THE AFTERLIFE
Donald Atrim
This darkly entertaining but also enlightening memoir gives the reader insight into familial relationships that are poignant but also uplifting, as Antrim attempts to fathom his mother’s operatically suicidal alcoholism.
B/Atrim
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AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy
Francis Fukuyama
Providing a history of the varied strands of neo-conservative thought since the 1930’s, Fukuyama parts ways with fellow neo-cons, censures their blunders and those of the Bush administration, and offers advice for the future.
327.73/FUK
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ANDREW CARNEGIE
David Nasaw
This colorful biography is weighty, but reads like a breeze and reveals a far from conventional capitalist.
B/Carnegie
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AT CANAAN’S EDGE: America in the King Years, 1965-68
Taylor Branch
The third volume is remarkable for its breadth and detail. This Pulitzer Prize-winning author's history of the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. is masterful both as a literary work and historical scholarship, and merits the widest possible readership.
323.1196/BRA
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AVA GARDNER: “Love is Nothing”
Lee Server
This is the unexpurgated version of a Cinderella story. From Tobacco Road urchin to international sex goddess, Ava Gardner’s story is also the story of the big studio system that used and misused its stars.
B/Gardner
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THE BLIND SIDE: Evolution of a Game
Michael Lewis
Combining a tour de force of sports analysis with a piquant ethnography of the South’s pigskin mania, Lewis, author of Moneyball, probes the fascinating question of whether football is a matter of brute force or subtle intellect.
796.332/LEW
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BLOOD AND THUNDER: An Epic of the American West
Hampton Sides
Combining literary lyricism with an historian’s attention to facts, Sides’ main focus is the decimation of the Navajo nation in the mid-1860s. At the center of this account is famed mountain man, Kit Carson, a study in contradictions. Illiterate but extremely intelligent, Carson respected Indians and had two Indian wives, but he could be a cold-blooded killer when government policy required action against the Indians.
978.02/HAM
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BLUE ARABESQUE: A Search for the Sublime
Patricia Hampl
Hampl’s memoirs of discovery are exhilarating. Writing of both early pilgrimages and the inner journeys they provoke, she brings a poet’s love of language and fascination with the life of the mind to unusual aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural inquiries.
818.54/HAM
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BUILDING JERUSALEM: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City
Tristam Hunt
Hunt’s account is awash in fascinating details about Dickensian London and the history of architectural style, but at its compelling core, it offers a thought-provoking look at how to create a humane urban world. An enlightening historical context for urgent current issues.
307.76/HUN
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CLEMENTE: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero
David Maraniss
Clemente wasn't entirely virtuous he had a temper and was sometimes given to pouting but his altruism appears to have been a genuine product of his impoverished Puerto Rican upbringing. Maraniss deftly balances baseball and loftier concerns like racism; he presents a nuanced picture of a ballplayer more complicated than the encomiums would suggest, while still wholly deserving them.
B/Clemente
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COLLECTED POEMS, 1947-1997
Allen Ginsburg
A hefty, brilliant volume that shows Ginsberg (1926-97) to be not only a legendary protest writer, but also a lyric poet preoccupied with passion and fate.
811.54/GIN
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THE CREATION: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth
Edward O. Wilson
One of the world’s most forward-looking, eloquent, and concerned scientists, Wilson issues a commonsensical and deeply moving call for unity between science and religion in the increasingly pressing effort to preserve living nature.
333.95/WIL
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THE DISCOMFORT ZONE: A Personal History
Jonathan Franzen
Essays by the author of The Corrections focus on formative experiences of his youth.
B/Franzen
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EAT, PRAY, LOVE: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Elizabeth Gilbert
A charismatic but troubled traveler seeks a balance of pleasure and devotion—and finds romance.
910.4/GIL
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The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain
Diane Purkiss
Addressing the upheaval in 1640’s Britain, this fluently written history is superbly sensitive to the human personality making its way through great and apocalyptic times.
942.06/PUR
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FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH: A Memoir
Danielle Trussoni
This memoir recounts not only her father’s story of Vietnam and of her own pilgrimage there years later, but also reinforces the fact that the war that had come between her parents and altered her family’s life had changed many American lives, on and off the battlefield. Trussoni’s writing is unsentimental and quite funny, as she gives us a view of what it was like to grow up in a screwed-up, working-class family.
B/Trussoni
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FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Thomas E. Ricks
A comprehensive account by a veteran Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post of how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency. The main points of this hard-hitting indictment have been made before, but seldom with such compelling specificity.
956.70443/RIC
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FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE: Man, Nature and Climate Change
Elizabeth Kolbert
Kolbert’s calmly persuasive reporting and sobering clarity makes this book an excellent introduction to issues involved in implementing climate-related policies in a world dominated by economic interests and increasing energy demand.
363.738/KOL
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FLAUBERT: A Biography
Frederick Brown
The man behind Madame Bovary is brought to life as a romantic and a realist, a dreamer and a debunker.
B/Flaubert
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THE GHOST MAP : the Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Steven Johnson
From microscopic bacteria (cholera), Johnson builds a sweeping nail-biter of ground-breaking science and sociology that drops readers in the dead center of malodorous Victorian London.
614.514/JOH
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THE GREAT DELUGE: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
Douglas Brinkley
A New Orleans native and history professor at Tulane, Brinkley lets Katrina survivors tell their own stories while he investigates government failure at every level.
916.335/BRI (eBook)
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THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina
Frank Rich
The New York Times columnist’s analysis is acidly pointed as he reviews the litany of half-truths told by the Bush administration in the lead-up to the war and since then. He also takes aim at a sycophantic media, spineless Democrats, and an infotainment culture that happily accommodates the administration’s erasure of the line between reality and fiction.
973.931/RIC
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THE HEARTLESS STONE: A Journey Through the A World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire
Tom Zoellner
Diamonds are the hardest substance, but what’s really hard about them is the poverty, corruption, smuggling, and tenacious cartels they inspire. Zoellner’s lucid text takes us into the blood and mire of diamond mining’s racism and political corruption, showing us that the jewelry we buy comes at a global cost.
553.82/ZOE
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HEAT: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
Bill Buford

641.5945 BUF
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HISTORY OF THE END OF THE WORLD: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization
Jonathan Kirsch
The question of how and when the world will end has captivated thinkers for centuries. Wars, natural disasters, social upheaval and personal suffering often send believers back to the writings of their prophets and seers, whose gift is to bring satisfying answers to such questions. The book most studied in the Western tradition is Revelation, the last entry in the Christian canon. Kirsch, an attorney and book columnist for the Los Angeles Times, takes the reader on a delightful 2,000-year journey as he explores a text he describes as "a romantic tale, full of intrigue and suspense" and shows how churches, philosophers, clergy and armchair interpreters have promoted their political, social and religious agendas based on their belief that the end was imminent.
228.06/KIR
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IRAN AWAKENING: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope
Shirin Ebadi/Ibadi with Azadeh
"Throughout an extraordinary career as a lawyer, writer, activist, and dissident, Shirin Ebadi has spoken out clearly and strongly for her native Iran - and her voice has resonated far beyond that country's borders. As a dedicated human rights advocate and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ebadi has almost single-handedly given both Iran and the world reason to hope for a better future." "Now, in this memoir, Ebadi provides an eyewitness account of one woman's courageous stand at the crossroads of history.
B/Ibadi
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The Iraq Study Group Report
James A. Baker
A government document that is concisely, even beautifully written? Indeed, this one is, and whether history will find that this controversial report’s suggestions about the war in Iraq were adopted by the Bush administration or not, it is nevertheless a vastly significant document of lasting importance.
973.931/IRA
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JAMES TIPTREE, JR.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
Julie Phillips
Over the course of a prolific 20-year career, the late James Tiptree, Jr. earned a well-deserved place in the pantheon of science fiction literature. Keeping her real, female identity secret, Alice Sheldon (1915-1987) led a life usually found only in fiction. In her life-long quest to express her creativity, she managed to have many personas—as debutante, graphic artist, WAC officer, CIA photo-analyst, wife and, of course, author.
B/Tiptree
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JANE GOODALL: The Woman Who Redefined Man
Dale Peterson
A meticulous portrait of the pioneering researcher whose years of observing chimpanzees changed the way we see our fellow primates.
B/Goodall
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Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn
William J. Mann
Mann looks at the complex, contradictory life of the actress played out against almost a century of American social history, and with painstaking research, dispels some of the myths surrounding her.
B/HEPBURN
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KINGFISH: The Reign of Huey Long
Richard D. White
This carefully researched work brings forward another picture of the famous Louisiana governor and U.S. senator and continues the debate of “outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary.” Always controversial, Long, born in 1893 and shot to death at age 42,was considered “one of the most dangerous men in America” by FDR.
B/Long
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THE LEMON TREE: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
Sandy Tolan
To see in human scale the tragic collision of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, Tolan focuses on one small stone house in Ramala. This story of how Jewish and Arab children have together planted seeds salvaged from a desiccated lemon tree behind the house becomes a much-needed antidote to the cynicism of realpolitik.
956.9405/TOL
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THE LOOMING TOWER: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
Going back to 1948 to dissect the personal influences and political radicalization that would lead to Al-Qaeda’s attack on America, Wright also illustrates the chilling counterpoint of what little attention was paid to the trickle of information that made its way into Western intelligence agencies.
973.931/WRI
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LOST MOUNTAIN: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness—Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia
Erik Reece
Reece's up-close assessment of a rapacious coal industry is a searing indictment of how a country's energy lust is ravaging the hills and hollows of Appalachia. The first-time author chronicles how, in one year, from October 2003 to September 2004, strip miners sheared away the top of Kentucky's aptly named Lost Mountain. This process of "mountaintop removal" left a barren wasteland that, months earlier, had supported songbirds, fox, deer and other wildlife, and a rich cover of trees. Reece's elegiac book much more than just an eyewitness report on ecological decimation also offers a concise history of how the coal industry long exploited workers; hints at harrowing tales of industry intimidation of antimining activists; details how toxic mining runoff has poisoned well water and how landslides have washed away homes and entire hamlets; and in a cautiously optimistic coda, reports how activists have reclaimed a few thousand acres of stripped land with reforestation projects.
622.282/REE
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THE LOST: A Search for Six of Six Million
Daniel Mendelsohn
Grappling with the Holocaust in both its personal and geopolitical dimensions, Mendelsohn relates the story of his great-uncle’s family.
973.04924/
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LOVE AND LOUIS XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King
Antonia Fraser
In her book, this highly regarded popular biographer brings the king so much to life that he almost steps off the detail-rich pages as the high-heeled, but decidedly masculine and forceful personality he was.
944.033/FRA
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MAYFLOWER: A Story of Courage, Community and War
Nathaniel Philbrick
This vivid account of the earnest band of English men and women known as America’s founders offers perspectives of both the Pilgrims and the Indians.
973.2/PHI
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THE MIGHTY AND THE ALMIGHTY: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs
Madeleine Albright
Albright brings considerable experience as a former diplomat, history professor, and child of Czech immigrants to this utterly absorbing look at the intersection of world politics and religion.
261.87/ALB (eBook)
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THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN AMERICA: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Debby Applegate
A rich portrait of the 19th-century Protestant reformer renowned for his preaching—and for an adulterous scandal.
B/Beecher
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THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
The author embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which begins at the very beginning—in the soil—and ends with a cooked, finished meal.
394.1/ONE
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ONE PLANET: A Celebration of Biodiversity
Nicolas Hulot
This French journalist presents an eloquent survey of the beauty, diversity, and interconnectivity of earthly life, richly illustrated with breathtaking color photographs that embrace the tiniest creatures to the most dramatic vistas.
333.95/ONE
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THE ONLY BOY IN THE WORLD: A Father Explores the Mysteries of Autism
Michael Blastland
As the parent of a severely autistic son, BBC journalist Blastland knows frustration, but it does not fuel his crystalline contemplation. Neither patronizing nor glib, he instead relies on fascination to unlock Joe’s head, reminding us how much we “normal” people take for granted.
616.85882/BLA
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ORACLE BONES: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present
Peter Hessler
The New Yorker’s Beijing correspondent focuses on the interaction of China with the West. In spite of the fact that little information is available in China, Hessler gets the stories that no one talks about and delivers them in a personal manner that informs, entertains and mesmerizes. This is a book every Westerner should read.
951/HES
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A PERFECT UNION: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation
Catherine Allgor
This engaging biography of the wife of the fourth U.S. president stresses the importance of Dolley’s making the office of First Lady her own.
B/Madison
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THE PLACES IN BETWEEN
Rory Stewart
In January 2002, only a few months after the Taliban had been deposed, the author walked across Afghanistan—surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers.
958.1/STE
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PRISONERS: A Muslin and A Jew Across the Middle East Divide
Jeffrey Goldberg
American born, Goldberg immigrated to Israel and spent his military service as a prison guard in a bleak desert jail where he befriended a Palestinian prisoner. Their friendship endured after each returned to his former life, but like the warring nationalisms it represents, this memoir is complex and unsettling.
070.92/GOL
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PROGRAMMING THE UNIVERSE: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos
Seth Lloyd
An M.I.T. professor seeks to explain the fundamental workings of the universe by equating it with a new device called a quantum computer.
