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Rainy Day Books
Rainy Day Books is located in
The Fairway Shops
2706 W 53rd Street
Fairway, Kansas 66205-1705
Phone: 913-384-3126

Store Hours:
Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri 10 to 6 and Saturdays 10 to 5
Sundays we are Home with our families and friends when we read and rest!

In This Newsletter
Tuesday Night: Mary Pipher, Ph.D.
Wednesday Night: Tim O'Mara
Great New Books arriving this Week!
HERE THEY COME!
Our World-Famous Author Events Calendar!

 

Mary Pipher, Tuesday, July 16

 

Tim O'Mara, Wednesday, July 17

 

B.A. Shapiro, Tuesday, July 23

 

Julie Garwood, Tuesday, August 6

 

Susannah Cahalan, Wednesday, August 14

 

Daniel Woodrell, Tuesday, September 3

 

Marisha Pessl, Tuesday, September 10

 

Mark Lee Gardner, Wednesday, September 18

 

Tracey Garvis Graves, Wednesday, September 18

 

Michael Chabon, Thursday, September 19

 

Kate White, Monday, September 23

 

Thomas Keneally, Thursday, September 26

 

Bill McKibben, Friday, September 27

 

Terry McMillan, Thursday, October 3

 

Garrison Keillor, Tuesday, October 8

 

Nicholas Sparks, Thursday, October 10

 

Stephen Jimenez, Thursday, October 17

Volume 644                        July 15, 2013

Greetings! ,

 

Chris Bohjalian + Stephen P. Kiernan Event 07102013

 

Last Week Rainy Day Books hosted 2 Award-Winning, Bestselling and Notable Authors.  Chris Bohjalian gave us an intriguing Multimedia PowerPoint Presentation of his New Book The Light in the Ruins followed by Vivien Jennings joining Chris and Stephen P. Kiernan In Conversation about Chris' New Book and Stephen's New Book The Curiosity.  Both Authors Autographed Hardcovers of their New Books for us to sell and ship globally.  Books make great gifts that can be opened again and again. 

 

Open Books feed to Open Minds, 

 

Vivien & Roger 

Tuesday Night:  Mary Pipher, Ph.D., will appear In Conversation about her New Book The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

MaryPipher 

Mary Pipher, Ph.D., will discuss her New Book The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture In Conversation with Vivien Jennings, Founder & President of Rainy Day Books, Inc.

 

In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher, Ph.D., offered a paradigm-shattering look at the lives of adolescent women.  Now Dr. Pipher returns with another ground-breaking examination of everyday life, this time exploring how to conquer our fears about the major environmental issues that confound us and transform them into a positive force in our lives.  Dr. Pipher emphasizes the importance of taking small, positive steps to preserve what's important, drawing from her own experiences as part of a group fighting energy company TransCanada's installation of the Keystone XL oil pipeline across the Midwest, which will sit atop the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of 40% of the United States' fresh water.  The challenges she confronts reveal surprising answers to the critical questions we face: How do we mobilize ourselves and our communities to work together to solve global problems?   How do we stay happy amid very difficult situations?   And what is the true meaning of hope?  Both profound and practical, The Green Boat explains how we can attend to the world around us with calmness, balance, and great love.  

 

Jim Pipher, Ph.D., Mary's Husband will entertain us with his guitar before Mary gives her Presentation.

 

Bring your family, friends and colleagues to join the Conversation that will give you direction, insight and solutions. 

 

This Event is Tuesday, July 16, 2013 at 7:00 PM at Unity Temple on The Plaza, Sanctuary, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64112. 

Wednesday Night:  Tim O'Mara will present his New Novel Sacrifice Fly

TimOmara 
Novelist Tim O'Mara will present his acclaimed debut mystery Sacrifice Fly.

 

Tim O'Mara has been teaching math and special education in the New York City public schools since 1987.  He has written several short stories, and his second Raymond Donne mystery, Crooked Numbers, will launch in Bookstores on October 15, 2013.  O'Mara's debut mystery, Sacrifice Fly has been nominated for the 2013 "Best First Novel" Barry Award.  The novel introduced the series hero Raymond Donne, a Brooklyn public schoolteacher who was once an up-and-coming Police Officer until a tragic accident destroyed his knees and the future he envisioned on the force. 

 

O'Mara was inspired to write Sacrifice Fly and create the character of Raymond Donne after making home visits while a schoolteacher in the poorer section of the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn.  Further moved by his many interactions with the Youth Officers of the NYPD while he served as a middle school dean and his brother's stories as a police sergeant, O'Mara believed that a character with experience in both worlds would make a great protagonist.

 

This Event is Wednesday, July 17, 2013 at 7:00 PM at Rainy Day Books in The Fairway Shops.

 
Great New Books arrive on our shelves every Tuesday!  Be the first to discover something New and Wonderful!

