Book Talk

New Books, November 2011

Old habits die hard, and even after P.J. O’Rourke retirement as a foreign correspondent, he can’t give up his travel habit. Unfortunately, it included taking his kids to his home away from home, the bar at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. Read Holidays in Heck: a Former War Correspondent Experiences Frightening Vacation Fun, such as horse trekking in remote (redundant?)Kyrgyzstan, skiing in the mountains of Ohio, and visiting Disneyland’s beige house of the future.

Treated for lymphoma as a teenager, diagnosed three more times with cancer, undergoing a hip replacement, a bone marrow and heart transplant, Kyle Garlett eventually took on a challenge of his own choosing. He competed in two Iron Man triathlons. In Heart of Iron: My Journey from Transplant Patient to Ironman Triathlete, Garlett tells not only of his illness, but his subsequent life.

Daniel S. Hamermesh has measured something we all knew to be true, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful. Better looking people receive undeniable benefits in all areas of their life. They are more likely to be employed, make more money, work more productively and have better looking and more highly educated spouses. In the past good looks provided a biological advantage, and though they no longer do, the biases remain.

Fiction

National Book Award winner Han Jin has written Nanjing Requiem about the 1937 invasion of China by Japan, during which an estimated 370,000 lives were lost. Dean of Jinling Women’s College, American Minnie Vautrin decides to remain during the battle, convinced her American citizenship will protect her and her employees.  The college eventually becomes the sanctuary for 10,000 homeless women and children, and Minnie was forever haunted by the lives she couldn’t save.

Charlaine Harris is well known for her Sookie Stackhouse series.  A Secret Rage is a release of an earlier book.  Nickie Callahan is looking forward to her new life in Knolls, Tennessee.  After years of successful modeling, she plans to return to college and use her mind. A string of brutal crimes destroy her feelings of safety and force her to take justice into her own hands.

The story of Joan of Arc is familiar to most, but Kimberley Cutter has written about Joan, the girl. How did a young girl from a small French town, one whose sister was killed by the English, who had an abusive father and was being forced into marriage, rally thousands to follow her? Read The Maid: a Novel of Joan of Arc.

When a graffiti scrawl claims that there is a killer in Christy Burke’s Dublin bar, Christy’s grandson, Father Brennan Burke is asked to look into it. His reluctance to do so is overcome when a body is found on the premises.  Enlisting the aid of two friends he finds that some bar patrons have secrets they don’t want revealed. Canadian author Anne Emery has written Death at Christy Burke’s.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian