OPENING LINES:
Perspective. I need to get perspective. It’s not an earthquake or a crazed gunman or a nuclear meltdown, is it? On the scale of disasters, this is not huge. Not huge. One day I expect I’ll look back at this moment and laugh and think, Ha-ha, how silly I was to worry—
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Poppy Wyatt feels like the luckiest girl in the world, about to marry a gorgeous man and celebrating her engagement at a hotel with all her friends. But when she loses her expensive heirloom engagement ring and her phone on the same day, she panics. Salvation appears in the form of a cell phone she finds in a trash bin, and under the age-old rule of “finders keepers” she takes possession, giving the number to the hotel staff who are looking for her ring, as well as to all her friends. The trouble is the phone used to belong to the personal assistant of businessman Sam Roxton and he not only wants it back, he really wants Poppy to stop reading his personal texts and emails. Kinsella has a great ear for dialogue and character and her comic timing helps carry the reader over any of the more wacky plot points. The frothy premise works, thanks mostly to loveable Poppy who struggles with self-esteem issues but remains plucky and adorable.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: I’ve Got Your Number
GREAT LINES:
But how did these ordinary people get these piles of money? Then it dawns on you.
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If one of your life goals is to make a few investments and enjoy a secure retirement, this may be the best book on investing you’ll ever find. The author compares Wall Street to two casinos. The red casino has fashions, fads, exciting people, exotic formulas, mathematical wizards, magnificent fee structures, 24/7 news cycles, day traders, trend extrapolators, and is crowded with people being relieved of their life savings. The other casino, the green one, is rather drab, almost empty, with just a few ordinary people following common-sense guidelines year in and year out, but who over the long haul are making plenty of money. The secret to investing is not that the guidelines are so complicated – most anyone has the smarts to follow them – but that it is so emotionally easy to get drawn into Wall Street’s exotic high-fee fads. Dreman, a veteran professional investor, tells you how to avoid most of the traps, why his simple common-sense guidelines should work, and (what makes this great book) he shows you exactly how following his guidelines would have rewarded you in the past.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Contrarian Investment Strategies
OPENING LINE:
They had discovered a lost world above California, and it was unexplored.
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Richard Preston is an exciting writer. He wrote the terrifying true account of an Ebola virus outbreak in his 1994 book The Hot Zone. The Wild Trees is just as powerful. It is a love story between Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine, two scientists who come together and discover the incredible secrets hiding in the tops of the ancient coastal redwoods. Before their work, arborists didn’t think there was much to be found in these canopies. This new breed of scientists, however, discover creatures who spend their whole lives without ever touching the ground. The giant redwoods that these explorers and their colleagues learn to climb and study are so massive that they literally have other trees of different species growing out of their limbs. Thirty stories above the earth there is another forest rising from the tops of the Sequoia sempervirens. Some of these trees are almost 2,000 years old. They survive periodic fires that can leave charred caves at their bases large enough for cars to drive through. The tallest of these trees was cut down in 1886 and was reported to be 424 feet. And of course the greatest threat to this glorious species is us: an estimated 95% of the ancient redwood forests have been cut down since the 1850s. Preston learned to climb these trees so he could follow the scientists into the hearts of the giants. He has written a book that takes the reader with him.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Wild Trees
GREAT LINES:
At 4:00, maybe 4:30, in the morning, they were standing in our room: Rolf Isaakson, another Jewish snatcher, and two SS men. They had come in through the bathroom window of the ground floor apartment, and their weapons were pointing at us.
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Gad Beck was born in 1923 to a Jewish father and Christian mother in Austria and as he grew so, too, did fascism, the Nazi Party, and the persecution of the Jews. His sexual awakening came without hang-ups, he says. One afternoon he rushed home to his mother and giddily announced that he’d hugged his gym teacher. “’Aha, I thought so,’ she answered dryly.” That Gad Beck came of age in a peculiarly frightening time, doesn’t mean he doesn’t also remember fights with the parents, first love, and looking for a way to fit in, the sorts of things we all go through. On the other hand, most of us aren’t growing up in a war zone, with friends and family among both victims and perpetrators. Beck’s voice is personal and lively and it’s easy to get the feeling he’s telling you about something that’s just happened. He disguises himself in a Hitler Youth uniform (“It was at least four sizes too big … As makeshift alterations I tucked the sleeves and legs up on the inside.”); he makes arrangements with a smuggler (“Strunck was hardened and venal. It didn’t mean anything to him that he was saving Jews. He wanted thousands of marks per person.”); he laments the capture of a colleague bearing a list of people in hiding (“When I was in charge, there never even was a list; I always had all the names and addresses in my head. But of course, no one was really in charge anymore.”). A gay Jew in Nazi Berlin? A leader in the resistance? It is not a long book, but it gets intense. There were times I had to look again at the author photograph to reassure myself that he had survived.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: An Underground Life
OPENING LINE:
There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.
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Rebecca Skloot almost failed her high school biology class. But her teacher told her about Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells and then and there she planned one day to write a book about the subject. After getting a BS in biology and a Masters in journalism she became a science writer, and wrote this book. Henreitta Lacks was a poor Africian American woman, the daughter of a tobacco grower from small town Virginia. She was raised mostly by her grandfather, married her cousin and had five children. In 1951 she died at Johns Hopkins Hospital of cervical cancer. What makes her famous, though is the fact that some of the cells taken from her tumor became the first human cells to survive and grow in a culture medium. As such they helped make the polio vacine and have been involved in countless medical studies. These remarkable cells are known as HeLa cells. In the 1970′s her family found out that Henrietta’s cells had been used in this way, though they did not understand and no one explained to them. This book is about Henietta’s decendents learning of the importance of the cells and beginnig to pull themselves out of poverty. It is written with an even-hand and positive tone. Read it if you are interested in science, social justice, or family histories.
OPENING LINES:
Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death. The uniqueness of each of us extends even to the way we die.
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“Oh, ugh- what do you want to read that for? How morbid,” is often the reaction I get when I read (and reread) this title. Is it morbid? I would say that in fact Nuland’s sensitive and beautifully written examination of a universal experience is life-affirming and comforting. Nuland was a physician for many years, and taught medicine at Yale. He must have been an excellent professor, for he knows how to communicate difficult, complex information in elegant, digestible servings. He examines the physiological, psychological, spiritual and ethical issues surrounding death, using different scenarios such as heart attack, murder, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, cancer and old age. Researching and analyzing near-death experiences, he presents a picture of death as an experience which seems to be at least neutral, and frequently positive, for the person experiencing it. Some of the scenarios he presents are wrenching and unforgettable, such as the 10 year old child whose mother watches helplessly as a mentally ill homeless person stabs her daughter to death right in front of her. The thorough research and even tone are balanced by Nuland’s compassion and empathy. Remarkably, he avoids sentimentality, a welcome respite from many books on death and dying. Look for the edition which includes Coda: 2010, where Nuland delivers an incisive and critical analysis of our health care system as we approach our ends. “Death belongs to the dying and those who love them,” states Nuland in an eloquent epilogue- and so this book belongs to all of us.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: How We Die