Books, Literature & Fiction, Books & Reading, History of Books

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Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic & Madness and the Fair that Changed America (Illinois)
by Random House Audio (Audio Cassette) (Release Date: 2003-02-11)

A. J. Jacobs
The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
by Simon & Schuster (Paperback)

You go to school. You work hard. You go to university. You learn a lot. You're pretty pleased with yourself. You're erudite, well-read and know a whole bunch of obscure facts guaranteed at some point to appear in the questions on Mastermind or University Challenge. Then you get a job, and ten years later you stumble over Beckett but are eloquent about Big Brother and you discuss Kyle like you used to discuss Kierkegaard. Sound familiar? Well it happened to AJ Jacobs too. But he decided to do something about it. An editor at Esquire, Jacobs had built up an impressive knowledge of celebrity trivia - the cure was going to take a long time. It was big - 33,000 pages, it was heavy - 9 stone. It was the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Join Jacobs on his journey of discovery as he learns every known fact - however arcane - in the entire world. Sympathise with his long-suffering wife. Share his glee at finding a mistake. Wince with embarrassment as he fails to get into Mensa - ...

Benjamin Hoff
The Tao of Pooh
by Penguin (Non-Classics) (Paperback)

David Liss
The Coffee Trader: A Novel
by Random House Audio (CD) (Release Date: 2003-03-04)

The Edgar Award–winning novel A Conspiracy of Paper was one of the most acclaimed debuts of 2000. In his richly suspenseful second novel, author David Liss once again travels back in time to a crucial moment in cultural and financial history. His destination: Amsterdam, 1659—a mysterious world of trade populated by schemers and rogues, where deception rules the day.On the world’s first commodities exchange, fortunes are won and lost in an instant. Miguel Lienzo, a sharp-witted trader in the city’s close-knit community of Portuguese Jews, knows this only too well. Once among the city’s most envied merchants, Miguel has lost everything in a sudden shift in the sugar markets. Now, impoverished and humiliated, living on the charity of his petty younger brother, Miguel must find a way to restore his wealth and reputation.Miguel enters into a partnership with a seduc-tive Dutchwoman who offers him one last chance at success—a daring plot to corner the market of an ...

Sarah Dunant
The Birth of Venus
by Random House Audio (CD) (Release Date: 2004-02-17)

Personal History
by Random House Audio Voices (CD) (Release Date: 2004-05-04)

America Firsthand: Readings from Reconstruction to the Present
by Bedford/St. Martin's (Paperback)

Simon Winchester
The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary
by Oxford University Press, USA (Paperback)

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language--'so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy'--and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from 'the irredeemably famous' Samuel Johnson to the 'short, pale, smug and boastful' schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched talent for story-telling to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries. In this fast-paced narrative, the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half-century ...

Alberto Manguel
A History of Reading
by Penguin (Non-Classics) (Paperback)

Julia Alvarez, Rolando Costa Picazo
En El Tiempo De Las Mariposas (Spanish Edition)
by Thorndike Press (Hardcover)

On a deserted mountain road in the Dominican Republic in 1960, three young women from a pious Catholic family were assassinated after visiting their husbands who had been jailed as suspected rebel leaders. The Mirabal sisters, thus martyred, became mythical figures in their country, where they are known as Las Mariposas (the butterflies). Three decades later, Julia Alvarez, daughter of the Dominican Republic and author of the acclaimed How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, brings the Mirabal sisters back to life in this extraordinary novel. Each of the sisters speaks in her own voice, beginning as young girls in the 1940s, their stories vary from hair ribbons to gun-running to prison torture. Their story is framed by their surviving sister who tells her own tale of suffering and dedication to the memory of Las Mariposas. This inspired portrait of four women is a haunting statement about the human cost of political oppression, and is destined to take its place alongside ...

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