BookBrowse Editorial Review
Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling
by David Crystal
(7/10/2013)
David Crystal's rich, useful, and fascinating survey of English spelling will change the way you think about language. But what really makes this book interesting is that Crystal makes English come alive and shows us that the language is not a fixed system set in stone by scholars.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
(5/8/2013)
The experience of reading tumultuous and beautiful Wave is like the Zen proverb that advises, "Let go over a cliff, die completely, and then come back to life - after that you cannot be deceived." The book is both a memento mori and an elegy, a lasting monument to the lost. Read Wave and you will never forget Vik, Malli and Steve, or that love is indelible and loss is inevitable.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time
by Bob Harris
(4/3/2013)
Bob Harris educates, amuses, and introduces readers to people we're honored to know, all while explaining the sometimes complex workings of micro-finance in a lively and lucid way.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Girl Who Fell to Earth: A Memoir
by Sophia Al-Maria
(2/20/2013)
Time spent in the Gulf has changed Sophia Al-Maria. She is now an inhabitant of two distinct worlds, a member of two families, and keenly aware of her otherness. When her teenage rebellion is too much for her mother, Al-Maria is sent to live with the women of her family in Doha where, though she wears an abaya (long, "cloak-like dress") and a shala, (long, black head scarf) she discovers freedom.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People
by Neil Shubin
(1/23/2013)
To read The Universe Within is to arrive at all sorts of wonders. Neil Shubin illuminates our inner and outer selves and our world, and demonstrates how beautifully connected, transitory, rare, and changeable we are.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi
by Aman Sethi
(10/31/2012)
A Free Man is a heartbreaking and troubling portrait of poverty and loss, and also an unvarnished record of one journalist's complicated relationship with his subject. At the end of the book, day laborer, Mohammed Ashraf, remains a sketch rather than a full portrait. He doesn't feel whole but instead feels like a composite of the many migrant laborers who drift in and out of Delhi. But because of Sethi, these solitary and forsaken men will never be forgotten.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
by Timothy Egan
(10/17/2012)
Timothy Egan's robust biography of Edward Curtis is not only the record of a prophetic artist's life and work, it is a transfixing story of audacious achievement and massive commercial failure during a period of stunning cultural blindness and injustice. Edward Curtis was a passionate photographer who moved in society's high circles until he gave it all up to capture Native Americans on film. Egan's portrait of Curtis, who produced an historic twenty-volume photographic and cultural record of Am
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man
by Mark Kurlansky
(5/16/2012)
Throughout this smart, eloquent and sometimes troubling biography, Kurlansky celebrates the restless and particularly American energy that animated Birdseye: no experience or opportunity was wasted. Birdseye lived the way he ate, digesting everything. He was a curious adventurer eager to discover the next big thing, and he always looked forward. And though Birdseye lived and worked unworried by the consequences of what he did and what he made, people today must struggle with the repercussions of
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Best Care Possible: A Physician's Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life
by Ira Byock MD
(4/18/2012)
In this suspenseful, moving and indispensable book, Byock shares a great deal of important information... I especially appreciate Byock's affectionate and optimistic view of human nature. He believes that caring for one another is essential to human character and that death, when done right, affirms love, heals loss and completes and enriches our lives.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos
(11/3/2011)
Young readers will find Jack authentic and funny - especially his embarrassing nose. What will they make of the Utopian community's history or the frequent references to Eleanor Roosevelt? I don't know. But Gantos's obit to Norvelt is too real and too interesting for that to matter much.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris
by David King
(10/5/2011)
David King's engrossing and atmospheric examination of French mass murderer and physician Marcel Petiot's life is true-crime noir at its best. Always a cruel and crooked opportunist, Petiot develops into a rapacious executioner in the dark, desperate, and violent world of Nazi-occupied France. King deftly establishes this world with many fascinating digressions, including a brief look at the development of existentialism, and implies that the Paris of No Exit was the perfect killing groun
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Third Wave: A Volunteer Story
by Alison Thompson
(9/21/2011)
The Third Wave offers an unvarnished but ultimately uplifting account of Alison Thompson's day-to-day experiences as a relief worker in devastated and dangerous places around the globe... She lets the reader know just what's required in an effective volunteer––optimism, courage, love, and inventiveness––and what isn't––special talents, or lots of money. In The Third Wave Thompson demonstrates that we're all valuable, necessary and deeply important to one another.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris
by David McCullough
(8/4/2011)
The Greater Journey is a history of Paris-inspired life-changes... a record of the transformative moments that led to greatness and changed the world. Along the way McCullough celebrates the joy, freedom, and beauty Paris offered at that time; notes the loves, sorrows, losses, and important friendships Americans found there; and reminds us that between inspiration and fame came years of determined and good-old American hard work.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Imposter
by Mark Seal
(6/15/2011)
Mark Seal's absorbing biography about con man Christian Karl Gerhartstreiter (aka Clark Rockefeller), The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, invites the reader to contemplate the power of a big lie, the fluidity of a person's identity, and the limits of credulity. Seal succeeds in fleshing out a personality so unfixed that, at times, the man at the center of his narrative seems completely empty on the inside - save for a relentless drive toward personal wealth and social advancement.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout
by Philip Connors
(4/20/2011)
Fire Season is an anatomy of solitude, a paean to a wild American landscape, a history of wildfires and those who watch them, a celebration of adventure, and a demonstration of the connection between looking hard, thinking deeply and writing brilliantly.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero
by Stephan Talty
(2/16/2011)
Central to the story is Tibet's religious foundation and the Dalai Lama's unique status and profound connection to his people: "Buddhism was much more than a state religion: it was the sole reason for Tibet's existence." The narrative becomes more detailed, suspenseful and upsetting as Talty describes the days prior to the Dalai Lama's frightening escape during the 1959 uprising against Chinese occupation forces. If this history lacks anything it is photographs, but Escape from the Land of Sn
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
by Guy Deutscher
(10/6/2010)
How does our mother tongue (Why don't we call it a "father tongue," I wonder?) shape what we see and what we don't see; how we orient ourselves in space and time; and the associations we attach to people, animals, ideas and objects? Why do some people describe the sky as black, not blue? And what exactly did Homer mean when he said "wine-dark sea"? Through the Language Glass is Guy Deutscher's exuberant and very excellent adventure among competing ideas, theories and scientific experiment
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light
by Jane Brox
(9/8/2010)
Brilliant is more than an eloquent and gorgeous history of artificial light; it is a survey of profound experiences long lost to the human senses, imagination and heart. Brox reveals how light and darkness create intimacy and isolation, mark periods of rest, work and dreaming, and she demonstrates how light divorces us from and damages the natural world. All students of literature, history and art should read Brilliant; anyone interested in what it means to be human should read it,
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India
by William Dalrymple
(7/8/2010)
Nine Lives is a stunning, affecting study of human aspiration and goodness. But despite the jacket blurbs, this isn't really "travel writing." As Dalrymple moves through India's "sacred topography," he assembles the biographies of nine people whose lives intersect with the divine. Although contemporary India is always present (a shaman listens to a soccer game on a transistor radio from his hut on a bone-strewn cremation plot), Nine Lives immerses the reader in an India of "sacred
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Jenniemae & James: A Memoir in Black and White
by Brooke Newman
(5/19/2010)
Jennimae & James is a smart and troubling memoir of bigotry and generosity, darkness and light, intellectual virtuosity and untapped talent, revelation and silence. The story of a family, it also records the routine and crushing injustice of life in segregated America, and honors the love African American women gave the white children and families in their care.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Freeze Frame: The Fourth of the Enzo Files
(4/21/2010)
Spending time with Peter May's charming and clever Enzo Macleod in Brittany is pure pleasure. In May's fourth installment of the Enzo Files series, the remote Ile de Groix, with its turbulent coast, rough weather, and laconic and secretive residents, tests Macleod intellectually and physically as he attempts to solve a case so cold it's frigid... If there's a flaw.. it's May's occasional awkward overwriting... Still, the truth hidden inside the mystery of Freeze Frame is fascinatin
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett
(2/3/2010)
The Spirit Level will change the way you think about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, especially if you live in the United States. You will reexamine what it means to be successful, how you will seek and achieve personal satisfaction, and what you owe your fellow citizen... Despite the vagueness of the egalitarian future they envision, and the sometime less-than-persuasive data in support of their arguments, Wilson and Pickett leave the reader to grapple with a powerful and dis
