Siddhartha Mukherjee wins Guardian First Book Award.

Indian-American doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee's book on cancer has won the Guardian First Book Award.

The Emperor of All Maladies, which won a Pulitzer prize in April, was the only work of non-fiction on the shortlist.

The author, who describes his book as a "biography" of cancer, receives a £10,000 prize.

He said he was "delighted and honoured" to join the ranks of previous winners, including Zadie Smith, Alexandra Harris, Petina Gappah and Alex Ross.

"In recognising The Emperor of All Maladies, the judges have also recognised the extraordinary courage and resilience of the men and women who struggle with illness, and the men and women who struggle to treat illnesses," he added.

Mukherjee is an oncologist, treating cancer patients at the Columbia University Medical Center.

He started the book after a 56-year-old woman, who was dealing with her second relapse, asked him to describe what she was fighting against.

His answer begins thousands of years ago in 1600 BC, with one of the first recorded descriptions of a tumour - scored onto a papyrus in hieroglyphics.
As the story progresses, the author describes how scientists came to identify cancerous cells and the (sometimes brutal and unnecessary) treatments devised to tackle them.

The book also provides a glimpse into the future of cancer care.

"Cancer is the load built into our genome," writes Mukherjee, "the leaden counterweight to our aspirations for immortality."

Author and academic Sarah Curchwell, who was part of the judging panel, said: "Siddhartha Mukherjee has marshalled an immense amount of material into a readable and inspiring story.

"The result is a gripping, enlightening read about the nature of illness and our battle against what begins to look like mortality itself."

Other books shortlisted for the prize included Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator, a thriller set in his native Kashmir, and Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English, about a young Ghanaian boy trying to solve a murder on a council estate.

Completing the list were Down the Rabbit Hole, the saga of a boy born to a Mexican drug lord, by Juan Pablo, and Amy Waldman's The Submission, in which a Muslim enters and wins a competition to design a memorial to those killed in the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.

Judges for the prize included One Day author David Nicholls, and Lisa Allardice, editor of the Guardian Review.

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The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna/Book Review

Aminatta Forna (Author)

2011 Orange Prize for fiction Shortlist

2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize

Paperback: 464 pages    Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition   Language: English

ISBN-10: 080214568X      ISBN-13: 978-0802145680

"A subtle and complex exploration of both the psyche of a war-torn African state and the attractions which it holds for an outsider. Forna is a writer of great talent and courage, one who never shies away from asking the difficult question."-Monica Ali

“Delivering us to a common center, no matter where we happen to be have been born, Aminatta Forna tackles those great human experiences of love and war, of friendship, rivalry, of death and triumphant survival. Often darkly funny, written with gritty realism and tenderness, The Memory of Love is a profoundly affecting work.”—Kiran Desai

Book Description

Since its publication in hardcover, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love has been hailed as a book of rare beauty and importance, and has been shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and selected for the January 2011 Indie Next List. With astounding depth and elegance, it takes the reader through the haunting atmosphere of a country at war, delicately intertwining the powerful stories of two generations.

In contemporary Freetown, a devastating civil war has left an entire populace with secrets to keep. In the capital hospital Kai, a gifted young surgeon is plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his livelihood. Elsewhere in the hospital lies Elias Cole, a man who has stories to tell from the country’s turbulent postcolonial years that are far from heroic. As past and present intersect, Kai and Elias are drawn unwittingly closer by Adrian, a British psychiatrist with good intentions, and into the path of one woman at the center of their stories.

A work of breathtaking writing and rare wisdom, The Memory of Love seamlessly weaves together the lives of these three men to create a story of loss, absolution, and the indelible effects of the past—and the very nature of love.

From Publishers Weekly

Forma, recipient of a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Ancestor Stones, returns to Africa's troubled conscience in this admirable if uneven outing. Adrian Lockheart is a well-meaning English psychologist who embarks on a temporary post at a Sierra Leone hospital intending to modernize treatment of the long-neglected schizophrenics, transients, and scarred victims of civil war who walk the hospital grounds. He soon meets his match in the elderly ex-professor Elias Cole, who speaks eloquently of his country's turbulent history--and also of his passion for the wife of a more radically minded colleague whose eventual disappearance Cole may be implicated in. As the holes in Elias's story widen, Adrian falls for a patient's daughter and into conflict with a surgeon, and ripples from the unexamined past threaten the present. Yet Forma's material doesn't measure up to the book's length. The book's prolixity, combined with scenes that drag or come off as forced, certainly doesn't ruin the experience, but it does occasionally glut what amounts to a heartening cry for moral responsibility in the thick of maddening injustice.

From Booklist

Set in Sierra Leone at the turn of the twenty-first century, Forna’s absorbing second novel (after Ancestor Stones, 2006) revolves around three very different men. British psychiatrist Adrian Lockheart has fled his failing marriage in England in the hopes of doing some good in Sierra Leone. Adrian becomes fascinated by two of his patients, elderly Elias Cole, a former university professor, and Agnes, a woman lost in a fugue state. The dying Cole reveals to Adrian, Scheherazade-like, how he fell in love with a radical colleague’s wife in the late 1960s, while Adrian must piece together the details of Agnes’ life. Adrian finds a friend in a haunted young surgeon, Kai, who is contemplating leaving the country. Kai questions some of Adrian’s risky decisions, such as his intention to track Agnes down once she leaves the hospital, but it is Adrian’s involvement with a local woman from Kai’s past that shocks the young doctor. Fate and tragedy intertwine in this stunning and powerful portrait of a country in the aftermath of a decade of civil war.

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Praises

“Forna has achieved something…startling and impressive here. Here is a luminous tale of passion and betrayal….Forna’s sharp eye spares no one its brutal honesty…. And she writes to expose what remains after all the noise has faded: at the core of this novel is the brave and beating heart, at once vulnerable and determined, unwilling to let go of all it has ever loved.”— New York Times Book Review

“[An] elegantly rendered novel of loss and rehabilitation in the aftermath of Sierra Leone's long civil war….As Kai, Adrian and Elias are revealed in flashbacks and fragments, the novel coalesces into an ambitious exploration of trauma and storytelling….Forna advances the story through tightly executed scenes…time bombs that detonate once their context becomes clear.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“The real pleasure of Forna’s storytelling is in her scrutiny of her characters’ inner lives and her ability to connect their choices to the moral dilemmas of a traumatized society.”—The New Yorker

"She threads her stories like music, imperceptibly into the reader's consciousness. One is left hauntingly familiar with the distant and alien; not quite able to distinguish the emotional spirits of fiction from the scars of real experience." —The Times (London)

"Forna weaves an intricate tapestry of betrayal, tragedy and loss; expertly drawing together the threads that link the sick old man, the brilliant doctor with dreams of leaving his troubled homeland, the wounded English psychologist and the young woman who links the three of them in a common bond of love… [Forna] moves deftly between the enchantments of different narratives: the therapeutic, the confessional, the traumatic—flashbacks, nightmares, hauntings, fugue states where stories are lost or distorted beyond recognition and the sweetly joyous themes of new love, renewal, springing hope, second chances." — The Telegraph, April 2010 (UK)

“Aminatta Forna’s brilliant new novel takes an oblique look at the Sierra Leonean civil war of the 1990s. . . Forna writes like a scientist, not only in the accuracy of her descriptions but in the way she selects which incidents to highlight, turning each scene into a metaphor that reverberates with meaning beyond the event itself…you feel that what she is reaching for is economy of phrasing, aptness of imagery, exactness of description, and she achieves that perfectly. This is a remarkable novel: well researched, well thought out, well written – the kind that deserves to be on the Booker shortlist.”—Helon Habila, The Guardian (UK)