530.12/LLO
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QUEEN OF FASHION: What Marie Antoinette wore to the Revolution
Caroline Weber
An iconic trendsetter whose styles were copied by prostitutes and aristocrats alike, Marie Antoinette was often blamed for France’s moral decay. This generously illustrated history posits that the queen’s fashion obsession wasn’t about narcissism but rather self-assertion; even at the guillotine she controlled her image with a radiantly white ensemble.
391.0094/WEB
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READING LIKE A WRITER: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Francine Prose
Known for her novels and nonfiction, Prose presents a short volume that serves as literary criticism, as a writing guide, and as an ode to the value of careful reading. In the process she escorts the reader to a heightened level of appreciation of great literature.
808.02/PRO
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REDEMPTION: The Last Battle of the Civil War
Nicholas Lemann
The book’s title refers to the popular version of Reconstruction in which valiant Southern whites “redeemed” their states from corrupt carpetbaggers and freemen. Agreeing with recent scholars who consider this another Civil War myth, Lemann delivers an engrossing but painful account of a disgraceful episode in American history.
975.004/LEM
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SELF-MADE MAN: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Again
Norah Vincent
Disguised as a man, Vincent spent 18 months working as a salesman, going to strip clubs, joining an all-guy bowling team in order to view the male world that women don’t get to see. Among other issues of gender identity, she found the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity surprisingly complex.
305.31/VIN
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Simple Courage: A True Story of Peril on the Sea
Frank Delaney
On Christmas Day 1951, the Flying Enterprise began splitting apart in a North Atlantic gale. Possibly guarding a secret cargo, the captain stayed aboard almost to the end, and a media blitz made him a hero. One of the great sea stories of the 20th century.
910.45/DEL
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STATE OF DENIAL
Bob Woodward
Part 3 of the Bush at War cycle, by the longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, describes the inept conduct of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
973.931/WOO
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STRANGE PIECE OF PARADISE: A Return to the American West to Investigate My Attempted Murder and Solve the Riddle of Myself
Terri Jentz
The author was a Yale student biking cross-country during the summer of 1977 when she and her roommate were attacked by an axe-wielding cowboy while camping in Oregon. Jentz suffered multiple injures including a gashed arm and collapsed lung, while her friend was nearly blinded from head injuries. Fifteen years later, in 1992, Jentz returns to the scene of the attack to repair the psychic wound and attempt to close the case.
364.1555/JEN
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STRONG IS YOUR HOLD
Galway Kinnell
Kinnell’s first collection of new poems in more than a decade revisits themes of marriage, friendship, and death, with long, loose lines reminiscent of Whitman.
811.54/KIN
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SWEET AND LOW: A Family Story
Rich Cohen
Disinherited from the family fortune built by his maternal grandfather who invented the artificial sweetener Sweet’N Low, Cohen mines a wealth of family history in this funny, angry memoir.
B/Eisenstadt
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Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond
Pankaj Mishra
This author expresses his indignation at the folly and injustice portrayed in these eight travelogues and profiles illuminating the challenge of Western-style globalization in South and Central Asia.
954/MIS
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THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW: A Memoir
Robert Hughes
Writing after a near-fatal car crash, the Australian art critic describes his formative years and the evolution of his craft.
B/Hughes
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THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
Lee Smolin
Theoretical physicist Smolin argues that string theory is a scientific dead end, having led to unprecedented stagnation in theoretical physics over the past 30 years. Provocative and groundbreaking.
530.14/SMO
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TRUCK: A Love Story
Michael Perry
Perry views the resurrection of a truck as an epic adventure of self-exploration, but he tells it in a wonderfully ironic voice. Motorcycle maintenance for the 21st century.
818.54/PER
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UNCOMMON CARRIERS
John McPhee
McPhee’s 28th book is a grown-up version of every young boy’s fantasy as he rides in an 18-wheeler, travels on a barge up the Illinois River and captains a 20-ton ocean tanker. A pleasure to read, each of the seven chapters is an adventure for the reader.
388.044/MCP
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THE UNITED STATES OF ARUGULA: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
David Kamp
revolution, Vanity Fair magazine writer Kamp pays special tribute to the “big three” pioneer chefs (James Beard, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne) who changed the way we shop, cook, and eat.
641.013/KAM
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THE WAR OF THE WORLD: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
Niall Ferguson
A panoramic moral analysis of an age of military-industrial slaughter.
303.66/FER
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THE WORST HARD TIME: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Timothy Egan
This unique story tells us what happened to those who remained on their land in the 1930s while the very earth itself blew away.
978.032/EGA
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