From From The New York Times Knocking on Heaven’s Door – Katy Butler Those Angry Days – Lynne Olson Top Ten of 2013 Top 100 List of 2013 Butler’s study of the flaws in end-of-life care mixes The savage political dispute between Roosevelt and the personal narrative and tough reporting. 616.029 BUT isolationist movement, presented in spellbinding detail. 940.53 OLS After the Music Stopped – Alan Blinder The Barbarous Years – Bernard Bailyn Blinder’s terrific book on the financial meltdown of 2008 A noted Harvard historian looks at the chaotic decades Lawrence in Arabia – Scott Anderson argues that it happened because of a “perfect storm,” in between Jamestown and King Philip’s War. 973.2 BAI By contextualizing T.E. Lawrence, Anderson is able to To the End of June – Cris Beam which many unfortunate events occurred than would have address modern themes like oil, jihad and the Arab-Jewish Beam’s wrenching study is a triumph of narrative reporting resulted from just a single cause. 330.973 BLI conflict. 940.41241 AND and storytelling. 362.733 BEA The Billionaire’s Apprentice – Anita Raghavan Indian Americans populate every aspect of this meticulously Days of Fire – Peter Baker reported true-life business thriller. 364.168 RAG Lean In – Sheryl Sandberg War That Ended Peace – Margaret MacMillan Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New The lesson conveyed loud and clear by the Facebook Why did the peace fail, a Canadian historian asks, and she York Times succeeds in telling the story of the several crises executive is that women should step forward and not doubt offers superb portraits of the men who took Europe to war of the Bush administration with fairness and balance. He is The Blood Telegram – Gary J. Bass their ability to combine work and family. 658.4 SAN in the summer of 1914. 940.311 MAC fascinated by the mystery of the Bush-Cheney relationship Bass reveals the sordid White House diplomacy that and even more so by the mystery of George Bush himself. attended the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. 327.73 BASS 973.931 BAK Manson – Jeff Guinn Year Zero – Ian Buruma Guinn’s tour de force examines Manson’s rise and fall, the This lively history shows how the Good War turned out The Boy Detective – Roger Rosenblatt 1960s music industry and the decade’s bizarre ambience. badly for many people and splendidly for others less *Five Days at Memorial – Sheri Fink In his memoir, New Yorker Rosenblatt recalls being a boy B MANSON deserving. 940.5314 BUR Fans of nonfiction that’s backed by extensive, learning to see, and to live, in the city he scrutinizes. meticulous research will savor this examination of B ROSENBLATT events at a New Orleans hospital before, during, My Promised Land – Ari Shavit Washington Post and after Hurricane Katrina. A compelling picture Shavit, a columnist for Haaretz, expresses both solidarity of the city and social injustices that persist. 362 FINK The Cancer Chronicles – George Johnson with and criticism of his countrymen in this important and *Book of Ages – Jill Lepore Johnson’s fascinating look at cancer reveals certain powerful book. 956.054 SHA This portrait of Ben Franklin’s sister Jane reveals, that in profound truths about life itself. 616.994 JOH spite of obscurity and poverty, she was a passionate reader, The Sleepwalkers – Christopher Clark gifted writer and shrewd political commentator. Clark provides a comprehensive, highly readable survey of The Riddle of the Labyrinth – Margalit Fox B FRANKLIN the events leading up to World War I. He avoids singling Catastrophe 1914 – Max Hastings Focusing on an unheralded but heroic Brooklyn classics out any one nation or leader as the guilty party. The This excellent chronicle of World War I’s first months by a professor, Fox turns the decipherment of Linear B into a participants were, in his term, “sleepwalkers,” not fanatics British military historian dispels some popular myths. detective story. 467.1 FOX Drink – Ann Johnston or murderers, and the war itself was a tragedy, not a crime. 940.3 HAS Johnston, a recovering alcoholic, veers between reporting 940.3 CLA and memoir as she untangles the messy realities behind The Smartest Kids in the World – Amanda Ripley women’s rising rate of alcohol abuse and why it is so much Country Girl – Edna O’Brien A look at countries that are outeducating us – Finland, South more dangerous for them than for men. 362.292 JOH *Wave – Sonali Deraniyagala O’Brien reflects on a fraught and distinguished life, from Korea, Poland – through the eyes of American high school Deraniyagala’s unforgettable account of her struggle to the restraints of her Irish childhood to literary stardom. students abroad. 370.9 RIP carry on living after her husband, sons and parents were B O’BRIEN *The Guns at Last Light – Rick Atkinson killed in the 2004 tsunami isn’t only as unsparing as they Atkinson reconstructs the period from D-Day to V-E Day by come, but also defiantly imbued with light. The Third Coast – Thomas Dyja weaving a multitude of tiny details into a tapestry of sublime B DERANIYAGALA Ecstatic Nation – Brenda Wineapple This robust cultural history weaves together the stories of prose. He conveys the immensity of war, the absurdity, the A masterly Civil war-era history, full of foiled schemes, the artists, styles and ideas that developed in Chicago before heroism and iniquity. 940.5421 ATK misfired plans and less-than-happy endings. 973.6 WIN and after World War II. 977.311 DYJ

