Alex's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 07 Feb 2025 09:29:12 -0800 60 Alex's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Junie B. Jones Smells Something Fishy (Junie B. Jones, #12)]]> 9330513 “Hilarious. Barbara Park makes reading fun.â€� —Dav Pilkey, author of Dog ManÌęBarbara Park’s #1ÌęNew York TimesÌębestselling chapter book series, Junie B. Jones, has been keeping kids laughing—and reading—for more than twenty-five years. Over 65 million copies sold! Ìę Meet the World’s Funniest Kindergartner—Junie B. Jones! There’s going to be a pet day at school, only guess what? No dogs allowed! And that’s the only kind of pet Junie B. has! If Mother and Daddy won’t buy her a new pet, Junie B. will just have to find one on her own. Like maybe a jar of ants. Or a wiggly worm. Or—could it be—something even better? Ìę USA Today: “Junie B. is the darling of the young-reader set.â€� Ìę Publishers Weekly: “Park convinces beginning readers that Junie B.—and reading—are lots of fun.â€� Ìę Kirkus Reviews: “Junie’s swarms of young fans will continue to delight in her unique take on the world. . . . A hilarious, first-rate read-aloud.â€� Ìę Time: “Junie B. Jones is a feisty six-year-old with an endearing penchant for honesty.”]]> 66 Barbara Park Alex 0 currently-reading 4.42 1998 Junie B. Jones Smells Something Fishy (Junie B. Jones, #12)
author: Barbara Park
name: Alex
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Lisboa Ultrassecreta (Portuguese Edition)]]> 27431540 51 Dejan Tiago Stankovic Alex 0 currently-reading 4.25 Lisboa Ultrassecreta (Portuguese Edition)
author: Dejan Tiago Stankovic
name: Alex
average rating: 4.25
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date added: 2025/01/07
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Os Maias 44554559 450 Eça de Queirós 9895620039 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.50 1888 Os Maias
author: Eça de Queirós
name: Alex
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1888
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
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Doxology 41088575
On September 11, 2001, the city’s unfathomable devastation coincides with a shattering personal loss for the trio. In the aftermath, Flora comes of age, navigating a charged political landscape and discovering a love of the natural world. Joining the ranks of those fighting for ecological conservation, Flora works to bridge the wide gap between powerful strategists and ordinary Americans, becoming entangled ever more intimately with her fellow activists along the way. And when the country faces an astonishing new threat, Flora’s family will have no choice but to look to the past—both to examine wounds that have never healed, and to rediscover strengths they have long forgotten.

At once an elegiac takedown of today’s political climate and a touching invocation of humanity’s goodness, Doxology offers daring revelations about America’s past and possible future that could only come from Nell Zink, one of the sharpest novelists of our time.]]>
0 Nell Zink 006287781X Alex 4 3.46 2019 Doxology
author: Nell Zink
name: Alex
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2019/10/22
date added: 2024/09/21
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River City Blues 30220716
Detective Sergeant Bennie Sherwood, fresh off a soul-scarring tour of duty with the Marines, couldn't care less. His old man was recently murdered under suspect circumstances and he's on a hunt for the truth.

But then an old friend is killed during a botched black market raid and Bennie is thrust onto a hellride through Richmond's underworld. Suddenly, he's at the front lines of a new kind of war, one that's played out in gentlemen's clubs and back alleys between tobacco kingpins and numbers runners.

It's a dark, twisted journey that will test Bennie's every limit, even as it gets him closer to the truth about his father...]]>
275 Ward Howarth 099760980X Alex 0 currently-reading 3.91 River City Blues
author: Ward Howarth
name: Alex
average rating: 3.91
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Essays of Montaigne 25367856 1679 Michel de Montaigne 1623959551 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.29 1580 Essays of Montaigne
author: Michel de Montaigne
name: Alex
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1580
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra]]> 24059818
O Índice Ativo no e-reader Kindle pode ser acessado clicando em "Ir Para" e nos aplicativos do Kindle de tablet e smartphones clicando em "SumĂĄrio" nas opçÔes do livro.

Esta obra respeita as regras do Novo Acordo OrtogrĂĄfico.

O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra é um romance da autoria conjunta de Eça de Queirós e de Ramalho Ortigão. Foi publicado no Diårio de Notícias, de Lisboa, sobre a forma de cartas anónimas, entre 24 de Julho e 27 de Setembro de 1870, recebendo a primeira versão em livro em 1884.

É a primeira narrativa de cariz policial da literatura portuguesa.: Clássicos de Eça de Queirós]]>
240 Eça de Queirós Alex 0 currently-reading 3.67 1870 O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra
author: Eça de Queirós
name: Alex
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1870
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[What Your Clutter Is Trying to Tell You: Uncover the Message in the Mess and Reclaim Your Life]]> 35966606 With a practical, warm, and welcoming approach, intuitive life and business coach Kerri Richardson guides you to accept your clutter as a natural manifestation of your mind, body, and spirit looking out for yourself. It is your soul calling out for you invest in self-care and to face the fears holding you back from being your best self. Richardson dives into the most common categories of physical clutter and provides efficient and effective steps for clearing the space for your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being to flourish. But more than house and home, Richardson encourages you to clear out the clutter of relationships and habits that have been occupying your time and energy for too long.

Actionable clutter-clearing activities provide the foundation of this achievable plan to maximize your house, home, and heart’s potential.

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108 Kerri L. Richardson 1401952887 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.82 What Your Clutter Is Trying to Tell You: Uncover the Message in the Mess and Reclaim Your Life
author: Kerri L. Richardson
name: Alex
average rating: 3.82
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One Train Later: A Memoir 19243188
In this extraordinary memoir, world-renowned guitarist Andy Summers provides a revealing and passionate account of a life dedicated to music. From his first guitar at age thirteen and his early days on the English music scene to the ascendancy of his band, the Police, Summers recounts his relationships and encounters with the Big Roll Band, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Animals, John Belushi, and others, all the while proving himself a master of telling detail and dramatic anecdote.

But, of course, the early work is only part of the story, and Andy's account of his role as guitarist for the Police---a gig that was only confirmed by a chance encounter with drummer Stewart Copeland on a London train---has been long-awaited by music fans worldwide. The heights of fame that the Police achieved have rarely been duplicated, and the band's triumphs were rivaled only by the personal chaos that such success brought about, an insight never lost on Summers in the telling.

Complete with never-before-published photos from Summers's personal collection, One Train Later is a constantly surprising and poignant memoir, and the work of a world-class musician and a first-class writer.]]>
372 Andy Summers Alex 0 currently-reading 4.17 2006 One Train Later: A Memoir
author: Andy Summers
name: Alex
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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Cities for People 8556291
Taking into account changing demographics and changing lifestyles, Gehl explains how to develop cities that are lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy.

The book is extensively illustrated with over 700 photos and drawings of examples from Gehl’s work around the globe.]]>
285 Jan Gehl Alex 5 4.34 2010 Cities for People
author: Jan Gehl
name: Alex
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2010
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Wheels of Commerce : Civilization and Capitalism: 15Th-18th Century -Volume 2]]> 171134067 1713 Fernand Braudel Alex 0 currently-reading 0.0 The Wheels of Commerce : Civilization and Capitalism: 15Th-18th Century -Volume 2
author: Fernand Braudel
name: Alex
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<![CDATA[The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire]]> 8428101 A REVELATORY AND DARKLY COMIC ADVENTURE THROUGH A NATION ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN—FROM THE HALLS OF CONGRESS TO THE BASES OF BAGHDAD TO THE APOCALYPTIC CHURCHES OF THE HEARTLANDRolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi set out to describe the nature of George Bush’s America in the post-9/11 era and ended up vomiting demons in an evangelical church in Texas, riding the streets of Baghdad in an American convoy to nowhere, searching for phantom fighter jets in Congress, and falling into the rabbit hole of the 9/11 Truth Movement.Matt discovered in his travels across the country that the resilient blue state/red state narrative of American politics had become irrelevant. A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off—or radicalized—by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders (“they hate us for our freedomâ€�) that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement.Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq; The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress; The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants. Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places.Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era.]]> 338 Matt Taibbi 0385525702 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.04 2008 The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
author: Matt Taibbi
name: Alex
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2008
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<![CDATA[Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events]]> 51895008 From Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a new way to think about how popular stories help drive economic events

In a world in which internet troll farms attempt to influence foreign elections, can we afford to ignore the power of viral stories to affect economies? In this groundbreaking book, Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller offers a new way to think about the economy and economic change. Using a rich array of historical examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—has the potential to vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises, recessions, depressions, and other major economic events.

Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets—whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up, that housing prices never fall, or that some firms are too big to fail. Whether true or false, stories like these—transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media—drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that by laying the foundation for a way of understanding how stories help propel economic events that have had led to war, mass unemployment, and increased inequality.

The stories people tell—about economic confidence or panic, housing booms, the American dream, or Bitcoin—affect economic outcomes. Narrative Economics explains how we can begin to take these stories seriously. It may be Robert Shiller's most important book to date.

