Senior Reading List (Annotated) • Summer 2007

Newton South High School

All students entering Curriculum I & II & Honors English classes are required to read ONE of the following memoirs:

Fuller, Alexandra, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Hornby, Nick, Fever Pitch

Karr, Mary, The Liars' Club,

MacDonald, Michael Patrick, All Souls

Obama, Barack, Dreams from My Father

Orwell, George, Down and Out in Paris and London

All students are required to also read one book from the list below, and one book of their choice.

Be sure to read books that you have not read previously, in or out of school.

At the beginning of the school year, students will be asked to consider, discuss, and respond to the books verbally and in written form. A summer reading examination is commonly given. Students should be prepared to bring either the books or detailed notes, or both, to class sometime during the first weeks of school.

Have a great summer and read, read, read!

In Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity.

Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller's endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. In wry and sometimes.hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.

Nick Hornby has been a soccer fan since the moment he was born. Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong

obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby's award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom -its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young men's coming of age stories. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.

In The Liars' Club, Mary Karr, a prize-winning poet and critic, looks back at her upbringing in a swampy

East Texas refinery town with a volatile, defiantly loving family. She recalls her painter mother, seven times married, whose outlaw spirit could tip into psychosis; a fist-swinging father who spun tales with his cronies, dubbed the Liars' Club; and a neighborhood rape when she was eight. An inheritance was squandered, endless bottles emptied, and guns leveled at the deserving and undeserving. With a raw authenticity stripped of self-pity and a poet's eye for the lyrical detail, Karr shows us a "terrific family of liars and drunks . . .redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth".

All Souls is a plainly written, powerful memoir. MacDonald, now 32, details not only his own story of

growing up in Southie, Boston's Irish Catholic enclave, but examines the myriad ways in which the media and law enforcement agencies exploit marginalized working-class communities. Having grown up in the Old Colony housing project, he describes his neighbors' indigence and pride of place, as well as their blatant racism (in 1975 the anti-busing riots in Southie made national headlines) and their deep denial of the organized crime and entrenched drug culture that was destroying the youth and social fabric. MacDonald paints a frightening portrait of a community under intense economic and social stress, issuing a forceful plea for understanding and justice.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama, the son of a white American mother and a black African father, writes

an elegant and compelling biography that powerfully articulates America's racial battleground and tells of his search for his place in black America. Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to an American woman and a Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents. Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity and reconciliation of his divided inheritance.

Down and Out in Paris and London is an autobiographical work by George Orwell, published in 1933.

Orwell's first published book, it contains essays in which actual events are recounted in a fictionalized form. The book recounts that to atone for the guilt he feels about the conditions under which the disenfranchised and downtrodden peoples of the world exist, Orwell decides to live and work as one of them. Dressed as a beggar, he takes whatever employment might be available to a poverty-stricken outcast of Europe. In Paris he lives in a slum and works as a dishwasher. The essay "How the Poor Die" describes conditions at a charity hospital there. In London's East End, he dresses and lives like his neighbors, who are paupers and the poorest of working-class laborers. Dressed as a tramp, he travels throughout England with hoboes and migrant laborers.

Ambrose, Stephen, Undaunted Courage

From the bestselling author of the book on D-Day comes the definitive book on the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a colorful and realistic backdrop for the expedition. High adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy combine with high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel.

Angelou, Maya, Heart of a Woman

Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired countless readers with the first three volumes of her autobiography, one of the most remarkable personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth volume, her turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for writing blazes anew. Her compassion and commitment lead her to respond to the fiery times by becoming the northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest. A tempestuous, earthy woman, she promises her heart to one man only to have it stolen, virtually on her wedding day, by a passionate African freedom fighter. Filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous characters, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X, The Heart of a Woman sings with Maya Angelou's eloquent prose -- her fondest dreams, deepest disappointments, and her dramatically tender relationship with her rebellious teenage son. Vulnerable, humorous, tough, Maya speaks with an intimate awareness of the heart within all of us.

Anonymous, It Happened to Nancy

Fourteen-year-old Nancy, an asthmatic, meets 18-year-old Collin, a gentle, caring young man who appears to be the answer to her dreams, until he rapes her, leaving her HIV-infected. In spite of her rapid decline, explained in a note at the beginning of the book, as the result of her weakened immune system, Nancy leads a full, poignantly happy life because of the loving support of both friends and family. Sparks provides additional educational information at the end of the book, "Questions Nancy Wanted Answered About Rape and AIDS," a good thing, since Nancy asked her diary several questions without providing their answers in the body of the text. Parts of the book are graphic; and she progresses from happy-go-lucky junior high school student to AIDS patient in a spiral that will hold the readerπs attention, without the didacticism of so many message-inherent titles. In spite of its flaws, Nancy's diary should be on our shelves.

Atwood, Margaret, Cat's Eye OR The Handmaid's Tale

Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to the city ofher youth for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship, longing, and betrayal. Elaine must come to terms with her own identity as a daughter, a lover, an artist, and a woman -- but above all she must seek release from her haunting memories. Disturbing, hilarious, and compassionate, Cat's Eye is a breathtaking novel of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life.

The Handmaid's Tale: In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies? Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now.... Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

Bauby, Jean-Dominique, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor-in-chief of French Elle, the father of two young children, a 44-year-old man known and loved for his wit, his style, and his impassioned approach to life. By the end of the year he was also the victim of a rare kind of stroke to the brainstem.  After 20 days in a coma, Bauby awoke into a body which had all but stopped working: only his left eye functioned, allowing him to see and, by blinking it, to make clear that his mind was unimpaired. Almost miraculously, he was soon able to express himself in the richest detail: dictating a word at a time, blinking to select each letter as the alphabet was recited to him slowly, over and over again. In the same way, he was able eventually to compose this extraordinary book. By turns wistful, mischievous, angry, and witty, Bauby bears witness to his determination to live as fully in his mind as he had been able to do in his body. He explains the joy, and deep sadness, of seeing his children and of hearing his aged father's voice on the phone. In magical sequences, he imagines traveling to other places and times and of lying next to the woman he loves. Fed only intravenously, he imagines preparing and tasting the full flavor of delectable dishes. Again and again he returns to an "inexhaustible reservoir of sensations," keeping in touch with himself and the life around him. Jean-Dominique Bauby died two days after the French publication of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This book is a lasting testament to his life.

Bellow, Saul, Ravelstein

This latest novel by Pulitzer (1975) and Nobel prize (1976) winner Bellow is basically a rumination on the themes of friendship, love, death, and aging. It offers very little in the way of plot but a great deal as a sensitive exploration into the human condition. Ravelstein is a brilliant albeit eccentric professor of political philosophy, many of whose acolytes have become the movers and shakers of today's world. He has always lived life to the fullest, even when he couldn't afford to--a point that becomes moot when he publishes, at best friend Chick's suggestion, a best-selling book outlining his ideas. When he is diagnosed with AIDS, Ravelstein convinces Chick, a well-known writer in his own right, to become his Boswell. Consisting of Chick's reflections on their relationship--memories of discussions on a wide range of topics from the nature of truth to nihilism, from the responsibilities inherent in being a Jew to the nature of love, from the world of the intellect to the world of vaudeville--the book is at once witty, erudite, and compassionate. While its pace and intellectual depth may put off those more attuned to today's "popular" genre, this is the work of a master and unquestionably belongs in all academic and public libraries.

Bragg, Rick, All Over But the Shoutin' OR Ava's Man (biog.)

All Over But the Shoutin' is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who need him most. But at the center of this memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives, and the country that shaped them, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family.

In Ava's Man, Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother's childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.

Brown, Rita Mae, Rubyfruit Jungle

Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after. Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a dirt-poor southern couple who want something better for their daughter. Molly plays doctor with the boys, beats up Leroy, and loses her virginity to her girlfriend. Molly decides not to apologize for that, but the world is not tolerant. Booted out of college for moral turpitude, an unrepentant, penniless Molly takes New York by storm, sending not a few female hearts aflutter with her startling beauty, crackling wit, and fierce determination.

Camus, Albert, The Stranger

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once heπs imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. This is the story of a man who commits a pointless murder, in which the author asks if there is a God or just a cold indifferent universe.

Carver, Raymond, Cathedral

Nothing much happens to the subjects of Carverπs fiction, which is precisely why they are so harrowing: nothingness is a daunting presence to overcome. And rarely do they prevail, but the loneliness and quiet struggle the characters endure provide fertile ground for literary triumph, particularly in the hands of Carver, who was perhaps in his best form with this collection. Stories include: "Feathers" "Chef's House" "Preservation" "The Compartment" "A Small, Good Thing" "Vitamins" "Careful" "Where I'm Calling From" "The Train" "Fever" "The Bridle" "Cathedral."

Chai, May-Lee, The Girl from Purple Mountain (biog)

The authors, Winberg Chai and his daughter May-lee, examine the life of Winberg's mother, Ruth, in an attempt to understand her secret decision to be buried alone instead of in the shared plots she and her husband had bought together years before.

Chekhov, Anton, The Cherry Orchard

This classic of world drama is set in turn-of-the-century Russia, symbolized in the sale of the cherry orchard owned by Madame Ranevskaya. It showcases Chekhov's rich sensitivities as observer of human nature.

Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Sharer

The Secret Sharer is about a murderous captain who is tragically alienated from other people.

Davies, Robertson, Fifth Business

Part of the Deptford Trilogy; Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous.

Desai, Kiran, The Inheritance of Loss

Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan state - Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibe - meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquility of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.

Dubus, Andre, Dancing After Hours OR Meditations From a Movable Chair

Dancing After Hours: Dubus's first story collection in nearly a decade centers around the concerns that have informed all his writing: spirituality, Catholicism, adultery, love and the difficult attempt to sustain it through marriage and family-and, more broadly, the ways lives can suddenly change, sometimes with sudden cruelty, sometimes with grace. Two stories among the 14 here are particularly fine; both gain resonance from the way Dubus's own life was affected by a tragic accident. They are "The Colonel's Wife," about a retired Marine whose relationship with his wife is altered in complex and surprising ways after he breaks both his legs when his horse falls; and the magnificent title story, which concerns a man turned into a quadriplegic by a freak diving mishap, but whose continued zest for life helps bring other people together. Also very strong are the four stories that chronicle the lives of Ted Briggs and LuAnn Arceneaux, and their love for one another, by portraying their lives before they've met and tracing them through a decade of marriage. Dubus's material can be seen as either slightly old-fashioned or as timeless, particularly since he is unapologetically concerned with the spiritual and religious health of his characters. Hopefully, this collection will serve to introduce this important and consistently fine writer to the wider audience he has always deserved.

Meditations from a Movable Chair: The 1986 highway accident that resulted in Dubus being largely confined to a wheelchair is an event that is by now familiar to readers of his award-winning short stories (Dancing After Hours, etc.) and previous collection of personal essays (Broken Vessels, 1991). In these 25 spare and luminous essays, most of which have previously appeared in magazines like the New Yorker, Harper's and Yankee, the author lingers over experiences past and present, from the everyday trials of life in a wheelchair to his thoughts on being a writer, a divorced Catholic and father. "Song of Pity" combines simmering rage at public indifference to the handicapped ("newspaper[s] would not review a restaurant that was accessible only to Caucasians, or only to men") with recollections of an earlier time when he was the one pushing a wheelchair: "I spoke to the back of his head, and he spoke to the cold air in front of him." Other essays recall his encounters as a young writer with Kurt Vonnegut and Ralph Ellison in Iowa City, and Norman Mailer, whom he meets at the Algonquin during a whirlwind trip to New York to meet with his editor in 1967. In Dubus's sharply distilled prose, these meditations are as starkly tangible as they are resonant, providing a vision of his own life before and after the accident, a life united finally by a passion for love, life and craft.

Erdrich, Louise, Tracks

Set in North Dakota at a time in this century when Indian tribes were struggling to keep what little remained of their lands, Tracks is a tale of passion and deep unrest. Over the course of ten crucial years, as tribal land and trust between people erode ceaselessly, men and women are pushed to the brink of their endurance--yet their pride and humor prohibit surrender. The reader will experience shock and pleasure in encountering a group of characters that are compelling and rich in their vigor, clarity, and indomitable vitality.

Fadiman, Anne, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Brilliantly reported & beautifully crafted, The Spirit Catches You & You Fall Down explores the clash between the Merced Community Medical Center in California & a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Lia's parents & her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy.

Faulkner, William, Intruder in the Dust

A classic Faulkner novel, which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black man who has long refused to adopt the black's traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white woman.