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
by William Kamkwamba
(11/19/2009)
William Kamkwamba's story is important, sad and beautiful. Despite the degradation of his and his people's suffering, his story reminds us - especially those of us in the West whose intellectual and physical appetites have been deadened by plenty - that being human is a constant striving for the possible and the wonderful.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko
(10/21/2009)
Al Capone Shines My Shoes is the sequel to Choldenko's celebrated
Al Capone Does My Shirts. Twelve-year old Moose Flanagan continues his account of life on the Rock and the conflicts and crises that beset the isolated community of cons, guards, mothers and kids who call it home. Moose's voice - so true, so funny, so boyish, so irreverent - will make
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours
by Tom Shachtman
(9/23/2009)
This thorough, patiently researched, and at times moving account will appeal to students of American history in the 1960's in particular, and anyone interested in an important turning-point in the struggle for human rights in the U.S. and in Africa... The architects of the student airlifts believed in freedom, human dignity and self-determination; the students they helped believed that through education they could help a nation. By having the courage to act on those beliefs, and the determinatio
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
(9/2/2009)
The Age of Wonder is stirring reading for anyone interested in the lives of extraordinary, world-altering people. Learning how and when great poets and great scientists met one another, read each other’s work, or absorbed each other’s speculations and discoveries makes reading The Age of Wonder an especially ecstatic adventure. From every angle, this is a wonderful book.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases
by Ross Donaldson
(5/21/2009)
A potent mix of travel memoir, coming-of-age narrative and medical mystery. Donaldson's experiences treating a frighteningly infectious and often deadly hemorrhagic fever, the strength of his West African patients, and his own grave illness bring him to a contemplation of mortality, poverty, civil war, and medicine as it is practiced in the first and third worlds.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean
by Tori Murden Mcclure
(4/22/2009)
While McClure-the-writer claims that her first failure and ultimately successful trans-Atlantic row brought her peace, understanding and true love, it is McClure-the-adventurer driven to row 14 hour days on violent seas day after day after day in a vast solitude, fighting storm after storm -- strong, resourceful, alone, competent and utterly complete within herself -- who exhilarates and inspires.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
(4/1/2009)
Though Singer's plea is reasoned and calm, The Life You Can Save is rough reading, especially for readers used to "feel good" nonfiction or the narcissistic wallow offered by most self-help titles. The Life You Can Save is definitely a "feel bad" read and that's why it's so good and so important: Pour yourself a glass of tap water and settle down with it for a few hours. You won't escape into fantasy, lose weight, unclutter your closets or boost your self-esteem, but you might be shamed i
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had by Kristin Levine
(3/8/2009)
Middle-grade readers are in luck. Levine has written a richly-realized tale of a powerful best-friendship and a boy's passage into manhood during a shameful and violent period in America's past.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Possibilities of Sainthood by Donna Freitas
(2/19/2009)
Freitas is freshest and most interesting when writing about people who aren't
Italian and issues that are not related to Catholic saints. While the
first generation Italians are painfully stereotypical,
Antonia is finely drawn - she has an earthy liveliness, an amusing lack of
self-knowledge, a distinct voice and a charming yearning for experiencing life,
especially a perfect first kiss.
I'm not sure Freitas needed to
suspend the laws of nature and include miracles of
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Brooklyn Bridge by Karen Hesse
(10/15/2008)
The ponderous prose, the horror stories of cruelty and abuse, the death-in-life Neverland of the street children, and the life-in-death of the wraithlike Radiant Boy subvert the novel and diminish its aesthetic success. Although Hesse connects The Radiant Boy to the living world Joseph inhabits through a series of improbable (and puzzling) coincidences, most potent are the sections of the novel in which Hesse devotes her great talents to realizing a real place and a real time in history: New Yor
BookBrowse Editorial Review
My One Hundred Adventures by Polly Horvath
(9/18/2008)
Lovely, fresh, ambitious, subversive, sharp and generous, My One Hundred Adventures is a splendid novel for wise children; world-weary teens; and adults, young and old. Reading Horvath is good for the mind, the body and the heart.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl
by Stacey O'Brien
(9/4/2008)
O'Brien's story of her profound friendship with a barn owl is
strange, exciting, lovely and important. A much-needed corrective to our
sanitized, human-centric view of animals as machines or as pets that can be
trained to perform stupid tricks, Wesley the Owl reasserts the powerful
and sometimes icky otherworldliness and breathtaking complexity of nature.
Prepare to be enlightened, disgusted, delighted and humbled.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Lucky by Rachel Vail
(8/13/2008)
Vail confidently and brilliantly describes the cruel dynamics of female hierarchies, their moment-to-moment coercions and sharp little miseries. The antithesis of Jerry Spinelli's quirky and individualistic heroine in Stargirl, Phoebe is still a richly developed character who grows in good and surprising ways. Still I wonder why Vail had to make Bridget Burgess's mother so repellent, and why Phoebe's world is so rich and so white. I would have liked to see Vail use her great ear for young
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Bird Lake Moon by Kevin Henkes
(6/18/2008)
With sure, crystalline prose, Henkes discloses the breathless suspense that even the shortest moment can contain, and the enormous courage that loss demands. Young readers who plunge into these extraordinary interlocking stories will discover mysterious, sad, and hopeful things about themselves and the people they love.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Savvy by Ingrid Law
(6/1/2008)
With Savvy, Law bets everything on a single conceit, the idea of a family whose members each possess a unique, sometimes whimsical, sometimes supernatural, talent, which manifests itself on the bearer's thirteenth birthday. Law asserts that her characters' talents or savvys are "not ... sorcery," but an "inheritance, like brown eyes or ... [a] talent for dancing to polka music ..." However, because of the 'magical' element to the story, bookstores may feel obligated to market it on the F
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution
by Moying Li
(5/15/2008)
Li's story, though rooted in China, will speak to every young person struggling to realize his or her ambitions, and to every loving family facing hardship or loss. Young readers will appreciate Li's plainspoken style, her restraint, and the clarity with which she describes the unthinkable as well as the beautiful. Adult readers will find much to admire, and will discover not only a poignant story of a vanished world, but a meditation on what parents can and cannot give their children: They cann
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting
by Hara Estroff Marano
(5/2/2008)
Parents of babies, toddlers, school age children and teenagers will find much in this book to provoke, irritate, and clarify the tough and often perplexing work of raising and educating 21st century kids. Marano, even when she fails to persuade, makes us think hard about what parents should expect from their children and what kids need to become strong, happy, and healthy young adults ... The saddest sections of the book are also the most persuasive and concern the exuberant, brave, elastic and
BookBrowse Editorial Review
My Dad's A Birdman by David Almond & Polly Dunbar
(5/2/2008)
This bittersweet and nimbly-illustrated tale of a wise girl whose bird-brained father attempts to rise above earthly sorrow will lift the spirits of readers young and old. Almond has written a fable and the language is poem-like, even delicate, throughout. Children will enjoy reading about silly grownups and wise kids. Adults, more keenly mortal, will, with a pang, recognize Lizzie's father's impulse to, as Robert Frost put in his poem "Birches, " …get away from earth awhile/And then come back
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Willoughbys by Lois Lowry
(4/3/2008)
Lois Lowry's The Willoughbys is the latest faux antique to hit your
quaint little bookshop's fusty shelves. To make sure the reader gets the joke,
Lowry's blast from the past includes pointedly charming retro pen and ink
illustrations; wavy old-fashioned fonts, and alliterative, adverb-laden diction
("A Novel Nefariously Written & Ignominiously Illustrated by the Author") ...
To be truly delectable, The Willoughbys must work for children who haven't read
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart
(4/3/2008)
Lockhart has a sensitive ear for her characters' young voices; the dialogue is funny and real. Young women will savor this subversive cautionary tale of a girl geek's exhilarating pursuit of power -- sexual, intellectual, and social -- within the retrograde, male-dominated world of an elite boarding school.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd
(2/21/2008)
A boy's spectacular and mystifying into-thin-air disappearance from a sealed chamber high above London launches this determined and thoughtful page-turner for middle-grade readers ....
While the mysterious disappearance is intriguing, what Ted must do to understand it is truly exciting: To discover how and why his cousin vanished from a sealed pod, Ted breaches the closed chamber of his psyche and invites the world and the reader in.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
If A Tree Falls at Lunch Period by Gennifer Choldenko
(1/24/2008)
The novel's focus is decidedly internal rather than external, and the reader lives inside twelve year old heads for the duration. But Choldenko's unwavering interior focus isn't gimmickry: it illuminates her young characters' imperfect knowledge of the world and of themselves, and reflects the self-absorption typical and probably necessary to their growth.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Taken by Edward Bloor
(1/10/2008)
Taken's vision of families where hired help do the parenting, and of a world where racial and economic injustice imprison both rich and poor is made vivid by the anger and brilliance that inform Bloor's most successful, moving and darkest novels—Tangerine and Crusader.