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How Literature Saved My Life
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: David Shields
Format: Deckle Edge]
Publisher: Knopf (2013, Feb 5th).
Pages:
In this wonderfully intelligent, stunningly honest, and painfully funny book, acclaimed writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all readers and writers who seek to find salvation in literature.Blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the power of literature (from Blaise Pascal's Pensées to Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Renata Adler's Speedboat to Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past) to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his "ridiculous" ambivalence), his character flaws, his woes, his serious despairs. Books are his life, but when they come to feel unlifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of art that is based heavily on quotation and consciousness and self-consciousness--perfect, since so much of what ails him is acute self-consciousness. more
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Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Cita Stelzer
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Pegasus; 1 edition (2013, Jan 9th).
Pages: 336
A colorful and eloquent look at Churchill as he has never been seen before. With fascinating new insights into the food he ate, the champagne he loved, and the important guests he charmed, this delectable volume is a sumptuous and intellectual treat.A friend once said of Churchill “He is a man of simple tastes; he is quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.” But dinners for Churchill were about more than good food, excellent champagnes and Havana cigars. “Everything” included the opportunity to use the dinner table both as a stage on which to display his brilliant conversational talents, and an intimate setting in which to glean gossip and diplomatic insights, and to argue for the many policies he espoused over a long life. more
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Home Fires Burning: Married to the Military-for Better or Worse
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Karen Houppert
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books (2006, Jan 31st).
Pages: 272
As taps echoes across the cookie-cutter housing areas of upstate New York’s Fort Drum, the wives turn on the evening news, both hoping for and dreading word of their husbands overseas. It’s a ritual played out on military bases across the nation as the waiting wives of Karen Houppert’s extraordinary new book endure a long, lonely, and difficult year with their husbands far from home. Houppert, a prize winning journalist, spent a year among these women, joining them as they had babies, raised families, ran Cub Scout troops, coached soccer–and went to funerals.The waiting wives include Lauren, twenty-six, whose Navy SEAL husband was killed in Afghanistan; Heidi, peace activist and Army wife whose life is a daily struggle with her conscience; Crystal, a nineteen-year-old raising two babies on a shoestring while her husband fights in the Middle East; Tabitha, who becomes the alleged victim of murderous domestic violence at the hands of her Special Operations boyfriend; and Danette, once an Army brat and now a devoted Air Force wife, who teaches, raises two teens, and fills her days with endless volunteer work. more
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How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain's Most Ineligible Bachelor and his Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Wendy Moore
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Basic Books (2013, Apr 9th).
Pages: 360
Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal like an English country maid yet tough and hardy like a Spartan heroine, she would live with him in an isolated cottage, completely subservient to his whims. But after being rejected by a number of spirited young women, Day concluded that the perfect partner he envisioned simply did not exist in frivolous, fashion-obsessed Georgian society. Rather than conceding defeat and giving up his search for the woman of his dreams, however, Day set out to create her.So begins the extraordinary true story at the heart of How to Create the Perfect Wife, prize-winning historian Wendy Moore’s captivating tale of one man’s mission to groom his ideal mate. more
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Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Ira Katznelson
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Liveright; 1 edition (2013, Mar 1st).
Pages: 512
“Fear Itself deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions.”—David Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from FearRedefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, “a towering figure in the study of American and European history” (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. more
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Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Lynne Olson
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House (2013, Mar 26th).
Pages: 576
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERFrom the acclaimed author of Citizens of London comes the definitive account of the debate over American intervention in World War II—a bitter, sometimes violent clash of personalities and ideas that divided the nation and ultimately determined the fate of the free world. At the center of this controversy stood the two most famous men in America: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who as unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s isolationists emerged as the president’s most formidable adversary. Their contest of wills personified the divisions within the country at large, and Lynne Olson makes masterly use of their dramatic personal stories to create a poignant and riveting narrative. more
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The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Michael R. Gordon
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon (2012, Feb 7th).
Pages: 640
Eagerly anticipated in the wake of their national best seller Cobra II (“The superb, must-read military history of the invasion of Iraq”—Thomas L. Friedman), The Endgame is Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor’s most ambitious and news-breaking book to date. A peerless work of investigative journalism and historical recreation ranging from 2003 to 2012, it gives us the first comprehensive, inside account of arguably the most widely reported yet least understood war in American history—from the occupation of Iraq to the withdrawal of American troops. Prodigiously researched, The Endgame is not only based on an abundance of highly classified, still-secret government documents but is also brilliantly informed by access to key figures in the White House, the military, the State and Defense departments, the intelligence community, and, most strikingly, by extensive interviews with both Sunni and Shiite leaders, key Kurdish politicians, tribal sheikhs, former insurgents, Sadrists, and senior Iraqi military officers, whose insights about critical turning points and previously unknown decisions made during the war have heretofore been conspicuously missing from the media’s coverage of it. more
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