Readers' Advisory

The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
by Jack E. Davis (2017)

A comprehensive history of the Gulf of Mexico and its identity as a region marked by hurricanes, oil fields and debates about population growth and the environment demonstrates how its picturesque ecosystems have inspired and reflected key historical events.

Readers' Advisory

Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World
by Abigail Tucker (2016)

 

The intriguing history of how house cats found their way onto our hearths and into our hearts.In her debut, Smithsonian correspondent Tucker takes readers back into prehistory to examine the qualities of such killer cats as saber-tooth tigers and their ilk. Today, big cats are rapidly vanishing, but domesticated cats are thriving. By some estimates, in the United States alone, the tally of pet cats is approaching 100 million. Tucker, a devoted cat lover and owner, brings dozens of points of view about cats through her interviews with archaeologists, veterinarians, biologists, animal ecologists, and research scientists; her time spent observing cat fanciers at pet shows; and her encounters with wildlife refuge managers, animal rights activists, and cat breeders. Cat lovers may be dismayed to learn some of the negatives the author reveals—e.g., the link between cats and serious mental and physical conditions, the threat they pose to birds and other endangered animal populations—and cat owners may be alarmed to read of the vicious behavior of some ordinary house cats. Tucker relates one incident in which cat owners barricaded themselves inside their bedroom and called 911 to be rescued from their fierce little pet. The author also reports the work of hybrid breeders, who are producing some very strange-looking animals. Illustrations would have enhanced this lively and informative book, but readers curious to know what the rare Lykoi, also known as the werewolf cat, looks like can find ample photographs online. As many readers already know, cat videos have taken over the internet, and Tucker explores this phenomenon, visiting such current stars as Lil Bub. Read this entertaining book and you will be convinced that house cats are "the most transformative invaders the world has ever seen"—except for humans, of course. (Kirkus).

                              

Readers' Advisory

Heaven's Ditch: God, Gold and Murder on the Erie Canal
By Jack Kelly (2016)

The technological marvel of its age, the Erie Canal grew out of a sudden fit of inspiration. Proponents didn't just dream; they built a 360-mile waterway entirely by hand and largely through wilderness. As excitement crackled down its length, the canal became the scene of the most striking outburst of imagination in American history. Zealots invented new religions and new modes of living. The Erie Canal made New York the financial capital of America and brought the modern world crashing into the frontier. Men and women saw God face to face, gained and lost fortunes, and reveled in a period of intense spiritual creativity.

Heaven's Ditch illuminates the spiritual and political upheavals along this "psychic highway" from its opening in 1825 through 1844. "Wage slave" Sam Patch became America's first celebrity daredevil. William Miller envisioned the apocalypse. Farm boy Joseph Smith gave birth to Mormonism, a new and distinctly American religion. Along the way, the reader encounters America's very first "crime of the century," a treasure hunt, searing acts of violence, a visionary cross-dresser, and a panoply of fanatics, mystics, and hoaxers.

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Elie Wiesel

Author

1928-2016

Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania, on September 30, 1928. The third of four children and the only son, Wiesel was educated in sacred Jewish texts. When he was 15, Wiesel was taken off with his family to the concentration camps at Birkenau and Auschwitz, where he remained until January 1945 when, along with thousands of other Jewish prisoners, he was moved to Buchenwald in a forced death march. Buchenwald was liberated on April 11, 1945, by the United States army, but neither Wiesel's parents nor his younger sister survived. After the war Wiesel went to France where he completed secondary school, studied at the Sorbonne, and began working as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper. In 1956 he moved to New York to cover the United Nations and became a U.S. citizen in 1963. He was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Boston University in the mid-1980s.
Wiesel's writings bear witness to his year-long ordeal and to the Jewish tragedy. In 1956 Wiesel's first book, a Yiddish memoir titled And the World Was Silent, was published in Argentina. Two years later a much abbreviated version of the work was published in France as La Nuit. After the 1960 English language publication of Night, Wiesel wrote more than 40 books: novels, collections of short stories and essays, plays, and a cantata. His works established him as the most widely known and admired Holocaust writer. Wiesel received many honors including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
(Source: Encyclopedia of World Biography, December 12, 1998).



Click for books by and about Elie Wiesel.

Readers' Advisory

The Cracked Spine
Paige Shelton (2016)

In need of a good adventure, Delaney Nichols takes the leap and moves to Edinburgh, Scotland to start a job at The Cracked Spine. She doesn't know much about what she's gotten herself into, other than that the work sounds exciting, and that her new boss, Edwin MacAlister, has given her the opportunity of a lifetime. Edwin has promised that she'll be working with "a desk that has seen the likes of kings and queens, paupers and princes," and Delaney can't wait to get started.


