Andrew Krivak3.9 From National Book Award in Fiction finalist Andrew Krivak comes a gorgeous fable of Earth’s last two human inhabitants and a girl's journey home.
In an Eden-like future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They own a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches his daughter how to fish and hunt and the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can learn to listen. A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion.
Джеральд Уокер0.0 For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. Walker refuses to lull his readers; instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love.
Майк Курато0.0 Award-winning author and artist Mike Curato draws on his own experiences in Flamer, his debut graphic novel, telling a difficult story with humor, compassion, and love.
I know I’m not gay. Gay boys like other boys. I hate boys. They’re mean, and scary, and they’re always destroying something or saying something dumb or both.
I hate that word. Gay. It makes me feel . . . unsafe.
It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes—but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.
Оушен Вуонг4.0 Дебютный роман молодого, но уже известного вьетнамо-американского поэта Оушена Вонга о роли семьи, о первой любви и об искупительной силе слова.
Это письмо сына к матери, которая не умеет читать. Написанное главным героем на излете взросления, оно раскрывает историю семьи, переплетенную с трагическими событиями Вьетнамской войны.
Герой с теплом и щемящей ностальгией вспоминает свое вьетнамо-американское детство, трудное, но пронизанное любовью. Для своей семьи мальчик был окном в мир, единственным, у кого есть шанс быть услышанным и понятым. Хрупкое подростковое чувство любви оборачивается печалью и одиночеством. Жизнь — это краткие мгновения прекрасного среди боли и непонимания. И все же, как у бабочек, мигрирующих каждый год, тяга к движению и переменам оказывается сильнее.
Этот роман — о необходимости быть услышанным, он пронизан нежностью и состраданием. Это смелое исследование коллективной и индивидуальной травмы.
Книга уже переведена на 16 языков, всего ожидается 30 переводов на разные языки.
Грейс Талусан0.0 Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers bravely explores her experiences with sexual abuse, depression, cancer, and life as a Filipino immigrant, supplemented with government documents, medical records, and family photos.
Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first.
The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.
Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating and documenting such abuse and trauma, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.
Lynda Mullaly Hunt4.5 Delsie loves tracking the weather--lately, though, it seems the squalls are in her own life. She's always lived with her kindhearted Grammy, but now she's looking at their life with new eyes and wishing she could have a "regular family." Delsie observes other changes in the air, too--the most painful being a friend who's outgrown her. Luckily, she has neighbors with strong shoulders to support her, and Ronan, a new friend who is caring and courageous but also troubled by the losses he's endured. As Ronan and Delsie traipse around Cape Cod on their adventures, they both learn what it means to be angry versus sad, broken versus whole, and abandoned versus loved. And that, together, they can weather any storm.
Карен Сколфилд0.0 In a poetic voice at once accessible and otherworldly, gutsy and insightful, U.S. Army veteran Karen Skolfield offers a rare glimpse of a female soldier’s training and mental conditioning. Through the narratives of a young soldier, her older counterpart, and her fellow soldiers, Skolfield searches for meaning in combat preparation, long-term trauma, and the way war is embedded in our language and psyche.
Рауль Третий0.0 Visit a marketplace of a buzzing border town.
This bilingual board book teaches readers simple words in Spanish as they experience the bustling life of a border town. Follow Little Lobo and his dog Bernabe as they deliver supplies to a variety of vendors, selling everything from sweets to sombreros, portraits to piñatas, carved masks to comic books!
Стив Ярбро0.0 Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland.
The Unmade World covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan’s wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife.
The Unmade World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the personal grief, sense of guilt, and the emotional consequences of violence. Along the way, the novel grapples with a spectrum of cultural and political issues. It includes a murder mystery wrapped around the corruption of major college sports, the pressures on immigrants and refugees in both the US and Poland, the fallout of political change, economic upheavals and armed conflicts--including the horrific destruction of Luhansk, Ukraine in 2014. It also references the 2016 presidential campaign, cultural politics in the American university, and the demise of print journalism, etc., though never in a dogmatic or overtly partisan way.
Джилл Лепор0.0 In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history.
Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—"these truths," Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?
These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.
Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.
Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."
Джейн Йолен0.0 It's 1942 in Poland, and the world is coming to pieces. At least that's how it seems to Chaim and Gittel, twins whose lives feel like a fairy tale torn apart, with evil witches, forbidden forests, and dangerous ovens looming on the horizon. But in all darkness there is light, and the twins find it through Chaim's poetry and the love they have for each other. Like the bright flame of a Yahrzeit candle, his words become a beacon of memory so that the children and grandchildren of survivors will never forget the atrocities that happened during the Holocaust.
Илан Ставанс0.0 The Wall is a poetic exploration—across time, space, and language, real as well as metaphorical—of the U.S.-Mexican wall dividing the two civilizations, of similar walls (Jerusalem, China, Berlin, Warsaw, etc.) in history, and of the act of separating people by ideology, class, race, and other subterfuges. It is an indictment of hateful political rhetoric. In the spirit of Virgil’s Aeneid and Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Master, it gives voice in symphonic fashion to an assortment of participants (immigrants, border patrol, soldiers, activists, presidents, people dead and alive) involved in the debate on walls. It brings in elements of literature and pop culture, fashion and cuisine. Poetry becomes a tool to explore raw human emotions in all its extremes.
Грейс Лин4.0 A gorgeous picture book that tells a whimsical origin story of the phases of the moon, from award-winning, bestselling author-illustrator Grace Lin
Pat, pat, pat...
Little Star's soft feet tiptoed to the Big Mooncake.
Little Star loves the delicious Mooncake that she bakes with her mama. But she's not supposed to eat any yet! What happens when she can't resist a nibble?
In this stunning picture book that shines as bright as the stars in the sky, Newbery Honor author Grace Lin creates a heartwarming original story that explains phases of the moon.
Allegra Goodman0.0 Tension arises in the love affair of a young artist for whom nothing is permanent and his girlfriend, a teacher who believes that things are meant to last by the New York Times bestselling author and National Book Award finalist.
This is a compelling love story between two very different young people: Collin, a disarming chalk artist who thinks nothing of erasing his dazzling work, and Nina, an idealistic teacher who struggles every day to make a lasting impact on her students. Wanting Collin to realize his full talent, Nina warily introduces him to her powerful father, who owns the most cutting edge virtual reality game company in the world. Add to this a brilliant but unstable pupil of Nina’s who is gaming obsessed, and you have contemporary life caught in the crosshairs by one of our most charming and socially astute literary voices.
Мартин Пачнер5.0 The story of literature in seventeen acts, from Alexander the Great and The Iliad to J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter, this wonderful book combines biography, history, and stories from literature to show how the written word has had the power to shape civilizations throughout time.
Мишель Куэвас0.0 A girl's friendship with a lonely black hole leads her to face her own sadness.
When eleven-year-old Stella Rodriguez shows up at NASA to request that her recording be included in Carl Sagan's Golden Record, something unexpected happens: A black hole follows her home, and sets out to live in her house as a pet. The black hole swallows everything he touches, which is challenging to say the least—but also turns out to be a convenient way to get rid of those items that Stella doesn't want around. Soon the ugly sweaters her aunt has made for her all disappear within the black hole, as does the smelly class hamster she's taking care of, and most important, all the reminders of her dead father that are just too painful to have around.
It's not until Stella, her younger brother, Cosmo, the family puppy, and even the bathroom tub all get swallowed up by the black hole that Stella comes to realize she has been letting her own grief consume her. And that's not the only thing she realizes as she attempts to get back home.
Ричард Хоффман0.0 Poetry. "In Richard Hoffman's long, complex title poem, which anchors his concerns throughout the book, he says with characteristic lucid candor, '...now when longevity itself begins to seem at once / the only wealth worth having and the booby prize.' It should be noted that NOON UNTIL NIGHT is not a book about noon until evening. Yet the darkness that night suggests has its rays of hope in it, as Hoffman artfully meditates on how we live and, without sentimentality, manage to go on."--Stephen Dunn
Джулия Денос0.0 Walking his dog at dusk, one boy catches glimpses of the lives around him in this lovely ode to autumn evenings, exploring your neighborhood, and coming home.
