Outside+Reading


 * Outside Reading (OR) Assignment**

Book Sign Up Semester One

You will read **two** outside reading books in the first semester. The reading lists posted in class and linked here and provide many options from which to choose. Please see me if your book is not on the list for possible approval. Make sure your selection is school appropriate and meets the approval of your parents. Choose something you actually want to read. This should be enjoyable!
 * The first book you read must be from the memoir list and will be used for an oral prose interpretation.
 * For the second book that must be from this list or approved by me, you will give a persuasive speech convincing your audience to read or not to read your book

Choose the books you’d like to read as soon as possible. I will record your titles and periodically ask for OR updates, which should be about 250 words and should include the title, author, # of pages total and where you are, a brief summary of what’s going on in your book, and what you think about it. (“I’m on p. 67 of 311 pages in //Falling Leaves// by Adeline Yen Mah. Since my last update, Adeline has suffered two more humiliating experiences: her brothers give her nasty lemonade and her father lets the dog eat her duck.”)

Q2 Fiction list with cover art and links.

 **LIST OF MEMOIRS FOR OUTSIDE READING QUARTER ONE 2010-11**  **1. Achebe, Chinua** //**Things Fall Apart**//   First novel by Chinua Achebe, written in English and published in 1958. The novel chronicles the life of Okonkwo, the leader of an Igbo (Ibo) community, from the events leading up to his banishment from the community for accidentally killing a clansman, through the seven years of his exile, to his return. The novel addresses the problem of the intrusion in the 1890s of white missionaries and colonial government into tribal Igbo society. It describes the simultaneous disintegration of its protagonist Okonkwo and of his village. The novel was praised for its intelligent and realistic treatment of tribal beliefs and of psychological disintegration coincident with social unraveling. //Things Fall Apart// helped create the Nigerian literary renaissance of the 1960s. -- //The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature//  **2. Agassi, Andre** //**Open**//  From Booklist: Agassi has always had a tortured look in his eyes on the tennis court. In 1992, when he burst onto the world sports stage by winning the Grand Slam at Wimbledon, he looked like a deer in headlights. Nobody seemed more surprised and upset by his big win that day than he did. For good reason, too. Agassi hated tennis. This is the biggest revelation in his very revealing autobiography. Agassi has hated tennis from early childhood, finding it extremely lonely out on the court. But he didn’t have a choice about playing the game because his father drove him to become a champion, like it or not. Mike Agassi, a former Golden Gloves fighter who never made it professionally, decided that his son would become a champion tennis player. In militaristic fashion, Mike pushed seven-year-old Andre to practice relentlessly until the young boy was exhausted and in pain. He also arranged for Andre, age 13, to attend a tennis camp where he was expected to pull weeds and clean toilets. The culmination of all of this parental pushing came when Andre began winning as an adult. But it didn’t make him happy. Within this framework, Agassi’s other disclosures make sense. He had a troubled marriage to Brooke Shields that didn’t last. He developed a drug problem that sabotaged his career. He was insecure about everything. Only when Andre met tennis star Steffi Graf (whom he eventually married) did things begin to change. Readers will definitely cheer when Andre finally makes peace with the game he once hated and learns to enjoy it. --Jerry Eberle **3. Alexie, Sherman** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Booklist: Arnold Spirit, a goofy-looking dork with a decent jumpshot, spends his time lamenting life on the "poor-ass" Spokane Indian reservation, drawing cartoons (which accompany, and often provide more insight than, the narrative), and, along with his aptly named pal Rowdy, laughing those laughs over anything and nothing that affix best friends so intricately together. When a teacher pleads with Arnold to want more, to escape the hopelessness of the rez, Arnold switches to a rich white school and immediately becomes as much an outcast in his own community as he is a curiosity in his new one. He weathers the typical teenage indignations and triumphs like a champ but soon faces far more trying ordeals as his home life begins to crumble and decay amidst the suffocating mire of alcoholism on the reservation. Alexie's humor and prose are easygoing and well suited to his young audience, and he doesn't pull many punches as he levels his eye at stereotypes both warranted and inapt. A few of the plotlines fade to gray by the end, but this ultimately affirms the incredible power of best friends to hurt and heal in equal measure. Younger teens looking for the strength to lift themselves out of rough situations would do well to start here. Chipman, Ian <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**4. Beah, Ishmael** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center's work after his "repatriation" to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives. (Beah graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.) Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**5. Cooper, Helene** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">From Publishers Weekly: Journalist Cooper has a compelling story to tell: born into a wealthy, powerful, dynastic Liberian family descended from freed American slaves, she came of age in the 1980s when her homeland slipped into civil war. On Cooper's 14th birthday, her mother gives her a diamond pendant and sends her to school. Cooper is convinced that somehow our world would right itself. That afternoon her uncle Cecil, the minister of foreign affairs, is executed. Cooper combines deeply personal and wide-ranging political strands in her memoir. There's the halcyon early childhood in Africa, a history of the early settlement of Liberia, an account of the violent, troubled years as several regimes are overthrown, and the story of the family's exile to America. A journalist-as-a-young-woman narrative unfolds as Cooper reports the career path that led her from local to national papers in the U.S. The stories themselves are fascinating, but a flatness prevails—perhaps one that mirror's the author's experience. After her uncle's televised execution, Cooper does the same thing I would do for the rest of my life when something bad happens: I focus on something else. I concentrate on minutiae. It's the only way to keep going when the world has ended. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**6. Eggers, Dave** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**What Is the What?**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war – the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath – of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers ( <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other "Lost Boys," beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers's limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**7. Fuller, Alexandra** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">From Library Journal: It is difficult for most people even to imagine the world described in this book, let alone live in it as a child: the nights are dark, scary, and filled with strange noises; the people welcome you and despise you at the same time; there is a constant anxious feeling burning in your stomach, which, you later realize, is fear of the unrest surrounding you. The British-born Fuller grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), losing three siblings to disease as her father fought in the Rhodesian civil war and her mother managed the farm. She approaches her childhood with reserve, leaving many stories open to interpretation while also maintaining a remarkable clarity about what really transpired in her homeland, in her own home, and in her head. The narrative seems complicated, weaving together war, politics, racial issues, and alcoholism, but its emotional core remains honest, playful, and unapologetic; it hardly seems possible that this 32-year-old has so much to say and says it so well. In this powerful debut, Fuller fully succeeds in memorializing the beauty of each desert puddle and each African summer night sky while also recognizing that beauty can lie hidden in the faces of those who have crossed her path. Highly recommended. Rachel Collins <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**8. Greenfeld, Karl Taro** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Boy Alone**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Sibling rivalry—and love—of a ravaging kind is the subject of this unsparing memoir of the author's life with his severely autistic brother. Journalist Greenfeld ( <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//Standard Deviations// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) describes his brother, Noah, as a spitting, jibbering, finger-twiddling, head-bobbing idiot; unable to speak or clean himself and given to violent tantrums, Noah and his utter indifference to others makes him permanently alone. But Karl feels almost as alienated; with his parents preoccupied with Noah's needs (and Noah's celebrity after his father, Joshua, wrote a bestselling account of his illness in <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//A Child Called Noah// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">), he turns to drugs and petty crime in the teenage wasteland of suburban Los Angeles. Greenfeld doesn't flinch in his depiction of Noah's raging dysfunctions or his critique of a callous mental health-care system and arrogant autism-research establishment. (He's especially hard on the psychoanalytic theories of the Viennese charlatan Bruno Bettelheim.) But the author's self-portrait is equally lacerating; he often wallows in self-pity—I return home stoned, drunk, puking on myself as I sit defecating into the toilet, crying to my parents... that I am a failure—and owns up to the coldness that Noah's condition can provoke in him. The result is a bleak but affecting chronicle of a family simultaneously shattered and bound tight by autism. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**9. Gregory, Dick** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Nigger: An Autobiography**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Synopsis: Published in 1964, the autobiography of comedian Dick Gregory is by turns funny, poignant, and thought-provoking. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**10. Griffin, John** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Black Like Me**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Description: In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**11. Gunther, John** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Death Be Not Proud**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Description: Johnny Gunther was only seventeen years old when he died of a brain tumor. During the months of his illness, everyone near him was unforgettably impressed by his level-headed courage, his wit and quiet friendliness, and, above all, his unfaltering patience through times of despair. This deeply moving book is a father's memoir of a brave, intelligent, and spirited boy. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**12. Herriot, James** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**All Creatures Great and Small**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Delve into the magical, unforgettable world of James Herriot, the world's most beloved veterinarian, and his menagerie of heartwarming, funny, and tragic animal patients. For over thirty years, generations of readers have thrilled to Herriot's marvelous tales, deep love of life, and extraordinary storytelling abilities. For decades, Herriot roamed the remote, beautiful Yorkshire Dales, treating every patient that came his way from smallest to largest, and observing animals and humans alike with his keen, loving eye. In <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//All Creatures Great and Small// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, we meet the young Herriot as he takes up his calling and discovers that the realities of veterinary practice in rural Yorkshire are very different from the sterile setting of veterinary school. From caring for his patients in the depths of winter on the remotest homesteads to dealing with uncooperative owners and critically ill animals, Herriot discovers the wondrous variety and never-ending challenges of veterinary practice as his humor, compassion, and love of the animal world shine forth. "[Herriot] is the most entertaining, most thoroughly likeable, most engaging person to have come <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">along in a long time, and the stories he has to tell are fascinating."--The Washington Post <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**13. Hersey, John** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Hiroshima**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Library Journal: On the basis of a return visit 40 years after the dropping of the bomb, Hersey has written a “final chapter'' to one of the most important books to come out of World War II. The new chapter follows a reprint of the original text on the dropping of the first atomic bomb, and is written in the same spare, objective style. In it, Hersey brings up to date the lives of six survivors he covered so brilliantly in 1946. Once again he evokes the humdrum and the surreal elements in the aftermath of the bomb, and with eloquent simplicity he includes statements of other nations' nuclear tests. Compelling, unforgettable, and more timely than ever, this is absolutely essential for collections from junior high on. Robert H. Donahugh, Youngstown and Mahoning Cty. P.L., Ohio Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**14. Hirsch, James S.** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey of Rubin Carter**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: This authorized biography of Carter by former Wall Street Journal and New York Times reporter Hirsch brings an objective historical perspective to the boxer's story. Scrupulously researched and expertly crafted, Hirsch's updated account of Carter's life is both a rich portrait of a complex man and a clear-eyed telling of a remarkable life. Despite his success in the ring, or because of it, Carter was a man with a bad reputation when he was wrongfully accused of a gruesome triple homicide. As a defiant black man with a mean streak, a criminal record and flamboyant tastes, Carter jarred the sensibilities of many whites in his hometown of Paterson, N.J., and Hirsch explores the role that race played in determining his fate. Carter's hellish ride through the judicial system and the heroic efforts to free him make for fascinating reading. Hirsch used the Canadian edition of Lazarus and the Hurricane (reviewed above) as a source for much of his material, and some scenes are straight out of the earlier book. But Hirsch also explores the nature of Carter's relationships with the Canadians, including his romance and marriage to Lisa Peters, which is treated as a mere footnote in the Canadians' account. When Carter finally became a free man in 1988, he spent several years living in the Canadians' commune, but their controlling nature led him to believe he had traded one prison for another, with a debt of gratitude tying him down. He eventually severed ties. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**15.** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**Ilibagaiza, Immaculee** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Holocaust**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. In 1994, Rwandan native Ilibagiza was 22 years old and home from college to spend Easter with her devout Catholic family, when the death of Rwanda's Hutu president sparked a three-month slaughter of nearly one million ethnic Tutsis in the country. She survived by hiding in a Hutu pastor's tiny bathroom with seven other starving women for 91 cramped, terrifying days. This searing firsthand account of Ilibagiza's experience cuts two ways: her description of the evil that was perpetrated, including the brutal murders of her family members, is soul-numbingly devastating, yet the story of her unquenchable faith and connection to God throughout the ordeal uplifts and inspires. Her account of the miracles that protected her is simple and vivid. Her Catholic faith shines through, but the book will speak on a deep level to any person of faith. Ilibagiza's remarkable path to forgiving the perpetrators and releasing her anger is a beacon to others who have suffered injustice. She brings the battlefield between good and evil out of the genocide around her and into her own heart, mind and soul. This book is a precious addition to the literature that tries to make sense of humankind's seemingly bottomless depravity and counterbalancing hope in an all-powerful, loving God. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**16. Kamkwamba, William and Bryan Mealer** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. American readers will have their imaginations challenged by 14-year-old Kamkwamba's description of life in Malawi, a famine-stricken, land-locked nation in southern Africa: math is taught in school with the aid of bottle tops ("three Coca-Cola plus ten Carlsberg equal thirteen"), people are slaughtered by enemy warriors "disguised... as green grass" and a ferocious black rhino; and everyday trading is "replaced by the business of survival" after famine hits the country. After starving for five months on his family's small farm, the corn harvest slowly brings Kamkwamba back to life. Witnessing his family's struggle, Kamkwamba's supercharged curiosity leads him to pursue the improbable dream of using "electric wind"(they have no word for windmills) to harness energy for the farm. Kamkwamba's efforts were of course derided; salvaging a motley collection of materials, from his father's broken bike to his mother's clothes line, he was often greeted to the tune of "Ah, look, the madman has come with his garbage." This exquisite tale strips life down to its barest essentials, and once there finds reason for hopes and dreams, and is especially resonant for Americans given the economy and increasingly heated debates over health care and energy policy. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**17. Krakauer, John** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Into the Wild**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**18. Mah, Adeline Yen** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Falling Leaves**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Although the focus of this memoir is the author's struggle to be loved by a family that treated her cruelly, it is more notable for its portrait of the domestic affairs of an immensely wealthy, Westernized Chinese family in Shanghai as the city evolved under the harsh strictures of Mao and Deng. Yen Mah's father knew how to make money and survive, regardless of the regime in power. In addition to an assortment of profitable enterprises, he stashed away two tons of gold in a Swiss bank, and eventually the family fled to Hong Kong. But he was indifferent to his seven children and in the thrall of a second wife who makes Cinderella's stepmother seem angelic. His first wife, Yen Mah's mother, died at her birth, and the child, considered an ill omen, was treated with crushing severity. But she was encouraged by the love of an aunt and eventually made her way to the U.S., where she became a doctor, married happily and, ironically, was the one her father and stepmother turned to in their old age. In recounting this painful tale, Yen Mah's unadorned prose is powerful, her insights keen and her portrait of her family devastating. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**19. Markham, Beryl** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**West with the Night**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Review: "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//West with the Night// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true. . . I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book."--Ernest Hemingway

