Father's Day Suggestions
June is here and Fathers' Day is right around the corner! We have numerous titles sure to please the dads (or granddads!) in your life. We are happy to wrap and/or mail your selections so stop by or just give us a call!
From Connie Goetz, one of the staff's most prolific readers (and most enthusiastic reviewers) come the following recommendations:
The Second Objective by Mark Frost
Here's an intriguing book for Dad, turning actual historical events into a page turning, suspenseful thriller. Mark Frost's sixth book (he is also the author of the fantastic golf books, The Greatest Game Ever Played and Grand Slam) takes place in France and Germany in the fall of 1944, when Germany assembles a brigade of English-speaking Germans to go behind Allied lines, dressed as American GIs, in a last ditch effort to win the war. A "second objective" of the plot was to send a smaller group of commandos to France to assassinate Eisenhower. Frost builds on these facts by fleshing out the story of two of the would-be assassins. This is a top-notch blend of espionage tradecraft and pulse-pounding action adventure.
Connie's second suggestion for Fathers' Day is The Victim Donor by Ken Corre. 
The premise is of a stockbroker named John Harris, who is kidnapped and then returned to his family a few days later, missing a kidney. But his troubles are far from over. Being an intelligent and loving family man, the reader gets to know and like him, and so the reader has to turn the pages as fast as possible to see what happens next! The story is riveting, the scientific details fascinating, and the characters memorable. This chilling tale of a family on the run will keep you guessing until the final satisfying word. This is a fantastic debut novel, and will be sure to please.
Other suggestions....
Tales From Q School by John Feinstein
The annual PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament is one of the most grueling competitions in any sport. Every fall, hundreds of veterans and talented hopefuls sweat through two qualifying stages and then six rounds of hell at Q school, as the tournament is universally known, to get a shot at the PGA Tour, vying for the 30 slots available. The grim reality: If you don't make it through Q school, you're not on the PGA tour. You're out. John Feinstein tells the story of the players who compete for these coveted positions in the 2005 Q school as only he can. With arresting accounts from the players, established winners, rising stars, the defeated, and the endlessly hopeful, America's favorite sportswriter unearths the inside story behind the PGA Tour's brutal all-or-nothing competition.
The Reagan Diaries by Ronald Reagan 
During his two terms as the fortieth president of the United States, Ronald Reagan kept a daily diary in which he recorded, by hand, his innermost thoughts and observations on the extraordinary, the historic, and the routine day-to-day occurrences of his presidency. Now, nearly two decades after he left office, this remarkable record - the only daily presidential diary in American history - is available for the first time. Brought together in one volume and edited by historian Douglas Brinkley, The Reagan Diaries reveals Reagan's political experiences - his relationships with Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, Mohammar al-Qaddafi, and Margaret Thatcher, among others - and the unforgettable moments that defined the era from his first inauguration to the end of the Cold War, the Iran hostage crisis, and John Hinckley Jr.'s assassination attempt. It also describes many of his private thoughts and feelings - his love and devotion for Nancy Reagan and their family, his belief in God and the power of prayer. To read these diaries - filled with Reagan's trademark wit, sharp intelligence, and humor - is to gain a unique understanding of one of the most beloved occupants of the Oval Office in our nation's history.
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hoesseini
Afghan-American novelist Hosseini follows up his bestselling The Kite Runner with another searing epic of Afghanistan in turmoil. The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal as she fails to produce a child. Later, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or starvation. Against a backdrop of unending war, Mariam and Laila become allies in an asymmetrical battle with Rasheed, whose violent misogyny is endorsed by custom and law. Hosseini gives a forceful but nuanced portrait of a patriarchal despotism where women are agonizingly dependent on fathers, husbands and especially sons, the bearing of male children being their sole path to social status. His tale is a powerful, harrowing depiction of Afghanistan, but also a lyrical evocation of the lives and enduring hopes of its resilient characters.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this searing, post-apocalyptic novel is destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America.
Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
Falling Man by Don Delillo
When DeLillo's novel Players was published in 1977, one of the main characters, Pammy, worked in the newly built World Trade Center. She felt that "the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." DeLillo's new novel begins on a September morning, 24 years later, with Keith Neudecker standing in a New York City street covered with dust, glass shards and blood, holding somebody else's briefcase, while that intimation of the building's mortality is realized in a sickening roar behind him. Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September 11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of the world in a way that is at once cathartic, beautiful, and heartbreaking.
The Overlook by Michael Connelly 
Bestseller Connelly's dazzling 13th Harry Bosch novel (after 2006's Echo Park) reunites Bosch with his former flame, FBI agent Rachel Walling. Bosch must break in a new partner, rookie Iggy Ferras, when they're called to look into the execution of physicist Stanley Kent on a Mulholland Drive overlook. When a special FBI unit, headed by Walling, arrives and tries to usurp his case, claiming it's a matter of national security, Bosch refuses to back down. Walling's focus on the potential theft of radioactive material from the hospital where Kent was lending his expertise to cancer treatment and her unwillingness to share information only make Bosch more determined to solve the case. This is a quick read, almost half the length of Connelly's previous novels, but he spares no punches when it comes to complexity and suspense. The scramble to investigate threats to national security, justified or otherwise, is a timely subject and one on which Connelly puts a brilliant new spin.
Best American Sports Writing ed. by Michael Lewis
For fans of sports and just plain great writing, this collection of twenty-seven of the finest pieces of sprots writing from the past year features articles published in 2006 in a variety of American magazines, newspapers, and Internet resources. Guest editor Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Moneyball and Coach, has assembled a compelling look at a variety of sports stories and issues including the politically and sexually charged world of competitive cheerleading, a nineteen-year-old world-record weightlifter who was born with no arms or legs, the super-sizing of NFL players, the story of a New Orleans high school and its football program as they pick up the pieces in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as well as profiles of the world's greatest poker player (a boyish thirty-year-old whose mom still packs him a brown bag lunch) and a girl who can dunk -- in eighth grade! The pieces in this outstanding volume show the true reach and impact of sports, its importance often extending far beyond the playing field. As Lewis writes in his introduction, "What's reassuring about great sports writing is what's reassuring about great sports performances: facing opposition, and often against the odds, someone, at last, did something right."