BOOKS TO KNOW – Top 10 List – October 2013

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October Books

1. Every Day Is Election Day: A Woman;s Guide to Winning Any Office, from the PTA to the White House

By Rebecca Sive (Anna Eleanor Roosevelt contributed the foreward), August 2013

Every Day Is Election Day is a practical, inspirational guide for women who want to achieve political leadership and influence public policy. In her no-nonsense, woman-to-woman style, public affairs strategist and consultant Rebecca Sive offers insider advice for women’s daily lives as advocates, candidates, and power brokers. This accessible primer explains how to surmount public barriers, conquer private fears, and run a campaign with humor, confidence, and no apologies. Sive provides tips for realizing the power of sisterhood, bankrolling oneself, creating an inimitable brand, and getting men to accept a take-charge personality. She also shares the secrets of success, and frank suggestions from women who have led, run, and won, including US senators Mary Landrieu and Debbie Stabenow; Planned Parenthood Federation of America president Cecile Richards; Cook County, Illinois, board president Toni Preckwinkle; feminist activist Shelby Knox; and many others. Whether you want to become more actively involved in the issues you care about, or you’re considering a run for a PTA position, board president, US senator or beyond, Every Day Is Election Day will inspire you to stand up, stand out, and treat each day as part of a winning campaign.

2. The Healing Paradox:  A Revolutionary Approach to Treating and Curing Physical and Mental Illness

By Steven Goldsmith M.D., June 2013

Why does Western medicine fail to cure chronic physical and mental illness? Why do so many treatments and drugs work only for a limited time before eventually losing effectiveness or producing harmful side effects?

Dr. Steven Goldsmith’s answer is at once counter-intuitive and commonsensical: the root of the problem is our combative approach. Instead of resisting and fighting our ailments, we should cooperate with and even embrace them. We should look for and apply treatments that are integrated with the causes of illness, not regard illness as an enemy to conquer.

This “hair of the dog” principle is already widely evident in practice. Take, for example, vaccines and inoculations, which are small doses of the microbes that cause the diseases being prevented; the use of the stimulant Ritalin to calm and ground people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; and radiation, which is both a well-known cause of cancer and a well-known method of treating it. These are just a few of Goldsmith’s many examples, which he relays in clear, evocative, and thought-provoking language. Perhaps most compelling of all, he explores reasons why this clearly effective principle is ignored by Western medicine.

Drawing on fascinating case studies and personal experiences from his forty-year career as a medical doctor and psychiatrist—as well as abundant clinical, experimental, and public health data that support his seemingly paradoxical assertion—Dr. Goldsmith presents an exciting, revolutionary approach that will change the way you think about medicine and psychotherapy.

3. The Hero

By Robyn Carr, August 2013

With warmth and sensitivity, #1 New York Times bestselling author Robyn Carr shows readers that falling in love can be the bravest act of all.

In a moment of desperation, Devon McAllister takes her daughter and flees a place where they should have been safe and secure. She has no idea what is around the next bend, but she is pretty certain it can’t be worse than what they’ve left behind. Her plan is to escape to somewhere she can be invisible. Instead, an unexpected offer of assistance leads her to Thunder Point, a tiny Oregon town with a willingness to help someone in need.

As the widowed father of a vulnerable young boy, Spencer Lawson knows something about needing friendship. But he’s not looking for anything else. Instead, he’s thrown his energy into his new role as Thunder Point’s high school football coach. Tough and demanding to his team, off the field he’s gentle and kind…just the kind of man who could heal Devon’s wounded heart.

Devon thought she wanted to hide from the world. But in Thunder Point, you find bravery where you least expect it…and sometimes, you find a hero.

4. Bones of the Lost (Temperance Brennan Series #16)

By Kathy Reichs, August 2013

#1 New York Times bestselling author and producer of the Fox hit series Bones, Kathy Reichs returns with an unforgettable new novel featuring forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan, whose examination of a mysterious hit-and-run victim triggers an investigation into human trafficking.

When Charlotte police discover the body of a teenage girl along a desolate stretch of two-lane highway, Temperance Brennan fears the worst. The girl’s body shows signs of foul play. Inside her purse, police find an airline club card bearing the name of prominent local businessman John-Henry Story, who died in a horrific fire months earlier. How did Story and the girl know each other? Was she an illegal immigrant turning tricks? Was she murdered? Was he?