Before your city goes to sleep, you might head out for a walk, your dog at your side as you go out the door and into the almost-night. Anything can happen on such a walk: you might pass a cat, or a friend, or even an early raccoon. And as you go down your street and around the corner, the windows around you light up one by one until you are walking through a maze of paper lanterns, each one granting you a brief, glowing snapshot of your neighbors as families come together and folks settle in for the night. With a setting that feels both specific and universal and a story full of homages to The Snowy Day, Julia Denos and E. B. Goodale have created a singular book — at once about the idea of home and the magic of curiosity, but also about how a sense of safety and belonging is something to which every child is entitled.
Марго Ливси0.0 A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year • A BookPage Best Book of the Year • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year
The New York Times bestselling author of “brilliantly paced contemporary adventure” (Elle) delivers her most gripping novel yet—at once a tense, psychological drama and a taut emotional thriller about love, obsession, and the deceits that pull a family apart.
Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury—a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past—arrives at Windy Hill and everything changes.
Mercury’s owner, Hilary, is a newcomer to town who has enrolled her daughter in riding lessons. When she brings Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everyone is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. As she rides him, Viv begins to dream of competing again, embracing the ambitions that she had harbored, and relinquished, as a young woman. Her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred escalates to obsession.
Donald may have 20/20 vision but he is slow to notice how profoundly Viv has changed and how these changes threaten their quiet, secure world. By the time he does, it is too late to stop the catastrophic collision of Viv’s ambitions and his own myopia.
At once a tense psychological drama and a taut emotional thriller exploring love, obsession, and the deceits that pull a family apart, Mercury is a riveting tour de force that showcases this “searingly intelligent writer at the height of her powers” (Jennifer Egan).
Джейн Каменски0.0 Through an intimate narrative of the life of painter John Singleton Copley, award-winning historian Jane Kamensky reveals the world of the American Revolution, rife with divided loyalties and tangled sympathies.
Famed today for his portraits of patriot leaders like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, Copley is celebrated as one of America’s founding artists. But, married to the daughter of a tea merchant and seeking artistic approval from abroad, he could not sever his own ties with Great Britain. Rather, ambition took him to London just as the war began. His view from abroad as rich and fascinating as his harrowing experiences of patriotism in Boston, Copley’s refusal to choose sides cost him dearly. Yet to this day, his towering artistic legacy remains shared by America and Britain alike.
Лорен Уолк4.5 Волчья лощина — живописный овраг, увитый плющом, с множеством цветов на дне. Через Волчью лощину Аннабель и её братья каждый день ходят в школу. Неподалёку живёт покалеченный войной безобидный бродяга Тоби. Он — друг Аннабель, благодаря ему девочка получает первые урокидоброты и сострадания.
В Волчьей лощине Аннабель впервые сталкивается со школьной верзилой Бетти Гленгарри. В Бетти нет ничего хорошего, одна только злоба. Из-за неё Аннабель узнаёт, что такое страх и что зло бывает безнаказанным.
Бетти заражает своей ненавистью всех в Волчьей лощине. Беззащитный Тоби превращается в объект травли. Чтобы защитить его, Аннабель бросит вызов всему городу. Но можно ли из грязного сделать чистое? Всегда ли доброта лечит, а правда — спасает?
Мартин Эспада0.0 In this powerful new collection of poems, Martín Espada articulates the transcendent vision of another, possible world. He invokes the words of Whitman in “Vivas to Those Who Have Failed,” a cycle of sonnets about the Paterson Silk Strike and the immigrant laborers who envisioned an eight-hour workday. At the heart of this volume is a series of ten poems about the death of the poet’s father. “El Moriviví” uses the metaphor of a plant that grows in Puerto Rico to celebrate the many lives of Frank Espada, community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer, from a jailhouse in Mississippi to the streets of Brooklyn. The son lyrically imagines his father’s return to a bay in Puerto Rico: “May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.” Other poems confront collective grief in the wake of the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and police violence against people of color: “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World” urges us to “melt the bullets into bells.” Yet the poet also revels in the absurd, recalling his dubious career as a Shakespearean “actor,” finding madness and tenderness in the crowd at Fenway Park. In exquisitely wrought images, Espada’s poems show us the faces of Whitman’s “numberless unknown heroes.”
Сьюзан Э. Гудман0.0 In 1847, a young African American girl named Sarah Roberts was attending a school in Boston. Then one day she was told she could never come back. She didn't belong. The Otis School was for white children only.
Sarah deserved an equal education, and the Roberts family fought for change. They made history. Roberts v. City of Boston was the first case challenging our legal system to outlaw segregated schools. It was the first time an African American lawyer argued in a supreme court.
These first steps set in motion changes that ultimately led to equality under the law in the United States. Sarah's cause was won when people--black and white--stood together and said, No more. Now, right now, it is time for change!
With gorgeous art from award-winning illustrator E. B. Lewis, The First Step is an inspiring look at the first lawsuit to demand desegregation--long before the American Civil Rights movement, even before the Civil War.
Backmatter includes: integration timeline, bios on key people in the book, list of resources, and author's note.
Жизнь семьи Барретт рушится, когда они узнают о диагнозе своей четырнадцатилетней дочери Марджори. У девочки все признаки острой шизофрении, и, к отчаянию родителей, врачи не в силах остановить ее безумие. Тогда Барретты обращаются к священнику, который предлагает провести обряд экзорцизма, веря в то, что в Марджори вселился демон. А чтобы покрыть бесконечные медицинские расходы, родители девочки соглашаются на участие в реалити-шоу...
Наше время.
Младшая сестра Марджори дает интервью известной писательнице, вспоминая события, которые произошли, когда ей было восемь лет. Ее воспоминания сильно отличаются от того, что транслировалось по телевидению. На поверхность начинают всплывать давно похороненные секреты, поднимающие непростые вопросы о памяти и реальности, науке и религии, а также о самой природе зла.
Кейт Клиффорд Ларсон4.4 They were the most prominent American family of the twentieth century. The daughter they secreted away made all the difference.
Joe and Rose Kennedy’s strikingly beautiful daughter Rosemary attended exclusive schools, was presented as a debutante to the Queen of England, and traveled the world with her high-spirited sisters. And yet, Rosemary was intellectually disabled — a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and glamorous family. Major new sources — Rose Kennedy’s diaries and correspondence, school and doctors' letters, and exclusive family interviews — bring Rosemary alive as a girl adored but left far behind by her competitive siblings. Kate Larson reveals both the sensitive care Rose and Joe gave to Rosemary and then — as the family’s standing reached an apex — the often desperate and duplicitous arrangements the Kennedys made to keep her away from home as she became increasingly intractable in her early twenties. Finally, Larson illuminates Joe’s decision to have Rosemary lobotomized at age twenty-three, and the family's complicity in keeping the secret.
Rosemary delivers a profoundly moving coda: JFK visited Rosemary for the first time while campaigning in the Midwest; she had been living isolated in a Wisconsin institution for nearly twenty years. Only then did the siblings understand what had happened to Rosemary and bring her home for loving family visits. It was a reckoning that inspired them to direct attention to the plight of the disabled, transforming the lives of millions.
Али Бенджамин4.5 Взрослые говорят, что иногда страшное случается без всякой причины. Но двенадцатилетняя Сузи не верит, что её лучшая подруга могла просто утонуть, ведь она так хорошо плавала! Нет, её наверняка погубила редкая и опасная медуза. Шаг за шагом, как настоящий исследователь, Сузи ищет подтверждение своей гипотезы, а заодно постигает жизнь, смерть, чудеса Вселенной… Она взрослеет.
Алан Фельдман0.0 “Drop the personal,” Alan Feldman’s best friend advises. But what else does he have? Feldman takes his title from Zhivago’s interpretations of the afterlife: “Your soul, your immortality, your life in others.”
In a collection where the dead do speak, Feldman’s poems in his first segment, “Self-Portraits,” are more likely to be about others than about himself. The segment “Partners” reflects on marriage and divorce, the latter an “uncontested victor over marriage, / the way the flood is champion over the flood plain.” In the section “Offshore” Feldman writes about travel to Uruguay, his impractical love of sailing, and his wonder at Walter Cronkite’s obtuseness about Vietnam. In his final segment, “What Now?,” he asks about meaning itself. Babysitting his tiny granddaughter, he thinks of sailing—hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror—and wonders if even this suggests something world-encompassing he’s “still hoping to find a name for. / If it isn’t joy.”
