A.P Composition Reading List

-Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
The Inspector General
Satiric masterpiece skewers Russian provincial officials, offering a highly entertaining

glimpse of human foibles and failings.
http://www.amazon.com/Inspector-General-Dover-Thrift-
Editions/dp/0486285006/ref=pd_cp_b_1
-Ellen Goodman
Close to Home
-Wendy Ann Kesselman
Dairy of Anne Frank
In this book, and young girl Anne, and her family, as well as another family and Mr.
Dussel, (seven people in all) went into hiding from the Nazis for TWO YEARS.
I feel so sorry for them that having not to breathe fresh air for two years, and to be
cramped up with many people for two years, and the end result was being killed by the
Nazis.
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Anne-Frank-Wendy-
Kesselman/dp/082221718X/ref=pd_cp_b_1
-Nadine Gordimer
A Sport of Nature
This book is a thickly textured look at 3 sisters and their divurgent lives and the daughter of
1 who is exposed to all 3 and then further divurges into the racial movements of 70's
South Africa. Gordimer's use of setting is really good. I found particularly interesting
the family of the most politically oriented sister, Pauline and her husband Joe and
children where the domestic lives interleave with the sometimes violent politial terrain.
The main character, Hillela, however, I found to be less than heroic -- she simply
seemed to be a sensual being who floated in and out of various beds and even the
tragedy which befalls her later in the story doesn't REALLY seem to have changed her
http://www.amazon.com/Sport-Nature-Nadine-Gordimer/dp/0140084703/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253899447&sr=1-1
-Judith Guest
Ordinary People
A novel about an ordinary family's response to an extraordinary tragedy; it was so popular in its
time precisely because the Jarretts could be any American family and what happened in their
family could happen in anyone's family. Well, maybe not in anyone's family; most Americans
aren't wealthy enough to live in a McMansion in an upper-middle-class bedroom community nor
do most families own a boat; but income aside, the Jarretts are like most people one knows: a
hardworking father, a mother who wants the best for her family, and two teenage sons, one
outgoing and confident, the other quiet and retiring, living in his older brother's shadow. A freak
boating accident leaves the older brother dead by drowning, and the family devastated. The
parents, Cal and Beth, and their younger son Conrad, are left to cope with the aftermath
http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-People-Judith-Guest/dp/0140065172/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253900042&sr=1-1-spell
-Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon
Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's archetypally tough San Francisco detective, is more noir
than L.A. Confidential and more vulnerable than Raymond Chandler's Marlowe. In The
Maltese Falcon, the best known of Hammett's Sam Spade novels (including The Dain
Curse and The Glass Key), Spade is tough enough to bluff the toughest thugs and hold off
the police, risking his reputation when a beautiful woman begs for his help, while
knowing that betrayal may deal him a new hand in the next moment.
Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout; the cops blame him for the killing; a beautiful
redhead with a heartbreaking story appears and disappears; grotesque villains demand a
payoff he can't provide; and everyone wants a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a
falcon, created as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Who has it? And what
will it take to get it back? Spade's solution is as complicated as the motives of the seekers
assembled in his hotel room, but the truth can be a cold comfort indeed.
http://www.amazon.com/Maltese-Falcon-Crime-
Masterworks/dp/0752847643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253900268&sr=1-1
-Lorraine Hansberry
A Raisin in the Sun

A beautiful, lovable play. It is affectionately human, funny and touching. . . . A work of theatrical
magic in which the usual barrier between audience and stage disappears.
John Chapman, New York News
An honest, intelligible, and moving experience.

Walter Kerr, New York Herald Tribune
Miss Hansberry has etched her characters with understanding, and told her story with dramatic
impact. She has a keen sense of humor, an ear for accurate speech and compassion for people.
Robert Coleman, New York Mirror
http://www.amazon.com/Raisin-Sun-Lorraine-Hansberry/dp/0679755330/ref=sr_1_1?
-Thomas Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd

A young man falls victim to his own obsession with an amorous farm girl in this classic
novel of fate and unrequited love. Published anonymously and first attributed,
erroneously, to George Eliot, this Signet Classic version is set from Hardy's revised final
draft-the authoritative Wessex edition of 1912.
http://www.amazon.com/Far-Madding-Crowd-Signet-
Classics/dp/0451528565/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253900679&sr=1-1
-Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge
A cruel joke at a country fair goes too far when a drunken laborer auctions off his wife and child
to the highest bidder. So begins The Mayor of Casterbridge. Rich in descriptive powers and
steeped in irony, this timeless tale offers a spellbinding portrayal of ambition, rivalry, revenge,
and repentance.
http://www.amazon.com/Mayor-Casterbridge-Thrift-Thomas-Hardy/dp/0486437493/ref=sr_1_1?
-Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native
Passionate Eustacia Vye detests her life amid the dreary environs of Egdon Heath and spies
her escape when Clym Yeobright returns from Paris. Hardy's timeless tale of a
romantic misalliance embodies his view of character as fate and underscores the tragic
nature of ordinary human lives. The Return of the Native ranks among the author's
greatest works.
http://www.amazon.com/Return-Native-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486431657/ref=sr_1_1?
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables
The story of the Pyncheon family, residents of an evil house cursed by the victim of their
ancestor's witch hunt and haunted by the ghosts of many generations
http://www.amazon.com/House-Seven-Gables-Enriched-Classics/dp/1416534776/ref=sr_1_1?
-Joseph Heller
Catch-22
There was a time when reading Joseph Heller's classic satire on the murderous insanity of war
was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was
too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard
throughout the counterculture. As a result, it's impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be
something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel's undiminished strength is its looking-
glass logic. Again and again, Heller's characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be
good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense.
http://www.amazon.com/Catch-22-Joseph-Heller/dp/0684833395/ref=sr_1_1?
-Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it
ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the
mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater
and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His
cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fianc, Mike
Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill
Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this
quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style
as well as lifestyle.
Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him
sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English
woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability.
Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in
Paris cafs, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the
"wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fianc and ex-lover Cohn in
tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter
Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see
him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.
But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also
Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times
you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't
be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation.
http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Also-Rises-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/0743297334/ref=sr_1_1?
-Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honor to the author. In fact The Old
Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the
weight of such postwar stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly
to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite
his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote
anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This
tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent
marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet
Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much
of the author's later work: "The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun
brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well
down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy
fish on the cords." Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of
perception that won him his initial fame:
Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and
swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a
yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in
the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.
If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed
the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author
delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks.
Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line,
cements his identification with his creator: "The old man was dreaming about the lions."
Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--
but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's
career.
http://www.amazon.com/Old-Man-Sea-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/0684801221/ref=sr_1_1?
-John Hersey
Hiroshima (N-F)
An article called "Hiroshima" written by John Hersey was published in The New Yorker
magazine in August 1946, a year after World War II ended. The article was based on
interviews with atomic bomb survivors and tells their experiences the morning of the
blast and for the next few days and weeks. It was a calm and accurate account of survival
in the first city to be destroyed by a single weapon.
http://www.herseyhiroshima.com/
-Herman Hesse
Siddhartha
In the shade of a banyan tree, a grizzled ferryman sits listening to the river. Some say he's
a sage. He was once a wandering shramana and, briefly, like thousands of others, he
followed Gotama the Buddha, enraptured by his sermons. But this man, Siddhartha, was
not a follower of any but his own soul. Born the son of a Brahmin, Siddhartha was
blessed in appearance, intelligence, and charisma. In order to find meaning in life, he
discarded his promising future for the life of a wandering ascetic. Still, true happiness
evaded him. Then a life of pleasure and titillation merely eroded away his spiritual gains
until he was just like all the other "child people," dragged around by his desires. Like
Hermann Hesse's other creations of struggling young men, Siddhartha has a good dose of
European angst and stubborn individualism. His final epiphany challenges both the
Buddhist and the Hindu ideals of enlightenment. Neither a practitioner nor a devotee,
neither meditating nor reciting, Siddhartha comes to blend in with the world, resonating
with the rhythms of nature, bending the reader's ear down to hear answers from the river.
In this translation Sherab Chodzin Kohn captures the slow, spare lyricism of Siddhartha's
search, putting her version on par with Hilda Rosner's standard edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Siddhartha-Hermann-Hesse/dp/1934648035/ref=sr_1_1?
-William Dean Howells
Years of My Youth
Victor Hugo
Les Miserables
Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and
violence of human passions, LES MISERABLES is not only superb adventure but a
powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape
his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance,
became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.
http://www.amazon.com/Miserables-Victor-Hugo/dp/0449300021/ref=sr_1_2?
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the
preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator
with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major
magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an
autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late
1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in
1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from
literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived
interest in her work.
Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and
perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a
woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her
locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story
of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about
black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism
from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:
It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and
talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules
and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone,
so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things.
They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married
three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to
justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the
implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just
de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."
Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who
accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they
expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her
depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were
Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and
allows them to speak in their own voices.
http://www.amazon.com/Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God/dp/0061120065/ref=sr_1_1?
Aldous Huxley
Brave the New World
"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State.
Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in
laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that
stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and
everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his
relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of
their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take
for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't
yet to come.
http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-
Huxley/dp/0060850523/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253915465&sr=1-1
Henrik Ibsen
An Enemy of the People
Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet
library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - DR.
STOCKMANN'S sitting-room. It is evening. The room is plainly but neatly appointed
and furnished. In the right-hand wall are two doors; the farther leads out to the hall, the
nearer to the doctor's study. In the left-hand wall, opposite the door leading to the hall, is
a door leading to the other rooms occupied by the family. In the middle of the same wall
stands the stove, and, further forward, a couch with a looking-glass hanging over it and
an oval table in front of it. On the table, a lighted lamp, with a lampshade. At the back of
the room, an open door leads to the dining-room. BILLING is seen sitting at the dining
table, on which a lamp is burning. He has a napkin tucked under his chin, and MRS.
STOCKMANN is standing by the table handing him a large plate-full of roast beef. The
other places at the table are empty, and the table somewhat in disorder, evidently a meal
having recently been finished.)
http://www.amazon.com/Enemy-People-Henrik-Ibsen/dp/1595406441/ref=sr_1_2?
Henry James
Portrait of a Lady
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy
Aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to determine
her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. She then finds herself
irresistibly drawn to Gilbert Osmond, who, beneath his veneer of charm and cultivation,
is cruelty itself. A story of intense poignancy, Isabel's tale of love and betrayal still
resonates with modern audiences.
http://www.amazon.com/Portrait-Lady-Penguin-
Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist
Like the one-time bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist presents a
simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And
though we may sniff a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient
tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audience
while slipping in a lesson or two. Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago,
an Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian
pyramids. And so he's off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream.
Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such
as a camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In one of the Englishman's books,
Santiago first learns about the alchemists--men who believed that if a metal were heated
for many years, it would free itself of all its individual properties, and what was left
would be the "Soul of the World." Of course he does eventually meet an alchemist, and
the ensuing student-teacher relationship clarifies much of the boy's misguided agenda,
while also emboldening him to stay true to his dreams. "My heart is afraid that it will
have to suffer," the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless
night.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself," the alchemist
replies. "And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because
every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
http://www.amazon.com/Alchemist-Paulo-Coelho/dp/0061122416/ref=sr_1_1?
James Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a boy growing
up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, as he gradually decides to cast off all
his social, familial, and religious constraints to live a life devoted to the art of writing. As
a young boy, Stephen's Catholic faith and Irish nationality heavily influence him. He
attends a strict religious boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. At first,
Stephen is lonely and homesick at the school, but as time passes he finds his place among
the other boys. He enjoys his visits home, even though family tensions run high after the
death of the Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. This sensitive subject becomes
the topic of a furious, politically charged argument over the family's Christmas dinner.
Stephen's father, Simon, is inept with money, and the family sinks deeper and deeper into
debt. After a summer spent in the company of his Uncle Charles, Stephen learns that the
family cannot afford to send him back to Clongowes, and that they will instead move to
Dublin. Stephen starts attending a prestigious day school called Belvedere, where he
grows to excel as a writer and as an actor in the student theater. His first sexual
experience, with a young Dublin prostitute, unleashes a storm of guilt and shame in
Stephen, as he tries to reconcile his physical desires with the stern Catholic morality of
his surroundings. For a while, he ignores his religious upbringing, throwing himself with
debauched abandon into a variety of sinsmasturbation, gluttony, and more visits to
prostitutes, among others. Then, on a three-day religious retreat, Stephen hears a trio of
fiery sermons about sin, judgment, and hell. Deeply shaken, the young man resolves to
rededicate himself to a life of Christian piety.
Stephen begins attending Mass every day, becoming a model of Catholic piety,
abstinence, and self-denial. His religious devotion is so pronounced that the director of
his school asks him to consider entering the priesthood. After briefly considering the
offer, Stephen realizes that the austerity of the priestly life is utterly incompatible with his
love for sensual beauty. That day, Stephen learns from his sister that the family will be
moving, once again for financial reasons. Anxiously awaiting news about his acceptance
to the university, Stephen goes for a walk on the beach, where he observes a young girl
wading in the tide. He is struck by her beauty, and realizes, in a moment of epiphany, that
the love and desire of beauty should not be a source of shame. Stephen resolves to live
his life to the fullest, and vows not to be constrained by the boundaries of his family, his
nation, and his religion.
Stephen moves on to the university, where he develops a number of strong friendships,