"Aminatta Forna's two previous books explored, with elegance and empathy, the conflicts endemic to Sierra Leone. Her second novel continues Forna's examination of unpalatable truths while sacrificing none of her talent as a storyteller." — The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"Through the complicated connections between characters, Forna explores a country’s history: the violence and chaos of war, the scars, the hope and determination and the uncertainty of rebuilding." — The Sunday Times (UK)

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 Reader's Review

I took my lead from The New York Times' top rated review of The Memory of Love and was not disappointed. The narrative takes place either side of the civil war in Sierra Leone. Elias, an elderly university professor tells his story to Adrian Lockheart, a British psychologist. Meanwhile Adrian becomes friends with a young Sierra Leonian surgeon Kai Mansaray. The book encompasses a multitude of themes. How do people live and love in war? Where is the line between inaction and complicity? Can you really ever heal trauma, or do people simply learn to live with what has happened? The story unwinds slowly and richly. Cole's voice is one of wrecked grandeur as he tells his story to Adrian. But can he be trusted? Is he telling the whole truth, or as his daughter says: 'There are things about him you don't know.' Gradually the story gathers page turning pace. This is not an easy novel, the author doesn't spoon feed the reader, but forces them to think. I found the characters and themes lingered long after I finished reading. Brilliant!

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Let the Great World Spin: A Novel /Book Review

Colum McCann (Author)
WINNER OF THE 2011 IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

Paperback: 400 pages

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (December 2, 2009)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0812973992

ISBN-13: 978-0812973990

Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches

Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.

From Publishers Weekly

McCann's sweeping new novel hinges on Philippe Petit's illicit 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers. It is the aftermath, in which Petit appears in the courtroom of Judge Solomon Soderberg, that sets events into motion. Solomon, anxious to get to Petit, quickly dispenses with a petty larceny involving mother/daughter hookers Tillie and Jazzlyn Henderson. Jazzlyn is let go, but is killed on the way home in a traffic accident. Also killed is John Corrigan, a priest who was giving her a ride. The other driver, an artist named Blaine, drives away, and the next day his wife, Lara, feeling guilty, tries to check on the victims, leading her to meet John's brother, with whom she'll form an enduring bond. Meanwhile, Solomon's wife, Claire, meets with a group of mothers who have lost sons in Vietnam. One of them, Gloria, lives in the same building where John lived, which is how Claire, taking Gloria home, witnesses a small salvation. McCann's dogged, DeLillo-like ambition to show American magic and dread sometimes comes unfocused—John Corrigan in particular never seems real—but he succeeds in giving us a high-wire performance of style and heart.

From Booklist

 After the rigors of Zoli (2007), his historical tale of Romani life, best-selling literary novelist McCann allows himself more artistic freedom in his shimmering, shattering fifth novel. It begins on August 7, 1974, when New Yorkers are stopped in their tracks by the sight of a man walking between the towers of the World Trade Center. Yes, it’s Philippe Petit, the subject of the Academy Award–winning documentary Man on Wire and one of McCann’s many intense and valiant characters. The cast also includes two Irish brothers: Corrigan, a radical monk, and Ciaran, who follows him to the blasted Bronx, where he encounters resilient prostitute Tillie and her spirited daughter Jazzlyn. Gloria lives in the same housing project, and she befriends Claire of Park Avenue as they mourn the deaths of their sons in Vietnam. McCann’s hallucinatory descriptions of a great city tattooed and besmirched with graffiti, blood, and drugs in the midst of a financial freefall are eerie in their edgy beauty, chilling reminders of how quickly civilization unravels. Here, too, are portals onto war, the justice system, and the dawning of the cyber age. In McCann’s wise and elegiac novel of origins and consequences, each of his finely drawn, unexpectedly connected characters balances above an abyss, evincing great courage with every step.

Frank McCourt's Review

Now I worry about Colum McCann. What is he going to do after this blockbuster groundbreaking heartbreaking symphony of a novel? No novelist writing of New York has climbed higher, dived deeper.

Trust me, this is the sort of book that you will take off your shelf over and over again as the years go along. It’s a story of the early 1970s, but it’s also the story of our present times. And it is, in many ways, a story of a moment of lasting redemption even in the face of all the evidence.

There are dozens of intimate tales and threads at the core of Let the Great World Spin. On one level there’s the tightrope walker making his way across the World Trade Center towers. But as the novel goes along the “walker” becomes less and less of a focal point and we begin to care more about the people down below, on the pavement, in the ordinary throes of their existence. There’s an Irish monk living in the Bronx projects. There’s a Park Avenue mother in mourning for her dead son, who was blown up in the cafés of Saigon. There are the original computer hackers who "visit" New York in an early echo of the Internet. There’s an artist who has learn to return to the simplicity of love. And then--in possibly the book’s wildest and most ambitious section--there’s a Bronx hooker who has brought up her children in “the house that horse built”--“horse” of course being the heroin that was ubiquitous in the '70s.

All the voices feel realized and authentic and the writing floats along. This was my city back then--and now. McCann has written about New York before, but never quite as piercingly or as provocatively as this. This is fiction that gets the heart thumping.

The stories are interweaved so that it is one story, on one day, in one city, and yet it is also a history of the present time. In Let the Great World Spin, you can’t ignore the overtones for today: suffice it to say that the novel is held together by an act of redemption and beauty. I didn’t want to stop turning the pages.

I’m really not sure what McCann will do after this, but this is a great New York book, not just for New Yorkers but for anyone who walks any sort of tightrope at all. And yes, it doesn’t surprise me that it takes an Irishman to capture the heart of the city.

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PRAISES

“Every character … grabs you by the throat and makes you care. McCann's dazzling polyphony walks the high wire and succeeds triumphantly.”–Emma Donoghue, author of The Sealed Letter

“What a book! Complex and captivating … a very sensual novel.”–John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“Stunning… [an] elegiac glimpse of hope…It’s a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it’s a novel about families – the ones we’re born into and the ones we make for ourselves.”–USA Today

“McCann…both resurrects and redeems the horrors of Sept. 11, creating a metaphorical landscape of human endurance in the face of unspeakable tragedy…. This is McCann's gift, finding grace in grief and magic in the mundane.”–San Francisco Chronicle,

“Mesmerizing…A Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day….Colum McCann’s marvelously rich novel…weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down.”–Seattle Times

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Reader's Review:

Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin" follows the lives of a group of individuals immediately before and after Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. Although the book does not feature Petit as one of its central characters, the lives of all of the main characters intersect with Petit's walk in a key way, creating a neat puzzle around the event. The book looks at people from all walks of life in NYC in the 1970s--from Bronx hookers to a Park Avenue matron. As the lives of each of these people comes together you wonder who will survive this vicious city, where people and souls seem to be eaten alive.

This was the first work I had ever read by McCann, and wow, was I impressed. McCann is a master storyteller and the way he weaves words together creates such vivid pictures, you feel like you can smell the smoke from the burning Bronx. While this novel wasn't my typical style--it is much darker and rawer than what I typically read--McCann's literary gifts can only leave a reader in awe. I did have a few problems with the structure of the novel--the jumping from character to character sometimes felt jumpy and abrupt, but I think this technique was intended to jar the reader--mimicking the realities of life in 1970s New York. The ending also felt out of place to me.

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A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan/Book Review

Jennifer Egan

Winner of 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Paperback: 352 pages

Publisher: Anchor (March 22, 2011)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0307477479

ISBN-13: 978-0307477477

Product Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist

A New York Times Book Review Best Book

One of the Best Books of the Year: Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday, NPR's On Point, O, the Oprah Magazine, People, Publishers Weekly, Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Slate, Time, The Washington Post, and Village Voice

Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive in well in this graceful yet wild novel. We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Or as one character asks, How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Egan answers the question elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics loved Egan's newest novel, describing it as "audacious" and "extraordinary" (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the hands of a less-gifted writer, Egans's time-hopping narrative, unorthodox format, and motley cast of characters might have failed spectacularly. But it works here, primarily because each person shines within his or her individual chapter that offers a distinct voice and a fascinating backstory. A few reviewers mentioned the uneven nature of the chapters and the different stylistic experiments within them. Yet, hailed as "a frequently dazzling piece of layer-cake metafiction" (Entertainment Weekly), A Visit from the Goon Squad is a gutsy novel that succeeds on all levels.

