January 10, 2013
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Here's the latest issue of our free twice-monthly newsletter to keep you up to date with some of the new books and authors featured at BookBrowse.
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Readers Recommend
Each month we give away books to members to read and review (or discuss). Members who choose to take part tend to receive a free book about every 3-4 months. Here are their opinions on one recently published book: The Spy Lover by Kiana Davenport Publisher: Thomas & Mercer Historical Fiction, 303 pages Number of reader reviews: 34 Readers' consensus: BookBrowse Members Say "This marvelous work has no heroes and no villains but only victims of the seemingly endless ritual called war. Kiana Davenport focuses on the lives of three people caught up in the absurd pursuit of a victory without victors, of a laurel wreath of dead flowers. A dedicated nurse who must use her position to be a carrier of death, her Chinese father, fighting for a nation which does not love him and for a cause in which he cannot believe, and a young soldier who becomes the love of his enemy: these three are interconnected with all the others whose lives are blighted by slaughter without meaning." - Bob S. (Lawrenceburg, IN). "This book is the greatest reason I love to read! It took me to the era of the American Civil War and to the wet cold climate in which it took place. I learned facts about American history that were never a part of school lessons. I met three characters who showed human strengths and frailties and struggled to overcome the emotional and physical adversities of their lives. The book is a page turner that I will recommend to my friends." - Joan B. (Ellicott City, MD). "The author has done a magnificent job of creating a beautiful story of love made especially meaningful because it has survived prejudice, feelings of betrayal, sorrow, the beastly ugliness/savagery of war, forgiveness, and individual searches for self. Notice that I did not call it a "love story" because those words describe a romance. This book conveys deeper feelings and thoughts and the love found in the book expands to more than just one mere man and a woman... I recommend it to audiences of all ages." - Vam (San Antonio, Texas). "I came away feeling like my life was enriched by reading about these three people, and they will stay with me for a long time." - Jan Z-R (Jefferson, SD). These are four of the 34 reviews about this book. Read all the Reviews Buy at Amazon
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Featured Review
Below is part of BookBrowse's review of Swimming Home. Read the review in full here Swimming Home: A Novel by Deborah Levy Hardcover (Oct 2012), 176 pages. Publisher: Bloomsbury ISBN 9781620401699 BookBrowse Rating: Critics' Consensus: Review: Reading Deborah Levy's Swimming Home is as unsettling as skating across a thinly frozen pond. You know you will fall through, tumbling into the deep, murky waters below the story's surface, but you are never sure exactly when or how. Levy sets her novel, which spans merely eight days - Saturday to Saturday - in a tourist villa shared by two couples in the Alpes-Maritimes. Against the backdrop of this clich�d and innocuous setting, she spins a richly plotted, darkly humorous, and disturbing tale of psychological unraveling. Levy's characters swim rather than skate, but the water into which they dive is no less turbulent. Staying at the villa are the aging, philandering poet Joseph Jacobs, his war correspondent wife Isabel, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, who stands at the edge of her sexuality in a cherry-print bikini. Joe has a past, tied to his Holocaust-era childhood in Poland, that he wants to forget. Isabel records catastrophes "to try and make people remember." Also at the villa are their friends Mitch and Laura, who have a London emporium where they sell antique Asian weapons and expensive African jewelry. They have "come to the Alpes-Maritimes to escape from the futility of mending broken glass," which is literally, the shop windows that keep getting smashed in break-ins and figuratively, their splintering marriage and finances hurtling toward total ruin. Laura spends her time trying to keep her life together. Mitch has an insatiable appetite, expensive tastes, and shoots animals as a way to avoid facing his. There is a circus-like cast of side characters including Jurgen, the perpetually stoned hippie caretaker, his sidekick Claude, Mick Jagger look-alike and owner of a local caf�, and Madeleine Sheridan, an elderly English physician who spies on the villa from her balcony. There are also cameo appearances by a three-foot high rubber alien and a hashish-dealing accordion player. And then there is red-haired Kitty Finch, anorexic, mad, and beautiful, a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails. She first appears naked in the villa's swimming pool, and it soon becomes clear that she is stalking Joe the poet because she has written a poem she wants to show him, and because she believes his poetry is a conversation with her. "He writes about things I often think," she tells Isabel. "We are in nerve contact." Kitty Finch, predatory as a cat and fragile as a bird, is the lit fuse at the novel's center. "Standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating." Isabel, despite - or perhaps because - she understands that her husband will sleep with Kitty Finch, invites her to stay in the spare bedroom. Upon hearing the invitation, Laura thinks:
The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway. She couldn't be sure of this, but it seemed to her that Joe Jacobs had already wedged his foot into the crack and his wife had helped him. In that moment, the die is cast. Kitty will stay. From there, she spins the characters in wild and dangerous directions. She drives the plot toward its inevitable and unexpected conclusion.
