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Divisadero
by Michael Ondaatje
The spellbinding new novel from Michael Ondaatje—his first in six years. It begins in the 1970s in Northern California. A man and his teenage daughters—Anna and Claire—work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence-of both hand and heart-that "sets fire to the rest of their lives." Anna will come to rest amid the sensuous and calming landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies-a story that circles around the "raw truth" of her own life, the one she's left behind but can never truly leave. And while Anna's story lies at the heart of the novel, the narrative sweeps across the terrain of the lives of Coop and Claire as well, each of them managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. Divisadero is a novel about possession and loss, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. Written in the breathtaking prose for which his fiction is celebrated, it gives us Michael Ondaatje at the height of his artistic powers. |
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon rocked readers across the world with the imaginative acrobatics of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Now, four years later, he follows up that triumph with an even more audacious invention -- a psychological thriller that is also a monumental novel of love and faith , boasting the same compassion, wit, and warmth that have garnered him such passionate fans. It is the year 2000, but the world is not as we now know it. Israel does not exist, and Alaska is not—quite—Alaska; a ravelled strip of it serves instead of the former Palestine as the comically unlikely new homeland for Jews following the ravages of WWII. Orthodox sects clad in breeches, stockings, and furred hats battle it out on the snowbound streets of frontier towns for control of a brisk black market trade in drugs and guns. Amidst the madness, the perennially world-weary and cynical Meyer -- once an upstanding member of the Yiddish Policeman's Union, now more the slouching, shambling, half-drunk variety -- attempts to puzzle his way through a murky mystery set off by the discovery of a skull that purports to be Native American. In fact, it appears to be Tlingit, the very tribe pitted against the Jews in an eternal struggle for territorial rights. His ridiculous plight is made worse by the fact that his ex-wife, the flame-haired and fiery-tempered Bina (with whom he is, of course, still in love), has been rotated from her uttermost northerly posting to resume her job as Chief Medical Examiner. She whisks the skull from his hands quicker than he can say "divorce decree." Shemets, his half-Tlingit/half-Jewish partner, a walrus-like figure clad in impeccable Italian suiting, is the only presence who can maintain a semblance of calm as Meyer and the skeptical Bina find an eerie threat circling ever closer to what he calls home. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon offers a loving tribute to the hard-boiled world of Hollywood noir—from The Big Sleep to Chinatown—even as he engages with vital questions of identity, faith, and the simple but profound subject of love. It is a masterful work that will continue to broaden his enormous readership.
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God is Not Great
by Christopher Hitchens
In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.
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Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
From the master of literary reportage whose acclaimed books include Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and The Shadow of the Sun, an intimate account of his first youthful forays beyond the Iron Curtain. Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his editor that he'd like to go abroad. Dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia, the young reporter found himself sent to India. Wide-eyed and captivated, he would discover in those days his life's work—to understand and describe the world in its remotest reaches, in all its multiplicity. From the rituals of sunrise at Persepolis to the incongruity of Louis Armstrong performing before a stone-faced crowd in Khartoum, Kapuscinski gives us the non-Western world as he first saw it, through still-virginal Western eyes. The companion on his travels: a volume of Herodotus, a gift from his first boss. Whether in China, Poland, Iran, or the Congo, it was the "father of history"—and, as Kapuscinski would realize, of globalism—who helped the young correspondent to make sense of events, to find the story where it did not obviously exist. It is this great forerunner's spirit—both supremely worldly and innately Occidental—that would continue to whet Kapuscinski's ravenous appetite for discovering the broader world and that has made him our own indispensable companion on any leg of that perpetual journey.
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North River
by Pete Hamill
The North River is what real New Yorkers call the Hudson. Two blocks from its shore, Dr. James Finbar Delaney lives on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. He is a GP, servicing the indigent poor. A wounded veteran of World War I, he is despondent that his wife, Molly, has deserted him and that his only child, Grace, has left her son, two-year-old Carlito, in his care. In the dead of winter in the Depression year of 1934, Dr. Delaney knows the cause of death was always life. Delaney is numb from the war and the abandonment of his family. When he saves the life of gangster friend Eddie Corso, Italian hood Frankie Botts is not happy. Delaney can feel the threat to him and his grandson in his bones. To further complicate matters, the FBI shows up looking for Grace. If there's any consolation for Delaney in the chaos that has become his life, it's Carlito and Rose, his Sicilian illegal alien housekeeper, who has become little Carlito's surrogate mother ?and Delaney's lover. Soon the North River comes to symbolize Delaney's tormented life, as enemies and loved ones float in it, and Grace, on a liner, returns to New York to further complicate Delaney's new, delicate household. Hamill (Forever; A Drinking Life) has crafted a beautiful novel, rich in New York City detail and ambience, that showcases the power of human goodness and how love, in its many forms, can prevail in an unfair world. (PW Review)
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Mere Anarchy
by Woody Allen
Here, in his first collection since his three hilarious classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, Woody Allen has managed to write a book that not only answers the most profound questions of human existence but is the perfect size to place under any short table leg to prevent wobbling. "I awoke Friday, and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe," he explains in a piece on physics called "Strung Out." In other flights of inspirational sanity we are introduced to a cast of characters only Allen could imagine: Jasper Nutmeat, Flanders Mealworm, and the independent film mogul E. Coli Biggs, just to name a few. Whether he is writing about art, sex, food, or crime ("Pugh has been a policeman as far back as he can remember. His father was a notorious bank robber, and the only way Pugh could get to spend time with him was to apprehend him") he is explosively funny. In "This Nib for Hire," a Hollywood bigwig comes across an author's book in a little country store and describes it in a way that aptly captures this magnificent volume: "Actually," the producer says, "I'd never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before."
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Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
by Mike Davis
On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York's Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda's prototype the car bomb has evolved into a "poor man's air force," a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City. In this gripping and disturbing history, Mike Davis traces its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with "rings of steel" against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.
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Testimony: France in the Twenty-First Century
by Nicolas Sarkozy
"This book presents my analysis of the difficulties France faces. It outlines my proposals for putting France back on the path toward economic growth, social justice, and modernity. And it addresses many of the common domestic, international, economic, and social challenges that advanced democracies like France and the United States must confront." So writes Nicolas Sarkozy—France's outspoken and controversial minister of the interior and a leading presidential candidate —in the new preface to the American edition of his best-selling memoir. He analyzes the difficulties facing France—social tensions, inadequate education, high unemployment. But far from drawing fatalistic conclusions, he demonstrates that France does not suffer from an identity crisis but from a crisis of political debate. He accuses French political figures, sometimes harshly, of having deprived the public of their own say in government, leading to pervasive suspicion of elites, the state, and proper governance. This book is a testimony to how Nicolas Sarkozy has evolved over the past twenty years as the only French political figure across the entire spectrum to broaden public debate, to confront idées reçues, to seek a new direction for France—in short to re-empower the French in their own political deliberations. In Testimony, for which he has drawn fire, Sarkozy issues a wake-up call to his people and the world, setting forth his iconoclastic views on such hot-button issues as international relations vis-à-vis the United States, the Arab world, and Africa; globalization; cultural chauvinism; immigration; the welfare state; education; and law and order. Extraordinary for its candor regarding Sarkozy's political as well as personal life, Testimony gives us an unsparing critique of contemporary French society and its leaders even as it champions a sharp break with the past. Sarkozy's is a brave, new vision for France as it engages the world of the twenty-first century.
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Peeling the Onion
by Gunter Grass
In this memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous. Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, Peeling the Onion—which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany—reveals Grass at his most intimate.
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To the Castle and Back
by Vaclav Havel
As writer, dissident, and statesman, Václav Havel played an essential part in the profound changes that occurred in Central Europe during the last decades of the twentieth century, and became a powerful intellectual and political force for the reestablishment of democratic principles and institutions. Now, in this intimate, illuminating memoir, he recollects the pivotal experiences and ideas of his remarkable life. Known in his native Prague for his theatrical productions, and imprisoned for his anticommunist views, Havel emerged on the international stage in 1989 as the elected president of Czechoslovakia, and, in 1993, as president of the newly formed Czech Republic. He writes with eloquence and candor about his transition from playwright to politician, and the surreal challenges of governing a young democracy. But the scope of his writing extends far beyond the circumstances he faced in his own country. He shares his thoughts on the future of the EU, the reach of the American superpower, and the role of national identity in today's world. He explains why he has come to believe the war in Iraq is a fiasco, and he discusses the reverberations from his initial support of the invasion. This is also a personal book, in which he writes for the first time about his battle with lung cancer, the death of his first wife, Olga, and the controversy that has dogged his relationship with his second wife, the Czech actress Dagmar Vesakrnová. And, finally, it is a meditation on mortality and on the difficulties of writing itself. Infused with characteristic wit and well-honed irony, To the Castle and Back is a revelation of one of the most important figures of our time.
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Hardcover Book Archives
May 2007
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