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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Diane Prokop has commented on (11) products
11 22 63
by
Stephen King, Scribner
Diane Prokop
, January 01, 2012
This was the first King book I'd ever read and I was shocked at his masterful storytelling skills. Plus, I was totally entertained, and after the year we just had, that was a tall order. The premise is of traveling back through time to try and change history. The period the protagonist traveled back to was the time before John F. Kennedy's assassination. The dilemma is not really whether he can change the course of events, but should he.
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Troublemaker A Political Memoir of the Sixties
by
William Zimmerman
Diane Prokop
, September 19, 2011
Zimmerman gives us a riveting look at his evolution into a grassroots activist beginning in Chicago during the sixties. Not only does he articulately elucidate the reasons why we went to war in Viet Nam but he also explains the machinations of the civil rights movement. Not surprisingly, most of what he says about the sixties can be extrapolated to the present time. This book is perfect for anyone who wants to grasp corporate motives and manipulation of America at the expense of the middle class and minorities. This is a must-read primer to understanding all that ails America.
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Troublemaker A Political Memoir of the Sixties
by
William Zimmerman
Diane Prokop
, September 19, 2011
Zimmerman gives up a riveting look at his evolution into a grassroots activist beginning in Chicago in the sixties. Not only does he articulately elucidate the reasons why we went to war in Viet Nam but he also explains the machinations of the civil rights movement. Not surprisingly, most of what he says about the sixties can be extrapolated to the present time. This book is perfect for anyone who wants to grasp corporate motives and manipulation of America at the expense of the middle class and minorities. This is a must-read primer to understanding all that ails America.
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Wire to Wire
by
Scott Sparling, Tin House Books
Diane Prokop
, May 03, 2011
Dark Side of the Tracks Scott Sparling’s debut novel “Wire To Wire” is a dark panoramic view full of fleeting nightmares and bad memories racing across the electrified brain of Michael Slater. That’s because while riding atop a train through Detroit his head meets a power line that almost kills him. The “electricity used Slater’s body as a raceway, entering at his forehead and shooting through his feet, rearranging the molecules as it went.” After having his skull cut open and surgically retooled, his perspective is changed forever. A few years later, he’s working as a video editor in New York in a cubicle with nothing to keep him company but speed and the visions of his past that insist on unfolding on the screens of his editing suite over and over and over again. Slater recalls scenes from the desert when he was trying to live a regular life after recovering from his accident. In no time at all, he is sleeping with someone else’s girl and running from a psycho back to Wolverine, Michigan where he falls in again with his fellow train-hopping friend Harp. Harp’s girlfriend, Lane, is too much of a temptation to pass on and that creates a juicy love triangle. Soon Slater gets pulled into Lane’s brother’s nefarious ways and once again he is running for his life. The story is classic noir fiction full of drug dealers, crooked cops, and glue-huffing losers. Sparling uses the train as a vehicle for moving the plot and the characters through a story that follows Slater and Harp through Northern Michigan’s bleak wasteland. “There was woe spread all over Northern Michigan. They’d seen plenty on the road into town. Abandoned farmhouses in fields of purple wildflowers. Rusting double-wides with big cars in front. A long stretch of fence posts where no fence remained. And the signs. Stump blasting. Worms for sale. I do drywall. People piecing their lives together.” The characters are pitiful, but some are sympathetic as well - especially Slater who one feels is always on the verge of doing the right thing but never quite manages to pull it off. Stuff just keeps happening to him. Murders, train-hopping getaways, and speed-addled lowlifes lurking in every shadow keep the story moving swiftly down the tracks. There is seemingly no place to hide. Slater’s girlfriend Lane sums it up best when she says, “You’re looking for a safe place... But there isn’t any. It’s all a tightwire and you never get to come down. You just get used to it... You just move from wire to wire to wire.” Beautifully written and chilling prose makes this more than just a crime novel. The meticulous detail of the gritty and unrelenting gloom of the Northern Michigan landscape as well as the gripping scenes of riding the rails lend a persuasive feel to this brilliantly crafted thriller.
