Great New Reads

 

Just about every week, a few shelf-fulls of new books come into the Library.  Here are several titles that caught my eye:

Alexander and the Wonderful, Marvelous, Excellent, Terrific Ninety Days by Judith Viorst.  Do you remember someone reading to you, or maybe you reading to your child, the classic children’s book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day?.  Well, the real Alexander has grown up but has returned home with his wife and children and Mom’s still writing about him with that bemused air.  A funny and lovely read.

Freedom For the Thought That We Hate: a Biography of the First Amendment by Anthony Lewis. Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and First Amendment expert Anthony Lewis writes a nuanced exploration of the First Amendment, the struggle for its fulfillment and the threats it faces today.

The World’s Best Memoir Writing: the Literature of Life From St. Augustine to Gandhi, and From Pablo Picasso to Nelson Mandela, edited by Eve Claxton, is arranged by age from birth (Confessions by St. Augustine) to one hundred (My First Hundred Years by Margaret Murray). Each age consists of one or more short excerpts from a wide range of memoirs, each with a brief introduction to place the excerpt in context. Billie Holiday’s entry for age 40 is heart-breaking. Nelson Mandela writing of freedom at age 71 is awe-inspiring.  This is a great source for finding memoirs you’d like to read in full.  If we don’t have that book in our collection, we’ll be glad to look for a copy in another library we can “InterLibrary Loan” in for you.

Pushcart Prize XXXII Best of the Small Presses 2008, edited by Bill Henderson, is an anthology of American fiction, essays, memoirs and poetry published by small presses.  If you are skeptical of the domination of American literature by the Big Seven Publishers, this book will give you a taste of the very best of the rest. Again, we’ll do everything we can to locate any text you’d like to read in full.