Saul and Patsy - a novel
by Charles Baxter
10 CD’s Unabridged
New - Price $6.95
Five Oaks, Michigan is not exactly where Saul and Patsy meant to end up. Both from the East Coast, they met in college, fell in love, and settled down to married life in the Midwest. Saul is Jewish and a compulsively inventive worrier; Patsy is gentile and cheerfully pragmatic. On Saul's initiative (and to his continual dismay) they have moved to this small town-a place so devoid of irony as to be virtually "a museum of earlier American feelings"-where he has taken a job teaching high school. Soon this brainy and guiltily happy couple will find children have become a part of their lives, first their own baby daughter and then an unloved, unlovable boy named Gordy Himmelman. It is Gordy who will throw Saul and Patsy's lives into disarray with an inscrutable act of violence. As timely as a news flash yet informed by an immemorial understanding of human character, Saul and Patsy is a genuine miracle.
Last Lion - The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy
by the team at The Boston Globe
6 CD’s - NEW
Price: $6.95
Too Much of a Good Thing Audio
by Kimberla Lawson Roby
6 CD’s - NEW
5 hours - 4 compact discs
Price: $6.95
Phil Jackson's account of the Lakers' game-by-game progress through the 1999-2000 season and his views on the state of the NBA is supplemented by his friend Charley Rosen's novelist's impressions of the Lakers, Los Angeles, and the league.
More Than A Game
Phil Jackson & Charley Rosen
CD’s - NEW
4.5 hours -
Price: $6.95
Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
Letters and journal entries form a portal into the desires and passions of two very different women, underscoring the larger tableau of an era stirring with great events--the Depression, rumblings of another world war, and the infancy of radio and show business entertainment. Love and betrayal, friendship and family, hope and deception are the forces that temper the lives of Clara, the spinster schoolteacher, and her sister Nora, "whose enter life is a performance."
Wright, a master of revealing the drama of seemingly unremarkable lives, constructs a powerful, mesmerizing narrative. Clara Callan is a deeply moving portrait of two women and of an age heralding seismic changes that will alter the fabric of their inner lives and the world as they once knew it.
Clara Callan
by Richard B. Wright
CD’s - NEW
8 hours and 43 minutes
Price: $6.95
Dark of the Moon
John Sandford
5 CD’s - abridged NEW
approximately 6 hours
Price: $6.95
Virgil Flowers — tall, lean, late thirties, three times divorced, hair way too long for a cop's — had kicked around a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport had brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff."
He'd been doing the hard stuff for three years now — but never anything like this.
In the small town of Bluestem, where everybody knows everybody, a house way up on a ridge explodes into flames, its owner, a man named Judd, trapped inside. There is a lot of reason to hate him, Flowers discovers. Years ago, Judd had perpetrated a scam that'd driven a lot of local farmers out of business, even to suicide. There are also rumors swirling around: of some very dicey activities with other men's wives; of involvement with some nutcase religious guy; of an out-of-wedlock daughter. In fact, Flowers concludes, you'd probably have to dig around to find a person who didn't despise him.
And that wasn't even the reason Flowers had come to Bluestem. Three weeks before, there'd been another murder — two, in fact — a doctor and his wife, the doctor found propped up in his backyard, both eyes shot out. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years — and now, suddenly, three? Flowers knows two things: This wasn't a coincidence, and this had to be personal.
But just how personal is something even he doesn't realize, and may not find out until too late. Because the next victim... may be himself.
Filled with the audacious plotting, rich characters, and brilliant suspense that have always made his books "compulsively readable" (Los Angeles Times), Dark of the Moon is vintage Sandford, further proof that he "is in a class of his own" (The Orlando Sentinel).
Toast is Nigel Slater's truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. In each chapter, as he takes listeners on a tour of the contents of his family's pantry (rice pudding, tinned ham, cream soda, mince pies, lemon drops, bourbon biscuits), we are transported.
His mother was a chops-and-peas sort of cook, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental stove, a finicky little son, and the asthma that was to prove fatal. His father was a honey-and-crumpets man with an unpredictable temper. When Nigel's widowed father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen, the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his father's affections. But as he slowly loses the battle, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary talents, and we witness the birth of what was to become a lifelong passion for food. Nigel's likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses, form a fascinating backdrop to this exceptionally moving memoir of childhood, adolescence, and sexual awakening.
A best seller and award-winner in the UK, Toast is sure to delight both foodies and memoir readers on this side of the pond, especially those who made such enormous successes of Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.
Toast - The Story of a Boy’s Hunger
Nigel Slater
5 CD’s - unabridged NEW
approximately 6 hours
Price: $6.95
All Aunt Hagar’s Children
Stories performed by Peter Francis James
written by Edward P. Jones
13 CD’s - unabridged NEW
15 and 1/2 hours
Price: $6.95
In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever
Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.
In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person rhythms of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran investigates the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny seems inextricable from his mother's own violent Southern childhood. In "In the Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly married couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to pursue lives of urban promise only to be challenged and disappointed.
With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw away and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.
Toast is Nigel Slater's truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. In each chapter, as he takes listeners on a tour of the contents of his family's pantry (rice pudding, tinned ham, cream soda, mince pies, lemon drops, bourbon biscuits), we are transported.
