Recommendations – April 19, 2006

Gerry’s Recommendations:

Deafening, Frances Itani
Deafening is both a revelatory look inside the world of the deaf and a searing portrayal of war’s ravages. Set in the early 1900s, it tells the story of Grania O’Neill, who loses her hearing at the age of five. The small Ontario town where she grows up offers little support as she struggles to communicate and to understand the world around her. Grania is determined to break out of the isolation her deafness imposes. She goes away to a special school; where arduous training in sign language makes her feel she’s “...entering a new world. She is joining the larger conversation of hands.” After graduating, she marries Jim Lloyd, a hearing man. Soon after, the First World War breaks out and Jim enlists. During their years apart, Jim endures the carnage and horrors of combat, while Grania faces anxiety, loneliness and the influenza pandemic that eventually claims more lives than the War itself.

Cocksure, Mordecai Richler
A wild mix of outrageous comedy and speculative fiction, Cocksure is a one-of-a-kind novel. It won the Governor General's Award in 1968, well before Richler became known worldwide. Canadian Mortimer Griffin is a beleaguered editor adrift in a sea of hypocrisy and deceit during the swinging sixties in London, England. Alone in a world where nobody shares his values and everyone wants something, Mortimer must navigate the uncertain currents of changeable times. Richler’s eccentric cast of characters includes Star Maker, the narcissistic Hollywood tycoon who has discovered the secret of eternal life; the gorgeous Polly, who conducts her life as though it were a movie, complete with blackouts at all the climactic moments; and a precocious group of school children with a taste for the teachings of the Marquis de Sade.

A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
Meet Nomi Nickel, the narrator of A Complicated Kindness. At 16, living in a small Manitoba town, she feels stifled by her limited future and besieged by the narrow-mindedness of the community’s Mennonite majority. To top it all off, her family’s falling apart: her mother and sister have left, driven away by the religious rigidity of the town, and her father seems lost in his own sadness. How to cope? Told in Nomi’s wry, sardonically skeptical voice, A Complicated Kindness is a coming-of-age story that’s both darkly humorous and painfully touching in its portrayal of a teenager overwhelmed by life. Nomi and her father, Ray, both struggle with despair; her strategy is to rebel (dropping out of school, shaving her head and smoking pot), his is to withdraw into eccentricity (going for aimless night-time drives and gradually selling off their furniture). In her depiction of their struggles, Miriam Toews offers an honest look at people wrestling with their faith and their longing for acceptance, amid the enduring complexity of family ties.

Carolyn’s Recommendations:

The King of Torts, John Grisham
The office of the public defender is not known as a training ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there too long and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of enormous settlement that would totally change his life—that would make him, almost overnight, the legal profession’s newest king of torts...

Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
In 1940, Jakob Beer, a seven-year-old boy, bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from Nazi soldiers who have killed his family. Though he should have died with his family, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist. With this electrifying backdrop, Anne Michaels propels us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption. Michaels lets us witness Jakob''s transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artis who extracts meaning from the abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work.
A New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Lannan Literary Fiction AwardWinner of the Guardian Fiction Award

Strange Traffic, Irene Dische
All the characters in these 11 stories from an American writer living in Berlin find it impossible to make a clean break with the past. Those with romantic notions about freedom are invariably disappointed, although the reader is not, since Dische combines stylish prose with dark wit. "Portrait of a Defection" is the author's quintessential indictment of idealism: this story of an East German mathematician's methodical escape to the West opens with the words: "Once upon a time..." Enthusing to the Western press, the man announces, "It's like a fairy tale come true!"? but his idyll proves short-lived when his elderly mother, with whom he has shared a dreary apartment for years, announces that she is defecting, too. Like many others in this collection, the man can change his setting but can't alter his essential condition. Similarly, in "The Smuggled Wedding Ring," a couple who have fled Russia find themselves longing for the heavy gold ring? and all its symbolic baggage? that they left behind. Negative energy also drives the collection's opener, "Prior Conviction," the tale of a cynic who preaches that "rejection is much more important than affection." Even the elderly players in these stories prove to have learned little from their journeys through life. Dische draws her international cast and their ironic tales of disillusion with distinctive strokes and sharp clarity, producing sharply individualistic, memorable portraits.
Jessica’s Recommendations:

The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
When a group of scientists and Jesuit priests jet off into space on a mission to meet an alien race on another planet, they didn't let anyone on Earth know. They didn't exactly try to hide it; they just felt it wasn't anyone's business except the Vatican's. Besides, they were just going to learn about this new group of people that God had put not on Earth, but on a different planet. As they explore the Alpha Centuri planet Rakhat, their unusual experiences are both enlightening and catastrophic. Readers meet the only survivor of this mission, a priest, in The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell as he deals with the repercussions of the exploration.