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388 Robert J. Shiller 0691189978 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.80 2019 Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
author: Robert J. Shiller
name: Alex
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2019
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Lessons in Chemistry 57684325
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chlorideâ€�) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.]]>
400 Bonnie Garmus Alex 0 currently-reading 4.47 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Alex
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2022
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The Light Pirate 60733412
Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and timeâ€� The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

Includes a Reading Group Guide.]]>
357 Lily Brooks-Dalton 1538708299 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.18 2022 The Light Pirate
author: Lily Brooks-Dalton
name: Alex
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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War and Peace 9938317 1852 Leo Tolstoy Alex 4 4.44 1869 War and Peace
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Alex
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1869
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[The Tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War]]> 19222887 An account by “the finest travel writer of the last centuryâ€� of his journey through 1930s Spain in search of an ancestral tomb (The New Yorker). In the 1930s, Norman Lewis and his brother-in-law, Eugene Corvaja, journeyed to Spain to visit the family’s ancestral tomb in Seville. Seventy years later, with evocative and engrossing prose, Lewis recounts the trip, taken on the brink of the Spanish Civil War. Witnesses to the changing political climate and culture, Lewis and Corvaja travel through the countryside from Madrid to Seville by bus, car, train, and on foot, encountering many surprises along the way. Dodging the skirmishes that will later erupt into war, they immerse themselves in the local culture and landscape, marveling at the many enchantments of Spain during this pivotal time in its history.]]> 143 Norman Lewis Alex 0 currently-reading 3.78 2003 The Tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War
author: Norman Lewis
name: Alex
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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Gray's Anatomy 19960974 98 Spalding Gray Alex 0 currently-reading 4.44 1993 Gray's Anatomy
author: Spalding Gray
name: Alex
average rating: 4.44
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/06/04
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The Passing Storm 56281452 A gripping, openhearted novel about family, reconciliation, and bringing closure to the secrets of the past.

Early into the tempestuous decade of her thirties, Rae Langdon struggles to work through a grief she never anticipated. With her father, Connor, she tends to their Ohio farm, a forty-acre spread that itself has enjoyed better days. As memories sweep through her, some too precious to bear, Rae gives shelter from a brutal winter to a teenager named Quinn Galecki.

Quinn has been thrown out by his parents, a couple too troubled to help steer the misunderstood boy through his own losses. Now Quinn has found a temporary home with the Langdons—and an unexpected kinship, because Rae, Quinn, and Connor share a past and understand one another’s pain. But its depths—and all its revelations and secrets—have yet to come to light. To finally move forward, Rae must confront them and also fight for Quinn, whose parents have other plans in mind for their son.

With forgiveness, love, and the spring thaw, there might be hope for a new season—a second chance Rae believed in her heart was gone forever.]]>
317 Christine Nolfi 1542029139 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.12 2021 The Passing Storm
author: Christine Nolfi
name: Alex
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2021
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The World of Yesterday 629429 The World of Yesterday, mailed to his publisher a few days before Stefan Zweig took his life in 1942, has become a classic of the memoir genre. Originally titled “Three Lives,â€� the memoir describes Vienna of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, the world between the two world wars and the Hitler years.

Translated from the German by Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger; with an introduction by Harry Zohn, 34 illustrations, a chronology of Stefan Zweig’s life and a new bibliography, by Randolph Klawiter, of works by and about Stefan Zweig in English.

“The best single memoir of Old Vienna by any of the city’s native artists.â€� â€� Clive James

“A book that should be read by anyone who is even slightly interested in the creative imagination and the intellectual life, the brute force of history upon individual lives, the possibility of culture and, quite simply, what it meant to be alive between 1881 and 1942.â€� â€� The Guardian

“It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age.â€� â€� The New Republic]]>
455 Stefan Zweig 0803252242 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.48 1942 The World of Yesterday
author: Stefan Zweig
name: Alex
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1942
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<![CDATA[A Death in Vienna (Liebermann Papers #1)]]> 24611536 “[An] elegant historical mysteryÌę.Ìę.Ìę. stylishly presented and intelligently resolvedâ€� set at the dawn of psychoanalysis (The New York Times Book Review). Ìę In Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, Max Liebermann, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud’s, is at the forefront of psychoanalysis, practicing the controversial new science with all the skill of a master detective. Every dream, inflection, or slip of tongue in his “hystericalâ€� patients has meaning and reveals some hidden truth. When beautiful medium Charlotte Löwenstein dies under extraordinary circumstances, Max’s good friend, Detective Oskar Rheinhardt, calls for his expert assistance. Her body has been found in a room that can only be locked from the inside. She’s been shot through the heart, but there’s no gun and absolutely no trace of a bullet. All signs point to a supernatural killer, but Liebermann the scientist is not so easily convinced. Especially when one of Charlotte’s clients is also found in a locked room—this time bludgeoned to death. Ìę Unfolding in the Vienna of Klimt and Mahler, a time of unprecedented activity in the worlds of philosophy, science, and art,ÌęA Death in ViennaÌęis “an engrossing portrait of a legendary period as well as a brain teaser of startling perplexityâ€� (Chicago Tribune).]]> 464 Frank Tallis 0802191649 Alex 4 4.20 2005 A Death in Vienna (Liebermann Papers #1)
author: Frank Tallis
name: Alex
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage)]]> 19199541
"Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsmen. It is also a moving vindication of historical study itself, in the face of modernism's defiant suggestion that history is obsolete."

-- David A. Hollinger, History Book Club Review

"Each of [the seven separate studies] can be read separately....Yet they are so artfully designed and integrated that one who reads them in order is impressed by the book's wholeness and the momentum of its argument."

-- Gordon A. Craig, The New Republic

"A profound work...on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history" -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Invaluable to the social and political historian...as well as to those more concerned with the arts" -- John Willett, The New York Review of Books

"A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing."

-- Newsweek


From the Trade Paperback edition.]]>
512 Carl E. Schorske Alex 0 currently-reading 4.10 1980 Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage)
author: Carl E. Schorske
name: Alex
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1980
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<![CDATA[Stones of Venice [introductions]]]> 8926987 161 John Ruskin Alex 0 currently-reading 3.67 1886 Stones of Venice [introductions]
author: John Ruskin
name: Alex
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1886
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So Much Pretty 10814320
Five months after she disappeared, Wendy’s body is found in a ditch just off one of Haeden’s main roads. Suddenly, Flynn has a big story, but no one wants to talk to her. No one seems to think that Wendy’s killer could still be among them. A drifter, they say. Someone “not from here.â€�

Fifteen-year-old Alice Piper is an imaginative student with a genius IQ and strong ideals. The precocious, confident girl has stood out in Haeden since the day her eccentric hippie parents moved there from New York City, seeking a better life for their only child. When Alice reads Flynn’s passionate article in the Haeden Free Press about violence against women—about the staggering number of women who are killed each day by people they know—she begins to connect the dots of Wendy’s disappearance and death, leading her to make a join the rest in turning a blind eye, or risk getting involved. As Flynn and Alice separately observe the localsâ€� failure to acknowledge a murderer in their midst, Alice’s fate is forever entwined with Wendy’s when a second crime rocks the town to its core.

Stylishly written, closely observed, and bracingly unexpected, So Much Pretty leads the reader into the treacherous psychology of denial, where the details of an event are already known, deeply and intuitively felt, but not yet admitted to, reconciled or revealed.]]>
338 Cara Hoffman Alex 0 currently-reading 3.51 2011 So Much Pretty
author: Cara Hoffman
name: Alex
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2011
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<![CDATA[The Road Not Taken and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)]]> 19405893 66 Robert Frost 0486111296 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.83 1916 The Road Not Taken and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
author: Robert Frost
name: Alex
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1916
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost (Leather-bound Classics)]]> 51920021 The early works of beloved poet Robert Frost, collected in one volume.

The poetry of Robert Frost is praised for its realistic depiction of rural life in New England during the early twentieth century, as well as for its examination of social and philosophical issues. Through the use of American idiom and free verse, Frost produced many enduring poems that remain popular with modern readers.ÌęA Collection of Poems by Robert FrostÌęcontains all the poems from his first four published collections:ÌęA Boy’s WillÌę(1913),ÌęNorth of BostonÌę(1914),ÌęMountain IntervalÌę(1916), andÌęNew HampshireÌę(1923), including classics such as “The Road Not Taken,â€� “Fire and Ice,â€� and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.â€�
Ìę]]>
304 Robert Frost 1684129249 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.92 2019 A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost (Leather-bound Classics)
author: Robert Frost
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2019
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<![CDATA[Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail]]> 53521913
A few years ago, Ray Dalio noticed a confluence of political and economic conditions he hadn’t encountered before. They included huge debts and zero or near-zero interest rates that led to massive printing of money in the world’s three major reserve currencies; big political and social conflicts within countries, especially the US, due to the largest wealth, political, and values disparities in more than 100 years; and the rising of a world power (China) to challenge the existing world power (US) and the existing world order. The last time that this confluence occurred was between 1930 and 1945. This realization sent Dalio on a search for the repeating patterns and cause/effect relationships underlying all major changes in wealth and power over the last 500 years.

