Suggested Reading – October 2008

Living On the Black – John Feinstein
GV 865 .G53 F45 2008
Pitchers are at the heart of baseball.  They are the ones with the ball in their hands for every pitch of every game.  They have the potential to make their team a winner or, very quickly, a loser.  The pressure is huge.   The constant expectations of teammates, managers, owners, and, most certainly, fans make every outing a test of skill and of a pitcher’s will.  In the end, only those with the arm and the heart and the ability to manage extraordinary stress emerge as champions.

The Plague of Doves – Louise Erdrich
PS 3555 .R42 P55 2008
Evelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love.  Mooshum, Evelina’s grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past.  In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in their corner of North Dakota.

The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal – Gore Vidal
PS 3543 .I26 A6 2008
Gore Vidal—novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist—is America’s premier man of letters.  This volume comprises some twenty-four of his forays into criticism, reviewing, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling.  Among them are such classics as “The Top Ten Best Sellers,” “Dawn Powell: The American Writer,” “Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy,” “Pornography,” and “The Second American Revolution.”

Envious Moon – Thomas Christopher Greene
PS 3607 .R453 E58 2007
Envious Moon is a harrowing tale of the sometimes dark obsession, and often sensual beauty, that accompanies young love.  With a nod to Romeo and Juliet and reminiscent of Endless Love, Thomas Christopher Greene tells the story of two young lovers and their journey to find perfection in each other’s arms.

Baghdad at Sunrise – Peter R. Mansoor
DS 79.76 .M358 2008
Drawing not only on his own daily combat journal but also on observations by embedded reporters, news reports, combat logs, archived e-mails, and many other sources, Mansoor offers a contemporary record of the valor, motivations, and resolve of the 1st Brigade and its attachments during Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Baghdad at Sunrise provides a detailed, nuanced analysis of U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, and along with it critically important lessons for America’s military and political leaders of the twenty-first century.

The Great Wall – John Man
DS 793 .G67 M3 2008
In this account, John Man travels the entire length of the Great Wall and across two millennia to uncover the truth behind the legends.  He explores the largest, most familiar sections as well as the remotest outposts.  He is the first writer to describe two unknown walls in Mongolia.  Along the way, he finds his way into the remarkable and complex history of China, taking us from the country’s first brutal unification, through wars with the Mongols, and right up to the modern day.

Fresh Disasters – Stuart Woods
PS 3573 .O642 F74 2007
It starts as just another late night at Elaine’s and ends with Stone forced to deal, yet again, with the hapless Herbie Fisher, the bane of his existence.  Stone finds that what should have been a throwaway case instead leads right to a powerful mob boss with a notoriously bad temper and long reach.  Fortunately for Stone, the twists of the case also take a more congenial turn—sending a little romance his way, and giving him another opportunity to try to rescue a beautiful woman in distress.

A Voyage Long and Strange – Tony Horwitz
E 101 .H77 2008
In A Voyage Long and Strange Horwitz uncovers the neglected story of America’s founding by Europeans.  He begins a thousand years ago, with the Vikings, and then tells the dramatic tale of conquistadors, castaways, French voyageurs, Moorish slaves, and many others who roamed and rampaged across half the states of the present-day U.S. continent, long before the Mayflower landed.  These forgotten firstcomers sought grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis, and brought creatures, weapons, and germs unknown to natives of the New World.

My Sister, My Love – Joyce Carol Oates
PS 3565 .A8 M895 2008
“Dysfunctional families are all alike.  Ditto ‘survivors.’”  So begins the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an “infamous” American family.  A decade ago the Rampikes were destroyed by the murder of Skyler’s six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed.  Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler’s own lost childhood; and part corrosively funny expose of the pretentions of upper-middle-class American suburbia, this captivating novel explores with unexpected sympathy and subtlety the intimate lives of those who dwell in Tabloid Hell.

The Road to Monticello – Kevin J. Hayes
E 332.2 .H395 2008
Thomas Jefferson was an avid book collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer—a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton.  And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.  Kevin J. Hayes fills this important gap by offering a lively account of Jefferson’s spiritual and intellectual development, focusing on the books and ideas that exerted the most profound influence on him.

Light from Heaven – Jan Karon
PS 3561 .A678 L535 2005
Father Timothy Kavanagh has been asked to “come up higher” more than once.  He did, after all, raise a thrown-away boy, adopt a dog the size of a Buick, and recite his wedding vows at the tender age of sixtysomething.  But he’s never been asked to do the impossible.  While farm-sitting with Cynthia outside Mitford, the retired Episcopal priest is charged with the revival of Holy Trinity, a mountain church that’s been closed for forty years.  His bishop’s further mandate: “Get it up and running, ASAP.”

One Minute to Midnight – Michael Dobbs
E 841 .D573 2008
Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we came to Armageddon.  Here, for the first time, are griping accounts of Krushchev’s plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board.

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