and is especially close with a young man named Cranly. In a series of conversations with
his companions, Stephen works to formulate his theories about art. While he is dependent
on his friends as listeners, he is also determined to create an independent existence,
liberated from the expectations of friends and family. He becomes more and more
determined to free himself from all limiting pressures, and eventually decides to leave
Ireland to escape them. Like his namesake, the mythical Daedalus, Stephen hopes to
build himself wings on which he can fly above all obstacles and achieve a life as an artist.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/portraitartist/summary.html
John F. Kennedy
Profiles in Courage
In 1954-1955, John F. Kennedy's active role as a Senator in the affairs of the nation was
interrupted for the better part of a year by his convalescence from an operation to correct
a disability incurred as skipper of a World War II torpedo boat. He used his "idle" hours
to great advantage; he rediscovered, and did intensive research into, the courage and
patriotism of a handful of Americans who at crucial moments in history had revealed a
special sort of greatness: men who disregarded dreadful consequences to their public and
private lives to do that one thing which seemed right in itself. These men ranged from the
extraordinarily colorful to the near-drab; from the born aristocrats to the self-made. They
were men of various political and regional allegiancestheir one overriding loyalty was
to the United States and to the right as God gave them to see it.
There was John Quincy Adams, who lost his Senate seat and was repudiated in Boston
for his support of his father's enemy Thomas Jefferson; Sam Houston, who performed
political acts of courage as dramatic as his heroism on the field of battle; Thomas Hart
Benton, whose proud and sarcastic tongue fought against the overwhelming odds that
insured his political death; and Edmond Ross who "looked down into his open grave" as
he saved President Johnson from an impeachment; and Norris of Nebraska; and Taft of
Ohio; and Lamar of Mississippi (who did as much as any one man to heal the wounds of
civil war). There was Daniel Webster, scourged for his devotion to Union by the most
talented array of constituents ever to attack a Senator. For the most part Kennedy's
patriots are United States Senators, but he also pays tribute to such men as Governor
Altgeld of Illinois and Charles Evans Hughes of New York.
And in the opening and closing chapters, which are as inspiring as they are revealing,
Kennedy draws on his personal experience to tell something of the satisfactions and
burdens of a Senator's jobof the pressures, both outward and inwardand of the
standards by which a man of principle must work and live.
John F. Kennedy has used wonderful skill in transforming the facts of history into
dramatic personal stories. There are suspense, color and inspiration here, but first of all
there is extraordinary understanding of that intangible thing called courage. Courage such
as these men shared, Kennedy makes clear, is central to all moralitya man does what he
must in spite of personal consequencesand these exciting stories suggest the thought
that, without in the least disparaging the courage with which men die, we should not
overlook the true greatness adorning those acts of courage with which men must live.
http://www.amazon.com/Profiles-Courage-slipcased-Celebrated-
Americans/dp/0061205680/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253916148&sr=1-1
Ken Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
Kesey's new introduction to this anniversary edition could very well be the last thing he
worked on before shuffling off this mortal coil in 2001. Additionally, 25 sketches he drew
while working at a mental institution in the 1950s, the inspiration for the novel, are
littered throughout. Critics are divided on the meaning of the book: Is it a tale of good vs.
evil, sanity over insanity, or humankind trying to overcome repression amid chaos?
Whichever, it is a great read.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Flew-Over-Cuckoos-Nest/dp/014028334X/ref=sr_1_1?
Stephen King
On Writing
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly
sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is
terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're
right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters,
uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn
that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from
Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities,
radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who
looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as
crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber." As
a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a
janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife
retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own
memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie.
King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in
Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the
blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome
thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I
barely remember writing."
King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed
him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole
writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-
bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the
paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's
arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's
artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is
a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could
be the antidote.
King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher.
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Stephen-King/dp/0743455967/ref=sr_1_1?
John Knowles
A Separate Peace
Gene was a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas was a handsome, taunting, daredevil
athlete. What happened between them at school one summer during the early years of
World War II is the subject of "A Separate Peace".
http://www.amazon.com/Separate-Peace-John-Knowles/dp/055313079X/ref=sr_1_3?
Jon Krakauer
Into Thin Air
A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-

mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that
"suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong. The storm, which
claimed five lives and left countless more--including Krakauer's--in guilt-ridden disarray,
would also provide the impetus for Into Thin Air, Krakauer's epic account of the May
1996 disaster. With more than 250 black-and-white photographs taken by various
expedition members and an enlightening new postscript by the author, the Illustrated
Edition shows readers what this tragic climb looked like and potentially provides closure
for Krakauer and his detractors.
"I have no doubt that Boukreev's intentions were good on summit day," writes Krakauer
in a postscript dated August 1998. "What disturbs me, though, was Boukreev's refusal to
acknowledge the possibility that he made even a single poor decision. Never did he
indicate that perhaps it wasn't the best choice to climb without gas or go down ahead of
his clients." As usual, Krakauer supports his points with dogged research and a good dose
of humility. But rather than continue the heated discourse that has raged since Into Thin
Air's denouncement of guide Boukreev, Krakauer's tone is conciliatory; he points most of
his criticism at G. Weston De Walt, who coauthored The Climb, Boukreev's version of
events. And in a touching conclusion, Krakauer recounts his last conversation with the
late Boukreev, in which the two weathered climbers agreed to disagree about certain
points. Krakauer had great hopes to patch things up with Boukreev, but the Russian later
died in a avalanche on another Himalayan peak, Annapurna I. Krakauer further buries the
ice axe by donating his share of royalties from sales of The Illustrated Edition to the
Everest '96 Memorial Fund, which aids various environmental and humanitarian
charities.
http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/0385494785/ref=sr_1_1?
Jon Krakauer
Into the Wild
"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a
college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by
starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon
Krakauer's book tries to answer. While it doesn'tcannotanswer the question with
certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about
McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of
society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a
young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream,
he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man
with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams." Into the Wild
shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit
into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book's end,
McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic
personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot," you won't soon
forget Christopher McCandless.
http://www.amazon.com/Into-Wild-Jon-Krakauer/dp/0307387178/ref=sr_1_1?
Theodora Kroeber
Ishi: Last of His Tribe
From back cover: In the early 1900s, a small band of California Indians of the Yahi tribe
resisted the fate that had all but wiped out their people--violent death at the hands of the
invading white man. Throughout their ordeal and their final realization that they could
survive only by becoming a hidden people, this tiny group held to the gentle moral and
religious code of their ancestors. In time, one by one of the tribe died, until there
remained a single survivor--the man who became known as Ishi.
http://www.amazon.com/Ishi-Last-Tribe-Bantam-
Pathfinder/dp/B000EVL3WO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253916807&sr=1-1
Joseph P. Lash
Eleanor and Franklin
He was one of America's greatest presidents, leading the nation out of its darkest years
and guiding it through one of its most difficult wars. She was his wife, a First Lady who
declined the role of White House hostess and instead devoted herself to public service.
This exclusive HBO Double Feature brings together the two critically acclaimed films
("The Early Years" and "The Whitehouse Years") detailing the Roosevelt's saga,
presenting an intimate portrait of their public and private life, with award-winning
performances from Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann.
http://www.amazon.com/Eleanor-Franklin-Double-Feature-
Early/dp/B000ND91S6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1254173822&sr=8-1
D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers

Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to
Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was a son more
indentured to his mother's love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H.
Lawrence's young protagonist. Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his
1913 novel he grappled with the discordant loves that haunted him all his life--for his
spiritual childhood sweetheart, here called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he
transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence's own account, a book aimed at depicting
this woman's grasp: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then
the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged
on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the
strongest power in their lives."
Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early,
which further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her
psychological snare is immense. She loathes Paul's Miriam from the start, understanding
that the girl's deep love of her son will oust her: "She's not like an ordinary woman, who
can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him." Meanwhile, Paul plays his part
with equal fervor, incapable of committing himself in either direction: "Why did his
mother sit at home and suffer?... And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards
her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated
her--and he easily hated her." Soon thereafter he even confesses to his mother: "I really
don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you."
The result of all this is that Paul throws Miriam over for a married suffragette, Clara
Dawes, who fulfills the sexual component of his ascent to manhood but leaves him, as
ever, without a complete relationship to challenge his love for his mother. As Paul
voyages from the working-class mining world to the spheres of commerce and art (he has
fair success as a painter), he accepts that his own achievements must be equally his
mother's. "There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with promise.
She was to see herself fulfilled... All his work was hers."
The cycles of Paul's relationships with these three women are terrifying at times, and
Lawrence does nothing to dim their intensity. Nor does he shirk in his vivid, sensuous
descriptions of the landscape that offers up its blossoms and beasts and "shimmeriness" to
Paul's sensitive spirit. Sons and Lovers lays fully bare the souls of men and earth. Few
books tell such whole, complicated truths about the permutations of love as resolutely
without resolution. It's nothing short of searing to be brushed by humanity in this manner.
http://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Lawrence-Published-MobileReference-
ebook/dp/B001PBSDCK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254173963&sr=8-2-catcorr
Eugene Burdick & William J. Lederer
The Ugly American

Not only important but consistently entertaining. . . . The attack on American policy in
Asia this book makes is clothed in sharp characterizations, frequently humorous incident,
and perceptive descriptions of the countries and people where the action occurs.
http://www.amazon.com/Ugly-American-Eugene-Burdick/dp/0393318672/ref=sr_1_1?
Harper Lee
To Kill A Mockingbird
"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow....
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes
discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but
Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the
summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come
out."
Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a
Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem,
and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young
black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes,
Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender
novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.
Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the
heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school.
She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in
Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get
a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances surrounding the
alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely
penetrate the children's consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused,
Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their
understanding. During the trial, the town exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of
counterbalance as well--in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine
habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up for what he knows is
right; and finally in Scout's hard-won understanding that most people are essentially kind
"when you really see them." By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill a
Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new generations, and deserves to be
reread often.
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Mockingbird-Harper-Lee/dp/0060935464/ref=sr_1_1?
Gaston Leroux
The Phantom of the Opera
The French author Gaston Leroux has done a fantastic job of putting elements of
romance, mystery, horror, drama, and adventure into his story, producing a brilliant novel
that has lasted many years and will be read over and over by book-lovers.
http://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Opera-Original-Novel/dp/0060809248/ref=sr_1_1?
C.S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet
The New York TimesThis book has real splendor, compelling moments, and a flowing
narrative.
The New YorkerIf wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to passage through
the pearly gates, Mr. Lewis will be among the angels.
Los Angeles TimesLewis, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century writer, forced
those who listened to him and read his works to come to terms with their own
philosophical presuppositions.
http://www.amazon.com/Silent-Planet-Space-Trilogy-Book/dp/0743234901/ref=sr_1_1?
Sinclair Lewis
Arrowsmith
As the son and grandson of physicians, Sinclair Lewis had a store of experiences and
imparted knowledge to draw upon for Arrowsmith.Published in 1925, after three years of
anticipation, the book follows the life of Martin Arrowsmith, a rather ordinary fellow
who gets his first taste of medicine at 14 as an assistant to the drunken physician in his
home town. It is Leora Tozer who makes Martin's life extraordinary. With vitality and
love, she urges him beyond the confines of the mundane to risk answering his true calling
as a scientist and researcher. Not even her tragic death can extinguish her spirit or her
impact on Martin's life.
http://www.amazon.com/Arrowsmith-Sinclair-Lewis/dp/0451530861/ref=sr_1_1?
Jack London
The Call of the Wild

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition includes a glossary and reader's notes
to help the modern reader fully appreciate London's masterful weaving of science,
philosophy, and the storyteller's art.
This gripping story follows the adventures of the loyal dog Buck, who is stolen from his
comfortable family home and forced into the harsh life of an Alaskan sled dog. Passed
from master to master, Buck embarks on an extraordinary journey that ends with his
becoming the legendary leader of a wolf pack.
Included in this Edition is the short story, To Build a Fire, Londons biting commentary
on human folly in the face of indomitable natural forces.
http://www.amazon.com/Call-Wild-Jack-London/dp/1580495842/ref=sr_1_1?
Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
This 50th-anniversary edition of Mailer's World War II epic contains a new introduction
by the author. If your current copy is falling apart, now is the time to replace it.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Dead-50th-Anniversary/dp/0312265050/ref=sr_1_1?
Bernard Malamud
The Natural
Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of The Natural, makes the mistake of pronouncing aloud his
dream: to be the best there ever was. Such hubris, of course, invites divine intervention,
but the brilliance of Bernard Malamud's novel is the second chance it offers its hero,
elevating him--and his story--into the realm of myth.
http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Bernard-Malamud/dp/0374502005/ref=sr_1_1?
Bernard Malamud
The Fixer
"Brilliant [and] harrowing . . . Historical reality combined with fictional skill and beauty
of a high order make [it] a novel of startling importance." ---Elizabeth Hardwick, "Vogue
"What makes it a great book, above and beyond its glowing goodness, has to do with
something else altogether: its necessity...This novel, like all great novels reminds us that
we must do something." -- Jonathan Safran Foer, author of" Everything Is Illuminated
"The Fixer deserves to rank alongside the great Jewish-American novels of Saul Bellow
and Philip Roth." --"The Independent (London)
"A literary event in any season."
http://www.amazon.com/Fixer-Bernard-Malamud/dp/1412812585/ref=sr_1_1?
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X
turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims.
As their spokesman he became identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of race
hatred; but to his direct audience, the oppressed American blacks, he brought hope and
self-respect. This autobiography (written with Alex Haley) reveals his quick-witted
integrity, usually obscured by batteries of frenzied headlines, and the fierce idealism
which led him to reject both liberal hypocrisies and black racialism.
http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Malcolm-Penguin-Modern-
Victor Martinez
Parraot in the Oven
It's no wonder that Parrot in the Oven won the 1996 National Book Award for Young
People's Fiction. Victor Martinez's lush, evocative prose leaps from the page, grabbing
the reader by the throat right from the start. Not only do we witness Manuel Hernandez's
coming of age, we feel every juicy moment of it: his ache for something just out of reach,
the confusion of seeing his family with new eyes, the tickle and flood of awakening
passion. It's difficult to portray transformation from the inside, but Martinez does so with
grace and power.
http://www.amazon.com/Parrot-Oven-vida-Victor-Martinez/dp/0064471861/ref=sr_1_1?
David M. Masumoto
Epitaph for a Peach
This book is a delightful narrative on the life of a Japanese American peach and grape
farmer in the San Joaquin Valley near Del Rey, California. With poetic flair and a sense
of humor, Masumoto offers his perspectives on the joys and frustrations of raising and
tending peaches and grapes. He describes his relationship with the weeds and insects that
invade his fields, the unpredictability of the weather, his desire to treat workers fairly, and
the realities of the market structure. Reading about Masumoto's attempts to produce high-
quality peaches and his fears that rain at the wrong time will destroy his drying grapes
will be a truly educational experience for those not familiar with the complexities of
farming. Masumoto observes with awe the diversity of nature over four seasons and his
family's obligation to plan their lives around the seasons. Many books about family farms
today present an image of economic and social distress, but this work portrays the
positive aspects as told by a farmer who enjoys his work. Recommended for public
libraries.?Irwin Weintraub, Rutgers Univ. Libs., Piscataway, N.J.
http://www.amazon.com/Epitaph-Peach-Four-Seasons-Family/dp/0062510258/ref=sr_1_1?
Margaret Mead
Blackberry Winter
During her lifetime, Margaret Mead (1901-78) was the world's most famous
anthropologist. In this insightful memoir, she recalls her childhood, her place in her
family, and how the lessons learned and ideals instilled then shaped her life. Margaret
Mead was the first child of a university professor father and a social activist mother; her
paternal grandmother, who lived with the family, had been a school principal and taught
the Mead children at home for much of their youth. In college, Margaret discovered
anthropology and as a graduate student went to Samoa to conduct the research of
adolescent girls that resulted in her then-shocking study, Coming of Age in Samoa. In
Blackberry Winter, she reflects on her life and work, through three marriages and
ground-breaking fieldwork in eight cultures. But perhaps her most fascinating revelations
are the "gathered threads" of her own experience of childhood, motherhood, and
grandparenthood. From her observations of sex roles, childhood, and parenting styles in
other cultures, her appreciation of her own upbringing, and her shift to single, working
motherhood after the break-up of her third marriage, she anticipated and pioneered a new
model for family life. "In my family I was treated as a person," she writes. "It was never
suggested that because I was a child I could not understand the world around me and
respond to it responsibly and meaningfully." Affirmed and valued for herself during her
childhood, Margaret Mead was able to be herself throughout her life.
http://www.amazon.com/Blackberry-Winter-My-Earlier-Years/dp/0317600656/ref=sr_1_2?
Toni Morrison
Beloved
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the
Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its
fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family;
nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her
own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.
A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many
fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is
arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is
almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichd nor
melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they
belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to
us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in
the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves,
she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device
that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on
the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the
eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even
as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without
being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding
close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I
couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he
was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is
treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters
with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-
in-law.
Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison
takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her
baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a
mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the
narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the
defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by.
http://www.amazon.com/Beloved-Everymans-Library-Toni-
Morrison/dp/0307264882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254175294&sr=1-1
Joyce Carol Oates
Bellefleur
A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks,
in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythical Lake Noir. Written with a
voluptuousness and immediacy unusual even for Oates, Bellefleur was hailed upon
publication as the culmination of her work.
http://www.amazon.com/Bellefleur-Joyce-Carol-Oates/dp/0452267943/ref=sr_1_1?
Eugene ONeil
Long Days Journey into Night
This work is interesting enough for its history. Completed in 1940, Long Day's Journey
Into Night is an autobiographical play Eugene O'Neill wrote that--because of the highly
personal writing about his family--was not to be released until 25 years after his death,
which occurred in 1953. But since O'Neill's immediate family had died in the early
1920s, his wife allowed publication of the play in 1956. Besides the history alone, the
play is fascinating in its own right. It tells of the "Tyrones"--a fictional name for what is
clearly the O'Neills. Theirs is not a happy tale: The youngest son (Edmond) is sent to a
sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis; he despises his father for sending him; his
mother is wrecked by narcotics; and his older brother by drink. In real-life these factors
conspired to turn O'Neill into who he was--a tormented individual and a brilliant
playwright.
http://www.amazon.com/Long-Days-Journey-into-Night/dp/0300093055/ref=sr_1_1?
George Orwell
1984
Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that
grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949,
the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian,
bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the
novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of
the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required
reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever
written.
http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four-George-Orwell/dp/0452284236/ref=sr_1_1?
Francis Parkman
The Oregon Trail
In 1846, a young man of privilege left his comfortable Boston home to embark on a
strenuous overland journey to the untamed West. This timeless account of Parkman's
travels and travails provides an expressive portrait of the rough frontiersmen, immigrants,
and Native Americans he encounters, set against the splendor of the unspoiled wilderness.
While Parkman's patrician air and unabashed racism sometimes jolt the modern reader,
this remains a colorful classic by one of the 19th century's most prominent narrative
historians. A circumspect abridgment and a laudable interpretation by veteran narrator
Frank Muller enrich this audio version. Highly recommended.?Linda Bredengerd, Hanley
Lib., Univ. of Pittsburgh, Bradford, Pa.
http://www.amazon.com/Oregon-Trail-Dover-Value-Editions/dp/0486424804/ref=sr_1_1?
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
The best way to understand Pasternaks achievement in Doctor Zhivago is to see it in