In this remarkable and timely addition to his Principles series, Dalio brings readers along for his study of the major empires—including the Dutch, the British, and the American—putting into perspective the “Big Cycleâ€� that has driven the successes and failures of all the world’s major countries throughout history. He reveals the timeless and universal forces behind these shifts and uses them to look into the future, offering practical principles for positioning oneself for what’s ahead.]]>
576 Ray Dalio Alex 0 currently-reading 4.41 2021 Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail
author: Ray Dalio
name: Alex
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (L'amica geniale #1)]]> 38457091 New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends growing up in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted family epic by Italy’s most beloved and acclaimed writer, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time.â€� (Roxana Robinson, The New York Times)
Ìę
Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflictual friendship. Book one in the series follows Lila and Elena from their first fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.Ìę

Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists.

“An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends,â€� writes Entertainment Weekly. “Spectacular,â€� says Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air. “A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman,â€� writes James Wood in The New Yorker

Ferrante is one of the world’s great storytellers. With My Brilliant Friend she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.]]>
387 Elena Ferrante Alex 0 4.06 2011 My Brilliant Friend (L'amica geniale #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Alex
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2011
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The Cowards 565428 416 Josef Ć kvoreckĂœ 091294675X Alex 4 3.98 1958 The Cowards
author: Josef Ć kvoreckĂœ
name: Alex
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1958
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/01
date added: 2022/03/22
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<![CDATA[Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy]]> 19082214 The classic memoir of the Italian city left in chaos by the Nazis is “[a] masterpieceÌę.Ìę.Ìę. elegiac and furious, and frequently hilariousâ€� (The New York Times). Ìę “Vivid, lucid, elegant, often funny,â€� Naples â€�44 is the starkly human account of the true cost of war as seen through the eyes of a young, untested man who would never again look at his world the same way (The New York Times Book Review). Ìę With his gift for linguistics, Norman Lewis was assigned to the British Intelligence Corpsâ€� Field Security Service, tasked with reforming civil services, dealing with local leaders, and keeping the peace in places World War II had devastated. Ìę After a near-disastrous Allied landing at Salerno, Italy, Lewis was stationed in the newly liberated city of Naples. But bringing the city back to life was unlike anything he had been prepared for. Much of the populace was far from grateful, stealing anything they could, not only from each other but also from those sent to help them. Local vendettas and endless feuds made discerning friend from Nazi collaborator practically impossible, and turned attempts at meting out justice into a farce. And as the deprivations grew ever harsher, a proud and vibrant people were forced to survive on a diet of prostitution, corruption, and a desperate belief in miracles, cures, and saviors. Ìę But even through the darkness and chaos, Lewis evokes the essential dignity of the Neapolitan people, their traditions of civility, courage, and generosity of spirit, and the indefatigable pride that kept them fighting for life during the greatest calamity in human history. Ìę Praised by Graham Greene as “one of the best writers .Ìę.Ìę. of our century,â€� Norman Lewis presents a portrait of Naples that is a “lyrical, ironic and detached account of the tempestuous, byzantine and opaque city in the aftermath of warâ€� (Will Self). His Naples â€�44 “reads like prose .Ìę.Ìę. sings like poetryâ€� (The Plain Dealer).]]> 196 Norman Lewis Alex 5 4.15 1978 Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy
author: Norman Lewis
name: Alex
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/02/27
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<![CDATA[Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued]]> 56858087
An NPR Best Book of 2021

A New York Times Best Children'sÌęBook of 2021

A Washington Post Best Book of 2021

A Kirkus Reviews Best Children's Book of 2021

A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of 2021

In December 1938, a young Englishman canceled a ski vacation and went instead to Prague to help the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Nazis who were crowded into the city. Setting up a makeshift headquarters in his hotel room, Nicholas Winton took names and photographs from parents desperate to get their children out of danger. He raised money, found foster families in England, arranged travel and visas, and, when necessary, bribed officials and forged documents. In the frantic spring and summer of 1939, as the Nazi shadow fell over Europe, he organized the transportation of almost 700 children to safety.

Then, when the war began and no more children could be rescued, he put away his records and told no one. It was only fifty years later that a chance discovery and a famous television appearance brought Winton’s actions to light.

Peter Sís weaves Winton’s experiences and the story of one of the children he saved, Vera Gissing. Nicky & Vera is a tale of decency, action, and courage told in luminous, poetic images by an internationally renowned artist.]]>
64 Peter SĂ­s 1324019549 Alex 5 4.52 2021 Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued
author: Peter SĂ­s
name: Alex
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/31
date added: 2022/01/31
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<![CDATA[Perimenopause Power: Navigating your hormones on the journey to menopause]]> 57302827 'Maisie's knowledge of hormones changed my life... you need this book' - Anna Jones'Hill's advice is straightforward and no-nonsense' - The Guardian 'An informative must-read for any woman � whatever their age' - Vogue online----Maisie Hill, the highly qualified women's health expert, best-selling author of Period Power and founder of The Flow Collective, takes us through the physiological changes of perimenopause and menopause, step by step, with calm positivity.During perimenopause three quarters of women will experience symptoms such as mood changes, insomnia, hot flushes, and night sweats, but there is little in the way of evidence-based information out there to help and guide us. Perimenopause Power is the essential handbook to understanding what the hell's going on and to empower us to improve our experience of the dreaded 'change'. A must-read for anyone looking for a well-researched, evidenced-based book on perimenopause and menopause that gives women the information they need to address their hormonal needs. Perimenopause Power will help women to understand what's going on with their bodies and how to deal with troublesome symptoms, and share valuable insights into making it a positive and powerful experience.]]> 337 Maisie Hill 1472978870 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.17 2021 Perimenopause Power: Navigating your hormones on the journey to menopause
author: Maisie Hill
name: Alex
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/01/07
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<![CDATA[Captive Souls (Witches of Palmetto Point #7)]]> 44000861 Taken in the night.
Kidnapped for her light.
Keeley Moore is just trying to survive.

After thirteen-year-old Keeley Moore disappears during a camping trip with her parents, psychic Charlie Payne is invited to work the case by the local deputy. But the connection Charlie makes with the girl is a gossamer thread.

If Charlie didn't know better, she'd say someone is blocking the child's energy from reaching her. Someone with a connection to the supernatural. One thing Charlie is certain of—Keeley's light is fading. Once it goes out, it will be too late to rescue her.

To find the girl in time, Charlie must push the boundaries of magic. Her psychic abilities can peer into the light and dark, but now she must plumb the gray depths between the two. The question is, can she save the girl without losing herself to the darkness surrounding Keeley?]]>
392 Wendy Wang Alex 0 currently-reading 4.56 2019 Captive Souls (Witches of Palmetto Point #7)
author: Wendy Wang
name: Alex
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/10/03
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Greenlights 52838315 From the Academy Award¼–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.

Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.â€�

So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.

Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.

It’s a love letter. To life.

It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.

Good luck.]]>
289 Matthew McConaughey 0593139135 Alex 4
But I loved his stories and he had some good ones. About his mama and papa fighting with knives in the kitchen before dissolving into making love on the kitchen floor. The same mama and papa who divorced twice and married three times. A tempestuous relationship.

His story about, while in college, working at a black owned bar in nightclub with a wholly black clientele which for some reason he took a liking to.

His story about dropping the idea of becoming a lawyer and instead deciding to be a filmmaker and then actor. And his talking his way into his first premier role, in Richard Linklater’s dazed and confused. His story about being arrested in his own home while being naked and playing the bongos.

Matthew McConaughey is clearly a personality and someone with a lot of charisma. He is living his life well.

He comes from a working class family in Texas, and he got me thinking about value systems. His family, with regularity, lied, cheated and stole. To some degree, they trained him to do that as well.

But I have always respected elite schools that taught never to lie, cheat or steal.

Could or should there be a different value system for those in the elite or trained to be part of it? Maybe so. Maybe that makes sense. Maybe the elite should be expected not to lie, cheat or steal, and the lower classes should not be judged too harshly for it.

I wonder what Matt would say?]]>
4.21 2020 Greenlights
author: Matthew McConaughey
name: Alex
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/09/08
shelves:
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Sneer at me if you like for reading this but I enjoyed it. I skipped the aphorisms and platitudes, which read like Hallmark card sayings. I’m sure they meant something to him but I didn’t see much value in them collectively. Perhaps if I had plucked out only one or two they would have, like chocolates, been delicious and satisfying. But with so many, they were like too many sweets, bad for the digestion.

But I loved his stories and he had some good ones. About his mama and papa fighting with knives in the kitchen before dissolving into making love on the kitchen floor. The same mama and papa who divorced twice and married three times. A tempestuous relationship.

His story about, while in college, working at a black owned bar in nightclub with a wholly black clientele which for some reason he took a liking to.