Above is part of BookBrowse's review of Swimming Home. Read the review in full here Reviewed by Naomi Benaron, author of Running The RiftBrowse the book
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Beyond The Book
At BookBrowse, we don't just review books, we go 'beyond the book' to explore interesting aspects relating to the story.
Here is a recent "Beyond the Book" feature for Megan Chance's Bone River. Ethnology Ethnology is a section of anthropology that analyzes the differences between religion, language, technologies and other social structures of people as categorized by race, nationality or ethnicity. Its goals are broad - to understand the history of human beings and the creation of our various social norms (as defined by race, nationality or ethnicity). It has become exceedingly similar to cultural anthropology and social anthropology, so much so that the three terms are often interchangeable. Another way to understand ethnology is that it is the study of living cultures, both in their own, separate rights, and as compared to others across the world. In Bone River, Leonie and her husband, Junius, are ethnologists who study skeletons, as well as artifacts, of local primitive culture to try to understand the origins of human culture. They live near Bone River in Washington State, which is where they make their discoveries. Adam Franz Koll�r (1718-1783) is said to have coined the term ethnologia. Koll�r was interested in the diversity of ethnicities and cultures because Hungary, his native country, was multi-lingual and multi-"rooted." Ethnology is especially interesting to study within the context of modern technology, specifically in terms of the speed at which information can travel from nation to nation and culture to culture, because dominant cultural "norms" are disseminated rapidly and, as a result, can sometimes drown out the unique, distinctive customs of less dominant cultures. Globalization has also caused greater conflict between cultures, as access to one another can expose economic and resource disparities. On the positive side of this fast-paced present-day reality, ideas and information and even objects can be exchanged and studied and understood at a much greater and faster rate. Also, with the seeming increase of natural disasters across the world - from tsunamis to hurricanes to earthquakes - and the subsequent clarity of universal human actions and reactions, the study of ethnology focuses, in part, on the relationship between human beings and nature. At its center, ethnology is the quest to understand the movement and metamorphosis of people - their language, culture, lifestyle and physical identity - through history and time. Photograph of old map from Probert's Encyclopaedia
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Blog:
For the last few years, when the holiday season has come around, we've looked back to previous centuries for the newsworthy events of the year. Please join me on a whistle-stop tour one hundred years back in time, to 1912: Roosevelt Saved by The Written Word It's a Presidential election year in the USA and there's a rare 4-way race - two Republicans, one Democrat and one Socialist. The Republican Party is split between the conservative wing led by President William Howard Taft and the liberal/reform wing, led by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt is saved from an assassination attempt by a 50 page speech in his jacket pocket which takes much of the shot's impact, but the bullet still lodges in his chest. Just a few minutes later he opens his speech saying, "Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." He proceeds to deliver his speech in its full 90-minute glory. Later, doctors decide that the bullet is too dangerous to remove, so Roosevelt will carry it until the day he dies. Roosevelt and Taft receive 27% and 23% of the vote, losing to Woodrow Wilson with 42%. The socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, wins 6% - the party's best presedential performance, winning over 10% of the vote in Nevada, Oklahoma, Montana, Arizona, Washington and Idaho. Frank Baum and the Suffragettes Frank Baum, best known for his Oz series, publishes no less than four books in 1912, (actually probably six but two have been lost to posterity), two rather unsuccessful ones under his own name and two under one of his many pseudonyms, Edith Van Dyne, in which his female protagonists take part in traditionally masculine activities. Baum's support of women's suffrage wasn't limited to a few books written under a pseudonym; he was active in the movement for many years, acquainted with Susan B. Anthony, and included strong female leads in many of his books, not least in the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, in which a female general leads the women of Oz in a successful revolt armed only with knitting needles. He will die in 1919, the same year that Congress submits the 19th Amendment to the states for ratification, giving women the right to vote. In Britain, 54-year-old Edith Nesbit has long established herself as a household name with dozens of books for children, published as E. Nesbit, plus many lesser known poems and books for adults. In 1912 she publishes The Magic World, a collection of twelve short stories for children. Nesbit was an outspoken feminist and socialist, a follower of utopian socialist William Morris, and a founder of The Fabian Society - a socialist organization which aimed to advance socialism via reform rather than revolution. H.G. Wells was another early member of the Fabian Society (although later became critical of the organization believing that they had a poor understanding of economics and educational reform). By 1912, most of of his best known science fiction books are long behind him, but he's no less prolific, turning his focus towards politics and social commentary, in particular on the "New Woman" and the Suffragettes. Tarzan, Avonlea and A Death in Venice There's not much sign of feminism in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World - in which an expedition finds itself knee-deep in dinosaurs somewhere in the middle of the Amazon basin and we first meet Conan Doyle's new protagonist, Professor Challenger. Apparently, like Sherlock Holmes (who first appeared in 1887), Professor Challenger is based on a real person - a Scottish physiologist by the name of William Rutherford, who one must imagine was less pleased with being immortalized in print as "a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science" than Scottish doctor Joseph Bell, the inspiration for the asute and logical Sherlock Holmes. Back in the USA, manly men still rule the roost in the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs. 1912 sees the serialization of his first Tarzan book, Tarzan of the Apes; and the first in his Barsoom series, starring John Carter of Mars. The list of future authors who will be inspired by the Barsoom series reads like a who's who of 20th century science fiction. As for Tarzan, Burroughs will go on to write about two dozen sequels; and there will be many film and comic adaptations. More
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Book Club Chat
Meet the FRESH Ladies, a group of ten women ranging in age from fifties to ninety-five. With a diverse age range, a wide variety of professions and interests, and a common thread of respect and friendship, this book club hasn't had a dull moment in 8 years! And it's still going strong...
