The first volume in McCarthy's Border Trilogy, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES begins with the death of John Grady Cole's grandfather. John Grady, age 16, has lived with his grandfather for much of his life, and when the old man dies and the family home--a ranch in Texas--is sold, John Grady and his old frien ...
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“A beautiful and majestic fictional panorama.” --John Updike, <i>The New Yorker</i><br>“Flat-out brilliant. . . . Lush, detailed, vibrantly colored and intense.” –<i>San Francisco Chronicle<br></i><br>“A tour de force. . . . Every bit as affecting as it is grippi ...
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This biography analyzes how Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash's eccentric personality helped him to develop revolutionary mathematical processes, and chronicles the transformation of this prolific eccentricity into a 30-year bout of paranoid schizophrenia and eventual recovery in 1990. Nas ...
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Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents' desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s. By the author of The Virgin
<p>Somewhere in South America at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band ...
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A journalist recounts the year he spent as a corrections officer at the notorious prison, offering a true insider's view of the culture of its guards--both idealistic "new jacks" like himself and brutally hardened veterans, prison rituals like strip frisks and cell searches, and the impasse between ...
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The hero of John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are le ...
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First you took [the title] at face value, and picked it up immediately. "This is just the sort of book for which I have been looking!" Many of you, particularly those among you who seek out the maudlin and melodramatic, were struck by the "Heartbreaking" part. Others thought the "Staggering Genius" ...
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From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.<br><br>From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation ...
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A haunting novel that completes Updike's extraordinary tetralogy chronicling four decades of life in America. In the final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild while exploring the bleak terrain of late ...
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This riveting work of legal reportage is at once the story of an emotionally explosive lawsuit and a searing expose of the American legal system. When young lawyer Jan Schlichtmann initiates a civil suit against two of the nation's largest corporations who stand accused of the deaths of children in ...
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A new collection of short stories by the celebrated writer introduces a rich cast of characters--including a stroke victim who will help a young bride identify the problem at the core of her marriage, a daughter who confronts her father about the open secret of his life, a nurse tending a dying pati ...
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In 1939 New York City, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Hitler's Prague, joins forces with his Brooklyn-born cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic-book superheroes inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams. By the author of Wonder Boys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech--performed largely by machete--it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of ...
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Norman MacLean scrupulously examines the tragic events of August 5, 1949, when lightning struck and started a forest fire in the Rocky Mountains. Thirteen young airborne firefighters were killed trying to extinguish it, when a 200-foot high firestorm erupted into a vast wall of death. MacLean, who h ...
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From her birth in rural Manitoba, to her journey with her father to southern Indiana, to her years as a wife, mother, and widow, to her old age, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggles to find a place for herself in her own life.
The most riveting political biography of our time, Robert A. Caro’s life of Lyndon B. Johnson, continues. <b>Master of the Senate</b> takes Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 through 1960, in the United States Senate. Once the most a ...
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From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel.<br><br>Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in st ...
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On Baritone Bay, mid-afternoon, Joseph and Celice, married for almost thirty years, lie murdered in the dunes. The shocking particulars of their passing make up the arc of this courageous and haunting novel. The story of life, mortality and love, <I>Being Dead</I> confirms Jim Crace's place as one ...
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Barzun unpacks a lifetime of learning in this comprehensive overview of history and culture. The distinguished historian reexamines major themes in Western civilization from the Renaissance through modern times.
Demonstrating that the decisive "Seven Years' War" changed the balance of power between the British and French in North America, the author argues that this conflict destroyed the delicate balance of power that gave Native people a voice in the affairs of the continent while creating an "American ge ...
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As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student ...
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This biography of the emperor of Japan examines his formative years and how they shaped his character, his deft grasp of both the imperial system and modernity, his wielding of power and influence within his country, and that country's conflicts with major powers such as China and the United States. ...
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In this meticulously researched and ultimately explosive new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the <I>New York Times </I>bestseller <I>The Coming Plague</I>, Laurie Garrett takes readers across the globe to reveal how a series of potential and present public health catastrophes together f ...
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<i>Austerlitz</i>, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable” (<i>The New York Review of Books</i>), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a <i>Kin ...
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A new collection of stories by the celebrated author of Love Invents Us introduces a new cast of characters who search for love and satisfaction in a difficult and painful world.
Jonathan Raban, an Englishman, explores the harrowing reality behind the dream of the American West. Using the accounts of homesteaders, he evokes the realities of their disappointments, exploding our idea of the West as a realm of stable, settled communities and revealing a much less wholesome land ...
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In an exposT of contemporary library policies, the best-selling author of Vox describes how such institutions have dismantled collections of original bound newspapers and so-called brittle books to replace them with microfilmed copies, exploring the hidden reasons for such policies and calling for t ...
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The author's award-winning portrait of this most American of American Founding Fathers introduces readers to the great contradictions and extraordinary accomplishments of this master statesman, scientist, inventor, businessman, author, and first postmaster of the nation. Reprint. (Biography)
In THE MONK IN THE GARDEN, award-winning author Robin Marantz Henig vividly evokes a little-known chapter in science, taking us back to the birth of genetics, a field that continues to challenge the way we think about life itself. Shrouded in mystery, Gregor Mendel's quiet life and discoveries make ...
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