Bookworks' IT'S ABOUT BOOKS For January

Without a doubt Alexandra Fuller is one of my most favorite authors. Her first book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, is a delightfully funny yet poignant backward look at her childhood in Africa. The latest,Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, is, at first glance a charming, delightfully funny account of her mother's life as a child when she was growing up in Africa. Fuller never loses her sense of humor and there are numerous chuckle out loud moments where she uses her mother's own words to paint for us an undeniably brilliant picture of just who her mother is and what is important to her. However the story of her mother is complicated. She comes from a long line of womenfolk who balance precariously between here and there where there is a mental institution for the mildly nuts. I can't imagine a reality that could drive one over the edge faster than growing up and living in Africa as her mother did. What her mother faced would bring many, if not all, to their knees. Life didn't get any easier after marriage. Sometimes it became a bit more difficult as she moved with her husband from one precarious situation to the next having babies along with way. And there were instances where life in Africa became downright frightening. Fuller reminds us that this was the time of revolution and terrorism as majority rule came to first one nation and then to the next with the Fuller family moving from one country to the next hoping for a better life. Of the five children she bore only the two oldest lived. A boy dies as an infant from meningitis; another boy dies shortly after childbirth and a girl, the apple of everyone's eye, drowns before she turns three in a puddle with only a foot of water in it. Each death pushed her mother further into the land of "there" until she too was institutionalized for a short time justas was her mother before her.
What sounds like a depressing biography is actually a joyous yet, at times, an undeniably heart wrenching appreciation of a woman who withstood, who spoke her mind, and who saw life for what it was: brilliantly enticing and cruel in the same breath. What emanates from this author who examines her mother's life is wisdom, and an sage appreciation of the one word her father uses to describe her mother. That word is courage. Her father knows that no one can take courage from her mother's inner most soul and Fuller, despite all the differences and difficulties she had with her mother, has respect for that courage. By the way, there really is a tree called the Tree of Forgetfulness in Africa. There are occasions where it might be nice to have one of those trees in our own backyard.
Joanne Matzenbacher
Editor, It's About Books

Fiction
The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan (HarperCollins $29.99)

In her first novel in eight years, Amy Tan (Saving Fish From Drowning; The Joy Luck Club) spins a tale that propels us into the lives of three generations of women on both sides of the Pacific. At its vortex is half-Chinese and half-American Violet, an infinitely charismatic Shanghai courtesan who despite her material prosperity and professional success struggles with her identity, her past, and the possibility of real love. Tan's portrait of Violet's dominant, yet emotionally wounded mother Lucia possesses a poignancy that threads the novel together into a piece.

The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt (Little Brown & Co $30)
It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.

The Death of the Black-Haired Girl
by Robert Stone (Houghton Mifflin $25)

In an elite college in a once-decaying New England city, Steven Brookman has come to a decision. A brilliant but careless professor, he has determined that for the sake of his marriage, and his soul, he must end his relationship with Maud Stack, his electrifying student, whose papers are always late yet always incandescent. But Maud is a young woman whose passions are not easily curtailed, and their union will quickly yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.

Local Souls by Allan Gurganus (W.W. Norton $25.95)

Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of Widow. This first work in a decade offers three novellas mirroring today's face-lifted South, a zone revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties, and superior telecommunications, yet it celebrates those locals who have chosen to stay local. In doing so, Local Souls uncovers certain old habits-adultery, incest, obsession-still very much alive in our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet.

Harvest by Jim Grace (Doubleday $15)

On the morning after harvest, the inhabitants of a remote English village awaken looking forward to a hard-earned day of rest and feasting at their landowner's table. But the sky is marred by two conspicuous columns of smoke, replacing pleasurable anticipation with alarm and suspicion. One smoke column is the result of an overnight fire that has damaged the master's outbuildings. The second column rises from the wooded edge of the village, sent up by newcomers to announce their presence. In the minds of the wary villagers a mere coincidence of events appears to be unlikely, with violent confrontation looming as the unavoidable outcome. Meanwhile, another newcomer has recently been spotted taking careful notes and making drawings of the land. It is his presence more than any other that will threaten the village's entire way of life.

Benediction by Kent Haruf (Knopf Doubleday $15)

When Dad Lewis is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he and his wife, Mary, must work together to make his final days as comfortable as possible. Their daughter, Lorraine, hastens back from Denver to help look after him; her devotion softens the bitter absence of their estranged son, Frank, but this cannot be willed away and remains a palpable presence for all three of them. Next door, a young girl named Alice moves in with her grandmother and contends with the painful memories that Dad's condition stirs up of her own mother's death. Meanwhile, the town's newly arrived preacher attempts to mend his strained relationships with his wife and teenaged son, a task that proves all the more challenging when he faces the disdain of his congregation after offering more than they are accustomed to getting on a Sunday morning. And throughout, an elderly widow and her middle-aged daughter do everything they can to ease the pain of their friends and neighbors.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
by Helen Fielding (Knopf Doubleday $26.95)

What do you do when your girlfriend's sixtieth birthday party is the same day as your boyfriend's thirtieth?
Is it better to die of Botox or die of loneliness because you're so wrinkly? Is it wrong to lie about your age when online dating? Is sleeping with someone after two dates and six weeks of texting the same as getting married after two meetings and six months of letter writing in Jane Austen's day? Pondering these and other modern dilemmas, Bridget Jones stumbles through the challenges of loss, single motherhood, tweeting, texting, technology, and rediscovering her sexuality in-Warning! Bad, outdated phrase approaching!-middle age.

Short Stories
Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III (W.W, Norton $25.95)
In this heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love. In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty"-tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy.

thrillers
White Fire by Douglas Preston (Grand Central $27)

Special Agent Pendergast arrives at an exclusive Colorado ski resort to rescue his protégée, Corrie Swanson, from serious trouble with the law. His sudden appearance coincides with the first attack of a murderous arsonist who-with brutal precision-begins burning down multimillion-dollar mansions with the families locked inside.

King & Maxwell
by David Baldacci (Grand Central $28)

David Baldacci brings back Sean King and Michelle Maxwell-former Secret Service agents turned private investigators-in their most surprising, personal, and dangerous case ever . . . It seems at first like a simple, tragic story. Tyler Wingo, a teenage boy, learns the awful news that his father, a soldier, was killed in action in Afghanistan. Then the extraordinary happens: Tyler receives a communication from his father . . . after his supposed death. Tyler hires Sean and Michelle to solve the mystery surrounding his father. But their investigation quickly leads to deeper, more troubling questions. Could Tyler's father really still be alive? What was his true mission? Could Tyler be the next target?

Sycamore Row
by John Grisham (Knopf Doubleday $28.95)

The suspense never rests when A Time to Kill's Jake Brigance fights the good fight once again. Often named an all-time favorite by John Grisham's legions of fans, the book that started it all gets a brand-new chapter. America's favorite storyteller returns to Ford County, Mississippi, where defense attorney Jake Brigance will have to fight for justice in a trial that could tear the small town of Clanton apart.

Gods of Guilt
by Michael C0nnelly (Little Browmn & Co. $28)

Mickey Haller gets the text, "Call me ASAP - 187," and the California penal code for murder immediately gets his attention. Murder cases have the highest stakes and the biggest paydays, and they always mean Haller has to be at the top of his game. When Mickey learns that the victim was his own former client, a prostitute he thought he had rescued and put on the straight and narrow path, he knows he is on the hook for this one. He soon finds out that she was back in LA and back in the life. Far from saving her, Mickey may have been the one who put her in danger.

Personal Reflections
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins $27.99)

These essays twine to create both a portrait of life and a philosophy of life. Obstacles that at first appear insurmountable-scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department, opening an independent bookstore, and sitting down to write a novel-are eventually mastered with quiet tenacity and a sheer force of will. The actual happy marriage, which was the one thing she felt she wasn't capable of, ultimately proves to be a metaphor as well as a fact: Patchett has devoted her life to the people and ideals she loves the most.

Memoirs
Duty by Robert Gates (Knopf Doubleday $35)

In this unsparing memoir, meticulously fair in its assessments, Gates takes us behind the scenes of his nearly five years as a secretary at war: the battles with Congress, the two presidents he served, the military itself, and the vast Pentagon bureaucracy; his efforts to help Bush turn the tide in Iraq; his role as a guiding, and often dissenting, voice for Obama; the ardent devotion to and love for American soldiers-his "heroes"-he developed on the job.

My Mistake
by David Menaker (Houghton Mifflin $24)
A wry, witty, often tender memoir by a former New Yorker editor, magazine writer, and book publisher who offers great tales of his life. Daniel Menaker started as a fact checker at The New Yorker in 1969. With luck, hard work, and the support of William Maxwell, he was eventually promoted to editor. Never beloved by William Shawn, he was advised early on to find a position elsewhere; he stayed for another twenty-four years. Now Menaker brings us a new view of life in that wonderfully strange place and beyond, throughout his more than forty years working to celebrate language and good writing.

My Crazy Century by Ivan Kilma (Grove Press $30)
Klíma's story begins in the 1930s on the outskirts of Prague where he grew up unaware of his concealed Jewish heritage. It came as a surprise when his family was transported to the Terezín concentration camp-and an even greater surprise when most of them survived. They returned home to a city in economic turmoil and falling into the grip of Communism. Against this tumultuous backdrop, Klíma discovered his love of literature and matured as a writer. But as the regime further encroached on daily life, arresting his father and censoring his work, Klíma recognized the party for what it was: a deplorable, colossal lie. The true nature of oppression became clear to him and many of his peers, among them Josef Škvorecký, Milan Kundera, and Václav Havel. From the brief hope of freedom during the Prague Spring of 1968 to Charter 77 and the eventual collapse of the regime in 1989's Velvet Revolution, Klíma's revelatory account provides a profoundly rich personal and national history.

Non-Fiction
Revoluntionary Summer
by Joseph Ellis (Knopf Doubleday $26.95)

The summer months of 1776 witnessed the most consequential events in the story of our country's founding. While the thirteen colonies came together and agreed to secede from the British Empire, the British were dispatching the largest armada ever to cross the Atlantic to crush the rebellion in the cradle. The Continental Congress and the Continental Army were forced to make decisions on the run, improvising as history congealed around them. In a brilliant and seamless narrative, Ellis meticulously examines the most influential figures in this propitious moment, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Britain's Admiral Lord Richard and General William Howe. He weaves together the political and military experiences as two sides of a single story, and shows how events on one front influenced outcomes on the other.?Revolutionary Summer tells an old story in a new way, with a freshness at once colorful and compelling.

The Crash
by Thom Martmann (Grand Central $28)

The United States is in the midst of an economic implosion that could make the Great Depression look like child's play. In THE CRASH OF 2016, Thom Hartmann argues that the facade of our once-great United States will soon disintegrate to reveal the rotting core where corporate and billionaire power and greed have replaced democratic infrastructure and governance. Our once-enlightened political and economic systems have been manipulated to ensure the success of only a fraction of the population at the expense of the rest of us.

David & Goliath
by Marcolm Gladwell (Little Brown & Co. $29)

Apparently, Malcolm Gladwell doesn't blink. For more than a dozen years, the author of The Tipping Point, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw has continued observing topics astutely, in each case discerning meaningful patterns that the rest of us have missed. In his latest bestseller-to-be, he probes the often deceptive contests between giants and apparent underdogs. As usual, his research covers a vast terrain; in this case, from Cold War battlefields to the minutiae of microscopic cancer research; and as usual, his findings are as telling as they are surprising. David and Goliath reminds us again that with the proper guide, almost everything can be seen anew.

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War
by Max Hastings (Knopf Doubleday $35)

In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud and futility. He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also re-creates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas.

The War That Ended Peace
by Margaret MacMillan (Random House $35)

The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the first years of the twentieth century, Europe believed it was marching to a golden, happy, and prosperous future. But instead, complex personalities and rivalries, colonialism and ethnic nationalisms, and shifting alliances helped to bring about the failure of the long peace and the outbreak of a war that transformed Europe and the world.

Pre-Teen
Storybook of Legends by Shannon Hale
(Little Brown Young Readers $14.99 ages 8-12)

At Ever After High, an enchanting boarding school, the children of fairytale legends prepare themselves to fulfill their destinies as the next generation of Snow Whites, Prince Charmings and Evil Queens...whether they want to or not. Each year on Legacy Day, students sign the Storybook of Legends to seal their scripted fates. For generations, the Village of Book End has whispered that refusing to sign means The End-both for a story and for a life.

Teen
Beautiful Redemption
by Kami Garcia / Margaret Stohl
(Little Brown Young Readers $11 ages 12-17)

Ethan Wate has spent most of his life longing to escape the stiflingly small Southern town of Gatlin. He never thought he would meet the girl of his dreams, Lena Duchannes, who unveiled a secretive, powerful, and cursed side of Gatlin, hidden in plain sight. And he never could have expected that he would be forced to leave behind everyone and everything he cares about. So when Ethan awakes after the chilling events of the Eighteenth Moon, he has only one goal: to find a way to return to Lena and the ones he loves. Back in Gatlin, Lena is making her own bargains for Ethan's return, vowing to do whatever it takes - even if that means trusting old enemies or risking the lives of the family and friends Ethan left to protect.

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