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Monthly Archives: June 2015

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

29 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Weston Public Library Staff in Fiction, Historical Fiction

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bomber pilots, British aerial operations, families, Worl War II

9780316176538_p0_v3_s114x166 Kate Atkinson’s new book A God in Ruins is a companion piece to her 2013 novel Life After Life. Both books follow the Todd family in England before, during, and after World War II, focusing in particular on siblings Ursula and Teddy. In each story, Atkinson plays with the idea of time, and writes beautifully and powerfully about war. Both books are compelling in different ways; I recommend reading Life After Life first.

“Atkinson isn’t just telling a story: she’s deconstructing, taking apart the notion of how we believe stories are told. Using narrative tricks that range from the subtlest sleight of hand to direct address, she makes us feel the power of storytelling not as an intellectual conceit, but as a punch in the gut.”―Publishers Weekly
“A sprawling, unapologetically ambitious saga that tells the story of postwar Britain through the microcosm of a single family, and you remember what a big, old-school novel can do.”―Tom Perotta, New York Times Book Review

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You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz

22 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Weston Public Library Staff in Fiction

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love, man-women relationships, marriage

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Set in Manhattan with some side trips to the Boston area, the first third of this book is slow-paced and the characters are vague.  However, the reader will soon discover that as the details are filled in, all is not perfect in the life of the main character, Grace Sachs, a family therapist, who thinks she has a perfect marriage. Suddenly there is a murder, a mystery and a missing husband! You will read this book in a “New York minute”!

“This excellent literary mystery [unfolds] with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan. . . intriguing and beautiful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Korelitz does not disappoint as she chronicles the emotional unraveling of her heroine in this gripping saga…A cut above your average who-is-this-stranger-in-my-marriage-bed novel, “You Should Have Known” transforms itself at certain moments from a highly effective thriller into a nuanced novel of family, heritage, identity, and nurture.”—The Boston Globe
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Looking at Mindfulness: 25 Ways to Live in the Moment Through Art by Christophe Andre

15 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Weston Public Library Staff in Non-fiction

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art therapy, meditation, mindfulness

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This amazing book is written by a French psychiatrist, author, and meditation group leader.  He blends mindfulness and meditation teachings with beautiful works of art.  His writing style is clear and simple, providing an easy way to understand important points which are supported by incredible paintings.  I want the whole world to read this book!

“A work of art in its own right, and a meditative tour de force” –Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are
“In this internationally best-selling book, French psychiatrist André guides the reader through the practice of mindfulness to art itself. Using color photographs of classic and modern works, the author shows readers how to quiet the outer world and intensify their presence in the moment, neither trying to escape it or change it. André responds to each art piece in terms of feelings and sensory perceptions, helping readers to visualize themselves inside the canvas, smelling, hearing, and really seeing the scene.”-Library Journal
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Shadow Divers: the True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of theLast Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson

08 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Weston Public Library Staff in Non-fiction, Sports

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1939-45, deep diving, German submarine, naval operations, New Jersey, shipwrecks, underwater archaeology, World War II

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In the tradition of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery and make history themselves.  Kurson is a dynamic writer who will give the reader some fascinating human interest stories as well as a history lesson and a scuba diving lesson.  This book was a great hit with the Non-Fiction Book Discussion Group at the Weston Public Library.  An engrossing read!

“Robert Kurson’s Shadow Divers, about the divers exploring a sunken shipwreck off the New Jersey coast, is a gripping account of real-life adventurers and a real-life mystery. In addition to being compellingly readable on every page, the book offers a unique window on the deep, almost reckless nature of the human quest to know.”–SCOTT TUROW, author of Reversible Errors

“A winning tale exceedingly well told, Shadow Divers takes us on a dangerous and seemingly quixotic descent into the murk–and then, in a fog of nitrogen narcosis, brings us back to the surface with a richer, fuller fathoming of a history we only thought we knew.”–HAMPTON SIDES, author of Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission

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Transatlantic by Colum McCann

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by Weston Public Library Staff in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Travel

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air travel, Labrador, Newfoundland, Northern Ireland, transatlantic voyages

9780812981926_p0_v2_s114x166McCann, the author of Let the Great World Spin, has created a remarkable novel of multiple generations of fictional female characters, and has interwoven their lives with those of real historical figures in both Ireland and the United States. With the characters Lily Duggan, an Irish maid, her granddaughter, Hannah Carson, Arthur Brown, the aviator, Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist, and George Mitchell, former U.S. senator who mediated the ceasefire in Northern Ireland, the author spans continents and leaps centuries and links the New World with the Old.

Read this book once for the story line and then read it again to fully understand and follow the threads of family and history.

“One of the greatest pleasures of TransAtlantic is how provisional it makes history feel, how intimate, and intensely real. . . . Here is the uncanny thing McCann finds again and again about the miraculous: that it is inseparable from the everyday.”—The Boston Globe

 “What distinguishes TransAtlantic from [Colum] McCann’s earlier work isn’t the stunning language or the psychological acuity or the humor and imagination on display—all of that has been there before. It’s the sheer ambition, the audacity to imagine within the same novel the experience of Frederick Douglass in 1845 . . . then the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in 1919 . . . then to leap into the near-present and embody the former senator George Mitchell, . . . knitting through and around them the stories of four generations of women.”—The New York Times Magazine

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