Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?browse=true&Ne=7236&N=3+7515+7520 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1551759 The sequel to Hilary Mantels 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantels Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Annes head?-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1510995 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1390991 Follows a middle-aged man as he reflects on a past he thought was behind him, until he is presented with a legacy that forces him to reconsider different decisions, and to revise his place in the world. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1645220 In this book the author transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. In this work he has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1170825 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1054725 In this tough, tender memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith transports readers to what seemed like halcyon days for art and artists in New York as she shares tales of the denizens of Maxs Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribners, Brentanos and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplthorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1037092 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=986047 A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=804471 Historian and legal scholar Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family, and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=713036 Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world--when it did not succeed, it set out to change the world instead. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.--From publisher description. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=690819 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=606394 The dust storms that terrorized Americas High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived - those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave - Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=651950 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=594888 Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Years Eve - the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This book is Didions attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=615819 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=672396 Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that to care for anything is to invite disaster. Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each characters thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=671613 India, 1857 - the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrells The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years. Farrells story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion - at once brutal, blundering, and wistful - is soon revealed. The Siege of Krishnapur is a companion to Troubles, about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set upon the British Empire. Together these three novels offer a picture of the follies of empire.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=542252 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=479822 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=533242 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=443522 In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of Waiting for Snow in Havana, a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing up in a privileged Havana household - and of being exiled from his own childhood by the Cuban revolution. That childhood, until his world changes, is as joyous and troubled as any other - but with exotic differences. Lizards roam the house and grounds. Fights arent waged with snowballs but with breadfruit. The rich are outlandishly rich, like the eight-year-old son of a sugar baron who has a real miniature race car, or the neighbor with a private animal garden, complete with tiger. All this is bathed in sunlight and shades of turquoise and tangerine: the island of Cuba, says one of the stern monks at Carloss school, might have been the original Paradise - and it is tempting to believe. His father is a municipal judge and an obsessive collector of art and antiques, convinced that in a past life he was Louis XVI and that his wife was Marie Antoinette. His mother looks to the future; conceived on a transatlantic liner bound for Cuba from Spain, she wants her children to be modern, which means embracing all things American. His older brother electrocutes lizards. Surrounded by eccentrics, in a home crammed with portraits of Jesus that speak to him in dreams and nightmares, Carlos searches for secret proofs of the existence of God. Then, in January 1959, President Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Castro has taken his place, and Christmas is canceled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. At the Aquarium of the Revolution, sharks multiply in a swimming pool. And one by one, the authors schoolmates begin to disappear - spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, alone, never to see his father again.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=402553 At the heart of this work is its unprecedented revelation of how legislative power works. Interweaving his narrative with a brilliantly astute and concise history of the Senate, Caro shows readers how political initiatives triumph or fail and how political genius functions. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1047324 This book is an account of the history, ecology, and mystique of the arctic region. The author offers a thorough examination of this obscure world, its terrain, its wildlife, its history of Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on their icy shores. But what turns this marvelous work of natural history into a breathtaking study of profound originality is his unique meditation on how the landscape can shape our imagination, desires, and dreams. Its prose as hauntingly pure as the land it describes, and is nothing less than an indelible classic of modern literature. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=359237 The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policymakers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has had on various demographic populations around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. The depth of human experience Solomon chronicles, the range of his intelligence, and his boundless curiosity and compassion will change the readers view of the world.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=331920 True History of Kelly Gang is the song of Australia, and it sings its protest in a voice at once crude and delicate, menacing and heart-wrenching. Carey gives us Ned Kelly as orphan, as Oedipus, as horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank-robber, police-killer and, finally, as his countrys beloved Robin Hood. In 1878 Francis Harty, a poor farmer, said, Ned Kelly is the best bloody man that has ever been in Benalla, I would fight up to my knees in blood for him - I have known him for years, I would take his word sooner than another mans oath. By the time of his hanging in 1880 a whole country would seem to agree - and it is a measure of Peter Careys achievement that he has not only made art from his countrys great story but that he persuades us all to understand the true measure of that best bloody man.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=312743 The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the Titanic disaster was in the twentieth. Nathaniel Philbrick now restores this story - which inspired the climactic scene in Herman Melvilles Moby Dick - to its rightful place in American history. In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, the unthinkable happened: in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, decided instead to sail their three tiny boats for the distant South American coast. They would eventually travel over 4,500 miles. The next three months tested just how far humans could go in their battle against the sea as, one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear. Nathaniel Philbrick brings an incredible story to life, from the intricacies of Nantuckets whaling economy and the mechanics of sailing a square-rigger to the often mysterious behavior of whales. But it is his portrayal of the crew of the Essex that makes this a heartrending book. These were not romantic adventurers, but young working men, some teenagers, just trying to earn a living in the only way they knew how. They were a varied lot; the ambitious first mate, Owen Chase, whose impulsive nature failed at a crucial moment, then drew him to a more dangerous course; the cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, whose long-lost account of the ordeal, written at age seventy-one, provides new insights into the story; and Captain George Pollard, who was forced to take the most horrifying step if any of his men were to survive.