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Barbara’s Recommends that you enjoy the weather while you can—and
take a book to the park...
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World
War Z
An Oral History of the Zombie War |
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By Max
Brooks
The
Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max
Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the first-hand experiences
of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across
the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards
of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable
areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women,
and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living,
or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World
War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to
a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and
horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that
gripped human society through the plague years.
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By David
Wiesner, Author and Illustrator
A boy goes
to the beach to collect and examine flotsam—anything that
has been washed ashore. Bottles, toys, small objects of every
description are among his usual finds. But there’s no
way he could have prepared for one discovery: a barnacle-encrusted
underwater camera, with secrets to share... and to keep. In
each of his amazing picture books, David Wiesner has revealed
the magical possibilities of some ordinary thing or happening—a
frog on a lily pad, a trip to the Empire State Building, a well-known
nursery tale. Now, a day at the beach is the springboard into
an exploration of the deep, and of the qualities that enable
us to witness these wonders and delight in them.
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The
Discomfort Zone
A Personal History |
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By Jonathan
Franzen
The
Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen’s intimate
memoir of his growth from a “small and fundamentally ridiculous
person,” through an adolescence both excruciating and
strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected
passions. It’s also a portrait of a middle-class family
weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal
history of the decades in which America turned away from its
midcentury idealism and became a more polarized society. The
story Franzen tells here draws on elements as varied as the
explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship, the effects
of Kafka’s fiction on his protracted quest to lose his
virginity, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother’s
house after her death, and the web of connections between his
all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the
life lessons to be learned in watching birds. Sparkling, daring,
arrestingly honest, The
Discomfort Zone narrates the formation of a unique
mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.
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By Karleen
Koen
The
long-awaited prequel to Koen’s beloved Through a Glass
Darkly, is a feast of a novel that sparkles with all the
extravagance, danger, and scandal of 17th-century England. Alice
Verney is a young woman intent on achieving her dreams. Having
left England in the midst of a messy scandal, she has been living
in Louis XIV’s Baroque, mannered France for two years.
Now she is returning home and anxious to re-establish herself
quickly. First, she will regain her former position as a maid
of honor to Charles II’s queen. Then she will marry a
celebrated duke, putting herself in a position to attain power
she’s only dreamed of. As a duchess, Alice will be able
to make or break friends and enemies at will. Unforgettable
in its dramatic force, here is a novel of love and politics,
of betrayal and power—and of a resourceful woman who risks
everything for pride and status in an era in which women were
afforded little of either. |
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