Леслеа Ньюман0.0 A kitten’s stroll down a keyboard leads to a celebrated one-minute composition in this charming portrait of a remarkable true friendship.
Moshe Cotel was a composer who lived in a noisy building on a noisy street in a noisy city. But Moshe didn’t mind. Everything he heard was music to his ears. One day, while out for a walk, he heard a small, sad sound that he’d never heard before. It was a tiny kitten! "Come on, little Ketzel," Moshe said, "I will take you home and we will make beautiful music together." And they did—in a most surprising way. Inspired by a true story, Lesléa Newman and Amy June Bates craft an engaging tale of a creative man and the beloved cat who brings unexpected sweet notes his way.
Селеста Инг4.2 "Лидия мертва. Но они пока не знают..." Так начинается история очередной Лоры Палмер - семейная история ложных надежд и умолчания. С Лидией связывали столько надежд: она станет врачом, а не домохозяйкой, она вырвется из уютного, но душного мирка. Но когда с Лидией происходит трагедия, тонкий канат, на котором балансировала ее семья, рвется, и все, давние и не очень, секреты оказываются выпущены на волю. "Все, чего я не сказала" - история о лжи во спасение, которая не перестает быть ложью. О том, как травмированные родители невольно травмируют своих детей. О том, что родители способны сделать со своими детьми из любви и лучших побуждений. И о том, наконец, что порой молчание убивает.
Роман Селесты Инг - одна из самых заметных книг последних двух лет в англоязычной литературе. Дебют, который критики называют не иначе как "ошеломительный", проча молодой писательнице большое будущее.
Элизабет Колберт4.2 Что отличает происходящее сейчас массовое вымирание от тех пяти, что Земля уже претерпела за последние 500 миллионов лет? Пятое, уничтожившее всех нептичьих динозавров, было вызвано падением астероида. Теперь, говорят ведущие ученые, мы, люди, - астероид. Штатный сотрудник журнала The New Yorker Элизабет Колберт переносит читателя в те места на планете, где признаки Шестого вымирания наиболее очевидны. Возможно ли его остановить? Тревожная, но совершенно необходимая всем нам книга.
Katherine Howe0.0 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane comes a chilling mystery—Prep meets The Crucible.
It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can’t.
First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.
Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .
Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?
Дженьюари Джилл О'нил0.0 At the center of her second book are two islands off the coast of Salem, Massachusetts, through which O’Neil finds the rough terrain of marriage and what it means to love in the face of adversity. She navigates the waters of transition with exuberance and reflection, and discovers new ways to make the ordinary extraordinary.
Питер Рейнольдс, Пол Рейнольдс0.0 A go-cart contest inspires imagination to take flight in this picture book for creators of all ages, with art from New York Times bestselling illustrator Peter H. Reynolds.
It's time for this year's Going Places contest! Finally. Time to build a go-cart, race it—and win. Each kid grabs an identical kit, and scrambles to build.
Everyone but Maya. She sure doesn't seem to be in a hurry ... and that sure doesn't look like anybody else's go-cart!
But who said it had to be a go-cart? And who said there's only one way to cross the finish line?
This sublime celebration of creative spirit and thinking outside the box—both figuratively and literally—is ideal for early learners, recent grads, and everyone in between.
Меган Маршалл0.0 "Thoroughly absorbing, lively . . . Fuller, so misunderstood in life, richly deserves the nuanced, compassionate portrait Marshall paints." — Boston Globe
Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Marshall recounts the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller: Thoreau’s first editor, Emerson’s close friend, daring war correspondent, tragic heroine. After her untimely death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by scandal. Marshall’s inspired narrative brings her back to indelible life.
Whether detailing her front-page New-York Tribune editorials against poor conditions in the city’s prisons and mental hospitals, or illuminating her late-in-life hunger for passionate experience—including a secret affair with a young officer in the Roman Guard—Marshall’s biography gives the most thorough and compassionate view of an extraordinary woman. No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
Мордикай Герштейн0.0 Imagine you were born before the invention of drawing, more than thirty thousand years ago.
You would live with your whole family in a cave and see woolly mammoths walk by!
You might even see images of animals hidden in the shapes of clouds and rocks.
You would want to share these pictures with your family, but wouldn't know how.
Who would have made the world's first drawing? Would it have been you?
In The First Drawing, Caldecott Medal winner Mordicai Gerstein imagines the discovery of drawing...and inspires the young dreamers and artists of today.
Эми Дриански0.0 In her second collection of poems, Dryansky's intrepid speaker sets off once again, this time into the deceptively open field of adult life. Along the way she pushes at the boundaries of identity and connection, questioning our perceptions of selfhood and motherhood, marriage and relationships, fidelity and faith. These poems have a sense of humor; they play with language and meaning, but the questions they ask are serious: what do we want to be when we grow up? How will we know when we get there?
Мэтью Перл3.4 Таинственные преступления в Бостоне! Трагические пожары на кораблях в Бостонской гавани — в огненном хаосе погибли люди. Серия взрывов в центре города, в конторах и офисах — жертв стало еще больше. Трагические совпадения? Преступный умысел! Кто стоит за происходящим? За что и почему убивает? Полиция, ведущая дело, в недоумении. Горожане уверены: ужасные взрывы — дело рук самого дьявола. На помощь неожиданно приходит наука! За расследование берутся молодые ученые из недавно созданного Массачусетского технологического института, которому еще только предстоит стать колыбелью американской науки. Они намерены любой ценой найти и разоблачить таинственных преступников — и для этого воспользуются последними научными открытиями…
Джордж Хоу Кольт0.0 From the bestselling National Book Award finalist, a masterful blend of history and memoir featuring the author’s four brothers and iconic brothers in history—the Thoreaus, the Van Goghs, the Kelloggs, the Marx brothers, and the Booths.
George Howe Colt's The Big House is, as the New Yorker said, “full of surprises and contains more than seems possible: a family memoir, a brief history of the Cape, an investigation of nostalgia, a study of class, and a meditation on the privileges and burdens of the past.” Colt’s new book, Brothers, is an equally idiosyncratic and masterful blend of memoir and history featuring both the author’s three brothers and iconic brothers in history—the Booths, the Van Goghs, the Kelloggs, the Marx Brothers, and the Thoreaus.
Colt believes he would be a different man had he not grown up in a family of four brothers. He movingly recounts the adoration, envy, affection, resentment, and compassion in their shifting relationships from childhood through middle age, also rendering a volatile decade in American life: the 1960s. Some of the Colt men now have children; all have found their own paths; all now consider their brothers to be their closest friends.
In alternate chapters, Colt parallels his quest to understand how his own brothers shaped his life with an examination of the rich and complex relationships between iconic brothers in history. He explores how Edwin Booth grew up to become the greatest actor on the nineteenth-century American stage while his younger brother John grew up to assassinate a president. How Will Kellogg worked for his overbearing older brother John Harvey as a subservient yes-man for two decades until he finally broke free and launched the cereal empire that outlasted all his brother’s enterprises. How Vincent van Gogh would never have survived without the financial and emotional support of his younger brother, Theo, in a claustrophobic relationship that both defined and confined them. How Henry David Thoreau’s life was shadowed by the early death of his older brother, John, who haunted and inspired his writing. And how the Marx Brothers collaborated on the screen but competed offstage for women, money, and fame.
Illuminating and affecting, this book will be revelatory for any parent of sons, any sibling, anyone curious about how a man’s life can be molded by his brothers. Colt’s magnificent book is a testament to the abiding power of fraternal love.
Молли Бэнг, Пенни Чисхолм0.0 Acclaimed Caldecott artist Molly Bang paints a stunning, sweeping view of our ever-changing oceans.
In this timely book, award-winner Molly Bang uses her signature poetic language and dazzling illustrations to introduce the oceanic world. From tiny aquatic plants to the biggest whale or fish, Bang presents a moving, living picture of the miraculous balance sustaining each life cycle and food chain deep within our wondrous oceans.
On land or in the deep blue sea, we are all connected--and we are all a part of a grand living landscape. Co-authored by award-winning M.I.T. professor Penny Chisholm, a leading expert on ocean science, OCEAN SUNLIGHT is packed with clear, simple science. This informative, joyous book will help children understand and celebrate the astonishing role our oceans play in human life.