His story about dropping the idea of becoming a lawyer and instead deciding to be a filmmaker and then actor. And his talking his way into his first premier role, in Richard Linklater’s dazed and confused. His story about being arrested in his own home while being naked and playing the bongos.

Matthew McConaughey is clearly a personality and someone with a lot of charisma. He is living his life well.

He comes from a working class family in Texas, and he got me thinking about value systems. His family, with regularity, lied, cheated and stole. To some degree, they trained him to do that as well.

But I have always respected elite schools that taught never to lie, cheat or steal.

Could or should there be a different value system for those in the elite or trained to be part of it? Maybe so. Maybe that makes sense. Maybe the elite should be expected not to lie, cheat or steal, and the lower classes should not be judged too harshly for it.

I wonder what Matt would say?
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Uncle Vanya 9682150 49 Anton Chekhov 1420902431 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.17 1897 Uncle Vanya
author: Anton Chekhov
name: Alex
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1897
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/08/27
shelves: currently-reading
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<![CDATA[The Path to your R.E.A.L. Health: AN INTEGRATIVE GUIDE TO YOUR TOTAL WELL-BEING]]> 56853745 265 Raquelina Luna Alex 0 currently-reading 5.00 The Path to your R.E.A.L. Health: AN INTEGRATIVE GUIDE TO YOUR TOTAL WELL-BEING
author: Raquelina Luna
name: Alex
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/02/14
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Homeland Elegies 53031720 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and author of American Dervish, an American son and his immigrant father search for belonging -- in post-Trump America, and with each other.

"Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." - Salman Rushdie

A deeply personal work about hope and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque adventure -- at its heart, it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a nation in which debt has ruined countless lives and our ideals have been sacrificed to the gods of finance, where a TV personality is president and immigrants live in fear, and where the unhealed wounds of 9/11 continue to wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one -- least of all himself -- in the process.]]>
368 Ayad Akhtar 031649643X Alex 0 currently-reading 4.25 2020 Homeland Elegies
author: Ayad Akhtar
name: Alex
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/11/15
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The Good Lord Bird 18519534
Over the ensuing months, Henry, whom Brown nicknames Little Onion, conceals his true identity to stay alive. Eventually Brown sweeps him into the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859--one of the great catalysts for the Civil War. An absorbing mixture of history and imagination, and told with McBride's meticulous eye for detail and character,ÌęThe Good Lord BirdÌęis both a rousing adventure and a moving exploration of identity and survival.]]>
433 James McBride 1101616180 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.17 2013 The Good Lord Bird
author: James McBride
name: Alex
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/15
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Landscape and Images 606217 368 John R. Stilgoe 0813923212 Alex 0 to-read 4.28 2005 Landscape and Images
author: John R. Stilgoe
name: Alex
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/04/17
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<![CDATA[With All Due Respect: Defending America With Grit and Grace]]> 45711720 The New York Times and USA Today bestseller

A revealing, dramatic, deeply personal book about the most significant events of our time, written by the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations

Nikki Haley is widely admired for her forthright manner (“With all due respect, I don’t get confusedâ€�), her sensitive approach to tragic events, and her confident representation of America’s interests as our Ambassador to the United Nations during times of crisis and consequence.

In this book, Haley offers a first-hand perspective on major national and international matters, as well as a behind-the-scenes account of her tenure in the Trump administration.

This book reveals a woman who can hold her own—and better—in domestic and international power politics, a diplomat who is unafraid to take a principled stand even when it is unpopular, and a leader who seeks to bring Americans together in divisive times.]]>
320 Nikki R. Haley 1250266564 Alex 0 to-read 4.18 2019 With All Due Respect: Defending America With Grit and Grace
author: Nikki R. Haley
name: Alex
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/04/17
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<![CDATA[Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption]]> 8664353
The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he'd been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.

Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.]]>
475 Laura Hillenbrand 1400064163 Alex 4 4.38 2010 Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
author: Laura Hillenbrand
name: Alex
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2010
rating: 4
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date added: 2020/04/17
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Darwin's Blade 19149545 464 Dan Simmons 0316213489 Alex 0 to-read 3.91 2000 Darwin's Blade
author: Dan Simmons
name: Alex
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)]]> 629 Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.]]> 540 Robert M. Pirsig 0060589469 Alex 5 3.78 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)
author: Robert M. Pirsig
name: Alex
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1974
rating: 5
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date added: 2020/04/17
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<![CDATA[Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA]]> 43800588 240 Amaryllis Fox 0525654976 Alex 4 3.87 2019 Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA
author: Amaryllis Fox
name: Alex
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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date added: 2020/04/17
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<![CDATA[The Spy Who Came in from the Cold]]> 22068500 Binding: Hardcover
Publication date: 2009
Pages: 272]]>
271 John Le Carré Alex 4 4.26 1963 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
author: John Le Carré
name: Alex
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1963
rating: 4
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date added: 2020/04/17
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A Gentleman in Moscow 30007916
Newer cover editions of this title can be found here, here, and here.

He can’t leave his hotel. You won’t want to.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.]]>
502 Amor Towles Alex 4 4.47 2016 A Gentleman in Moscow
author: Amor Towles
name: Alex
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2020/04/17
date added: 2020/04/17
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<![CDATA[Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.]]> 39987944
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.

Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.

For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik’s elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.]]>
289 Lili Anolik 1501125818 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.71 2019 Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
author: Lili Anolik
name: Alex
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/03/03
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A Tale of Two Cities 51125376
This edition uses the text as it appeared in its serial publication in 1859 to convey the full scope of Dickens's vision, and includes the original illustrations by H. K. Browne ('Phiz'). Richard Maxwell's introduction discusses the intricate interweaving of epic drama with personal tragedy.]]>
393 Charles Dickens Alex 3 4.00 1859 A Tale of Two Cities
author: Charles Dickens
name: Alex
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1859
rating: 3
read at: 2019/10/22
date added: 2020/02/10
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Pink Bits (Awkward #1) 44644207 Alternate cover edition of ASIN B07Q3YGWJ4


Did you know the medical term for a butt crack is intergluteal cleft?

My name is Reagan, and spouting random facts like this one at inopportune moments is my affliction. I’m chronically awkward, socially inept and completely lack a filter. Believe it or not, men do not find these attractive traits.

When my sexy-as-sin neighbour barges into my apartment at the arse crack of dawn, everything changes. For some strange reason, my brand of crazy doesn’t send him running for the hills. Instead, he settles in for a nap on my couchâ€�

Oh, and did I mention he was completely naked?



Love RomCom's? Then Pink Bits is for you! Check out what advance readers are saying-

"Pink Bits is a refreshingly unique, snort-laugh worthy read that I could not put down! Featuring quite possibly the funniest meet cute ever, it's a definite must read."- Author Amali Rose

"This book is everything that is amazing, it is sweet, touching and absolutely hilarious."
"This book had me laughing out loud and I found I couldn’t put it down. "
"I honestly love this little lighthearted masterpiece and I think you will too!"
"JB has a real hit on her hands with this wonderful story."]]>
134 J.B. Heller Alex 0 currently-reading 4.16 2019 Pink Bits (Awkward #1)
author: J.B. Heller
name: Alex
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/02/06
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Searching for Sylvie Lee 42388197 A poignant and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties binding three women-two sisters and their mother-in one Chinese immigrant family and explores what happens when the eldest daughter disappears, and a series of family secrets emerge, from the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation

It begins with a mystery. Sylvie, the beautiful, brilliant, successful older daughter of the Lee family, flies to the Netherlands for one final visit with her dying grandmother-and then vanishes.

Amy, the sheltered baby of the Lee family, is too young to remember a time when her parents were newly immigrated and too poor to keep Sylvie. Seven years older, Sylvie was raised by a distant relative in a faraway, foreign place, and didn't rejoin her family in America until age nine. Timid and shy, Amy has always looked up to her sister, the fierce and fearless protector who showered her with unconditional love.

But what happened to Sylvie? Amy and her parents are distraught and desperate for answers. Sylvie has always looked out for them. Now, it's Amy's turn to help. Terrified yet determined, Amy retraces her sister's movements, flying to the last place Sylvie was seen. But instead of simple answers, she discovers something much more valuable: the truth. Sylvie, the golden girl, kept painful secrets . . . secrets that will reveal more about Amy's complicated family-and herself-than she ever could have imagined.

A deeply moving story of family, secrets, identity, and longing, Searching for Sylvie Lee is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive portrait of an immigrant family. It is a profound exploration of the many ways culture and language can divide us and the impossibility of ever truly knowing someone-especially those we love.]]>
335 Jean Kwok 0062834339 Alex 2 3.86 2019 Searching for Sylvie Lee
author: Jean Kwok
name: Alex
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2019/10/22
date added: 2019/10/22
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<![CDATA[Tarawa: The Incredible Story of One of World War II's Bloodiest Battles]]> 18929673 194 Robert Sherrod 1626361835 Alex 5 4.28 1944 Tarawa: The Incredible Story of One of World War II's Bloodiest Battles
author: Robert Sherrod
name: Alex
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1944
rating: 5
read at: 2019/09/21
date added: 2019/09/21
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<![CDATA[Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America]]> 34846249 An original and consequential argument about race, crime, and the law

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics—and their impact on people of color—are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done.

