This new novel from the author of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a wonderful tale of two generations. Elina and Ted, brand new parents of a son, live in current day London. Elina nearly died giving birth and Ted is haunted by having almost lost her. Lexie and Innes inhabit post war London of the 1950’s where they publish a magazine chronicling the vibrant art world that surrounds them. The story of these couples tucks and weaves in unexpected ways that leave the reader wondering how they will ever connect. But O’Farrell skillfully reels the two story lines toward each other until the reader understands in an Ah-hah moment how fate has touched them both. This is a love story, a mystery and a book that made me late for work having to finish it. -Sue

Without Toby Lester's fine book, the Waldseemüller Map might remain an interesting historical footnote. A treasure, sure, for naming the Americas, but its importance would remain obscured for all but a few scholars. Instead, one now understands the creation of the map as a world-changing moment, "a birth certificate for the world that came into being in 1492 -- and ... a death warrant for the one that was there before." Read the rest of CGB Assistant Manager Martin Schmutterer's review in the Star Tribune here.

Bookseller Joe looked more alarmed than usual when I asked him what he thought of Donald Ray Pollock's follow-up to his 2009 intertwined, but no less reckless collection of short stories, "Knockemstiff," which, in hindsight, was a compliment. While Joe had many things to say about "The Devil All the Time," one comment seemed to say it all: "I wouldn't recommend it for a book-club." -Colin, CGB Bookseller

 

A wonderful book. Super gritty and violent, and not for the faint of heart. Even I was disturbed at parts of this read. Great dialogue and black humor abound. Mr. Pollock is like a modern day Jim Thompson. Take a tour through hell! - Joe, CGB Bookseller

For all it has to say about the brain and how it works, Nicholas Carr's latest is, in fact, less scientific than its subtitle and index are letting on, enabling this reader to not only understand, but eagerly misquote it. Picking up where his last book, "The Big Switch" left off (and for those who didn't read it, sort of starting there as well), "The Shallows" first reviews the technological, neurological, and (just for laughs) societal changes that occurred in accordance with the Western world's " big switch" from oral communication to the invention of the printing press to a people who post pictures of their dogs in hats on facebook. Along the way, Carr takes a more than cursory look at the history of both the book and brain, as well as how the two were thought about and, in the process, amalgamated in the minds of dozens of comparatively lesser known philosophers and psychologists than Sigmund Freud and Frederic Nietzsche, whose names I'm both familiar with and comfortable pronouncing. It seems Carr is aware of this, my comfort level as a reader who is coming back to science after years of never having tried, if not the fact that books about the brain and its connection to behavior are in the midst of selling, at the very least to publishers, like hard-boiled mysteries, which should offer some indication of the role that science plays in our everyday thinking about things like the world. In that, while Carr spends a significant amount of time megaphoning his concept of the brain's "plasticity" or malleability, his point in doing so is to extol the eerie implications of evidence that suggests, like a dog who knows how to roll over when it works to his advantage, the brain is as easily influenced as it is prone to addiction to one pattern of behavior. Especially when that pattern produces a desired effect, or smells like peanut butter. In other words, Carr cares less about dopamine and mirror-neurons in and of themselves than how such features of the brain's circuitry, together with the ever-increasing speed of the internet and Google's literal investment in our concomitantly decreased ability to concentrate, influences "how we direct our attention and engage our senses." The rising tide of superficiality, on a deeply personal (i.e., biological) level is, in the end, "The Shallow's" subject and concern, which is weighted and made palpable by the desperation in Carr's tone throughout, and by the time that he himself admits that after several months of abstaining from the gratifications and temptations of living his life online, he's once again plugged in and only slightly miserable. Perhaps because his mind is too submerged to tell the difference between shooting birds at pigs in real life vs. online, or perhaps because as "The Shallows" not only claims but demonstrates, the world is always changing, and, like it or not, so are we. -Colin, CGB Bookseller

700 plus pages, with over 130 essays, books reviews, and columns by a witty, erudite, and mildly caustic observer. The penultimate entry is worth the book! -Elmer

Documentation of the Federal Government's assaults on civic liberty, privacy, and the right to dissent. Any inclination to assume personal security should be removed by reading this! -Elmer