When she arrives, she meets her new Scottish family; also working at the Cracked Spine are Rosie, perpetually wrapped in scarves, and who always has tiny dog Hector in tow; Hamlet, a nineteen-year-old thespian with a colored past and bright future; and Edwin, who is just as enigmatic and mysterious as Delaney expected. An unexpected bonus is Tom the bartender from across the street, with his piercing eyes, and a rolling brogue -- and it doesn't hurt that he looks awfully good in a kilt.


But before she can settle into her new life, a precious artifact -- a previously undiscovered First Folio of Shakespeare's plays -- goes missing, and Edwin's sister is murdered, seemingly in connection to the missing folio. Delaney decides to do some sleuthing of her own, to find out just what the real story is behind the priceless folio, and how it's connected to the tragic death, all without getting harmed herself.

Readers' Advisory

Mirage
by Matt Ruff (2012)

A thriller unusual in its concept, combining politics with an alternate reality. No attacks occur on Sept. 11. The real tragedy happens on Nov. 9, 2001, when terrorists from the Christian States of America (CSA) attack the twin towers in Baghdad. The world is turned upside down and inside out, with the United Arab States (UAS) being the world's dominant power and America a fragmented collection of countries that include the Republic of Texas. The UAS invades and conquers the CSA, but captured prisoners bring rumors that everything the Arabs see is a mirage, that the true superpower is America. Some even claim that "God loves America, not Arabia." Real-life characters show up aplenty but are cast in unexpected lights. Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden, for example, are warriors for the good guys, but at least Saddam Hussein is still a thug. Readers have someone to root for in conventional thrillers, but that is lacking here. Much detail mirrors the West we know, an approach that starts out looking clever but quickly becomes too cute—Gaddafi claiming to have invented the Internet; a Six Flags Hanging Gardens theme park; and a series of self-help books including Christianity for the Ignorant. Germany is a Jewish state, while Palestine belongs to the Arabs. The UAS is a largely tolerant place, where one character even says, "Hey, it's a free country." Another shrugs off the revelation that someone is gay, as if no one cares in the UAS. A few characters, including the heroine named Amal, risk their lives to determine the truth—is their whole world an illusion? (Kirkus)

Readers' Advisory

Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow (2014)

Alexander Hamilton was arguably the most important figure in American history who never attained the presidency, but he had a far more lasting impact than many who did. An illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, Hamilton rose with stunning speed to become George Washington's aide-de-camp, a battlefield hero, a member of the Constitutional Convention, the leading author of The Federalist Papers, and head of the Federalist party. As the first treasury secretary, he forged America's tax and budget systems, customs service, coast guard, and central bank. Chernow offers the whole sweep of Hamilton's turbulent life: his exotic, brutal upbringing; his brilliant military, legal, and financial exploits; his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Monroe; his shocking illicit romances; his enlightened abolitionism; and his famous death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804.

Readers' Advisory

Listen, Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People
By Thomas Frank (2016)

A critical assessment of what the author believes to be the shortcomings of the Democratic party draws on years of research and firsthand reporting to argue that the party has failed to advance traditional liberal goals and has victimized the middle class. By the best-selling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?

Readers' Advisory

American Walks Into A Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns, Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops
by Christine Sismondo (2011)

In America Walks into a Bar, Christine Sismondo recounts the rich and fascinating history of an institution often reviled, yet always central to American life. She traces the tavern from England to New England, showing how even the Puritans valued "a good Beere." With fast-paced narration and lively characters, she carries the story through the twentieth century and beyond, from repeated struggles over licensing and Sunday liquor sales, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the temperance movement, from attempts to ban "treating" to Prohibition and repeal. As the cockpit of organized crime, politics, and everyday social life, the bar has remained vital--and controversial--down to the present. In 2006, when the Hurricane Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act was passed, a rider excluded bars from applying for aid or tax breaks on the grounds that they contributed nothing to the community. Sismondo proves otherwise: the bar has contributed everything to the American story.

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Harper Lee

American Novelist

1926-2016

 

Harper Lee was considered by many to be a literary icon. Her controversial novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. For decades, the book was her first and only publication and was later turned into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. Harper stopped making public appearances and giving interviews shortly after the novel's release. She was presented with a number of honorary degrees and awards in her later years, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2007. Lee's second novel, Go Set a Watchman, was  published in July 2015. Lee completed the novel--written from the perspective of an adult Scout Finch looking back at events in her childhood--in the 1950s. Lee set the manuscript aside at the advice of an agent to instead write To Kill A Mockingbird.

 

Readers' Advisory

Invisible Ink: My Mother's Secret Love Affair With a Famous Cartoonish (A Graphic Memoir)
Bill Griffith (2015)

This is the renowned cartoonist's first long-form graphic work — a 200-page memoir that poignantly recounts his mother’s secret life, which included an affair with a cartoonist and crime novelist, Lawrence Lariar, in the 1950s and 1960s. Lariar lived at 57 West Lena Avenue. Freeport, NY.  Invisible Ink unfolds like a detective story, alternating between past and present, as Griffith recreates the quotidian habits of suburban Levittown and the professional and cultural life of mid-century Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s as seen through his mother’s and his own then-teenage eyes. Griffith puts the pieces together and reveals a mother he never knew.

Readers' Advisory

Start A Revolution: Stop Acting Like A Library
by Ben Bizzle with Maria Flora (2015)

Bizzle and Flora present students, academics, and librarians working in a variety of contexts with a comprehensive guide to reinventing and radically marketing library services based on the author’s experience in reinvigorating the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library in Arkansas. The authors have organized the bulk of their text into eight chapters, including a prelude telling the Jonesboro story, and an interlude telling the story of the Crooked Valley Regional Library. The eight chapters cover a variety of related topics, including digital library services, mobile library services, Facebook advertising and marketing, and many others. (Summary by: protoview.com).

Readers' Advisory

The Girl in the Spider's Web: A Lisbeth Salander Novel
by David Lagercrantz (2015)

Lagercrantz's worthy, crowd-pleasing fourth installment in the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium saga opens in Sweden, where some intellectual property developed by artificial intelligence genius Frans Balder has been stolen by a video game company with ties to Russian mobsters. Crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who's casting about for a new investigative project, is about to meet with Balder when an intruder kills the scientist and puts Balder's autistic eight-year-old son in danger. Meanwhile in the U.S., the National Security Agency is hacked, and its chief of security, Edwin Needham, vows revenge. Lisbeth Salander plays a central role in both plot lines, and the pleasure resides in watching Lagercrantz  corral an enormous cast of characters into an intricate story revolving around the larger-than-life hacker and her desire to right wrongs, including corporate espionage, a government spying on its own citizens, and violence against the defenseless. (PW Annex Reviews).

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Jackie Collins

Writer

1937-2015

British-born author Jackie Collins regularly landed on best-seller lists with her racy page-turners that chronicled the scandalous doings of various fictional movie stars, rock stars, up-and-coming stars, and has-been stars. Best known for her immensely successful Hollywood series that kicked off with the 1983 best seller Hollywood Wives, Collins mined her own experiences in celebrity-ville for the plots of many of her books. Critics were not always been kind to Collins, but the 500 million books sold under her name attest to her enduring appeal. Collins died of breast cancer at the age of 77. (Biography in Context).

Click here for book by Jackie Collins.

Readers' Advisory

Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real  Estate, and the Fight to Save A Public Library
By Scott Sherman (2015)

 

 

For over a century, the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been considered a cultural mecca, with its iconic lion statues "Patience" and "Fortitude" welcoming tourists, scholars, writers, new immigrants, and its fellow New Yorkers. As Sherman (contributing writer, The Nation) details in this real-life thriller, the historic research center and its branches recently faced an uncertain future in light of financial struggles and misguided good intentions. NYPL officials and trustees formulated a plan to renovate the central library by transporting three million research books to a storage facility in New Jersey in order to make room for Internet and technology labs. To raise money for the project, they also wanted to sell several rundown branches. When the public heard about the plan, they fought to keep the renowned research library intact and save the branches from closing. Famous authors, scholars, and library lovers built a grassroots campaign, which ultimately succeeded, in support of these vital neighborhood centers. (Library Journal).

 

NPR Review

 

Excerpt from NPR:

The late eminent architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable deserves special mention as a heroic voice of the opposition forces. Sherman says Huxtable was 91 and in failing health when the controversy erupted. Stonewalled by library officials when she initially tried to research the renovation plan, Huxtable persevered and wrote an excoriating essay for The Wall Street Journal in 2012. Responding to the library officials' argument that modernization was needed because only 6 percent of print sources were being read every year by patrons, Huxtable said:

"If we could estimate how many ways in which the world has been changed by that 6%, the number would be far more meaningful than the traffic through [the library's] lion-guarded doors ... [A] research library is a timeless repository of treasures, not a popularity contest measured by head counts, the current arbiter of success."

