Isbn: 0804108587
Sales Rank: 140111
Subjects:  1. Fiction    2. Fiction - Mystery/ Detective    3. Mystery & Detective - General    4. Mystery & Detective - Historical    5. Mystery & Detective - Police Procedural    6. Mystery & Detective - Series    7. Mystery and detective stories    8. Mystery/Suspense    9. Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General   

Editorial Review

"Gideon the Genius" and "Dave the Daredevil," their father called them: two Jewish boys growing up in 1920s New York, playing stickball and--in Dave's case--getting into trouble. But when their father dies, Dave finds himself separated from his older brother and thrust into the cold halls of the HHB, the Hebrew Home for Boys (which he later dubs the "Hopeless House of Beggars" and the "Hell Hole for Brats," among other things).

Eager to escape the strict rules, constant bullying, and tasteless gruel of the orphanage, the Daredevil hops the wall one night to explore the streets of Harlem. He hears what he thinks is someone--or something?--laughing, but traces the sound to a late-night trumpeter shuffling backward into a wild "rent party." And just as quickly as he'd found himself stuck in the HHB, Dave is immersed in yet another world--the swinging salons and speakeasies of the Harlem Renaissance. Cramped, crazy parties packed with the likes of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen give Dave refuge from life at the orphanage and awaken his artistic bent. And Dave's new friends, among them a grandfatherly "gonif" ("somebody who fools people out of their money") and a young "colored" heiress who takes a shine to him, help turn things around for him at the HHB.

Isbn: 0060090383
Sales Rank: 23604
Subjects:  1. Dublin (Ireland)    2. Fiction    3. Fiction - General    4. General    5. Group psychotherapy    6. Irish    7. New York    8. New York (State)   

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

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.

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita triggers a deep conflict within the American psyche about crossing the line between love and the perverse lust for a child. In the bestselling audiobook, Jeremy Irons delivers a smooth, calculating presentation of Humbert Humbert, the middle-aged man obsessed with a 13-year-old girl named Lolita. Following a failed marriage to a "large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba," Humbert decides to move to America to work as a tutor. Much to his dismay, his plans change and he moves into a boarding house in Ramsdale, New Hampshire. But his disappointment quickly fades after he realizes he lives next door to the "light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul Lo-li-ta." The relationship blossoms between the man "with a cesspool of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile" and the sassy, vivacious young girl.

Features

• Abridged

Isbn: 0787122785
Sales Rank: 3270861
Subjects:  1. Audio - Mystery    2. Audio Adult: Books On Tape    3. Fiction    4. Legal    5. Mystery & Detective - General    6. Suspense    7. Thrillers   

Editorial Review

Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, an unabashed riff on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, actually has more in common with Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Where Bridget keeps us apprised of her flawed but persistent attempts at self-improvement in a year's worth of diary entries, the morally upright Clarissa wrestles with her love for the devious Lovelace in very private letters to friends and family. With both heroines, we feel like the favored confidante of someone more interesting than we are.

Tennyson referred to Clarissa as a "large still book," and indeed, there's a stillness about most novels structured around letters and journals, no matter how lively the drama they expose. This may be why the audiocassette version of Bridget Jones's Diary sometimes seems shrill instead of earnest, petty instead of poignantly honest. As actress Tracie Bennett (Shirley Valentine) lifts Bridget Jones from the sanctity of the printed page, we find the cast of characters scratching at each other with the noisy exaggeration of a French farce.

Editorial Review

They were just a soft, ordinary pair of thrift-shop jeans until the fourgirls took turns trying them on--four girls, that is, who are close friends,about to be parted for the summer, with very different sizes and builds, not tomention backgrounds and personalities. Yet the pants settle on each girl's hipsperfectly, making her look sexy and long-legged and feel confident as a teenagercan feel. "These are magical Pants!" they realize, and so they make a pact toshare them equally, to mail them back and forth over the summer from whereverthey are. Beautiful, distant Lena is going to Greece to be with hergrandparents; strong, athletic Bridget is off to soccer camp in Baja,California; hot-tempered Carmen plans to have her divorced father all to herselfin South Carolina; and Tibby the rebel will be left at home to slave for minimumwage at Wallman's.