But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime. As Forman shows, the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office around the country amid a surge in crime. Many came to believe that tough measures—such as stringent drug and gun laws and “pretext traffic stopsâ€� in poor African American neighborhoods—were needed to secure a stable future for black communities. Some politicians and activists saw criminals as a “cancerâ€� that had to be cut away from the rest of black America. Others supported harsh measures more reluctantly, believing they had no other choice in the face of a public safety emergency.

Drawing on his experience as a public defender and focusing on Washington, D.C., Forman writes with compassion for individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas—from the young men and women he defended to officials struggling to cope with an impossible situation. The result is an original view of our justice system as well as a moving portrait of the human beings caught in its coils.]]>
322 James Forman Jr. 0374712905 Alex 5 currently-reading 4.37 2017 Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
author: James Forman Jr.
name: Alex
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2019/09/04
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Girl in Translation 8489651 304 Jean Kwok 1101187484 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.20 2010 Girl in Translation
author: Jean Kwok
name: Alex
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2019/08/09
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Eileen 23453099 So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boysâ€� prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.]]>
260 Ottessa Moshfegh 1594206627 Alex 1 3.57 2015 Eileen
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Alex
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2019/06/08
date added: 2019/06/24
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What is the opposite of enjoyment? That for me was this book. I kept with it because one, I kept expecting something to happen, and two, I trusted that Reese Witherspoon had some reason I shared for her recommendation of it. Hmmmm. I may not try any more of Reese’s recs.
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The Princess Diarist 26025989 The last book from beloved Hollywood icon Carrie Fisher, The Princess Diarist is an intimate, hilarious, and revealing recollection of what happened behind the scenes on one of the most famous film sets of all time, the first Star Wars movie.

When Carrie Fisher discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved--plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Before her passing, her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon was indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her costar, Harrison Ford.

With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher's intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time--and what developed behind the scenes. Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candor and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into one of Hollywood's most beloved stars.]]>
257 Carrie Fisher 0399173595 Alex 0 to-read 3.70 2016 The Princess Diarist
author: Carrie Fisher
name: Alex
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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Lethal People 8537445 339 John Locke 1935670042 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.68 2012 Lethal People
author: John Locke
name: Alex
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World � and Why Things Are Better Than You Think]]> 34890015 Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.

When asked simple questions about global trendsâ€�what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.

In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.

It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.

Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. ]]>
342 Hans Rosling 1473637465 Alex 5 4.34 2018 Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
author: Hans Rosling
name: Alex
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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Between the World and Me 25489625 “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.â€�
Ìę
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,â€� a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Ìę
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.]]>
152 Ta-Nehisi Coates Alex 4 4.40 2015 Between the World and Me
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Alex
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2015
rating: 4
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Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 34466958 From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.

Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.â€� It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.

There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.

Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.]]>
335 David Graeber 150114331X Alex 0 to-read 4.03 2018 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
author: David Graeber
name: Alex
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)]]> 42411230
This novel of the drug trade takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. Art Montana is an obsessive DEA agent. The Barrera brothers are heirs to a drug empire. Nora Hayden is a jaded teenager who becomes a high-class hooker. Father Parada is a powerful and uncorruptable Catholic priest. Callan is an Irish kid from Hell’s kitchen who grows up to be a merciless hitman. And they are all trapped in the world of the Mexican drug Federaci. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you’ve never seen it.]]>
560 Don Winslow Alex 0 currently-reading 4.39 2005 The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)
author: Don Winslow
name: Alex
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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Stop Decorating the Fish 40744018 99 Kristen Cox 0884272850 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.81 Stop Decorating the Fish
author: Kristen Cox
name: Alex
average rating: 3.81
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<![CDATA[American Prep: The Insider's Guide to U.S. Boarding Schools]]> 34754054 296 Ronald Mangravite 1633534901 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.57 American Prep: The Insider's Guide to U.S. Boarding Schools
author: Ronald Mangravite
name: Alex
average rating: 4.57
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<![CDATA[The Boarding School Survival Guide (Peterson's the Boarding School Survival Guide)]]> 24038513 194 Justin Ross Muchnick 0768939186 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.80 2014 The Boarding School Survival Guide (Peterson's the Boarding School Survival Guide)
author: Justin Ross Muchnick
name: Alex
average rating: 4.80
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting]]> 18877267 159 Pamela Druckerman 1101616997 Alex 5 4.07 2013 Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting
author: Pamela Druckerman
name: Alex
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2019/01/23
date added: 2019/01/23
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<![CDATA[Disruptive Play: The Trickster in Politics and Culture]]> 40828029
Disruptive Play connects knowledge from mythology, folklore, popular culture, art, politics, and play theory to make its case that to be playful means not taking power seriously. At critical mass, power collapses and leaves us swimming about in the waters of the amoral Trickster. New values emerge and could lead to some version of the dystopia that currently drenches popular culture. Or, if people can discern between the authentic contact and exhilaration of play, and branded, mediated, alienated pleasure, then we just might stumble and frolic our way to the Play Society.
This book is ideal for enthusiasts of the human condition and those who hold out for the vision, however slim, of the Play Society.]]>
373 Shepherd Siegel 1732294801 Alex 5 4.07 Disruptive Play: The Trickster in Politics and Culture
author: Shepherd Siegel
name: Alex
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2018/12/21
date added: 2018/12/21
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This book about play is some serious stuff. Can play be serious? Mr Siegel takes us from dada to 4chan to Burning Man, and says what has been gained and what destroyed. Convincing. A good, even a great, book.
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<![CDATA[Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed]]> 37837773
In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.]]>
462 James C. Scott 0300128789 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.17 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
author: James C. Scott
name: Alex
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place]]> 34783013 189 Andy Crouch 1493406558 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.29 2017 The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place
author: Andy Crouch
name: Alex
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/11/29
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The Poet X 33294200 Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.

But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.

With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.

Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.]]>
368 Elizabeth Acevedo Alex 0 currently-reading 4.37 2018 The Poet X
author: Elizabeth Acevedo
name: Alex
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization]]> 39343701
Conceived as a gorgeously illustrated accompaniment to “How Do We Lookâ€� and “The Eye of Faith,â€� the famed Civilisations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant volume on how we have looked at art. Focusing in Part I on the Olmec heads of early Mesoamerica, the colossal statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, and the nudes of classical Greece, Beard explores the power, hierarchy, and gender politics of the art of the ancient world, and explains how it came to define the so-called civilized world. In Part II, Beard chronicles some of the most breathtaking religious imagery ever made—whether at Angkor Wat, Ravenna, Venice, or in the art of Jewish and Islamic calligraphersâ€� to show how all religions, ancient and modern, have faced irreconcilable problems in trying to picture the divine. With this classic volume, Beard redefines the Western-and male-centric legacies of Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark.]]>
240 Mary Beard 1631494414 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.71 2018 How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization
author: Mary Beard
name: Alex
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2018
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<![CDATA[The Other Woman (Gabriel Allon, #18)]]> 36492614 From Daniel Silva, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author, comes a modern masterpiece of espionage, love, and betrayal She was his best-kept secret â€�

In an isolated village in the mountains of Andalusia, a mysterious Frenchwoman begins work on a dangerous memoir. It is the story of a man she once loved in the Beirut of old, and a child taken from her in treason’s name. The woman is the keeper of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secret. Long ago, the KGB inserted a mole into the heart of the West—a mole who stands on the doorstep of ultimate power.

Only one man can unravel the conspiracy: Gabriel Allon, the legendary art restorer and assassin who serves as the chief of Israel’s vaunted secret intelligence service. Gabriel has battled the dark forces of the new Russia before, at great personal cost. Now he and the Russians will engage in a final epic showdown, with the fate of the postwar global order hanging in the balance.

Gabriel is lured into the hunt for the traitor after his most important asset inside Russian intelligence is brutally assassinated while trying to defect in Vienna. His quest for the truth will lead him backward in time, to the twentieth century’s greatest act of treason, and, finally, to a spellbinding climax along the banks of the Potomac River outside Washington that will leave readers breathless.

Fast as a bullet, hauntingly beautiful, and filled with stunning double-crosses and twists of plot, The Other Woman is a tour de force that proves once again that “of all those writing spy novels today, Daniel Silva is quite simply the bestâ€� Kansas City Star).

