New Acquisitions

 

The Nine, By Jeffrey Toobin

It's not laws or constitutional theory that rule the High Court, argues this absorbing group profile, but quirky men and women guided by political intuition. New Yorker legal writer Toobin (The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson) surveys the Court from the Reagan administration onward, as the justices wrestled with abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty, gay rights and church-state separation. Despite a Court dominated by Republican appointees, Toobin paints not a conservative revolution but a period of intractable moderation. The real power, he argues, belonged to supreme swing-voter Sandra Day O'Connor, who decided important cases with what Toobin sees as an almost primal attunement to a middle-of-the-road public consensus. By contrast, he contends, conservative justices Rehnquist and Scalia ended up bitter old men, their rigorous constitutional doctrines made irrelevant by the moderates' compromises. The author deftly distills the issues and enlivens his narrative of the Court's internal wranglings with sharp thumbnail sketches (Anthony Kennedy the vain bloviator, David Souter the Thoreauvian ascetic) and editorials (inept and unsavory is his verdict on the Court's intervention in the 2000 election). His savvy account puts the supposedly cloistered Court right in the thick of American life. (Publishers Weekly )

Tree of Smoke, By Denis Johnson

To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle. This novel makes large demands on the reader: to submit to its length, to its disorienting language and structure, to the elusive and shattering experience of its characters, and finally to its sheer ambition to be definitive for the Vietnam generation. It is a presumptuous book, in other words, and you may will resist for the first several hundred pages. But it will grab you eventually, and get inside your head like the war it is describing — mystifying, horrifying, mesmerizing. Johnson, a poet, ex-junkie and adventure journalist, has written a book that by the end wraps around you as tightly as a jungle snake. (Washington Post Book World)

The Road, By Comac McCarthy - Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. In The Road, the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. -Dennis Lehane

The Audacity of Hope, By Barack Obama

Barack Obama's first book, Dreams of my Father was a compelling and moving memoir focusing on personal issues of race, identity, and community. With his second book The Audacity of Hope, Obama engages themes raised in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, shares personal views on faith and values and offers a vision of the future that involves repairing a "political process that is broken" and restoring a government that has fallen out of touch with the people.

John Adams, By David McCullough

One of the most critically acclaimed works of historic biography since McCullough’s "Truman," the story of John Adams has received nothing but raves from book reviewers. “As in his magisterial TRUMAN, McCullough spins out the story of John Adams through scads of solidly researched anecdotes of the sort that breathe real life into nonfiction.” – The Boston Globe “The authentic John Adams has been concealed too long in the glamorous shadows of Jefferson and Washington, and some rectification is past due. McCullough's biography will go far to provide it…”

Truman, by David McCullough

Consider what Truman faced... deciding to use the atomic bomb, taking on Stalin, getting the U.S. into Korea and firing Macarthur. The "Economist" declared David Mcullough's "Truman," "Remarkable... you may open it at any point and instantly become fascinated, so easy, lucid, and energetic is the narrative and so absorbing the sequence of events."

Hunger: An Unnatural History, By Sharman Russell,

Russell's playful survey of the effects of hunger, which moves inexorably toward a wider moral meditation on starvation, suggests, "Hunger is a country we enter every day, like a commuter across a friendly border." Observing that "not eating seems to be innately religious," Russell (Anatomy of a Rose) explores the biochemical and cultural dimensions of hunger, from the stunts of "hunger artists" to the practices of fasting ascetics.

Sunday Money: A Lap Around America with Nascar, By Jeff MacGregor

Author Jeff MacGregor was committed to understanding NASCAR, so instead of merely dropping in on a race or two, he traveled the nearly yearlong season in an RV with his wife, photographer Olya Evanitsky. The result is many books in one. It's a vivid history of the sport's roots, as it grows from a rowdy way for Florida good ol' boys to blow off steam to being a titan of American culture with a fan base of 75 million.

Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, By Caroline Morehead

The intractable, multifaceted problem of people driven from their homes by poverty, violence or persecution is given a human face in this moving survey of the refugee experience. Moorehead, a human rights journalist, refugee aid worker and biographer of Martha Gellhorn, tours a number of refugee milieus, visiting, among others, Liberian refugees in Cairo, Mexican migrants waiting to cross into the United States, Mideastern refugees detained in Australian internment camps and Palestinian refugees still nursing hopes of returning to a homeland they have never seen.

When the Rivers Run Dry, by Fred Pearce

Veteran science writer Pearce (Turning Up the Heat) makes a strong—and scary—case that a worldwide water shortage is the most fearful looming environmental crisis. With a drumbeat of facts both horrific (thousands of wells in India and Bangladesh are poisoned by fluoride and arsenic) and fascinating (it takes 20 tons of water to make one pound of coffee), the former New Scientist news editor documents a "kind of cataclysm" already affecting many of the world's great rivers.

How the Cows Turned Mad: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mad Cow Disease, By Maxime Schwartz

In How the Cows Turned Mad, Maxime Schwartz recounts the history of the prion diseases, or subacute spongiform encephalopathies, as if writing a mystery. Schwartz refers to all the prion diseases under one rubric, "The Disease," as if a single criminal with many disguises were active. This story has truly been an exceptional one, with events that have dramatically and unexpectedly affected the economy, public health, and the political scene.

The Rag and Bone Shop, By Robert Cormier

This final novel from the grand master of young-adult fiction is one last jewel in the literary crown of Robert Cormier, who died in November 2000. In it he continues to explore the themes that are so characteristic of his work: guilt and forgiveness, misuse of authority, and the corruption of innocence. But a new book from Cormier is always a surprise, and here he gives us a brilliant evocation of the detective story, in a narrative that centers on the interrogation of a murder suspect.

When We Were Orphans, By Kazuo Ishiguro

When 9-year-old Christopher Banks's father--a British businessman involved in the opium trade--disappears from the family home in Shanghai, the boy and his friend Akira play at being detectives: "Until in the end, after the chases, fist-fights and gun-battles around the warren-like alleys of the Chinese districts, whatever our variations and elaborations, our narratives would always conclude with a magnificent ceremony held in Jessfield Park, a ceremony that would see us, one after another, step out onto a specially erected stage ... to greet the vast cheering crowds."