terms of this great Russian literary tradition, as a fairy tale, not so much of good and evil
as of opposing forces and needs in human destiny and history that can never be
reconciled . . . [Zhivago is] a figure who embodies the principle of life itself, the principle
that contradicts every abstraction of revolutionary politics.
from the Introduction by John Bayley
http://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Zhivago-Boris-Pasternak/dp/0679774386/ref=sr_1_1?
Alan Paton
Cry, the Beloved Country
In search of missing family members, Zulu priest Stephen Kumalo leaves his South
African village to traverse the deep and perplexing city of Johannesburg in the 1940s.
With his sister turned prostitute, his brother turned labor protestor and his son, Absalom,
arrested for the murder of a white man, Kumalo must grapple with how to bring his
family back from the brink of destruction as the racial tension throughout Johannesburg
hampers his attempts to protect his family. With a deep yet gentle voice rounded out by
his English accent, Michael York captures the tone and energy of this novel. His rhythmic
narration proves hypnotizing. From the fierce love of Kumalo to the persuasive rhetoric
of Kumalo's brother and the solemn regret of Absalom, York injects soul into characters
tempered by their socioeconomic status as black South Africans. (May)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights
reserved.
http://www.amazon.com/Cry-Beloved-Country-Alan-Paton/dp/074326195X/ref=sr_1_1?
John Patrick
Teahouse of the August Moon
http://www.amazon.com/Teahouse-August-Moon-John-Patrick/dp/0822211149/ref=sr_1_1?
Samuel Pepys
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
'The Latham-Matthews transcription of Pepys' Diary is one of the glories of

contemporary English publishing.' The Times 'The pleasure of Pepys -- of reading him --
is his own pleasure in experience... Pepys' Diary is the cheerful self-report, not of the man
eminent in naval history, not of the historical witness, but of the unobjectionable
hedonist.' Guardian 'Here, in one of the finest feats in all the long history of scholarship,
is Pepys' Diary, once and for all. Exegi monumentum aere perennius.' Observer 'The
editors have achieved the impossible... one can now read the Diary perfectly easily,
month by month, year by year... here at last is a really learned edition where the learning
is put at the disposal of the layman.' New Statesman 'It isn't often that one encounters a
publication -- especially of this magnitude -- which achieves complete perfection, but
there is no doubt that this does.' Sir Arthur Bryant
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Samuel-Pepys-v/dp/0217755275/ref=sr_1_1?
Annie Proulx
Postcards
Reproduced as graphics that preface narrative sections, the postcards in this novel --
communications between the Blood family and their son Loyal, as well as other personal
mail and advertising material -- progressively reveal the insecurity of the rural Bloods in
the changing post-war world. Loyal has fled into exile after an accidental killing, but
cannot find a haven of rest. The family patriarch, Mink, writes vitriolic letters to local
agricultural agents when the real object of his ire is his absent son. Loyal's brother sends
off for an artificial arm to replace the one he lost in an accident; his sister answers a mail
order ad for a husband. Through the mail, Proulx inventively reveals the inchoate
longings of a difficult existence in this winner of the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award. --This
text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Postcards-Scribner-Classics-Annie-
Proulx/dp/0684833689/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254411562&sr=1-1#
Ernie Pyle
Here Is Your War
"Pyle was a keen observer, and it's the small details about minor things that make his
writing stand out. An essential piece of Americana for all collections."-Library Journal
(Library Journal )
"A full-length, deeply human portrait of the American soldier in action. . . . The things
that those at home want most to know."-New York Times (New York Times )
http://www.amazon.com/Here-Your-War-Story-G-I/dp/0803287771/ref=sr_1_1?
Ayn Rand
Anthem
Rand's dark portrait of the future was first released in England in 1938 and reedited for
publication in the United States in 1946. This 50th-anniversary edition includes a
scholarly introduction and a facsimile of the original British version, which bears Rand's
handwritten alterations for its American debut.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or
unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Anthem-Ayn-Rand/dp/0452281253/ref=sr_1_1?
Marjorie Kinnan
The Yearling
E. H. WaltonThe New York TimesNever before has Mrs. Rawlings created a set of
characters who are so close and real to the reader, whose intimate life one can share
without the taint of unconscious patronage.
http://www.amazon.com/Yearling-Marjorie-Kinnan-
Rawlings/dp/0743225252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254410746&sr=1-1
Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet On The Western Front
All Quiet On The Western Front written by legendary author Erich Maria Remarque is
widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great classic
will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, All Quiet On The
Western Front is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others
who simply enjoy reading timeless piees of classic literature, this gem by Erich Maria
Remarque is highly recommended. Published by Classic House Books and beautifully
produced, All Quiet On The Western Front would make an ideal gift and it should be a
part of everyone's personal library.
Richard Rodriguez
Hunger of Memory
Arresting ... Splendidly written intellectual autobiography.Boston Globe
Superb autobiographical essay ... Mr. Rodriguez offers himself as an example of the
long labor of change: its costs, about which he is movingly frank, its loneliness, but also
its triumph.New York Times Book Review
Philip Roth
The Counter Life
This is one of Roth's best works. And it is the most profound if questionable probing of
political Jewish questions. The brilliance of the writing is connected with the construction
of 'counter' or 'alternative lives ' for the main characters. The suggestion is that a life is a
limitation, one path chosen when there might as well have been another.
The action takes us to Eretz Yisrael where one of the alter egos is a 'settler'in Judea and
Samaria. In this work Roth presents his own dovish views, and his own criticisms of
those who believe Israel should be the center of Jewish life. He defends his own kind of
Diaspora Jewishness.
Nontheless, the passion, the involvement here are great.
A work to be read and reflected upon.
http://www.amazon.com/Counter-Life-Philip-Roth/dp/0517055074/ref=sr_1_1?
Edmund Rostand
Cyrano de Bergerac
This acclaimed adaptation for the stage by Anthony Burgess has garnered such reviews
as: "Emotional depth Rostand himself would surely have envied...Burgess' extravagant
verse keeps its contours, yet trips off the tongue almost as though it were contemporary
speech." - London Times. Paperback.
http://www.amazon.com/Cyrano-Bergerac-Rostand-translated-
Anthony/dp/1557832307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254412255&sr=1-1
Carl Sagan
The Dragons of Eden
Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling
insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of
our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries.
"A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day
before yesterday...It's a delight."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.amazon.com/Dragons-Eden-Speculations-Evolution-
Intelligence/dp/0345346297/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254412337&sr=1-1
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been
synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in
his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that
sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I
was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and
all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like
going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in
the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything
pretty personal about them."
His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the
two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage
experience of alienation. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Catcher-Rye-J-D-Salinger/dp/0316769487/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254412430&sr=1-1#
William Saroyan
The Human Comedy
The place is Ithaca, in California's San Joaquin Valley. The time is World War II. The
family is the Macauley's -- a mother, sister, and three brothers whose struggles and
dreams reflect those of America's second-generation immigrants.. In particular, fourteen-
year-old Homer, determined to become one of the fastest telegraph messengers in the
West, finds himself caught between reality and illusion as delivering his messages of
wartime death, love, and money brings him face-to-face with human emotion at its most
naked and raw.
Gentle, poignant and richly autobiographical, this delightful novel shows us the boy
becoming the man in a world that even in the midst of war, appears sweeter, safer and
more livable than out own.
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Comedy-Hbj-Modern-Classic/dp/0151423016/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254412507&sr=1-1-spell#
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
Written by one of our foremost historians and published in 1965, A Thousand Days is still
considered the most complete and definitive portrait of John F. Kennedy and his
administration. Handpicked by Kennedy to serve as special assistant to the president,
historian and Harvard professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. witnessed firsthand the politics
and personalities that influenced some of the most important and dramatic events in
modern history.
The hundreds of photographs and documents included here have been gleaned from such
sources as the John F. Kennedy Library, the Library of Congress, the Associated Press,
Life magazine, and more. The photos capture private meetings with the president, the Bay
of Pigs, the Civil Rights movement, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as official
White House memoranda, public speeches, social occasions, and private moments with
the Kennedy family. These powerful images add a new dimension to the award-winning
text and introduce a new generation to some of the most important and visually iconic
moments in our recent past.
http://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Days-Kennedy-White-
House/dp/1579124496/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254412614&sr=1-2-spell#
Eric Schlosser
Fast Food Nation
On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-
food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast
food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the
industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed
America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive
ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately
devastating expos with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such
as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a
factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the
counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms
where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant
meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so
good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between
those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--
literally--feces in your meat.
Schlosser's investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he

reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His
searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle,
written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices
that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes.
Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry "both feeds and feeds off the
young," insinuating itself into all aspects of children's lives, even the pages of their
school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser
offers some eminently practical remedies. "Eating in the United States should no longer
be a form of high-risk behavior," he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost
of having it "your way" really worth it? --Lesley Reed --This text refers to the Hardcover
edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Nation-Eric-Schlosser/dp/0060838582/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&qid=1254412695&sr=1-1-spell#
_____________________________________________________--------
Michael Shaara
The Killer Angels
This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned
nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important
days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including
Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book,
however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose 20th Maine regiment of
volunteers held the Union's left flank on the second day of the battle. This unit's bravery
at Little Round Top helped turned the tide of the war against the rebels. There are also
plenty of maps, which convey a complete sense of what happened July 1-3, 1863.
Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages. --This text refers to the
Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Killer-Angels-Michael-Shaara/dp/034540727X/ref=sr_1_1?
Peter Shaffer
Amadeus
"Peter Shaffer's infalliable instinct for what makes riveting theatre is again demonstrated
in his awesomely talented new play Amadeus." -- --Sunday Express
"Shaffer orchestrates this gripping and fascinating conflict with consummate skill and
delicious wit." -- --Saturday Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable
edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Amadeus-Play-Peter-Shaffer/dp/0060935499/ref=sr_1_1?
William Shakespeare
Richard III
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world's largest
collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from
around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the
Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs.
About the Author

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world's largest
collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from
around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the
Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit
www.folger.edu.
Barbara A. Mowat is Director of Academic Programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library,

Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, Chair of the Folger Institute, and author of The
Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances and of essays on Shakespeare's plays and on the
editing of the plays.
Paul Werstine is Professor of English at King's College and the Graduate School of the
University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is the author of many papers and articles on
the printing and editing of Shakespeare's plays and was Associate Editor of the annual
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England from 1980 to 1989
http://www.amazon.com/Richard-III-Folger-Shakespeare-
Library/dp/0743482840/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254413077&sr=1-1-
spell#
George Bernard Shaw
Arms and the Man
Humor, rather than romance, abounds in this audio play performed in front of a live
audience. From its Who's on FirstmeetsShakespeare introduction to its surprising and
irrelevant ending, Romance will leave listeners laughing uproariously at the running gags,
outrageous language and amusing tangents. Fred Willard as a befuddled, overmedicated
and pontificating judge hosts this kangaroo court of love affairs, foreign affairs and
bigotry so blatant that it would be appalling if it wasn't so satirical. The defendant has
discovered the key to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but unless he can get court
to adjourn, his plans will be wasted. The small but talented cast (including Noah Bean,
Ed Begley Jr., Gordon Clapp, Steven Goldstein, Rod McLachlan and Rob Nagle) possess
perfect timing and delivery. While the gross and vulgar language may scare some
listeners away, its nonchalant execution dissolves its venom and infuses humor. Dirty and
delicious, listeners will find this audiobook ending sooner than they will desire. (May)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights
reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Arms-Shaw-Library-George-
Bernard/dp/0140450351/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254413174&sr=1-2-
spell#
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley was born in 1797, the only daughter of writers William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin. In 1814 she eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she
married in 1816. She is best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, but she wrote
several other works, including Valperga and The Last Man. She died in 1851. Maurice
Hindle studied at the universities of Keele, Durham and Essex, gaining a Ph.D. in
Literature from Essex in 1989. He currently teaches at the Open University.
http://www.amazon.com/Frankenstein-Penguin-Classics-Mary-
Shelley/dp/0141439475/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254413266&sr=1-1
Nevil Shute
On the Beach
The most evocative novel on the aftermath of a nuclear war The Times Fictions such as
On the Beach played an important role in raising awareness about the threat of nuclear
war. We stared into the abyss and then stepped back from the brink Guardian Still
incredibly moving after nearly half a century Economist Timely and ironic..an indelibly
sad ending that leaves you tearful and disturbed Los Angeles Times On the Beach didn't
offer a literal second chance at life. But, as a nuclear cloud drifted over to people in
Australia, it did show how knowledge of the end can dislodge the truest of feelings from
their hiding places and give them a second chance Boston Globe Haunting Washington
Post Remarkable books...I share a fierce personal regard for Nevil Shute Shute's most
considerable achievement Daily Telegraph --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Beach-Nevil-Shute/dp/0345311485/ref=sr_1_1?
Alan Sillitoe
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
A bleak, but powerful 1960 British film that ranks as one of the most important United
Kingdom imports of the decade. Director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) tells the story of
a rebellious social misfit and petty thief played by Tom Courtenay (The Dresser) who is
picked to run on the track team at a reform school for boys. He finds he must balance his
spirit and desire to win with his anger and frustration at the life he has led. At times a
wrenching character study with no easy answers, Courtenay's performance is a touching
portrait of a young man and the journey he takes as he tries to run not only for an unclear
future, but from a past he cannot forget. A film indicative of the working class
expressionism that came out of England in the early 1960s, Richardson's films stands
alone as a downbeat, but insightful story of one man's struggle to determine who he is.
--Robert Lane
http://www.amazon.com/Loneliness-Long-Distance-
Runner/dp/B000JYW5E6/ref=pd_sim_b_4
Neil Simon
Lost in Yonkers
Richard Dreyfuss, Mercedes Ruehl and Irene Worth star in the acclaimed film adaptation
of Neil Simon's Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, Lost in Yonkers. Set during World War
II, Lost in Yonkers tells the story of two brothers who are sent to live with their
domineering grandmother after their mother's death. Strong as steel and twice as cold,
Grandma Kurnitz (Worth) rules her roost with an iron fist. And caught in her grasp is the
boys' lovely Aunt Bella (Ruehl), who has the mind of a child and the dreams of a woman.
But when Uncle Louie (Dreyfuss), a small-time gangster with plenty of "moxie" arrives,
everyone gets a surprising second chance at happiness. Worth and Ruehl both won Tony
Awardsfor their stage performances, and Dreyfuss adds a scene-stealing turn as Louie.
Together with Neil Simon and director Martha Coolidge (Rambling Rose), this
remarkable trio of actors makes Lost in Yonkers a magical, must-see voyage of discovery.
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Yonkers-Girl-Vice-
Versa/dp/B001EKP5EG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1254413552&sr=1-1
Sinclair Lewis
Main Street
Novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920. The story of Main Street is seen through the
eyes of Carol Kennicott, a young woman married to a Midwestern doctor who settles in
the Minnesota town of Gopher Prairie (modeled on Lewis' hometown of Sauk Center).
The power of the book derives from Lewis' careful rendering of local speech, customs,
and social amenities. The satire is double-edged--directed against both the townspeople
and the superficial intellectualism of those who despise them. -- The Merriam-Webster
Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of
this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Main-Street-Sinclair-Lewis/dp/1449527973/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254413644&sr=8-1-catcorr#
Upton Sinclair
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a vivid portrait of life and death in a turn-of-the-century
American meat-packing factory. A grim indictment that led to government regulations of
the food industry, The Jungle is Sinclair's extraordinary contribution to literature and
social reform.
http://www.amazon.com/Jungle-Penguin-American-Library/dp/0140390316/ref=sr_1_1?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful
artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told
story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a
modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international
reputation upon publication in 1962. It is painfully apparent that Solzhenitsyn himself
spent time in the gulags--he was imprisoned for nearly a decade as punishment for
making derogatory statements about Stalin in a letter to a friend. --This text refers to the
Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451228146/ref=sr_1_1?
Susan Sontag
On Photography
"A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way
of looking at the world and at ourselves over the last 140 years."Washington Post Book
World
"Every page of On Photography raises important and exciting questions about its subject
and raises them in the best way."The New York Times Book Review
"A book of great importance and originality . . . All future discussion or analysis of the
role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies are now bound to begin with her
book."John Berger
"Not many photographs are worth a thousand of [Susan Sontag's] words."Robert

