Reviewed in The Oregonian: June 26
<a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2500.html?p_bkslv">January 16, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2507.html?p_bkslv">January 23, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2516.html?p_bkslv">January 30, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2532.html?p_bkslv">February 6, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2544.html?p_bkslv">February 13, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2551.html?p_bkslv">February 20, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2559.html?p_bkslv">February 27, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2569.html?p_bkslv">March 6, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2583.html?p_bkslv">March 13, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2589.html?p_bkslv">March 20, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2598.html?p_bkslv">March 27, 2011 reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2615.html?p_bkslv">April 3, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2654.html?p_bkslv">April 10, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2655.html?p_bkslv">April 17, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2656.html?p_bkslv">April 24, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2672.html?p_bkslv">May 1, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2673.html?p_bkslv">May 8, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2677.html?p_bkslv">May 15, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2688.html?p_bkslv">May 22, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2690.html?p_bkslv">May 29, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2707.html?p_bkslv">June 5, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2726.html?p_bkslv">June 12, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2731.html?p_bkslv">June 19, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2743.html?p_bkslv">June 26, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2773.html?p_bkslv">July 3, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2799.html?p_bkslv">July 10, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2810.html?p_bkslv">July 17, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2821.html?p_bkslv">July 24, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2834.html?p_bkslv">July 31, 2011, reviews</a> | <a href="http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=33887&html=ppbs/33887_2836.html?p_bkslv">August 7, 2011, reviews</a> |
Wire to Wire by Scott Sparling, Tin House Books
Publisher Comments Wire to Wire assembles a cast of train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes, tells a harrowing tale of friendship and loss, and creates a stunning portrait of Northern Michigan in the late 1970s.
While riding a freight car through Detroit, Michael Slater suffers a near-fatal accident a power line to the head. After recovering, he tries to lead a quiet life in the desert, but his problems just follow him. Slater returns to his native Michigan to seek out his old train-hopping pal, only to find that the Pleasant Peninsula of his youth is none too pleasant. Before long he finds his way into a love triangle, gets caught in the schemes of the resident drug lord, and manages to end up on the wrong side of everyone and everything in the small town of Wolverine. When the violent sociopath Slater left to die in the desert tracks him down, the chance of getting out of this hell unscathed starts to look slim.
Three years later, Slater sits in a dark video-editing suite, popping speed like penny candy, trying to reconcile himself with the unfilmed memories that haunt his screens and his conscience.
Scott Sparling's debut novel, with echoes of Robert Stone and Denis Johnson, pays homage to one of our most popular and enduring genres the American crime novel. Your price $7.95 Used Trade Paperback
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Maine by J Courtney Sullivan
Publisher Comments A couple escaping the opulent lifestyle of Manhattans Upper East Side move to Newport, Rhode Island, only to be confronted by the trappings of the life they tried to leave behind. Nate, a midlevel Wall Streeter, and his longtime girlfriend Emily are effectively evicted from New York City when they find they can no longer afford their apartment. An out presents itself in the form of a job offer for Nate in Newport—complete with a bucolic, small, and comparatively affordable new house. Eager to start fresh, they flee city life with their worldly goods packed tightly in their Jeep Cherokee. Yet within minutes of arriving in Rhode Island, their car and belongings are stolen, and they're left with nothing but the keys to an empty house and their bawling 10-month-old son. Over the three-day weekend that follows, as Emily and Nate watch their meager pile of cash dwindle and tensions increase, the secrets they kept from each other in the city emerge, threatening to destroy their hope for a shared future. A story about losing it all, the complexities of family histories, tainted gene pools, art theft, architecture, and the mad grab for the American Dream, The Exiles bravely explores the weight of our pasts—and whether or not it's truly possible to start over. Your price $5.50 Used Hardcover
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Exiles by Cary Groner
Publisher Comments Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Exiles is an extraordinary debut in which East meets West at the point where lives hang in the balance.
Opening the door to a Nepal few Westerners have encountered, Exiles tells the haunting story of an American doctor and his teenage daughter caught in the midst of a civil war. Fleeing the messy dissolution of his marriage, cardiologist Peter Scanlon decides to take a risk and move with his seventeen-year-old daughter to Kathmandu, where he will volunteer in a free health clinic. But once there, he finds that he failed to anticipate the hardships and dangers: austere living conditions; a chronic shortage of medical supplies; diseases he has never encountered before; the sexual trafficking of young girls; and political instability and an encroaching civil war. At the same time, his friendship and philosophical discussions with a Tibetan Buddhist lama challenge and invigorate Scanlon, and his contentious relationship with the Nepali nurse who works with him gives way to deeper feelings. His daughter, in the meantime, flourishes as she quickly adapts to the new culture and falls in love for the first time. But when Scanlon is summoned to the scene of an accident on Mt. Annapurna, their lives become a nightmare of violence and fear. Set within an extreme landscape of both beauty and peril, Exiles takes the reader on a gripping adventure that asks profound questions about the nature of our beliefs—and how far we are willing to go to defend them. Your price $8.95 Used Hardcover
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Tassy Morgans Bluff by Jim Stinson
Publisher Comments San Andreas, California. It may be a quaint town, but its residents have high hopes for its future as a tourist destination. There's Bill the Fixer, the handyman who sidelines in chain-saw sculpted redwood totem poles; real estate agent Margaret Nam, who plans to make a mint rehabbing beach shacks; and Jimi, the well-to-do hairstylist whose chair is the epicenter of town gossip. Amid their town's growing pains, widower Lincoln Ellis and Tassy Morgan, a recently divorced painter, meet and-much to their surprise-sparks begin to fly.