Джори Грэм0.0 In Place, Graham explores the ways in which our imagination, intuition, and experience--increasingly devalued by a culture that regards them as "mere" subjectivity--aid us in navigating a world moving blindly towards its own annihilation and a political reality where the human person and its dignity are increasingly disposable. Throughout, Graham seeks out sites of wakeful resistance and achieved presence. From the natural world to human sensation, the poems test the unstable congeries of the self, and the creative tensions that exist within and between our inner and outer landscapes--particularly as these are shaped by language.
Beginning with a poem dated June 5th, placed on Omaha Beach, in Normandy--the anniversary of the day before the "historical" events of June 6th--Place is made up of meditations written in a uneasy lull before an unknowable, potentially drastic change--meditations which enact and explore the role of the human in and on nature. In these poems, time lived is felt to be both incipient, and already posthumous. This is not the same as preparing for a death. It is preparing for a life we know we, and our offspring, shall have no choice but to live. How does one think ethically as well as emotionally in such a predicament? How does one think of one's child--of having brought a person into this condition? How does love continue, and how is it supposed to be transmitted? Does the nature of love change?
Both formally and thematically poems of ec(h)o-location in space/time, Graham's new poems work to discern "aftermath" from "future"--as the two margins of the form ask us to feel the vertiginous "double" position in which we find ourselves, constantly looking back just as we are forced to try to see ahead.
In an era where distrust of human experience and its attendant accountability are pervasive Place calls us, in poems of unusual force and beauty, to re-inhabit and make full use of--and even rejoice in--a more responsive and responsible place of the human in the world.
Морин Стэнтон0.0 One dealer's journey from the populist mayhem of flea markets to the rarefied realm of auctions reveals the rich, often outrageous subculture of antiques and collectibles.
Millions of Americans are drawn to antiques and flea-market culture, whether as participants or as viewers of the perennially popular Antiques Roadshow or the recent hit American Pickers. This world has the air of a lottery: a $20 purchase might net you four, five, or six figures. Master dealer Curt Avery, the unlikely star of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, plays that lottery every day, and he wins it more than most. Occasionally he gets lucky, but more often, he draws on a deep knowledge of America's past and the odd, fascinating, and beautiful objects that have survived it.
Week in, week out, Avery trawls the flea and antiques circuit-buying, selling, and advising other dealers in his many areas of expertise, from furniture to glass to stoneware, and more. On the surface, he's an improbable candidate for an antiques dealer. He wrestled in high school and still retains the pugilistic build; he is gruff, funny, and profane; he favors shorts and sneakers, even in November; and he is remarkably generous toward both competitors and customers who want a break.
But as he struggles for a spot in a high-end Boston show, he must step up his game and, perhaps more challenging, fit in with a white-shoe crowd. Through his ascent, we see the flea-osphere for what it truly is-less a lottery than a contact sport with few rules and many pitfalls. This rich and sometimes hilarious subculture rewards peculiar interests and outright obsessions-one dealer specializes in shrunken heads; another wants all the postal memorabilia he can get. So Avery must be a guerrilla historian and use his hard-earned knowledge of America's past to live by and off his wits. Only the smartest survive in one of America's most ruthless meritocracies.
Killer Stuff and Tons of Money is many things: an insider's look at a subculture replete with arcane traditions and high drama, an inspiring account of a self-made man making his way in a cutthroat field, a treasure trove of tips for those who seek out old things themselves, and a thoroughly fresh, vibrant view of history as blood sport.
Криста Рассел0.0 Fourteen-year-old Lucky Valera is a seasoned sailor about to join the crew of the whaling ship, Nightbird. But when his estranged older brother suddenly kidnaps him and forces him into servitude as a mule spinner at the mill, his life takes a dramatic turn for the worse. Determined to escape, Lucky links up with some unlikely allies: Daniel, a fugitive slave who works alongside him at the mill, and Emmeline, a Quaker ship captains daughter. Emmeline offers Lucky passage on her fathers ship in exchange for his help leading escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, but Lucky knows getting out from under his brother wont be easy. When their plans go awry and Daniel is threatened by ruthless slave catchers, Lucky discovers that true freedom requires self-sacrifice, and he comes eventually to realize he is part of a larger movement from which he cannot run away.
Мартин Эспада0.0 In this new collection of poems, Martín Espada crosses the borderlands of epiphany and blasphemy: from a pilgrimage to the tomb of Frederick Douglass to an encounter with the swimming pool at a center of torture and execution in Chile, from the adolescent discovery of poet Omar Khayyám to the death of an "illegal" Mexican immigrant.
from "The Trouble Ball"
On my father's island, there were hurricanes and tuberculosis, dissidents in jail
and baseball. The loudspeakers boomed: Satchel Paige pitching for the Brujos
of Guayama. From the Negro Leagues he brought the gifts of Baltasar the King;
from a bench on the plaza he told the secrets of a thousand pitches: The Trouble Ball,
The Triple Curve, The Bat Dodger, The Midnight Creeper, The Slow Gin Fizz,
The Thoughtful Stuff. Pancho Coímbre hit rainmakers for the Leones of Ponce;
Satchel sat the outfielders in the grass to play poker, windmilled three pitches
to the plate, and Pancho spun around three times. He couldn't hit The Trouble Ball.
Джозеф Эллис0.0 The Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-selling author of "Founding Brothers" and "His Excellency "brings America's preeminent first couple to life in a moving and illuminating narrative that sweeps through the American Revolution and the republic's tenuous early years.
John and Abigail Adams left an indelible and remarkably preserved portrait of their lives together in their personal correspondence: both Adamses were prolific letter writers (although John conceded that Abigail was clearly the more gifted of the two), and over the years they exchanged more than twelve hundred letters. Joseph J. Ellis distills this unprecedented and unsurpassed record to give us an account both intimate and panoramic; part biography, part political history, and part love story.
Ellis describes the first meeting between the two as inauspicious--John was twenty-four, Abigail just fifteen, and each was entirely unimpressed with the other. But they soon began a passionate correspondence that resulted in their marriage five years later.
Over the next decades, the couple were separated nearly as much as they were together. John's political career took him first to Philadelphia, where he became the boldest advocate for the measures that would lead to the Declaration of Independence. Yet in order to attend the Second Continental Congress, he left his wife and children in the middle of the war zone that had by then engulfed Massachusetts. Later he was sent to Paris, where he served as a minister to the court of France alongside Benjamin Franklin. These years apart stressed the Adamses' union almost beyond what it could bear: Abigail grew lonely, while the Adams children suffered from their father's absence.
John was elected the nation's first vice president, but by the time of his reelection, Abigail's health prevented her from joining him in Philadelphia, the interim capital. She no doubt had further reservations about moving to the swamp on the Potomac when John became president, although this time he persuaded her. President Adams inherited a weak and bitterly divided country from George Washington. The political situation was perilous at best, and he needed his closest advisor by his side: "I can do nothing," John told Abigail after his election, "without you."
In Ellis's rich and striking new history, John and Abigail's relationship unfolds in the context of America's birth as a nation.
Sarah Smith0.0 Since losing both of her parents, fifteen-year-old Katie can see and talk to ghosts, which makes her a loner until fellow student Law sees her drawing of a historic house and together they seek a treasure rumored to be hidden there by illegal slave-traders.
Law Walker knew Katie Mullens before she was crazy. Before her mother died. Law knows Katie’s crazy now, but she’s always been talented. And she keeps filling sketch pads even though her drawings have gone a little crazy as well—dark, bloody. What Law doesn’t know is that these drawings are real. Or were real. Katie draws what she sees—and Katie sees dead people. People who have died—recently, and not so recently—in accidents, from suicide, even a boy who was trapped in a house that burned down more than 100 years ago. And it’s this boy who makes Law want to get to know Katie all over again. So what if his dad doesn’t want him dating a white girl? So what if people think Katie is dangerous? The ghost boy is hiding a secret that Law needs to know—and it’s much bigger, much more shocking than anyone ever expected.
Дэниел Тобин0.0 Daniel Tobin’s fifth book, Belated Heavens, spans from prehistory to modern Manhattan, Neanderthals “cowering in caves” to a man snoring in Penn Station as if he’s “swallowed an espresso machine.” Tobin delves into timeless themes of violence, destruction and endurance, his poems running the gamut from form to free verse as they offer the reader an underlying hope, a tentative belief, that, yes, we are surviving—somehow, thank heavens. An award-winning Irish American poet and scholar, Daniel Tobin’s assorted iconographic choices will hook every reader, whether by poems about environmental consciousness, murdered heretics, meal bugs or the caves of Lascaux. Throughout the writing is an ever-present violence that at times is as quiet and slow as “an endless tongue of water licking seams / where stone foundation meets concrete floor,” while other times is as brute and in your face as a “village idiot’s shredded legs.” Violence, however, is not the main concern of this collection, but rather how humanity thrives despite the volatility of the world.
Джон Пипкин0.0 Woodsburner springs from a little-known event in the life of one of Americaâ€s most iconic figures, Henry David Thoreau. On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods—an event that altered the landscape of American thought in a single day.
Against the background of Thoreauâ€s fire, Pipkinâ€s ambitious debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while also painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment. Pipkinâ€s Thoreau is a lost soul, plagued by indecision, resigned to a career designing pencils for his fatherâ€s factory while dreaming of better things. On the day of the fire, his path will intersect with three very different local citizens, each of whom also harbors a secret dream. Oddmund Hus, a lovable Norwegian farmhand, pines for the wife of his brutal employer. Elliott Calvert, a prosperous bookseller, is also a hilariously inept aspiring playwright. And Caleb Dowdy preaches fire and brimstone to his congregation through an opium haze. Each of their lives, like Thoreauâ€s, is changed forever by the fire.
Like Geraldine Brooksâ€s March and Colm TóibÃnâ€s The Master, Woodsburner illuminates Americaâ€s literary and cultural past with insight, wit, and deep affection for its unforgettable characters, as it brings to vivid life the complex man whose writings have inspired generations
Винсент Дж. Каннато0.0 For most of New York's early history, Ellis Island had been an obscure little island that barely held itself above high tide. Today the small island stands alongside Plymouth Rock in our nation's founding mythology as the place where many of our ancestors first touched American soil. Ellis Island's heyday—from 1892 to 1924—coincided with one of the greatest mass movements of individuals the world has ever seen, with some twelve million immigrants inspected at its gates. In American Passage, Vincent J. Cannato masterfully illuminates the story of Ellis Island from the days when it hosted pirate hangings witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century when massive migrations sparked fierce debate and hopeful new immigrants often encountered corruption, harsh conditions, and political scheming.
American Passage captures a time and a place unparalleled in American immigration and history, and articulates the dramatic and bittersweet accounts of the immigrants, officials, interpreters, and social reformers who all play an important role in Ellis Island's chronicle. Cannato traces the politics, prejudices, and ideologies that surrounded the great immigration debate, to the shift from immigration to detention of aliens during World War II and the Cold War, all the way to the rebirth of the island as a national monument. Long after Ellis Island ceased to be the nation's preeminent immigrant inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it are still relevant to Americans a century later.
In this sweeping, often heart-wrenching epic, Cannato reveals that the history of Ellis Island is ultimately the story of what it means to be an American.
Грейс Лин4.6 В долине Бесплодной реки живет девочка по имени Миньли. Целыми днями она вместе с родителями гнет спину на рисовом поле, а по вечерам папа рассказывает ей причудливые сказки про Нефритовую Дракониху и Лунного Старца. Девочка отправляется на поиски Лунного Старца, чтобы спросить его, как ей изменить судьбу своей семьи…
Грейс Лин написала чудесный роман о счастье, о семейных узах и о настоящей дружбе. «Где гора говорит с луной» - это приключенческая история в классической традиции «Волшебника страны Оз», основанная на китайском фольклоре.
Лин сама проиллюстрировала сказку великолепными цветными рисунками, и у неё получилась поистине завораживающая детская книга.
Джералдин Брукс4.2 Наши дни, Сидней. Известный реставратор Ханна Хит приступает к работе над легендарной "Сараевской Аггадой" - одной из самых древних иллюстрированных рукописей на иврите. Шаг за шагом Ханна раскрывает тайны рукописи - и заглядывает в прошлое людей, хранивших эту книгу… Назад - сквозь века. Все дальше и дальше. Из оккупированной нацистами Южной Европы - в пышную и роскошную Вену расцвета Австро-Венгерской империи. Из Венеции эпохи упадка Светлейшей республики - в средневековую Африку и Испанию времен Изабеллы и Фердинанда. Книга открывает секрет за секретом - и постепенно Ханна узнает историю ее создательницы - прекрасной сарацинки, сумевшей занять видное положение при дворе андалузского эмира. Завораживающую историю запретной любви, смертельной опасности и великого самопожертвования…
Мойинг Ли-Маркус0.0 Most people cannot remember when their childhood ended. I, on the other hand, have a crystal-clear memory of that moment. It happened at night in the summer of 1966, when my elementary school headmaster hanged himself.
In 1966 Moying, a student at a prestigious language school in Beijing, seems destined for a promising future. Everything changes when student Red Guards begin to orchestrate brutal assaults, violent public humiliations, and forced confessions. After watching her teachers and headmasters beaten in public, Moying flees school for the safety of home, only to witness her beloved grandmother denounced, her home ransacked, her father's precious books flung onto the back of a truck, and Baba himself taken away. From labor camp, Baba entrusts a friend to deliver a reading list of banned books to Moying so that she can continue to learn. Now, with so much of her life at risk, she finds sanctuary in the world of imagination and learning.
This inspiring memoir follows Moying Li from age twelve to twenty-two, illuminating a complex, dark time in China's history as it tells the compelling story of one girl's difficult but determined coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution.
Snow Falling in Spring is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Кэти Смит Милуэй0.0 Inspired by true events, One Hen tells the story of Kojo, a boy from Ghana who turns a small loan into a thriving farm and a livelihood for many.
After his father died, Kojo had to quit school to help his mother collect firewood to sell at the market. When his mother receives a loan from some village families, she gives a little money to her son. With this tiny loan, Kojo buys a hen.
A year later, Kojo has built up a flock of 25 hens. With his earnings Kojo is able to return to school. Soon Kojo's farm grows to become the largest in the region.
Kojo's story is inspired by the life of Kwabena Darko, who as a boy started a tiny poultry farm just like Kojo's, which later grew to be the largest in Ghana, and one of the largest in west Africa. Kwabena also started a trust that gives out small loans to people who cannot get a loan from a bank.
One Hen shows what happens when a little help makes a big difference. The final pages of One Hen explain the microloan system and include a list of relevant organizations for children to explore.
One Hen is part of CitizenKid: A collection of books that inform children about the world and inspire them to be better global citizens.
Джеймс Тэйт0.0 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate returns with his fifteenth book of poetry, an exciting new collection that offers nearly one hundred fresh and thought-provoking pieces that embody Tate's trademark style and voice: his accessibility, his dark humor, and his exquisite sense of the absurd.
Tate's work is stark—he writes in clear, everyday language—yet his seemingly simple and macabre stories are layered with broad and trenchant meaning. His characters are often lost or confused, his settings bizarre, his scenarios brilliantly surreal. Opaque, inscrutable people float through a dreamlike world where nothing is as it seems. The Ghost Soldiers offers resounding proof, once again, that Tate stands alone in American poetry.
Джуно Диас3.9 Очень заковыристо все в жизни Оскара, доброго, но прискорбно тучного романтика и фаната комиксов и фантастики из испано-язычного гетто в Нью-Джерси, мечтающего стать доминиканским Дж. Р. Р. Толкиеном, но прежде всего — найти любовь, хоть какую-нибудь. Но мечтам его так и остаться бы мечтами, если бы не фуку — древнее проклятье, преследующее семью Оскара на протяжении многих поколений: тюрьма, пытки и страдания, трагические происшествия и, самое печальное, несчастная любовь — таков удел семьи Оскара. Его мать Бели — божественная красавица с неукротимым и буйным нравом, испытала на себе всю силу семейного проклятия. Его сестра попыталась сбежать от неизбежности. И Оскар, с отрочества тщетно мечтающий о первом поцелуе, был бы лишь очередной жертвой фуку — пока одним знаменательным летом он не решил избавить семью от страшного проклятья.