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=325766 The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sisters death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Lauras story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=158710 On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Mollys lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence. Clive is Britains most successful modern composer; Vernon is editor of the quality broadsheet The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, foreign secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Mollys funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences neither has foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. And why Amsterdam? What happens there to Clive and Vernon is the most delicious climax of a novel brimming with surprises.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=223839 This outstanding book treating the three most beloved composers of the Vienna School is considered basic to any study of classical-era music. Drawing on his rich experience and intimate familiarity with the works of these giants, Charles Rosen presents his keen insights in clear and persuasive language. For this expanded edition of The Classical Style, Rosen provides an entirely new, 64-page chapter on the later years of Beethoven and the musical conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. Rosen has also written an extensive new preface in which he responds to other writers who have commented on his ideas. Finally, readers are treated to a compact disc, recorded by Rosen in 1996 and produced especially to accompany this new edition of the book. The CD offers complete performances of two late sonatas of Beethoven that are discussed extensively in the text: the Opus 106 in B[flat] major (the Hammerklavier) and the Opus 110 in A[flat] major.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=33550 In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today hover(s) over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams. For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large - a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles. We watch him exhibiting both great depth and great shallowness, combining massive learning with extraordinary naivete, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale. We understand why we should neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though we are by no means required to stop loving him. He is Thomas Jefferson, after all - our very own sphinx.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=137898 The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologists moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=179430 Graham Swifts first novel since the highly acclaimed Ever After is a subtle yet deeply felt exploration of the ways in which friendship and love are shaped by the past and by fate. At its center is a group of men, friends since the Second World War, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack, and their favorite pub. Now, the death of one of them, and the survivors task of driving their friends ashes from London to the seaside town where theyll be scattered, compels them to take stock. Through conversation and memory they trace the paths they have followed by choice and by accident: through war and its aftermath, through the dramas of their family lives and of their shifting relationships with one another. In brilliantly realized, richly humorous voices, Swift has created a narrative language that perfectly expresses not only the comforts of old habits and friendships but the profound emotional revelations this brief but far-reaching journey will bring them.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=162812 Central to this novel are two men divided by class and experience, but sharing a mutual respect and empathy. One is Lieutenant Billy Prior, cured of shell shock by famed psychologist Dr. William Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital, and determined to return to the front in France even as the war enters its final ferocious phase in the late summer of 1918. The other is Dr. Rivers himself, consumed by the medical challenge and moral dilemma of restoring men to health so that they can be sent back to the battlefields and almost certain death. Billy Prior is a working-class man on the rise, a temporary gentleman, who inhabits a sexual, social, and moral no-mans-land. His sexual encounters with both women and men are tinged with a cynical fatalism that the war has engendered. Still, he is eager to join a fellow Craiglockhart graduate, the poet Wilfred Owen, in France in time to participate in the great English offensive, the one last push intended to redeem all the shining heroism and senseless slaughter that has gone before.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=175914 The author of The Stananic Verses creates a fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people--a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy. Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction.--The Philadelphia Inquirer. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=213873 It is 1968. Patrick Clarke is ten. He loves George Best, Geronimo, and the smell of his hot water bottle. He hates zoos, kissing, and the boys from the Corporation houses. He cant stand his little brother Sinbad. He wants to be a missionary like Father Damien, and he coerces the McCarthy twins and Willy Hancock into playing lepers. He never picks the scabs off his knees before theyre ready. Kevin is his best friend. Their names are all over Barrytown, written with sticks in wet cement. They play football, knickknack, jumping to the bottom of the sea. They shoplift. Robbing Football Monthly means four million years in purgatory. But a good confession before you died and youd go straight to heaven. Paddy wants to know why no one jumped in for him when Charles Leavy had been going to kill him. He wants to stop his da arguing with his ma. Hes confused: he sees everything, but he understands less and less.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=218141 Already a classic, Monettes critically acclaimed coming of age/coming out story traces the first quarter-century of a remarkable life. One of the most most complex, moral, personal, and political books to have been written about gay life.--LA Weekly. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=24561 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=29559 Winner of Englands Booker Prize, a coast-to-coast bestseller, and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is a novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. Revolving around a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets, Byatt creates a haunting counterpoint of passion and ideas. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=174998 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=177749 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=187286 A compelling portrait of the perfect English butler, who, at the end of his career in postwar England, reviews his life and secretly questions the greatness of the nobleman he served. This Booker Prize-winning novel is now a Merchant-Ivory film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=38320 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=172495 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=57636 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=198844 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=234526 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=223274 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=100022 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=229236 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=9611 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=192061 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=220881 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=163338 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=336681 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=41006