Reviewed in The Oregonian: June 24
<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> |
Journalism by Joe Sacco
Publisher Comments A first for the world's greatest cartoon reporter, a collection of journalism, including articles on the American military in Iraq that have never been published in the United States Over the past decade, Joe Sacco, "our moral draughtsman" (Christopher Hitchens), has increasingly turned to short-form comics journalism to report from the sidelines of wars around the world. Collected here for the first time, Sacco's darkly funny, revealing reportage confirms his standing as one of the foremost war correspondents working today. In "The Unwanted," Sacco chronicles the detention of Saharan refugees who have washed up on the shores of Malta; "Chechen War, Chechen Women" documents the trial without end of widows in the Caucasus; and "Kushinagar" goes deep into the lives of India's untouchables, who are hanging "onto the planet by their fingernails." Other pieces take Sacco to the smuggling tunnels of Gaza; the trial of Milan Kovacevic, Bosnian warlord, in The Hague; and the darkest chapter in recent American history, Abu Ghraib. And on a mission with American troops — pieces never published in the United States — he confronts the misery and absurdity of the war in Iraq. Among Sacco's most mature, accomplished work, Journalism demonstrates the power of our premier cartoonist to chronicle human experience with a force that often eludes other media. Your price $24.00 Used Hardcover
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Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Publisher Comments The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot — searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion — along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams. Your price $15.95 Used Hardcover
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Shout Her Lovely Name by Natalie Serber
Publisher Comments Mothers and daughters ride the familial tide of joy, regret, loathing, and love in these stories of resilient and flawed women. In a battle between a teenage daughter and her mother, wheat bread and plain yogurt become weapons. An aimless college student, married to her much older professor, sneaks cigarettes while caring for their newborn son. On the eve of her husbands fiftieth birthday, a pilfered fifth of rum, an unexpected tattoo, and rogue teenagers leave a woman questioning her place. And in a suite of stories, we follow capricious, ambitious single mother Ruby and her cautious, steadfast daughter Nora through their tumultuous life — stray men, stray cats, and psychedelic drugs — in 1970s California. Gimlet-eyed and emotionally generous, achingly real and beautifully written, these unforgettable stories lay bare the connection and conflict in families. Shout Her Lovely Name heralds the arrival of a powerful new writer. Hardcover
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Full Body Burden Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen
Publisher Comments Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and — unknown to those who lived there — tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium. It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets — both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed) — best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. She learned about the infamous 1969 Mother's Day fire, in which a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously ignited and — despite the desperate efforts of firefighters — came perilously close to a "criticality," the deadly blue flash that signals a nuclear chain reaction. Intense heat and radiation almost melted the roof, which nearly resulted in an explosion that would have had devastating consequences for the entire Denver metro area. Yet the only mention of the fire was on page 28 of the Rocky Mountain News, underneath a photo of the Pet of the Week. In her early thirties, Iversen even worked at Rocky Flats for a time, typing up memos in which accidents were always called "incidents." And as this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism — a detailed and shocking account of the government's sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents' vain attempts to seek justice in court. Here, too, are vivid portraits of former Rocky Flats workers — from the healthy, who regard their work at the plant with pride and patriotism, to the ill or dying, who battle for compensation for cancers they got on the job. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book promises to have a very long half-life. Hardcover
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How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Publisher Comments Fresh from a failed marriage and unable to complete a feminist play she's been commissioned to write, Sheila, a twentysomething artist, is floundering. How can she write a play about women when everything she's learned about herself is from the men in her life who "wanted to teach her something"? How can she even live in the world without knowing how to be? So when Margaux, a talented painter, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, come into her life, Sheila plunges into a life experiment, treating them as specimens in an investigation about how to live and create. Perhaps in borrowing their best qualities, she can regain her footing in art and in life.
Previously published in Canada to terrific acclaim, How Should a Person Be? brilliantly fuses highbrow with lowbrow into a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum). What begins as curiosity about how to live well, in Sheila Heti's hands becomes an irresistible torn-from-life novel, crafted with transcribed dialogues, along with fiction, nonfiction, e-mails, and more, exploring the eternal questions of why we connect, whom we desire, and how a person should be. Your price $14.95 Used Hardcover
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