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Playing for Pizza (Hardcover) by John Grisham
John Grisham has already tried his hand at legal thrillers, autobiographical Southern fiction, Christmas angst and serious nonfiction, so why not add something funny to the mix? In his latest novel, Playing for Pizza, the master of courtroom tension aims for laughs with the story of an American football player transplanted to a country where "fourth down" is definitely a foreign expression. In a statement released by his publisher, Grisham says he got the idea for his new comic novel while in Bologna, Italy, doing research for a previous book, The Broker. "I was pleasantly surprised to find real American football in Italy, and as I dug deeper a novel came together," Grisham says. "The research was tough—food, wine, opera, football, Italian culture—but someone had to do it." The lead character in Playing for Pizza is Rick Dockery, a former college football star who ends up riding the bench in the NFL as the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. After a disastrous performance in an AFC championship game, Dockery is dumped by the Browns and ignored by everyone else in the NFL. Desperate to continue playing football, he turns to his agent, Artie, who lands him a job as starting quarterback with the mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy.
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Weight Loss Cure They Dont Want You to Know About (Hardcover) by Kevin Trudeau
By the #1 New York Times bestselling author Kevin Trudeau comes the last diet you will ever need. Imagine, you will lose at least 30 pounds in 30 days...with no hunger...no exercise...and no surgery! An absolute cure for obesity was discovered almost fifty years ago by a British medical doctor. Tens of thousands of people used this simple, inexpensive, safe medical treatment and achieved miraculous, fast, and permanent weight loss. Stubborn area fat deposits melted away. Body reshaping of the hips, thighs, buttocks, and waist was so dramatic it appeared as if the patients received liposuction! Amazingly, this medical breakthrough has been debunked, discredited, and suppressed by the American Medical Association, the Food and Drug Administration, and other medical establishments throughout the world. Now, for the first time in fifty years, this revolutionary breakthrough discovery, which permanently cures the condition of obesity, is being released to the public.
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Hardcover) by J. K. Rowling
It would seem churlish to review the Harry Potter series finale with something less than overwhelming enthusiasm-after all, there's no one like Rowling. Who else has sustained such an intricate, endlessly inventive plot over seven thick volumes and so constantly surprised her readers with twists, well-laid traps and Purloined Letter-style tricks? Hallows continues the tradition, both with sly feats of legerdemain and with several altogether new, unexpected elements. And yet the revelations don't pack as much of a punch; the moments of genuine astonishment or grief that mark every other book in the series go missing here. Perhaps readers know too well the rules of Rowling's magical universe, a universe she has constructed with extraordinary thoroughness and care.
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The War
An Intimate History, 1941-1945 (Hardcover) by Geoffrey C. Ward; Ken Burns
In the 1980s, Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns created what may be the most riveting and revolutionary documentary in television history, The Civil War . While many have tried to recapture this lightning in a bottle—including Burns and Ward themselves—they've never quite reached that compelling mix of conflict and human emotion. That will change this fall when PBS airs another Burns and Ward documentary about another war—the Second World War. The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 , is the companion volume to the series, and if words and pictures are any indication of what is to come, this could be another watershed cultural moment.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns (Hardcover) by Khaled Hosseini
After the unexpected success of his first novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini decided to focus his second book on a part of Afghan society often obscured from public view—its women. "There are women characters in The Kite Runner, but I wouldn't describe any of them as major characters," he says. "So there was this entire aspect of Afghan society and Afghan life that I hadn't touched upon. It was a landscape that I felt was rich with possibilities for storytelling." Hosseini, a superb storyteller, realizes those possibilities fully in A Thousand Splendid Suns, his textured, deeply affecting novel about the intersecting lives of two Afghan women. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Herat movie house owner. She grows up exiled with her mother to a hovel in the hills outside the city, visited occasionally by the father she adores. When her presence at the periphery of her father's life threatens family peace, she is forced into marriage with a shoemaker from Kabul. Life in Kabul goes from bad to worse under the Soviet occupation. Her husband brutalizes her and eventually takes in, then marries, a young, well-educated girl—Laila—who has been orphaned during the Afghan civil war. Most of A Thousand Splendid Suns depicts the extraordinary relationship that develops under grim circumstances between these two women.
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Giving (Hardcover) by Bill Clinton
Here, from Bill Clinton, is a call to action. Giving is an inspiring look at how each of us can change the world. First, it reveals the extraordinary and innovative efforts now being made by companies and organizations—and by individuals—to solve problems and save lives both “down the street and around the world.” Then it urges us to seek out what each of us, “regardless of income, available time, age, and skills,” can do to help, to give people a chance to live out their dreams. Bill Clinton shares his own experiences and those of other givers, representing a global flood tide of nongovernmental, nonprofit activity. These remarkable stories demonstrate that gifts of time, skills, things, and ideas are as important and effective as contributions of money. From Bill and Melinda Gates to a six-year-old California girl named McKenzie Steiner, who organized and supervised drives to clean up the beach in her community, Clinton introduces us to both well-known and unknown heroes of giving.
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Away (Hardcover) by Amy Bloom
Lillian Leyb, the heroine of Amy Bloom's latest novel, gives the appearance of a young woman who's practical to the point of a sort of animal amorality. The survivor of a massacre that took the lives of her parents, husband and, she believes, her little daughter Sophie, she sets sail in 1924 for America, where she's taken in by a cousin, gets a job as a mediocre seamstress and quickly becomes the mistress of not one but two theater bigwigs who happen to be father and son. Lillian is prepared to let this comfortable state of affairs continue until another cousin tells her that Sophie just might have survived the pogrom and is now living with a family in Siberia. Here the novel, which could have been subtitled "Sophie's Mother's Choice," stops being the somewhat offbeat story of an immigrant looking for a better life in America and becomes an almost Homeric quest.
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My Grandfather's Son (Hardcover) by Clarence Thomas
Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, this book relates the life story of one of Americas most remarkable and constroversial leaders--Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas--in his own words. 16-page photo insert.
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Water for Elephants (Paperback) by Sara Gruen
Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its ownway of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell. Jacob was there because his luck had run out --- orphaned and penniless, he had no direction until he landed on this locomotive "ship of fools." It was the early part of the Great Depression, and everyone in this third-rate circus was lucky to have any job at all. Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, was there because she fell in love with the wrong man, a handsome circus boss with a wide mean streak. And Rosie the elephant was there because she was the great gray hope, the new act that was going to be the salvation of the circus; the only problem was, Rosie didn't have an act --- in fact, she couldn't even follow instructions. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and ultimately, it was their only hope for survival. Surprising, poignant, and funny, Water for Elephants is that rare novel with a story so engrossing, one is reluctant to put it down; with characters so engaging, they continue to live long after the last page has been turned; with a world built of wonder, a world so real, one starts to breathe its air.
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If I Did It Confessions of the Killer (Hardcover) by Goldman Family
In 1994, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Smith were brutally murdered at her home in Brentwood, California. O.J. Simpson was tried for the crime in a case that captured the attention of the American people, but was ultimately acquitted of criminal charges.
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