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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
James Casto has commented on (8) products
Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story LP
by
Rick Bragg
James Casto
, October 26, 2014
Millions of words have been written about Jerry Lee Lewis as writers attempted to chronicle his one-of-a-kind life and career, but he’s never told his own story the way he does in “Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story,” a new book by Rick Bragg. A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who grew up with rock and roll, Bragg has written a half-dozen bestsellers. His first book, “All Over But the Shoutin,” is perhaps his best known. It’s a warts-and-all account of his childhood in Alabama. Southern-born Bragg seems a perfect choice to chronicle the adventures and misadventures of fellow Southerner Jerry Lee. Bragg spent two summers interviewing the aging rocker. It was, he says, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that writers dream about. “I mostly just sat ...and listened as he told me of the Louisiana bottomland, and church music, and Elvis. Some days we sat for long minutes in silence -- sometime he told me what he was remembering and sometimes he did not -- and at the end of the day I took the story of his life I had written down and tried to piece it back together into something fine.” And yes, the resulting book is “something fine.” It makes no attempt to whitewash the rock star, to transform the sinner into some kind of saint. It simply tells what happened, as Jerry Lee remembers it (which, to be sure, may not be exactly the way others recall it.)
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A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery
by
Johnson, Craig
James Casto
, July 06, 2013
Craig Johnson lives in tiny Ucross, Wyoming (Population 25). There he divides his time between tending his ranch and writing a string of modern-day western novels featuring Walt Longmire, the sheriff of fictional Absaroka County. Long a favorite of critics and fans alike, Johnson’s novels gained a whole new audience in the summer of 2012 with the debut of a new series, “Longmire,” on A&E Television. In its debut season, “Longmire” drew more total viewers than any other A&E series in the network’s history. That being the case, it’s no surprise that this summer it’s back for a second season. And, just in time for the TV show’s second season, Johnson has published “A Serpent’s Tooth” (Viking, $26.95). It’s the ninth installment of his Longmire saga ��" and it may be the best one yet. If you (like me) love a good mystery novel, then you know that some keep you reading because you’re caught up in the plot. You’re eager to learn what happens next. Others, however, have a different appeal. Especially those that, like Johnson’s books, feature a continuing cast of characters. The plot’s important but you also find yourself caught up in the interplay between the characters. And so “A Serpent’s Tooth” reintroduces us not only to Sheriff Longmire but also to his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, and his second in commend, the young Victoria Moretti, who’s a real spitfire. Walt has serious problems with depression and ghosts from his past. He’s a bit over his fighting weight and is quite a bit older than Vic, but that doesn’t stop her from setting her cap for him. As for Henry, he’s a very large and very tough Native American, a handy fellow to have at your side if, like Walt, you have a penchant for stumbling into trouble. This time around the trouble starts when a homeless teenage boy shows up in town. It turns out the boy, named Cord, isn’t a runaway but rather a “lost boy.” Johnson has said that his books often have their beginning when a news story catches his eye. In this case, he says, he read an article about so-called “lost boys,” teenage boys who are exiled by the leaders of polygamous religious groups in order to lessen the competition for young wives. When Walt, Vic and Henry go looking for Cord’s mother, their search leads them to the barbed wire doorstep of a polygamy group that’s set up shop for itself on what used to be a nearby ranch. The oddball sect is ruled over by a 400-pound polygamist who, it turns out, is Cord’s stepfather. He presides over his rural fiefdom from an improvised throne perched in the back of a pickup truck ��" and surrounds himself with a cadre of heavily-armed men who would be right at home on a SWAT team. The group, Walt learns, has lots of money ��" and lots of secrets, including some that involve Big Oil and the CIA. As his investigation heats up, so does his relationship with his sexy deputy. And the book’s last few pages bring a development that jolts Walt to his very core.
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American Drive How Manufacturing Will Save Our Country
by
Richard Dauch, Hank H Cox
James Casto
, January 15, 2013
After a 30-year career in key executive slots with General Motors, Chrysler and Volkswagen, Richard E. Dauch bought a handful of dilapidated parts plants that GM was eager to get rid of. He rehabilitated the plants, erased the red ink on their books and used them as the foundation of his own company, American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM) that today is a global giant in the industry. Now, Dauch has written a book, American Drive: How Manufacturing Will Save Our Country, that recounts some of his experiences in his remarkable career and offers his thoughts on the future of American manufacturing. As the book’s subtitle suggests, he’s optimistic about that future. “You see those ‘Made in China’ stickers on socks and stuffed toys sold in Walmart; you don’t see the ‘Made in the USA’ sticker on the satellites spinning overhead.” And he adds: “We hear a lot about ‘outsourcing’ when U.S. companies are taken to task for investing in foreign countries. … Instead of complaining about outsourcing �" we need to promote insourcing, encouraging more foreign companies to invest in the United States. Just as foreign nations send delegations to AAM to encourage us to invest in their countries, we should send delegations to foreign-based corporations to encourage them to invest here.”
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Field of Schemes
by
John W. Billheimer
James Casto
, October 07, 2012
For 30 years,John Billheimer was vice president of a small consulting firm specializing in transportation planning. But in recent years he’s also made a name for himself as a writer of whodunits. Billheimer, a West Virginia native who now lives in Californ ia, says he had never written anything but articles for technical journals before the writing bug bit him and he started taking creative writing courses at night. A business trip back to West Virginia to work on a railroad project set him to thinking about trying his hand at a novel set in his native state. The result was “The Contrary Blues,” published in 1998, the first of what would become a series of mysteries featuring Owen Allison, a California engineering consultant who finds himself drawn back to his native West Virginia. (The resemblance between Allison and Billheimer seems far from coincidental.) Billheimer is a huge baseball fan and in 2007 published a non-fiction book on baseball scapegoats, “Baseball and the Blame Game.” Given his passion for the game, it seems inevitable that sooner or later he would write a baseball mystery and that’s what he’s come up with in “Field of Schemes.” The novel introduces a new character, Lloyd Keaton, a newspaper sportswriter who lost his money, his wife and his big-city sportswriting job to a gambling habit. It’s set in the fictitious small town of Menckenburg, Ohio, with side trips to the gambling establishments of East Wheeling, W.Va. When a hotshot outfielder on Menckenburg’s minor league team asks his trainer, Dale Loren, for steroids, Loren supplies the player a harmless mixture of cold cream and lemon juice, telling him it’s a brand new steroid that can’t be detected by baseball’s urine-testing regimen. Believing he has an illegal edge, the player goes on a hitting spree and is called up to the majors where, cut off from his supply of “steroids,” he falls into a deep slump. Then he tests positive for drugs and fingers Loren as his supplier. Loren is fired and, not long after, the outfielder is found dead. The police say the outfielder was the victim of a fatal drug overdose. But sportswriter Keaton is unconvinced and sets out to clear trainer Loren’s name. In the process, he’s threatened by mobsters, shot at and learns that his own teenage son is hooked on steroids. But, just like Owen Allison in Billheimer’s earlier series of mysteries, Keaton soon manages to make things right. Billheimer has already completed writing a second baseball mystery featuring Keaton, “A Player To Be Maimed Later,” and anticipates it will be published next year. “
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Shrapnel
by
Manilla, Marie
James Casto
, September 03, 2012
In 2010, Marie Manilla published an outstanding collection of short stories, “Still Life With Plums.” Now she has published an equally outstanding first novel. Judging from its title, a reader picking up a copy of ‘Shrapnel” might think it’s a war novel. It’s not. It offers no heated exchange of gunfire, no battlefield heroics. Instead, Manilla’s novel explores the legacy of war as seen in three generations of men from the Butler family -- Bing Butler, his late son Roger and his grandson Brian. Webster defines shrapnel as “fragments thrown out by an exploding bomb or shell.” In the heat of battle, those flying fragments of hot metal can easily kill or maim. Manill’s unspoken premise in “Shrapnel” is that cruel and thoughtless words and attitudes can wound just as deeply as any bomb or shell. The publisher’s blurb for “Shrapnel” describes it as “at times funny and at other times frightening ��" and frighteningly honest.” And that it is. It’s also more evidence of Manilla’s extraordinary talent as a writer. Apparently the editors at one of the book industry’s best-known publishing houses, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, also recognize that talent. They’ve purchased her next novel, “The Patron Saint of Ugly,” also set in West Virginia, and have scheduled it for a spring 2014 release.
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Sea Witch
by
Stephen Coonts
James Casto
, July 29, 2012
Stephen Coonts loves to fly. And he loves to write. Fortunately for him, the West Virginia native has been able to combine both his passions, writing a whole shelf of high-flying best sellers, beginning with “Flight of the Intruder,” published in 1986. Born in Morgantown, Coonts grew up in Buckhannon. Graduating from West Virginia University in 1968, he joined the Navy, where he learned to fly and spent two years piloting A-6 Intruder bombers over Vietnam and Laos. When he left the Navy, he earned a law degree at the University of Colorado and became a lawyer for an oil company. But he still had an itch to write. Divorced in 1984, he says he found himself with “plenty of time and no money.”' So he sat down and wrote a novel based on his Vietnam combat experience. When he finished his manuscript and started sending it to publishers, 34 of them turned it down. Finally, an obscure military publishing house, the Naval Institute Press, agreed to publish it. “Flight of the Intruder”' spent 28 weeks on “The New York Times” best-seller list. That success allowed Coonts to put his legal career aside and devote himself full time to writing. He’s been hard at it ever since, publishing 16 “New York Times” best-sellers that have been translated and published around the world, in virtually every language you can think of. His latest book, “The Sea Witch,” is a collection of three novellas. In a brief Preface, Coonts promises readers that the three involve “airplanes, adventures, life and death in the sky” and you don’t have to read many pages before you realize he’s more than made good on that promise. The setting for the title story (for my money, easily the best of the three tales) is a squadron of PBY Catalina flying boats that’s playing havoc with the Japanese in the Pacific at the height of World War II. Ordinarily, the giant, ungainly planes were used for search and rescue missions or pressed into service as transports. But, as Coonts notes in his Preface, a few Catalina squadrons painted their planes flat black, making them all but invisible at night. That enabled these Black Cat squadrons to sneak up on Japanese warships and freighters virtually undetected until they unleashed their bombs and depth charges. Against that real-life background, Coonts introduces us to a fictional young dive bomber pilot who’s been booted out of his previous squadron for reckless behavior. He’s been demoted to a Black Cat squadron and he’s not happy about it but resolves to make the best of things. As the story unfolds, his first flight aboard the Sea Witch turns out to be its last. A daring mission forces the young pilot and the rest of the crew to band together as never before. Before the mission is over, each man finds out what he’s made of ��" and not all of them live to tell the tale. Coonts says the second story in the collection, “The 17th Day,” comes from his long-time fascination with World War I aviation. “I have always wanted to write a novel about WWI aviators, but is hasn’t happened yet.” The story’s title comes from a grim statistic: In 1915-16, the British military projected the average life expectancy of an aviator at the front at 17 days. Some went down in flames on their first day in combat. A lucky few of them flew and fought for as long as a year before being rotated back home. But the average was two weeks and three days. Coonts writes about Paul Hyde, an American who has dropped out of college to fly for Britain’s Royal Flying Corps. Hyde, we learn, was looking for adventure. What he found was death, as planes crashed all around him every day. We meet the young American on his 17th day of flying. The obvious question: Will he be able to beat the odds? The gritty realism of the book’s first two stories easily outshines the comic book stuff of the third, titled “Al Jihad.” Charles Dean put in 30 years in the Marine Corps and became perhaps the best sniper in the Corps. But now he’s retired and determined to be done with that part of his life. Then the daughter of his former commanding officer shows up with an intriguing proposition for him. It seems she wants to avenge the deaths of her parents at the hands of Islamic terrorists -- and she’s intent on enlisting his help. She says what she has in mind will be simple enough. All they two have to do is steal a Marine Corps tilt-wing V022 Osprey, a transport that can take off and land vertically, and then fly it to the terrorists’ remote desert hideout, blow them to kingdom come and fly back home. Not surprisingly, things turn out to be not quite that simple. This reader’s advice: Enjoy the first two stories in this collection, skip the third one and then hope that Counts somehow finds the time to write that novel about WWI in the air.
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Tabloid City
by
Pete Hamill
James Casto
, December 29, 2011
The opening paragraph of "Tabloid City" introduces the reader to Sam Briscoe, the gruff 71-year-old editor of the last afternoon newspaper in New York. As he enters the paper’s city room, Briscoe doesn’t know it, but he’s on the threshold of the worst 24 hours of his life. Briscoe is aware that his paper is on life support. What he doesn’t realize when we first meet him is that this day’s edition will be its last. The paper’s young, wet-behind-the-ears owner is pulling the plug. But as Briscoe struggles to come to terms with the paper’s death notice, there comes an even more traumatic blow. He learns that one of the two victims in a Greenwich Village slayings is Cynthia Harding, a wealthy socialite who for years has been, aside from his grown daughter, the only woman in his life. In chronicaling the events of the next 24 hours, veteran newspaperman Pete Hamill has given us a gritty snapshot of New York and a tribute to the journalists who cover the city’s dark corners,
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Miracle Boy & Other Stories
by
Pinckney Benedict
James Casto
, January 02, 2011
Pinckney Benedict is a gifted writer with a truly original voice. This collection of his short stories underscores how much I long to see a new novel from him.
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