*Thank you for Your Service – David Finkel Empress Dowager CIXI – Jung Chang This Town – Mark Leibovich In this sequel to The Good Soldiers, Finkel’s concern is Chang portrays Cixi as a proto-feminist and reformer in this An entertaining and deeply troubling view of Washington. with the soldiers who return from the war zone bearing authoritative account. B CIXI 306.2 LEI wounds and with the loved ones on whom those wounds also become imprinted. 362.86 FIN

TIME Magazine Library Journal Nonfiction *The Bully Pulpit – Doris Kearns Goodwin Gettysburg – Allen Guelzo Guelzo retells the story of Gettysburg through exhaustive Explores the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt Cooked – Michael Pollan and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, when research and firsthand accounts of the action. Explores the four elements of food preparation: fire Roosevelt wielded the Bully Pulpit to triumph over abuse, 973.7439 GUE (barbecuing), water (braising and stewing), air (bread monopolies, political bosses, and corrupt money brokers. making), and earth (fermenting pickles, cheese, and 973.911 GOO Gulp – Mary Roach alcoholic brews). Well-researched and engaging. Roach draws on weird science to describe the voyage our 641.5 POL food takes from one end to the other. 612.3 ROA *Command and Control – Eric Schlosser Presents a minute-by-minute account of an H-bomb accident How to Create the Perfect Wife – Wendy Moore that nearly caused a nuclear disaster, examining other near Gun Guys – Dan Baum Meet Thomas Day, an 18th-century aristocrat free to study misses and America’s growing risk of a catastrophic event. Baum, a self-professed liberal Democrat and gun owner, and practice Enlightenment philosophies, who goes to an 355.825119 SCH traveled through the United States and explored American orphanage and adopts a girl for long-term training to be his gun culture in an attempt to understand why these machines wife. 823.6 MOO polarize us so. 683.4 BAUM Falling Upwards – Richard Holmes Focuses on the experiences of the enigmatic pioneers of The Searchers – Glenn Frankel human flight to explore the character qualities that inspired Iron Curtain – Traces the making of the influential 1950s film inspired by their ambitions. 387.732 HOL After the “real army” liberated Eastern Europe from Nazi the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was abducted by the control in 1945, the Soviet Union embarked on a systematic Comanche and returned to white culture twenty-four years overhaul of every aspect of life in these nations. 947 APP later. 791.43 FRA Forty-One False Starts – Janet Malcolm This collection of essays offers insight into the working These titles were chosen by Library minds of writers and artists including Edith Wharton, My American Revolution – Robert Sullivan Publishers Weekly Edward Weston, Thomas Struth, and Sylvia Plath. Key events of the Revolutionary War took place in and Journal, The New York Times, 808.02 MAL around present-day . 974.7 SUL * – Lawrence Wright Bookmarks, The Washington Post, Asks exactly the right questions about : What is Time, and Publishers Weekly as the it that makes the religion alluring? What do its adherents get The Selected Letters of Willa Cather – Andrew Jewell *My Beloved World – Sonia Sotomayor best nonfiction of 2013. A robust volume that deepens our understanding of the The first Hispanic-American on the Supreme Court out of it? How can seemingly rational people subscribe to novelist’s witty, tenacious and richly intelligent character. describes her youth in a Bronx housing project, the ambition beliefs that others find incomprehensible? 299.936 WRI 813.52 SEL that fueled her ivy-league education, and the individuals who helped shape her career. B SOTOMAYOR *Men We Reaped – Jesmyn Ward Acclaimed novelist Ward bravely enters nonfiction terrain Bookmarks in this starkly honest and deeply tragic account of the deaths The Real Jane Austen – Paula Byrne Through examining objects owned by Austen, Byrne reveals of five important men in her life. B WARD The Age of Edison – Ernest Freeberg a much more sophisticated novelist than history has led A history of the culture of invention as epitomized by readers to believe. B AUSTEN Thomas Edison demonstrates how America’s lead in the *Lost Girls – Robert Kolker The Ridgefield Library electric light revolution of the late-19th century transformed In 2010, a young female escort disappeared in a remote part the country. 303.483 FRE Why Does the World Exist? - Jim Holt of Long Island. Months later, police found the skeletal

Drawing on the ruminations of intellectuals, scientists, remains of four other young women. 364.1523 KOL *Designates books found on “best books” lists of philosophers, and writers, Holt tackles the most elusive *The Boys in the Boat – Daniel Brown more than one publication During the Great Depression nine working-class young men question humankind will ever ask. 113 HOLT *Miss Anne in Harlem – Carla Kaplan from the University of Washington shocked the sports world Scholar Kaplan presents the untold story of six notable by winning the gold medal in rowing at the Berlin (Annotations taken from publications) white women who embraced black culture – and life – in Olympics. Harlem in the 1920s and ‘30s. 700.92 KAP

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