Book Quote: “I see that I’m going down,” Susan said. “Christopher and I are going down. No hope. Only we can go down with fear and anger, or we can go down with love. I want to go down with love. But I don’t know how.” Book Review: Review by Bonnie Brody (MAR 10, 2010) Lost , by Alice Lichtenstein, is a beautiful, literary and profoundly poetic novel. It will appeal to anyone who has ever known or loved a person with Alzheimer’s... 

Book Quote: “It was June’s decision to climb atop the overcrowded train. Since that night she had often wondered if it would have been better to wait for the next one, or to have taken their chances on foot, or else steered the twins and herself far off the main road without any provisions and simply waited for the one merciful night that would lift them away forever. The twins would not have suffered and she would not be here now. For... 

Book Quote: “Carefully, I injected each chocolate with a drop or two of the stuff, touching the injection site with a glass rod (slightly warmed in the Bunsen burner) to smooth over the little hole. “I had carried out the procedure so perfectly that only the faintest whiff of rotten egg reached my nostrils. Safe inside the gooey centers, the hydrogen sulfide would remain cocooned, invisible, unsuspected, until Feely – “Flavia!”... 

Book Quote: “It was as if growth had been the country’s vengeful response to Saddam. Spanking new three-story cement mansions sat on lots only meters bigger than their outer walls; all the freeways had been rebuilt; and the Cornice along the Gulf had been redesigned in its entirety, stripped bare of its immediate history as a battleground of the war. And everywhere, litter. It blew with the sand and grit of the city, tracing the fence-lines... 

Book Quote: “Hal saw nothing but the girl he was with and the service he was promised to, and in the deep silence at the centre of himself he made an absolute commitment to each.” Book Review: Review by Bonnie Brody (MAR 6, 2010) Major Hal Treherne first saw Clara, his friend’s sister, when he was 19 and she was 17. The year was 1946. He felt overwhelmed by her and within a few years they were married. Hal came from a family... 

Book Quote: “We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors…. I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short.” Book Review: Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAR 5, 2010) There is a great deal to like in Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand... 

Book Quote: “The [gender] divide implied certain things. Young women enjoyed a more fluid job situation; they could join a factory assembly line and move up to be clerks or salespeople. Young men had a harder time entering a factory, and once in they were often stuck. Women, in the factory or out, came into contact with a wider range of people and quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles, and accents of the city; men tended to stay locked in... 

Book Quote: “And I know for a fact that the dead don’t come back.” Book Review: Review by Guy Savage (MAR 3, 2010) If you read enough world literature in translation, sooner or later you stumble across some of history’s dirty little secrets, and this thought came to mind as I read See How Much I Love You by Spanish author, Luis Leante. The novel, which was inspired by a 2005 …  Read More →

Book Quote: “People have searched for these paintings for twenty years,” she said. “The police, the FBI, Interpol, private detectives, insurance detectives, art historians, treasure hunters. People have spent an enormous amount of energy trying to find these things, but no one has done it yet. There have been lots of theories about who was responsible. The most popular is that the IRA teamed up with the Boston mob to do the... 

Book Quote: “The father of the gods is in a sulk. It is always thus when one of his girls, all unknowing, goes back to her true, that is, her rightful mate, as she must. What does he expect? He comes to them in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them…  Read More →

Book Quote: “Nobody gets forgotten anymore. Seven fans in Australia team up with three Canadians, nine Brits and a couple of dozen Americans, and somebody who hasn’t recorded in twenty years gets talked about every day. It’s what the Internet’s for. That and pornography.” Book Review: Review by Mike Frechette (FEB 26, 2010) Nick Hornby novels translate well into film. Just think about High Fidelity and About a Boy , which…  Read More →

Book Quote: “She’s gone. She’s gone.” Paul sang the chorus of that Hall & Oates song. He sang without irony, for he was a twenty-first-century American who’d been taught to mourn his small and large losses by singing Top 40 hits. Book Review: Review by Debbie Lee Wesslemann (FEB 25, 2010) War Dances , Sherman Alexie’s collage of short stories and narrative and prose poems, covers familiar Alexie territory: the melancholy comedy... 

Book Quote: “The case of that pilot crashing was only one of many instances when someone at the White House or Pentagon told Adam that blood and treasure—how he despised the words—would be lost if he didn’t hide information that might or might not have been factual.” Book Review: Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 22, 2010) The talented Lorraine Adams’ debut novel, Harbor , was an absolute tour-de-force. Depicting the lives of Algerian... 

Book Quote: “Omar Yussef descended past boarded-up basement windows and entered a short corridor. The wall was covered with posters of Palestinian children, hackneyed images of defiance and suffering, and political slogans that fatigued Omar Yussef with their posturing and sentimentality. He glanced over a photo of a burned-out car, three victims of Israeli helicopter missiles lying within, their bearded faces vaguely nauseous in death, empty... 

Book Quote: “Inspector? Have you ever encountered anything like this before? What I mean to say is . . . Brother Stanislav’s head.” He winced as he recalled the decapitation and blood. “It looked as if his head had been ripped from his body.” Book Review: Review by Bonnie Brody (FEB 22, 2010) Vienna, 1903, is the pervasive ambiance of Frank Tallis’ book, Vienna Secrets . The atmosphere is spellbinding in its depiction of the people,...