 

Readers' Advisory

Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil's Deal
Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill (2000)

John Connolly and James "Whitey" Bulger grew up together on the tough streets of South Boston. Decades later, they met again when Connolly was a major figure in the FBI's Boston office and Bulger was godfather of the Irish Mob. This is the true story of what happened between them as a dark deal spiraled out of control, leading to drug dealing, racketeering, and murder. Includes black and white photographs. The authors write for the Boston Globe . O'Neill has won the Pulitzer Prize, and both authors have won the Hancock and Loeb awards. They have covered the Bulger-Connolly story for over a decade. (Booknews.com)

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Wayne Dyer

Self-Help Writer

1940-2015

 

Charismatic and camera-friendly, Wayne Dyer became well known after the publication of his first best-selling book, Your Erroneous Zones, in 1976. Since then, he has been a proponent of such typical New Age concepts as "living in the moment" and making "choices that bring us to a higher awareness," as he told a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times in 1994. In addition to books, Dyer has used audio recordings and the broadcast media to his advantage, securing his position as a cultural icon and leading light in the areas of motivation and self-awareness. (Biography in Context).

 

Dwyer was diagnosed with lymphocytic leukemia in 2009.  He died in August 2015 at the age of 75.

 

For books by Wayne Dyer, click here.

Readers' Advisory

Farewell Oliver Sacks

Neurologist

1933-2015

 

An author and physician in the field of neurology, Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) helped fuel debate about the essential qualities of humanity through his books, essays, and lectures. The author of such well-known works as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks used case studies from his own practice to advocate re-humanizing the medical arts. His stories of courageous patients coping with handicaps inspired popular movies, plays, and even an opera, but they spoke most eloquently on their own as a testament to the hardiness of the human spirit. (Biography in Context).

Click here for books by and about Oliver Sacks.

Readers' Advisory

The Wright Brothers
David McCullough (2015)

Pulitzer-winning historian McCullough  sees something exalted in the two bicycle mechanics and lifelong bachelors who lived with their sister and clergyman father in Dayton, Ohio. He finds them—especially Wilbur, the elder brother—to be cultured men with a steady drive and quiet charisma, not mere eccentrics. McCullough follows their monkish devotion to the goal of human flight, recounting their painstaking experiments in a homemade wind tunnel, their countless wrong turns and wrecked models, and their long stints roughing it on the desolate, buggy shore at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Thanks largely to their own caginess, the brothers endured years of doubt and ridicule while they improved their flyer. McCullough also describes the fame and adulation that the brothers received after public demonstrations in France and Washington, D.C., in 1908 cemented their claims. (Publishers Weekly)

Readers' Advisory

The House We Grew Up In
by Lisa Jewell (2014)

Meet the Bird family. They live in a simple brick house in a picture-perfect Cotswolds village, with rambling, unkempt gardens stretching just beyond. Pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and tow-headed twins Rory and Rhys all attend the village school and eat home-cooked meals together each night. Everybody in town gushes over the two girls, who share their mother’s apple cheeks and wide smiles. Of the boys, lively, adventurous Rory can stir up trouble, moving through life more easily than little Rhys, his slighter, more sensitive counterpart. Their father is a sweet gangly man, but it’s their mother, Lorelei, a beautiful free spirit with long flowing hair and eyes full of wonder, who spins at the center.

Time flies in those early years when the kids are still young. Lorelei knows that more than anyone, doing her part to freeze time by protecting the precious mementos she collects, filling the house with them day by day. Easter egg foils are her favorite. Craft supplies, too. She insists on hanging every single piece of art ever produced by any of the children, to her husband’s chagrin.Then one Easter weekend, tragedy occurs. The event is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear the family apart. Years pass and the children have become adults, found new relationships, and, in Meg's case, created families of their own. Lorelei has become the county’s worst hoarder. She has alienated her husband, her children, and has been living as a recluse for six years. It seems as though they’d never been The Bird Family at all, as if loyalty were never on the table. But then something happens that calls them home, back to the house they grew up in—and to what really happened that Easter weekend so many years ago.

Delving deeply into the hearts and minds of its characters, The House We Grew Up In is the gripping story of a family’s desire to restore long-forgotten peace and to unearth the many secrets hidden within the nooks and crannies of home. (Publisher's summary).