Staff Picks – May 2021

When the daughter of an oil magnate is found dead on the famous Blue Train to the French Riviera, Poirot must investigate the past to reveal the killer.

Amp Your MySpace Page

by Eric Butow

*Don’t settle for the basics! Create a page that makes an impact, reflects who you really are, and generates a buzz. Amp Your MySpace Page shows you how to create backgrounds, incorporate graphics and custom fonts, and include animation, audio, video, and blogs. Discover effective ways to promote yourself and your career, events, music, art, writing, film, and more. Millions of MySpace users are waiting for you-unleash your full potential online.

*Harry Potter spent ten long years living with Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, an aunt and uncle whose outrageous favoritism of their perfectly awful son Dudley leads to some of the most inspired dark comedy since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But fortunately for Harry, he’s about to be granted a scholarship to a unique boarding school called THE HOGWORTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY, where he will become a school hero at the game of Quidditch (a kind of aerial soccer played high above the ground on broomsticks), he will make some wonderful friends, and, unfortunately, a few terrible enemies. For although he seems to be getting your run-of-the-mill boarding school experience (well, ok, even that’s pretty darn out of the ordinary), Harry Potter has a destiny that he was born to fulfill. A destiny that others would kill to keep him from.

In the wake of a shocking tragedy, Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming, but financially strapped bookshop in San Francisco. She also becomes caretaker for her ailing grandfather Andrew, her only living relative–not counting her scoundrel father. But the gruff, deeply kind Andrew has begun displaying signs of decline. Natalie thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted living facility to ensure the care he needs. To pay for it, she plans to close the bookstore and sell the derelict, but valuable building on historic Perdita Street, which is in need of constant fixing. There’s only one problem–Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. Natalie adores her grandfather; she’ll do whatever it takes to make his final years happy. Besides, she loves the store and its books provide welcome solace for her overwhelming grief. After she moves into the small studio apartment above the shop, Natalie carries out her grandfather’s request and hires contractor Peach Gallagher to do the necessary and ongoing repairs. His young daughter, Dorothy, also becomes a regular at the store, and she and Natalie begin reading together while Peach works. To Natalie’s surprise, her sorrow begins to dissipate as her life becomes an unexpected journey of new connections, discoveries and revelations, from unearthing artifacts hidden in the bookshop’s walls, to discovering the truth about her family, her future, and her own heart.

I move throughout the world without a plan, guided by instinct, connecting through trust, and constantly watching for serendipitous opportunities.” From the Preface Tales of a Female Nomad is the story of Rita Golden Gelman, an ordinary woman who is living an extraordinary existence. At the age of forty-eight, on the verge of a divorce, Rita left an elegant life in L.A. to follow her dream of connecting with people in cultures all over the world. In 1986 she sold her possessions and became a nomad, living in a Zapotec village in Mexico, sleeping with sea lions on the Galapagos Islands, and residing everywhere from thatched huts to regal palaces. She has observed orangutans in the rain forest of Borneo, visited trance healers and dens of black magic, and cooked with women on fires all over the world. Rita’s example encourages us all to dust off our dreams and rediscover the joy, the exuberance, and the hidden spirit that so many of us bury when we become adults.

Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. There is ritual and routine, and it has been ever thus for generations. Then one day a jeep appears at the village gate–the first automobile any of them have seen–and a stranger arrives. In this remote Yunnan village, the stranger finds the rare tea he has been seeking and a reticent Akha people. In her biggest seller, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, See introduced the Yao people to her readers. Here she shares the customs of another Chinese ethnic minority, the Akha, whose world will soon change. Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, translates for the stranger and is among the first to reject the rules that have shaped her existence. When she has a baby outside of wedlock, rather than stand by tradition, she wraps her daughter in a blanket, with a tea cake hidden in her swaddling, and abandons her in the nearest city. After mother and daughter have gone their separate ways, Li-yan slowly emerges from the security and insularity of her village to encounter modern life while Haley grows up a privileged and well-loved California girl. Despite Haley’s happy home life, she wonders about her origins; and Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. They both search for and find answers in the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for generations. A powerful story about a family, separated by circumstances, culture, and distance, Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane paints an unforgettable portrait of a little known region and its people and celebrates the bond that connects mothers and daughters.

We have entered a new era in America–dangerous, divided, and uncertain. In a moment when people are hungry for meaningful ways to respond to the ascent of nationalism, polarization and hate in the U.S. and around the globe, this book answers the central question of our time: How do we love in a time of anger? How do we love those who hurt us? How do we love those who are different from us, whose race or religion or politics we do not understand? How do we love people who are targeted by laws, policies, and violence? And how do we love ourselves? Valarie Kaur is a renowned Sikh activist and in this book, she argues that Revolutionary Love is the call of our times. When we practice love in the face of fear or rage, it has the ability to transform an encounter, a relationship, a community, a culture, even a country. Drawing from her personal experiences, Sikh wisdom, and the work of civil rights leaders of all kinds, Kaur has reenvisioned love as a public ethic: a commitment to loving others, opponents, and ourselves. She argues that this type of love is not a passing feeling; it is an act of will. It is an active, political, and moral response to violence, hate, and otherness. It is the choice to extend our will for the flourishing of others and ourselves. Grounded in Kaur’s dramatic personal journey of practicing love in the face of political oppression, sexual assault, wrongful arrest, detention, racism, and murder, this important and timely book shows us a way to build movements that do not leave anyone behind. In an era defined by rage, Revolutionary Love is perhaps our greatest form of civil disobedience.

*Filled with spectacular photographs of the Rebels, Imperials, bounty hunters, and more, a thoroughly researched reference furnishes essential facts about every Star Wars character and their weapons. 300,000 first printing.

*John Kelly, former Navy SEAL and Vietnam veteran, is still getting over the accidental death of his wife, when he befriends a young woman with a checkered past. When the past reaches out for her in a particularly horrifying fashion, he vows revenge and sets out to track down the men responsible. At the same time, the Pentagon is readying an operation to rescue a key group of prisoners in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. One man knows the terrain around that camp better than anyone: John Kelly.

Kelly has his own mission. The Pentagon wants him for theirs. As Clancy takes us through the twists and turns of Without Remorse, he blends the exceptional realism and authenticity that are his trademarks with intricate plotting, knife-edge suspense, and a remarkable cast of characters.

In the aftermath of the brutal murder of his father, a mysterious woman, Kahlan Amnell, appears in Richard Cypher’s forest sanctuary seeking help . . . and more. His world, his very beliefs, are shattered when ancient debts come due with thundering violence.

In a dark age it takes courage to live, and more than mere courage to challenge those who hold dominion, Richard and Kahlan must take up that challenge or become the next victims. Beyond awaits a bewitching land where even the best of their hearts could betray them. Yet, Richard fears nothing so much as what secrets his sword might reveal about his own soul. Falling in love would destroy them–for reasons Richard can’t imagine and Kahlan dare not say.

In their darkest hour, hunted relentlessly, tormented by treachery and loss, Kahlan calls upon Richard to reach beyond his sword–to invoke within himself something more noble. Neither knows that the rules of battle have just changed . . . or that their time has run out.