The English Girl

The English Girl

Daniel Silva

Doubleday

 

Madeline Hart is a rising star in Britain's governing party: beautiful, intelligent, driven by an impoverished childhood to succeed. But she is also a woman with a dark secret: she is the lover of Prime Minister Jonathan Lancaster. Somehow, her kidnappers have learned of the affair, and they intend to make the British leader pay dearly for his sins. Fearful of a scandal that will destroy his career, Lancaster decides to handle the matter privately rather than involve the British police. It is a risky gambit, not only for the prime minister but also for the operative who will conduct the search. You have seven days, or the girl dies. Enter Gabriel Allon--master assassin, art restorer and spy--who is no stranger to dangerous assignments or political intrigue. With the clock ticking, Gabriel embarks on a desperate attempt to bring Madeline home safely. His mission takes him from the criminal underworld of Marseilles to an isolated valley in the mountains of Provence to the stately if faded corridors of power in London--and, finally, to a pulse-pounding climax in Moscow, a city of violence and spies where there is a long list of men who wish Gabriel dead.

 

The Never List

The Never List

Koethi Zan

Pamela Dorman Books

 

For years, best friends Sarah and Jennifer kept what they called the "Never List": a list of actions to be avoided, for safety's sake, at all costs. But one night, against their best instincts, they accept a cab ride with grave, everlasting consequences. For the next three years, they are held captive with two other girls in a dungeon-like cellar by a connoisseur of sadism. Ten years later, at thirty-one, Sarah is still struggling to resume a normal life, living as a virtual recluse under a new name, unable to come to grips with the fact that Jennifer didn't make it out of that cellar. Now, her abductor is up for parole and Sarah can no longer ignore the twisted letters he sends from jail. Finally, Sarah decides to confront her phobias and the other survivors-who hold their own deep grudges against her. When she goes on a cross-country chase that takes her into the perverse world of BDSM, secret cults, and the arcane study of torture, she begins unraveling a mystery more horrifying than even she could have imagined.

 

The Violet Hour

The Violet Hour

Katherine Hill

Scribner

 

Life hasn't always been perfect for Abe and Cassandra Green, but an afternoon on the San Francisco Bay might be as good as it gets. Abe is a rheumatologist, piloting his coveted new boat. Cassandra is a sculptor, finally gaining modest attention for her art. Their beautiful daughter, Elizabeth, is heading to Harvard in the fall. Somehow, they've made things work. But then, out of nowhere, they plunge into a terrible fight. Cassandra has been unfaithful. In a fit of fury, Abe throws himself off the boat.

 

Hunting Eve

Hunting Eve

Iris Johansen

St. Martin's Press

 

#1 New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen brings us book two in a heart-stopping new Eve Duncan trilogy The stakes are raised even higher in Hunting Eve as Eve battles the man who is holding her prisoner. Secrets about why Eve has been targeted come into the light, bringing Eve even closer to danger. With its cliffhanger ending, Hunting Eve sets up perfectly for the finale, Silencing Eve.

 

Return to Oakpine

Return to Oakpine

Ron Carlson

Viking Adult

 

In this finely wrought portrait of western American life, Ron Carlson takes us to the small town of Oakpine, Wyoming, and into the lives of four men trying to make peace with who they are in the world. In high school, these men were in a band. One of them, Jimmy, left Oakpine for New York City after the tragic death of his brother. A successful novelist, he has returned thirty years later, in 1999-because he is dying. With Carlson's characteristic grace, we learn what has become of these friends and the different directions of their lives. Craig and Frank never left; Mason, a top lawyer in Denver, is back in town to fix up and sell his parents' house. Now that they are reunited, getting the band back together might be the most important thing they can do.

 

Fin & Lady

Blood and Beauty: The Borgias

Sarah Dunant

Random House

 

By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family-in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia-in order to succeed. Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest-though increasingly unstable-weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli's The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player.

 

The Secret Keeper

The Secret Keeper

Kate Morton

Washington Square Press

 

During a summer party at the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson has escaped to her childhood tree house and is happily dreaming of the future. But before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime. A crime that challenges everything she knows about her family and especially her mother, Dorothyher vivacious, loving, nearly perfect mother. Now, fifty years later, the family is gathering at Greenacres farm for Dorothys ninetieth birthday. Realizing that this may be her last chance, Laurel searches for answers to the questions that haunt her from that long-ago day, answers that can only be found in Dorothys past. Dorothys story takes the reader from preWWII England through the blitz, to the 60s and beyond. It is the secret history of three strangers from vastly different worlds who meet by chance in wartime London and whose lives are forever entwined. Author Kate Morton, who excels at creating absorbing mystery (People), explores longings and dreams and the unexpected consequences they sometimes have.

 

The Weight of a Human Heart: Stories

The Weight of a Human Heart: Stories

Ryan O'Neill

St. Martin's Press

 

Ranging from Australia and Africa to Europe and Asia and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart heralds a fresh and important new voice in fiction. Ryan O'Neill takes us on a journey that is sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, and wholly original. A young Tutsi girl flees her village on the brink of the Rwandan genocide. A literary duel-and an affair-play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother's disturbing secrets through the broken key on a typewriter. With imagination, wit, and a keen eye, Ryan O'Neill draws the essence of the human experience with a cast of characters who stick with you long after you turn the last page of this brilliant short story collection.

 

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital

Mark Leibovich

Blue Rider Press

 

Washington-This Town-might be loathed from every corner of the nation, yet these are fun and busy days at this nexus of big politics, big money, big media, and big vanity. There are no Democrats and Republicans anymore in the nation's capital, just millionaires. That is the grubby secret of the place in the twenty-first century. You will always have lunch in This Town again. No matter how many elections you lose, apologies you make, or scandals you endure. In This Town, Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, presents a blistering, stunning-and often hysterically funny-examination of our ruling class's incestuous "media industrial complex." Through his eyes, we discover how the funeral for a beloved newsman becomes the social event of the year. How political reporters are fetishized for their ability to get their names into the predawn e-mail sent out by the city's most powerful and puzzled-over journalist. How a disgraced Hill aide can overcome ignominy and maybe emerge with a more potent "brand" than many elected members of Congress. And how an administration bent on "changing Washington" can be sucked into the ways of This Town with the same ease with which Tea Party insurgents can, once elected, settle into it like a warm bath.

 

Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

Tom Kizzia

Crown

 

When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new neighbors had little idea of the trouble to come. The Pilgrim Family presented themselves as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal, with their proud piety and beautiful old-timey music, but their true story ran dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa had bulldozed a road through the mountains to the new family home at an abandoned copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the National Park Service and forcing his ghost town neighbors to take sides in an ever-more volatile battle over where a citizen's rights end and the government's power begins. In Pilgrim's Wilderness, veteran Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia unfolds the remarkable, at times harrowing, story of a charismatic spinner of American myths who was not what he seemed, the townspeople caught in his thrall, and the family he brought to the brink of ruin. As Kizzia discovered, Papa Pilgrim was in fact the son of a rich Texas family with ties to Hoover's FBI and strange, oblique connections to the Kennedy assassination and the movie stars of Easy Rider. And as his fight with the government in Alaska grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive.

 

JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President

Thurston Clarke

Penguin Press

 

Kennedy's last hundred days began just after the death of two-day-old Patrick Kennedy, and during this time, the president made strides in the Cold War, civil rights, Vietnam, and his personal life. While Jackie was recuperating, the premature infant and his father were flown to Boston for Patrick's treatment. Kennedy was holding his son's hand when Patrick died on August 9, 1963. The loss of his son convinced Kennedy to work harder as a husband and father, and there is ample evidence that he suspended his notorious philandering during these last months of his life. Also in these months Kennedy finally came to view civil rights as a moral as well as a political issue, and after the March on Washington, he appreciated the power of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., for the first time. Though he is often depicted as a devout cold warrior, Kennedy pushed through his proudest legislative achievement in this period, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. This success, combined with his warming relations with Nikita Khrushchev in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, led to a d�tente that British foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas- Home hailed as the "beginning of the end of the Cold War." Throughout his presidency, Kennedy challenged demands from his advisers and the Pentagon to escalate America's involvement in Vietnam. Kennedy began a reappraisal in the last hundred days that would have led to the withdrawal of all sixteen thousand U.S. military advisers by 1965. JFK's Last Hundred Days is a gripping account that weaves together Kennedy's public and private lives, explains why the grief following his assassination has endured so long, and solves the most tantalizing Kennedy mystery of all-not who killed him but who he was when he was killed, and where he would have led us.

 

Bully

Bully

Laura Vaccaro Seeger

Roaring Brook Press

 

Bully doesn't have a kind word for any of his friends. When the other animals ask him to play, he responds in the way he's been taught: Chicken! Slow poke! You stink! Laura Vaccaro Seeger's bold, graphic artwork, along with her spare but powerful words, make for a tender, hilarious, and thoughtful tale.

 


Thank You for supporting Your Community Bookseller, Rainy Day Books!

Since 1975, we have pursued our Legacy of Literacy: 38 years of helping match readers to great books, bringing famous and soon-to-be-famous names to Kansas City, and enjoying the excitement of sharing so many experiences.

 

Take the time to tell someone new about Rainy Day Books.  Each book that you purchase at Rainy Day Books makes Rainy Day Books a place authors ask to visit, a vibrant part of Kansas City's arts community, and a bookstore where people love books enough to talk about them all day long.  Please encourage your fellow readers to sign up for this E-Newsletter.  We have an exciting schedule of upcoming Author Events, and this is the first place to hear about them!  We also take Orders for Author Autographed Books, so your friends far and wide can share in the experience.

 

Rainy Day Books is located in The Fairway Shops, at the intersection of Shawnee Mission Parkway and Belinder Road.  Our address is 2706 W 53rd Street, Fairway, Kansas (KS) 66205.

 

Get directions to Rainy Day Books and our Event venues by clicking here. 

 

Store Hours:  Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Fri 10 AM to 6 PM, Sat 10 AM to 5 PM, and Sundays we read, rest and enjoy our families and friends.

 

When you shop at Rainy Day Books you're a part of our Legacy of Literacy for Kansas City.  We provide full service, knowledgeable recommendations and priceless Author Event experiences, all at a fair price.  To our customers, 

thank you for your support. 

 

We look forward to seeing you soon!

 

Vivien Jennings & Roger Doeren  


Vivien, Roger, and all of your friends at Rainy Day Books