"What Bodanis does brilliantly is to give us a feel for Einstein as a person. I don't think I've ever read a book that does this as well . . . Whenever there's a chance for storytelling, Bodanis triumphs." --Popular Science "Fascinating." --Forbes Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life, he was ignored by most working scientists, and his ideas were opposed by even his closest friends. How did this happen? Best-selling biographer David Bodanis traces the arc of Einstein's life--from the skeptical, erratic student to the world's most brilliant physicist to the fallen-from-grace celebrity. An intimate biography in which "theories of the universe morph into theories of life" (Times, London), Einstein's Greatest Mistake reveals what we owe Einstein today--and how much more he might have achieved if not for his all-too-human flaws.
National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop is "a marvelously piercing fiction" (Times Literary Supplement), short-listed for the Booker Prize.With an Introduction by David Nicholls, international best-selling author of One Day. In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop?the only bookshop?in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.Basis for the major motion picture starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, and Patricia Clarkson.
"Propulsive . . . Not only is the book difficult to put down, it's also an adroit exploration of the ethical quandaries of true crime storytelling, particularly in podcasts."-New York Times Book Review Elle Castillo once trained as a social worker, supporting young victims of violent crime. Now she hosts a popular true crime podcast that focuses on cold cases of missing and abducted children. After four seasons of successfully solving these cases in Minnesota's Twin Cities, Elle decides to tackle her white whale: The Countdown Killer. Twenty years ago, TCK was terrorizing the community, kidnapping and ritualistically murdering three girls over seven days, each a year younger than the last. Then, after he took his eleven-year-old victim, the pattern-and the murders-abruptly stopped. No one has ever known why. When Elle follows up on a listener tip only to discover the man's dead body, she feels at fault. Then, within days, a child is abducted-a young girl who seems to fit suspiciously into the TCK sequence halted decades before. While media and law enforcement long ago concluded that TCK had died by suicide, Elle has never believed TCK was dead. She had hoped her investigation would lay that suspicion to rest, but her podcast seems instead to be inciting new victims. "A masterful, heart-pounding suspense that ushers in an astonishing new voice in crime fiction." -Samantha M. Bailey, internationally best-selling author of Woman on the Edge "A tale of obsession, dark histories, and one woman's quest to bring a terrifying killer to justice, Girl, 11 is delivered with poise, style, and cunning-making it impossible to put down." -Alex Segura, acclaimed author of Miami Midnight and Blackout
A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich" (Washington Post). The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers. In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth?the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs?ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin?administered by his personal doctor. Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows. "Delightfully nuts."?The New Yorker
An ?electrifying? biography of Walter White, a little-remembered Black civil rights leader who passed for white in order to investigate racist murders, help put the NAACP on the map, and change the racial identity of America forever (Chicago Review of Books).Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to ?pass? for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the civil rights movement.White's risky career led him to lead a double life. He was simultaneously a second-class citizen subject to Jim Crow laws at home and a widely respected professional with full access to the white world at work. His life was fraught with internal and external conflict?much like the story of race in America. Starting out as an obscure activist, White ultimately became Black America's most prominent leader, during his time. A character study of White's life and career with all these complexities has never been rendered, until now.By the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental President, Dewey Defeats Truman, and The Arsenal of Democracy, White Lies uncovers the life of a civil rights leader unlike any other.
The story of the fascinating, fraught alliance among Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Maria Weston Chapman?and how its breakup led to the success of America's most important social movement.?Fresh, provocative and engrossing.? ?New York TimesIn the crucial early years of the Abolition movement, the Boston branch of the cause seized upon the star power of the eloquent ex-slave Frederick Douglass to make its case for slaves' freedom. Journalist William Lloyd Garrison promoted emancipation while Garrison loyalist Maria Weston Chapman, known as ?the Contessa,? raised money and managed Douglass's speaking tour from her Boston townhouse.Conventional histories have seen Douglass's departure for the New York wing of the Abolition party as a result of a rift between Douglass and Garrison. But, as acclaimed historian Linda Hirshman reveals, this completely misses the woman in power. Weston Chapman wrote cutting letters to Douglass, doubting his loyalty; the Bostonian abolitionists were shot through with racist prejudice, even aiming the N-word at Douglass among themselves. Through incisive, original analysis, Hirshman convinces that the inevitable breakup was in fact a successful failure. Eventually, as the most sought-after Black activist in America, Douglass was able to dangle the prize of his endorsement over the Republican Party's candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln. Two years later the abolition of slavery?if not the abolition of racism?became immutable law.
The chilling debut mystery in the Brighton Mysteries series from Edgar Allen Poe Award-winner Elly Griffiths--author of the Ruth Galloway Mysteries--about a band of magicians who served together in World War II tracking a killer who's performing their deadly tricks."Captivating."--Wall Street Journal "An absorbing read, the debut of another great series."--San Jose Mercury News "A labyrinthine plot, a splendid reveal, and superb evocation of the wafer-thin veneer of glamour at the bottom end of showbusiness . . . Thoroughly enjoyable." --Guardian Brighton, 1950. A girl is found cut into three sections, and Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick--the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, served with Edgar in a special ops group called the Magic Men that used stage illusions to confound the enemy. Max still performs, touring with ventriloquists, sword-swallowers, and dancing girls.When Edgar asks for his help with the case, Max tells him to identify the victim, for it takes a special sidekick to do the Zig Zag Girl. Those words haunt Max when he learns the victim was a favorite former assistant of his own. And when Edgar receives a letter warning of another "trick" on the way, he realizes that it is the Magic Men themselves who are in the killer's sights. "Enormously engaging . . . Griffiths's plot is satisfyingly serpentine."--Daily Mail "Readers will finish looking forward to the next trick up [Griffiths's] sleeve."--Mystery Scene
A new novel by PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi??if you don't know this name yet, you should? (Entertainment Weekly)?about a young woman caught in an affair with a much older man, a personal and political exploration of desire, power, and human connection. It's summer when Arezu, an Iranian American teenager, goes to Spain to meet her estranged father at an apartment he owns there. He never shows up, instead sending her a weekly allowance, care of his step-nephew, Omar, a forty-year-old Lebanese man. As the weeks progress, Arezu is drawn into a mercurial, charged, and ultimately catastrophic affair with Omar, a relationship that shatters her just at the cusp of adulthood. Two decades later, Arezu inherits the apartment. She returns with her best friend, Ellie, an Israeli-American scholar devoted to the Palestinian cause, to excavate the place and finally put to words a trauma she's long held in silence. Together, she and Ellie catalog the questions of agency, sexuality, displacement, and erasure that surface as Arezu confronts the ghosts of that summer, crafting between them a story that spans continents and centuries.Equal parts Marguerite Duras and Shirley Jackson, Rachel Cusk and Clarice Lispector, Savage Tongues is a compulsive, unsettling, and bravely observed exploration of violence and eroticism, haunting and healing, the profound intimacy born of the deepest pain, and the life-long search for healing.
"Contemporary female friendship goes glam in this lively debut novel with remarkable depth." -- Washington Post"Great fun and extremely smart." -- npr.orgNAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY Vogue * Marie Claire * Glamour * Essence * Oprah Daily * Entertainment Weekly * Bustle * PopSugar * CrimeReads * and more! An incisive and exhilarating debut novel following three Anglo-Nigerian best friends and the lethally glamorous fourth woman who infiltrates their group?the most unforgettable girls since Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.Ronke wants happily ever after and 2.2. kids. She's dating Kayode and wants him to be ?the one? (perfect, like her dead father). Her friends think he's just another in a long line of dodgy Nigerian boyfriends.Boo has everything Ronke wants?a kind husband, gorgeous child. But she's frustrated, unfulfilled, plagued by guilt, and desperate to remember who she used to be.Simi is the golden one with the perfect lifestyle. No one knows she's crippled by impostor syndrome and tempted to pack it all in each time her boss mentions her ?urban vibe.? Her husband thinks they're trying for a baby. She's not.When the high-flying, charismatic Isobel explodes into the group, it seems at first she's bringing out the best in each woman. (She gets Simi an interview in Shanghai! Goes jogging with Boo!) But the more Isobel intervenes, the more chaos she sows, and Ronke, Simi, and Boo's close friendship begins to crack.A sharp, modern take on friendship, ambition, culture, and betrayal, Wahala (trouble) is an unforgettable novel from a brilliant new voice.
From the fearless defense attorney and civil rights lawyer who rose to fame with Netflix's The Staircase comes a ?bracing account of abuses of power and corruption in the criminal justice system.? (The Guardian)?A fine companion to Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy and Emily Bazelon's Charged. A stellar?and often shocking?report on a broken criminal justice system.? ?Kirkus Reviews (starred review)In the past thirty years alone, more than 2,800 innocent American prisoners?their combined sentences surpassing 25,000 years?have been exonerated and freed after being condemned for crimes they did not commit. Terrifyingly, this number represents only a fraction of the actual number of persons wrongfully accused and convicted over the same period. Renowned criminal defense and civil rights attorney David Rudolf has spent decades defending the wrongfully accused. In American Injustice, he draws from his years of experience in the American criminal legal system to shed light on the misconduct that exists at all levels of law enforcement and the tragic consequences that follow in its wake. Tracing these themes through the lens of some of his most important cases?including new details from the Michael Peterson trial made famous in The Staircase?Rudolf takes the reader inside crime scenes to examine forensic evidence left by perpetrators; revisits unsolved murders to detail how and why the true culprits were never prosecuted; reveals how confirmation bias leads police and prosecutors to employ tactics that make wrongful arrests and prosecutions more likely; and exposes how poverty and racism fundamentally distort the system.In American Injustice, Rudolf gives a voice to those who have been the victim of wrongful accusations and shows in the starkest terms the human impact of legal wrongdoing. Effortlessly blending gripping true-crime reporting and searing observations on civil rights in America, American Injustice takes readers behind the scenes of a justice system in desperate need of reform.
Glamour, danger, liberation: in a Mad Men era of commercial flight, Pan Am World Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted upRequired to have a college degree, speak two languages, and possess the political savvy of a Foreign Service officer, a jet-age stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 1966 and 1975 also had to be between 5′3″ and 5′9", between 105 and 140 pounds, and under twenty-six years old at the time of hire. Cooke's intimate storytelling weaves together the real-life stories of a memorable cast of characters, from small-town girl Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few Black stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of their new jet-set life.Cooke brings to light the story of Pan Am stewardesses' role in the Vietnam War, as the airline added runs from Saigon to Hong Kong for planeloads of weary young soldiers straight from the battlefields who were off for five days of R&R, and then flown back to war. Finally, with Operation Babylift-the dramatic evacuation of two thousand children during the fall of Saigon-the book's special cast of stewardesses unites to play an extraordinary role on the world stage.
?Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.? ? Tayari Jones, New York Times Book ReviewFrom the author of the bestselling novel The Street, comes a powerful collection of stories that captures a remarkably diverse panorama of African American experience in the 1950s and 1960s.A small-town pharmacist's decision to take a day off leads his wife to an agonizing encounter with the police. A retired Black college professor teaching at a predominately white high school is kidnapped and forced to witness an unthinkable horror. A young Black girl watches her aunt's suitors threaten her family's wellbeing, with repercussions that reverberate for decades. Ann Petry wrote these and the other extraordinary stories in this collection over half a century ago, but the problems they interrogate still exist today, incisively uncovering the consequences of America's pervasive racism, while telling timeless stories of everyday lives, of aspiration, frustration, and love. Miss Muriel and Other Stories is ?a delicate, unflinching probe into African-American existence? (Boston Globe) from one of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry's stories are ?a delicate, unflinching probe into African-American existence? (Boston Globe) and an assertion of her status as one of the most gifted writers of the twentieth century. ?I've recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it's that exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime writers for the first time.? ?Brandon Tyler
The fifth book in the Magic Men series, Now You See Them is a wild mystery with detective Edgar Stephens and the magician Max Mephisto, as they investigate a string of presumed kidnappings in the swinging 1960s. The new decade is going well for Edgar Stephens and his good friend the magician Max Mephisto. Edgar is happily married, with children, and promoted to Superintendent. Max has found fame and stardom in America, though is now back in England for a funeral, and a prospective movie job. Edgar's new wife, though--former detective Emma--is restless and frustrated at home, knowing she was the best detective on the team. But when an investigation into a string of disappearing girls begins, Emma sees her chance to get back in the action. She begins her own hunt, determined to prove, once and for all that she's better than the boys. Though she's not the only one working toward that goal--there's a new woman on the force, and she's determined to make detective. When two more girls go missing, both with ties to the group, the stakes climb ever higher, and Max finds himself drawn into his own search. Who will find the girls first? And will they get there in time?
A brilliant blend of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Orchid Thief, Earl Swift's wise, funny, and captivating Auto Biography follows an outlaw auto dealer as he struggles to save a rusted '57 Chevy--a car that has already passed through twelve pairs of hands before his--while financial ruin, government bureaucrats and the FBI close in on him.Slumped among hundreds of other decrepit hulks on a treeless, windswept moor in eastern North Carolina, the Chevy evokes none of the Jet Age mystique that made it the most beloved car to ever roll off an assembly line. It's open to the rain. Birds nest in its seats. Officials of the surrounding county consider it junk.To Tommy Arney, it's anything but: It's a fossil of the twentieth-century American experience, of a place and a people utterly devoted to the automobile and changed by it in myriad ways. It's a piece of history--especially so because its flaking skin conceals a rare asset: a complete provenance, stretching back more than fifty years.So, hassled by a growing assortment of challengers, the Chevy's thirteenth owner--an orphan, grade-school dropout and rounder, a felon arrested seventy-odd times, and a man who's been written off as a ruin himself--embarks on a mission to save the car and preserve long record of human experience it carries in its steel and upholstery.Written for both gearheads and Sunday drivers, Auto Biography charts the shifting nature of the American Dream and our strange and abiding relationship with the automobile, through an iconic classic and an improbable, unforgettable hero.
