Friday, December 31, 2010

LOST by ALICE LICHTENSTEIN

On a cold January morning, Susan a professor of Biology, leaves her husband alone for a few minutes and returns to find him gone. Suffering from dementia, no longer able to take care of himself, Christopher has wandered into a frigid landscape with no sense of direction, LOST!

Susan's life intersects with those of two strangers, Jeff, her liaison with the police, a social worker and search-and-rescue expert and Corey, a twelve year old boy rendered mute by a family tragedy who has become one of Jeff's cases.

From the unexpected convergence of three lives, Corey, Jeff and Susan, emerges an arresting portrait of the shifting terrain or marriage, and the uneasy burden of love and regret.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

It is January 1946. London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man that she had never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb.

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world
of this man and his friends. It is a wonderfully eccentric world. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, born as a spur of the moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island, boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers, all.

Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society's members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

The book is written with warmth and humor as a series of letters.

HOMER AND LANGLEY BY E.L. DOCTOROW

Homer and Langley are brothers, the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness or perhaps greatness by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think that they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers, as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet, the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers, wars, political movements, technological advances, and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians......and their housebound lives are fraught with peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

The book is brilliantly conceived, and gorgeously written, this is a wonderful rendering of the lives of the Collyer brothers.