Publishers Weekly

Calling attention to the plight of death row activist, journalist and NPR contributor Abu-Jamal, award-winning science fiction author Bisson attempts a full-scale portrait of the controversial figure implicated in a police slaying in Philadelphia nearly two decades ago. What he delivers is a well-intended rehash of mainstream media accounts. The book's real value is in its chronicle of Abu-Jamal's bold, inquisitive youth on Philadelphia's mean streets, inspired by his exceptional mother to become a compulsive reader with a deeply curious mind. In school, Abu-Jamal discovered the causes of black liberation and black power, and became a natural student leader. In his early teens, he faced his first police run-in at one of George Wallace's presidential campaign rallies and was "beaten so badly that his own mother didn't recognize him." His tenure with the Black Panthers during their glory days awakened his talent for writing and activism, and so impressed his comrades in Philadelphia that they made him lieutenant of information at age 15. Abu-Jamal's tireless efforts on behalf of the Panthers brought him to the attention of Hoover's FBI, placing him on the infamous Cointelpro target list. A series of painful episodes of police harassment and intimidation against Abu-Jamal followed, ultimately leading to that fateful night in 1981 when Abu-Jamal was shot and seriously wounded while defending his brother during a conflict that ended in the shooting death of an officer. Labeled a "cop-killer," Abu-Jamal faced a highly charged trial that ended in a death sentence that has stirred international interest. Written in short, energetic vignettes, Bisson's tribute occasionally fails to fill in the gaps in Abu-Jamal's travails, choosing heated rhetoric over researched substance at a time when more information and less fist pumping would suit the imprisoned writer's cause well. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Since the 1850s, women have come to the Colorado mountains under their own steam. Robertson recounts the experiences of some of these independent, courageous women and their successes. Julia Archibald Holmes, a suffragist and the first woman on record to climb a Colorado mountain (Pikes Peak, 1858); Susan Anderson, a physician who tended the folks in Fraser Valley until she was 80 years old; and Coral Bowman, who started an American school of technical climbing, are among the mountain women included in the book. Robertson's superbly crafted book will introduce YA readers to the achievements of women that they perhaps never knew existed through a fascinating historic perspective. Climbers and skiers will enjoy stories of those who participated in a dangerous sport requiring much skill and courage. Highly recommended for regional history and women's history/achievement collections. --Carol P. Clark, R. E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA

A lively biography of the famous homesteader and author Helen Knothe Nearing

With these, all his worldly possessions at the age of seventeen, Daja Wangchuk Meston caught an airliner to America, the unfamiliar land of which he was a citizen, and began his arduous personal journey to discover and mend his long-severed ties to his family, his country, and, in a very real sense, his own identity.

In this moving memoir, the author tells the incredible story of a young man who used his Buddhist upbringing and the love of a good woman -- his young wife -- to learn that forgiving others can play a critical role in healing a damaged soul.

Daja had much to forgive. In the early 1970s, at the age of three, he was taken by his hippie American parents to Nepal and left in the care of a Tibetan family. The Tibetans in turn placed him in a Buddhist monastery where, at the age of six, he was ordained to be a monk. There, in scenes reminiscent of the novels of Charles Dickens, he was ostracized by the other boy monks, who taunted him for his Caucasian physical traits, left so hungry he stole scraps of bread, and slept on a flea-infested straw mat. He was an outsider in an insular monastic world, unable to understand what had befallen him and longing for the warmth of his mother's embrace.

His mother became a Buddhist nun, and caring for a child, she thought, would impede her spiritual journey. Her occasional and brief visits with young Daja became increasingly rare. As he grew up, there were often years without a single maternal visit. His father, unbeknownst to the boy, had suffered a mental breakdown and returned, helpless, to Los Angeles.

The story of Daja's self-generated ouster from the monastery as an adolescent (he pretended to have slept with a prostitute), his eventual migration to his homeland, his lifelong attempt to understand and reconnect with his parents, and his eventual and dangerous work on behalf of Tibetan rights under Chinese oppression make for a compelling reading experience.

But more than that, the story of Daja Meston reminds us of the universal human need for roots and family bonds. It is ultimately an unforgettable story of love, hope, and forgiveness and of a gentle man with an enormous capacity for all three.

Publishers Weekly

In this memoir, Meston tells the wrenching tale of being put in a Buddhist monastery as a child by his hippie parents, who had hopes of him becoming a monk. Meston was born in 1970 to a father who was a self-taught artist, and later descended into mental illness, and a mother who hailed from a wealthy Hollywood family and became so enraptured by Buddhist teachings that she became a nun in a Nepalese monastery. At age six, Meston was placed in a large Tibetan foster family before entering the Kopan temple. The only white-skinned boy, he was teasingly called White Eye and Rotten, and soon grew bored by the tedious study and chores. He became rebellious, and was eventually expelled for breaking his vow of celibacy and sent to live with relatives in California. Meston spoke little English, had no formal education, and spent years educating himself (he was eventually accepted at Brandeis). Meston later worked for Tibetan rights issues, traveling to Tibet, where he created a cause célèbre when he leaped out the window while under house arrest to avoid interrogation by Chinese officials. Meston's (and Ansberry's) style is journalistically cut-and-dried and occasionally stifles the emotional turbulence that drives Weston's psychic journey, from abandoned child to lonely immigrant and suicidal prisoner. (Mar.)

"Edgar Morin, one of France's greatest living intellectuals, tells the story of his father, Vidal Nahoum, but also the story of Sephardic Jews, and of Europe. In this "holographic history" Vidal's story, and that of his family, carries within it the flowering, decline, and death of Jewish culture in Spain, the passage from Empires to Nation States, the complex relations between Jews and Gentiles, between East and West, and ultimately, the history of the 20th century itself. Morin's work ranges from the great sweep of global historical events to the everyday details of individual lives, reflections and experiences as the Nazi threat impacted on his father's family. Providence, circumstance and danger dominated every decision throughout that fateful period." Vidal lived through the Balkan wars, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and two World Wars. He wanted his son to join him in the family business, but it was clear that Edgar was destined for the Academy. During the Second World War, knowing that his son was part of the Resistance caused emotional estrangement between father and son, the one seeking the best for his family, the other determined to serve a more nationalistic and composite ideal. The emancipation and independence caused by the war experiences results in a profound change in their relationship, resulting in a hitherto unobtainable acceptance of personal destiny.

Publishers Weekly

On visits to and long stays in Hawaii, award-winning Japanese American poet Hongo (The River of Heaven), born in Hawaii but reared in Los Angeles, set out to understand his family and his heritage. Like many immigrant families intent on succeeding in America, his parents brushed aside their child's questions about their past. In his early 30s he visited Volcano, Hawaii, with his wife and young son, renting a cottage near Hilo, where his father had farmed and run a general store. There he felt ``as if I were entering a book about my own life.'' Overwhelmed by the paradisal landscape, ``a visual sonata, lavish and detailed as any jungle fantasy painted by Henri Rousseau,'' Hongo evokes its ecology, geology and ambience as he looks up relatives and friends of his parents, witnesses an eruption of Kilauea, walks on lava beds and through rain forests and visits Honolulu. He interweaves all this with his youthful experiences and puzzlement about L.A.'s Japanese American community, his struggle to become a poet against the wishes of his parents and his astonishment and anger on discovering racial discrimination. This memoir contrasts two worlds and comes to terms with both. (May)

Spanning most of the twentieth century, Another Way Home celebrates the special circumstance of being born and reared in a household where being a woman of mixed race could be a fundamental source of strength, vitality, and courage. Ronne Hartfield begins her chronicle with the early life of her mother, Day Shepherd. Born to a wealthy British plantation owner and the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, Day negotiates the complicated circumstances of plantation life in the border country of Louisiana and Mississippi and, as she enters womanhood, the quadroon and octoroon societies of New Orleans. Equally a tale of the Great Migration, Another Way Home traces Day's journey to Bronzeville, the epicenter of black Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, through the eyes of Day and, ultimately, her daughter, we witness the bustling city streets and vibrant middle-class culture of this iconic black neighborhood. We also relive crucial moments in African American history as they are experienced by the author's family and others in Chicago's South Side black community, from the race riots of 1919 and the Great Depression to the murder of Emmett Till and the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Throughout her book, Hartfield portrays mixed-race Americans navigating the challenges of their lives with resilience and grace, making Another Way Home an intimate and compelling encounter with one family's response to our racially charged culture.

"A warm and touching memoir of a close-knit family as well as a record of the tumultuous history of race relations in the U.S."—Booklist

A superb collection of essays on Salem's rich history and cultural life over the past four centuries.

Library Journal

Salem, MA, scene of the legendary witch trials, is a city rich in historic and literary significance. In this collection of essays, Salem State College professors Morrison (history; A Praying People: Massachusetts Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600-1690) and Schultz (English & American studies; Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834) attempt to explore many aspects of Salem's history and culture over a period of nearly four centuries. Essays deal with diverse topics, including local history, literature, religion, economic development, and popular culture, and vary from poetic works to fully documented scholarly discussions. The essays were contributed by the coeditors and other historians and literature professors, as well as by archaeologists, architects, art professors, other independent scholars, and writers of crime novels and other fiction. The result is a truly unusual collection that will both entertain and educate those interested in this city. Recommended for larger collections with an interest in Massachusetts and the New England area. Theresa McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

To learn was to live, and to learn well was to live well. This was the lesson of both cultures of the Modern Orthodox Jewish world in which Ilana Blumberg was educated, with its commitment to traditional Jewish practice and ideas alongside an appreciation for modern, secular wisdom. But when the paths of Jewish tradition and secular wisdom inevitably diverge, applying this lesson can become extraordinarily tricky, especially for a woman. Blumberg’s memoir of negotiating these two worlds is the story of how a Jewish woman’s life was shaped by a passion for learning; it is also a rare look into the life of Modern Orthodoxy, the twentieth-century movement of Judaism that tries to reconcile modernity with tradition.

Blumberg traces her own path from a childhood immersed in Hebrew and classical Judaic texts as well as Anglo-American novels and biographies, to a womanhood where the two literatures suddenly represent mutually exclusive possibilities for life. Set in “houses of study,” from a Jewish grammar school and high school to a Jerusalem yeshiva for women to a secular American university, her memoir asks, in an intimate and poignant manner: what happens when the traditional Jewish ideal of learning asserts itself in a body that is female—a body directed by that same tradition toward a life of modesty, early marriage, and motherhood?

Publishers Weekly

Tension wraps around the pages of Blumberg's memoir, an ardent intellectual autobiography by a woman in love with both Jewish texts and secular literature. Yet even more than the religious-secular divide symbolized by the beit midrash(Jewish house of learning) and the university, the struggle over a woman's place in Judaism tears at her soul. The granddaughter of a Hebrew scholar, as a child Blumberg juggled an Orthodox education with participation in an egalitarian Conservative synagogue. She details at length a depressing year in Israel at a women's michlalah(yeshiva), and then her introduction to university life, where she steeped herself in literature. Today, she has found a balance of sorts as a professor of English literature and Judaic studies at Michigan State University, but admits to still feeling a "sense of deep conflict" between tradition and secular ideas. Blumberg tries too hard to be poetic, and she risks losing some readers with assumptions of familiarity with Hebrew and Jewish texts. What her memoir elucidates, however, is the passion for study no matter what a person's gender: "If we studied we might come to see what... was truly important and what was trivial... we might come to see how God saw the world." (Mar. 15)

100 New Yorkers profiles musicians, painters, photographers, a journalist who donned disguises to get the inside scoop, comedians, crooners, politicians, a clairvoyant—even a pirate—and the places associated with them in the city. It describes affairs and love stories, profound and enduring friendships, feats of the imagination, lurid scandals, and fabulous parties, along with moments of unexpected humor—such as the description of young Edgar Allan Poe, who routinely draped a white sheet over his head to walk solemnly through his stepfather's dinner parties. Throughout, 100 New Yorkers features the incomparable panorama of the city—the drama surrounding the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s, the music coming out of smoky Harlem lounges in the 1940s, and the bustle of Coney Island in its heyday. Beautifully designed by Milton Glaser—himself an iconic New Yorker—this book features one hundred intriguing black-and-white photographs.

