*The Harder They Come
by T.C. Boyle returns to his trademark description of destructive misfits with individualism as a
central theme. A seventy-year-old Vietnam vet
returns home after killing a Costa Rican armed robber to find that his schizophrenic fragile son Adam is involved with an older woman dedicated to a right-wing
anarchist group. Adam imagines himself a
modern mountain man and shoots two people, leading to a major, eerily
contemporary, manhunt. My favorite Boyle book since Tortilla Curtain.
*The Three Roosevelts:
Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America by James MacGregor Burns and
Susan Dunn is a political biography of the intertwined lives of Theodore,
Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who emerged New York's Knickerbocker elite to
become the most prominent American political family of the twentieth century.
While building on Burns’ concept of transformational leadership, there is
little new insights on leadership or history in its almost thousand pages. Still,
it is an interesting view of how the Roosevelt family dominated the
first half of the 20th century with more impact than the Bush’s and
Clinton’s managed in more recent times.
**Dead Wake: The Last
Crossing of the Lufthansa by Eric
Larson, “ one of the modern masters of popular narrative nonfiction”--.a
resourceful researcher and a subtle storyteller places the world’s fastest and
most opulent passenger ship and the deadly German U-boat as protagonists in a
thrilling suspense tale even if you already know the outcome. Larson
draws on telegrams, war logs, love letters, and survivor depositions to
provide intriguing details about things
you didn't know you need to know...”Thrilling, dramatic and powerful."
Life After Life by
Jill McCorkle explore the capacity for self-discovery at any age (from
twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie). The residents, staff, and
neighbors of a North Carolina retirement center
share their secret memories and life’s
profound discoveries in a somewhat disjointed meditation on life, death,
and dying.
