bookshelf

Grasshopper by Barbara Vine

15 tapes / 21 hours, Narrated by  Jenny Sterlin
Recorded Books, (c) 2000, Read: 04/09/09, Blog: 04/20/09

This tale of suspense concerns an international assortment of young people crashing in a top floor apartment and their adventures-some criminal, some not-on the roofs of London.

Empires of Trust by Thomas Madden

How Rome Built - and America Is Building - A New World
10 CDs, 12.5 hours. (c) 2008. Narrated by Richard Poe
Recorded Books, Read: 03/22/09, Blog 03/23/09

Madden compares the development and influence of Rome (defined as both the Republic and the Empire, covering a span of 2,000 years) and the U.S. on the larger world. Unexpected and thought-provoking parallels are drawn, challenging conventional thinking.

Lost White Tribes by Riccardo Orizio

The End of Privilege and the Laser Colonials in Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti, Namibia, and Guadeloupe
270 pgs (c) 2000, Secker & Warburg, (c) 2001, Free Press, NY
Broward Library # 909.090869OR Read: 01/08/08

This is a fascinating little book of colonialism, emigration, assimilation and cultural separation. It answers such questions as: Whatever became of the expatriate U.S. Confederates who settled in Brazil? the Poles in Haiti? the Dutch Burghers in Indonesia? the Germans in Jamaica?

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

358 pgs (c) 2008 Uwem Akpan; Little Brown and Company
Broward County Library, Read 02/15/09

This is a terrifying collection of stories, if one is able to open the mind enough to read them. The author gives voice to characters trapped by violence, fear, and poverty, in situations beyond their control. Their choices are so few that any effort is difficult and often futile.

Eothen by A. W. Kinglake

371 pgs written 1844, (c) 1970 University of Nebraska Press, Reprint of 1904 edition with new introduction by V.S. Pritchett.
Brow Library 915.6 K54E, read 11/11/06

A hugely entertaining and wildly eccentric memoir of an Englishman traveling in Arabia in the mid-1800s. Kinglake takes the first-hand travel narrative to the extreme and includes nothing that he does not personally experience, warning that "volume is thoroughly free" of geographic discussion, historical and scientific illustrations, all useful statistics and political disquisitions.