PRAISES :

“Pitch perfect. . . . Darkly, rippingly funny. . . . Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.”-New York Times Book Review

“At once intellectually stimulating and moving. . . . Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

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“A new classic of American fiction.”—Time

“Audacious, extraordinary.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“A spiky, shape-shifting new book. . . . A display of Egan’s extreme virtuosity.”—The New York Times

“Wildly ambitious. . . . A tour de force. . . . Music is both subject and metaphor as Egan explores the mutability of time, destiny, and individual accountability post-technology.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

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“The smartest book you can get your hands on.”—Los Angeles Times

“It ends in the same place it starts, except that everything has changes, including you, the reader.”

—The New Republic

“Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking. . . . Features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human.”

—The Chicago Tribune

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“Egan’s bravura fifth book samples from different eras (the glory days of punk; a slick, socially networked future) and styles (sly satire, moving tragedy, even PowerPoint) to explore the interplay between music and the rough rhythms of life.” —Vogue

“Brilliant, inventive. . . . Emboldening. It cracks the world open afresh. . . . Would that Marcel Proust could receive [a copy]. It would blow his considerable mind. . . . Expect to inhale Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Then expect it to lodge in your cranium and your breastbone a good long while.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

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“Frequently dazzling. . . . Egan’s expert flaying of human foibles has the compulsive allure of poking at a sore tooth: excruciating but exhilarating too.”—Entertainment Weekly

“If Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile. . . . [A] triumph of technical bravado and tender sympathy. . . . Turn up the music, skip the college reunion and curl up with The Goon Squad instead.”

—The Washington Post

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“Brilliantly structured. . . . We are pulled right in. . . . [Egan is] a boldly intellectual writer who is not afraid to apply her equally powerful intuitive skills to her ambitious projects.” —Elle

“This is art at its best—as a bulwark against the goon, as it embodies everything at once.”

—Austin American Statesman

“Egan has accomplished the tricky feat of using metafiction techniques without sacrificing old-fashioned story-telling. . . . A Visit from the Goon Squad has a circuitous structure that seems almost designed for our Internet rewired brains.”—The Wall Street Journal

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The Best of It: New and Selected Poems /Book Review

Kay Ryan

Winner of 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Hardcover: 288 pages

Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (March 23, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 080211914X

ASIN: B004H8GLZY

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

 Ryan, the current U.S. poet laureate, may well be the oddest and wisest poet to hold that prestigious post. Her tiny, skinny poems pack a punch unlike anything else in contemporary poetry, though not unlike haiku, if haiku could be cut with a dash of Groucho Marx. This, her first retrospective volume, which also contains a book's worth of new poems, is a much-needed introduction to the work of one of our best and most accessible poets. She asks the necessary questions hiding just beneath the obvious ones: Why isn't it all/ more marked,/ why isn't every wall/ graffitied, every park tree/ stripped/... / Not why people are; why not more violent? Odd rhymes draw crystal clear relations between disparate thoughts we never realized had always gone together: As/ though our garden/ could be one bean/ and we'd rejoice if/ it flourishes, as/ though one bean/ could nourish us. Pithy poems manage to encapsulate far more than their few words should be able to hold, as in Bitter Pill, a new poem: A bitter pill/ doesn't need/ to be swallowed/ to work. Just/ reading your name/ on the bottle/ does the trick. Sassy, smart, and deep as they are hilarious, Ryan's poems are among the best.

From Booklist

 This ample but representative collection should attract new readers curious about the work of America’s current poet laureate and should also satisfy those familiar with Ryan’s conversational but tightly wrought poems. Her strength lies in creating short-lined poems that slide past the reader like notes from a journal but that, unlike many such efforts, are not merely self-indulgent anecdotes or predictable bromides. Rather, readers find surprise arising from each incident or pondering, creating an effect like that of the classical Zen haiku that starts out commonplace and rises to philosophical heights. Ryan’s observation of a spider weaving begins with a comment on how “from other / angles the / fibers look / fragile,” then embeds itself in the spider’s own viewpoint, from which those fibers are “coarse ropes” requiring “heavy work” to get in place in the web. The point of this close reading of insect life reveals itself in the last lines: “It / isn’t ever / delicate / to live.” Ryan’s work is best read slowly and observing intervals between poems, for the similarity of form among them risks dulling the attention when they are read one quickly after another. Also, her work, consistently excellent as it is, deserves careful reading

Top Reviews

“Everything [Ryan’s] eye falls upon takes on a brisk, beautifully complete clarity. Her tidy lines disguise an enormous intelligence and tonal warmth: a ferocious capacity for finding the essence of things. The Best of It reveals that right before our eyes Ryan has become a classic American poet.” Los Angeles Times

“Ryan is one of the few contemporary poets to have imitators because she is one of the few truly compelling stylists now at work. Her voice is authoritative, confident, unfussy, exacting…she is astutely reserved, watchful, and understands that no one is special in his or her grief…So many “new and selected” volumes come out each year, but The Best of It is rare in being truly the best of the poet’s work so far. Kay Ryan is so disarming, so fresh and original, that she has earned her recent reputation as one of the very best poets among us.” The Hudson Review

“Ryan’s poems are consistent delights. They fizz with euphonies, they crackle with rhyme and off-rhyme…they are marvels of compact, slightly bitter wit…Ryan’s poems are what Robert Frost said all poems must be, momentary stays against confusion.”— San Francisco Chronicle

"The Best of It is a generous and nearly career-spanning collection of her verse, a greatest-hits album of a sort…you can’t help consuming [her] poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back—what was that?—and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.” The New York Times

“Melancholy lucidity is Ryan’s greatest gift, and it can be heard in all her most successful poems. But her most startling discovery is that melancholy, with its tendency to brood and spread, is best contained in a form that is tight, witty, almost sprightly sounding. Her poems are often built on the logic of the pun, taking an ordinary word or dead cliché as a title and then jolting it to unexpected life.” The New Yorker

“Ryan’s oblique humor runs from grim to whimsical, from delighted to sardonic . . . Despite her desert beginnings, she cannot disavow her own talent and taste, her intelligence and achievement . . . From a life that has not been easy, she has mined nuggets that add to American poetic wealth.” The New York Review of Books

“When she’s at the top of her game, [Ryan] has the uncanny ability to construct a tiny word-mechanism that produces the experience of genuine wonder…In the utter complexity of her vision and lyricism, I’m reminded of those mechanical devices of the ancient world meant to show us our place among the stars and help us navigate the uncharted darkness beyond. And in the very best examples, Ryan’s poems do precisely that.”The Washington Post

“Kay Ryan is a distinctive and original voice within the rich variety of contemporary American poetry. She writes easily understandable short poems on improbable subjects. Within her compact compositions there are many surprises in rhyme and rhythm and in sly wit pointing to subtle wisdom.”— Librarian of Congress

“[Ryan’s] poems . . . [are] surprising and fresh, keeping the reader slightly off-kilter...As the poems swerve between images and ideas, meaning and sound, white space and the black ink of a line—between surface action and metaphorical depths—the attentive reader will see a glimmer of secret life.”Newsweek

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The Fiery Trial- Book Review

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Eric Foner

Winner of 2011 Pulitzer Prize for history

Hardcover: 448 pages

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition (October 4, 2010)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0393066185