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Bright Before Us
by
Katie Arnold Ratliff, Tin House Books
Diane Prokop
, April 29, 2011
I like when authors take me hostage right out of the gate and don’t let me go until they’ve had their way with me. That’s what Katie Arnold-Ratliff does in her debut novel “Bright Before Us.” The story begins: “We hadn’t expected it; the sky had been clear.” That’s ominous. I want to read more and as I do I watch while teacher Francis Mason discovers a dead body on a San Francisco beach. But it gets worse; he’s got his second-grade class with him. This moment of unexpected darkness on an otherwise unexceptional day sends Francis, the young, newly-minted teacher, on a downward spiral into an abyss of shifting realities. Paranoia, grief and confusion sidle up to him and shake him silly. He has that moment of realization when you’ve graduated from college, started your first adult job and are settling into a “real” relationship when you wonder: How did I get here? Did I pick the wrong profession? Who is this woman and why am I about to have a baby with her? For Francis, the incident of finding the body catapults him into an examination of his fixation with an unrequited love from his past as well as his dysfunctional upbringing. Nora was his friend growing up and then the object of his love obsession. There are problems with his current wife, Greta, with whom he’s expecting a baby. He also is second-guessing his career choice as a teacher where he feels inept. Suddenly, fleeing the whole mess starts to look like the only option. Arnold-Ratliff builds an interesting plot structure by alternating each chapter with the present and then the past. It creates a powerful narrative momentum that makes the book hard to put down. You need to know why he ended up held captive by a past full of mistakes and will he continue to make mistakes. Another compelling aspect was Francis’ continuing shifts into what can only be described as altered states of deep paranoia. He reaches that sort of high-adrenaline state when perception changes slightly fueling his growing fears and insecurities. Is he a bad teacher? Is he ready to be a husband and a parent? Does he have what it takes to move forward? Up until the point when he finds the body, Francis seems to have let life happen to him and then has ridden out the consequences. He lives “the examined life” but he doesn’t put the self-knowledge he gains to any good use - at first. “Bright Before Us” is a brilliant look at the process required of Francis to realize he must take responsibility for past choices and take charge of choices to come. The reader rides along for his transformation into adulthood as he learns that his past love is more delusion than anything else. Arnold-Ratliff lets us know that the life you get is not often the life you think you should have but it can turn out to be the life that you need to survive. I was happy for the reminder.
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Half a Life
by
Strauss, Darin
Diane Prokop
, March 22, 2011
The first line of Darin Strauss’s award-winning 2010 memoir “Half A Life” is the most stripped down, high octane, attention-grabbing opener I can ever remember reading. It reads, “Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” That sparse, almost objective, tone sets the stage for the rest of this brutally honest book where Strauss recounts the journey of his life since that day. Most of us don’t have the defining moment that Strauss had on that fateful day when he hit a young girl on a bicycle who swerved in front of him while he was driving his father’s Oldsmobile on the way to play miniature golf. We drift along absorbing the highs and lows and the outcomes and repercussions of our actions without much consequence. And I’ve seldom read a memoir that didn’t mash through a troubling childhood toward an equally dark adulthood to get to the crash and burn part, but for Strauss that certainly was not the case. He was an average high school kid, not too outstanding in school, surrounded by family and friends who loved and supported him. After the accident, for which Strauss was found completely faultless, that averageness quickly turned into a dark and tragic drama that would forever change his life. But Strauss goes to college which he calls a “witness protection program” where he is able to keep the accident under wraps. He picks and chooses with whom he shares the gritty details and finds that no one’s response is quite right. He graduates, finds work, dates, marries and has children all the while wearing the weighty memory from his adolescence like a hair shirt for penance. This is not an emotionally-charged melt down of the sort that it would have been had it been written right away. It’s an adult’s story written long after the accident. As it is, Strauss has had years to gain perspective and is able recount the tragedy to his readers without the hand-wringing or self-pity that might have been the case earlier. He could have become a shadow of himself, committed suicide or faded away but instead he picked up the pieces of his life and carried on. This is how I did it, he seems to say. It worked for me. Hopefully this memoir has been cathartic for Strauss because living with a secret is exhausting. It becomes who you are at your most basic level. Now he can say: this is who I am, this is the pain I inflicted and endured - do you still love me? “Half A Life” will make your heart beat fast and, as for me, I barely took a breath and was unable to put it down until I finished it. I hesitate to call it my favorite memoir of 2010 only because it’s like saying something is my favorite natural disaster but it is the most haunting and touching one of the year and it is a must read!
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Oracle of Stamboul
by
Michael David Lukas
Diane Prokop
, March 21, 2011
This first novel from Michael David Lukas does a superb job of transporting the reader back to the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s. His imagery of flocks of hoopoes and German frigates floating down the Bosporus creates a spectacular backdrop in this fantasy story of a precocious young girl who finds herself entangled in the fall of an empire. You can almost smell the spices and feel the heat of the ancient city of Stamboul. Although the plot lacked a compelling page-turning narrative, Lukas is a master of details and I look forward to reading the author’s sophomore effort.
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Life
by
Keith Richards
Diane Prokop
, March 12, 2011
Keith Richards’ memoir, Life, is a great read on so many levels and for so many reasons I don’t know where to begin. The first reason may actually qualify this book as a self-help tome for those who carry around a ton of guilt regarding a past full of bad choices. “Life” will make your checkered past look as though you’ve been living the life of a monk in comparison. Believe me when I say that nothing you’ve ever done could come close to Richards’ life lived in extremis. No amount of drinking, debauchery, even gun-toting partying could come close to the life Richard’s portrays in this tell-all. It’s an Our Father combined with a three Hail Mary pass for those of you still having flashbacks about that time you dropped acid and ran naked through your neighbor’s yard. That he lived to tell about it is another reason entirely. The guy deserves your ear. He’s 67 and still going strong and there’s a lot to learn from him about living the life you dream of and never leaving a stone unturned when opportunity knocks. He worked hard, played hard and amazingly remembers everything down to how much cocaine he did, where he hid it, who the judge was (there were a lot of them) and what he was wearing at the time. His story unfolds with total candor and lots of humility, amazingly. He comes across as quite a likable guy who could charm your grandmother. Of course there’s also the fact that he was the life force of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band of all time and that’s not just my opinion. Try and name any other band besides The Rolling Stones that wrote so many great songs, over such a long span, with so many hits and just so much of everything AND is still out there doing it in their sixties. You can’t - there is no one else. For those of us who rocked along with the Stones in the late 60s and into the 70s, this book is a special treat. It’s a time capsule that will make you want to dig around in closet for your black leather pants and boots, find a big doobie and kick up the volume on Let It Bleed which I’m listening to right now (without the getup or the doobie). Since Richards remembers everything, you’ll be able to fill in the blanks on what actually happened back then - a big help for the boomers out there. Finally, for us music geeks, there’s plenty to keep you happy with details on how they wrote many of their best songs. Apparently Richards can write songs in his sleep as well as when he’s falling down drunk or on a seven-day heroin binge. He talks a lot about open five-string tuning that he discovered in the late sixties and used in Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Women and Satisfaction. I love the shout outs to all the Chicago rhythm and blues musicians who Richards say influenced him. In fact, he gives plenty of credit all the way around cuz that’s just the kinda guy he is.
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So Much Pretty
by
Cara Hoffman
Diane Prokop
, March 07, 2011
Cara Hoffman’s debut novel, So Much Pretty, is an extraordinarily smart and beautifully written page turner. This suspenseful and highly charged story is of a young woman, Wendy White, who goes missing in the rural town of Haeden in upstate New York. Stacey Flynn, a transplanted reporter from Cleveland, clashes with local townspeople whom she believes know more than they’re saying. Alice Piper is the precocious young daughter of transplanted hippies whose idealized dream of country living comes crashing down around them. In no time at all, White’s disappearance turns to tragedy and the Piper family is forever changed. Hoffman passionately blends the issue of violence against women that lurks unacknowledged at the dark edges of our culture with a narrative that paints a grim picture of any-town America. Hoffman’s literary voice is a force and this novel will leave you reeling.
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River House A Memoir
by
Lawrence, Sarahlee
Diane Prokop
, January 03, 2011
Sarahlee Lawrence is a master storyteller. In her memoir, River House, she channels the frontier spirit of Willa Cather and recalls the high seas exploits of Jack London. Her story is both riveting and heart wrenching as she seeks to find herself, first by riding the white water of some of the world's most deadly rivers and then amongst her family in the backbreaking work of building her home with her own hands in the harsh winter weather of Eastern Oregon. The hardships and hardscrabble living of farm life reminds this reader of the Joads of The Grapes of Wrath. Her family, especially her father, is the puzzle she tries to parse for clues to finding meaning in her life. It's a literary page turner and we will hopefully hear much more from this bright, new voice.
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Making Metal Beads Techniques Projects Inspiration
by
Pauline Warg
Diane Prokop
, November 26, 2007
I love this book! It's the most innovative jewelry how-to book I've run across in years plus it's just a delight to peruse with all it's full-color pics. With Pauline's help, you won't need a lot of new tools to make spectacularly embellished beads that are unique and hip. For some projects Pauline shows you how to transform boring store-bought beads into beads that you would pay big dollars for on the retail market. Lark Books spared no expense in printing this beautifully done and inspiring book. You'll definitely get your money's worth when you buy this book.
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