"Turkmenistan! It was a strange place," begins Jesse Lonergan's graphic travelogue based on his own experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in the central Asian former republic of the Soviet Union. Lonergan's alter-ego is "Joe" – as in average Joe Schmoe? – a bewildered American...
Before I even finished the book, I had already preordered multiple copies of Gretchen Rubin’s latest title, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Which...
Half the Sky is a remarkable, life-changing book. It should be required reading for all adults (and more mature young adults), but especially for us overprivileged, lucky-solely-by-chance-of-birth citizens of the West. If there is ONE book you read this new year, let it be this...
The eponymous Arzee is a diminutive young man in his late 20s living with his mother and younger brother in crowded Bombay, swaggeringly looking forward to the near future. In spite of the difficulties he's faced (much of which he blames on his size), he's convinced his life...
First things first: Indu Sundaresan’s only (thus far) short story collection (she’s best known for her lengthy historical novels, The Twentieth Wife and Feast of Roses) is definitely an effective read. Many of the stories make you think beyond your immediate world as they temporarily...
Four years ago (could say five, actually, as we just entered 2010 – already!), University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and noted journalist Stephen Dubner debuted with Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. That first duo-effort quickly became a mega-bestseller...
One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life. Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who has already lived too...
Three weeks after 9/11, University of Arizona professor Adele Barker arrived in Sri Lanka as a senior Fulbright Scholar to teach Russian literature, feminist literary theory, and American literature to select students at the University of Peradeniya. But her own education about the history and...
Samuel Polk is 16, athletic, has good friends, and lives in a small southern town in Georgia. He tells everyone he's gotten over his mother's sudden death a year ago. While his relationship with his father isn't the closest, they've managed to establish a daily...
Cynthia Kadohata – who won the top American children's book honor, the Newbery Medal, in 2005 for her debut middle-grade title, Kira-Kira –returns with a heartbreaking story about a young Vietnamese boy and his special relationship with the elephant in his charge. High in the central highlands of war-torn...
Andy Nguyen is most definitely Australian, not Vietnamese. And yet his father insists they're going "home" to Vietnam, somewhere Andy has never been. Andy's Dad is Viet Kieu, a name given to Vietnamese-born immigrants who live in other countries around the world. Returning Viet Kieu...
From Kazu Kibuishi, the creator of our son's favorite Amuletseries [Amulet 3 is apparently in the final stretch of production, whoo hooo!], comes the "definitive collection" of his webcomic about a boy named Copper and his droll best friend, an adorably spotty dog named Fred. "The...
Winner of Le Prix Goncourt 2008, considered France's highest literary honor, this disturbingly powerful slim volume gives voice to the too-many silenced women living "[s]omewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere." Written almost like a dramatic play script complete with what read like stage directions – not...
Slim and gorgeous, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, couldn't be more different from the 10-volume, powerfully resonating Barefoot Gen series in scope and style. But don't let its whimsical beauty fool you for a moment ...
The final volume of Keiji Nakazawa's 10-part Barefoot Gen series begins in March 1953, almost eight years after the widespread decimation of August 1945 caused by American-dropped atomic bombs. Gen and his friends have established a routine in their young lives, with Ryuta, Katsuko, and Musubi working...
Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa's graphic testimony continues in the penultimate volume of the heart-wrenching Barefoot Gen series, finally available in an unabridged English translation of all 10 volumes from San Francisco's renegade publisher Last Gasp. Alone and newly homeless, Nakazawa's fictionalized stand-in, Gen Nakaoka, moves in with...
Strong, no-nonsense, independent Kanna takes center stage again in volume 06 (that's her in color on the cover), in a world shrouded by the choking control of the all-powerful Friends. When bumbling Detective Chono comes looking for drag queen Britney, Kanna know she's got to...
Confession: This is not my favorite Malcolm Gladwell title. But that's not to say that I didn't enjoy parts of it more than probably 75% of the titles collected in this whole blog. Really. Gladwell is one phenomenal, erudite entertainer ...
A Quartet of Unsalable Gems: Madras Press Debuts Series One A modern eco-fable about an almost-royal swan and just-a-common-bluebird couple whose lives intersect with a miner and a logger who turn away from their destructive careers… a contemporary fairy tale about a witch with one heck...
Eva Mozes Kor survived the Holocaust because she was an identical twin. After a grueling journey from her native Romania which eventually ended at the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, Eva and her twin Miriam were immediately separated from their parents and two older sisters....