ISBN-13: 978-0393066180

From Publishers Weekly

A mixture of visionary progressivism and repugnant racism, Abraham Lincoln's attitude toward slavery is the most troubling aspect of his public life, one that gets a probing assessment in this study. Columbia historian and Bancroft Prize winner Foner (Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men) traces the complexities of Lincoln's evolving ideas about slavery and African-Americans: while he detested slavery, he also publicly rejected political and social equality for blacks, dragged his feet (critics charged) on emancipating slaves and accepting black recruits into the Union army, and floated schemes for colonizing freedmen overseas almost to war's end. Foner situates this record within a lucid, nuanced discussion of the era's turbulent racial politics; in his account Lincoln is a canny operator, cautiously navigating the racist attitudes of Northern whites, prodded--and sometimes willing to be prodded--by abolitionists and racial egalitarians pressing faster reforms. But as Foner tells it, Lincoln also embodies a society-wide transformation in consciousness, as the war's upheavals and the dynamic new roles played by African-Americans made previously unthinkable claims of freedom and equality seem inevitable. Lincoln is no paragon in Foner's searching portrait, but something more essential--a politician with an open mind and a restless conscience.

Top Review

Starred Review. Original and compelling….In the vast library on Lincoln, Foner’s book stands out as the most sensible and sensitive reading of Lincoln’s lifetime involvement with slavery and the most insightful assessment of Lincoln’s—and indeed America’s—imperative to move toward freedom lest it be lost. An essential work for all Americans. (Library Journal )

Do we need yet another book on Lincoln?... Well, yes, we do—if the book is by so richly informed a commentator as Eric Foner. Foner tackles what would seem to be an obvious topic, Lincoln and slavery, and manages to cast new light on it.... Because of his broad-ranging knowledge of the 19th century, Foner is able to provide the most thorough and judicious account of Lincoln's attitudes toward slavery that we have.  The New York Times Book Review

A well orchestrated examination of Lincoln’s changing views of slavery, bringing unforeseeable twists and a fresh sense of improbability to a familiar story. (The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Committee )

While many thousands of books deal with Lincoln and slavery, Eric Foner has written the definitive account of this crucial subject, illuminating in a highly original and profound way the interactions of race, slavery, public opinion, politics, and Lincoln's own character that led to the wholly improbable uncompensated emancipation of some four million slaves. Even seasoned historians will acquire fresh and new perspectives from reading The Fiery Trial. (David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World )

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The Emperor of All Maladies/Book Review

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Winner of 2011 Pulitzer Prize for non- fiction

Paperback: 608 pages

Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (August 9, 2011)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1439170916

ISBN-13: 978-1439170915

“This volume should earn Mukherjee a rightful place alongside Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Stephen Hawking in the pantheon of our epoch's great explicators.”—Boston Globe

 

Product Description

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mukherjee's magisterial history of cancer research is poorly served by Stephen Hoye's impersonal, tone-deaf narration. Mukherjee is a practicing oncologist, and his is a deeply personal account, replete with stories of his own patients and practice, that begs for an intimate reading. But Hoye is pedantic, dry, stentorian-everything that this book isn't-and his newscaster's delivery cannot convey the author's compassion for his patients or the suspense and thrill of scientific discovery that the book so brilliantly describes.

From Booklist

 Apparently researching, treating, and teaching about cancer isn’t enough of a challenge for Columbia University cancer specialist Mukherjee. He was also moved to write a biography of a disease whose name, for millennia, could not be uttered. The eminently readable result is a weighty tale of an enigma that has remained outside the grasp of both the people who endeavored to know it and those who would prefer never to have become acquainted with it. An unauthorized biography told through the voices of people who have lived, toiled, and, yes, died under cancer’s inexorable watch. Mukherjee recounts cancer’s first known literary reference—hence its birth, so to speak—in the teachings of the Egyptian physician Imhotep in the twenty-fifth century BCE, in which it is clear that Imhotep possessed no tools with which to treat what appears to be breast cancer. His cryptic note under “Therapy:” “There is none.” Throughout cancer’s subsequent years, many more physicians and scientists with names both familiar and obscure attempted and occasionally succeeded in deciphering or unlocking keys to many of the disease’s mysteries. Alas, this is not a posthumous biography, but it is nonetheless a surprisingly accessible and encouraging narrative.

