THE DEATH OF SANTINI: The Story of a Father and His Son by Pat Conroy.
One of our best storytellers, Southern or otherwise, and author of
The Prince of Tides and
Beach Music (among others), has written this powerful and intimate memoir about his relationship with his dad. It's a story many know something about - Conroy's tough Marine father was the inspiration for
The Great Santini - and now Conroy provides his own cathartic closure.
The relationship between father and son, the oldest of seven children, did not exactly grow and prosper in the early years. Conroy said of the often brutal, cruel,and violent patriarch,"I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for 'hate.'" But thanks in part to his long-suffering mother, Conroy was exposed to culture and books and eventually became a successful writer. As might be imagined, the publication of
The Great Santini didn't do much for family harmony, but what we discover in
The Death of Santini is that even the oldest of wounds can heal and demons may be exorcised.
DOUBLE DOWN: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilmann.
This is the duo that wrote
Game Change, a fascinating and fabulous recounting of the 2008 presidential campaign. The book was meaty enough to please political junkies and entertaining enough to engage the casual voter, as politi
cal reporters Halperin and Heilmann proved themselves tenacious interviewers and fact-gatherers as well as terrific storytellers.
The sequel.
Double Down, presents an account of the 2012 presidential election that draws again on hundreds of insider interviews to chronicle the ups and downs of another wild and woolly election cycle. The Republicans ride the nomination roller coaster that finally ends with Mitt Romney's victory, while President Obama faces an re-election that will not be swayed by messages of hope but rather one that will vindicate or repudiate what he has accomplished to date. The details come from people who lived the story, and the authors again write with page-turning skill.
THE BULLY PULPIT: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin. You all know author and historian Goodwin - she wrote
Team of Rivals, which was the basis of the movie
Lincoln, which won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar. Now she returns with a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era at the turn of the
20th century.
Goodwin tells her story through the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, a close friendship that ruptured in 1912 when they engaged in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination. That bitter campaign served to divide their families and friends, while crippling the progressive wing of the Republican Party and causing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to be elected. The book also examines the muckraking press of the time - comprised of some of the best investigative journalists in our country's history and willing providers of a bully pulpit for the reform-minded Roosevelt.
about a middle-school weakling named Greg Heffley. He worked on the concept for six years before publishing it on Funbrain.com in daily installments. To date, the online version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid has more than 80 million visits, and is typically read by more than 70,000 kids a day - wow!
text with Kinney's cartoon drawings and was an immediate hit with elementary and middle school readers. Hard Luck, just out in independent bookstores, is book #8 of what is now a hugely successful franchise. Here's a video of Kinney himself talking about the new title.