Blog Post
New Fiction Titles on the New York Times Bestseller List (August 7, 2005)
by Mazie
There are three new additions to pack for the beach or cottage on this week’s list.
At #2 is The Interruption of Everything by Terry McMillan: a troubled marriage is complicated even more by an unplanned pregnancy.
At #7 is The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella: the laughs begin when a lawyer flees London and her job in a high-powered law firm to work as a housekeeper in the middle of nowhere.
At #8 is No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy: a gritty modern western involving drugs and stolen money.
Blog Post
New Non-fiction Books on the New York Times Best Sellers List: August 14, 2005
by Van
Ann Arborites, which book do you think will get the most holds?
#10
Bill Maher’s New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer with such polite, timid musings on George W. Bush as “George Bush must stop saying he owes all his success to Laura. George Bush owes all his success to his daddy, his daddy’s friends, trust funds, legacy admissions, the National Guard, the Supreme Court, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and A.A.”
or
#13
Pennsylvania’s Senator Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, a direct rebuttal to New York’s Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s It Takes a Village : and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The book outlines how liberal philosophies and attempts to deal with social problems over the past forty years have failed. Senator Santorum feels we need compassionate conservatism, a policy approach that centers on family, community and church. Dr. Laura A. Schlessinger likes the book: “I am amazed at the depth and breadth of information, wisdom, and sensitivity.”
Blog Post
Traveling Through Time: a Guide to Michigan’s Historical Markers
by Van
This book, edited by Laura R. Ashlee, is arranged by county and by place within the county and has the location and the text of the official Michigan Historical Markers. Of the over fourteen hundred Michigan Historical Markers dedicated since the program began in 1955 fifty-five are in Washtenaw County and fourteen are in Ann Arbor.
The markers in Ann Arbor commemorate the founding of the Michigan Anti-Slavery Society in 1836; the Earhart Manor on the grounds of Concordia University; Governor Alpheus Felch (also Mayor of Ann Arbor, Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, United States Senator, and Tappan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan); the Ticknor-Campbell House (the Cobblestone Farm); Michigan’s First Jewish Cemetery Site; and nine other events, buildings, and churches.
Blog Post
The Cup of the World
by Blanche
Enjoy fantasy? Here’s one that should keep you guessing. The Cup of the World by John Dickinson is the story of 16-year-old Phaedra who is courted by a handsome, mysterious young knight who has visited her in dreams since childhood. When she finally meets the knight in the flesh, she marries him immediately, despite his family's sinister reputation for practicing black magic and his leadership of a territory on the verge of rebellion against the king. As her country descends into civil war, Phaedra discovers the dark truth about her husband's powers and must find the strength to fight for what matters most to her. Ages 14 and up. Watch for the sequel The Widow and the King.
Blog Post
Summer's End
by kidlit
Summer's End by Audrey Couloumbis takes place in the summer of 1965. But it could just as well be set in the present.
12-year-old Grace is angered when her 18-year-old brother burns his draft card and takes off for Canada the day before her 13th birthday party. The party is called off and her family is thrown into turmoil.
When four generations of Grace's family gather at the family farm that summer, feelings run rampant. Two of the cousins are off to Canada, two are already in Vietnam, some older members are veterans from the Korean War. The discussions are heated, but always filled with mutual love and respect.
This book is a well-written story that could be used as a starting point for family or classroom discussions about war, both past and present.
Blog Post
A Long Way Down
by muffy
Just finished Nick Hornby’s latest – A Long Way Down . It’s a bit darker than About a Boy and High Fidelity, but no less engaging. That wicked sense of humor is there though you might not expect it since the plot centered around four desperate would-be jumpers who met on New Year’s Eve atop one of London’s tallest buildings.
Narrated in alternate chapters by each of these miserable souls, they recounted what led them to this fateful meeting and also subsequent events that coalesced them into some kind of surrogate family.
Starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Critic’s Choice in People Weekly. Film rights to Johnny Depp.
I am thinking Jude Law to play bad-boy Martin Sharp; definitely Toni Collette as at-the-end-of-her-rope single Mom Maureen; Evan Rachel Wood as the vulnerable, potty-mouthed Jess; and we MUST have hunky Ewan for the washed-up rocker – besides, he already knows how to ride a bike. What do you think?
Blog Post
Peter Jennings
by sernabad
Peter Jennings, longtime ABC Nightly News anchor, died August 7, after a short, determined battle against lung cancer.
Jennings, a Canadian who had dropped out of high school, was known for his ubiquitous presence at seemingly all the major breaking news events of the past two four decades, and for his extensive travels worldwide which brought the news into our living rooms. Jennings was never more front and center than when reporting on September 11th. According to today’s New York Times, “[Jennings]" would spend more than 60 hours on the air in what Tom Shales of The Washington Post, among other critics, praised as a tour de force of interviewing and explanatory broadcast journalism laced with undisguised bewilderment.”
Remarkably, Jennings managed to co-write, with Todd Brewster, two books during his journalism career. The Century (1998), wrote a companion book to the popular 12-hour ABC-TV documentary series by the same name. Using photographs and interviews, Jennings and Brewster spanned 100 years in American history .
In their second collaboration, In Search of America (2002), Jennings and Brewster spent time in six cities (Aiken, SC; Washington, D.C.; Salt Lake City; Plano, TX; Boulder, CO; and Gary, IN) checking the pulse of American opinions. Their observations on America’s thoughts about religion, globalization, and popular culture, among other topics, go a long way to explain the contentious nature of today’s national discussion.
Peter Jennings was 67.
Blog Post
The Play Ground
by Albert
Opening The Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Michigan gave established movie actor Jeff Daniels the opportunity to create a professional theatre company, featuring Midwestern actors, directors, designers and playwrights. Playing there through September 24 is a play by author and columnist Mitch Albom, And the Winner Is. It is directed by PRTC Artistic Director Guy Sanville.
Jenn McKee of the Ann Arbor News says that the play "...takes on considerable emotional heft and poignancy, and Albom achieves a fitting end that is simultaneously inevitable and surprising. Albom also, throughout the play, offers up a good deal of bright, cynical humor... “
Blog Post
Fair and Tender Ladies, by Lee Smith
by sernabad
For her August 2005 book club discussion, Reader’s Review, Diane Rehm has breathed new life into Fair and Tender Ladies, the 1988 epistolary novel by Lee Smith. Set in pre World War I Sugar Fork, Virginia, tucked into the Appalachians, Smith’s letter-writing protagonist, Ivy Rowe, is as prolific a storyteller as Smith herself. Ivy had big ambitions to be a writer but an early pregnancy and marriage turned her, instead, into a non-stop correspondent throughout her life. Based on letters that Smith picked up at a garage sale, Fair and Tender Ladies is one of those timeless stories to be cherished over and over.
Rehm and her audience will discuss Fair and Tender Ladies on Wednesday, August, 17.
Blog Post
In the Shadow of the Law, by Kermit Roosevelt III
by sernabad
Not since Scott Turow’s break-away 1987 best seller, Presumed Innocent, has there been quite this much buzz for a new legal thriller author. Kermit Roosevelt III, blue-blooded great-great grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, sure knows from whence he writes. A former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice David Souter, Roosevelt has penned a riveting page turner with The Law starring front and center. At the heart of this first novel are two lawyers in one of Washington’s toniest, most cut throat K Street law firms. Rumpled sleepy Mark Clayton is doing pro bono work for a death penalty case while his much more cut-throat colleague, Walker Eliot, works a defense for a Texas chemical plant, site of a deadly explosion that killed dozens of low-wage employees.
Roosevelt, assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the recipient of a flood of rave reviews, will be interviewed on the Diane Rehm Show on Tuesday, August 9, 2005.