Saturday, Ian McEwan
Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before. On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne’s day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of marchers filling the streets of London, protesting against the war. A minor accident in his car brings him into a confrontation with a small-time thug. To Perowne’s professional eye, something appears to be profoundly wrong with this young man, who in turn believes the surgeon has humiliated him — with savage consequences that will lead Henry Perowne to deploy all his skills to keep his family alive.

Blindness, Joes Saramago
A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses-and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man's will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Graham’s Recommendations:

The End of Faith, Sam Harris
Sam Harris offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs—even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Natalie Angier wrote in the New York Times: "The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated. . . . Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say." While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic.

Cocksure, Mordecai Richler
See above.

Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis
With Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis offers compelling insight into the problems that continue to threaten humankind - poverty, hunger, gender and class inequality - and a hopeful glimpse of a solution on the horizon. This is a heartfelt plea, an examination of the depth of these challenges and a recipe for banishing them.

Jenn’s Recommendations:

After Dachau, Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinn, well known for Ishmael – a life-changing book for readers the world over – once again turns the tables and creates an otherworld that is very like our own, yet fascinating beyond words. Imagine that Nazi Germany was the first to develop an atomic bomb and the Allies surrendered. America was never bombed, occupied, or even invaded, but was nonetheless forced to recognize Nazi world dominance. The Nazis continued to press their campaign to rid the planet of “mongrel races” until eventually the world – from Capetown to Tokyo – was populated by only white faces. Two thousand years in the future people don’t remember, or much care, about this distant past. The reality is that to be human is to be Caucasian, and what came before was literally ancient history having nothing to do with those then living. Now imagine that reincarnation is real, that souls migrate over time from one living creature to another, and that a soul that once animated an American black woman living at the time of World War II now animates an Aryan in Quinn’s new world, and that due to a traumatic accident memories of this earlier incarnation assert themselves. Compared by readers and critics alike to 1984 and Brave New World, After Dachau is a new dystopian classic with much to say about our own time, and the dynamics of human history.

Night, Elie Wiesel
Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey
At the age of twenty-three, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his four front teeth had been knocked out. His nose was broken and there was a hole through his cheek. He had no idea where the plane was headed or what had happened over the preceding two weeks. He had been an alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three. When he checked into a treatment facility shortly thereafter, he was told he could either stop using or die before he reached twenty-four. A Million Little Pieces is Frey's acclaimed account of his six weeks in rehab; fiercely honest and deeply affecting, it is one of the most graphic and immediate books ever to be written about addiction and recovery.

Rachel’s Recommendations:

Burridge Unbound, Alan Cumyn
After surviving a terrifying ordeal at the hands of terrorists in the South Pacific island of Santa Irene, Bill Burridge returns home to Ottawa and casts himself single-mindedly into building a human-rights organization to stand watch over the world’s most troubled areas. Yet, plagued by memories of his incarceration and by the strain of his disintegrating marriage, he is a man struggling to hold his life together. When a democratic revolution stands Santa Irene on a knife-edge between chaos and healing, Burridge reluctantly agrees to serve on a Truth Commission there to investigate past atrocities. Taut, intelligent, and written in the compelling, often sardonic voice of Bill Burridge, Cumyn’s gripping novel immerses us in a shadowy world of betrayals and shifting loyalties, and reveals the intricate, rejuvenating bonds of human relationships. Bill Burridge’s voice is infectious, his story a remarkable one as the novel builds to its climactic final scenes.

One hundred years of solitude, Manuel Garcia Marquez
One of the 20th century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, andpurity that are the mark of a master. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race.

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, possibly the most influential and controversial novel of ideas in American history, presents a philosophy of vital interest to anyone seeking an understanding of our present-day culture. As relevant and exciting now as it was for those who clamored to read it when it burst upon the scene in 1943, this book continues to focus worldwide attention on its brilliant author, who pointedly asks, "Is it possible to be an individual in today's world?"

Joyce’s Recommendations:

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The timeless classic of growing up and the human dignity that unites us all. The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill a Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award winning film, also a classic. Compassion, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill a Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 15 million copies in print and translated into ten languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
An ingenious code hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci.A desperate race through the cathedrals and castles of Europe.An astonishing truth concealed for centuries . . . unveiled at last.As millions of readers around the globe have already discovered, The Da Vinci Code is a reading experience unlike any other. Simultaneously lightning-paced, intelligent, and intricately layered with remarkable research and detail, Dan Brown''s novel is a thrilling masterpiece—from its opening pages to its stunning conclusion.

Three Day Road, Joseph Boyden
Inspired in part by real-life World War I Ojibwa hero Francis Pegahmagabow, this unblinking, impeccably researched novel is the astonishing story of two Cree snipers in the killing fields of Ypres and the Somme, and the winding journey home to northern Ontario that only one of them will make. A remarkable tale of brutality, survival, and rebirth, Three Day Road is an unforgettable reading experience.
The National BestsellerShortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary AwardOne of The Globe and Mail One Hundred Best Books of 2004