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Awista Ayub's peaceful revolution in Afghanistan began with little more than eight brave young women, a few soccer balls and her own strong will. When she returned to the country that she and her family had left when she was just two years old, Awista was determined to empower Afghan women through sports, but her efforts faced stubborn opposition. For many locals, especially those who had grown up under Taliban rule, female athletics were immodest and disgraceful. In this memoir, Ayub describes how the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange was born in strife and grew into a safe zone where women can be themselves. Ultimately, However Tall the Mountain is a thoroughly inspiring true story about sports, feminism, political change, and living out your dreams.

For most of us, meteorites are simply ugly, misshapen rocks that have fallen from space. For geologists and other scientists, these dark objects conceal secrets to the origin of our solar system; for visionaries and poets, they are stony and metallic reminders of our primal connection with the universe. Christopher Cokinos' The Fallen Sky is not just a dull study of the composition of meteorites any more than his Hope Is A Thing with Feathers is a taxonomy of extinct birds. Instead, this intimate history approaches these celestial fragments through the eyes of the maverick scientists, meteorite collectors, and independent researchers who seek to discover their hidden meaning. Cokinos' own quest to track their story takes us from Polar Regions to the far expanses of space; from Iron Age ritual sites to post-modern laboratories. The Fallen Sky is a hybrid of science, poetry, adventure, and pure magic.

Kirsten Holmstedt's Band of Sisters: American Women at War in Iraq spotlighted the female soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen who serve in Iraq; it also extinguished forever the fiction that U.S. women aren't fighting on the front lines in the Middle East. The Girls Come Marching Home isn't just the obligatory follow-up to that award-winning book. It is a standalone tribute to the courage, resilience, but also the hardships experienced by women warriors on their return to the States. As in her previous book (which is now in paperback), Holmstedt profiles individual women in the services, describing how these ordinary women cope with the extraordinary circumstance of combat and its aftermath. This isn't a pro-war book or an anti-war book; it's a book about real women who put their lives on the line and came back to tell about it.

In the Age of Oprah, there are dozens of engaging, feel good books about teachers and other school officials who have made a difference. There are also, thank goodness, a full bounty of helpful tomes to help anxiety-ridden parents find the right school for their offspring. What makes David Marcus's Acceptance special is that it interweaves those two functions and does it so artfully that the narrative never descends into schmaltz or "guidance speak." To research this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Marcus embedded himself for a year at Oyster Bay High, the small North Shore Long Island school where veteran counseling director Gwyneth Smith Jr. works his magic. For four decades, "Smitty" has learned to read the college application process like a savant, often finding success (and scholarships) in totally unexpected places. By focusing on seven students ranging from a free spirit to an overachieving valedictorian, Marcus demonstrates not only Smitty's merits, but also his own. I think of Acceptance as a stress-relieving device for every harried parent and nervous teenager.

Seventy-year-old Alec Malone, the protagonist in this novel, lives in Georgetown, at one remove, literally and figuratively, from the Washington political scene. His father, 95-year-old Erwin "Kim" Malone is a venerated national monument, a former nine-term U.S. Senator who has outlived all his critics. Though an only child, Alec has been careful to remain beyond the pull of strong Potomac currents. Instead of government, he chose photography as career. Maintaining his aesthetic purity, he even turned down a plum assignment to cover the Vietnam War. Now, abandoned by his wife, he contemplates the roads he has taken and rejected. Ward Just's Exiles in The Garden is not, however, a solitary meditation; Malone's musings are seasoned with his encounters with his Czech-American spouse and her émigré friends; his State Department official daughter; and his talented actress girlfriend. Former D.C. insider Ward Just has composed a Washington novel that escapes the confines of the genre.

The French Empire was at its height. Napoleon Bonaparte had vanquished most of continental Europe; now, in 1812, the self-crowned emperor set out to conquer Russia. Angered by czarist actions, he organized the best-trained, best-equipped land army ever assembled. With his aptly named, 700,000-man Grande Armee, he began his march towards Moscow. At that point, the grandeur stops and the terror begins. Stephan Talty's The Illustrious Dead etches a picture of war far different from standard Napoleonic histories. He demonstrates convincingly that the brilliant French military strategist was defeated not by enemy armies, but by typhus, tiny bacterium transmitted in the feces of fleas and lice. During the ill-fated campaign, he notes, more troops died from disease than from battle. This account is so gripping that like the best histories, it cuts across subjects.

 

The best answers available to one of life’s core questions: How can I survive danger?

 

Even when we’re in the safest of situations, we humans worry and wonder about survival. Whether we’re imagining how we would escape from a burning building or plane; avoid a deadly wild animal attack; or stay alive as a psychopath’s hostage, we all know that surviving is the bottom line. Los Angeles Times journalist Ben Sherwood traveled the world to learn the secrets that helped real men and women stay alive in moments of extreme physical crisis. The stories are gripping; the lessons could be life-saving.

 

Too refreshing to be restricted to an academic audience, this sprightly romp uses dozens of example to show us that Shakespeare still lives.

 

 

“The premise of this book is simple and direct: Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare.” Award-winning Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber demonstrates her thesis with an often astonishing array of contemporary appropriations, including Stratford Bard influenced rock lyrics, advertisement campaigns, and management primers as well as more respectable plays, novels, and ballets. Her trenchant examination of ten major Shakespearean dramas shows how each has been mined not only for its archetypal messages, but also reshaped to reflect more modern preoccupations.

