Top Twenty Picks for Spring 2007!
Village Books is brimming with the latest selection of spring fiction and nonfiction. Katie as selected twenty titles to recommend but there are so many more! Read on and then stop by the store, call us, or visit our website - www.palivillagebooks.com - any time of day or night for Staff Picks and other reading suggestions!
Hardcover Fiction
Body Surfing, by Anita Shreve (Little Brown, $25.99, April 2007). Shreve’s lastest book features the same seaside New Hampshire house that appears in The Pilot’s Wife, Fortune’s Rocks and Sea Glass. Twenty nine year old Sydney, once divorced and now recently widowed, takes a summer job tutoring the sweet but slow youngest child of a wealthy architect, hoping to heal from her turbulent romantic life. She is made to feel part of the family by the gracious Mr. Edwards and like a paid servant by the more status conscious Mrs. Edwards. Then the Edwards’ two older sons show up and compete for Sydney’s attentions – they teach her to night surf and ply her with witty conversation, food and wine. She soon becomes caught between the two brothers with devastating consequences. Shreve weaves a wonderful novel about marriage, family, and the supreme courage it takes to love.
The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones (Houghton Mifflin, $24, May 2007). 
A recently widowed American food writer is fighting a losing struggle with grief. When a woman in China (where her attorney husband frequently traveled) files a paternity suit against the estate, Maggie goes to China to find the mother and determine the validity of her claim. Maggie’s editor suggests that while she is there, she should research an article about a young American born Jewish Chinese chef, Sam, who is determined to open a restaurant dedicated to the most ancient examples and purest principles of Chinese cuisine, and is about to enter a prestigious cooking competition. Sam’s old-school recipes and history lessons of high Chinese cuisine kick-start Maggie’s dulled passion for food and help her let go of her grief. Maybe food can heal the heart!
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid (Harcourt, $22, April 2007). Presented in the form of a monologue, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger at a café table in Lahore. As dusk deepens, he tells the tale of a young Pakistani man, educated at Princeton and employed in a highly prestigious financial-analysis firm in New York, who was about to start a brilliant career and had fallen for a beautiful young woman who promised entry into Manhattan society when 9/11 happened. Answering to his own conscience, and the pull of his true personal identity, he returns to Pakistan. The balance between the political and personal creates a nuanced and complex portrait of a reluctant fundamentalist.
The Tourists, by Jeff Hobbs (S&S, $24, April 2007). A striking and stylish debut about the dark and sometimes destructive aspects of physical attraction and love, marital disillusionment, and the inevitable disappointments life can bring. The unnamed narrator, a New York freelancer struggling to stay afloat, picks up the story of his three former classmates from Yale as they approach their 30’s and find that despite their apparent successes, they are at loose ends. This auspicious debut has been compared to The Great Gatsby and Bright Lights, Big City.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon (Harper, $26.95, May 2007). 
The Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay pens an homage to the stylish menace of 1940’s noir in a novel that imagines that Alaska, not Israel, became the homeland for the Jews after WWII. However, now the U.S. government has enacted a policy that will evict all Jews without proper papers from Sitka, the center of Jewish Alaska. In the midst of this nightmare, browbeaten police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who happens to be the disgraced son of Sitka’s most powerful rabbi. No one wants this case solved, from Landsman’s boss (his ex-wife Bina) to the FBI, but our Yiddish Marlowe keeps digging, uncovering an apocalypse in the making. The amazing Chabon manages to create a gripping whodunit, a love story and an exploration of the mysteries of exil and redemption all in one.
Paperback Fiction
The Accidental, by Ali Smith (Anchor, $13.95, April 2007). An inventive and thought provoking novel about a chance encounter that irrevocably changes a family’s understanding of itself. A barefoot, thirtysomething stranger named Amber abandons her broken-down car and arrives at the doorstep of Eve and Michael Smart, who are summering in Norfolk, England, with Eve’s children, 12 year old Astrid and 17 year old Magnus. She is invited in and insinuates herself into the family, and all of its flaws. The novel is alternately narrated by each member of the Smart family and is both creepy and thought provoking. The Accidental was short-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize.
