In the late summer of a long ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy.
Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating in detail Blackwood’s crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family—his wife and three children—will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer.
As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return.
Here is ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling.
Description: Ever since being brought up by The Beatles, Frankie Boyle has been a tremendous liar. Join him on his adventures with his chum Clangy The Brass Boy and laugh as he doesn’t accidentally kill a student nurse when a party gets out of hand. I don’t think anyone can have written an autobiography without at some point thinking “Why would anyone want to know this shit?” I’ve always read them thinking “I don’t want to know where Steve Tyler grew up, just tell me how many groupies he f**ked!”’ So begins Frankie’s outrageous, laugh-out loud, cynical rant on life as he knows it. From growing up in Pollockshaws, Glasgow (‘it was an aching cement void, a slap in the face to Childhood, and for the family it was a step up’), to his rampant teenage sex drive (‘in those days if you glimpsed a nipple on T.V. it was like porn Christmas’), and first job working in a mental hospital (‘where most evenings were spent persuading an old man in his pants not to eat a family sized block of cheese’), nothing is out of bounds. Outspoken, outrageous and brilliantly inappropriate, Frankie Boyle, the dark heart of Mock the Week, says the unsayable as only he can. From the TV programmes he would like to see made (‘Celebrities On Acid On Ice: just like Celebrity Dancing On Ice, but with an opening sequence where Graham Norton hoses the celebrities down with liquid LSD’), to his native Scotland and the Mayor of London (‘voting for Boris Johnson wasn’t that different to voting for a Labrador wearing a Wonder Woman costume’), nothing and no one is safe from Frankie’s fearless, sharp-tongued assault. Sharply observed and full of taboo-busting, we-really-shouldn’t-be-laughing-at-this humour, “My Sh*t Life So Far” shows why Frankie Boyle really is the blackest man in show business.
Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down—all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years. Yet Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair. This bold book covers the entire sweep of human history, from the Stone Age to the Internet, from the stagnation of the Ming empire to the invention of the steam engine, from the population explosion to the likely consequences of climate change. It ends with a confident assertion that thanks to the ceaseless capacity of the human race for innovative change, and despite inevitable disasters along the way, the twenty-first century will see both human prosperity and natural biodiversity enhanced. Acute, refreshing, and revelatory, The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories? --Tom Nissley Amazon Exclusive: Jad Abumrad Reviews The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Jad Abumrad is host and creator of the public radio hit Radiolab, now in its seventh season and reaching over a million people monthly. Radiolab combines cutting-edge production with a philosophical approach to big ideas in science and beyond, and an inventive method of storytelling. Abumrad has won numerous awards, including a National Headliner Award in Radio and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Award. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Honestly, I can't imagine a better tale. A detective story that's at once mythically large and painfully intimate. Just the simple facts are hard to believe: that in 1951, a poor black woman named Henrietta Lacks dies of cervical cancer, but pieces of the tumor that killed her--taken without her knowledge or consent--live on, first in one lab, then in hundreds, then thousands, then in giant factories churning out polio vaccines, then aboard rocket ships launched into space. The cells from this one tumor would spawn a multi-billion dollar industry and become a foundation of modern science--leading to breakthroughs in gene mapping, cloning and fertility and helping to discover how viruses work and how cancer develops (among a million other things). All of which is to say: the science end of this story is enough to blow one's mind right out of one's face. But what's truly remarkable about Rebecca Skloot's book is that we also get the rest of the story, the part that could have easily remained hidden had she not spent ten years unearthing it: Who was Henrietta Lacks? How did she live? How she did die? Did her family know that she'd become, in some sense, immortal, and how did that affect them? These are crucial questions, because science should never forget the people who gave it life. And so, what unfolds is not only a reporting tour de force but also a very entertaining account of Henrietta, her ancestors, her cells and the scientists who grew them. The book ultimately channels its journey of discovery though Henrietta's youngest daughter, Deborah, who never knew her mother, and who dreamt of one day being a scientist. As Deborah Lacks and Skloot search for answers, we're bounced effortlessly from the tiny tobacco-farming Virginia hamlet of Henrietta's childhood to modern-day Baltimore, where Henrietta's family remains. Along the way, a series of unforgettable juxtapositions: cell culturing bumps into faith healings, cutting edge medicine collides with the dark truth that Henrietta's family can't afford the health insurance to care for diseases their mother's cells have helped to cure. Rebecca Skloot tells the story with great sensitivity, urgency and, in the end, damn fine writing. I highly recommend this book. --Jad Abumrad Look Inside The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Click on thumbnails for larger images Henrietta and David Lacks, circa 1945. Elsie Lacks, Henrietta’s older daughter, about five years before she was committed to Crownsville State Hospital, with a diagnosis of “idiocy.” Deborah Lacks at about age four. The home-house where Henrietta was raised, a four-room log cabin in Clover, Virginia, that once served as slave quarters. (1999) Main Street in downtown Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta was raised, circa 1930s. Margaret Gey and Minnie, a lab technician, in the Gey lab at Hopkins, circa 1951. Deborah with her children, LaTonya and Alfred, and her second husband, James Pullum, in the mid-1980s. In 2001, Deborah developed a severe case of hives after learning upsetting new information about her mother and sister. Deborah and her cousin Gary Lacks standing in front of drying tobacco, 2001. The Lacks family in 2009.
In the introduction to his 2003 collection of journalism, “Death as a Way of Life,” the Israeli novelist David Grossmanwrote: “The daily reality in which I live surpasses anything I could imagine, and it seeps into my deepest parts.” In a note at the conclusion of his somber, haunting new novel, “To the End of the Land,” he explains that he began writing it in May 2003 — around the same time he wrote that introduction, six months before the end of his older son’s military service and a year and a half before his younger son, Uri, enlisted. “At the time,” he writes, “I had the feeling — or rather, a wish — that the book I was writing would protect him.”
“On Aug. 12, 2006,” Grossman continues, “in the final hours of the Second Lebanon War, Uri was killed in Southern Lebanon.” By that time, most of this book “was already written. What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written.”
It is a testament to Grossman’s novelistic talent, indeed perhaps his genius, that “To the End of the Land” manages to create and dramatize a world that gives both the reality and the echo their full due. He weaves the essences of private life into the tapestry of history with deliberate and delicate skill; he has created a panorama of breathtaking emotional force, a masterpiece of pacing, of dedicated storytelling, with characters whose lives are etched with extraordinary, vivid detail. While his novel has the vast sweep of pure tragedy, it is also at times playful, and utterly engrossing; it is filled with original and unexpected detail about domestic life, about the shapes and shadows that surround love and memory, and about the sharp and desperate edges of loss and fear.
This novel is, on the one hand, a retelling of Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim,” in which two guys, best friends, fall in love with the same girl. Ora, the girl in this novel, is emotional, introspective, filled with an ability to notice and an ability to love. As for the boys, Ilan is rational, vulnerable, brittle, oddly needy and nerdy; and Avram is impulsive, brilliant, super*intelligent, larger than life. Having loved them both, Ora finally decides to marry Ilan, and they have a son, Adam; a few years later, made pregnant by Avram, she has a second son, Ofer, who is brought up as though he were Ilan’s child.
In another society, this might have the makings of a comedy, but in Israel between 1967 and 2000, the years in which the novel takes place, public life had a way of eating into the most private moments and the most intimate relationships and poisoning them. Avram is captured and tortured during the 1973 war; this free-spirited, somewhat goofy genius is thereafter a broken man. He does not want to have anything to do with his old friends and does not want to see his son.
In parallel with the pain and terror of war, there is daily life. Grossman offers a wonderful, almost quirky account of Ora raising her two boys. He has a way of making the most ordinary moments glow, each detail chosen to suggest how odd and engaging people are, and how unsimple and deeply interesting human relations become. Like everything else in the book, the haven of love and care that Ora creates for her sons and her husband is invaded by fear and misery and a sort of coarseness once her sons begin their military service, entering a world of roadblocks, ambushes and arrests that she can only imagine in horror.
With her husband and elder son away in South America, Ora arranges to go on a hike with Ofer when his time with the military is up. Instead, he re-enlists. Ora must again live in fear of the “notifiers” from the army, who might call in the night, knocking on her door to deliver bad news.
Rather than staying at home and waiting, however, Ora settles on an almost magical way of keeping her son safe: she will not be there for the notifiers if they call. She will go to the north of Israel without a phone, where no one can notify her of anything, and she will hike south and not listen to news. She will find Avram, the boy’s father, and she will make him come with her.