100 New Yorkers includes: Diane Arbus, Tallulah Bankhead, Henry James, Jacob Lawrence, John Lennon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allan Poe, Jackson Pollock, Diego Rivera, Babe Ruth, Sojourner Truth, Diana Vreeland, Weegee, Walt Whitman, and eighty-five more.

The dramatic and varied experiences of young Jews who fled the Nazis.

Publishers Weekly

"For them it was a question of swimming or sinking. For some of this generation it can certainly be said that but for Hitler and the Nazis they would never have gone as far in life as they did." Noted historian (Weimar: A Cultural History; A History of Zionism) and current chairman of the Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., Laqueur writes about a generation of German Jews who were in their teens or early 20s when they fled Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1941 a generation of refugees (of which he is a member) that would eventually include a disproportionately large number of successful, even world-renowned, men and women. Drawing on interviews and published and unpublished memoirs, he relates a series of representative anecdotes that testify to an astonishing variety of experiences and serve as a valuable contribution to Holocaust literature. Although large numbers of Jews went to Palestine, Great Britain and the U.S., others, like the author Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala, found refuge in India and elsewhere. Many of the survivors were forever broken by the experience, while others, like Henry Kissinger, were bolstered in their resolve to succeed and did so eminently. Some helped build the nation of Israel, and still others tried to deny their heritage after the war. Laqueur makes the point that luck and accident had an important role in their individual survival. (Apr. 20) Forecast: Though this book comes from a relatively small university press, Laqueur is a major Holocaust historian and editor-in-chief of Yale's Holocaust Encyclopedia, a notable reference volume also coming out in April; sales of Generation Exodus should piggyback on that. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Charles Bukowski chronicled the seedy underside of the city in which he spent most of his life—Los Angeles. His heroes were the panhandlers and hustlers, the drunks and the hookers, his beat the racetracks and strip joints, and his inspiration a series of dead-end jobs in warehouses, offices, and factories. It was in the evenings that he would put on a classical record, open a beer, and begin to type. Brought up by a violent father, Bukowski suffered childhood beatings before developing horrific acne and withdrawing into a moody adolescence. Much of his young life epitomized the style of the Beat generation—riding Greyhound buses, bumming around, and drinking himself into a stupor. Yet his novels sold millions of copies worldwide in dozens of languages. In this definitive biography Barry Miles, celebrated author of Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, turns his attention to the exploits of this hard-drinking, belligerent wild man of literature. This is an essential addition to every Bukowski fan's collection.

From radical abolitionist John Brown to presidential candidate Bob Dole to visionary environmentalist Wes Jackson, Kansas history is bursting with fascinating stories of individuals who made a difference to the nation and whose lives reveal much about our collective past.

Prominent Kansas historian Virgil Dean has gathered a distinguished team of writers—Thomas Isern, Craig Miner, and others—who have crafted incisive portraits of 27 notable men and women, covering 150 years of Kansas and American history. Here are agitators who moved their fellow citizens to action over political, social, and economic problems: not only John Brown, but also proslavery agitator William H. Russell; Mary Elizabeth Lease, lecturer for the Farmers' Alliance and Populist Party; Gerald B. Winrod, a.k.a. the "Jayhawk Hitler"; and Esther Brown, who challenged segregation in public schools.

Here, too, are motivators, like women's rights activist Clarina I. H. Nichols; William Allen White, the "Sage of Emporia"; and favorite sons Dwight D. Eisenhower and Bob Dole. Then there are the innovators, from trailblazers like Joseph G. McCoy, who changed the face of the cattle industry, and wheat king Theodore C. Henry to Wes Jackson, a pioneer in the sustainable agriculture movement, and the multitalented Gordon Parks, photographer, filmmaker, and author of The Learning Tree.

