The Embers : a novel

by Hyatt Bass. This heart-wrenching debut novel from filmmaker Bass (Seventy-Five Degrees in July) crisscrosses 16 years of one family's life, weaving a tender tale riveting in its realism. In the fall of 2007, bride-to-be Emily Ascher should be deliriously happy but instead is coping with many doubts and dilemmas. While confident of her love for her fiancé and now enjoying an easier give-and-take with her mother, Emily still faces an uneasy relationship with her father. Joe, a once-famous playwright and actor, is still carrying the burden of guilt for the tragic death of Emily's brother, Thomas. As the nuptials approach, this struggling, splintered family picks up the pieces, and they all go on with their lives. Bass's well-paced, nuanced family saga is as engrossing as it is empathetic. Sure to appeal to readers who enjoy such family dramas as Judith Guest's Ordinary People. --Library Journal (Check catalog)

Inside jihadism : understanding jihadi movements worldwide

by Farhad Khosrokhavar. Khosrokhavar (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France) attempts an anatomy of Islamic Jihadism. He explores its diversity, religious foundations, intellectual basis, and social roots and also discusses the impact of state policies and economics, both domestically within the Islamic world and the external roles of the United States and other Western powers. He argues that Jihadism is caused by, in combination, reaction to Western imperialism, a recurring phenomenon within Islam in which movements arise seeking to restore its primal purity, the failure of communist and leftist radicalization in the Muslim world, and hostility to the state of Israel, which is perceived as an offshoot of Western imperialism. His central argument, however, is that Jihadism is a product of "perverse modernization," wherein traditional communities are dissolved through state action and the market economy, but without "the promotion of individual freedoms, the individual capacity to assure social and economic upward mobility by positive involvement in society, the opening up of the political system, and the creation of a new role for government as the defender of social liberty rather than the instigator of blind repression." (Check Catalog)

by Monica Ali. From the immigrant world of East End London in Brick Lane, shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize, Ali moves into the culinary world of a once posh London hotel restaurant, again capturing the multicultural layers of modern London. Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef for the Imperial Hotel, dreams of owning his own restaurant but must first contend with the UN task force that is his kitchen crew. His life becomes even more complicated when the body of a Hungarian porter is found dead in a storeroom. Still, restaurant troubles are nothing when compared with his personal life. His girlfriend is pressuring him about marriage, unaware that he's sleeping with a Russian kitchen girl, and his ever-difficult father is dying of cancer. Gabe's two stories entwine, the pressure mounts, and, finally, he loses his bearings. With sometimes sly humor, Ali deftly sheds light on the irony of struggling in a land with abundant opportunities. For all fiction readers. --Library Journal. (Check Catalog)

Atomic awakening : a new look at the history and future of nuclear power

by James Mahaffey. For many people, the idea of nuclear power died with the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, but for the curious and open-minded, this book offers a timely look at nuclear technology that, the author argues, could provide plenty of cheap, renewable energy, if only we can get past our oversized dread of it. Mahaffey's history lesson begins along a familiar path, from 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle to the great 20th-century physicists. Nazism and WWII sent hundreds of scientists—and their cutting-edge work—to the U.S. But the war also sent that research underground in the ultra-secret Manhattan Project. Researchers also dreamed of peaceful atoms to generate electricity and run submarines, planes and rockets. The specters of Hiroshima and a few horrifying nuclear accidents displaced that peaceful vision. With a wealth of anecdotes, Mahaffey, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, offers hope leavened with pragmatism that, while nuclear technology may be experimental forever, it can still be useful and safe. --Publisher's weekly (Check Catalog)

Wicked prey

by John Sandford. The 2008 Republican convention serves as the backdrop for bestseller Sandford's amped-up, ultra-violent 19th thriller to feature Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolis Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (after Phantom Prey). An assassination plot aimed at John McCain turns out to be just a sidebar to another criminal operation—extremely slick thieves have come to the twin cities to rob Republican political operatives loaded down with millions of dollars of street money, illegal handouts for low-level campaign workers. Mastermind Rosie Cruz handles the gang's complicated planning, while gangster Brutus Cohn does the robbery and killing aided by a couple of lesser thugs. A subplot involving Davenport's teenage ward, Letty West, who's provided interesting complications in the series, establishes her as a brave and intrepid investigator. A slam-bang shootout climax proves that Davenport still has what it takes when it comes to guts and gunplay.--Publisher's Weekly (Check catalog)

Honeymoon in Tehran : two years of love and danger in Iran

by Azadeh Moaveni. In her new memoir, American-born journalist Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad) returns to Tehran in 2005 to cover Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election for Time magazine, hoping to make the city her permanent home. Her plans are complicated by the standoff with the U.S. over Iran's nuclear program, as well as several unexpected turns in her life. She falls in love, moves in with her boyfriend, becomes pregnant, gets married—in that order—in a country that has no word for boyfriend and no qualms about brutally beating unmarried pregnant women. Through her own experience, Moaveni reports on the growing apathy of the people of Iran, a society burdened by staggering inflation and tensions between religion, political oppression and secular life, the latter ever more enticing through ubiquitous, illegal satellite television. Gradually, the idealism and religious faith that characterized Moaveni's younger years wane. With the birth of her son, her misgivings come to a head, compounded by the spying, threats and intimidation she experienced at the hands of the Ministry of Intelligence. Moaveni, who now lives in London with her family, has penned a story of coming-of-age in two cultures with a keen eye and a measured tone. --Publisher's Weekly (Check catalog)

Brooklyn : a novel

by Colm Tóibín This latest from Tóibín (The Master) begins in the southwestern Ireland town of Enniscorthy during the early 1950s, where dutiful daughter, doting sister, and aspiring bookkeeper Eilis Lacey lives with her mother and older sister, Rose. Her brothers have long since left Ireland to seek work in England, and Eilis herself soon departs for Brooklyn, NY. Once there, she attempts to master living and working in a strange land and to quell an acute and threatening loneliness. Initially friendless and of few means, Eilis gradually embraces new freedoms. She excels in work and school, falls in love, and begins to imagine a life in America. When tragedy strikes in Enniscorthy, however, Eilis returns to discover the hopes and aspirations once beyond her grasp are now hers for the taking. Tóibín conveys Eilis's transformative struggles with an aching lyricism reminiscent of the mature Henry James and ultimately confers upon his readers a sort of grace that illuminates the opportunities for tenderness in our lives. Both more accessible and more sublime than his previous works, this is highly recommended. --Library Journal (Check Catalog)

How Lincoln learned to read : twelve great Americans and the educations that made them

by Daniel Wolff. This extended essay, in the form of a dozen entertaining profiles of great Americans—an unexpected cross-section, from Ben Franklin to Elvis Presley—provides an unusual look at the varieties of educational experience that shaped these groundbreakers. Along the way, many of the prejudices and misunderstandings that are part of the American fabric are shown to be overcome by each through his or her mode of learning. Poet Wolff (4th of July, Asbury Park) shows how the studied yokel Ben Franklin created an American archetype, and how Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan would inspire Maria Montessori on the instruction of all children. Wolff wears his learning lightly, and there is a subtlety to his contrasting biographies. For example, the education of Lincoln, whose formal schooling ended at the age of 15, could not be further from the privileged world of JFK's; auto pioneer Henry Ford and environmental pioneer Rachel Carson, both Midwesterners, could not be more different. Above all, Wolff observes that in our national tradition an American education is going to bear the marks of rebellion. --Publisheer's Weekly (Check Catalog)

A world I loved: the story of an Arab woman

by Wadad al-Maqdisi. Through Cortas’ eyes we experience life in Lebanon under the oppressive French mandate, and her desire to forge an Arab identity based on religious tolerance. We learn of her dedication to the education of women, and the difficulties that she overcomes to become the principal of a school in Lebanon. And in final, heartbreaking detail, we watch as her world becomes rent by the “Palestine question,” Western interference, and civil war. (Check Catalog)