"Another great series." -- San Jose Mercury News "A dazzlingly tricky mystery." -- Kirkus Reviews "A tremendous skein of red herrings, sharp and thorough police work, [and] mysterious connections." -- Bookgasm It's Christmastime in Brighton, and the city is abuzz about magician Max Mephisto's star turn in Aladdin. But the holiday cheer is lost on DI Edgar Stephens. He's investigating the murder of two children, Annie and Mark, who were found in the woods alongside a trail of candy--a horrifying scene eerily reminiscent of "Hansel and Gretel." Edgar has plenty of leads. Annie, a dark child, wrote gruesome plays based on the Grimms' fairy tales. Does the key to the case lie in her final script? Or does the macabre staging of the bodies point to the theater and the capricious cast of Aladdin? Edgar enlists Max's help in penetrating the shadowy world of the theater. But is this all just classic misdirection? "Excellent . . . Evoking both the St. Mary Mead of Agatha Christie and the theater world of Ngaio Marsh." -- Booklist
?Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.? ? Tayari Jones, New York Times Book ReviewFrom the author of the bestselling novel The Street, Ann Petry's classic 1947 novel portrays a small, sleepy New England town grappling with the indignities and lies of American life.Johnnie Roane has come home from four years of fighting in World War II to his loving parents and his beautiful wife, Gloria. But his first doubts of Gloria's infidelity are created on the way home by the local taxi driver, a passionate gossip, and these doubts which mature with the hurricane that is bearing down on them darkening the seemingly perfect town of Lennox, Connecticut. But a greater violence lurks beneath the surface of the storm...Country Place is a classic, page-turning story that masterfully captures the transformation of small-town life in America from one of the twentieth century's finest writers.?I've recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it's that exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime writers for the first time.? ?Brandon Tyler
?Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.? ? Tayari Jones, New York Times Book ReviewFrom author of the bestselling novel The Street, a ?masterpiece of social realism? (Wall Street Journal) about a tragic love affair, and a powerful look into how class, race, and love intersected in midcentury America.With a new introduction by Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie.?The Narrows deftly explores what it means to have an interior life under the unrelenting gaze of whiteness...it is a master class in using descriptions of place and space to explore the realities of race, gender, class and psychology.??Kaitlyn Greenidge, from her introductionIt's Saturday, past midnight, and thick fog rolls in from the river like smoke. Link Williams is standing on the dock when he hears quick footsteps approaching, and the gasp of a woman too terrified to scream. After chasing off her pursuer, he takes the woman to a nearby bar to calm her nerves, and as they enter, it's as if the oxygen has left the room: they, and the other patrons, see in the dim light that he's Black and she's white.Link is a brilliant Dartmouth graduate, former athlete and soldier who, because of the lack of opportunities available to him, tends bar; Camilo is a wealthy married woman dissatisfied with and bored of her life of privilege. Thrown together by a chance encounter, both Link and Camilo secretly cross the town's racial divide, defying the social prejudices of their times.In this stunning and heartbreaking story, Petry illuminates the harsh realities of race and class through two doomed lovers. This profound, necessary novel stakes Petry's place as an indelible writer of American literature. ?I've recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it's that exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime writers for the first time.? ?Brandon Tyler
International Bestseller Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel "This lively whodunit keeps you guessing until the end." -People Death lies between the lines when the events of a dark story start coming true in this haunting modern Gothic mystery, perfect for fans of Magpie Murders and The Lake House. Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. A high school teacher specializing in the Gothic writer R. M. Holland, she even teaches a course on him. But when one of Clare's colleagues is found dead, with a line from Holland's iconic story "The Stranger" left by her body, Clare is horrified to see her life collide with her favorite literature. The police suspect the killer is someone Clare knows. Unsure whom to trust, she turns to her diary, the only outlet for her suspicions and fears. Then one day she notices something odd. Writing that isn't hers, left on the page of an old diary:Hallo Clare. You don't know me. Clare becomes more certain than ever: "The Stranger" has come to terrifying life. But can the ending be rewritten in time?
