Thursday, September 27, 2018

My Dear Hamilton by Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie, 641 pages

From the New York Times bestselling authors of America’s First Daughter comes the epic story of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton—a revolutionary woman who, like her new nation, struggled to define herself in the wake of war, betrayal, and tragedy. Haunting, moving, and beautifully written, Dray and Kamoie used thousands of letters and original sources to tell Eliza’s story as it’s never been told before—not just as the wronged wife at the center of a political sex scandal—but also as a founding mother who shaped an American legacy in her own right.

A general’s daughter…

Coming of age on the perilous frontier of revolutionary New York, Elizabeth Schuyler champions the fight for independence. And when she meets Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s penniless but passionate aide-de-camp, she’s captivated by the young officer’s charisma and brilliance. They fall in love, despite Hamilton’s bastard birth and the uncertainties of war.

A founding father’s wife...

But the union they create—in their marriage and the new nation—is far from perfect. From glittering inaugural balls to bloody street riots, the Hamiltons are at the center of it all—including the political treachery of America’s first sex scandal, which forces Eliza to struggle through heartbreak and betrayal to find forgiveness.

The last surviving light of the Revolution…

When a duel destroys Eliza’s hard-won peace, the grieving widow fights her husband’s enemies to preserve Alexander’s legacy. But long-buried secrets threaten everything Eliza believes about her marriage and her own legacy. Questioning her tireless devotion to the man and country that have broken her heart, she’s left with one last battle—to understand the flawed man she married and the imperfect union he could never have created without her…
 

Monday, September 24, 2018

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, 178 pages

In his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the classic private eye finds his full-fledged form as Philip Marlowe: at once tough, independent, brash, disillusioned, and sensitive—and man of weary honor threading his way (in Chandler’s phrase) “down these mean streets” among blackmailers, pornographers, and murderers for hire.


Part of Your World by Liz Braswell, 475 pages

What if Ariel had never defeated Ursula? Five years after the (twisted) events of the film, Ariel is now the queen of Atlantica, and Ursula is running Eric's kingdom on land. But when the sea witch threatens Atlantica once more, Ariel finds herself returning to a world (and a prince) she thought she'd left behind forever.


Thursday, September 20, 2018

The Black Death by Philip Ziegler, 249 pages

Philip Ziegler follows the course of the black plague as it swept from Asia into Italy and then into the rest of Europe.

When first published in 1969, this study was described by the Guardian as …as exciting and readable an account as you could wish." This new edition of the major study on the subject is illustrated by over seventy contemporary black and white illustrations and eight pages of color.

A series of natural disasters in the furthest reaches of the Orient during the third of the fourteenth century heralded what was, for the population of Europe, the most devastating period of death and destruction in its history. By the autumn of 1347 the Black Death had reached the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, and the years that followed were to witness a horrifying and apparently relentless epidemic.

One third of England's population died between the years 1347 and 1350, and over one thousand villages were deserted, never to be repopulated. In towns and cities the cemeteries were unable to provide space for all the dead, and violence and crime spiraled. Travel became dangerous and interruption of food and other supplies across the country added hunger and deprivation to the problems of people already overwhelmed by the threat of the vilest of deaths.

In the countryside the population was halved in places, and as land became plentiful, landowners' profits fell and the government tried in vain to fix labourers' wages and prices, peasant unrest accelerated and the manorial system disintegrated, culminating eventually in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Throughout Europe whole societies were disrupted; racial tensions built as a direct result of the plague, and persecution of Jews began in earnest throughout the continent. The social and economic consequences of the period were to reach far into the following century.
 

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman, 286 pages

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots.

Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions. Women wore makeup made with mercury and lead. Men rubbed turds on their bald spots. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings, and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. The most gorgeous palaces were little better than filthy latrines. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes and the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on private parts; and worms nesting in the intestines.

In The Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman combines her unique access to royal archives with cutting-edge forensic discoveries to tell the true story of Europe’s glittering palaces: one of medical bafflement, poisonous cosmetics, ever-present excrement, festering natural illness, and, sometimes, murder.


Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe, 303 pages

In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the United States--by far the most plentiful among all our ethnic eateries. Now, in Chop Suey Andrew Coe provides the authoritative history of the American infatuation with Chinese food, telling its fascinating story for the first time. 
It's a tale that moves from curiosity to disgust and then desire. From China, Coe's story travels to the American West, where Chinese immigrants drawn by the 1848 Gold Rush struggled against racism and culinary prejudice but still established restaurants and farms and imported an array of Asian ingredients. He traces the Chinese migration to the East Coast, highlighting that crucial moment when New York "Bohemians" discovered Chinese cuisine--and for better or worse, chop suey. Along the way, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origins; reveals why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; shows how President Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new range of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like those served in Beijing or Shanghai. The book also explores how American tastes have been shaped by our relationship with the outside world, and how we've relentlessly changed foreign foods to adapt to them our own deep-down conservative culinary preferences. 
Andrew Coe's Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States is a fascinating tour of America's centuries-long appetite for Chinese food. Always illuminating, often exploding long-held culinary myths, this book opens a new window into defining what is American cuisine.


Wednesday, September 12, 2018

I Don't Want to Kill You by Dan Wells, 320 pages

John Cleaver has called a demon—literally called it, on the phone, and challenged it to a fight. He’s faced two of the monsters already, barely escaping with his life, and now he’s done running; he’s taking the fight to them. But as he wades through his town’s darkest secrets, searching for any sign of who the demon might be, one thing becomes all too clear: in a game of cat and mouse with a supernatural killer, the human is always the mouse. 

