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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Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 2007

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Jun 062012
 

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Love in the Time of Cholera
By Gabriel García Márquez
Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 2007

Book Description:

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs–yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.



 Posted by on June 6, 2012

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 »

A Summer of Faulkner – Oprah’s Book Club® Selection, June 2005

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May 212012
 

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A Summer of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying/The Sound and the Fury/Light in August
By William Faulkner
Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2005

Editorial Review:

The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness–the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the “idiot” man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family’s former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy’s lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family’s honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family. Continue reading »

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