Faulks, Sebastian, Birdsong

A bestseller in Britain for nearly a year, this novel about the horror and passion of World War I is destined to be compared to classics such as All Quiet on the Western Front and A Farewell to Arms. "An extremely good novel, and a considerable addition to the fin-de-siecle flowering of first world war literature." Penelope Lively, The Spectator (London).

Flaubert, Gustav, Madame Bovary

Bored and unhappy in a lifeless marriage, Emma Bovary yearns to escape from the dull circumstances of provincial life. Powerful, deeply moving examination of the moral degeneration of a middle-class Frenchwoman.

Foer, Jonathan Safran, Everything is Illuminated

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

Forster, E. M., Passage to India

A classic account of the clash of cultures in British India after the turn of the century.

Furst, Alan, Red Gold

Autumn 1941: In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the war is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: All partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy linesãfrom Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet menace as predators from the dark edge of warãarms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassinsãemerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean Casson, once a well-to-do film producer, now a target of the Gestapo living on a few francs a day. As the occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist Party. Reprisals are brutal. At last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully re-creates the shadow world of French resistance in the darkest days of World War II.

Golden, Arthur, Memoirs of a Geisha

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel offers, with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism, the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geishas.

Goodall, Jane, A Reason for Hope

Her revolutionary studies of Tanzanias chimpanzees forever altered our definition of humanity. Now Dr. Jane Goodall, preeminent scientist, conservationist, and animal rights activist, explores her deepest beliefs in a heartfelt memoir that takes her from the London blitz to Louis Leakeyπs famous excavations in Africa and then into the Gombe jungle. In this book she candidly shares her life, talking of the love and support of her mother, her son, her late husband, of friends and strangers as well as the Gombe chimpanzees she introduced to the world nearly forty years ago.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

This multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history. Historian Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius, as the one-term congressman rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals to become president. When Lincoln emerged as the victor at the Republican National Convention, his rivals were dismayed. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery led inexorably to civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was because of his extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. It was this that enabled Lincoln to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union.

Grisham, John, The Chamber

The author of the number one bestsellers The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client has written another spellbinding tale of legal intrigue. Twenty-two years after the bombing deaths of a civil rights activist's two sons, the Klansman on death row for their murders is mysteriously aided in his last appeal by a young lawyer in a major firm. But why?

Hardy, Thomas, The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy's almost supernatural insight into the course of wayward lives, his instinctive feeling for the beauty of the rural landscape, and his power to invest that landscape with moral significance all came together in an utterly fluent way in The Mayor of Casterbridge. A classically shaped story about the rise and fall of the brooding and sometimes brutal Michael Henchard in the harsh world of nineteenth-century rural England, this is an emblematic product of Hardy's maturity-vigorous, forceful, and unclouded by illusions.

Heaney, Seamus, Beowulf

A brilliant and faithful rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic from the Nobel laureate. Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the end of the twentieth century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface. Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

Hegi, Ursula, Stones from the River

A stunning novel about ordinary people living in extraordinary times, set in a small German town and spanning both world wars. Through the voice of the town's unofficial historian and conscience, Hegi explores the secrets, the actions, and lack of action that shapes the residents' fates.

Heller, Joseph, Catch-22

There was a time when reading Joseph Heller's classic satire on the murderous insanity of war was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard throughout the counterculture. As a result, it's impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel's undiminished strength is its looking-glass logic. Again and again, Heller's characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense.

Hesse, Herman, Demian OR Siddhartha

In Demian, one of the great writers of the twentieth century tells the dramatic story of young, docile Emil Sinclair's descent--led by precocious schoolmate Max Demian--into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention and eventual awakening to selfhood.

Siddhartha: Siddhartha's life takes him on a journey toward enlightenment. Afire with youthful idealism, the Brahmin joins a group of ascetics, fasting and living without possessions. Meeting Gotama the Buddha, he comes to feel this is not the right path, though he also declines joining the Buddha's followers. He reenters the world, hoping to learn of his own nature, but instead slips gradually into hedonism and materialism. Surfeited and disgusted, he flees from his possessions to become a ferryman's apprentice, learning what lessons he can from the river itself. Herman Hesse's 1922 Bildungsroman parallels the life of Buddha and seems to argue that lessons of this sort cannot be taught but come from one's own struggle to find truth.