Hughes, Time
"After Sontag, photography must be written about not only as a force in the arts, but as
one that is increasingly powerful in the nature and destiny of our global society."
Newsweek
"On Photography is to my mind the most original and illuminating study of the
subject."Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker
http://www.amazon.com/Photography-Susan-Sontag/dp/0312420099/ref=sr_1_1?
Sophocles
Oedipus Rex
To make Oedipus more accessible for the modern reader, our Prestwick House Literary
Touchstone Edition includes a glossary of the more difficult words, as well as
convenient sidebar notes to enlighten the reader on aspects that may be confusing or
overlooked. We hope that the reader may, through this edition, more fully enjoy the
beauty of the verse, the wisdom of the insights, and the impact of the drama. Sophocles
Oedipus Rex has never been surpassed for the raw and terrible power with which its hero
struggles to answer the eternal question, "Who am I?" The play, a story of a king who
acting entirely in ignorancekills his father and marries his mother, unfolds with
shattering power; we are helplessly carried along with Oedipus towards the final, horrific
truth. This vibrant, new translation invites its readers to lose themselves in the unfolding
of this tragic taleas suspenseful as a detective mystery, yet with an outcome long ago
determined by Fate.
http://www.amazon.com/Oedipus-Rex-Literary-Touchstone-
Sophocles/dp/1580495931/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254413999&sr=1-1#
Gary Soto
Local News
Once again, the author of Taking Sides and Pacific Crossing creates a vibrant tapestry of
Chicano American neighborhoods in this newest collection of stories highlighting small
yet significant moments in the lives of 13 adolescents. Soto's sharp ear for contemporary
lingo and keen insights into teenagers' minds bring life to such characters as Philip
Quintana, self-proclaimed mechanic; quarreling brothers Angel and Weasel; and lovesick
Jose, who tries to win a girl's notice by pretending to be a racquetball champ. Conflicts
may vary, yet in almost all of the selections determination, loyalty and a general zest for
life are acutely depicted. Mexican terms and expressions (defined in a glossary) add
particular spice and believability. Catching the infectious spirit of these slice-of-life
stories, readers will have no trouble staying involved--they may pause only long enough
to reflect on the subtle ironies that emerge at piquant moments. Ages 8-12.
http://www.amazon.com/Local-News-Stories-Gary-Soto/dp/015204695X/ref=sr_1_1?
Wallace Earle Stegner
Crossing to Safety
It's deceptively simple: two bright young couples meet during the Depression and form
an instant and lifelong friendship. "How do you make a book that anyone will read out of
lives as quiet as these?" Larry Morgan, a successful novelist and the narrator of the story,
poses that question many years after he and his wife, Sally, have befriended the vibrant,
wealthy, and often troubled Sid and Charity Lang. "Where is the high life, the
conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish?" It's not here. What is
here is just as fascinating, just as compelling, as touching, and as tragic.
Crossing to Safety is about loyalty and survival in its most everyday form--the need to
create bonds and the urge to tear them apart. Thirty-four years after their first meeting,
when Larry and Sally are called back to the Langs' summer home in Vermont, it's as if for
a final showdown. How has this friendship defined them? What is its legacy? Stegner
offer answers in those small, perfectly rendered moments that make up lives "as quiet as
these"--and as familiar as our own. --Sara Nickerson --This text refers to an out of print
or unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Safety-Modern-Library-
Classics/dp/037575931X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254414198&sr=1-1
Wallace Earle Stegner
Crossing to Safety
It's deceptively simple: two bright young couples meet during the Depression and form
an instant and lifelong friendship. "How do you make a book that anyone will read out of
lives as quiet as these?" Larry Morgan, a successful novelist and the narrator of the story,
poses that question many years after he and his wife, Sally, have befriended the vibrant,
wealthy, and often troubled Sid and Charity Lang. "Where is the high life, the
conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish?" It's not here. What is
here is just as fascinating, just as compelling, as touching, and as tragic.
Crossing to Safety is about loyalty and survival in its most everyday form--the need to
create bonds and the urge to tear them apart. Thirty-four years after their first meeting,
when Larry and Sally are called back to the Langs' summer home in Vermont, it's as if for
a final showdown. How has this friendship defined them? What is its legacy? Stegner
offer answers in those small, perfectly rendered moments that make up lives "as quiet as
these"--and as familiar as our own. --Sara Nickerson --This text refers to an out of print
or unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Safety-Modern-Library-
Classics/dp/037575931X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254414198&sr=1-1
John Steinbeck
Cannery Row
Novel by John Steinbeck, published in 1945. Like most of Steinbeck's postwar work,
Cannery Row is sentimental in tone while retaining the author's characteristic social
criticism. Peopled by stereotypical good-natured bums and warm-hearted prostitutes
living on the fringes of Monterey, Calif., the picaresque novel celebrates lowlifes who are
poor but happy. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to
an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Cannery-Row-Centennial-John-
Steinbeck/dp/014200068X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254414371&sr=1-1#
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
Journey with the Joads for 21 hours in this first unabridged version of Steinbeck's classic.
Controversial, even shocking, when it was written, the work continues to be so even
today. The keen listener can hear why, because it poses fundamental questions about
justice, the ownership and stewardship of the land, the role of government, power, and
the very foundations of capitalist society. As history, this brings the Dust Bowl years to
life in a most memorable way. Steinbeck (Travels with Charley, Audio Reviews, LJ
11/15/94) is a master storyteller and manages to engage the listener's sympathy with this
epic story. Reader Dylan Baker, who gives each character a distinctive voice, draws the
listener in. His female characters, especially the minor ones and Rose of Sharon, don't
seem as authentic as his wonderful evocation of the fictional Tom, Ma, and Pa. But his
voice is easy to listen to, and he is faithful to the characters' backgrounds and the plains
region. The music that ends each individual tape is perfect for the story. This program is a
well-produced, affordable, and worthwhile addition for any library with a serious
audiobook collection.?Nancy Paul, Brandon P.L., WI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette
edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-20th-Century-Classics/dp/0140186409/ref=sr_1_1?
ie=UTF8&qid=1254414564&sr=1-1-spell
George R. Stewart
Ordeal by Hunger
The tragedy of the Donner party constitutes one of the most amazing stories of the
American West. In 1846 eighty-seven people -- men, women, and children -- set out for
California, persuaded to attempt a new overland route. After struggling across the desert,
losing many oxen, and nearly dying of thirst, they reached the very summit of the Sierras,
only to be trapped by blinding snow and bitter storms. Many perished; some survived by
resorting to cannibalism; all were subjected to unbearable suffering. Incorporating the
diaries of the survivors and other contemporary documents, George Stewart wrote the
definitive history of that ill-fated band of pioneers; an astonishing account of what human
beings may endure and achieve in the final press of circumstance.
http://www.amazon.com/Ordeal-Hunger-George-R-Stewart/dp/0395611598/ref=sr_1_1?
Bram Stoker
Dracula
A true masterwork of storytelling, Dracula has transcended generation, language, and

culture to become one of the most popular novels ever written. It is a quintessential tale
of suspense and horror, boasting one of the most terrifying characters ever born in
literature: Count Dracula, a tragic, night-dwelling specter who feeds upon the blood of
the living, and whose diabolical passions prey upon the innocent, the helpless, and the
beautiful. But Dracula also stands as a bleak allegorical saga of an eternally cursed being
whose nocturnal atrocities reflect the dark underside of the supremely moralistic age in
which it was originally written -- and the corrupt desires that continue to plague the
modern human condition.
Pocket Books Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for
the contemporary reader. This edition of Dracula was prepared by Joseph Valente,
Professor of English at the University of Illinois and the author of Dracula's Crypt: Bram
Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood, who provides insight into the racial
connotations of this enduring masterpiece.
http://www.amazon.com/Dracula-Enriched-Classics-Bram-
Stoker/dp/0743477367/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254414690&sr=1-1
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Two minor characters from "Hamlet" offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane.
http://www.amazon.com/Rosencrantz-Guildenstern-Are-Dead-
Stoppard/dp/0571081827/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254414765&sr=1-1
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin
In the nineteenth century Uncle Tom's Cabin sold more copies than any other book
in the world except the Bible. It was quickly translated into thirty-seven languages and
has never gone out of print. The book had a far-reaching impact and deeply affected the
national conscience of antebellum America. The Norton Critical Edition text is that of the
1852 book edition, published in two volumes by John P. Jewett and Company, Boston;
original illustrations are included. Annotations are provided to assist the reader with
obscure historical terms and biblical allusions. Backgrounds and Contexts includes a
wealth of historical material relevant to slavery and abolitionism. Among the documents
presented are Josiah Henson's 1849 slave narrative (named by Stowe as one of the
sources for the novel); Solomon Northup's eyewitness account of an 1841 slave auction;
Harriet Jacobs's narrative of her life as a fifteen-year-old slave; two epistolary accounts
by ex-slave and abolitionist William Wells Brown, which document events in Uncle
Tom's Cabin; two crucial excerpts from Stowe's Key to "Uncle Tom's Cabin " which
provide the real-life basis for characters and events in the novel; and accounts of Tom-
Shows and the anti-Uncle Tom literature that sprang up in response to the novel's
publication. Illustrative material includes slave advertisements, runaway slave posters,
and illustrations for the first British edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Britain's premier
illustrator, George Cruikshank, as well as popular illustrations from American editions of
the novel. Criticism is arranged under two headings. "Nineteenth-Century Reviews and
Reception" includes critiques by George Sand, William G. Allen and Ethiop (both from
Frederick Douglass' Paper), George F. Holmes, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, among others.
Twentieth-Century Criticism collects five of the best critical assessments of the novel's
continuing impact on American society. With the exception of James Baldwin's
groundbreaking essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," the critical essays date from the
years 1985 to 1992. Jane P. Tompkins investigates why the text was excluded from the
canon for most of the twentieth century. Robert S. Levine provides an overview of the
text's popular reception and influence since publication, including current critical schools
and critics. Hortense J. Spillers takes a textual/linguistic view in her comparison between
Stowe and Ishmael Reed as "impression points in the literary imagination of slavery."
And Christina Zwarg traces the influence Stowe's feminism had on her treatment of
fatherhood and its effect on the home. A Chronology of Stowe's life and work and a
Selected Bibliography are also included. .
http://www.amazon.com/Uncle-Cabin-Norton-Critical-Editions/dp/0393963039/ref=sr_1_1?
William Styron
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Styron's 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel depicting the leader of a slave revolt is the
latest offering in Random's "Modern Library." This is the least expensive hardcover
edition of Turner currently available.
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Nat-Turner-Novel/dp/0375508031/ref=sr_1_1?
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travels
Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive

Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the
philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into
human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our
own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.
Edited with an Introduction by Robert DeMaria, Jr.
http://www.amazon.com/Gullivers-Travels-Penguin-Classics-
Jonathan/dp/0141439491/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254414985&sr=1-1
- Amy Tan
The Kitchen God's Wife

