A Mercy By Toni Morrison
Early American life was punishing. The scythe of sickness has never been sharper in this country, the fickleness of crops quite so lethal. Everyone involved in the
"settlement" suffered, especially when smallpox epidemics scorched through towns and villages. In her meditatively hopeful A Mercy, set on a Virginia farm in the 1690s as pox rages like a fire, Toni Morrison reminds that in these horrific conditions the tenderness of humans could cross boundaries one might assume were unbreachable at the time.
The Happiness Project By Gretchen Rubin
Rubin is not an unhappy woman: she has a loving husband, two great kids and a writing career in New York City. Still, she could-and, arguably, should-be happier. Thus, her methodical (and bizarre) happiness project: spend one year achieving careful, measurable goals in different areas of life (marriage, work, parenting, self-fulfillment) and build on them cumulatively, using concrete steps (such as, in January, going to bed earlier, exercising better, getting organized, and "acting more energetic"). By December, she's striving bemusedly to keep increasing happiness in every aspect of her life. The outcome is good, not perfect (in accordance with one of her "Secrets of Adulthood": "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good"), but Rubin's funny, perceptive account is both inspirational and forgiving, and sprinkled with just enough wise tips, concrete advice and timely research (including all those other recent books on happiness) to qualify as self-help. Defying self-help expectations, however, Rubin writes with keen senses of self and narrative, balancing the personal and the universal with a light touch. Rubin's project makes curiously compulsive reading, which is enough to make any reader happy.
South of Broad By Pat Conroy
Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator's awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group's love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat.
In the follow-up to his award winning national bestseller, Letters to a Young Brother, actor and star of CSI: NY shares his powerful wisdom for young women everywhere, 
drawing on the courageous advice of the female role models who transformed his life. Letters to a Young Sister unfolds as a series of letters written by older brother Hill to a universal Young Sistah. She's up against the same challenges as every young
drawing on the courageous advice of the female role models who transformed his life. Letters to a Young Sister unfolds as a series of letters written by older brother Hill to a universal Young Sistah. She's up against the same challenges as every young
woman: from relating to her parents and dealing with peer pressure, to juggling schoolwork and crushes and keeping faith in the face of heartache. In his straight-talking style, Hill helps his young sister build self-confidence, self-reliance, self-respect, and encourages her on her journeys towards becoming a strong and successful woman. The book also includes contributions from admirable women like Angela Basset, Ciara, Michelle Obama, Tatyana Ali, Nikki Giovanni, Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrikck, Eve, Malinda Williams, Kim Porter, and more.
Signature in the Cell By Stephen Myer
The first major scientific argument for Intelligent Design by a leading spokesperson within the scientific community.
13 ½ By Nevada Barr
Reaching beyond her successful Anna Pigeon series (Borderline, etc.), bestseller Barr comes up with the brass ring: a stand-alone psychological thriller with grit, teeth and heart. At 15, Polly Farmer escapes an alcoholic mother and a trailer-park no-future, hitchhikes to New Orleans and makes a life for herself as an English professor. Polly, divorced with two daughters, romantically intersects with handsome restoration architect Marshall Marchand—who's really Dylan Raines, who was incarcerated as the 11-year-old “Butcher Boy” who axe-murdered his parents 25 years earlier in Minnesota. As Barr artfully unfolds this mystery of wickedness and pain in eerie post-Katrina New Orleans, she tackles a multitude of societal evils, from psychiatric drug abuse to the juvenile justice system, but her central conflict, Polly's fierce determination to keep her daughters safe while trying to believe in the man she loves, makes this a terrifying, utterly convincing glimpse into the abyss.
Ford County By John Grisham
In the years since his first novel, A Time to Kill, John Grisham said he has often returned to the people and places of that book: "I've had dozens of ideas for Ford County novels, almost all of which peter out for one reason or another...The good stories stick, but they're not always long enough to become novels." His first collection of short fiction, Ford County, collects seven of those tales set in the titular Mississippi region where his characters are "always in the vicinity of trouble." While none of the stories are out-and-out courtroom dramas, most of them are populated with felons, ex-felons, and the kind of lawyers of who are one bad decision away from a jail sentence. In one story, three good ol' boys start driving to Memphis to donate blood for an injured friend, but they're distracted by beer joints and strip clubs along the way. In another, a down-and-out divorce lawyer gets a second chance to make some big money on an old class-action lawsuit. Like his literary predecessors Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and that other icon from Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner, Grisham knows how southerners tick. The characters in Ford County are rendered with great humor and tenderness; even the worst rapscallion and the slimiest scallywag can be loved here in these pages. Ford County may just be Grisham's best book to date. Gone are the problems which have long plagued his novels: paper-thin characters, trite dialogue, and sentences that tangle in a traffic jam of adverbs and adjectives. By winnowing his "ideas" to the shorter form, Grisham has, by necessity, dispensed with the padding and come closer to richer, deeper writing than ever before.
Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
*Reviews are from the Barnes and Noble website.
*Reviews are from the Barnes and Noble website.