Horwitz, Tony, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart. Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.' Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

Hulme, Keri, The Bone People

In a tower on the New Zealand sea lives Kerewin Holmes, part Maori, part European, an artist estranged from her art, a woman in exile from her family. One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor, a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon's feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where Maori and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge. Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

Jamison, Kay Redfield, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods & Madness

From a leading international authority on manic-depressive illness--and one of only a handful of women who are full professors of medicine--comes a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since childhood with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life.

Kidder, Tracy, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer

In medical school, Paul Farmer found his life's calling: to cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. Tracy Kidder's magnificent account shows how one person can make a difference in solving global health problems through a clear-eyed understanding of the interaction of politics, wealth, social systems, and disease. Profound and powerful, Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes people's minds through his dedication to the philosophy that "the only real nation is humanity."

Kogawa, Joy, Obasan

Based on the author's own experiences, this story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during WWII is "a tour de force, a deeply felt novel, brilliantly poetic in its sensibility" (The New York Times Book Review).

Kurlansky, Mark, Cod: a Biography of the fish that changed the world

A delightful romp through history with all its economic forces laid bare, Cod is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world's folly?

Lamb, Wally, I Know This Much Is True

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.

Laurence, Margaret, The Diviners

In The Diviners, Morag Gunn, a middle aged writer who lives in a farmhouse on the Canadian prairie, struggles to understand the loneliness of her eighteen-year-old daughter. With unusual wit and depth, Morag recognizes that she needs solitude and work as much as she needs the love of her family. "Mrs. Laurence's [novel] is both poetic and muscular, and her heroine is certainly one of the more humane, unglorified, unpolemical, believable women to have appeared in recent fiction."--The New Yorker

Lawrence, D.H., Sons and Lovers

Since its publication, in 1913, D. H. Lawrence's powerful and passionate third novel stands as one of the greatest autobiographical novels of the twentieth century. Here is the story of artist Paul Morel as a young man, his powerful relationship with his possessive mother, his passionate love affair with Miriam Leivers, his intense liaison with married Clara Dawes. Here, too, England's Derbyshire springs to life with both its sooty mining villages and deep green pastures, a setting as full of contrasts as the deep emotions, which rule this remarkable book. Sons and Lovers is rich with universal truths about relationships; moreover, it brims with what Alfred Kazin has called Lawrence's "magic sympathy, between himself and life."

Larson, Erik, Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, & Madness at the Fair that Changed America

The story of two men's obsessions with the Chicago World's Fair, one its architect, the other a murderer. The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others.

Lee, ChangRae, Native Speaker

In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American, a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away. Park's harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has shaped him as a natural spy. But the very attributes that help him to excel in his profession put a strain on his marriage to his American wife and stand in the way of his coming to terms with his young son's death. When he is assigned to spy on a rising Korean-American politician, his very identity is tested, and he must figure out who he is amid not only the conflicts within himself but also within the ethnic and political tensions of the New York City streets. Native Speaker is a story of cultural alienation. It is about fathers and sons, about the desire to connect with the world rather than stand apart from it, about loyalty and betrayal, about the alien in all of us and who we finally are.

Lee, Gus, Tiger's Tail

From the author of Honor and Duty and China Boy comes an ingenious thriller set in Korea in 1973, a gripping story of sorrow, corruption and redemption, with plenty of brawls to boot.

Lindgren, Torgny, Hash

In a small town where an epidemic of tuberculosis rages, two very different men arrive to a scene of stoically accepted suffering. Robert Maser is a traveling garment salesman whose accent and demeanor betray the fact that he is actually Martin Borman, the fugitive Nazi leader. He engages the local schoolteacher, Lars, on the bizarre quest to find the world's best hash. As they wander the Swedish countryside, inviting themselves into peasant homes to sample the variety of humble family recipes, it becomes clear that their goal is much more than a culinary marvel, and that what they've really been seeking is the force of life that must present itself even in the darkest of times.

Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. The foster son of a Thembu chief, Mandela was raised in the traditional, tribal culture of his ancestors, but at an early age learned the modern, inescapable reality of what came to be called apartheid, one of the most powerful and effective systems of oppression ever conceived. In classically elegant and engrossing prose, he tells of his early years as an impoverished student and law clerk in Johannesburg, of his slow political awakening, and of his pivotal role in the rebirth of a stagnant ANC and the formation of its Youth League in the 1950s. He describes the struggle to reconcile his political activity with his devotion to his family, the anguished breakup of his first marriage, and the painful separations from his children. He brings vividly to life the escalating political warfare in the fifties between the ANC and the government, culminating in his dramatic escapades as an underground leader and the notorious Rivonia Trial of 1964, at which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He recounts the surprisingly eventful twenty-seven years in prison and the complex, delicate negotiations that led both to his freedom and to the beginning of the end of apartheid. Finally he provides the ultimate inside account.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, Love in the Time of Cholera

The ironic vision and luminous evocation of South America that have distinguished Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize winning fiction persist in this turn-of-the-century chronicle of a unique love triangle. It is a fully mature novel in scope and perspective, flawlessly translated, as rich in ideas as in humanity.

Martel, Yann, The Life of Pi

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional -- but is it more true?

Martinez, Demetria, Mother Tongue

A love story. A journey in search of self. A meditation on our frightening times. With Mother Tongue, Demetria MartÌnez gives us all these and more, in an unforgettable novel infused with the color, sunlight, and cool shadows of the world her two lovers inhabit. Told in the cadences of a poet, with the unsparing honesty of a woman looking back on the most important decision of her life, the events in Mother Tongue unfold with the urgency, the inevitability, of destiny. Mary is nineteen and living alone in Albuquerque. Adrift in the wake of her mother's death, she longs for something meaningful to take her over. Vulnerable to love and game for anything, Mary knows she has found the other part of herself when José Luis enters her life. A refugee from El Salvador and its vicious and bloody civil war, José Luis has been smuggled to the United States as part of the sanctuary movement that is attempting to expose the plight of thousands of citizens being harassed, tortured, and disappeared by a United States-supported military government. Mary cannot help but fall in love with the movement and the man who represents it for her--his strength, his sadness, and the life he has left behind. And little by little, she begins to reveal to José Luis the hope that always lives in love. Though violent times conspire against Mary's dreams, she is about to lay claim to a part of herself she has never known.

Mason, Daniel, The Piano Tuner

In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon who has proven mysteriously indispensable to the imperial design. From this irresistible beginning, The Piano Tuner "launches its protagonist into a world of seductive loveliness and nightmarish intrigue." And as he follows Drake's journey, Mason dazzles readers with his erudition, moves them with his vibrantly rendered characters, and enmeshes them in the unbreakable spell of his storytelling.

McCarthy, Cormac, All the Pretty Horses OR The Crossing

All the Pretty Horses tells the story of John Grady Cole who, at 16, finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.

In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.

Morrison, Toni, Song of Solomon

This novel takes readers into a magical and richly peopled world which encompasses four generations of African American life.

Nemriovsky, Irene, Suite Francaise

"By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irene Nemirovsky began working on what would become Suite Francaise - the first two parts of a planned five-part novel - she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France - where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis - she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic; her daughters took the manuscript with them into hiding. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Nemirovsky's literary masterpiece."

O'Brien, Tim, In the Lake of the Woods

On a lake deep in Minnesota's north woods, John and Kathy Wade are trying to reassemble their lives. John, a rising political star, has just suffered a devastating electoral defeat. Kathy attempts to comfort her husband, but soon it becomes apparent that something is horribly wrong between them, that they have hidden too much from each other. Then one day Kathy vanishes. Their boat is gone-did she drown or is she lost? Or did she flee, disappearing into a new life? As a massive search gets under way, the possibilities multiply in terrifying directions. Uncovering the truth requires an investigation of Wade's life, and gradually we come to see that he is a sorcerer lost inside his own magic, a Houdini capable of escaping everything but the chains of his darkest secret.

Pham, Andrew, Catfish and Mandala

As a child, Pham fled Vietnam with his family and settled in California. Here he recounts his return--by bicycle, as he wheels up the West Coast, boards a plane, and finds himself at the airport in Saigon, cursing out the "nitwits in flip-flops" who wrecked his bike. Clearly, this is no sentimental journey; Pham's is a soul divided. He's a contentious guide, but the journey is heartrending and invaluable.

Proulx, E. Annie, Shipping News

E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life-- his elderly aunt and two young daughters-- who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, "The Shipping News" enlightens readers to the powers of E.Annie Proulx's storytelling genius and her expert evocation of time and place.

