Richard

Rating

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Description

B+

A

B+

Adult/High School-Marji tells of her life in Iran from the age of 10, when the Islamic revolution of 1979 reintroduced a religious state, through the age of 14 when the Iran-Iraq war forced her parents to send her to Europe for safety. This story, told in graphic format with simple, but expressive, black-and-white illustrations, combines the normal rebelliousness of an intelligent adolescent with the horrors of war and totalitarianism. Marji's parents, especially her freethinking mother, modeled a strong belief in freedom and equality, while her French education gave her a strong faith in God. Her Marxist-inclined family initially favored the overthrow of the Shah, but soon realized that the new regime was more restrictive and unfair than the last. The girl's independence, which made her parents both proud and fearful, caused them to send her to Austria.

A-

I read this book when I was in college about 20 years ago (like just about the rest of the world) and LOVED it.  After Vonnegut died in 2007 I decided to read it again.  Man is it weird reading this stuff again.  So it goes.   :-)

A

C+

"In my newly released book, Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars, I ask the question, why wait for a crisis to rally your team or organization? Create a sense of sharing and a compelling purpose all the time. We call this rallying cry a thematic goal. This involves deciding the one thing that matters most in the organization and rallying your people around it. Who knows? You may find that by doing so, you'll avoid a crisis."  - Patrick M. Lencioni

A

The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule.

A

Steven D. Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives - how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of...well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan.

C+

While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant; meanwhile, in the distracting aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, the surgeon is seduced by his housekeeper. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband's left hand - that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy.

B+

An astutely written fictional tale to unambiguously but painlessly deliver some hard truths about critical business procedures, Patrick Lencioni targets group behavior in the final entry of his trilogy of corporate fables. And like those preceding it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is an entertaining, quick read filled with useful information that will prove easy to digest and implement. This time, Lencioni weaves his lessons around the story of a troubled Silicon Valley firm and its unexpected choice for a new CEO: an old-school manager who had retired from a traditional manufacturing company two years earlier at age 55. Showing exactly how existing personnel failed to function as a unit, and precisely how the new boss worked to reestablish that essential conduct, the book's first part colorfully illustrates the ways that teamwork can elude even the most dedicated individuals--and be restored by an insightful leader. A second part offers details on Lencioni's "five dysfunctions" (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results), along with a questionnaire for readers to use in evaluating their own teams and specifics to help them understand and overcome these common shortcomings.

A-

Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come.

B

Albom takes a big risk with the novel; such a story can easily veer into the saccharine and preachy, and this one does in moments. But, for the most part, Albom's telling remains poignant and is occasionally profound. Even with its flaws, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a small, pure, and simple book that will find good company on a shelf next to It's A Wonderful Life. --Patrick O'Kelley

A-

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

B+

I didn't like the ending, but overall it was a good read.

Tom Perrotta's thirtyish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms at the playground, and his wife, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband, Richard, who is becoming more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child. And then there's Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at nine P.M.

They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen - until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined.

B

A murder mystery set against a religious conspiracy theory involving Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, their child and the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code mixes page-turning suspense with art history, architecture and religious history.

B

Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded malls, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That's just what Luther and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they'll skip the holiday altogether. Theirs will be the only house on Hemlock Street without a rooftop Frosty; they won't be hosting their annual Christmas Eve bash; they aren't even going to have a tree. They won't need one, because come December 25 they're setting sail on a Caribbean cruise. But, as this weary couple is about to discover, skipping Christmas bring enormous consequences - and isn't half as easy as they'd imagined.

Although you may know Ben Bova as an award-winning author of science fiction, he is also an accomplished writer of popular science books. In this nonfiction work, Bova explores all facets of light -- from shining stars to fireflies -- and gives an update on the new technologies of light, such as lasers.

B+

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

C+

Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to run--from his wife, his life, and from himself, until he reaches the end of the road and has to turn back....

B+

"The Lisbon girls, all five of whom committed suicide in the early 1970s, haunt the memories of boys next door in a wealthy Detroit suburb. A nameless narrator, one of the boys, 20 years later collects and weaves together the impressions that friends, neighbors, and parents had of the dead girls. Except for school and group outings to two ill-fated parties, the girls' lives played out confined to their dwelling, a cloistered existence protected by a mother vigilant for their virtue and by a meek father."

A-

Awesome story.  Easy read and lots to chew on.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama - 2000

From Debra Jo Immergut  
Donald Margulies has drawn one of the most complex and convincing portraits of a marriage in recent memory.
       — The Wall Street Journal

B+

From the actor, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author comes a bittersweet story of modern day love and romance.  One of our country's most acclaimed and beloved entertainers, Steve Martin is quickly becoming recognized as "a gorgeous writer capable of being at once melancholy and tart, achingly innocent and astonishingly ironic" (Elle). A frequent contributor to both The New Yorker and the New York Times as well as the author of the New York Times bestseller Pure Drivel, Martin is once again poised to capture the attention of readers with his debut novella, a delightful depiction of life and love. The shopgirl is Mirabelle, a beautiful aspiring artist who pays the rent by selling gloves at the Beverly Hills Neiman Marcus. She captures the attention of Ray Porter, a wealthy, lonely businessman. As Ray and Mirabelle tentatively embark on a relationship, they both struggle to decipher the language of love--with consequences that are both comic and heartbreaking.