In I Am Not a Serial Killer we watched a budding sociopath break every rule he had to save his town from evil. In Mr. Monster we held our breath as he fought madly with himself, struggling to stay in control. Now John Cleaver has mastered his twisted talents and embraced his role as a killer of killers. I Don’t Want to Kill You brings his story to a thundering climax of suspicion, mayhem, and death.

It’s time to punish the guilty.

And in a town full of secrets, everyone is guilty of something.

Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal, 373 pages

London, 1940. Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat of a Blitz looms larger by the day. But none of this deters Maggie Hope. She graduated at the top of her college class and possesses all the skills of the finest minds in British intelligence, but her gender qualifies her only to be the newest typist at No. 10 Downing Street. Her indefatigable spirit and remarkable gifts for codebreaking, though, rival those of even the highest men in government, and Maggie finds that working for the prime minister affords her a level of clearance she could never have imagined—and opportunities she will not let pass. In troubled, deadly times, with air-raid sirens sending multitudes underground, access to the War Rooms also exposes Maggie to the machinations of a menacing faction determined to do whatever it takes to change the course of history.

Ensnared in a web of spies, murder, and intrigue, Maggie must work quickly to balance her duty to King and Country with her chances for survival. And when she unravels a mystery that points toward her own family’s hidden secrets, she’ll discover that her quick wits are all that stand between an assassin’s murderous plan and Churchill himself.

Sunday, September 9, 2018

The Complete Funky Winkerbean: Volume 2 1975-1977 by Tom Batiuk, 490 pages

Funky, Les, and the gang pun their way through Westview High

Since its debut on March 27, 1972, Funky Winkerbean has chronicled the lives of a group of students from the fictitious Westview High School. This second volume, which presents strips from 1975, 1976, and 1977, sees the comic strip rounding into the form that will carry it into its middle years. With gentle humor and not-so-gentle puns, Les, Funky, Crazy Harry, and the gang comment on life's little absurdities.

Funky begins to ponder why there are cloakrooms in elementary schools when no one wears cloaks. Crazy Harry, firmly ensconced in his locker-as-living-quarters, moves out because his row of lockers has gone condo. Les Moore blossoms as a character and replaces Funky as the leader of the school's out crowd when he is seen alone on his bicycle at the local drive-in movie. The computer at Westview High becomes sentient and subjects the students to its obsession with Star Trek, including holding Star Trek conventions at the school. Westview's principal and teachers cope with it all with irony or Zen-like detachment.

In Volume 1, we met Harry L. Dinkle, the band director at West-view High. The self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Band Director," Dinkle is based on a retired band director from Avon Lake, Ohio, who was also the band director at the junior high school that Tom Batiuk attended. Band camps, the Fall Battle of the Bands, and the annual torrential downpours become fixtures in the strip. Other familiar themes are the turkeys and fruitcakes that show up through the years as band fund-raisers. The Westview Scapegoats go national and march off to the 1976 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Harry L. Dinkle marches into real life, lending his name to a line of Dinkles band shoes, actual band candy, and the "Harry L. Dinkle March" composed by Andy Clark. He even shows up on scoreboards at college football games.

Volume 2 includes an introduction in which Tom Batiuk shares the creative and evolutionary processes in his development of these characters. Subsequent volumes will each contain three years of Funky strips and will be published annually. Batiuk has been recognized for his humorous and entertaining portrayals of the students and staff at Westview and acclaimed for his sensitive treatment of social and educational issues.

Scythe by Neal Shusterman, 435 pages

Thou shalt kill.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

BabyMouse: Tales From the Locker: Miss Communication by Jennifer Holm & Matthew Holm, 196 pages

Watch out, middle school! In her second foray out of graphic novels and into middle grade, Babymouse has a smartphone, and she's not afraid to use it. . . .

Ping! Ping! The sound of texting is in the air. Everyone at middle school has a cell phone. Babymouse just has to get one, too.

But having a phone is a lot of work! Building up a following on SoFamous, learning text lingo, keeping up with all the important koala videos . . . Babymouse is ready to tear her whiskers out. Why does it suddenly feel like she has no friends? Somehow, Babymouse needs to figure out how to stop worrying and love her smartphone . . . if Locker doesn't eat it first.


Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, 466 pages

Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders... but her father isn't a very good one. Free to lend and reluctant to collect, he has loaned out most of his wife's dowry and left the family on the edge of poverty--until Miryem steps in. Hardening her heart against her fellow villagers' pleas, she sets out to collect what is owed--and finds herself more than up to the task. When her grandfather loans her a pouch of silver pennies, she brings it back full of gold.

But having the reputation of being able to change silver to gold can be more trouble than it's worth--especially when her fate becomes tangled with the cold creatures that haunt the wood, and whose king has learned of her reputation and wants to exploit it for reasons Miryem cannot understand.



Sunday, September 2, 2018

Moloka'i by Alan Brennert, 406 pages

This richly imagined novel, set in Hawai'i more than a century ago, is an extraordinary epic of a little-known time and place---and a deeply moving testament to the resiliency of the human spirit.

Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her. Taken from her home and family, Rachel is sent to Kalaupapa, the quarantined leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka'i. Here her life is supposed to end---but instead she discovers it is only just beginning.