С невероятной энергией, литературным обаянием и знанием предмета Джуно Диас погружает читателя в бурную жизнь Оскара, его своенравной сестры Лолы и их неистовой матери Белисии, красавицы с королевской статью, а также в историю эпического путешествия семьи из прекрасного, но печального Санто-Доминго в обыкновенный американский городок Патерсон и обратно. Искренности и юмору автора трудно противостоять. "Короткая фантастическая Оскара Вау" живописует современный мир в непривычном, тревожном и завораживающем ракурсе, повествуя об извечной готовности человека претерпеть все — и рискнуть всем — во имя любви.
Иначе, как подлинным литературным триумфом этот роман назвать невозможно, и со всей очевидностью, Джуно Диас — один из самых необычных, своеобразных и притягательных писателей наших дней.
Ив Лапланте0.0 In 1692 Puritan Samuel Sewall sent twenty people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts represent a low point of American history, made famous in works by Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges), and Arthur Miller. The trials might have doomed Sewall to infamy except for a courageous act of contrition now commemorated in a mural that hangs beneath the golden dome of the Massachusetts State House picturing Sewall's public repentance. He was the only Salem witch judge to make amends.
But, remarkably, the judge's story didn't end there. Once he realized his error, Sewall turned his attention to other pressing social issues. Struck by the injustice of the New England slave trade, a commerce in which his own relatives and neighbors were engaged, he authored "The Selling of Joseph," America's first antislavery tract. While his peers viewed Native Americans as savages, Sewall advocated for their essential rights and encouraged their education, even paying for several Indian youths to attend Harvard College. Finally, at a time when women were universally considered inferior to men, Sewall published an essay affirming the fundamental equality of the sexes. The text of that essay, composed at the deathbed of his daughter Hannah, is republished here for the first time.
In Salem Witch Judge, acclaimed biographer Eve LaPlante, Sewall's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, draws on family lore, her ancestor's personal diaries, and archival documents to open a window onto life in colonial America, painting a portrait of a man traditionally vilified, but who was in fact an innovator and forefather who came to represent the best of the American spirit.
Alice Hoffman0.0
This is a chilling story of friendship, first love and family secrets. Estrella lives in Spain, next door to her best friend Catalina. They used to be inseparable, but then Andres, Catalina's cousin and the boy she's planning to marry, starts to gaze at Estrella instead. And Catalina starts to plot...Estrella's family have always done things slightly differently. Lighting candles on a Friday, for example. But these tiny things that Estrella has done all her life suddenly add up to something huge. She discovers that she and her family are Marranos - Spanish Jews living double lives as Catholics. And soon the outside world starts to intrude on her life - the world of the Spanish Inquisition, of neighbours accusing each other, of looting and riots. It is a world where new love burns and where friendship ends in flame and ash.
Генри Коул0.0 I don't want words to sever me from reality.
I don't want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling--as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured in a bowl.
--from "Gravity and Center"
In his sixth collection of poetry, Henri Cole deepens his excavations of autobiography and memory. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," he asserts, and these poems--often hovering within the realm of the sonnet--combine a delight in the senses with the rueful, the elegiac, the harrowing. Many confront the human need for love, the highest function of our species. But whether writing about solitude or the desire for unsanctioned love, animals or flowers, the dissolution of his mother's body or war, Cole maintains a style that is neither confessional nor abstract. And in Blackbird and Wolf, he is always opposing disappointment and difficult truths with innocence and wonder.
Клэр Мессуд0.0 The Emperor’s Children is a richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune—about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way--and not-- in New York City. In this tour de force, the celebrated author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.
Nathaniel Philbrick0.0 *Starred Review* Departing from his customary nautical stories, including the phenomenally popular In the Heart of the Sea (2000), Philbrick makes landfall with the saga of the Pilgrims. By necessity, all modern writing about the founding colonists
Марк Фостер0.0 Long before the invention of electricity or the discovery of underground reservoirs of fossil fuels, people depended on whale oil to keep their lamps lit. A few brave Colonial farmers left their fields and headed out to sea to chase whales and profits farther and farther off shore. When they did, towns sprung up around their harbors as demand grew for sailors, blacksmiths, ropewalkers, and the many other craftsmen needed to support the growing whaling industry. Through the fictional village of Tuckanucket, Whale Port explores the history of these towns. Detailed illustrations and an informative narrative reveal the way Tuckanucket’s citizens lived and worked by sharing the personal stories of people like Zachariah Taber, his family and neighbors, and the place they called home. Whale Port is also the story of America, and the important role whales played in its history and development as people worked together to build communities that not only survived, but prospered and grew into the flourishing cities of a new nation.
Louise Glück4.7 Averno is a small crater lake in southern , regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück’s eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence.
Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
Дон Трипп0.0 From the critically acclaimed author of Moon Tide comes a mesmerizing novel of love and violence, family and betrayal. The Season of Open Water is the passionate, searing story of a young woman coming of age in a New England seacoast town that is swept up in the dangerous trade of rum-running.
It is October 1927. Bridge Weld is nineteen, headstrong and beautiful, working in her grandfather Noel's boatbuilding shop. When Noel is approached by a local bootlegger to refit a boat for smuggling, he feels in his gut that he should not accept the work, yet he takes the job for the money it offers and for the chance it gives him to build a future for his beloved granddaughter, Bridge, and her brother, Luce. What Noel doesn’t count on is that Luce will be lured into the rum work himself and will try to pull Bridge into it with him.
But Bridge has embarked on a different course. Caught up in a passion for Henry, a veteran of World War I, Bridge is propelled beyond the confines of her known world, and ultimately she must choose between the man who loves her and the brother to whom she has been loyal all her life. As Bridge strikes out on her own, Luce's fierce attachment spirals out of control.
Exquisitely written, haunting in its rendering of place, The Season of Open Water is a superb novel about a family and the lawlessness of the heart, a love story that explores the often inescapable connections between violence and desire.
Меган Маршалл0.0 Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. The story of these remarkable sisters and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biography brings to new life the era of creative ferment known as the American Renaissance. Elizabeth, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire thinker. A powerful influence on the great writers of the era Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them she also published some of their earliest works. It was Elizabeth who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson's individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Mary was a determined and passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. The frail Sophia was a painter who won the admiration of the great society artists of the day. She married Nathaniel Hawthorne but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray. Marshall focuses on the moment when the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered hundreds of letters never read before as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era. It is destined to become an event in American biography.
Лиза Кетчум0.0 On Daniel Tucker’s 13th birthday, a hawk flies over his family’s farm. Does the hawk announce a visitor, or warn of imminent danger? Daniel’s mother and sister listen for the hawk’s message, while something urgent stirs inside Daniel. He is struggling to find his own path between the heritage of his Pequot mother and the customs of his English father.
Meanwhile, a new family has moved into the crumbling cabin next door. Hiram Coombs can’t believe his parents have returned to Vermont now that the Revolutionary War is over. Don’t they remember the terror of the raid, when Indians and Redcoats burned the family’s previous farm and kidnapped Hiram’s uncle?
When Hiram encounters Daniel at the trout stream that separates the two farms, he sees only a “dirty Injun,” while Daniel regards Hiram as “buffle-brained.” The arrival of two more unexpected visitors heightens the tensions between the boys and threatens to rekindle the smoldering embers of the war.
Гейл Мазур0.0 from Enormously Sad
. . . Sad, so sad-compared to what?
To your earlier more oblivious state?
It never was oblivious enough-
always those presentiments of sadness
prickling the limbic. Now a voice says, Get outside
yourself, go walk on the flats. The tide's gone out—
but your little metal detector will detect little metallic coins
of enormous sadness in the teeming wet sand,
and then, the tide will come back, erasing, cleansing!
And you, standing there in the salty scouring air-
will you still be enormously sad,
While the other world, outside your tiny purview, struck
by iron, reels? World of intentional iron, pure savage
organized iron of the world, it hasn't the time
that you have for your puny enormous sadness.
Widely acclaimed for expanding the stylistic boundaries of both the narrative and meditative lyric, Gail Mazur’s poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo’s First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur’s four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura. Mazur’s explorations of “this fallen world, this loony world” are deeply moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility—evident from the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized “Baseball,” a stunning bird’s-eye view of human foibles and passions. Clear-eyed, full of paradoxical griefs and appetites, her poems brave the most urgent subjects—from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak.
Jim Shepard4.5 Below the sign welcoming the new eighth-grade class to school is one that promises to leave no child unsuccessful and a handout that offers eight ways of being smart. For Edwin Hanratty, at times as hilarious as he is miserable, this is part of what makes junior high pretty much a relentless nightmare. And so, with Flake, his only friend, he contends with clique upon clique—the jocks who pummel them, the girls who ignore or taunt them—as well as the dogged and disconcerting attentions of a sixth-grader who’s even more ferociously disaffected than they are. And while Edwin’s parents work hard to understand him, they face without fully realizing it a demoralization so systemic that he and Flake have no recourse other than their own bitter and smart remarks, until they gradually begin flirting with the most horrible revenge of all.
This lethal impulse, which has touched communities across America, has never been given such shocking credibility as it has in Project X, which suggests that these boys’ central predicament is not their hatred of the world but their agonized and enduring love of it. Never before has Jim Shepard’s compassionate virtuosity been on such conspicuous, unsettling, and haunting display.
“A marvelous yarn, loaded with near-calamitous adventures and characters as memorable as Singer creations.” —The New York Post
“What began as a quixotic journey was also a picaresque romp, a detective story, a profound history lesson, and a poignant evocation of a bygone world.” —The Boston Globe
“Every now and again a book with near-universal appeal comes along: Outwitting History is just such a book.” —The Sunday Oregonian
As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, Aaron Lansky set out to save the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Today, more than a million books later, he has accomplished what has been called “the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history.” In Outwitting History, Lansky shares his adventures as well as the poignant and often laugh-out-loud stories he heard as he traveled the country collecting books. Introducing us to a dazzling array of writers, he shows us how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future—and how the written word can unite everyone who believes in the power of great literature.
A Library Journal Best Book
A Massachusetts Book Award Winner in Nonfiction
An ALA Notable Book
Молли Бэнг0.0 Caldecott Honor artist Molly Bang celebrates the many wonders of the sun, with radiant words and images that illuminate the myriad ways in which the sun gives us energy and power from its light.
Often taken for granted, the sun gives us more than its light. Here, acclaimed author and illustrator Molly Bang presents a celebration of the wonder and power of the sun and its radiance. With dazzling paintings and a simple poetic text, MY LIGHT follows the paths of the sun's rays, showing the many ways in which we obtain energy from its light. As in COMMON GROUND (Giverny Award for Best Science Picture Book), Bang uses a story to explain the basic concepts behind electricity and our energy resources--a compelling and easily-accessible way to present a non-fiction subject.
Люси Брок-Бройдо0.0 With Trouble in Mind, her long-awaited third collection, Lucie Brock-Broido has written her most exceptional poems to date. There is a new clarity to her work, a disquieting transparency, even in the midst of the wild thickets of language for which she is known. A poet “at the border of her own allegory,” Brock-Broido searches for a lexicon adequate to the extremities of experience–a quest that is as capricious as it is uncompromising. In the process, she reveals, unsparingly, things as they are. In “Pamphlet on Ravening” she recalls, “I was a hunger artist once, as well. / My bones had shone. / I had had rapture on my side.” The book is laced with sequences: haunted, odd self-portraits; a succession of poems provoked by discarded titles by Wallace Stevens; an intermittent series of fractured and beguiling lyrics that she variously refers to as fragments, leaflets, and apologues.
Trouble in Mind is a book that astonishes us afresh at the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock-Broido is not afraid to follow where it may lead her: “That the name of bliss is only in the diminishing / (As far as possible) of pain. That I had quit / The quiet velvet cult of it, / Yet trouble came.” Even trouble, in Brock-Broido’s idiom, becomes something resplendent.
Кристофер Кастеллани0.0 Some in Santa Cecilia think that a rich, beautiful girl like Maddalena Piccinelli wouldn't look at Vito Leone if he were the last boy on earth. But it is 1943, and Vito is nearly the last boy in the village-and in a few months, after he turns eighteen, the soldiers may come for him too. For now, he is determined to win her. And he is beginning to get past her self-contained reserve and melt her stubborn heart. But as forces from the world outside-including an American stranger-begin to invade their quiet refuge, Vito will face challenges far more daunting than coaxing a kiss from Maddalena.
Кристиан Дж. Аппи0.0 Intense and absorbing... If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want. -Chicago Tribune
Christian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These vivid testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides: Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a vivid human history of the war.
A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely. -The Washington Post Book World
Лоис Лоури5.0 Precocious Katy Thatcher always knew she wanted to be a doctor like her father. She joins him on his rounds and has a keen interest in the people around her. She's especially intrigued by Jacob, a gentle, silent boy who has a special sensitivity toward animals. While Jacob never speaks to or looks at Katy, they develop an unusual friendship and understanding. The townspeople dismiss Jacob as an imbecile. Katy just thinks of him as someone special who has a way of communicating with the animals through his sounds and movements.
And only Katy comes to realize what the gentle, silent boy did for his family. He meant to help, not harm. It didn't turn out that way.
Генри Коул0.0 Time was plunging forward,
like dolphins scissoring open water or like me,
following Jenny's flippers down to see the coral reef,
where the color of sand, sea and sky merged,
and it was as if that was all God wanted:
not a wife, a house or a position,
but a self, like a needle, pushing in a vein.
-from "Olympia"
In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole's melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man's creaturely self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of "a man alone," trying --to say something true that has body, because it is proof of his existence.. . Middle Earth is a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are . . .marvels-unbuttoned, riveting, dramatic-burned into being-- (Tina Barr, Boston Review).
Норман Гатро0.0 A BookSense 76 selected title As French Canadians living on a saltwater farm overlooking the rugged Maine coast, the Dupuy men are hardworking fishermen and the women are strong and resourceful wives and mothers. Jordi Dupuy is set to become a lobsterman like his father and grandfather when World War II erupts and his father heads to the battlefields. In the wake of the war, Jordi leads three generations of men in building a sailboat worthy of all they have lost and all they have left to live for. Jordi grows up with the code of honor passed down to him, choosing to live a life of integrity--even when it means facing a charge of murder. When Sea Room first appeared in hardback in May 2002, I resolved to visit every bookseller in New England to introduce myself and my book. Using lists from NEBA, BookSense, and the ABA, I plotted a series of trips, little realizing how ambitious my undertaking was. Through a long, hot summer driving a car whose A/C had long ago gone kerflooey, I visited about 150 bookstores, sometimes up to eight a day. But for my ability to take the wrong turn a statistically impossible number of times coupled with New England's antipathy to street signs, I'd have visited more. What started as a journey to introduce my hard-bound, stiff-spined child to the world became a heartening education in the vibrant world of bookstores and the people who run them. Sure, I'd feared hostile receptions. ("What are you doing dropping in unannounced like this?") But while I did receive two or three such greetings, the vast majority of booksellers were warmly welcoming. Most were people who loved what they were doing. You could see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices. I came awaywith a fondness for booksellers--their love of books; their hospitality to writers; and mostly, most assuredly mostly, their commitment to their customers. What a lesson in the way businesses can be! In almost every store I walked into, the shelves whispered, "This ain't the phone company." Also, I feel I made many friends, a good number of whom I saw on several occasions as my efforts yielded up more than fifty store events. So now Sea Room has a softer sibling and I look forward to doing it all again. Oh, if only we have a cool summer...If only I had one of those fancy GPS navigation systems...I was immediately swept away by this evocative and accomplished first novel. Norman Gautreau has created an irresistible universe that centers on a saltwater farm on the rugged coast of Maine during World War II. This is the story of family love and courage under unspeakable circumstances. And the honorable lives of the Dupuy family teach us that, with enough hope, we can always find a little sea room.--E.H.
Роланд Мерулло0.0 The author of the acclaimed novel Revere Beach Boulevard writes his own story of place, class, family, and love
"Sentimentality is cheap. Real emotion is difficult to render. Memoirists walk a tightrope between sentimentality and simple feeling. What gives Revere Beach Elegy its vitality and 'worth' is the author's taut prose and his fearlessness to run across that tightrope." --Greg Lalas, Boston Magazine
In Revere Beach Elegy, Roland Merullo returns to his childhood heaven of Revere, Massachusetts, to begin an intricate, impressionistic portrait of his rich and complex life. The tough codes of Revere's working-class streets mix with the warmth and affirmation of family-- forty cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles--to form a background against which Merullo's later wanderings are always set.
