Jtlillie's Wish List

The Letter from Death

Lillian Moats; David J. Moats; Howard Zinn — 2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

The Letter from Death, with a foreword by Howard Zinn and 20 full-page illustrations, is a startling take on death, fear, war and love.

A World Without Ice

Henry Ph.D. Pollack — 2009-10-15T00:00:00-04:00

A co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize offers a clear-eyed explanation of the planet's imperiled ice.

Much has been written about global warming, but the crucial relationship between people and ice has received little focus-until now. As one of the world's leading experts on climate change, Henry Pollack provides an accessible, comprehensive survey of ice as a force of nature, and the potential consequences as we face the possibility of a world without ice.

A World Without Ice traces the effect of mountain glaciers on supplies of drinking water and agricultural irrigation, as well as the current results of melting permafrost and shrinking Arctic sea ice-a situation that has degraded the habitat of numerous animals and sparked an international race for seabed oil and minerals. Catastrophic possibilities loom, including rising sea levels and subsequent flooding of lowlying regions worldwide, and the ultimate displacement of millions of coastal residents. A World Without Ice answers our most urgent questions about this pending crisis, laying out the necessary steps for managing the unavoidable and avoiding the unmanageable.

In the Valley of the Kings

Terrence Holt — 2009-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

In the Valley of the Kings marks the extraordinary debut of Terrence Holt, who fifteen years ago abandoned a promising writing career to practice medicine. Moved by his patients' valor in the face of death, seeking to comprehend the mysteries revealed at their bedside, Holt has taken up fiction again. He emerges now with this astonishing collection of one novella and seven short stories that explore the farthest reaches of the imagination in a style that recalls the nineteenth-century American masters. Holt leaps across genres and millennia, from small-town America to deep space, daring his readers to journey with him into realms as mysterious as they are unforgettable. The opening story, "'Ο Λογοσ," is a chilling account of the last days of the human race, as the hospitalization of a little girl in a New England town heralds a terrifying plague, transmitted not by a microbe but by a single word. The final story, "Apocalypse," returns to small-town New England and another vision of the end, in an intimate account of how a couple struggles to live and love under the shadow of the Earth's approaching doom. In between, these stories range from outer space, where-in "Charybdis"-an astronaut alone on a doomed NASA mission comes to terms with his fate, to the Egyptian desert of the title novella, where an archaeologist seeks a fabulous tomb that holds the secret of immortality. Painting with lurid colors and finely crafted prose, Holt offers his readers haunting visions of the reefs and abysses of the human imagination. In the Valley of the Kings redefines the art of the story, throwing aside the rules in search of the enduring truths that ultimately make stories worth reading.

Last Night in Twisted River

John Irving — 2009-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County–to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto–pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them.

In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River–John Irving’s twelfth novel–depicts the recent half-century in the United States as “a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course.” From the novel’s taut opening sentence–“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long”–to its elegiac final chapter, Last Night in Twisted River is written with the historical authenticity and emotional authority of The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is also as violent and disturbing a story as John Irving’s breakthrough bestseller, The World According to Garp.

What further distinguishes Last Night in Twisted River is the author’s unmistakable voice–the inimitable voice of an accomplished storyteller. Near the end of this moving novel, John Irving writes: “We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly–as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth–the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.”

Eating

Jason Epstein — 2009-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

Jason Epstein, the legendary editor and publisher of Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, and E. L. Doctorow, among many other distinguished writers, and the editor of such great chefs and bakers as Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, and Maida Heatter, takes us on a culinary tour through his eventful life, beginning with his childhood summers in Maine, where his decision to improve upon his grandmother’s chicken pot pie led to a lifetime at the stove.

From the great restaurants of postwar Paris to the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown today; from a New Year’s dinner aboard the old Ile de France with Buster Keaton to an evening at New York’s glamorous “21” restaurant with the dreaded Roy Cohn; from Chinese omelettes with the great Jane Jacobs at the edge of the Arctic Ocean to a lobster dinner with the Mailers on Cape Cod, as well as a warning to examine the chair before you sit down to dinner with W. H. Auden, this delicious book celebrates a lifetime of pleasure in cooking and eating well.

The author agrees with the Greek philosopher Heraclitus that you can never step in the same river twice, that every act is unique and so is every dish. In Jason Epstein’s hands, rather than being presented in the usual rigid formula, recipes unfold as stories that he would tell a friend in stove-side conversation. And as Epstein demonstrates his personal touches in putting a dish together, he inspires his readers to be creative.

A rich and provocative book, Eating will whet the appetites of all who love good food and delightful company.

The Book of Genesis

R. Crumb — 2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Envisioning the first book of the bible like no one before him, R. Crumb, the legendary illustrator, reveals here the story of Genesis in a profoundly honest and deeply moving way. Originally thinking that we would do a take off of Adam and Eve, Crumb became so fascinated by the Bible's language, "a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions," that he decided instead to do a literal interpretation using the text word for word in a version primarily assembled from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James bible. Now, readers of every persuasion-Crumb fans, comic book lovers, and believers-can gain astonishing new insights from these harrowing, tragic, and even juicy stories. Crumb's Book of Genesis reintroduces us to the bountiful tree lined garden of Adam and Eve, the massive ark of Noah with beasts of every kind, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by brimstone and fire that rained from the heavens, and the Egypt of the Pharaoh, where Joseph's embalmed body is carried in a coffin, in a scene as elegiac as any in Genesis. Using clues from the text and peeling away the theological and scholarly interpretation that have often obscured the Bible's most dramatic stories, Crumb fleshes out a parade of Biblical originals: from the serpent in Eden, the humanoid reptile appearing like an alien out of a science fiction movie, to Jacob, a "kind've depressed guy who doesn't strike you as physically courageous," and his bother, Esau, "a rough and kick ass guy," to Abraham's wife Sarah, more fetching than most woman at 90, to God himself, "a standard Charlton Heston-like figure with long white hair and a flowing beard." As Crumb writes in his introduction, "the stories of these people, the Hebrews, were something more than just stories. They were the foundation, the source, in writing of religious and political power, handed down by God himself." Crumb's Book of Genesis, the culmination of 5 years of painstaking work, is a tapestry of masterly detail and storytelling which celebrates the astonishing diversity of the one of our greatest artistic geniuses.

Good Omens

Neil Gaiman; Terry Pratchett — 2006-11-02T00:00:00-05:00

According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.

So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.

And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .