoned from his Moscow apartment to KGB headquarters, where he is informed that he will be charged with a crime more heinous than any mere man could ever devise. Comrade Etcetera will be tried for "the vicious rape and murder of an aged kangaroo in the Moscow Zoo on a night between July 14, 1789, and January 9, 1905."Every moment in the nightmarish and hilarious account that follows lives up to the absurdity of this accusation. A seductive KGB agent attempts to convince Fan Fanych that he is a kangaroo; he finds himself in the dock at a spectacular show trial; is sent to a camp full of dedicated old Bolsheviks pathetically attempting to maintain their beliefs in the face of every new atrocity; encounters Hitler in Berlin and Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, where he is privileged to witness the famous conference as it was really conducted.
Politicking: How to Get Elected, Take Action, and Make an Impact in Your Community
by Bill RauchHow to get elected--and live to tell the taleBill Rauch has lived an unusual political life: a decade as press secretary, advance man, and confidant to New York mayor Ed Koch, followed by a decade as city councilman and now as mayor of Beaufort, South Carolina.In this account of the ways and means of local politics, Rauch contends that a great city and an antebellum town pose the same challenge-that of blending blood sport and selfless public service day in and day out. How to get elected, run a meeting, work the room, and take credit when it is due; how to ward off threats from rivals and control the agenda; how to look good on camera, leak stories, and shape press coverage to your advantage: Rauch illustrates these crucial points of political life with vivid and often hilarious inside stories from his tenure in New York and in Beaufort. Politicking is a winning blend of political primer and personal chronicle; more than that, it is an unusually candid account of how the political game is played-and won-in America today.