Tan can relax. If The Joy Luck Club was an astonishing literary debut, The Kitchen God's
Wife is a triumph, a solid indication of a mature talent for magically involving
storytelling, beguiling use of language and deeply textured and nuanced character
development. And while this second novel is again a story that a Chinese mother tells her
daughter, it surpasses its predecessor as a fully integrated and developed narrative,
immensely readable, perceptive, humorous, poignant and wise. Pearl Louie Brandt
deplores her mother Winnie's captious criticism and cranky bossiness, her myriad
superstitious rituals to ward off bad luck, and her fearful, negative outlook, which has
created an emotional abyss between them. Dreading her mother's reaction, Pearl has kept
secret the fact that she is suffering from MS. But as she learns during the course of the
narrative, Winnie herself has concealed some astonishing facts about her early life in
China, abetted by her friend and fellow emigree Helen Kwong. The story Winnie unfolds
to Pearl is a series of secrets, each in turn giving way to yet another surprising revelation.
Winnie's understated account--during which she goes from a young woman "full of
innocence and hope and dreams" through marriage to a sadistic bully, the loss of three
babies, and the horror and privations of the Japanese war on China--is compelling and
heartrending. As Winnie gains insights into the motivations for other peoples' actions, she
herself grows strong enough to conceal her past while building a new life in America,
never admitting her deadly hidden fears. Integrated into this mesmerizing story is a view
of prewar and wartime China--both the living conditions and the mind-set. Tan draws a
vivid picture of the male-dominated culture, the chasm between different classes of
society, and the profusion of rules for maintaining respect and dignity. But the novel's
immediacy resides in its depiction of human nature, exposing foibles and frailties, dreams
and hopes, universal to us all.
http://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Gods-Wife-Amy-Tan/dp/0143038109/ref=sr_1_1?
- Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club

our mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's
"saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to
eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the
Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To
despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty
years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep
connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth
about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters,
and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an
astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. --This
text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Luck-Club-Amy-Tan/dp/0399134204/ref=sr_1_1?
-Studs Terkel
Working
First class . . . The talk in Working is good talk-earthy, passionate, honest, sometimes
tender, sometimes crisp, juicy as reality, seasoned with experience . . . It is a pleasure to
join the hallelujah chorus.
http://www.amazon.com/Working-People-Talk-About-What/dp/1565843428/ref=sr_1_1?
William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) was born and educated to be a gentleman but
gambled away much of his fortune while at Cambridge. He trained as a lawyer before
turning to journalism. He was a regular contributor to periodicals and magazines and
Vanity Fair was serialised in Punch in 1847-8. John Carey is Professor of English at
Oxford University. He has written on Dickens and Thackeray.
http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Classics-William-Makepeace-
Thackeray/dp/0141439831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254417337&sr=1-1
Paul Theroux
The Mosquito Coast
In a breathtaking adventure story, the paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his
family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the
one they've left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity,
he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his
obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger.
http://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Coast-Paul-Theroux/dp/0618658963/ref=sr_1_1?
James Thurber
My World and Welcome to It
"I preferred Thurber as a humorist to Mark Twain." -- E.B. White
"These are brilliant sketches." -- The New York Times Book Review
http://www.amazon.com/My-World-Welcome-James-Thurber/dp/0891902694/ref=sr_1_1?
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Some people say Anna Karenina is the single greatest novel ever written, which makes
about as much sense to me as trying to determine the world's greatest color. But there is
no doubt that Anna Karenina, generally considered Tolstoy's best book, is definitely one
ripping great read. Anna, miserable in her loveless marriage, does the barely thinkable
and succumbs to her desires for the dashing Vronsky. I don't want to give away the
ending, but I will say that 19th-century Russia doesn't take well to that sort of thing.
http://www.amazon.com/Anna-Karenina-Oprahs-Book-Club/dp/0143035002/ref=sr_1_1?
Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons
Novel by Ivan Turgenev, published in 1862 as Ottsy i deti. Quite controversial at the time
of its publication, Fathers and Sons concerns the inevitable conflict between generations
and between the values of traditionalists and intellectuals. The physician Bazarov, the
novel's protagonist, is the most powerful of Turgenev's creations. He is a nihilist, denying
the validity of all laws save those of the natural sciences. Uncouth and forthright in his
opinions, he is nonetheless susceptible to love and by that fact doomed to unhappiness. In
sociopolitical terms he represents the victory of the revolutionary nongentry intelligentsia
over the gentry intelligentsia to which Turgenev belonged. At the novel's first appearance
the radical younger generation attacked it bitterly as a slander, and conservatives
condemned it as too lenient in its characterization of nihilism. -- The Merriam-Webster
this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Fathers-Sons-Penguin-Classics-
Turgenev/dp/014144133X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254417659&sr=1-1
Mark Twain
Life on The Mississippi
Memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War by
Mark Twain, published in 1883. The book begins with a brief history of the river from its
discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541. Chapters 4-22 describe Twain's career as a
Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life
on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St.
Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from railroads had made steamboats
passe, in spite of improvements in navigation and boat construction. Twain sees new,
large cities on the river, and records his observations on greed, gullibility, tragedy, and
bad architecture. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to
an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Mississippi-Mark-Twain/dp/0451531205/ref=sr_1_1?
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Take a lighthearted, nostalgic trip to a simpler time, seen through the eyes of a special
boy named Tom Sawyer. It is a summertime world of hooky and adventure, pranks and
punishment, villains and young love.
http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Sawyer-Huckleberry-Signet-
Anne Tyler
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Another of Tyler's family portraits: again she draws forth that elusive aura of redemptive
family unity - despite snapped loyalties, devastating loneliness, and the conflicts between
those who hit life hard and those who "live life at a slant." Ezra Tull - one of Tyler's
gentle, bumbling men - is, unlike his meddlesome, reproachful mother Pearl, a "feeder."
And at his "Homesick Restaurant," an untidy establishment where he'll solicitously "cook
what other people felt homesick for," Ezra sometimes hopefully sets a table for family
occasions. But "the family as a whole never yet finished one of his dinners - it was as if
what they couldn't get right they had to keep returning to." The family, you see, has never
been "right" since that day years before when Pearl's husband Beck left them for good:
overburdened with the raising of three young children, lonely and friendless, Pearl
became an angry sort of mother to them all, raising them each with a "trademark flaw."
Older brother Cody is handsome, bland, a prankster who hides the unloved rage of an
unfavorite son - and this drives him to steal Ezra's fiancee Ruth for his own wife. Sister
Jenny, deserted by her second husband, given to child abuse, hurt and overworked, is
rescued by the family. Gentle Ezra is stuck with mother Pearl - though he comes to see
"her true interior self, still enormous, larger than life, powerful. Overwhelming." And
when Cody's teenage son Luke hitchhikes, on the crest of one of Cody's pristine rages,
from the Virginia home to Ezra in Baltimore, he too is inundated with family miseries.
Finally, then, Pearl dies and the family will gather again at the restaurant. But this time
they'll be joined by the near-mythical old Beck Tull: can he now ever be part of the
family? Well, perhaps - because a life's anger seems to drain as Cody sees all his family
"opening like a fan," drawing him in - and Beck, an old man who could not, long ago,
take the "tangles" of family, will stay "until the dessert wine." Less magical, perhaps, than
other Tylers - but her vision of saving interdependencies and time's witchiness continues
to tease and enchant. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable
edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Dinner-Homesick-Restaurant-Anne-
Tyler/dp/0099916401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254417933&sr=1-1-spell
Anne Tyler
Breathing Lessons
Maggie Moran's mission is to connect and unite people, whether they want to be united
or not. Maggie is a meddler and as she and her husband, Ira, drive 90 miles to the funeral
of an old friend, Ira contemplates his wasted life and the traffic, while Maggie hatches a
plant to reunite her son Jesse with his long-estranged wife and baby. As Ira explains, "She
thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing
things around to suit her view of them." Though everyone criticizes her for being
"ordinary," Maggie's ability to see the beauty and potential in others ultimately proves
that she is the only one fighting the resignation they all fear. The book captured the
Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1989. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Breathing-Lessons-Novel-Anne-Tyler/dp/0345485599/ref=sr_1_1?
John Updike
Rabbit Is Rich
"...An American protest against all the attempts to impress upon us the 'healthy, life-
loving and comic' as our standard for novels. It is sexy, in bad taste, violent, and basically
cynical. And good luck to it."
-- Angus Wilson, naming three Books of the Year in the Observer
And Rabbit Redux
"Against all odds, Rabbit Redux is a sequel that succeeds; it is in every respect uncannily
superior to its distinguished predecessor and deserves to achieve even greater critical and
popular acclaim."
http://www.amazon.com/Rabbit-Rich-John-Updike/dp/0449911829/ref=sr_1_1?
Kurt Vonnegut
Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle, one of Vonnegut's most entertaining novels, is filled with scientists and G-
men and even ordinary folks caught up in the game. These assorted characters chase each
other around in search of the world's most important and dangerous substance, a new
form of ice that freezes at room temperature. At one time, this novel could probably be
found on the bookshelf of every college kid in America; it's still a fabulous read and a
great place to start if you're young enough to have missed the first Vonnegut craze. --This
text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Cats-Cradle-Novel-Kurt-Vonnegut/dp/038533348X/ref=sr_1_1?
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a

man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet
Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim
simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's)
shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of
Dresden.
Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel.
He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic
confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless
playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are
discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the
building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as
important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences
in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the
service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and
gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis
in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor. --This text refers to the
Mass Market Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Slaughterhouse-Five-Novel-Kurt-
Vonnegut/dp/0385333846/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254418219&sr=1-1
Alice Walker
The Color Purple

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning
at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her
sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to "Mister," a
brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been
keeping her sister's letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of
love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an
awakening of her creative and loving self.
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Purple-Musical-Tie/dp/0156031825/ref=sr_1_1?
Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men
This landmark book is a loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of

