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Gabrielle Emilie le
Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise Du Châtelet,
might be best known for her unorthodox
fifteen-year liaison with Voltaire, but she
was much more than the patron, mistress, and
intellectual companion of France's most
famous poet and playwright. In the first
decades of the French Enlightenment,
although barred...
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Just out of college,
Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse
painting she saw in the Chicago Art
Institute: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish
in a bowl, a mysterious Moroccan screen
behind her. This woman seemed a welcome
secular version of the nuns of her girlhood,
free and untouchable, a poster girl for 20th
century...
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No. It’s not just a
one-word answer, it’s a parenting strategy.
By saying no when they need to, parents help
their children learn skills, such as
self-reliance, self-discipline, respect,
integrity, the ability to delay
gratification, and a host of other crucial
character traits. Although the importance of
no should be obvious, many parents have a
hard time...
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In the best tradition of
The Color of Water comes a beautifully
written evocative memoir of a relationship
between a mother and son – and the Chinese
immigrant experience. In THE EIGHTH PROMISE,
author William Poy Lee gives us a rare view
of the Chinese-American experience from a
mother-son perspective. His moving and
complex stories unfold...
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In the tradition of Reading
Lolita in Tehran, a look at the lives of
women in Afghanistan through the lens of The
Kabul Beauty School.
Most Westerners now working in Afghanistan
spend their time tucked inside the wall of a
military compound or embassy. Deborah
Rodrgiguez is one of the very few who lives
life smack in the middle of Kabul...
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WHO HATES WHOM is a simple
book of maps and accompanying text providing
a country-by-country breakdown of who hates
whom in ethnic, religious, economic, and
territorial conflicts worldwide. Each deadly
conflict, grim tragedy, and dreadful threat
will be festively illustrated by
brightly-colored maps covered with
eye-catching arrows...
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One of our most masterful
memoirists has written her most personal,
yet most universal book to date. During the
long farewell of her mother’s dying,
Patricia Hampl revisits her Midwestern
girlhood. Daughter of a debonair Czech
father whose floral work gave him entrée to
St. Paul society and a distrustful
Irishwoman with an uncanny ability to tell a
tale, she remained, primarily and
passionately, a daughter well into
adulthood...
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When licensed cosmetologist
turned publisher's rep Kathy Patrick lost
her job due to industry cutbacks, she wasn't
deterred. One year later, she opened Beauty
and the Book, the world's only combination
beauty salon/bookstore. Soon after, she
founded The Pulpwood Queens of East Texas --
a reading group...
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The USA DECENCY Act (Deny Evolution,
Combat Europe, and Never, ever Concede that You might be wrong about
anything, ever) was passed this year by an overwhelming majority, and
decency is now the law of the land. You are required by law to be decent.
There will be no exceptions.
Praise the government: Decency is back!
America is in the middle of a moral
revival...
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Kate Brennan is like a lot
of women: hesitant to love for fear of being
hurt. Only her fears prove to be warranted,
and the collateral damage she has suffered
is far more devastating than a broken heart.
Kate is a woman of simple tastes—and a
checkered romantic history. So when she
meets Paul, a wealthy, charismatic...
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In 1310, between the
inundations of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, Dante Alighieri wrote in The
Inferno of the acqua tinta, the dark water
that descended upon Florence to threaten its
citizens and their artistic and cultural
heritage. In 1966, one of the most dramatic
floods in modern times devastated the city
and resulted in great loss of life and
tremendous damage to the city’s many works
of art...
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Everyone keeps score,
whether we admit it or not.
The day we turn thirty-one, we become
contemporaries with everyone who has ever
been thirty-one, and it becomes our business
that Microsoft has just made Bill Gates an
instant billionaire and Charlotte Bronte is
astounding the public with Jane Eyre,
Valentino is about to snuff it and so is
Franz Schubert, and guess who will get the
bigger funeral...
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In this incredibly poignant memoir, Thrity Umrigar traces the arc of her
Bombay childhood and adolescence—from her earliest memories growing up in a
middle-class Parsi household to her eventual departure for the U.S. at age
21. Her emotionally charged scenes take an unflinching look at family issues
once considered unspeakable—including intimate secrets...
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In 1993, Judith and Michael Sleavin and their two children set out to
live their dream: to sail around the world. But one night, a freighter off
the coast of New Zealand altered its course by a mere ten degrees. And
changed everything.
After surviving forty-four hours in the
water, with a back broken in several places
and paralyzed below the waist, Judith
miraculously survived. Doctors would later
say...
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"Without the writing of books, there is no history, there is no
concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a
small space…the history of the human spirit and to make it his own,
he can only do this in the form of a collection of books."
--Hermann Hesse, The Magic of Books
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Nonfiction coming in 2012
January:
A SIMPLE
ACT OF GRATITUDE (originally published as 365 Thank Yous)
by John Kralik, paperback.
February:
A CENTURY OF WISDOM:
Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, The World’s Oldest
Living Holocaust Survivor by Caroline Stoessinger.
March:
DREAMING IN FRENCH: The Paris Years of Jacqueline
Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis by Alice Kaplan.
July: THE
ORCHARD by Theresa Weir, paperback.
September:
SMART
PARENTING, SMARTER KIDS by David Walsh, paperback.
November/December: MR. OWITA’S GUIDE TO GARDENING by
Carol Wall, FIRST INTERNATIONAL BANK OF BOB by Bob Harris |
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