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Holiday Recommendations, page 2

The P&P 2011 Holiday Newsletter and the Children and Teens' Department 2011 Favorites are our suggestions for reading and gift-giving. Politics & Prose members receive discounts on everything featured in the newsletter until the end of December. In last week's email, we highlighted our top ten favorite books of the year - five novels and five non-fiction titles.

This week we offer more recommendations, some of our own and some by our knowledgeable staff. Our booksellers help make our store great because they help you find the books that you want to read. Here are several that we are eager to share with you . . . including one of Barbara Meade's favorites.

Fiction

$23.00
ISBN-13: 9781555975821
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Graywolf Press, 4/2011

Margaret Marcus was a secular Jew in Mamaroneck, N.Y., before she grew fascinated with Islam and moved to Pakistan in 1962, taking the name Maryam Jameelah and becoming one of the pre-eminent Islamic voices, writing blistering critiques of Western materialism and secularism. Deborah Baker, who discovered the archive of Marcus’s papers in the New York Public Library, carefully reconstructs Marcus's life after she reached Lahore, using letters Marcus sent to her parents and articles she published in Islamic magazines. In The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf, $23), Baker assembles the pieces of a singularly perplexing life that has proven stranger than fiction. Baker delivers not just a riveting and disturbing biographical account but an illuminating tale about the meeting of West and East and the role of women under orthodox Islam. Bradley Graham


$55.00
ISBN-13: 9780307718266
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Clarkson Potter, 8/2011

Truth in advertising: I grew up in Berkeley and, from Chez Panisse’s beginnings in 1971, my parents were great fans—and great friends—of Alice Waters and her restaurant. My mother, a food writer and critic in the Bay Area, spent every Bastille Day in the Chez Panisse kitchen peeling garlic for the restaurant’s annual July 14th celebration. When my mother died in 2006, Alice touchingly invited my dad to dine at the restaurant any time, even without his wife (he had celebrated many birthdays at Chez P, and on each occasion the menu mysteriously included his two favorite items: duck for the main course, and a lemon tart for dessert). Over the years, Alice has used her Chez Panisse Foundation to champion the Edible Schoolyard and other efforts to bring healthy, sustainable food to communities across the country. Indeed, the restaurant’s 40th anniversary celebrations last August raised funds for these projects. This beautiful book, 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering (Clarkson Potter, $55) by Alice Waters and Friends, which includes a foreword by Calvin Trillin and an afterword by Michael Pollan, tells the story of Chez Panisse through photos, recollections, and the iconic posters that artist David Lance Goines made for the restaurant over many years. More than a collector’s item, this is a lively celebration of Chez Panisse and its revolutionary role in making local, seasonal, and sustainable food a building block of community—and gathering—across our country. Lissa Muscatine


A Man of Parts (Hardcover)

$26.95
ISBN-13: 9780670022984
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Viking Adult, 9/2011

I first read and admired David Lodge’s work twenty-five years ago in his laugh-aloud satirical novel of academia and political correctness, Nice Work. In A Man of Parts (Viking, $26.95), his new fiction based on the life of H.G. Wells, Lodge applies his creative license to substantial biographical research. His subject, known for the science-fiction classics The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, was a short, dumpy man with a squeaky voice— none of which deterred an active sex life. An early Fabian, Wells was also an unabashed advocate of Free Love and during his quarter-century-long marriage had numerous affairs; his lovers included birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger and author Rebecca West, by whom he had a son, the novelist Anthony West. Such colorful material, with its many ménages à trois, filtered through Lodge’s rich imagination, makes for some very funny scenes and also presents a vivid intellectual portrait of Edwardian London and the period leading up to World War I. Barbara Meade


$40.00
ISBN-13: 9780547232799
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 10/2011

You have asked, so we are letting you know. . . Essential Pepin, A History of the World in 100 Objects, and Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy are all in stock. Call us at 202-364-1919 or click the links to order online. We can handle giftwrapping and shipping, and help make your holidays happen.


