Matilda444

“Up from Orchard Street” by Eleanor Widmor

Three generations of Roths live together in a crowded tenement flat. Long-widowed Manya is the family’s head and its heart. She’s renowned throughout the neighborhood for her cooking, and every noontime the front room of the flat turns into Manya’s private restaurant. But Manya is no soft touch, except, perhaps, where her granddaughter Elka is concerned. Precocious Elka is her closest companion and confidante. Through Elka’s eyes we come to know the fascinating characters who move in and out of the Roths’ lives. Money may have been short, but opinions were not, and their tart tongues and lively humor abound. In this riveting story lies the heart of the American immigrant experience: a novel at once wise, funny, poignant, anguishing, exultant, and bursting with love.

“Two Lives” by Vikram Seth

This is a heartrending new book, the story of a marriage and the story of two lives, from the author of the international best-selling novel A Suitable Boy.

Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He was brought up in India in the apparently vigorous but dying Raj and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin, though he could not speak a word of German, to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti’s path first crossed that of his future wife.

Helga Gerda Caro, known to everyone as “Henny” was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic, and intensely German. When the family decided to take Shanti as a lodger, Henny’s first reaction was, “Don’t take the black man!” But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler’s Germany for England just one month before war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person in the country she knew: Shanti.

Vikram Seth has woven together their astonishing story, which recounts the arrival into this childless couple’s lives of their great-nephew from India, the teenage student Vikram Seth. The result is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain.

Two Lives is both a history of a violent century seen through the eyes of two survivors and an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage, and abiding yet complex love. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable lives, a masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers.

“Thunderstruck” by Erik Larson

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication. Their lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.

Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners; scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed; and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men”, nearly commits the perfect crime.

With his superb narrative skills, Erik Larson guides these parallel narratives toward a relentlessly suspenseful meeting on the waters of the North Atlantic. Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate.

Thunderstruck presents a vibrant portrait of an era of séances, science, and fog, inhabited by inventors, magicians, and Scotland Yard detectives, all presided over by the amiable and fun-loving Edward VII as the world slid inevitably toward the first great war of the 20th century.

Gripping from the start, and rich with fascinating detail about the time, the people, and the new inventions that connect and divide us, Thunderstruck is splendid narrative history from a master of the form.

“The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne

It has been passed down through the ages, highly coveted, hidden, lost, stolen, and bought for vast sums of money. Fragments of this Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. It has been understood by some of the most prominent people in history: Plato, Galileo, Beethoven, Edison, Carnegie, and Einstein, along with other renowned inventors, theologians, scientists, and great thinkers.

For the first time, all the pieces of the Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life transforming for all who experience it.

In this book you will discover the Secret, and you will learn how to have, do, or be anything you want. You will learn how to use the Secret in every area of your life. You will hear from modern-day teachers - men and women who have used the Secret to achieve health, prosperity, relationships, and happiness. They share their incredible stories of using the Secret to eradicate disease, acquire massive wealth, overcome obstacles, and achieve what many would regard as impossible. Through them, you will begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that is within you, and the true magnificence that awaits you.

“The Keepers of the House” by Shirley Ann Grau

Abigail was the last keeper of the house, the last to know the Howland family’s secrets. Now, in the name of all her brothers and sisters, she must take her bitter revenge on the small-minded Southern town that shamed them, persecuted them, but could never destroy them.

“The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward

Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes.  He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.  Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of “intelligent design”, or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East or Middle America.

“Fragile Things” by Neil Gaiman

An extraordinary collection of short stories which showcase Gaiman’s storytelling brilliance as well as his entertaining (and dark) sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time.

“The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell

In this brilliant and groundbreaking book, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell looks at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he argues, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the Tipping Point.  In The Tipping Point, Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children’s television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world’s greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.  The Tipping Point is an intellectual adventure story written with an infectious enthusiasm for the power and joy of new ideas. Most of all, it is a road map to change, with a profoundly hopeful message, that one imaginative person applying a well-placed lever can move the world.

“The Book of God” by Walter Wangerin, Jr

Master storyteller Walter Wangerin, Jr. makes the Bible come alive in vivid detail with The Book of God, his passionate, exciting dramatization of the events and people of the Scriptures. Recreating the high drama, low comedy, gentle humor, and awe-inspiring holiness of the Biblical narrative, Wangerin reveals the humanity and eternal messages behind the text. Imaginative yet meticulously researched, The Book of God is a sweeping history that covers thousands of years and hundreds of lives, in a myriad of foreign yet familiar cultures. The award-winning Wangerin, one of our most respected and beloved contemporary writers, has produced his magnum opus, a timeless masterpiece that rekindles the imagination and nurtures the spirit.

“The Accidental” by Ali Smith

Barefoot, thirtysomething Amber shows up at the door of a Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. Amber doesn’t know them, but she talks her way in, telling lies, and stays for dinner. Eve, an author, thinks Amber is a student her husband is sleeping with. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age 12, thinks she’s her mother’s friend. Son Magnus, 17, thinks she’s an angel.  Gradually, Amber insinuates herself into the family. Dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives under the searing lens of Amber’s perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not, as they find when they return home to London, from their profoundly altered lives.

“I Like You:  Hospitality Under the Influence” by Amy Sedaris

No matter the style or size of the gathering, from the straightforward to the bizarre, I Like You provides jackpot recipes and solid advice laced with Amy’s blisteringly funny take on entertaining and everything it takes to pull off a party with extraordinary flair.

“Lisey’s Story” by Stephen King

Perhaps King’s most personal and powerful story ever, Lisey’s Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love.

“Let Me Go” by Helga Schneider

Helga Schneider was four when her mother suddenly abandoned her family in Berlin in 1941. When she next saw her mother, 30 years later, she learned the shocking reason why. Her mother had joined the Nazi SS and had become a guard in the concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she was in charge of a “correction” unit and responsible for untold acts of torture.

Nearly 30 more years would pass before their second and final reunion, an emotional encounter in Vienna, where her ailing mother, then 87 and unrepentant about her past, was living in a nursing home. Let Me Go is the extraordinary account of that meeting and of their conversation, which powerfully evokes the misery of obligation colliding with inescapable horror.

“Moral Disorder and Other Stories” by Margaret Atwood

A memorable mosaic of domestic pain and the surface tension of a troubled family. 

“The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz

The Four Agreements:  Be impeccable with your word.  Don’t take anything personally.  Don’t make assumptions.  Always do your best.  Assigned by Ilyne.