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497 Daniel Silva Alex 0 currently-reading 4.35 2018 The Other Woman (Gabriel Allon, #18)
author: Daniel Silva
name: Alex
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm]]> 18882579 The truth Most women do not have satisfying sex lives. Slow Sex can change that. Better sex is about one better orgasm. This life-altering guide teaches men and women how to use the practice of Orgasmic Meditation-or OM-to slow down, connect emotionally, and achieve authentic female sexual satisfaction. The In just fifteen minutes every woman can become orgasmic. And, with the right partner and the right technique, that orgasm could last and last! For more than a decade, Nicole Daedone has been leading the "slow sex movement," which is devoted to the art and craft of the female orgasm. OM is the act of slowing down, tuning in, and experiencing a deeper spiritual and physical connection during sex. Slow Sex reveals the philosophy and techniques of OM and includes a step-by-step, ten-day OM starter program, as well as OM secrets for achieving ultimate satisfaction. It also includes exercises to help enhance readers' "regular" sex lives, such as Slow Oral for Her, Slow Oral for Him, and Slow Intercourse. This book is the argument for daily intimacy, and for paying attention as the foundation of pleasure, all with a focus on the female experience.]]> 224 Nicole Daedone Alex 0 currently-reading 3.83 2011 Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm
author: Nicole Daedone
name: Alex
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/08/11
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<![CDATA[Tender is the Night (Serapis Classics)]]> 36455094 341 F. Scott Fitzgerald 3963130113 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.75 1934 Tender is the Night (Serapis Classics)
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Alex
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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Lincoln 106590 Lincoln is a stunning portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s life and presidency.

Donald brilliantly depicts Lincoln’s gradual ascent from humble beginnings in rural Kentucky to the ever-expanding political circles in Illinois, and finally to the presidency of a country divided by civil war. Donald goes beyond biography, illuminating the gradual development of Lincoln’s character, chronicling his tremendous capacity for evolution and growth, thus illustrating what made it possible for a man so inexperienced and so unprepared for the presidency to become a great moral leader. In the most troubled of times, here was a man who led the country out of slavery and preserved a shattered Union—in short, one of the greatest presidents this country has ever seen.]]>
714 David Herbert Donald 068482535X Alex 0 to-read 4.19 1995 Lincoln
author: David Herbert Donald
name: Alex
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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Hidden Figures 25953369 349 Margot Lee Shetterly Alex 5 3.97 2016 Hidden Figures
author: Margot Lee Shetterly
name: Alex
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 5
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Pachinko 29983711 Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan.

So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.]]>
490 Min Jin Lee 1455563935 Alex 0 to-read 4.25 2017 Pachinko
author: Min Jin Lee
name: Alex
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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The Flamethrowers 18720335 Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers just made it from the National Book Award longlist to the shortlist of five finalists. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba, was also nominated for a National Book Award and reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. The Flamethrowers, even more ambitious and brilliant, is the riveting story of a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s—by turns underground, elite, and dangerous.

The year is 1975 and Reno—so-called because of the place of her birth—has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world—artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging actions in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro’s family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow.

The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner’s brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.]]>
416 Rachel Kushner 1439154171 Alex 0 to-read 3.57 2013 The Flamethrowers
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Alex
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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China in Ten Words 12356776 228 Yu Hua 0307906930 Alex 5 4.10 2011 China in Ten Words
author: Yu Hua
name: Alex
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2018/05/18
date added: 2018/05/18
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<![CDATA[Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)]]> 6148028 Sparks are igniting.
Flames are spreading.
And the Capitol wants revenge.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has returned to her family and her longtime friend, Gale. Yet nothing is the way Katniss wishes it to be. Gale holds her at an icy distance. Peeta has turned his back on her completely. And there are whispers of a rebellion against the Capitol—a rebellion that Katniss and Peeta may have helped create.

Much to her shock, Katniss has fueled an unrest that she's afraid she cannot stop. And what scares her even more is that she's not entirely convinced she should try. As time draws near for Katniss and Peeta to visit the districts on the Capitol's cruel Victory Tour, the stakes are higher than ever. If they can't prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lost in their love for each other, the consequences will be horrifying.

In Catching Fire, the second novel of the Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins continues the story of Katniss Everdeen, testing her more than ever before . . . and surprising readers at every turn.]]>
391 Suzanne Collins 0439023491 Alex 2 4.34 2009 Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Alex
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2009
rating: 2
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<![CDATA[Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail]]> 12262741 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State â€� and she would do it alone.

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.]]>
336 Cheryl Strayed 0307592731 Alex 5 4.06 2012 Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
author: Cheryl Strayed
name: Alex
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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The Count of Monte Cristo 9570663 Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’sÌęThe Great American ReadA popular bestseller since its publication in 1844,ÌęThe Count of Monte CristoÌęis one of the great page-turning thrillers of all time. Set against the tumultuous years of the post-Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas’s grand historical romance recounts the swashbuckling adventures of Edmond DantĂšs, a dashing young sailor falsely accused of treason. The story of his long imprisonment, dramatic escape, and carefully wrought revenge offers up a vision of France that has become immortal. As Robert Louis Stevenson declared, “I do not believe there is another volume extant where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of romance.”]]> 1479 Alexandre Dumas Alex 0 currently-reading 4.50 1846 The Count of Monte Cristo
author: Alexandre Dumas
name: Alex
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1846
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[How to Taste: The Curious Cooks Handbook to Seasoning and Balance, from Umami to Acid and Beyondwith Recipes]]> 38904930 This engaging and approachable (and humorous!) guide to taste and flavor will make you a more skilled and confident home cookHow to Taste outlines the underlying principles of taste, and then takes a deep dive into salt, acid, bitter, sweet, fat, umami, bite (heat), aromatics, and texture. You'll find out how temperature impacts your enjoyment of the dishes you make as does color, alcohol, and more. The handbook goes beyond telling home cooks what ingredients go well together or explaining cooking ratios. You'll learn how to adjust a dish that's too salty or too acidic and how to determine when something might be lacking. It also includes recipes and simple kitchen experiments that illustrate the importance of salt in a dish, or identifies whether you're a "supertaster" or not. Each recipe and experiment highlights the chapter's main lesson. How to Taste will ultimately help you feel confident about why and how various components of a dish are used to create balance, harmony, and deliciousness.]]> 240 Becky Selengut 1632171066 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.33 How to Taste: The Curious Cooks Handbook to Seasoning and Balance, from Umami to Acid and Beyondwith Recipes
author: Becky Selengut
name: Alex
average rating: 4.33
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date added: 2018/04/29
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<![CDATA[Secrets of Religion: a temporary separation of God and religion.]]> 25447499 271 Mike Bhangu Alex 0 currently-reading 3.12 2014 Secrets of Religion: a temporary separation of God and religion.
author: Mike Bhangu
name: Alex
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[North Of Nowhere (Alex McKnight, #4)]]> 9002453 288 Steve Hamilton 1429905107 Alex 0 to-read 4.23 2002 North Of Nowhere (Alex McKnight, #4)
author: Steve Hamilton
name: Alex
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/04/22
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When Breath Becomes Air 25899336
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naĂŻve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.]]>
208 Paul Kalanithi 0812988418 Alex 0 to-read 4.41 2016 When Breath Becomes Air
author: Paul Kalanithi
name: Alex
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

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For the Win 7241373
At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual "gold," jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world's poorest countries, where countless "gold farmers," bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of "General Robotwalla." In Shenzen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister's people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation]]>
477 Cory Doctorow 0765322161 Alex 5
I recently read For The Win, by Cory Doctorow. I was amazed at how good it is. It took me on a tour of factories in India, China and California, factories filled with adolescent boys, working not physical machines but playing online games in a virtual reality.

These factories from what I know of it actually exist. People really do employee boys and some girls, a new form of child labor, who harvest “goldâ€� by slaying dragons and such, which is then re-sold in the real world for real gold, that is dollars. Apparently thousands of children do this, and do it in conditions that would make a 19th industrialist proud.

The virtual gold these children harvest is not only sold; it is wagered in by financiers, who speculate on its future price, just as they do with the real soft golden stuff.

Doctorow works all this into the plot, and along the way tells you his thoughts and views on economics and economies. He sets up a world where the old forces of labor play out of capital versus labor, except the fight in both the real world and the virtual one. He brings in the old players in new situations: including wobblies, Pinkertons and one big union for us all.

Doctorow is an interesting fellow. Along with being a writer, he is an actavist in forging a new type of intellectual property for the digital world, one both looser and more encompassing. Although I bought my son a physical copy of the book in a bookstore, I downloaded my copy for free from Doctorow’s website, which I then read on my Kindle. He makes virtually all of his books available for free online. It is part of his view, I assume, that
Culture is not a zero-sum game. If you like his books for free, you’re more likely to eventually buy one between two physical covers.The edition I downloaded is seeded with a little shoutouts to great real bookstores around the world. He also licenses the content to the Creative
Commons, meaning he encourages people to use it for other things, as long as they acknowledge doing so.

I now want to tell various people about this book, my good friend Jim, who was active for years in the real life wobblies and leftist Labor movements.

I do wonder what my seventh grade son Max thinks of all this. Doctorow discusses people like the famous economist Ronald Coase, and something called the Coase cost, which I think is the transactional cost if something. I’m sure Max learned a lot about the contemporary world and the forces shaping it, but I bet he wrestled with some of the concepts and information. That’s okay.

