At first glance, Fieldhouse, by Scott Novosel appears to be a basketball story. And it is a story about basketball. After three tryouts as a walk-on player with the Kansas Jayhawks, Novosel finally succeeds in his senior year. He plays fifteen games for Coach Roy Williams and alongside future NBA players.
All American Boys is a big-issue book that also makes an excellent character study. Rashad, a sixteen-year-old African-American boy, is the victim of police brutality. Quinn, a sixteen-year-old white boy, is a witness to Rashad's beating. These two guys live in the same city and go to the same school. Quinn plays on the same basketball team as some of Rashad's friends. And yet they barely know each other.
Changing your lifestyle is not an easy choice, so when taking on a challenge like becoming a vegetarian, chances are you would like for the transition to be as easy as possible. Trudy Slabosz shows readers how to ease the transition with her short and sweet book Going Veggie. In it, readers will find a very concise plan for cutting out meat from their diets in 30 days.
In Montage of Heck, filmmaker Brett Morgen uses personal sketchbooks and videos of Kurt Cobain's, and combines them with animation that matches Cobain’s own aesthetic. There’s also footage of Nirvana and interviews with family, but what carries the film is the access it gives viewers to Cobain’s tumultuous life and unique genius.
In Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, Lara Vapnyar brings the lives of recent immigrants to New York into crystal clear focus. Using the universal language of food, Vapnyar illustrates the sadness of Nina’s wilting marriage with the broccoli in her refrigerator; Sergey’s loneliness cured, not by companionship, but by Borscht; Katya crafts her memory of puffed rice and meatballs specifically for her lover’s entertainment.
If you ever wanted to know what it would be like to be in the middle of a drug war, then pick up The Cartel. Art Keller is a DEA agent living in Mexico and trying to bring down the drug barons. The reader is slowly drawn into the political and economic landscape of Mexico and the reality of the effects of the “war on drugs” on Mexicans. While educating the reader about this conflict, the author entertains with a sizzling plot that is full of violence and pathos.
The second book in the Echo Park Coven series picks up immediately after the end of the first book, The Witches of Echo Park. Lyse and her fellow witches, or blood sisters as they prefer to call themselves, have a major threat called "the Flood" looming over them. It isn't long before the Flood comes in and washes the coven, and the plot, in many different, dangerous directions.
It’s not often that you open a book to find the main character quoting author James Crumley. But Ken Bruen is clearly a student of the genre; references to the history of hard-boiled fiction keep dropping, which is a very nice treat for the reader.
It's an occupational hazard that I read lots of different things for lots of different reasons. Don't get me wrong, they are almost all very good and I enjoy almost all of them, but there's the underlying awareness that I most likely wouldn't have read the majority of them if not for my job so they always feel just a little bit like work. Then there are books like this one that feel completely and entirely like fun.
A veggie-lover’s dream! This cookbook takes us through the alphabet one vegetable at a time, with classics like potatoes to more unusual veggies like daikon. He even sneaks in a few fruits, like the tomato. V is for Vegetables is not expressly vegetarian, although some of the recipes certainly are.