His mother was a chops-and-peas sort of cook, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental stove, a finicky little son, and the asthma that was to prove fatal. His father was a honey-and-crumpets man with an unpredictable temper. When Nigel's widowed father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen, the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his father's affections. But as he slowly loses the battle, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary talents, and we witness the birth of what was to become a lifelong passion for food. Nigel's likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses, form a fascinating backdrop to this exceptionally moving memoir of childhood, adolescence, and sexual awakening.
A best seller and award-winner in the UK, Toast is sure to delight both foodies and memoir readers on this side of the pond, especially those who made such enormous successes of Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.
Toast - The Story of a Boy’s Hunger
Nigel Slater
5 CD’s - unabridged NEW
approximately 6 hours
Price: $6.95
Summary:
Ninety Years of American History Told in the First Person Singular by the Nation's Preeminent African American Historian.
Mirror to America
The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin - read by the author
Nigel Slater
6 CD’s - abridged USED
approximately 7 hours
Price: $3.95
Volume two of McCullough's triumphant Roman series. The First in Rome (1990) initiated the chronicle of the edgy partnership of new-man-in-Rome Gaius Marius and aristocrat Lucius Cornelius Sulla during the German wars. Here, the calamitous last hurrah of one and the violent pinnacle acts of the other twist through years of Italian wars, expeditions into Asia Minor, domestic trials and brief happinesses, terrible cruelties, and politics, always politics, in which sectors, families, and the famous fight for power--by diplomacy, manipulation, alliances, or the simple art of murder. By now (roughly 80's and 90's B.C.) Marius is in his 60s and escaping a ``dull'' Rome to scout Asia Minor and sniff out the purposes of the barbarian king Mithridates of Pontus. The king will be faced down, and, some years later, Sulla, in a spectacular expedition over the Euphrates, will face him down again. Meanwhile, in the Senate there is a movement to enfranchise the sophisticated neighboring Italians, a movement snapped off by an assassination and a polarizing of ruling powers--and, inevitably, there's war. It is the overwhelming victory over one of the Italian tribes that brings Sulla his highest honor (the Grass Crown). Surely he is now equal to the great general Marius, now crippled by a stroke and attended by the boy Gaius Julius Caesar Junior, his wife's nephew. (Yep. The very same.) Marius intends to fulfill an old prophecy- -that he will be elected Consul for a seventh time. The inevitable conflict between Marius and Sulla explodes during an ongoing battle to dilute the power of the Senate elite. There will be a march on an unarmed Rome, screaming grabs for ascendance from an unhinged, dying Marius, and a raving Sulla, plus bloody deaths...and deaths...and deaths. Again, magnificent portraits of real beings. And, again, gamey politics, bright talk, great scenery, and gore. With glossary and maps.
The Grass Crown
Colleen McCullough
the book on four cassettes - NEW
360 minutes
Price: $4.95
In the sequel to the enormously successful Casting the First Stone, Kimberla Lawson Roby brings back a character readers love to hate.
Curtis Black might be a man of the cloth, but with his irresistible looks, seductive charm, and charismatic personality, he's particularly beloved by his female parishioners––and almost every other woman he's ever met.
The trouble is, Curtis is married. At first he tries to resist temptation, but not for long. His insatiable appetite for women quickly gets the best of him. Eventually, the women in Curtis's life find that with a little careful planning––sneaky and otherwise––they can help Curtis reap the punishment that he so richly deserves.
In this captivating and dramatic sequel to Casting the First Stone, Kimberla Lawson Roby, with her trademark with and insight, sets sparks flying.
No figure in American public life has had such great expectations thrust upon him, or has responded so poorly. But Ted Kennedy -- the youngest of the Kennedy children and the son who felt the least pressure to satisfy his father's enormous ambitions -- would go on to live a life that no one could have predicted: dismissed as a spent force in politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation's keeper of traditional liberalism. As Peter S. Canellos and his team of Boston Globe reporters show in this revealing and intimate biography, the gregarious and least academically successful of the Kennedy boys has witnessed greater tragedy and suffered greater pressure than any of his siblings. Late one night in the summer of 1969, he left the scene of a fatal automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island. The death there of a young woman from his brother's campaign would haunt and ultimately doom his presidential ambitions. Political rivals turned his all-too-human failings -- drinking, philandering, and divorce -- into a condemnation of his liberal politics. But as the presidency eluded his grasp, Kennedy was finally liberated from the expectations of others, free to become his own man. Once a symbol of youthful folly and nepotism, he transformed himself in his later years into a symbol of wisdom and perseverance. And as his health failed, he anointed the young and ambitious presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom many commentators compared to his brother Jack. The Kennedy brand of liberalism was rediscovered by a new generation of Americans.
Oh, the Things I Know - A Guide to Success, or Failing That, Happiness
by Al Franken, Ph.D. (Hon.)
read by the author - two NEW AUDIO CASSETTE tapes
three hours - unabridged
High Bridge Audio Company
sealed package has not been opened but the
plastic packaging shows some shelf wear
$4.95 plus media mail shipping