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The Tiger's Wife- Book Review

The Tiger's Wife: A Novel

by Téa Obreht

The Orange Prize for Fiction 2011 Winner

Hardcover: 352 pages

Publisher: Random House; First Edition, First Printing edition (March 8, 2011)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0385343833

ISBN-13: 978-0385343831

“Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years.” —Colum McCann

“A novel of surpassing beauty, exquisitely wrought and magical. Téa Obreht is a towering new talent.”—T. C. Boyle

“A marvel of beauty and imagination. Téa Obreht is a tremendously talented writer.”—Ann Patchett 

Product Description

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel.

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weeklytrips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for.

Top Press Reviews

“[A] brilliant debut…[Téa] Obreht is an expert at depicting history through aftermath, people through the love they inspire, and place through the stories that endure; the reflected world she creates is both immediately recognizable and a legend in its own right. Obreht is talented far beyond her years, and her unsentimental faith in language, dream, and memory is a pleasure.”

 – Publishers Weekly

  

“Ingeniously, Obreht juxtaposes [her protagonist’s] matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling, and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen…Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger’s Wife is all the more remarkable for being a product not of observation but imagination….Arrestingly, Obreht shows that you don’t have to go back centuries to find history transformed into myth; the process can occur within a lifetime is a gifted observer is on hand to record it.”

 –  The New York Times Book Review

“Dizzyingly nuanced yet crisp, [and] muscularly written…This complex, humbling, and beautifully crafted debut from one of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 is highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in contemporary fiction.”

 – Library Journal

“Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work…[She] writes with remarkable authority and eloquence, and she demonstrates an uncommon ability to move seamlessly between the gritty realm of the real and the more primary-colored world of the fable…It’s not so much magical realism in the tradition of Gabriel García Marquez or Günter Grass as it is an extraordinarily limber exploration of allegory and myth…A richly textured and searing novel.”

 –  The New York Times

“Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife comes freighted with more critical anticipation than any debut novel in recent memory…That sort of unearned, pre-emptive prestige spurs both impossible expectations and skeptical readings – a burden that would doom most first novels.  Yet The Tiger’s Wife, in its solemn beauty and unerring execution, fully justifies the accolades that Ms. Obreht’s short fiction inspired.   She has a talent for subtle plotting that eludes most writers twice her age, and her descriptive powers suggest a kind of channeled genius.  No novel this year has seemed more likely to disappoint; no novel has been more satisfying.” – The Wall Street Journal

“[A] spectacular debut novel…[Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop….Obreht will make headlines as one of the most exciting new writers of her generation, a young artist with the maturity and grace that comes of knowing where one is from, and of honoring those who came before.”  – Entertainment Weekly

“So rich with themes of love, legends and mortality that every novel that comes after it this year is in peril of falling short in comparison with its uncanny beauty…Not since Zadie Smith has a young writer arrived with such power and grace….“[An] astounding debut novel.”  – Time Magazine

“Astonishingly assured…full of vivid, dreamlike sequences…Obreht’s mesmerizing writing is key to the novel, which succeeds through a kind of harmonic resonance...Obreht’s striking ability to explain the world through stories is matched by her patience with the parts of life – and death – that endlessly confound us.” –  The Boston Globe

“Deliver[s] the kind of truth history can’t touch…Well-deserved praise [for The Tiger’s Wife] has been accumulating ever since Obreht published a chapter in The New Yorker almost two years ago, and now that we have the whole, its graceful commingling of contemporary realism and village legend seems even more absorbing…That The Tiger’s Wife never slips entirely into magical realism is part of its magic – its agile play with tragic material and with us…Conveyed in storytelling this enchanting, it’s the life you remember.”  – The Washington Post

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Mao's Great Famine- A Review

Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury)

2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize

Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. Access to Communist Party archives has long been denied to all but the most loyal historians, but now a new law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era.

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