"I've never met Roland Merullo, or even read anything he's written before now. Yet today I feel as if I've known him my whole life. . . . At the close of Elegy, the reader is comfortably walking alongside a man who has grown into himself, accepted and embraced his past." --Ray Suarez, The Washington Post
Praise for Roland Merullo's Revere Beach Boulevard:
"A great novel--ambitious, heartfelt, generous, and oh-so-skilled." --Richard Russo
Roland Merullo is the author of Revere Beach Boulevard, A Russian Requiem, and Leaving Losapas. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and daughters.
Джек Гантос0.0
Jack Gantos, bestselling author of the Joey Pigza books, had a peripatetic childhood around the US and the Caribbean. At 18 years old, he was doing a dead-end job on a Caribbean island, looking for adventure and a way to fund himself through university. When he was offered $10,000 to sail a boatload of drugs to New York, he jumped at it. It resulted in a year in a federal prison - and a lot of thinking time. In prison, Jack discovered the library where he was able to indulge his passion for literature and continue to write the journal he'd started in childhood. Denied a diary of his own by prison regulations, he wrote his notes in a tiny hand between the lines of a Russian novel. Becoming ever more determined to get to university, Jack discovered that he didn't have to let one bad choice map out the course of the rest of his life. There are such things as second chances. Paroled after a year in order to go directly to college to study writing, Jack had his first children's book published within two years of being released.
Джори Грэм0.0 Jorie Graham's collection of poems, Never, primarily addresses concern over our environment in crisis. One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."
With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.
Деннис Лихэйн4.1 Американец ирландского происхождения Деннис Лихэйн — признанный мастер “нуара”, лауреат множества американских и зарубежных премий. Триллер, поставленный Клинтом Иствудом по его роману “Таинственная река” с Шоном Пенном, Тимом Роббинсом и Кевином Бэйконом в главных ролях, завоевал всемирную известность и удостоился двух “Оскаров”,“Золотого глобуса” и премии Каннского фестиваля.
Элизабет Гиттер0.0 In 1837, Samuel Gridley Howe, the ambitious director of Boston's Perkins Institution for the Blind, heard about Laura Bridgman, a bright deaf-blind seven-year-old, the daughter of New Hampshire farmers. He resolved to dazzle the world by rescuing her from the "darkness and silence of the tomb." And indeed, thanks to Howe and an extraordinary group of female teachers, Laura learned to finger-spell, to read raised letters, and to write legibly and even eloquently.
Philosophers, poets, educators, theologians, and early psychologists hailed Laura as a moral inspiration and a living laboratory for the most controversial ideas of the day. She quickly became a major tourist attraction, and many influential writers and reformers—Carlyle, Dickens, and Hawthorne among them—visited her or wrote about her. But as the Civil War loomed and her girlish appeal faded, the public began to lose interest. By the time Laura died in 1889, she had been wholly eclipsed by Helen Keller.
The Imprisoned Guest recovers Laura Bridgman's forgotten life, placing it in the context of nineteenth-century American social, intellectual, and cultural history. Her troubling, tumultuous relationship with Howe, who rode her achievements to his own fame but could not cope with the intense, demanding adult she became, sheds light on the contradictory attitudes of a reform era in which we can find some precursors to our own.
Барбара О'Коннор0.0 A girl abandoned by her mother discovers the feeling of family
Pearl's mother, Ruby, just up and left her with Aunt Ivy, who's a complete stranger to Pearl. "Your mama's done gone off the deep end," Ivy says, and Pearl wonders if she'll ever come back - Ruby has always been wild and irresponsible. So Pearl is stuck with Aunt Ivy, and Moonpie, the neighbor boy whose mother doesn't want him, either, and John Dee, Aunt Ivy's Beau. But these three people seem to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, in a way that Pearl can't comprehend, and she feels left out. As she starts to understand what connects them, and how much she wants to be a part of it, Ruby appears.
With a vividly depicted setting, emotional truth, and a distinctly Southern voice, Barbara O'Connor shows how Pearl develops a whole new notion of what she wants, and what she deserves.
Алан Дуган0.0 Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan’s new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet’s insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
Джейн Энн Филлипс0.0 MotherKind explores the spiritual education at the heart of the most fundamental transition: the child who grows to nurture his or her parent. Kate, whose care for her terminally ill mother coincides with the birth of her first child and the early months of a young marriage, must come to terms with crucial loss and radiant beginnings in the same deftly chronicled year.MotherKind invites the reader into a layering of experience that is nearly limitless, yet wholly ordinary and familiar. First and second marriages, babies and step-children, neighbors, friends, blended families, baby sitters and wise strangers all intermingle in the tumult of an everyday marked by a turning of seasons and the gradual vanishing of Kate's mother, the strong woman who has been her friend, mentor and counterpart across a divide of experience and time.
MotherKind describes a very contemporary situation yet deals with timeless themes. What is the nature of "home", when so many of us live our lives far from where we started? How do we translate all we have passed from into what we carry forward? How are we inextricably linked, even in separation, across generations, cultures, eras; across death itself. In MotherKind, the everyday is illumined with the past as Kate finds her former and present lives joined into one luminous passage.
Диана Мьюир0.0 From the vantage point of a nearby pond in Newton, Massachusetts, Diana Muir reconstructs an intriguing interpretation of New England's natural history and the people who have lived there since pre-Columbian times. Taking a radically new way to illustrate for general readers the vast interrelationships between natural ecology and human economics, Muir weaves together an imaginative and dramatic account of the changes, massive and subtle, that successive generations of humankind and such animals as sheep and beavers have worked on the land. Her compelling narrative takes us to a New England populated by individuals struggling to make a living from a land not generously endowed by nature. Yankee history, she argues, was a string of ecological crises from which the only escape lay in creating radical new solutions to apparently insurmountable problems. Young men and women coming of age in the 1790s faced a bleak future. In a time when farming was virtually the only occupation, a burgeoning population meant that there was not enough land to go around. Worse, such land as there was had been worn out by generations of careless use. With no prospects and no options, young men like Eli Whitney and Thomas Blanchard might have resigned themselves to a life of poverty. Instead, they started an industrial revolution, the power of which astonished the world. Reflections in Bullough's Pond is history on a grand scale. Drawing on scholarship in fields ranging from archaeology to zoology, Muir offers an exhilarating tour of Paleolithic megafauna, the population crisis faced by New England natives in the pre-Columbian period, the introduction of indoor plumbing, and the invention of the shoe-peg. At the end, we understand ourselves and our world a little better.
Эллен Виттлингер0.0 What's really going on here?There's something brewing in the town of Scrub Harbor and it's not just about changing the name from Scrub Harbor to Folly Bay. O'Neill has a secret. Adam is starting over. Christine has a crush. Gretchen has a cause. You'll get an earful getting to know them!
Питер Дэвисон0.0 “Peter Davison, for years, has pondered with clear insight the perspectives of affection, attachment, loss, and memory, his language spare and his tone classical and deceptively quiet. The poems of this new collection look at the same world with surprise and speak of it with a startled and startling freedom, feeling ‘entitled to the liberty of breathing easy’—a freedom that brings with it the old clarity and eloquence.”
—W. S. Merwin
The poems in Peter Davison’s exuberant new collection contemplate the paradox of growing old—of having a mind still “a juicy swamp of invention” in a body beginning to falter.
Both intimate and generous, these poems celebrate the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth: snapping turtles lay their eggs and new ones hatch; a ruffed grouse drums his spring mating dance. Memory is central: a mother’s lost face; a father’s voice that “plumbed the marrow of poetry as tenderly / as if a darling had crept into his arms”; a wife’s “rueful eyes, cornflower blue.” And the poet pays tribute to the literary life—to reading, to the precise moment a word rises to consciousness, to getting over Robert Frost, to the mind of Sylvia Plath.
These are poems that expand time for us and deepen place, whether Davison is taking us on a path along a limestone cliff under canopies of holly and ivy, or is revisiting the instant while recovering from surgery when it becomes clear he is going to heal. “To learn poetry,” Davison writes in his foreword, “we need to take poems into our breath and blood, and that requires us to hear them as we read them, to learn to read with all the senses, especially with the ear.” Breathing Room gives us a splendid array of poems that we want to read with all our senses.
