Freedom by Jonathan Franzen – Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2010

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Jun 112012
 

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Freedom: A Novel
By Jonathan Franzen
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2010

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: “The awful thing about life is this:” says Octave to the Marquis in Renoir’s Rules of the Game. “Everyone has his reasons.” That could be a motto for novelists as well, few more so than Jonathan Franzen, who seems less concerned with creating merely likeable characters than ones who are fully alive, in all their self-justifying complexity. Freedom is his fourth novel, and, yes, his first in nine years since The Corrections. Happy to say, it’s very much a match for that great book, a wrenching, funny, and forgiving portrait of a Midwestern family (from St. Paul this time, rather than the fictional St. Jude). Continue reading »

Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan – Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2009

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Jun 102012
 

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Say You’re One of Them
By Uwem Akpan
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2009

Book Description:

Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances. Continue reading »

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski – Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2008

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Jun 092012
 

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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (P.S.)
By David Wroblewski
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2008

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008: It’s gutsy for a debut novelist to offer a modern take on Hamlet set in rural Wisconsin–particularly one in which the young hero, born mute, communicates with people, dogs, and the occasional ghost through his own mix of sign and body language. But David Wroblewski’s extraordinary way with language in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle immerses readers in a living, breathing world that is both fantastic and utterly believable. In selecting for temperament and a special intelligence, Edgar’s grandfather started a line of unusual dogs–the Sawtelles–and his sons carried on his work. Continue reading »

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle – Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 2008

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Jun 082012
 

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A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
By Eckhart Tolle
Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 2008

Book Description:

With his bestselling spiritual guide The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle inspired millions of readers to discover the freedom and joy of a life lived “in the now.” In A New Earth, Tolle expands on these powerful ideas to show how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness, but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world. Tolle describes how our attachment to the ego creates the dysfunction that leads to anger, jealousy, and unhappiness, and shows readers how to awaken to a new state of consciousness and follow the path to a truly fulfilling existence. Continue reading »

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett – Oprah Book Club® Selection, November 2007

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Jun 072012
 

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The Pillars of the Earth
By Ken Follett
Oprah Book Club® Selection, November 2007

Editorial Review:

Set in 12th-century England, the narrative concerns the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge. The ambitions of three men merge, conflict and collide through 40 years of social and political upheaval as internal church politics affect the progress of the cathedral and the fortunes of the protagonists. “Follett has written a novel that entertains, instructs and satisfies on a grand scale,” judged PW.
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Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides – Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2007

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May 312012
 

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Middlesex: A Novel
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2007

Editorial Review:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory. Continue reading »

The Road by Cormac McCarthy – Oprah Book Club® Selection, March 2007

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May 272012
 

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The Road
By Cormac McCarthy
Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2007

Editorial Review:

Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as “an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century,” Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we’ve read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review – Click Here. –Daphne Durham Continue reading »

The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier – Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 2007

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May 262012
 

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The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography
By Sidney Poitier
Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 2007

“I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I’ve suddenly come up with the answers to all life’s questions. Quite the contrary, I began this book as an exploration, an exercise in self-questing. In other words, I wanted to find out, as I looked back at a long and complicated life, with many twists and turns, how well I’ve done at measuring up to the values I myself have set.” —Sidney Poitier

Editorial Review:

Sidney Poitier wrote The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography because he “felt called to write about certain values, such as integrity and commitment, faith and forgiveness, about the virtues of simplicity, about the difference between ‘amusing ourselves to death’ and finding meaningful pleasures–even joy.” Yet Poitier’s book does not speak from on high; its tone is conversational and endearingly self-critical. He begins the first chapter by recounting an evening spent channel-surfing and wondering, as most of us do at one time or another, “What am I doing with my time?” Continue reading »

Night by Elie Wiesel – Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 2006

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May 242012
 

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Night
By Elie Wiesel
Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 2006

Book Description:

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. Continue reading »

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey – Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2005

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May 232012
 

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A Million Little Pieces
By James Frey
Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 2005

Editorial Review:

The electrifying opening of James Frey’s debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises “he will be dead within a few days” if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting “The Fury” head on:

I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can. Continue reading »

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