$45.00
ISBN-13: 9780670022700
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Viking Adult, 10/2011

$60.00
ISBN-13: 9781401324254
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Hyperion, 9/2011

$25.99
ISBN-13: 9780061803673
Availability: Not currently in the store – Usually ships in 1-5 days
Published: Ecco, 9/2011
Lucette Lagnado’s 2007 memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, was a narrative of her family’s wrenching exile from Nasser’s increasingly anti-Semitic 1960s Cairo, filtered through the lens of her dashing, charismatic father. Her extraordinary gift for storytelling left the reader with an almost proprietary attachment to the characters, particularly to her long-suffering mother, who was something of a footnote in that book. Lagnado’s new memoir, The Arrogant Years (Ecco, $25.99), fills in those gaps and much more, with a rich, vivid portrait of immigrant life in Brooklyn and of the author’s own excruciating coming-of-age, which included battling cancer. Susan Coll

$27.95
ISBN-13: 9781598531077
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Library of America, 10/2011
Humorist Andy Borowitz has compiled a raucous array of writing in The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion (Library of America, $27.95). An asterisk in the title reminds readers that this selection is “according to Andy Borowitz.” In any case, he has assembled work by some unquestionably funny folks. Pieces by contemporary wits such as George Saunders, Wanda Sykes, and David Sedaris are present, but the editor has also picked samples from writers who aren’t read much anymore, people like Peter DeVries, George Ade, and Anita Loos. Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, S.J. Perelman, H.L. Mencken, and James Thurber are here (this is the Library of America, after all), making it a literary anthology that will be cherished by everyone in the household. Mark LaFramboise

$27.95
ISBN-13: 9780385534956
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Doubleday, 11/2011
Four years ago in Harper’s, Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Gun, With Occasional Music, published a defense of “plagiarism” which was so sane and commonsensical that it was at once attacked as radical, subversive, and, perhaps, even blasphemous. Riffing on Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, Lethem called his essay The Ecstasy of Influence (Doubleday, $27.95). He has now plagiarized his own title for this wonderful collection of essays, occasional pieces, odd bits, and, yes, riffs on everything from the novels of Phillip K. Dick, a lunatic encountered on the G train, and the music of Rick James to the joys and perils of the ten years he spent working in used-book stores while learning his craft – a time he seems also to have spent reading and thinking about everything under the sun. John Teague

Conquistadora (Hardcover)

$27.50
ISBN-13: 9780307268327
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Knopf, 7/2011
I’m a sucker for a well-developed, strong woman character and Esmeralda Santiago delivers one beautifully in her well-paced historical novel, Conquistadora (Knopf, $27.50). Set in mid-eighteenth-century Spain and Puerto Rico, the novel focuses on Ana, a well-born woman alienated from her patrician Spanish peers and yearning for adventure; she dreams of following in the footsteps of her conquistador forebears. Where her ancestors relentlessly searched for gold, Ana searches for something more valuable for a woman in the 1800s: she wants to carve out a piece of the earth for herself. Exerting an iron will, she works to steer her destiny by using the men around her, traveling to Puerto Rico to run a sugar plantation, and doing all she can to make it a success. Santiago evokes the region’s lush landscape and populates it with solid characters—especially with a protagonist readers will be compelled to follow into the tropical wilderness. Angela Maria Williams

$28.95
ISBN-13: 9780385526265
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Doubleday, 9/2011
With the right narrator, a seemingly one- dimensional historical event can become a riveting story. This is the case with Candice Millard and The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President (Doubleday, $28.95). Millard, who spun a tale of adventure and suspense out of Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 expedition through the Amazon in The River of Doubt, is such a skillful writer, and her story is so fascinating, that you barely notice how the vivid details presented early on gradually draw together into a powerful whole. James Garfield’s life and death is a saga of political wrangling, a delusional assassin, and medical techniques that failed to save the President and might in fact have killed him—techniques that included Alexander Graham Bell’s effort to develop an electrical device to locate the bullet in the fallen president’s back. Bill Leggett

$35.00
ISBN-13: 9781439163375
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Free Press, 10/2011

A work of both art and scholarship, Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The Iliad (Free Press, $35) updates Homer’s epic for the 21st century, even as it takes the work back to its roots. Written down many centuries after it was composed, the original oral version has been added to over the generations, but Mitchell has based this latest rendition on a text stripped of known later accretions. To tell this “dramatically sharper and leaner” story, Mitchell, a prolific translator of works as varied in style, language, and purpose as Gilgamesh, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, and Rilke’s poetry, studied the flow of the Greek meter and worked to match its rhythms in English. The result is an energetic and graceful account of the long Trojan War and the passions of the warriors that drove it, with every word carefully chosen for sound as well as sense. Mitchell’s informative commentary and unobtrusive notes are invaluable to appreciating the richness of this elegant volume, the first new rendering of The Iliad in some fifteen years. Laurie Greer

 

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