Rodriguez, Luis, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.

In the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Manchild in the Promised Land--an explosive memoir of hopelessness and resurrection that vividly portrays the brutality of barrio gang life. A timely exploration into the roots of Latino rage.

Roth, Henry, Call It Sleep

Novel by Henry Roth, published in 1934. It centers on the character and perceptions of a young boy, the son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in a ghetto in New York City. Roth uses stream-of-consciousness techniques to trace the boy's psychological development and to explore his perceptions of his family and of the larger world around him. The book powerfully evokes the terrors and anxieties the child experiences in his anguished relations with his father and realistically describes the squalid urban environment in which the family lives. The novel was rediscovered in the late 1950s and early '60s and came to be viewed both as an important proletarian novel of the 1930s and as a classic of Jewish-American literature.

Roth, Phillip, The Human Stain

Roth almost never fails to surprise. After a clunky beginning, in which crusty Nathan Zuckerman is carrying on about the orgy of sanctimoniousness surrounding Clinton's Monica misadventures, his new novel settles into what would seem to be patented Roth territory. Coleman Silk, at 71 a distinguished professor at a small New England college, has been harried from his position because of what has been perceived as a racist slur. His life is ruined: his wife succumbs under the strain, his friends are forsaking him, and he is reduced to an affair with 34-year-old Faunia Farley, the somber and illiterate janitor at the college. This is a fitting capstone to the trilogy that includes American Pastoral and I Married a Communist--a book more balanced and humane than either, and bound, because of its explosive theme, to be widely discussed.

Rushdie, Salman, East-West

The author of The Satanic Verses creates a fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people, a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy. "Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction". The Philadelphia Inquirer

Sacks, Oliver, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

Here are seven detailed and fascinating portraits of neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. Sacks combines the well honed mind of an academician with the verve of a true storyteller, and manages to produce a book at once accessible and challenging. The capacity to observe the patient as a different form of human being, instead of as just an 'interesting case', is a true insight into what medicine should be; furthermore, as the author insistently teaches, neurological diseases differ from other ailments in that they become a true portion of the persona, and, in a sense, they belong to the patient, whereas most people consider disease to be something that 'happens' to them, an outside influence not to be confused with the true Self. It is a truly accessible and moving book, and teaches us all something about the diversity and depths of the human mind.

Schlink, Bernard, The Reader

Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover; then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

Scott, Sir Walter, Ivanhoe

The epitome of the chivalric novel, Ivanhoe sweeps readers into Medieval England and the lives of a memorable cast of characters. The success of this novel lies with Scott's skillful blend of historic reality, chivalric romance, and high adventure.

Slater, Lauren, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

If fact is shaded with metaphor, does it become fiction? In a memoir that raises that question, the author of Prozac Diary and Welcome to My Country narrates a life marked by a disease she may or may not actually have. This memoir touchingly describes the coming of age of a young girl who relies on illness to gain the attention of her narcissistic mother and ineffectual father, and who must find a way to navigate her parents' often vicious marriage and her own troubled adolescence.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch

A masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, this novel is one of the most significant and outspoken literary documents ever to come out of Soviet Russia. A brutal depiction of life in a Stalinist camp and a moving tribute to man's triumph of will over relentless dehumanization, this is Solzhenitsyn's first novel to win international acclaim.

Stephenson, Neal, In The Beginning . . .Was The Command Line (nonfiction)

This is "the Word" about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the "one man" is Neal Stephenson, "the hacker Hemingway" (Newsweek), acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.), the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past and present; on operating system tyrannies and downloaded popular revolutions; on the Internet, Disney World, Big Bangs, not to mention the meaning of life itself.

Suskind, Ron, A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (biog.)

As an honor student walking the gauntlet of sneers and threats at his crime-infested high school in Washington, D.C., Cedric Jennings achieved the impossible: a 4.02 grade-point average and acceptance into Brown University. Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his stories about Jennings and now expands them into this full-length, nonfiction narrative.

Tan, Amy, The Hundred Secret Senses

Amy Tan's latest effort unfolds a series of family secrets that questions the connection between fate, beliefs, hopes, memory and imagination, and the natural gifts of our hundred secret senses. Years after her Chinese half-sister assails her with ghost stories set in the mysterious world of Yin, a young woman finds herself in China, looking for a way to reconcile the ghosts of her past with the dreams of her future. "The Hundred Secret Senses doesn't simply return to a world but burrows more deeply into it, following new trails to fresh revelations". --Newsweek.

