The Girl in the Red Coat By: Kate Hamer It's a parent’s worst nightmare: a child wanders off in a busy crowd and can’t be found. In The Girl in the Red Coat, Beth treats her daughter, Carmel, to a trip to a storytelling festival, but newly-single and wounded...
March, Books 1, 2, & 3 By: John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell March is probably the best graphic novel series I've ever read. It's devastating and uplifting at the same time, but in this dichotomy we can see the continuing story of the civil rights movement...
How to Sauté By: Michael Ruhlman Alton Brown, the great kitchen science guru, said, “I’m not sure if Michael Ruhlman is a great writer who cooks or a great cook who writes, but either way he always manages to make my favorite thing: good sense.” How to Sauté...
Moloka’i By: Alan Brennert In 1891, Hawaii was still a sovereign kingdom, and seven-year-old Rachel Kalama was diagnosed with leprosy. The fear of contagion was so strong that Rachel, like anyone diagnosed with the disease, was forcibly removed from her family, sent to a hospital for a...
The Eyre Affair By: Jasper Fforde Wordplay and literary allusions abound in this alternate 1985 Britain where warring factions of Shakespeare authorship skeptics brawl in violent street fights, dodos have been genetically re-engineered and are common pets, and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has an unsatisfying ending. Thursday Next, a special...
The Wrecking Crew! (DVD) If you know the recordings of Elvis, The Righteous Brothers, Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke, The Byrds, Ricky Nelson, The Beach Boys, Nat King Cole, The Monkees, Sonny & Cher, or The Mamas & the Papas, then you know The Wrecking Crew. The Wrecking...
The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames By: Kai Bird The Good Spy was so good that I read it twice. Actually, I listened to it once as an audio book and read the print book, but that's beside the point. It’s a fascinating biography...
Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies By: Alastair Bonnett [blockquote text='“The most fascinating places are often also the most disturbing, entrapping, and appalling. They are also often temporary. In ten years’ time most of the places we will be exploring will look very different;...
The Magnificent Ambersons By: Booth Tarkington I hadn't heard of Booth Tarkington until I moved to this area, but now I run across his name on a daily basis, so I thought I’d better read his best-known work, The Magnificent Ambersons. It’s now considered sentimental and somewhat of...
The Book of William By Paul Collins Shakespeare’s First Folio: no printed book has had each copy so obsessively cataloged, studied, and coveted. Scholars study and analyze past owners’ doodles in the margins, and some specialize in examining the stress on the type to determine in which order...