Reformers and preachers, publishers and artists, these fascinating personalities are brought vividly back to life by Dean and his fellow authors. They offer a fresh and engaging look at many of the important themes of Kansas history—especially the state's identification with some of the great radical movements, including abolitionism, populism, and civil rights—and ultimately recapture the true spirit of Kansas and its meaning for the rest of the nation.

Annals of Iowa

A fine collection. Dean has assembled an all-star lineup.

A woman who went West with her husband in the 1840s must have expected hardships and privation, but during the 1940s, when Etta Koch stopped off in Big Bend with her young family and a 23-foot travel trailer in tow, she anticipated no more than a civilized camping trip between her old home in Ohio and a new one in Arizona. It was only when she found herself moving into an old rock house without plumbing or electricity in the new Big Bend National Park that Etta realized, "From the sheltered life of a city girl of moderate circumstances, I too would have to face the reality of frontier living."

In this book based on her journals and letters, Etta Koch and her daughter June Cooper Price chronicle their family's first years (1944-1946) in the Big Bend. Etta describes how her photographer husband Peter Koch became captivated by the region as a place for natural history filmmaking-and how she and their three young daughters slowly adapted to a pioneer lifestyle during his months' long absences on the photo-lecture circuit. In vivid, often humorous anecdotes, she describes making the rock house into a home, getting to know the Park Service personnel and other neighbors, coping with the local wildlife, and, most of all, learning to love the rugged landscape and the hardy individuals who call it home.

One of the most important Native American leaders in history, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh protested land cession, and was a major catalyst of the Battle of Tippecanoe. He harnessed the tradition of American Indian pan-tribal unity to become the most important symbol of multi-national Native American identity and resistance in North America. This in-depth, accessible treatment explores the life of a key figure in Native American battle-lore who figures prominently in U.S. history curricula.

Lively, narrative chapters explore the Shawnee culture, Tecumseh's childhood, the transformation of his brother, Tenskwatawa into The Prophet, his creation of a pan-tribal movement, the War of 1812, and his legacy in history and popular culture.

The Milkweed Ladies the memoirs of poet Louise McNeill, is written our deep affection for and intimate knowledge of the lives of rural people and the rhythms of the natural world.  It is a personal account of the farm in southern West Virginia where her family has lived for nine generations.

Born in 1911, McNeill tells the story of her own growing years on the farm through the circadian rhythms of rural life.  She presents the farm itself, “its level fields, its fence row, and hilly pastures . . . some two hundred acres of trees and bluegrass, running water, and the winding, dusty paths that cattle and humans have kept open through the years.”  She writes movingly of the harsh routines of the lives of her family, from spring ploughing to winter sugaring, and of the hold the farm itself has on them and the earth itself on all of us.

By the 1930s, the farm and the surrounding community had been drastically changed by the destruction left by the lumber companies, by the increased access to the outside world resulting from railway and automobile, and by war.  McNeill herself left the farm in 1937 to complete her college education and to persue her literary career.

Throughout <I>The Milkweed Ladies</I>, McNeill juxtaposes the life of the farm with the larger world events that impinge on it.  But the larger world moves closer and closer to the world of the farm as McNeill herself moves away from it.  The book concludes with McNeill’s perspective on the events of August 5, 1945.  As she sits in the Commodore Hotel in New York City, reading the headlines about Hiroshima, she understands that she cannever see the farm in the same way again.

The Milkweed Ladies is filled with memorable characters - an herb-gathering Granny, McNeill’s sailor father, her patient, flower-loving mother, and Aunt Malindy in her “black sateen dress” who “never did a lick of work.”  With her poet’s gift for detail and language, McNeill creates a world, forgotten by many of us, to some of us never known.