Could you please tell us a bit about The FRESH Ladies?
Sue: We are a group of ten ladies, ranging in age from fifties to ninety-five. Our eldest member, Rita, is one of our most energetic. She has shared many wonderful stories and life experiences with us, particularly stories about her years as a teacher. Five members have been in the club since the beginning: Rita, Mary Ann, Maria, Karen and myself. Our youngest member, Jill, recently moved with her family to California. We hope that she will rejoin us when they return to the area because we miss her and her perspective as a thirty-something mother of two.
Kathy M: We are all ladies with very different personalities: gentle and supporting, assertive, good listeners, those that can get "off topic" if not reined in, some who have much to offer to the discussion but need to be drawn out.
Barbara: Another form of diversity is the career paths we have followed: computer science, commercial art, school principal, teacher, librarian, and occupational therapy. This gives different insights into our reading.
Ninety-five! Rita must have very unique perspectives on some of the topics you discuss...
Continue Reading...
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Win
The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
Publishing Feb 26, 2013
Enter the Giveaway
From the Jacket
Some stories live forever...
Sage Singer is a baker. She works through the night, preparing the day's breads and pastries, trying to escape a reality of loneliness, bad memories, and the shadow of her mother's death. When Josef Weber, an elderly man in Sage's grief support group, begins stopping by the bakery, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Despite their differences, they see in each other the hidden scars that others can't, and they become companions.
Everything changes on the day that Josef confesses a long-buried and shameful secret-one that nobody else in town would ever suspect-and asks Sage for an extraordinary favor. If she says yes, she faces not only moral repercussions, but potentially legal ones as well. With her own identity suddenly challenged, and the integrity of the closest friend she's ever had clouded, Sage begins to question the assumptions and expectations she's made about her life and her family. When does a moral choice become a moral imperative? And where does one draw the line between punishment and justice, forgiveness and mercy?
In this searingly honest novel, Jodi Picoult gracefully explores the lengths we will go in order to protect our families and to keep the past from dictating the future.
Reviews:
"A powerful and riveting, sometimes gut-wrenching, read, in which the always compelling Picoult brings a fresh perspective to an oft-explored topic." - Booklist
5 people will each win a hardcover copy of The Storyteller.
This giveaway is open to residents of the USA only, unless you are a BookBrowse member, in which case you are eligible to win wherever you might live. Enter the giveaway here
Past Winners
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Featured Reading List: 1st in Series
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Author Interviews
Yangzom Brauen, author of Across Many Mountains
Peter May
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Wordplay
Solve this clue "T S's C Always G B" and be entered to win the book of your choice from a wide selection Enter NowAll winners are contacted by email. View list
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Answer to the Big Holiday Wordplay
T H G T T G by D A The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
A G by N G American Gods by Neil Gaiman
L I T T O C by G G M Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
T M O A by M Z B The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
T G E by P S B The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck
S by H H Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
A S by A R Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
S-F by K V Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A W I T by M L A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
T T T W by A N The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
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News
Jan 10 2013: Richard Blanco, a son of Cuban exiles, is to be the 2013 inaugural poet, joining the ranks of notables like Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. Mr. Blanco will compose an original poem for the president's ceremonial swearing-in on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 21...(more) Jan 10 2013: McDonald's in the UK has launched a two-year children's books campaign, committing to 'hand out more than 15 million books by the end of 2014' through a book offer on its Happy Meal boxes...(more) Jan 04 2013: Unit sales of print books fell just over 9 percent in 2012 at outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan, roughly the same percentage decline posted between 2010 and...(more) Jan 04 2013: In contrast to general retailers and Barnes & Noble, which had mixed or disappointing sales during the holiday season (see stories below), many independent bookstores had tidings of joy, with many reporting their best sales in store...(more) Jan 03 2013: The winners of the 2012 Costa Book Awards are:
Costa First Novel Award: The Innocents by Francesca Segal
Costa Novel Award (formerly Whitbread): Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Costa Biography Award (formerly Whitbread): Dotter...(more) Read these news stories, and others, in full.
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