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**20. Mortenson, Greg** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Three Cups of Tea**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**21. Obama, Barack** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Dreams from My Father**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work – he's now a civil rights lawyer there. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment. Obama leaves some lingering questions – his mother is virtually absent – but still has written a resonant book. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**22. Pelzer, Dave** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**A Child Called “It”**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Amazon.com Review: David J. Pelzer's mother, Catherine Roerva, was, he writes in this ghastly, fascinating memoir, a devoted den mother to the Cub Scouts in her care, and somewhat nurturant to her children--but not to David, whom she referred to as "an It." This book is a brief, horrifying account of the bizarre tortures she inflicted on him, told from the point of view of the author as a young boy being starved, stabbed, smashed face-first into mirrors, forced to eat the contents of his sibling's diapers and a spoonful of ammonia, and burned over a gas stove by a maniacal, alcoholic mom. Sometimes she claimed he had violated some rule--no walking on the grass at school!--but mostly it was pure sadism. Inexplicably, his father didn't protect him; only an alert schoolteacher saved David. One wants to learn more about his ordeal and its aftermath, and now he's written a sequel, <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//The Lost Boy// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, detailing his life in the foster-care system. Though it's a grim story, <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//A Child Called "It"// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">is very much in the tradition of <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">and the many books in that upbeat series, whose author Pelzer thanks for helping get his book going. It's all about weathering adversity to find love, and Pelzer is an expert witness. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**23. Szpilman, Wladyslaw** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**The Pianist**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: Originally published in Poland in 1945 but then suppressed by the Communist authorities, this memoir of survival in the Warsaw Ghetto joins the ranks of Holocaust memoirs notable as much for their literary value as for their historical significance. Szpilman, a Jewish classical pianist, played the last live music broadcast from Warsaw before Polish Radio went off the air in September 1939 because of the German invasion. In a tone that is at once dispassionate and immediate, Szpilman relates the horrors of life inside the ghetto. But his book is distinguished by the dazzling clarity he brings to the banalities of ghetto life, especially the eerie normalcy of some social relations amid catastrophic upheaval. He shows how Jewish residents of the Polish capital adjusted to life under the occupation: "The armbands branding us as Jews did not bother us, because we were all wearing them, and after some time living in the ghetto I realized that I had become thoroughly used to them." Using a reporter's powers of description, Szpilman, who is still alive at the age of 88, records the chilling conversations that took place as Jews waited to be transported to their deaths. "We're not heroes!" he recalls his father saying. "We're perfectly ordinary people, which is why we prefer to risk hoping for that 10 per cent chance of living." In a twist that exemplifies how this book will make readers look again at a history they thought they knew, he details how a German captain saved his life. Employing language that has more in common with the understatement of Primo Levi than with the moral urgency of Elie Wiesel, Szpilman is a remarkably lucid observer and chronicler of how, while his family perished, he survived thanks to a combination of resourcefulness and chance. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**24. Wakatsuki-Huston, Jean** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Farewell to Manzanar**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From the Publisher: Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp--with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton twirling lessons and a dance band called The Jive Bombers who would play any popular song except the nation's #1 hit: "Don't Fence Me In." Farewell To Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention. . . and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**25. Wiesel, Elie** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**Night**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Amazon.com Review: In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//Night// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died. <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**26. Wolfe, Tobias** <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13pt; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">//**This Boy’s Life**// <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> From Publishers Weekly: In PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Wolff's fourth book, he recounts his coming-of-age with customary skill and self-assurance. Seeking a better life in the Northwestern U.S. with his divorced mother, whose "strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed" taught Wolff the virtue of rebellion, he considered himself "in hiding," moved to invent a private, "better" version of himself in order to rise above his troubles. Primary among these were the adults – drolly eccentric, sometimes demented – who were bent on humiliating him. Since Wolff the writer never pities Wolff the boy, the author characterizes the crew of grown-up losers with damning objectivity, from the neurotic stepfather who painted his entire house (piano and Christmas tree included) white, to the Native American football star whose ultimate failure was as inexplicable as his athletic brilliance. Briskly and candidly reported – Wolff's boyhood best friend "bathed twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the smell of growth and anxiety" – his youth yields a self-made man whose struggle to fit the pieces together is authentic and endearing. Literary Guild alternate. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.