Publishers Weekly

In this graceful, poignant memoir, poet McNeill writes of the West Virginia land that has been in her family for nine generations. With a meandering, appealing style, she recounts the history of the Swago Farm, from Grandpa Tom, who took the area from the Indians in 1769, down to her father, G. D., sailor, lawyer, teacher and farmer. Short, flowing chapters chronicle a rustic childhood with hardworking Mama, whose Japanese kimono is her one luxury, crotchety Granny Fanny, who roams the hills gathering herbs, and Aunt Malindy, the beloved, idle boarder. Chores mark the passing of seasons: maple-sugaring in winter, plowing and planting in spring, haying and blackberry picking in summer and Apple Butter Makin' Day in fall. The farm is so safely isolated that the family does not learn of World War I until a telephone is installed in 1916. But soon, with the railroads and the lumber industry, the world encroaches. McNeill leaves for college, begins publishing poetry, gets married. It seems the farm will always remain, in her mind, untouched by timeuntil August 7, 1945, while sitting in a New York hotel and reading in the newspaper about Hiroshima, she realizes that ``Never again would I be able to say with such infinite certainty that the earth would always green in the springtime, and the purple hepaticas come to bloom on my woodland rock.'' (September)

A TRAVÉS DE MIS OJOS es un recuento de leyendas, tradiciones, sucesos, personajes y experiencias autobiográficas, que han pasado a través de mis ojos.

En este libro de reminiscencias, el cual quise escribir para perpetuar mis gratas memorias de crecer en el tan folclórico Chitré, en la muy particular región de Azuero del interior de Panamá, describo historias y sucesos extraños que presencié y oí de niña, pero que aún se repetían cuando ya era adulta.

Ya en los Estados Unidos pude notar que las tradiciones y la religión en esas regiones con costumbres españolas tienen una particular relación, que es alimentada por la forma de ser de los pobladores. En este libro se describen algunas de esas tradiciones y de esos simples pero interesantes personajes, que harán que muchas personas de cualquier país o lugar, se remonten a recordar a los que también formaron alguna vez parte de sus vivencias.

La familia es el centro de nuestras vidas, por lo que relato aspectos chistosos de algunos de los miembros de la mía, como también hechos tristes y otros acontecimientos que no tienen explicación. A quién no le han pasado sucesos inexplicables? En este libro le dedico un corto capítulo a algunos de los que han tenido directa relación con mi entorno familiar.

Los días de escuela, de aventuras en trabajos en las montañas, ríos y selvas, y algunas anotaciones sobre las experiencias vividas durante una de las épocas más relevantes de la historia política y lainvasión a Panamá, también tienen su espacio en este libro.

Como si me siguieran a través de la vida, describo vivencias extrañas durante los años de estudios en un interesante pueblecito cerca de los Apalaches, Athens, en Ohio, en donde se experimentaron y aún suceden eventos paranormales.

Cuando el destino me lleva a vivir en el norte de los Estados Unidos, en una cultura muy diferente a la que conocí de niña, me doy cuenta que estos mundos tan diferentes, son también muy parecidos, y que muchas más experiencias de vida seguían pasando a través de mis ojos. Lourdes Pérez Athanasiadis

With these, all his worldly possessions at the age of seventeen, Daja Wangchuk Meston caught an airliner to America, the unfamiliar land of which he was a citizen, and began his arduous personal journey to discover and mend his long-severed ties to his family, his country, and, in a very real sense, his own identity.

In this moving memoir, the author tells the incredible story of a young man who used his Buddhist upbringing and the love of a good woman -- his young wife -- to learn that forgiving others can play a critical role in healing a damaged soul.

Daja had much to forgive. In the early 1970s, at the age of three, he was taken by his hippie American parents to Nepal and left in the care of a Tibetan family. The Tibetans in turn placed him in a Buddhist monastery where, at the age of six, he was ordained to be a monk. There, in scenes reminiscent of the novels of Charles Dickens, he was ostracized by the other boy monks, who taunted him for his Caucasian physical traits, left so hungry he stole scraps of bread, and slept on a flea-infested straw mat. He was an outsider in an insular monastic world, unable to understand what had befallen him and longing for the warmth of his mother's embrace.