5. Envy

By Sandra Brown, July 2002

Sandra Brown, the #1 New York Times bestselling author, keeps readers turning pages with an explosive tale of a long-ago crime and the victim’s plan for revenge…When New York publisher Maris Matherly Reed receives a tantalizing manuscript from someone identified only as P.M.E., its blockbuster potential-and perhaps something else-compels her to meet its author. On an eerie, ruined cotton plantation on a remote Georgia island she finds Parker Evans, a man concealing his identity and his past. Maris is drawn into his tale of two young friends and a deadly betrayal … and to Parker himself. But there’s something especially chilling about this novel, its possible connection to Maris’s own life, and the real-life character who uses her, or anyone, to get what he wants.

6. PETE THE CAT: THE WHEELS ON THE BUS

By James Dean, June 2013

#1 New York Times bestselling artist James Dean makes Pete the Cat groovier than ever in this cool adaptation of “The Wheels on the Bus.” Join Pete as he rides on the bus to school with his friends and hears all the different sounds a bus makes as it drives. Fans of Pete the Cat will sing along with Pete in this rendition of a classic favorite children’s song.

7. THE BUTLER: A Witness to History

By Wil Haygood, July 2013

From Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Wil Haygood comes a mesmerizing inquiry into the life of Eugene Allen, the butler who ignited a nation’s imagination and inspired a major motion picture: Lee Daniels’ The Butler, the highly anticipated film that stars six Oscar winners, including Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey (honorary and nominee), Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr., Vanessa Redgrave, and Robin Williams; as well as Oscar nominee Terrence Howard, Mariah Carey, John Cusack, Lenny Kravitz, James Marsden, David Oyelowo, Alex Pettyfer, Alan Rickman, and Liev Schreiber.

With a foreword by the Academy Award nominated director Lee Daniels, The Butler not only explores Allen’s life and service to eight American Presidents, from Truman to Reagan, but also includes an essay, in the vein of James Baldwin’s jewel The Devil Finds Work, that explores the history of black images on celluloid and in Hollywood, and fifty-seven pictures of Eugene Allen, his family, the presidents he served, and the remarkable cast of the movie.

8. Someone

By Alice McDermott, September 2013

A fully realized portrait of one woman’s life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award–winning author

An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott’s extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott’s deft, lyrical voice.

Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an “amadan,” a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott’s novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another.

Marie’s first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother’s brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents’ deaths; the births and lives of Marie’s children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn—McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. This is a novel that speaks of life as it is daily lived; a crowning achievement by one of the finest American writers at work today.

9. ASYLUM

By Madeleine Roux, August 2013

Asylum is a thrilling and creepy photo-novel perfect for fans of the New York Times bestseller Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.

For sixteen-year-old Dan Crawford, New Hampshire College Prep is more than a summer program—it’s a lifeline. An outcast at his high school, Dan is excited to finally make some friends in his last summer before college. But when he arrives at the program, Dan learns that his dorm for the summer used to be a sanatorium, more commonly known as an asylum. And not just any asylum—a last resort for the criminally insane.

As Dan and his new friends, Abby and Jordan, explore the hidden recesses of their creepy summer home, they soon discover it’s no coincidence that the three of them ended up here. Because the asylum holds the key to a terrifying past. And there are some secrets that refuse to stay buried.

10. Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass Series #2)

By Sarah J. Maas, August 2013

She is the greatest assassin her world has ever known.

But where will her conscience, and her heart, lead her?

After a year of hard labor in the Salt Mines of Endovier, eighteen-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien has won the king’s contest to become the new royal assassin. Yet Celaena is far from loyal to the crown – a secret she hides from even her most intimate confidantes.Keeping up the deadly charade—while pretending to do the king’s bidding—will test her in frightening new ways, especially when she’s given a task that could jeopardize everything she’s come to care for. And there are far more dangerous forces gathering on the horizon — forces that threaten to destroy her entire world, and will surely force Celaena to make a choice. Where do the assassin’s loyalties lie, and who is she willing to fight for?

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