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Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival
By Dean King

By jessicaSun, 10/25/2009 - 12:26

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Love in the Driest Season
By Neely Tucker

By jessicaSun, 10/25/2009 - 12:02

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Ironfire
By David Ball

By jessicaSat, 10/24/2009 - 12:25

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The Full Cupboard of Life
By Alexander McCall Smith

By jessicaSat, 10/24/2009 - 11:26

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GraceLand
By Chris Abani

By jessicaFri, 10/23/2009 - 12:56

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Scribbling the Cat
By Alexandra Fuller

By jessicaWed, 10/21/2009 - 12:11

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The Laments
By George Hagen

By jessicaMon, 10/19/2009 - 18:38

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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
By William Kamkwamba

By jonSun, 10/18/2009 - 18:56

Bookmarks has not yet published a review of this book. We may do so in the future; in the meantime, please see the other review sources to the right and browse the information from Amazon.com below.
William Morrow
288 pages
Amazon.com Review
<b>Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009:</b> Discarded motor parts, PVC pipe, and an old bicycle wheel may be junk to most people, but in the inspired hands of William Kamkwamba, they are instruments of opportunity. Growing up amid famine and poverty in rural Malawi, wind was one of the few abundant resources available, and the inventive fourteen-year-old saw its energy as a way to power his dreams. "With a windmill, we'd finally release ourselves from the troubles of darkness and hunger," he realized. "A windmill meant more than just power, it was freedom." Despite the biting jeers of village skeptics, young William devoted himself to borrowed textbooks and salvage yards in pursuit of a device that could produce an "electric wind." <i>The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind</i> is an inspiring story of an indomitable will that refused to bend to doubt or circumstance. When the world seemed to be against him, William Kamkwamba set out to change it. --</i>Dave Callanan</i>
William Morrow
288 pages
Product Description
William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger, and a place where hope and opportunity were hard to find. But William had read about windmills in a book called Using Energy, and he dreamed of building one that would bring electricity and water to his village and change his life and the lives of those around him. His neighbors may have mocked him and called him misala--crazy--but William was determined to show them what a little grit and ingenuity could do.<P>Enchanted by the workings of electricity as a boy, William had a goal to study science in Malawi's top boarding schools. But in 2002, his country was stricken with a famine that left his family's farm devastated and his parents destitute. Unable to pay the eighty-dollar-a-year tuition for his education, William was forced to drop out and help his family forage for food as thousands across the country starved and died.<P>Yet William refused to let go of his dreams. With nothing more than a fistful of cornmeal in his stomach, a small pile of once-forgotten science textbooks, and an armory of curiosity and determination, he embarked on a daring plan to bring his family a set of luxuries that only two percent of Malawians could afford and what the West considers a necessity--electricity and running water. Using scrap metal, tractor parts, and bicycle halves, William forged a crude yet operable windmill, an unlikely contraption and small miracle that eventually powered four lights, complete with homemade switches and a circuit breaker made from nails and wire. A second machine turned a water pump that could battle the drought and famine that loomed with every season.<P>Soon, news of William's <i>magetsi a mphepo</i>--his "electric wind"--spread beyond the borders of his home, and the boy who was once called crazy became an inspiration to those around the world.<P>Here is the remarkable story about human inventiveness and its power to overcome crippling adversity. <i>The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind</i> will inspire anyone who doubts the power of one individual's ability to change his community and better the lives of those around him.

A Change in Altitude
By Anita Shreve

By jonSun, 09/27/2009 - 09:36

Bookmarks has not yet published a review of this book. We may do so in the future; in the meantime, please see the other review sources to the right and browse the information from Amazon.com below.
Little, Brown and Company
320 pages
Product Description
Margaret and Patrick have been married just a few months when they set off on what they hope will be a great adventure-a year living in Kenya. Margaret quickly realizes there is a great deal she doesn't know about the complex mores of her new home, and about her own husband. <br><br>A British couple invites the newlyweds to join on a climbing expedition to <ST1:PLACE w:st="on">Mount Kenya</ST1:PLACE>, and they eagerly agree. But during their harrowing ascent, a horrific accident occurs. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Margaret struggles to understand what happened on the mountain and how these events have transformed her and her marriage, perhaps forever.<br><br><i>A Change in Altitude </i>illuminates the inner landscape of a couple, the irrevocable impact of tragedy, and the elusive nature of forgiveness. With stunning language and striking emotional intensity, Anita Shreve transports us to the exotic panoramas of <ST1:PLACE w:st="on">Africa</ST1:PLACE> and into the core of our most intimate relationships.

Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
By Tracy Kidder

By jonSun, 08/23/2009 - 19:16

Bookmarks has not yet published a review of this book. We may do so in the future; in the meantime, please see the other review sources to the right and browse the information from Amazon.com below.
Random House
304 pages
Amazon.com Review
<b>Amazon Best of the Month, September 2009:</b> <i>Strength in What Remains</i> is an unlikely story about an unreasonable man. Deo was a young medical student who fled the genocidal civil war in Burundi in 1994 for the uncertainty of New York City. Against absurd odds--he arrived with little money and less English and slept in Central Park while delivering groceries for starvation wages--his own ambition and a few kind New Yorkers led him to Columbia University and, beyond that, to medical school and American citizenship. That his rise followed a familiar immigrant's path to success doesn't make it any less remarkable, but what gives Deo's story its particular power is that becoming an American citizen did not erase his connection to Burundi, in either his memory or his dreams for the future. Writing with the same modest but dogged empathy that made his recent <i>Mountains Beyond Mountains</i> (about Deo's colleague and mentor, Dr. Paul Farmer) a modern classic, Tracy Kidder follows Deo back to Burundi, where he recalls the horrors of his narrow escape from the war and begins to build a medical clinic where none had been before. Deo's terrible journey makes his story a hard one to tell; his tirelessly hopeful but clear-eyed efforts make it a gripping and inspiring one to read. <i>--Tom Nissley</i> </p> <hr size="1"><span class="h1"><strong>Amazon Exclusive: Tracy Kidder on <i>Strength in What Remains </i></strong></span><br><br> <img align="right" border="0" src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/randoEMS/Tracy_Kidder_Gabriel_Amadeus_Cooney.jpg"/> <i>Strength in What Remains</i> is the story of Deogratias, a young man from the central African nation of Burundi. In 1993, through no fault of his own, he was forced onto a terrifying journey, a journey that split his life in two. First he made a six-months-long escape, on foot, from ethnic violence in Burundi and from genocide in Rwanda. Then, in a strange twist of fate, he was, as it were, transported to New York City, where it sometimes seemed that his travails had only just begun.</p> <p>I met Deo by chance 6 years ago. When I first heard his story, I had one simple thought: I would not have survived. I hoped in part to reproduce that feeling as I retold his story. I also hoped to humanize what, to most westerners anyway, is a mysterious, little-known part of the world. We hear about mass slaughter in distant countries and we imagine that murder and mayhem define those locales. Deo’s story opens up one of those places into a comprehensible landscape—and also opens up a part of New York that is designed to be invisible, the service entrances of the upper East Side, the camping sites that homeless people use in Central Park. But above all, I think, this is a book about coming to terms with memories. How can a person deal with memories like Deo’s, tormenting memories, memories with a distinctly ungovernable quality?</p> <p>In the first part of <i>Strength In What Remains</i>, I recount Deo’s story. In the second part, I tell about going back with him to the stations of his life, in New York and Burundi. So the story that I tell isn’t only about the memories that Deo related to me. It’s also about seeing him overtaken by memories—again and again, and sometimes acutely. But Deo didn’t take me to Burundi just to show me around. Giving me a tour of his past was incidental to what he was up to in the present and the future. His story has a denoument that even now amazes me. </p> <p>Deo is an American citizen. He doesn’t have to go back to Burundi. But he has returned continually and keeps on returning, and, amid the postwar wreckage, with the help of friends and family, he has created a clinic and public health system, free to those who can’t pay, in a rural village—part of a beginning, Deo dreams, of a new Burundi.</p> <p>This facility was a pile of rocks when I visited the site in the summer of 2006. By the fall of 2008, it had become a medical center with several new buildings, a trained professional staff, and a fully stocked pharmacy. In its first year of operation it treated 21,000 different patients. (The organization that Deo founded and that sponsors and operates this facility is called Village Health Works.) </p> <p>Deo was very young when he went through his long travail. Several strangers helped to save him from death and despair in Burundi and New York. So did sheer courage and pluck, and also Columbia University, which he attended as an undergraduate. But when it’s come to dealing with the burden of his memories, the public health system and clinic that he founded has been the nearest thing to a solution. In the end, it’s neither forgetting the past nor dwelling on the past that has worked for him. For him the answer has been remembering and acting. I once asked Deo why he had studied philosophy at Columbia. He told me, "I wanted to understand what had happened to me." In the end, he received what most students of philosophy receive—not answers, but more questions. As I was trying to describe his effort to build a clinic, I found myself writing: "Deo had discovered a way to quiet the questions he’d been asking at Columbia. That is, he saw there might be an answer for what troubled him most about the world, an answer that lay in his hands, indeed in his memory. You had to do something."<i>—Tracy Kidder</i></p> <p>(Photo © Gabriel Amadeus Cooney) </p>
Random House
304 pages
Product Description
Tracy Kidder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of the bestsellers <i>The Soul of a New Machine, House, </i>and the enduring classic <b>Mountains Beyond Mountains</b>, has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the “master of the non-fiction narrative.” In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. <b>Strength in What Remains </b>is a wonderfully written, inspiring account of one man’s remarkable American journey and of the ordinary people who helped him–a brilliant testament to the power of will and of second chances.<br><br>Deo arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and genocide, plagued by horrific dreams, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English, and no contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in Central Park, and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him eventually in the direction of Columbia University, medical school, and a life devoted to healing. Kidder breaks new ground in telling this unforgettable story as he travels with Deo back over a turbulent life in search of meaning and forgiveness. <br><br>An extraordinary writer, Tracy Kidder once again shows us what it means to be fully human by telling a story about the heroism inherent in ordinary people, a story about a life based on hope.