A piercing howl of a novel about one young woman's endless quest for an apartment of her own and the aspirations and challenges faced by the millennial generation as it finds its footing in the world, from a shockingly talented debut author "A woman must have money and a room of her own." So said Virginia Woolf in her classic A Room of One's Own, but in this scrupulously observed, gorgeously wrought, debut novel, Jo Hamya pushes that adage powerfully into the twenty-first century, to a generation of people living in rented rooms. What a woman needs now is an apartment of her own, the ultimate mark of financial stability, unattainable for many. Set over the course of one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she's working as a research assistant; to a stranger's sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she's been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she'll ever be able to afford to do so.
"Informative and entertaining...Rogers is a seasoned raconteur, unreeling an eons-spanning tale with skill." ?Wall Street JournalA lively account of our age-old quest for brighter colors, which changed the way we see the world, with a new afterword by the author From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven't always matched nature's kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that's allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world.In Full Spectrum, Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that's rewriting the rules of color forever. In prose as vibrant as its subject, Rogers opens the door to Oz, sharing the liveliest events of an expansive human quest?to make a brighter, more beautiful world?and along the way, proving why he's ?one of the best science writers around.?* *National Geographic
A character so outrageous he could only have come from the ingenious imagination of Elmore Leonard, lewd, lecherous, law-bending Florida jurist Judge Robert "Maximum Bob" Gibbs has been judged guilty by a grudge-bearing malefactor and sentenced to death--by alligator, if necessary. Maximum Bob is a delightfully dark classic thriller from "the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever" (New York Times Book Review), and any reader who loved getting gleefully lost in criminal mayhem of Get Shorty, Rum Punch, Out of Sight, The Hot Kid, or any number of the inimitable Leonard's numerous crime fiction masterworks will get maximum enjoyment out of this one.
"Road Dogs is terrific, and Elmore Leonard is in a class of one."--Dennis Lehane, author of Shutter Island and Mystic River "You know from the first sentence that you're in the hands of the original Daddy Cool....This one'll kill you."--Stephen King Elmore Leonard is eternal. In Road Dogs, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award winner and "America's greatest crime master" (Newsweek) brings back three of his favorite characters--Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Cundo Rey from La Brava, and Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap--for a twisting, explosive, always surprising masterwork of crime fiction the San Francisco Chronicle calls, "a sly, violent, funny and superbly written story of friendship, greed, and betrayal."
Loosely based on Porter Shreve's own childhood, When the White House Was Ours is the atmospheric and captivating story of a family's struggle to stay together against great odds. It's 1976, and while the country prepares to celebrate the bicentennial, Daniel Truitt's family is falling apart. His father, Pete, has been fired from yet another teaching job, and his mother, Valerie, is one step away from leaving for good. But when Pete lucks into a crumbling mansion in the nation's capital, he makes a bold plan to start a school under his own roof where students and teachers will be equals. Replete with the wry humor, human insight, and cultural resonance that characterizes Shreve's critically acclaimed fiction, When the White House Was Ours will be a joy to anyone whose family has lived through an idealistic time and ended up in an era of compromise.
"The clarity and compassion of [Saramago's] vision make Seeing worthy of its name." --Washington Post ¿"I have never read a novel that gets so many details of the political behavior that we for some reason insist on calling 'organized' so hilariously and grimly right." --Chicago Tribune On election day in the capital, it is raining so hard that no one has bothered to come out to vote. The politicians are growing jittery. Should they reschedule the elections for another day? Around three o'clock, the rain finally stops. Promptly at four, voters rush to the polling stations, as if they had been ordered to appear.But when the ballots are counted, more than 70 percent are blank. The citizens are rebellious. A state of emergency is declared. But are the authorities acting too precipitously? Or even blindly? The word evokes terrible memories of the plague of blindness that hit the city four years before, and of the one woman who kept her sight. Could she be behind the blank ballots? A police superintendent is put on the case.What begins as a satire on governments and the sometimes dubious efficacy of the democratic system turns into something far more sinister.
A candid memoir of love, art, and grief from a celebrated man of letters, United States poet laureate Donald HallIn an intimate record of his twenty-three-year marriage to poet Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall recounts the rich pleasures and the unforeseen trials of their shared life. The couple made a home at their New England farmhouse, where they rejoiced in rituals of writing, gardening, caring for pets, and connecting with their rural community through friends and church. The Best Day the Worst Day presents a portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Between recollections of better times, Hall shares with readers the daily ordeal of Jane's dying through heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring storytelling.
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