Beautifully written and infused with sly humor, Tassy Morgan's Bluff will welcome readers of all ages to a place they'll want to visit again and again. Your price $7.50 Used Trade Paperback
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Incognito The Secret Lives of the Brain by Eagleman, David
Publisher Comments If the conscious mind—the part you consider to be you—is just the tip of the iceberg, what is the rest doing? In this sparkling and provocative new book, the renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman navigates the depths of the subconscious brain to illuminate surprising mysteries: Why can your foot move halfway to the brake pedal before you become consciously aware of danger ahead? Why do you hear your name being mentioned in a conversation that you didn’t think you were listening to? What do Ulysses and the credit crunch have in common? Why did Thomas Edison electrocute an elephant in 1916? Why are people whose names begin with J more likely to marry other people whose names begin with J? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? And how is it possible to get angry at yourself—who, exactly, is mad at whom? Taking in brain damage, plane spotting, dating, drugs, beauty, infidelity, synesthesia, criminal law, artificial intelligence, and visual illusions, Incognito is a thrilling subsurface exploration of the mind and all its contradictions. Your price $10.95 Used Hardcover
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End of Boys by Hoffmeister, Peter Brown
Publisher Comments Peter Hoffmeister was a nervous child who ran away repeatedly and bit his fingernails until they bled. Home-schooled until the age of fourteen, he had only to deal with his parents and siblings on a daily basis, yet even that sometimes proved too much for him. Over the years, he watched his mother disintegrate into her own form of mania, while his father — a scholar and doctor who had once played semi-pro baseball — was strict and pushed Peter particularly hard. He wanted only the best from his son but in the process taught Peter to expect only the worst from himself. In the midst of his chaotic home life, Peter began to hear a voice — an insistent, monotone that would periodically dictate his actions. When Peter finally entered public school he started to break free from his father's control — only to fall sway to the voice more and more. His obsessive-compulsive behavior morphed into ruthless competition in sports and, ultimately, into lies, violence, and drugs.
The End of Boys follows Hoffmeister to the very brink of sanity and back, in a harrowing and heartbreaking account of the trauma of adolescence and the redemption available to us all, if only we choose to find it. Your price $3.95 Used Trade Paperback
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Long Gone by Alafair Burke
Publisher Comments What if everything you thought you knew turned out to be a lie?
After a layoff and months of struggling, Alice Humphrey finally lands her dream job managing a new art gallery in Manhattan's trendy Meatpacking District. According to Drew Campbell, the well-heeled corporate representative who hires her, the gallery is a passion project for its anonymous, wealthy, and eccentric owner. Her friends think it sounds too good to be true, but Alice sees an opportunity to make a name for herself beyond the shadow of her famous father, an award-winning and controversial filmmaker.
Everything is perfect until the morning Alice arrives at work to find the gallery gone the space stripped bare as if it had never been there and Drew Campbell's dead body on the floor. Overnight, Alice's dream job has vanished, and she finds herself at the center of a police investigation, with the evidence mounting against her. The phone number Drew gave her links back to a disposable phone. The artist whose work she displayed doesn't seem to exist. And the dead man she claims is Drew has been identified as someone else.
When police discover ties between the gallery and a missing girl, Alice knows she's been set up. Now she has to prove it a dangerous search for answers that will entangle her in a dark, high-tech criminal conspiracy and force her to unearth long-hidden secrets involving her own family...secrets that could cost Alice her life. Your price $8.95 Used Hardcover
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Lost on Treasure Island: A Memoir of Longing, Love, and Lousy Choices in New York City by Steve Friedman
Publisher Comments When Midwesterner Steve Friedman arrived in Manhattan, the land of the quick and the mean, raring to go and ready to conquer, he soon found pitfalls and pratfalls more numerous and perilous than he had ever imagined. Here is his utterly honest, often hilarious, self-deprecating account of those fateful years, starting with his first job at GQ and his awkward efforts to impress his boss, Art Cooper, and including real and imagined love affairs, disasters at work and play, growing self-awareness with its inevitable bouts of depression and subsequent therapiesall of which failand in the end, a wisdom that promises better things to come. In the tradition of Bright Lights, Big City and The Devil Wears Prada, Lost on Treasure Island is a witty rendition of the perils of growing up and being thrown into the real world. With sharp humor and unexpected sincerity, Friedman crafts a inviting portrait of the best of times and the worst of times. For all those who have confronted the endless opportunities of the Big Apple, only to discover how hard it is to succeed in thisor anybig city, this boisterous and often enlightening memoir will prove irresistible. Hardcover
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