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage, $14.95, March 2007). A father and son walk alone through a burned and ravished post-apocalyptic America. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. The book imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and son are sustained by love. This is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of. Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (Penguin, $15, May 2007).
Following the mysterious death of her mother, Blue Van Meer and her father, Professor Gareth Van Meer, embark on a tour of college towns, never staying in any one place for longer than a semester. I would have enjoyed a whole book of just hanging out with Blue and Dad as they drove from town to town, but in her senior year, they settle in Stockton, N.C so Blue can hunker down and prepare for college. At the St. Gallway School, Blue is taken in by a group of eccentric student geniuses known as the Bluebloods, and their ringleader, the beautiful and enigmatic film teacher, Hannah Schneider. As Blue becomes enmeshed with Hannah and the Bluebloods, the novel becomes a murder mystery so intricately plotted that readers will be tempted (and I in fact did!) to start again at the beginning and watch the tiny clues fall into place. This has definite shades of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and tips its hat to many classic works of film and literature.
Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky (Vintage, $14.95, April 2007). An extraordinary novel of life under Nazi occupation – discovered and published 62 years after the author’s tragic death at Auschwitz. Nemirovsky began a planned five novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping “suite” includes the first two sections. The first, “Storm in June”, chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate group of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside mere hours before the advancing Germans. The second, “Dolce”, set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Nemirovsky noted that her goal was to describe “daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides”.
Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen (Algonquin Books, $13.95, May 2007). 
Ninety something year old Jacob Jankowski remembers back to a time when, after his parents are killed in a traffic accident, he walks out on his final exams at Cornell where he hoped to earn a veterinary degree. He hops a train which turns out to be a circus train. It’s the Depression, and he soon finds himself attached to the animal acts and the beautiful young Marlena, the horse rider, and her husband, August. This is an atmospheric, gritty and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world of 1932.
Hardcover Nonfiction
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, $26.95, May 2007). In her first full-length nonfiction narrative, the beloved author opens readers’ eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: you are what you eat. This is a wise and compelling celebration of family, food, nature and community. Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma set the standard in this genre as the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now Kingsolver recounts a year in which her family vows to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries as they search for a food culture that’s better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. The tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), and makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson (S&S, $32, April 2007). 
Isaacson is the former managing editor at Time magazine and head of CNN, currently the CEO of the Aspen Institute, and the acclaimed biographer of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger. This is the first full biography of Einstein since all his papers have been made available, and is well written and sensibly balanced in its treatment of the famed theoretical physicist, his family and his friends. Although the author makes Einstein’s extraordinary scientific achievements the center of attention, he also covers his subject’s complex and often painful familial relationships, his political interventions and comments, and his remarkable celebrity status with the American public.
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott (Riverhead, $24.95, April 2007). The third in a series after Traveling Mercies and Plan B, this collection records Lamott’s attempts to live with grace. Now 20 years sober and the single mother of a 17-year old son, the author shares 23 stories of her life, eight never before published. Covering everything from politics to child rearing to experiences teaching Sunday school, the essays are well written and heartfelt, and she is most effective when talking about her spiritual beliefs and how they developed over time. With gentle wisdom refining her signature humor, Lamott explores helpfulness, decency, love and especially forgiveness.
Nixon & Kissinger: Partners in Power, by Robert Dallek (Harper, $32.50, May 2007). Dallek delivers what will probably become a recognized classic of modern history: the definitive analysis of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s complex, often troubled partnership in running American foreign policy from January 1969 through 1974. Nixon and Kissinger both reveled in power and were driven by the hope of attaining greatness. The author maintains that their partnership achieved important victories, notably the opening of China, détente with the Soviet Union, and Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, which ended the Yom Kippur War at a time when Nixon was consumed by Watergate. However, such failures as the disastrous policies in Vietnam and Cambodia; the toppling of the legitimately elected Allende government in Chile; and the willingness to use foreign policy as a means to secure Nixon’s reelection and to downplay Watergate damaged America’s reputation for decades. Dallek had access to major new resources including transcriptions of Kissinger’s telephone conversations as Secretary of State, unreleased audio files of key Nixon telephone conversations and Oval office discussions, and previously unexamined documents from the archives of Nixon, Kissinger, and White House hands Alexander Haig and H.R. Haldeman.
Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, by Lee Iacocca (Scribner, $25, April 2007). 
Business icon Iacocca uses a lifetime’s worth of business examples from Ford (where he was president) and Chrysler (where he was CEO), as well as his charitable endeavors, to make his case that better leadership is needed to regain America’s social and economic greatness. Iacocca questions America’s lack of leadership, fragile global relationships, capitalism, and tackles such broadly ranging subjects as the prospective 2008 presidential candidates, the war in Iraq, our lack of an energy policy, globalization’s challenges and his own retirement. Its also full of great stories about the prominent people he’s met and known, including the time he smoked cigars with Fidel Castro, what Bob Hope told him about how to live a long life, what Lady Sarah Ferguson said to him as they danced, why Bill Clinton woke him up in Italy, what Robert McNamara taught him about success, how Frank Sinatra sang for him personally and whom Pope John Paul II asked him to pray for. We learn what he discussed with Warren Buffett, Ronald Reagan, Senator John Kerry, Prince Charles and Camilla, former Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, rapper Snoop Dogg, and many more. This is a call to action to summon Americans back to their roots of hard work, common sense, integrity, generosity, and optimism.
Paperback Nonfiction
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay, $15.99, April 2007). Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, the author shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information that can be processed quickly, but on the few particular details on which people focus. Gladwell cites many intriguing examples, such as art experts spontaneously recognizing forgeries; sports prodigies; and psychologist John Gottman’s uncanny ability to divine the future of marriages by watching videos of couples in conversation. Such feats are based on a form of rapid cognition called “thin-slicing”, during which our unconscious “draws conclusions based on very narrow ‘slices’ of experience”. But there is a dark side of blink, which Gladwell illuminates by analyzing the many ways in which our instincts can be thwarted. Enlightening, provocative and great fun to read!
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin, $15, Feb 2007). 
This heartfelt memoir has touched a nerve among readers, probably because of Gilbert’s ability to be both funny and profound. Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to explore and study three aspects of her nature among three different cultures, she explored the art of pleasure (Eat) in Italy; the art of devotion (Pray) in India; and then a balance (Love) between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. Also highly recommended as an audio book, read by the author herself - a real treat!
Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, by James Swanson (Harper, $15.95, Feb 2007). In this fast paced, hour-by-hour account of the 12 days following Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, Swanson allows the reader to ride along with the Union cavalry and federal agents through the streets of the nation’s capital and the wilds of Maryland and Virginia in pursuit of John Wilkes Booth, his coconspirators, and the host of rebel enablers who constituted a viable Confederate underground railroad. Swanson details the conditions endured by Booth while on the run and the foolish mistakes committed by him and his pursuers during the long chase until the last stand at a farm near Port Royal, VA, on April 26. Swanson concludes with discussions of the trial and execution of the four secondary conspirators, the subsequent squabbling over reward money, and the unfolding of the post-assassination lives of the drama’s major personalities.
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick 
(Penguin, $16, May 2007). National Book Award winner Philbrick gives us a story of both heartbreaking misery and driving determination as he relates the Pilgrims’ historic journey from Europe and their hardscrabble work to establish the Plymouth Colony. They faced the threat of starvation, illness and the savage winter (half ultimately died) and, 50 years later, bloody wars against the Indians who had saved the Pilgrim forbears from certain death. Impeccably researched, Philbrook’s account brings the Plymouth Colony and its leaders, including William Bradford, Benjamin Church, and the bellicose, dwarfish Miles Standish, vividly to life.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations….One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson (Penguin, $15, Feb 2007). On a 1993 expedition to climb K2 in honor of his sister Christa, who had died of epilepsy at age 23, Mortensen was an exhausted survivor of the climb who stumbled, emaciated and lost, upon a remote mountain village in Pakistan. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of the impoverished village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew an incredible humanitarian campaign. Facing daunting challenges of raising funds, death threats from enraged mullahs, separation from his family and a kidnapping, Mortenson eventually built 55 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and his co-author argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls.