Book Talk

Watch your pennies and don’t ignore the bad guys either…

It’s hard, these days to have a conversation that doesn’t revolve around the economy. Though we’re in uncharted waters, there are many who are willing to help us through.

How did we get here? Adam Michaelson has written The Foreclosure of America: the Inside Story of the Rise and Fall of Countrywide Home Loans, the Mortgage Crisis, and the Default of the American Dream.  Countrywide executives believed that the housing boom could only get bigger and that their new mortgage products were worth the risks. If you ever wished you knew what went on in those discussions, Michaelson tells you.

Trained as an economist and now manager of Kissinger Associates, a geo-strategic consulting company,  Joshua Cooper Ramo believes that crises create winners as well as losers.  The Age of the Unthinkable: why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises us and what we can do about it, draws on theories from many different disciplines. Ramos establishes a framework for working with unpredictability

And how do we navigate this? After explaining the collapse of those investments we all trusted, Dr.Stephen Leeb provides suggestions for reliable future investments, in
Game Over: how you can Prosper in a Shattered Economy.

Jean Chatzky believes that with some behavior modifications we can change our relationship to money, She has examined the behaviors of the self-made wealthy to find changes that everyone can make to achieve their money goals. The Difference: how Anyone can Prosper in Even the Toughest Timesshows how personal decisions and personality traits affect your money future.

Ryan D’Agostino knocked on doors and asked people how they got rich. Surprisingly, they answered. Rich like Them: My Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods, is the result of those answers. One of the simplest methods, one that we all can do - watch your pennies!

Fiction

In Korea, early in the 1900s, newborn born girls were not worthy to receive formal names. The heroine of Honolulu by Alan Brenner is called Regret. Sent as a picture bride to Hawaii in 1914, Regret does not find the rich young man she was promised, and is instead married off to a poor laborer.  She and three other picture brides struggle to overcome prejudice and poverty in early Honolulu.

Legend has it that the devil once danced in Bleeding Heart Square, now an human form of evil has taken up residence. Fleeing an abusive husband, Lydia Langstrome moves in to number 7. But the building has a history; middle aged spinster, Miss Penhow, vanished.  And why are people looking for her now, four years later? Read the newest literary thriller by Andrew Taylor.

We’ve all had at least one vacation from hell, and Zack and Barbara Chasteen find theirs aboard the Royal Star for its inaugural cruise. Instead of a week of luxury, the ship is boarded by armed gunmen, who kill the crew, and sequester the passengers. Zack and his eight month pregnant wife are separated. Is this a kidnapping plan or something much worse? In A Deadly Silver Sea, by Bob Morris, the passengers must attempt to overcome the hijackers.

Lavendar Morning is the first in a new series by Jude Deveraux. Jocelyn Minton was befriended by Edilean Harcourt, a wealthy woman 60 years her senior. On her death, she left all her possessions to Joce, including an eighteenth century house in Edilean, Viriginia.  A mysterious letter containing clues to a mystery that began in 1941, unearths some of Joce’s own family history, and that of a mysterious young man.

While recovering from an accident, Rick Bentz begins to see his late wife who had been killed in a horrific car crash twelve years earlier. He was the one who identified her body… When a copy of Jennifer’s death certificate arrives in the mail with a big red question mark drawn on it, he follows the postmark to Los Angeles. There he finds information about his first wife that he never knew, and learns that a sadistic killer has made his second wife, Olivia, his prime target. The ever-popular Lisa Jackson offers Malice for your reading pleasure.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian