Friday, October 2, 2009

New This Month: October 09

Last Night in Twisted River
by John Irving

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County–-to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto–-pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.

In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River–-John Irving’s twelfth novel–-depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” From the novel’s taut opening sentence–-“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long”–-to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.
Visit the website here.

What the Dog Saw
by Malcolm Gladwell

What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard, but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?

In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from the New Yorker over the same period.
Visit Gladwell's website here.


Also new this month:


Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies
by Julie Andrews


Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne Heller


Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

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