New Adult Books - April 2009

 

 

 

 

We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land by Jimmy Carter

President Carter has been a student of the biblical Holy Land all his life. For the last three decades, as president of the United States and as founder of The Carter Center, he has studied the complex and interrelated issues of the region's conflicts and has been actively involved in reconciling them. He knows the leaders of all factions in the region who will need to play key roles, and he sees encouraging signs among them.

Carter describes the history of previous peace efforts and why they fell short. He argues persuasively that the road to a peace agreement is now open and that it has broad international and regional support. Most of all, since there will be no progress without courageous and sustained U.S. leadership, he says the time for progress is now. President Barack Obama is committed to a personal effort to exert that leadership, starting early in his administration. This is President Carter's call for action, and he lays out a practical and doable path to peace.

 

The Dark Volume by Gordon Dahlquist

Awakening from a fevered delirium, Celeste Temple finds herself in a fishing village on the remote Iron Coast. She has no idea where her companions, Cardinal Chang and Doctor Svenson, might be—nor whether any of her enemies survived the dirigible crash that marked her last conscious moment. And while her body seems intact, she cannot say the same for her mind. For she must contend not only with the possibility that peril awaits her but with the memory of her traitorous fiancé’s murder at sea…along with thousands of other memories that now live within her—courtesy of a bewitching glass book.

 

Unembedded by Scott Taylor

In September 2004, veteran Canadian journalist Scott Taylor was taken hostage in northern Iraq. While awaiting execution by beheading, he reflected on the events that had brought him to a torture chamber in a remote Iraqi village.

Taylor’s recounting includes his experiences as a Canadian Forces infantryman and as a frontline reporter investigating military affairs for the military magazine Esprit de Corps. His quest to see “the other side” has taken him to Africa and the former Yugoslavia, and to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in twentyone trips before, during and after the U.S.led invasion.

With searing criticism, Taylor exposes the deceit of the politicians and media cheerleaders who are ultimately responsible for waging the senseless wars that cause so much needless suffering for innocent people.

 

 

 

In a Gilded Cage by Rhys Bowen

Irish immigrant Molly Murphy and her New York City P.I. Business are in the midst of a sweeping influenza epidemic and a fight for women's suffrage that lands her in jail. Her betrothed, Police Captain Daniel Sullivan, finds her, but he hardly has time to bail her out, what with Chinese gangs battling for control of a thriving opium trade.

The only consolation Molly can take from her vexing afternoon in the clink is that it made her some new friends among the Vassar suffragists---and brought her a pair of new cases. For the first, Emily Boswell is convinced her miserly uncle stole her inheritance and wants Molly to uncover the truth behind her parents' lives and deaths. Second, Emily's college roommate Fanny Poindexter wants Molly to find proof of her husband's philandering so that she can leave him without one red cent. But when Fanny dies and her husband claims she's a victim of the epidemic, it's more than Molly's conscience can take.

 

 

Blue Thunder by Bob Plamondon

Although Tories have held power for only fifty-seven of the 142 years since Confederation, they have given Canada some of its most fascinating and colourful leaders and prime ministers. Nonetheless, their contributions to Canada while in and out of office, good and bad, are rarely recognized let alone understood. With Conservatives back in form—and in national favour—the time is right for their remarkable and sometimes maddening story to be brought to life for the first time in a single volume.

Blue Thunder: The Truth about Conservatives from Macdonald to Harper is a lively, often humorous and always pertinent look at the Tories at their best and their worst.

 

 

Manna From Hades by Carola Dunn

Eleanor Trewynn is a widow of some years living in Port Mabyn, a small fishing village in Cornwall. In her younger days, she travelled the exotic parts of the world with her husband. These days, she's retired and founded the local charity shop. Her niece, Megan Pencarrow, transferred nearby, and was recently promoted to the rank of Detective Sergeant. Perhaps the only downside is that she is now working for a DI who doesn't approve of women on the police force and who really doesn't much approve of Megan's aunt Eleanor, as she is something of a thorn in his rather substantial side.

All of these factors collide when, the day after collecting donations, Eleanor and the vicar's wife find the dead body of a longhaired, scruffy-looking youth hidden in the stockroom of the charity shop. Then they discover that some donated jewellery thought to be fake is actually very real, very expensive, and the haul from a violent robbery in London. Making matters more complex, the corpse found in the storeroom is apparently not one of the robbers.

 

 

A Saint on Death Row by Thomas Cahill


On October 26, 2004, Dominique Green, thirty, was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas. Arrested at the age of eighteen in the fatal shooting of a man during a robbery outside a Houston convenience store, Green may have taken part in the robbery but always insisted that he did not pull the trigger. The jury, which had no African Americans on it, sentenced him to death. Despite obvious errors in the legal procedures and the protests of the victim’s family, he spent the last twelve years of his life on Death Row.

When Cahill found himself in Texas in December 2003, he visited Dominique at the request of Judge Sheila Murphy, who was working on the appeal of the case. In Dominique, he encountered a level of goodness, peace, and enlightenment that few human beings ever attain. Cahill joined the fierce fight for Dominique’s life, even enlisting Dominique’s hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to make an historic visit to Dominique and to plead publicly for mercy. Cahill was so profoundly moved by Dominique’s extraordinary life that he was compelled to tell the tragic story of his unjust death at the hands of the state.

 

 

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

As the novel opens, Helen lovingly prepares the spare room in her home for her dear friend Nicola, who is coming to visit for three weeks while receiving controversial treatment for late-stage cancer. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel, and her stony judge. The Spare Room tells an unforgettable story of the complex humour, rage, and compassion that informs and changes a lifelong friendship.

 

 

How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner


In the 1980s, Horner began using CAT scans to look inside fossilized dinosaur eggs, and he and his colleagues have been delving deeper ever since. At North Carolina State University, Mary Schweitzer has extracted fossil molecules—proteins that survived 68 million years—from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil excavated by Horner. These proteins show that T. rex and the modern chicken are kissing cousins. At McGill University, Hans Larsson is manipulating a chicken embryo to awaken the dinosaur within: starting by growing a tail and eventually prompting it to grow the forelimbs of a dinosaur. All of this is happening without changing a single gene.

This incredible research is leading to discoveries and applications so profound they’re scary in the power they confer on humanity. How to Build a Dinosaur is a tour of the hot rocky deserts and air-conditioned laboratories at the forefront of this scientific revolution.

 

 

Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint

Altagracia – her friends call her Grace – has a tattoo of Nuestra Señora de Altagracia on her shoulder, she's got a Ford Motor Company tattoo running down her leg, and she has grease worked so deep into her hands that it'll never wash out.  Grace works at Sanchez Motorworks, customizing hot rods.  Finding the line in a classic car is her calling.

Now Grace has to find the line in her own life.  A few blocks around the Alverson Arms is all her world -- from the little grocery store where she buys beans, tamales, and cigarettes (“cigarettes can kill you,” they tell her, but she smokes them anyway) to the record shop, to the library where Henry, a black man confined to a wheelchair, researches the mystery of life in death – but she’s got unfinished business keeping her close to home.

Grace loves John, and John loves her, and that would be wonderful, except that John, like Grace, has unfinished business – he’s haunted by the childhood death of his younger brother.  He's never stopped feeling responsible. Like Grace in her way, John is an artist, and before their relationship can find its resolution, the two of them will have to teach each other about life and love, about hot rods and Elvis Presley, and about why it's necessary to let some things go.