Some Books Ive Read in the Last Year (as of Feb 2005)
Explore a curated list of books read in 2005, featuring insightful reviews and personal recommendations. Discover top literary picks and hidden gems from February 2005.
Item Not Found
ID: 0374528497
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0743255488
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0743250400
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 1574670999
(Type: books)
Book
Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Moving into the attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy, politically connected Fedden family in 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest becomes caught up in the rising fortunes of this glamorous family and finds his own life forever altered by his association during the boom years of the 1980s. By the author of The Swimming-Pool Library. 30,000 first printing.
Item Not Found
ID: 0670033510
(Type: books)
Book
Will in the World
by Stephen Greenblatt
A portrait of Elizabethan England and how it contributed to the making of William Shakespeare discusses how he moved to London lacking money, connections, and a formal education and rose to became his age's foremost playwright.
Item Not Found
ID: 0007162200
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0195169794
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0393035158
(Type: books)
Book
The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy the freedom that her fortune has opened up and to determine her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. It is only when she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the cultivated but worthless Gilbert Osmond that she discovers that wealth is a two-edged sword and that there is a price to be paid for independence. With its subtle delineation of American characters in a European setting, Portrait of a Lady is one of the most accomplished and popular of Henry James's early novels.
Item Not Found
ID: 158479349X
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0805076913
(Type: books)
Book
Reefer Madness
by Eric Schlosser
Reports on America's "shadow" economy of illegal drugs, pornography, and illegal migrant workers, arguing that these underground industries continue to grow with government intervention.
Item Not Found
ID: 0198165110
(Type: books)
Book
Waiting for the Barbarians
by J. M. Coetzee
A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.
Item Not Found
ID: 0140390820
(Type: books)
Book
Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
The #1 New York Times bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton! Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation. "Grand-scale biography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book." —David McCullough “A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all." —Joseph Ellis Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804. Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans. 9780143034759
Item Not Found
ID: 1573222674
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 1400046408
(Type: books)
Book
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Authorized Edition)
by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States
The eagerly awaited release of The 9/11 Commission Report has caused an avalanche of press coverage, but nearly all of the media commentary has omitted one important attribute of this instant bestseller: its readability. For once, our government has produced a report designed for the public that it purports to serve. By comparison, the Starr Commission Report was a confusing hodgepodge cobbled together for lawyer clones, and the Warren Commission Report resembled a hastily constructed mountain of data. By contrast, The 9/11 Commission Report is a model of narrative clarity. Reading it, one gains a better sense of every stage and dimension of these truly terrifying events; from the rise of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to the collapse of the World Trade Center and its aftermath. Like a full-throttled detective story thrust into real life, it renders the near misses and muffed opportunities that enabled the plot to reach fruition. With sensationalizing or overgeneralizing, the report s authors have given us a document that illuminates the planning and possible countermeasures to these terrible acts. Every American should read this book: After all, we are its target audience and its sponsors. R. N. Wilson