B

In his bestseller, The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger describes Linda Greenlaw as "one of the best sea captains, period, on the East Coast." Now Greenlaw tells her own riveting story of a thirty-day swordfishing voyage aboard one of the best-outfitted boats on the East Coast, complete with danger, humor, and characters so colorful they seem to have been ripped from the pages of Moby Dick.

A-

From Giles Foden - The Times Literary Supplement  
"This exceptional first novel by a young Alex Garland creates a picture of an ideal society gone awry....[The novel] is very much a hallucinatory Lord of the Flies for twentysomethings. But its allegorical frame is less obtrusive, and the naturalistic element is so much to the fore as to seem documentary....The use of the first-person narrative is so successful that it does not appear to be a literary device at all....An action novel that provokes subtle responses, The Beach takes in ideas about man's inevitable progress from noble savage to social breakdown--the line of thought followed by Golding and by Aldous Huxley in Island--but it is also concerned with the related tradition of nature versus art. The mock innocence of the narrator's voice is of a piece with the notion of an artificial paradise the novel plays with."

B+

Plainsong (1999 National Book Award nominee for Fiction.)
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.  In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl -- her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house -- is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.

B+

Laugh out loud funny!

For reasons even he didn't understand, Bill Bryson decided in 1996 to walk the 2,100-mile Appalachian trail. Winding from Georgia to Maine, this uninterrupted 'hiker's highway' sweeps through the heart of some of America's most beautiful and treacherous terrain. Accompanied by his infamous crony, Stephen Katz, Bryson risks snake bite and hantavirus to trudge up unforgiving mountains, plod through swollen rivers, and yearn for cream sodas and hot showers. This amusingly ill-conceived adventure brings Bryson to the height of his comic powers, but his acute eye also observes an astonishing landscape of silent forests, sparkling lakes, and other national treasures that are often ignored or endangered. Fresh, illuminating, and uproariously funny, A Walk in the Woods showcases Bill Bryson at his very best.

A-

A gripping cautionary tale documenting the deaths of six climbers near the summit of Mt. Everest. What started as a childhood dream of climbing became reality for Jon Krakauer when Outside Magazine hired him to report on the increasing number of commercial expeditions to the top of Mt. Everest. Krakauer, his guide, and a group of experienced climbers set out to tackle Mt. Everest, with disastrous results.

B+

 I made it through high school and college without reading The Great Gatsby.

The timeless story of Jay Gatsby and his love for Daisy Buchanan is widely acknowledged to be the closest thing to the "Great American Novel" ever written.

B

At the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind, Grandpa Herman makes the rules for everyone, and everyone obeys, or else. Try as she might, Ninah hasn't succeeded in resisting temptation -- her prayer partner, James -- and finds herself pregnant. She fears the wrath of Grandpa Herman, the congregation and of God Himself. But the events that follow show Ninah that God's ways are more mysterious than even Grandpa Herman understands . . .

C-

This book was just slightly better than sucky.

Set in postwar Germany, The Reader is a provocative, morally challenging, and deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening in a clandestine love affair with a mysterious older woman. Falling ill on his way home from school, 15-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. For a time, the two become passionate lovers. Then, one day, Hanna disappears without a word. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael recognizes his former lover on the stand, accused of a hideous crime.

A-

It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high -- a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it 'the perfect storm.' When it struck in October 1991, there was virtually no warning. 'She's comin' on, boys, and she's comin' on strong,' radioed Captain Billy Tyne of the Andrea Gail off the coast of Nova Scotia, and soon afterward the boat and its crew of six disappeared without a trace.

A

"The Cider House Rules is filled with people to love and to feel for. . . . The characters in John Irving's novel break all the rules, and yet they remain noble and free-spirited. Victims of tragedy, violence, and injustice, their lives seem more interesting and full of thought-provoking dilemmas than the lives of many real people." 

      --The Houston Post

A+

Awesome book. My favorite of all time (so far).

In the summer of 1953, during a Little League baseball game, 11-year-old Owen Meany hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. What happens to him after that fateful day makes A Prayer for Owen Meany extraordinary, terrifying, and unforgettable.

B+

It was an unusual friendship: 11-year-old Michael Devlin, an Irish Catholic from Brooklyn, and Judah Hirsch, a rabbi and refugee from Prague, meet during a swirling blizzard on the Saturday morning. For Michael, Hirsch is an extraordinary window to ancient times and foreign lands; for the Rabbi, Michael is an encyclopedia of cultural knowledge of his new land. In baseball, the two find a common love, but when some anti-Semitic hoodlums threaten them with violence, the two must look for a miracle in a most unlikely place.

A

Twenty years after "The World According To Garp", John Irving gives us a new novel about family marked with tragedy. Centering around the complex, often self-contradictory character of celebrated writer Ruth Cole, "A Widow For One Year" manifests all the compassion and undertow of Irving's best, big-hearted novels.

B

Some bus drivers never meet a "white widow"--a wild card, a woman traveling alone who can change the course of a driver's life, and not always for the best. In this subtle, poignant novel, based on the true experiences of the anchor of PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Jack T. Oliver, who drives the Houston to Corpus Christi run for the Great Western Trailways bus line, is about to meet his.

B

"Mickey Sabbath, the hero in Sabbath's Theater, the winner of the 1995 National Book Award, makes a concerted effort to be bad.  Sabbath has an appetite for 'acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus.'  Sabbath often feels imprisoned by his own acts of self-indulgence. Though his frantic pursuit of sex is a desperate attempt to abate his anxieties about death, it only serves to obliterate any semblance of real life he could have had."