]]>
3.80 2010 For the Win
author: Cory Doctorow
name: Alex
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2018/04/20
date added: 2018/04/20
shelves:
review:
One of the benefits of having a 13-year-old son is that you get to read his books.

I recently read For The Win, by Cory Doctorow. I was amazed at how good it is. It took me on a tour of factories in India, China and California, factories filled with adolescent boys, working not physical machines but playing online games in a virtual reality.

These factories from what I know of it actually exist. People really do employee boys and some girls, a new form of child labor, who harvest “goldâ€� by slaying dragons and such, which is then re-sold in the real world for real gold, that is dollars. Apparently thousands of children do this, and do it in conditions that would make a 19th industrialist proud.

The virtual gold these children harvest is not only sold; it is wagered in by financiers, who speculate on its future price, just as they do with the real soft golden stuff.

Doctorow works all this into the plot, and along the way tells you his thoughts and views on economics and economies. He sets up a world where the old forces of labor play out of capital versus labor, except the fight in both the real world and the virtual one. He brings in the old players in new situations: including wobblies, Pinkertons and one big union for us all.

Doctorow is an interesting fellow. Along with being a writer, he is an actavist in forging a new type of intellectual property for the digital world, one both looser and more encompassing. Although I bought my son a physical copy of the book in a bookstore, I downloaded my copy for free from Doctorow’s website, which I then read on my Kindle. He makes virtually all of his books available for free online. It is part of his view, I assume, that
Culture is not a zero-sum game. If you like his books for free, you’re more likely to eventually buy one between two physical covers.The edition I downloaded is seeded with a little shoutouts to great real bookstores around the world. He also licenses the content to the Creative
Commons, meaning he encourages people to use it for other things, as long as they acknowledge doing so.

I now want to tell various people about this book, my good friend Jim, who was active for years in the real life wobblies and leftist Labor movements.

I do wonder what my seventh grade son Max thinks of all this. Doctorow discusses people like the famous economist Ronald Coase, and something called the Coase cost, which I think is the transactional cost if something. I’m sure Max learned a lot about the contemporary world and the forces shaping it, but I bet he wrestled with some of the concepts and information. That’s okay.


]]>
<![CDATA[Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream]]> 26042126 With a new afterword by the author

Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business. In bad times, the unemployment rate barrels out of control; in good times, its murder rate skyrockets. But every Friday night from September to December, when the Permian High School Panthers play football, this West Texas town becomes a place where dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, H. G. Bissinger chronicles a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires--and sometimes shatters--the teenagers who wear the Panthers' uniforms. The author’s new afterword not only updates the story but also offers a sure-to-be controversial assessment of the state of football today.
]]>
440 H.G. Bissinger 0306824221 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.27 1988 Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
author: H.G. Bissinger
name: Alex
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1988
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/04/18
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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The Berlin Stories 18890412 256 Christopher Isherwood 0811220281 Alex 4 4.12 1945 The Berlin Stories
author: Christopher Isherwood
name: Alex
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1945
rating: 4
read at: 2018/03/29
date added: 2018/03/29
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 (The How To Talk Series)]]> 29430725
A must-have resource for anyone who lives or works with young kids, with an introduction by Adele Faber, coauthor of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk , the international mega-bestseller The Boston Globe dubbed “The Parenting Bible.â€�

For over thirty-five years, parents have turned to How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk for its respectful and effective solutions to the unending challenges of raising children. Now, in response to growing demand, Adele’s daughter, Joanna Faber, along with Julie King, tailor How to Talk’s powerful communication skills to children ages two to seven.

Faber and King, each a parenting expert in her own right, share their wisdom accumulated over years of conducting How To Talk workshops with parents and a broad variety of professionals. With a lively combination of storytelling, cartoons, and fly-on-the-wall discussions from their workshops, they provide concrete tools and tips that will transform your relationship with the young kids in your life.

What do you do with a little kid who
won’t brush her teeth
screams in his car seat
pinches the baby...refuses to eat vegetables
throws books in the library...runs rampant in the supermarket? Organized according to common challenges and conflicts, this book is an essential emergency first-aid manual of communication strategies, including a chapter that addresses the special needs of children with sensory processing and autism spectrum disorders.

This user-friendly guide will empower parents and caregivers of young children to forge rewarding, joyful relationships with terrible two-year-olds, truculent three-year-olds, ferocious four-year-olds, foolhardy five-year-olds, self-centered six-year-olds, and the occasional semi-civilized seven-year-old. And, it will help little kids grow into self-reliant big kids who are cooperative and connected to their parents, teachers, siblings, and peers.]]>
385 Joanna Faber 1501131656 Alex 0 to-read 4.38 2017 How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 (The How To Talk Series)
author: Joanna Faber
name: Alex
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

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Commonwealth 28214468
#1 New York Times Bestseller | NBCC Award Finalist | New York Times Best Book of the Year | USA Today Best Book | TIME Magazine Top 10 Selection | Oprah Favorite Book | New York Magazine Best Book of The Year

The acclaimed, bestselling author—winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize—tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two familiesâ€� lives.

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.]]>
352 Ann Patchett 0062491814 Alex 0 currently-reading 3.97 2016 Commonwealth
author: Ann Patchett
name: Alex
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/02/25
shelves: currently-reading
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The Berlin Stories 16810 The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which make up The Berlin Stories are recognized today as classics of modern fiction.

A charming city of avenues and cafés, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs - all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power.

Here are Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught in the struggle between Nazis and Communists; plump FrĂ€ulein Schroeder, who thinks an operation to reduce the scale of her ”țĂŒČőłÙ±đ might relieve her heart palpitations; the Landauers, a distinguished and doomed Jewish family; Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie Harris in "I Am a Camera" and by Liza Minelli in "Cabaret."]]>
401 Christopher Isherwood 0811200701 Alex 3
The colorful paintings of Hockney led me to it because the author, Christopher Isherwood, was a longtime friend (lover?) of Hockney when they were both I guess middle-aged. Isherwood must be older than Hockney. I still would not have known about the book though, but my nephew's girlfriend brought it up when we were discussing Hockney. We were discussing Hockney because we had all seen the show of his at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She said I had to read Isherwood's book, The Berlin Stories. So I did.

I would say it's a good book, but not a great one, which is not the same thing as saying it's not significant. Probably it affects some people more strongly than others. What makes the book good is that it has the flavor of coming across someone's journal about living in Berlin in the early 1930s, with people he met turned into characters and so forth. It doesn't have the power or trajectory of the film. (I haven't seen the play.) And of course, it doesn't have the singing and dancing!

The book is basically a collection of stories built around people Isherwood met while in Berlin as an English teacher. Because of his job, and his living situation in various boarding houses, he came across a wide variety of people and did sketch out all sorts, from wealthy industrialists to society girls, to cabaret singers, to Communists and Nazis.

Sally Bowles, the character Liza Minnelli plays in the film, is in the book. She is a reoccurring character, and probably the most powerful one in terms of her vibrancy and staying power. She is the only character I could see who made it into the film whole. Everyone else in the film, as well as its plot, seems to be a mashup of various things in the book.

The book does bring to mind again the dangers of passion, of believing in anything, basically. The only people worth a damn in the book, to overstate a bit, are the Communists and the Nazis. They are the only ones getting up early, working hard, sticking together, fighting for a cause. Everyone else are no-accounts, good for nothings, drunks, cheats and beggars. In the book, the Communists actually seem more powerful and numerous than the Nazis. I wonder if in some alternate future, the Communists could have taken over Germany, instead of the Nazis. Probably not, because I think the Nazis came to power in part because the elite feared the Communists, and thus allied themselves with the Nazis, thinking it would be a short term thing. It wasn't.

Both the Communists and the Nazis were, of course, deeply wrong. It is an annual game among people who care about which group resulted in the deaths of more millions. Neither were "the good guys," although I guess you can say neither was wrong about everything. No one is wrong about everything.

I forgot to say that there were some troubling similarities with our own times. The tension and antagonism between the groups, the unrest in society, does remind me of the tensions and anger between the Trump supporters, and basically everyone else. But we don't have people beating people up in the streets, or political murders. We are still a long way from 1930s Berlin.]]>
4.04 1945 The Berlin Stories
author: Christopher Isherwood
name: Alex
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1945
rating: 3
read at: 2018/01/01
date added: 2018/02/07
shelves:
review:
It was David Hockney, the painter, and family relations that led me to this book, which I am embarrassed to say I had never heard of. I say embarrassed because the play and film Cabaret, which I love, were based on it. I should have known this.

The colorful paintings of Hockney led me to it because the author, Christopher Isherwood, was a longtime friend (lover?) of Hockney when they were both I guess middle-aged. Isherwood must be older than Hockney. I still would not have known about the book though, but my nephew's girlfriend brought it up when we were discussing Hockney. We were discussing Hockney because we had all seen the show of his at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She said I had to read Isherwood's book, The Berlin Stories. So I did.

I would say it's a good book, but not a great one, which is not the same thing as saying it's not significant. Probably it affects some people more strongly than others. What makes the book good is that it has the flavor of coming across someone's journal about living in Berlin in the early 1930s, with people he met turned into characters and so forth. It doesn't have the power or trajectory of the film. (I haven't seen the play.) And of course, it doesn't have the singing and dancing!

The book is basically a collection of stories built around people Isherwood met while in Berlin as an English teacher. Because of his job, and his living situation in various boarding houses, he came across a wide variety of people and did sketch out all sorts, from wealthy industrialists to society girls, to cabaret singers, to Communists and Nazis.

Sally Bowles, the character Liza Minnelli plays in the film, is in the book. She is a reoccurring character, and probably the most powerful one in terms of her vibrancy and staying power. She is the only character I could see who made it into the film whole. Everyone else in the film, as well as its plot, seems to be a mashup of various things in the book.

The book does bring to mind again the dangers of passion, of believing in anything, basically. The only people worth a damn in the book, to overstate a bit, are the Communists and the Nazis. They are the only ones getting up early, working hard, sticking together, fighting for a cause. Everyone else are no-accounts, good for nothings, drunks, cheats and beggars. In the book, the Communists actually seem more powerful and numerous than the Nazis. I wonder if in some alternate future, the Communists could have taken over Germany, instead of the Nazis. Probably not, because I think the Nazis came to power in part because the elite feared the Communists, and thus allied themselves with the Nazis, thinking it would be a short term thing. It wasn't.

Both the Communists and the Nazis were, of course, deeply wrong. It is an annual game among people who care about which group resulted in the deaths of more millions. Neither were "the good guys," although I guess you can say neither was wrong about everything. No one is wrong about everything.

I forgot to say that there were some troubling similarities with our own times. The tension and antagonism between the groups, the unrest in society, does remind me of the tensions and anger between the Trump supporters, and basically everyone else. But we don't have people beating people up in the streets, or political murders. We are still a long way from 1930s Berlin.
]]>
Sing, Unburied, Sing 33620321 A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a New York Times bestseller, this majestic, stirring, and widely praised novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, the story of a family on a journey through rural Mississippi, is a “tour de forceâ€� (O, The Oprah Magazine) and a timeless work of fiction that is destined to become a classic.

Jesmyn Ward’s historic second National Book Award–winner is “perfectly poised for the momentâ€� (The New York Times), an intimate portrait of three generations of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. “Ward’s writing throbs with life, grief, and loveâ€� this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to itâ€� (Buzzfeed).

Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn’t lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won’t acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.

His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister’s lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children’s father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can’t put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.

When the children’s father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.

Rich with Ward’s distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic and unforgettable family story and “an odyssey through rural Mississippi’s past and presentâ€� (The Philadelphia Inquirer).]]>
299 Jesmyn Ward Alex 1 4.08 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Alex
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2017
rating: 1
read at: 2018/01/13
date added: 2018/01/13
shelves:
review:

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Darkness at Noon 8081498 272 Arthur Koestler 1439188459 Alex 0 currently-reading 4.19 1940 Darkness at Noon
author: Arthur Koestler
name: Alex
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1940
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/01/04
shelves: currently-reading
review:

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<![CDATA[We Die Alone: A WWII Epic Of Escape And Endurance]]> 399694 208 David Howarth 1599210630 Alex 5 4.15 1954 We Die Alone: A WWII Epic Of Escape And Endurance
author: David Howarth
name: Alex
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2017/12/31
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies]]> 18848977 One of the most influential economists of the decade-and the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Stagnation-boldly argues that just about everything you've heard about food is wrong. Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social commentator, and maverick dining guide blogger Tyler Cowen. Americans are becoming angry that our agricultural practices have led to global warming-but while food snobs are right that local food tastes better, they're wrong that it is better for the environment, and they are wrong that cheap food is bad food. The food world needs to know that you don't have to spend more to eat healthy, green, exciting meals. At last, some good news from an economist!

Tyler Cowen discusses everything from slow food to fast food, from agriculture to gourmet culture, from modernist cuisine to how to pick the best street vendor. He shows why airplane food is bad but airport food is good; why restaurants full of happy, attractive people serve mediocre meals; and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. And most important of all, he shows how to get good, cheap eats just about anywhere.

Just as The Great Stagnation was Cowen's response to all the fashionable thinking about the economic crisis, An Economist Gets Lunch is his response to all the fashionable thinking about food. Provocative, incisive, and as enjoyable as a juicy, grass-fed burger, it will influence what you'll choose to eat today and how we're going to feed the world tomorrow.]]>
302 Tyler Cowen 1101561661 Alex 5 3.92 2012 An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
author: Tyler Cowen
name: Alex
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2017/12/31
shelves:
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To Kill a Mockingbird 2654 "Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.]]>
323 Harper Lee Alex 5 4.42 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird
author: Harper Lee
name: Alex
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2017/12/31
shelves:
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<![CDATA[Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America]]> 13331138
In 1784, Thomas Jefferson struck a deal with his slave, James Hemings. The Founding Father was traveling to Paris and wanted to bring James along “for a particular purpose”â€� to master the art of French cooking. In exchange for James’s cooperation, Jefferson would grant his freedom.

So began one of the strangest partnerships in United States history. As Hemings apprenticed under master French chefs, Jefferson studied the cultivation of French crops (especially grapes for wine-making) so they might be replicated in American agriculture. The two men returned home with such marvels as pasta, French fries, Champagne, macaroni and cheese, crĂšme brĂ»lĂ©e, and a host of other treats. This narrative history tells the story of their remarkable adventure—and even includes a few of their favorite recipes!]]>
234 Thomas J. Craughwell 1594745781 Alex 5 3.45 2012 Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America
author: Thomas J. Craughwell
name: Alex
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2017/12/31
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life]]> 11728735
France is a seductive country, seductive in its elegance, its beauty, its sensual pleasures, and its joie de vivre. But Elaine Sciolino, the longtime Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, has discovered that seduction is much more than a game to the French: it is the key to understanding France.

Seduction plays a crucial role in how the French relate to one another—not just in romantic relationships but also in how they conduct business, enjoy food and drink, define style, engage in intellectual debate, elect politicians, and project power around the world. While sexual repartee and conquest remain at the heart of seduction, for the French seduction has become a philosophy of life, even an ideology, that can confuse outsiders.

In La Seduction, Sciolino gives us an inside view of how seduction works in all areas, analyzing its limits as well as its power. She demystifies the French way of life in an entertaining and personal narrative that carries us from the neighborhood shops of Paris to the halls of government, from the gardens of Versailles to the agricultural heartland.

La Seduction will charm you and encourage you to lower your defenses about the French. Pull up a chair and let Elaine Sciolino seduce you.]]>
352 Elaine Sciolino Alex 5 3.86 2011 La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life
author: Elaine Sciolino
name: Alex
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/12/31
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Venice and Food 2564810 200 Sally Spector 8877431733 Alex 5 4.48 1998 Venice and Food
author: Sally Spector
name: Alex
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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date added: 2017/12/31
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Venetian Life 29500790 This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

]]>
William Dean Howells Alex 5 5.00 1866 Venetian Life
author: William Dean Howells
name: Alex
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1866
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2017/12/31
shelves:
review:

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<![CDATA[The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community]]> 19858014
Americans today find themselves mired in an era of uncertainty and frustration. The nation's safety net is pulling apart under its own weight; political compromise is viewed as a form of defeat; and our faith in the enduring concept of American exceptionalism appears increasingly outdated.

But the American Age may not be ending. In The Vanishing Neighbor, Marc J. Dunkelman identifies an epochal shift in the structure of American life—a shift unnoticed by many. Routines that once put doctors and lawyers in touch with grocers and plumbers—interactions that encouraged debate and cultivated compromise—have changed dramatically since the postwar era. Both technology and the new routines of everyday life connect tight-knit circles and expand the breadth of our social landscapes, but they've sapped the commonplace, incidental interactions that for centuries have built local communities and fostered healthy debate.

The disappearance of these once-central relationships—between people who are familiar but not close, or friendly but not intimate—lies at the root of America's economic woes and political gridlock. The institutions that were erected to support what Tocqueville called the "township"—that unique locus of the power of citizens—are failing because they haven't yet been molded to the realities of the new American community.

It's time we moved beyond the debate over whether the changes being made to American life are good or bad and focus instead on understanding the tradeoffs. Our cities are less racially segregated than in decades past, but we’ve become less cognizant of what's happening in the lives of people from different economic backgrounds, education levels, or age groups. Familiar divisions have been replaced by cross-cutting networks—with profound effects for the way we resolve conflicts, spur innovation, and care for those in need.

The good news is that the very transformation at the heart of our current anxiety holds the promise of more hope and prosperity than would have been possible under the old order. The Vanishing Neighbor argues persuasively that to win the future we need to adapt yesterday’s institutions to the realities of the twenty-first-century American community.]]>
321 Marc J. Dunkelman 0393243990 Alex 4 3.55 2014 The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
author: Marc J. Dunkelman
name: Alex
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2017/12/31
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