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2003 - 2004
The Middle of Everywhere: The World’s Refugees Come to Our Town
by Mary Pipher
Pipher writes about her work as a “cultural broker”, teacher and counselor to refugees who relocate to her town, Lincoln, Nebraska. Many of them fled dangerous situations – war, genocide, repressive regimes. Their stories are heartrending. Anton, a Bosnian teenager, saw his father and grandfather shot in his living room. Trinh’s parents drowned crossing from Vietnam into Thailand. Pipher observes that, despite the challenges of surviving and adjusting (“Refugees come from a fire into a fire.”), those who adapt and prosper display amazing courage, love and compassion toward others.
Monsoon Diary
by Shoba Narayan
Shoba Narayan is the strong-willed and industrious daughter of Brahmin parents in South India. She introduces us to her exuberant extended family and the festivals, feasts and ceremonies that mark their lives. When she announces to her family that her application to study in the U.S. has been accepted, her family has a hundred objections. “No unmarried girl should venture into such a promiscuous society,” warns her grandmother. After much pleading on Shoba’s part, her uncle devises a test. She passes the test, which involves cooking a feast for her family, and is allowed to accept her fellowship. She describes her studies, her adjustment to American life, her jobs, and her longing for the comfort foods of her youth.
The Family on Beartown Road
by Elizabeth Cohen
Elizabeth Cohen, a writer and reporter for a Binghamton newspaper, lives an idyllic life with her husband, toddler and various dogs and cats in a farmhouse in upstate New York. Her life is disrupted when her distraught mother and sister ship her father, who has Alzheimer’s, across the country because they can no longer manage his care. When Elizabeth’s husband moves out, she is left alone to care for her father, who is losing language at an alarming rate and her daughter, who is soaking up language like a sponge. Caretaking consumes her time and energy, and Elizabeth is often overwhelmed. There are also wonderful moments, such as a walk the three of them take one snowy day. One reviewer described Cohen’s memoir as “a triumphant epic of coping”.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
by Alexander McCall Smith
Can Precious Ramotswe’s new detective agency, recently opened in Gaborone, Botswana, succeed? Although she has read The Principles of Private Investigation by Clovis Andersen, she has no formal training in detective work. What if no clients want her services? Precious soon finds she has plenty of interesting clients. Precious tackles each case with ingenuity, courage and common sense. She does her job out of a conviction that “people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother.”
Larry’s Party
by Carol Shields
What is life like for an “ordinary guy”? What does he worry about, dream about, wish for? What does he think about romance, marriage, divorce, aging, relationships? We first meet Larry Weller, ordinary guy, in 1977 when he is 26 years old, living in Winnipeg and working as a floral designer. On their honeymoon, he and his bride Dorrie visit England, and Larry develops a fascination with garden mazes. As we follow Larry’s life journey and his flourishing career as a designer of mazes, we experience also his failed marriages, his relationship with his son, and his quest for self-awareness. Carol Shields writes with engaging humor and earnestness about this most ordinary Everyman.
The Monk Downstairs
by Tim Farrington
Michael Christopher has left the monastery where he devoted his life to prayer and contemplation for the past 20 years. He moves to San Francisco, rents the downstairs apartment owned by 38-year-old Rebecca Martin, a divorced single mother, and gets a job at McDonalds. Rebecca, who is raising her 6-year-old daughter, working at a job she doesn’t enjoy and bailing her ex-husband, a pot-smoking failed professional surfer, out of jail, is not looking for another complication in her life. After all, she has just turned down a marriage proposal from slick Bob Schofield. Besides, wouldn’t having an affair with a former monk be like getting involved with someone on the rebound from a relationship with God?
On Green Dolphin Street
by Sebastian Faulks
Mary Van der Linden is a reserved Englishwoman, loving mother of two children and devoted wife of Charlie, a brilliant and charming diplomat posted to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Mary watches as her husband sinks into alcoholism and depression and neglects his work and family. When Frank Renzo, an American WWII vet and journalist based in New York, declares his love for her, Mary is faced with a difficult moral choice. As a background to this tormented love triangle, Faulks meticulously details the food, music, social scene and politics of the 1960’s.
I Want That!: How We All Became Shoppers
by Thomas Hine
In his introduction, Hine observes that “most people in developed societies spend large percentages of their waking hours shopping, preparing to shop, or being urged to do so.” How old is the impulse to acquire things? Do women like to shop more than men because they traditionally had the responsibility for nurturing and sustaining the family? How did the tradition of giving presents at Christmas evolve? Hine analyzes our contemporary shopping habits and places them in the context of human history.
The Piano Tuner
by Daniel Mason
Colonial Burma in the late 1800’s is a stew of intrigue and revolt. The British are trying to consolidate their power over the region and prevent the French from moving into Burma from Indochina. The British war office hires London piano tuner Edgar Drake for an unusual mission. Anthony Carroll, an eccentric British Major-Surgeon, has had a grand piano shipped to his camp, and the dampness has caused it to go out of tune. Drake must travel halfway around the world to fix it. Caught up by Carroll’s charisma and entranced by the beauty of the country and its people, Drake’s journey opens his life to new places and rich experiences – and dangerous decisions.
Talking to High Monks in the Snow
by Lydia Minatoya
Minatoya, the American-born daughter of Japanese immigrants, grew up in Albany, NY, in the 1950’s. Despite the discrimination that her parents experience, including the indignity of spending the war in a relocation camp, both have unwavering faith in the promise of their adopted country. Lydia embarks on a search to reconcile the cultural forces that shaped her. She teaches on an army base in Okinawa, then travels to China and Nepal and to Japan, where she meets the patriarch of her mother’s family.
Titles Selected by Suzanne Fisher, Librarian
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