His mother became a Buddhist nun, and caring for a child, she thought, would impede her spiritual journey. Her occasional and brief visits with young Daja became increasingly rare. As he grew up, there were often years without a single maternal visit. His father, unbeknownst to the boy, had suffered a mental breakdown and returned, helpless, to Los Angeles.

The story of Daja's self-generated ouster from the monastery as an adolescent (he pretended to have slept with a prostitute), his eventual migration to his homeland, his lifelong attempt to understand and reconnect with his parents, and his eventual and dangerous work on behalf of Tibetan rights under Chinese oppression make for a compelling reading experience.

But more than that, the story of Daja Meston reminds us of the universal human need for roots and family bonds. It is ultimately an unforgettable story of love, hope, and forgiveness and of a gentle man with an enormous capacity for all three.

Publishers Weekly

In this memoir, Meston tells the wrenching tale of being put in a Buddhist monastery as a child by his hippie parents, who had hopes of him becoming a monk. Meston was born in 1970 to a father who was a self-taught artist, and later descended into mental illness, and a mother who hailed from a wealthy Hollywood family and became so enraptured by Buddhist teachings that she became a nun in a Nepalese monastery. At age six, Meston was placed in a large Tibetan foster family before entering the Kopan temple. The only white-skinned boy, he was teasingly called White Eye and Rotten, and soon grew bored by the tedious study and chores. He became rebellious, and was eventually expelled for breaking his vow of celibacy and sent to live with relatives in California. Meston spoke little English, had no formal education, and spent years educating himself (he was eventually accepted at Brandeis). Meston later worked for Tibetan rights issues, traveling to Tibet, where he created a cause célèbre when he leaped out the window while under house arrest to avoid interrogation by Chinese officials. Meston's (and Ansberry's) style is journalistically cut-and-dried and occasionally stifles the emotional turbulence that drives Weston's psychic journey, from abandoned child to lonely immigrant and suicidal prisoner. (Mar.)

A healing memoir that confronts national guilt for the Nazi past

Stuart Dybek

John O'Brien's is an original voice, yet his talent allows for the welcome echoes of a distant American humanist tradition—Steinbeck, Agee, and Sherwood Anderson come to mind. Like them, O'Brien's powerful sense of place is indistinguishable from his empathy for those who inhabit it. The lovely, natural flow of his prose makes At Home In The Heart Of Appalachia a beautiful reading experience.

"An Italian ROOTS." The Washington Post Book World At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.

Publishers Weekly

Filtering the history of Italian immigration to America through the personal saga of Talese's family, this massive and masterful volume recreates the author's ancestral home in the Southern Italian backwater of Maida, vivifying a superstitious, impoverished, apolitical and powerless underclass that for centuries was exploited by both its own aristocracy and a parade of foreign rulers and invaders. In Maida the author's great-grandfather Domenico ruled his farm with an iron hand; lured by a dream of prosperity, Talese's grandfather Gaetano left his family in Italy and worked himself to an early grave in a Pennsylvania asbestos-factory town. Gaetano's son Joseph witnessed the devastation that WW I heaped on his village, apprenticed as a tailor to a kindly uncle in Maida, later joined a cousin who had made his way to Paris, and eventually followed his late father's path to America in 1920. Talese ( Thy Neighbor's Wife ) nimbly juggles a large variety of characters, events and settings. An aloof loner, Talese's first-generation American mother, Catherine, grew up in an insular Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y.; the walls of her home were hung with crucifixes, and her parents, who had both experienced tragic earlier marriages in the old country, wore the dark clothes of mourning. Raised in Ocean City, N.J., as a minority within a minority (an Italian in an Irish Catholic parish on a Protestant island), Talese recalls an exacting father who never played ball with him and who used him as a mannequin for his clothing creations. A story that will resonate for parents and children of every nationality relates how Joseph, torn between his loyalty to his adopted homeland and his love for his family in Italy, lost control of himself during WW II; upon learning that the Allies had bombed an abbey in southern Italy, he shut his ears to his son's cries and destroyed the fleet of model U.S. aircraft that Gay had painstakingly built. 300,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. (Feb.)