Thompson, Hunter S., Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

With the same drug-addled alacrity and jaundiced wit that made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a hilarious hit, Thompson turns his savage eye and gonzo heart to the repellent and seductive race for President. He deconstructs the 1972 campaigns of idealist McGovern and political hack Nixon, ending up with a political vision that is eerily prophetic.

Truong, Monique, The Book of Salt

The Book of Salt serves up a wholly original take on Paris in the 1930s through the eyes of Binh, the Vietnamese cook employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Viewing his famous Mesdames and their entourage from the kitchen of their rue de Fleurus home, Binh observes their domestic entanglements while seeking his own place in the world. In a mesmerizing tale of yearning and betrayal, Monique Truong explores Paris from the salons of its artists to the dark nightlife of its outsiders and exiles. She takes us back to Binh's youthful servitude in Saigon under colonial rule, to his life as a galley hand at sea, to his brief, fateful encounters in Paris with Paul Robeson and the young Ho Chi Minh.

Weart, Spencer, The Discovery of Global Warming (nonfiction)

In 2001 a panel representing virtually all the world's governments and climate scientists announced that they had reached a consensus: the world was warming at a rate without precedent during at least the last ten millennia, and that warming was caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases from human activity. The consensus itself was at least a century in the making. The story of how scientists reached their conclusion--by way of unexpected twists and turns and in the face of formidable intellectual, financial, and political obstacles--is told for the first time in The Discovery of Global Warming. Spencer R. Weart lucidly explains the emerging science, introduces us to the major players, and shows us how the Earth's irreducibly complicated climate system was mirrored by the global scientific community that studied it. Unlike familiar tales of Science Triumphant, this book portrays scientists working on bits and pieces of a topic so complex that they could never achieve full certainty--yet so important to human survival that provisional answers were essential. Weart unsparingly depicts the conflicts and mistakes, and how they sometimes led to fruitful results. His book reminds us that scientists do not work in isolation, but interact in crucial ways with the political system and with the general public. The book not only reveals the history of global warming, but also analyzes the nature of modern scientific work as it confronts the most difficult questions about the Earth's future.

Wells, Rebecca, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Tells the story of three generations relating to the experiences of motherhood, marriage and love.

Siddalee Walker needs her mother's help with a play she's writing about women's friendships, so Vivi sends her the letters, photos, journals, and souvenirs from the Ya-Ya sisterhood. This group of girlfriends was wild and clever--and stuck in a small town where they were expected to raise babies not Cain.

Wideman, John Edgar, Philadelphia Fire

Philadelphia Fire is the most ambitious, most highly praised, and best-selling work of fiction by "one of America's premier writers of fiction" (The New York Times). Based on the 1985 bombing by police of a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult Move, it tells of Cudjoe, a writer who returns to his old neighborhood after a decade of self-imposed exile, obsessed with finding the lone boy who was seen running from the flames.

Winterson, Jeanette, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit OR The Passion

Innovative in style, its humor by turns punchy and tender, Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession. Itπs a love story, too.

Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice's compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meet their singular destiny. In her unique and mesmerizing voice, Winterson blends reality with fantasy, dream, and imagination to weave a hypnotic tale with stunning effects.

Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe's much-discussed kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel chronicles the tale of novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD-induced "acid tests" all along the way. Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe's ability to research like a reporter and simultaneously evoke the hallucinogenic indulgence of the era ensures that this book, written in 1967, will live long in the counter-culture canon of American literature.

Wright, Richard, Native Son

Widely acclaimed as one of the finest books ever written on race and class divisions in America, this powerful novel reflects the forces of poverty, injustice, and hopelessness that continue to shape out society. Trapped in the poverty-stricken ghetto of Chicago's South Side, a young black man finds release only in acts of violence.

Yen Mah, Adeline, Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (biog)

This enthralling, emotionally wrenching saga of a prosperous Chinese family, living during a time of political upheaval in China, reveals the effects of communism and capitalism on a family caught in the collision of East and West.

Revised May 2007

Annotations from www.npsdestiny.newton.edu, www.bpl.org, and www.amazon.com