Louisiana, one of the nation's most astounding politicians. All the King's Men tells the
story of Willie Stark, a southern-fried politician who builds support by appealing to the
common man and playing dirty politics with the best of the back-room deal-makers.
Though Stark quickly sheds his idealism, his right-hand man, Jack Burden -- who
narrates the story -- retains it and proves to be a thorn in the new governor's side. Stark
becomes a successful leader, but at a very high price, one that eventually costs him his
life. The award-winning book is a play of politics, society and personal affairs, all
wrapped in the cloak of history. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/All-Kings-2006-Movie-Tie/dp/B000V5WH7S/ref=sr_1_1?
H. G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
The classic tale by H.G. Wells. Also contains a bonus selection (excerpt) as well as an
absolutely free download offer of the complete text of "The Invisible Man" by H.G.
Wells. Visit www.PhoenixPick.com for more great science fiction by this and other great
authors and for downloads of books and excerpts.
http://www.amazon.com/Island-Dr-Moreau-Classic-Wells/dp/1604502452/ref=sr_1_1?
H. G. Wells
The Time Machine

When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year a.d. 802,701, he is initially
delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment, and peace.
Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realizes that
these beautiful people are simply remnants of a once-great culturenow weak and
childishly afraid of the dark. They have every reason to be afraid: in deep tunnels beneath
their paradise lurks another race descended from humanitythe sinister Morlocks. And
when the scientists time machine vanishes, it becomes clear he must search these tunnels
if he is ever to return to his own era.
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Machine-Penguin-Classics/dp/0141439971/ref=sr_1_1?
H. G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
This is the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories, first published by H.G. Wells in 1898.
The novel begins ominously, as the lone voice of a narrator tells readers that "No one
would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being
watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's..."
Things then progress from a series of seemingly mundane reports about odd atmospheric
disturbances taking place on Mars to the arrival of Martians just outside of London. At
first the Martians seem laughable, hardly able to move in Earth's comparatively heavy
gravity even enough to raise themselves out of the pit created when their spaceship
landed. But soon the Martians reveal their true nature as death machines 100-feet tall rise
up from the pit and begin laying waste to the surrounding land. Wells quickly moves the
story from the countryside to the evacuation of London itself and the loss of all hope as
England's military suffers defeat after defeat. With horror his narrator describes how the
Martians suck the blood from living humans for sustenance, and how it's clear that man is
not being conquered so much a corralled. --Craig E. Engler --This text refers to the Mass
Market Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/War-Worlds-Modern-Library-
Eudora Welty
One Writer's Beginnings

Among the most beloved of American writers, Eudora Welty's stories and novels have
entertained us for over half a century. Here, in her memoirs, she writes with her usual
candor and grace about how a writer's sensibilities are shaped. As compelling as her
stories, as witty as her personality, as finely honed as her fiction, Welty's account of her
life is a powerful and fulfilling read.
http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Beginnings-Lectures-American-
Civilization/dp/0674639278/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254418672&sr=1-1
Jessamyn West
The Friendly Persuasion
A quintessential American heroine, Eliza Birdwell is a wonderful blend of would-be

austerity, practicality, and gentle humor when it comes to keeping her faith and caring for
her family and community. Her husband, Jess, shares Eliza's love of people and peaceful
ways but, unlike Eliza, also displays a fondness for a fast horse and a lively tune. With
their children, they must negotiate their way through a world that constantly confronts
them-sometimes with candor, sometimes with violence-and tests the strength of their
beliefs. Whether it's a gift parcel arriving on their doorstep or Confederate soldiers
approaching their land, the Birdwells embrace life with emotion, conviction, and a love
for one another that seems to conquer all.
The Friendly Persuasion has charmed generations of readers as one of our classic tales of
the American Midwest.
http://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Persuasion-Jessamyn-West/dp/015602909X/ref=sr_1_1?
Elie Wiesel
Night
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with
guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that
consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present
him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have
allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing
book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature
achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for
those who died.
http://www.amazon.com/Night-Oprahs-Book-Club-Wiesel/dp/0374500010/ref=sr_1_1?
Oscar, 1854-1900 Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray
A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the
aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful,
young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain
the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to
appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her
little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or
surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in
my garden."
As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry
Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes,
including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good
we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of
Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian
is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-
room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of
Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in
an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his
just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as
all renunciation, brings its own punishment." --This text refers to an out of print or
http://www.amazon.com/Picture-Dorian-Barnes-Noble-Classics/dp/1593080255/ref=sr_1_2?
Thornton Wilder
Our Town
Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize
winning drama of life in the town of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all
life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently
performed play.
It is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition, featuring a new Foreword by

Donald Margulies, who writes, "You are holding in your hands a great American play.
Possibly the great American play." In addition, Tappan Wilder has written an eye-opening
new Afterword, which includes Thornton Wilder's unpublished notes and other
illuminating photographs and documentary material.
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Town-Play-Three-Acts/dp/0060535253/ref=sr_1_1?
T. Harry Williams
Huey Long
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this work describes the life of
one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history.
http://www.amazon.com/Huey-Long-T-Harry-Williams/dp/0394747909/ref=sr_1_1?
Thornton Wilder
The Skin of Our Teeth
A timeless statement about human foibles . . . and human endurance, this beautiful new
edition features Wilder's unpublished production notes, diary entries, and other
illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by
Tappan Wilder.
Time magazine called The Skin of Our Teeth "a sort of Hellzapoppin' with brains," as it
broke from established theatrical conventions and walked off with the 1943 Pulitzer Prize
for Best Drama. Combining farce, burlesque, and satire (among other styles), Thornton
Wilder departs from his studied use of nostalgia and sentiment in Our Town to have an
Eternal Family narrowly escape one disaster after another, from ancient times to the
present. Meet George and Maggie Antrobus (married only 5,000 years); their two
children, Gladys and Henry (perfect in every way!); and their maid, Sabina (the ageless
vamp) as they overcome ice, flood, and war -- by the skin of their teeth.
http://www.amazon.com/Skin-Our-Teeth-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060088931/ref=sr_1_1?
Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie
No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American
public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Menagerie was Williams's first
popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-
eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary
Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great
actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in
classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the
author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new
introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee
Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the
New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a
family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still
resonates deeply and universally." This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes
Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe
of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." The cover
features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New
Directions edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Menagerie-Tennessee-Williams/dp/0811214044/ref=sr_1_1?
Tennessee Williams
A Streetcar Named Desire
It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same
power and impact as when they first appeared57 years after its Broadway premiere,
Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously
recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her
sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of
Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position
of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation,
as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s.
Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur
Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A
Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic
dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable
new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include
Wihttp://www.amazon.com/Streetcar-Named-Desire-Tennessee-
Williams/dp/0811216020/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254417712&sr=1-
1lliams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.
Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Play by Tennessee Williams, published and produced in 1955. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
The play exposes the emotional lies governing relationships in the family of a wealthy
Southern planter of humble origins. The patriarch, Big Daddy, is about to celebrate his
65th birthday. His two married sons, Gooper (Brother Man) and Brick, have returned for
the occasion, the former with his pregnant wife and five children, the latter with his wife
Margaret (Maggie). The interactions between Big Daddy, Brick, and Maggie form the
substance of the play.
http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Hot-Tin-Roof-Signet/dp/0451171128/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254419252&sr=1-1
Thomas Wolfe
You Can't Go Home Again
Novel by Thomas Wolfe, published posthumously in 1940 after heavy editing by Edward
Aswell. This novel, like Wolfe's other works, is largely autobiographical, reflecting
details of his life in the 1930s. As the sequel to The Web and the Rock (1939), You Can't
Go Home Again continues the story of George Webber, a thoughtful author in search of
meaning in his personal life and in American society. Leaving New York City, he is
dismayed at the social decay he finds on his travels to England, Germany, and his small
hometown in the Carolinas. Nonetheless, he is optimistic about the future of the United
States. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of
print or unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Go-Home-Again/dp/0060930055/ref=sr_1_1?
Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own
Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most
accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet
conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in
writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William
Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of
university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their
full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty
much invented modern feminist criticism. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/Room-Ones-Own-Virginia-Woolf/dp/0151787336/ref=sr_1_1?
Herman Wouk
The Caine Mutiny
Novel by Herman Wouk, published in 1951. The novel was awarded the 1952 Pulitzer
Prize for fiction. The Caine Mutiny grew out of Wouk's experiences aboard a destroyer-
minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II. The novel focuses on Willie Keith, a rich
New Yorker assigned to the USS Caine, who gradually matures during the course of the
book. But the work is best known for its portrayal of the neurotic Captain Queeg, who
becomes obsessed with petty infractions at the expense of the safety of ship and crew.
Cynical, intellectual Lieutenant Tom Keefer persuades loyal Lieutenant Steve Maryk that
Queeg's bizarre behavior is endangering the ship; Maryk reluctantly relieves Queeg of
command. Much of the book describes Maryk's court-martial and its aftermath. The
unstable Queeg eventually breaks down completely. -- The Merriam-Webster
this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Caine-Mutiny-Novel-Herman-
Wouk/dp/0316955108/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254419507&sr=1-1
Richard Wright
Native Son
Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that will lead to arrest, prison,
or death, driven by despair, frustration, poverty, and incomprehension. As a young black
man in the Chicago of the '30s, he has no way out of the walls of poverty and racism that
surround him, and after he murders a young white woman in a moment of panic, these
walls begin to close in. There is no help for him--not from his hapless family; not from
liberal do-gooders or from his well-meaning yet naive friend Jan; certainly not from the
police, prosecutors, or judges. Bigger is debased, aggressive, dangerous, and a violent
criminal. As such, he has no claim upon our compassion or sympathy. And yet...
A more compelling story than Native Son has not been written in the 20th century by an
American writer. That is not to say that Richard Wright created a novel free of flaws, but
that he wrote the first novel that successfully told the most painful and unvarnished truth
about American social and class relations. As Irving Howe asserted in 1963, "The day
Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. It made impossible a
repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the
hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture."
http://www.amazon.com/Native-Blooms-Modern-Critical-
Interpretations/dp/0791096254/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254419497&sr=1-2

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