The novel traces what happens as they walk and talk. Most of the time this device works brilliantly. Ora needs to tell Avram about his son, every single detail she can think of, to make him come alive for his natural father for the first time. By invoking him with such zeal, however, she is already placing him in the past. This casts a shadow on their walk and imbues their conversation with a sort of dark tension. At times, Ora’s level of self-consciousness, her alertness to the emotional contours of things, her exquisite introspection, give this story the depth and privacy of an *Ingmar Bergman film, especially “Scenes From a Marriage.” The story she tells darts between public and private life, between war and torture on the one hand and the sweet anxieties of bourgeois life on the other.
As in other novels of love and loyalty in a time of conflict — Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter,” Michael Ondaatje’s “English Patient” or Shirley Hazzard’s “Great Fire” — there is a palpable urgency here about the carnal and the sexual. The portrait of Ora as a woman alive in her body is one of the triumphs of Grossman’s book.
Grossman also manages to play the ordinary against the highly charged. He displays masterly control over the emotional life of the novel, maintaining it at a very high level indeed, and then pushing it at points where the narrative becomes almost unbearable. There is a moment, for example, when Ora and Avram meet a man on their journey who says, “It’s good to get away from the news a bit, especially after yesterday,” and you simply have to put the book down, so great is your fear for Ora’s son. There is another moment, told in flashback, when Avram, delirious in the hospital, having been released from captivity after the war, when he was led to believe that Israel had been fully defeated, asks Ora: “Is there . . . Is there an Israel?” Again, the tension becomes so great that you hold your breath.
To say this is an antiwar book is to put it too mildly, and in any case such labels do an injustice to its great sweep, the levels of its sympathy. There is a plenitude of felt life in the book. There is a novelist’s notice taken of the sheer complexity not only of the characters but of the legacy of pain and conflict written into the gnarled and beautiful landscape through which Ora and Avram walk. And there is the story itself, unfolded with care and truth, wit and tenderness and rare understanding. This is one of those few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world.
Colm Toibin is the author, most recently, of the novel “Brooklyn.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, a former candidate for the presidency of Peru , is better placed than most novelists to write about the machinations of Latin American politics. In The Feast of the Goat he offers a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo's insidious and evil regime. Told from several viewpoints, the book has three distinctive, alternating strands. There is Urania Cabral, the daughter of Trujillo's disgraced secretary of state, who has returned to Santo Domingo after more than 30 years. Now a successful New York lawyer, Urania has never forgiven her aging and paralyzed father, AgustÃn, for literally sacrificing her to the carnal despot in the hope of regaining his political post. Flipping back to May of 1961, there is a group of assassins, all equally scarred by Trujillo, waiting to gun the Generalissimo down. Finally there is an astonishing portrait of Trujillo--the Goat--and his grotesque coterie. Llosa depicts Trujillo as a villain of Shakespearean proportions. He is a preening, macho dandy who equates his own virility with the nation's health. An admirer of Hitler "not for his ideas but for the way he wore a uniform" (fittingly he equips his secret police force with a fleet of black Volkswagen Beetles), Trujillo even has his own Himler in Colonel Abbes Garcia, a vicious torturer with a predilection for the occult.
As the novel edges toward Trujillo's inevitable murder, Urania's story gets a bit lost in the action; the remaining narratives however, are rarely short of mesmerizing. Trujillo's death unleashes a new order, but not the one expected by the conspirators. Enslaved by the soul of the dead chief, neither they nor the Trujillo family--who embark on a hideous spree of bloody reprisals--are able to fill the void. Llosa has them all skillfully outmaneuvered by the puppet-president JoaquÃn Belaguer, a former poet who is the very antithesis of the machismo Goat. Savage, touching, and bleakly funny, this compelling book gives an all too human face to one of Latin America's most destructive tyrants. --Travis Elborough,
Mick Jagger has always looked -- will always look -- like Mick Jagger. But try to connect the glum schoolboy-guitarist of early '60s black-and-white pics with the Keith Richards of today. A heap of living and occasional bouts of near-dying have gone into that flayed, weathered, kohl-eyed visage, whose topography suggests a moonscape irrigated with Jack Daniel's. After half a century on the road, Richards has the face he deserves -- but not, it appears, the brain. Against all pharmaceutical odds, he has held on to a substantial portion of his own history and has turned it into the most scabrously honest and essential rock memoir in a long time. Then again, where's the competition? The gods of rock-and-roll tend to falter on the printed page. (Even Bob Dylan disappoints.) Maybe that's what comes from being a frontman: Gazing night after night into fame's corona blinds you to everything else. It's the guys prowling around behind you, the Harrisons and the Townshends, who take the fullest measure. How else to explain why Richards's "Life" is almost as densely packed as his life? Seemingly everything is here: the shabby origins in an East London suburb ("Everyone from Dartford is a thief. It runs in the blood"); the brief career as, yes, a boy soprano; the first guitar at 15; the astonishingly rapid rise to fame; the groupies and birds and dealers and sidemen; the booms, the busts, the loves lost and won; the hard-won and faintly miraculous old age. In some cases, Richards's memories are supplemented by others; on every page, they are shaped by co-writer James Fox. But the voice that emerges is unmistakably the dark lord's: growly and profane and black with comedy. And, for all that, surprisingly charming, particularly in limning the Rolling Stones' origins, which can be traced, mundanely enough, to a fateful encounter in a train station. Here is how the young Keith described it at the time in a letter to his aunt: "You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin' on Dartford Stn. (that's so I don't have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck's records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y'know came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too. . . . Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger . . . the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe." Still teenagers, Mick and Keith were soon recruiting other musicians to their cause -- a guitarist named Brian Jones, a drummer named Charlie Watts -- and spending every hour of every day listening to American blues players, trying to divine the music's secret language. They borrowed their band's name from a Muddy Waters tune, nabbed their first regular gig at a joint called the Crawdaddy Club, and within six weeks they were famous. Take that, Lennon and McCartney! Small wonder that the Stones were marketed from the very start as "the anti-Beatles," the boys you must never let your daughters marry (and who will, on occasion, resemble your daughters). And through a combination of provocative behavior and equally provocative songs like "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Paint It Black," they got themselves promoted to "most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world," a reputation sealed by the violent 1969 concert at California's Altamont Speedway. Infamy like this doesn't seem to have bothered Richards too much. And if he's less enthused by fame, he's never shied away from its perks. As a pop star, everything was vouchsafed to him: other people's clothes; other people's women; a battery of lawyers to bail him out every time he was arrested; a posse of enablers, leaving him free to do what he did best, which was to make music and get high. He undertook getting high with particular gusto: first weed and hash, then coke ("pure, pure Merck") and, for a ruinous decade, heroin. Even by rock standards, his consumption levels were Olympian. For a decade, he topped a magazine's list of "rock stars most likely to die." And yet here he is, defiantly alive, and defiant in every other respect, too, his language just as politically incorrect, his judgments every bit as summary. The late Brian Jones: a whiner. Hugh Hefner: "What a nut." Bianca Jagger: "If she'd had a sense of humor, I'd have married her!" John Lennon: "a silly sod" who never left Richards's house "except horizontally." As for Anita Pallenberg, the model/actress/addict who bore three of Richards's children, family-newspaper decorum prevents me from repeating the author's opinions (even the nice ones). By far the most complex and threshed-out relationship is the one between those two kids at the Dartford train station. They found early on that they were perfectly matched as songwriters -- Richards provided the riffs and chords, Jagger the lyrics -- but ill-matched as people. "Do you know Mick Jagger?" Richards snarls. "Yeah, which one? He's a nice bunch of guys." "Life" is larded with anecdotes of Jagger's egotism and vanity, not to mention aspersions against his manhood, and the hostility piles so high you may be pulled up short when Richards at last writes, with something of a defeated sigh, "I love the man dearly; I'm still his mate." The word "mate" is well chosen, for this is a portrait of a marriage: an impossible union impossible to dissolve. Nearly 50 years on, Jagger and Richards are still (in a fashion) together, still (in a small way) making music. And it's one of the book's triumphs that it never completely loses sight of that music. Richards offers revealing looks into the genesis of individual songs (the breakup that inspired "Ruby Tuesday," for instance) and the complex open tuning that gave records like "Start Me Up" and "Honky Tonk Women" a reverb like no other. By book's end, one thing at least is clear: The work has mattered as much to Richards as the life; at some level, his work has been his life. "I could kick smack," he writes. "I couldn't kick music. One note leads to another, and you never know quite what's going to come next, and you don't want to." Bayard is a novelist who lives in Washington.
In First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover, Sameera showed the United States it was ready for a Pakistani-born First Daughter. With her brains and bravado,White House. Fabulous! Right? Actually, it's no fairy tale. The Secret Service and the paparazzi follow Sameera everywhere. She misses her friends—and even her school—back home. So Sameera decides to escape. Will she be able to pull it off, or will her plan backfire on the entire First Family? This smart and funny novel continues the adventures of a Pakistani- American teen in the spotlight.
