BBBC suggestions 2008
Explore the top BBBC book suggestions for 2008 with our curated list of must-read titles. Discover acclaimed recommendations and literary gems from this iconic year.
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Three Cups of Tea
by Greg Mortenson
The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Talibanâs backyard Anyone who despairs of the individualâs power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistanâs treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schoolsâespecially for girlsâthat offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortensonâs quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.
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The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan
"Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." âThe New Yorker One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award Author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestseller In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivoreâs Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollanâs revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivoreâs Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
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The Age of American Unreason
by Susan Jacoby
Traces the current of anti-intellectualism from post-WWII to the present and argues that the nation's cult of unreason is both deadly and destructive.
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Memories, Dreams, Reflections
by Carl G. Jung
An eye-opening biography of one of the most influential psychiatrists of the modern age, drawing from his lectures, conversations, and own writings. "An important, firsthand document for readers who wish to understand this seminal writer and thinker." âBooklist In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, Carl Gustav Jung undertook the telling of his life story. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is that book, composed of conversations with his colleague and friend Aniela JaffĂŠ, as well as chapters written in his own hand, and other materials. Jung continued to work on the final stages of the manuscript until shortly before his death on June 6, 1961, making this a uniquely comprehensive reflection on a remarkable life. Fully corrected, this edition also includes Jung's VII Sermones ad Mortuos.
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The Power of One
by Bryce Courtenay
âThe Power of One has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama.â âThe New York Times âUnabashedly uplifting . . . asserts forcefully what all of us would like to believe: that the individual, armed with the spirit of independenceââthe power of oneââcan prevail.â âCleveland Plain Dealer In 1939, as Hitler casts his enormous, cruel shadow across the world, the seeds of apartheid take root in South Africa. There, a boy called Peekay is born. His childhood is marked by humiliation and abandonment, yet he vows to survive and conceives heroic dreamsâwhich are nothing compared to what life actually has in store for him. He embarks on an epic journey through a land of tribal superstition and modern prejudice where he will learn the power of words, the power to transform lives, and the power of one. âTotally engrossing . . . [presents] the metamorphosis of a most remarkable young man and the almost spiritual influence he has on others . . . Peekay has both humor and a refreshingly earthy touch, and his adventures, at times, are hair-raising in their suspense.â âLos Angeles Times Book Review âMarvelous . . . It is the people of the sun-baked plains of Africa who tug at the heartstrings in this book. . . . [Bryce] Courtenay draws them all with a fierce and violent love.â âThe Washington Post Book World âImpressive.â âNewsday âA compelling tale.â âThe Christian Science Monitor
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Till We Have Faces
by Clive Staples Lewis
This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister, who posessively and harmfully loves Psyche. Much to Orual's frustration, Psyche is loved by Cupid, the god of love himself, setting the troubled Orual on a path of moral development.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. âJust as good, if not better, than Khaled Hosseiniâs best-selling first book, The Kite Runner.ââNewsweek Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.
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The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
by Amy Hempel
With her trademark compassion and wit, Hempel takes readers into the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America.
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The Woman Who Walked into Doors
by Roddy Doyle
âThis unflinching novel chronicles a womanâs relationship with a violent man in a way that brings fresh insight to the subject . . . engaging and uplifting.â âO, The Oprah Magazine From Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of The Women Behind the Door, the heartrending origin story of Paula Spencer, a brave and tenacious housewife Paula Spencer is a thirty-nine-year-old mother of four, a blue-collar worker, an alcoholic in recoveryâor maybe not. Then one day a police officer knocks on her door. From the look on his face, she can tell itâs not good news. His revelation takes Paula back to the past, to her contented childhood, the audacity she learned as a teenager, the exhilaration of her romance with her husband Charlo, and the violent marriage to him that left her powerless. Now, as she struggles to reclaim her dignity from the abuse that left her with scars and a worsening drinking problem, this new revelation threatens to shatter the fragile peace sheâs built for herself and drag her back down the dark paths she thought sheâd left behind. Capturing both her vulnerability and strength, Roddy Doyle gives Paula a voice that is singular and real, the story of an ordinary woman whose extraordinary character will stay with you long after this novel and into the subsequent books in his trilogy, Paula Spencer and The Women Behind the Door.
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
by Milan Kundera
Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.
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The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD ⢠The Pulitzer Prizeâwinning author of American Pastoral delivers âa master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment" (The Wall Street Journal). One of the New York Timesâs 100 Best Books of the 21st Century It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."
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Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope. Reader's Guide included. Reprint.
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A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah
My new friends have begun to suspect I havenât told them the full story of my life. âWhy did you leave Sierra Leone?â âBecause there is a war.â âYou mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?â âYes, all the time.â âCool.â I smile a little. âYou should tell us about it sometime.â âYes, sometime.â This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, heâd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
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Outlander
by Diana Gabaldon
The "New York Times" bestseller that began the beloved saga of Jamie and Claire Fraser is now available in this specially-priced edition that includes an excerpt from Gabaldon's highly anticipated new Outlander hardcover, due for release in November 2005. Reissue.
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