 

 

Dalia Jurgenson has lived out the life of most foodies’ dreams: She quit her dreary office job; went through the hard fire and burnt cakes of training; and emerged as the pastry chef of a well-known three-star restaurant. Along the way, she picked up a full menu of kitchen secrets and stories of staff escapades (including her own). Spiced is a spicy, entertaining read; a Kitchen Confidential from a woman’s perspective; less profane, but sometimes more profound.

 

 

 

 Matthew Pearl loves the lives and works of great writers, but he doesn't stop there. While others wait for the next major biography, he conjures up enthralling historical thrillers about legendary authors. his debut novel The Dante Club, he drafted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and other New England literati to be impromptu sleuths investigating a series of unsolved murders in Boston and Cambridge. In The Poe Shadow, he has readers following a young Baltimore lawyer as he uncovers the real truth behind the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe. Pearl's first two novels were original spellbinders, but his latest is his most engaging yet. The Last Dickens propels us on a double quest: On one hand, we (and the protagonist) are racing to solve a series of homicides on both sides of the Atlantic; on the other, we're delving into the conundrums of "the last Dickens," Charles Dickens' unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. A good book to recommend this fiction to anyone who likes mysteries or Dickens or, better yet, both.

Picking Cotton   is a story about a rape and its legal aftermath, but it’s really about so much more. Jennifer Thompson was a college student when, with a knife at her throat, she was startled from her sleep, and then attacked by an angry rapist. Terrified, but apparently at least partly unfazed, this former homecoming queen escaped from this predator, but not before she made clear note of his face. Several days later, she picked Ronald Cotton out of a lineup. Several months later, she testified against him at the trial. Two years later, when he won an appeal, she took the stand again and again he was convicted, sent to a North Carolina prison for life. There he remained incarcerated for eleven years; then a DNA test confirmed what Cotton already knew: He was innocent. With his release, the deeper story begins. After this long, intense ordeal victim Ronald and victim/former accuser Jennifer somehow become not only friends, but also committed partners in the fight against future injustices. While I was reading this book, I came upon Edith Wharton’s description of a good story. She called it, “a shaft driven straight into the heart of human experience.” This is such a story.

 

A wondrously unpretentious novel that offers a funny, free-spirited feminine take on roads taken and not taken.

 

When Lanie Coates and her family uproot themselves from Houston to Cambridge, Massachusetts so that husband Peter can pursue his musical aspirations, this mother of three slides into a giant-sized mid-life crisis. The crush of three young sons and the absence of a support system leave her reeling, doubting even the authenticity of her marriage. Suddenly, without notice, an old camera found a storage closet offers not just release, but also exciting new vistas. Novelist Marisa de los Santos said that “I laughed, winced in recognition, and cheered wholeheartedly (sometimes out loud) for Lanie as she struggles to learn how to love everyone enough and still give part of herself to herself.”

 

A vividly etched portrayal of an isolated Midwestern community knotted together in strife.

 

Dark family secrets, savage acts of violence, and simmering resentments surface in this auspicious novel debut. For several generations before, during, and after World War I, the Richters and Sutters of New Germany, Minnesota have lived beside one another, their lives strangely and tragically intertwined. Estranged from their more assimilated neighbors, these ingrown old world families have shared one another’s company and punished one another for their unspeakable misdeeds. Nicole Helget’s debut novel resonates with the atmosphere of haunting European folklore and the immediacy of characters you can’t forget.

 

Early readers praise Lark and Termite for the subtlety of its prose and its nuanced rendering of the relationship between its two main characters.

 

Jayne Anne Phillip’s first fiction in nine years immerses us in the lives of Termite, Lark, and Nonie, three characters as memorable as their names. Set in rural West Virginia and war-torn Korea during the fifties, Lark and Termite  follows an inquisitive 17-year-old girl; her younger, developmentally challenged brother; and their aunt, the hard-working woman who raised them, through a single, eventful week in 1959.  Through captivating flashbacks, memories, and vignettes, we learn the deepest secrets about them and the parents absent from their lives. A major work by the author of Black Tickets and Machine Dreams.

 

The arresting story of how a single woman’s struggle to keep a small cottage evolved into a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

The little pink house on this book’s cover belonged to Suzette Kelo; or at least, so she believed. In 1997, this strong-minded EMT left a troubled marriage and bought this modest cottage in working class New London, Connecticut. She was still settling in when the city’s development corporation threatened to invoke its right to eminent domain to force home owners to make way for a giant Pfizer research complex. Refusing to abandon her newfound home, Kelo joined neighbors in legal actions that eventually landed her case in the United States Supreme Court. Even a historic decision in that high court, however, did not bring final resolution. In fact, as award-winning journalist Jeff Benedict notes in this powerful book, the saga of the single little pink house has implications that none of us can ignore.

 

This brilliant drawing-room mystery by an Agatha and Anthony Award-winning author features flawless plotting and slyly calibrated clues.

 

When a genteel family gathering at Quebec’s sumptuous lake-front Manoir Bellechasse terminates with a brutal homicide, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache interrupts his own holiday to find the culprit. It takes only a few pokes at the Finney family tree to bring down a full bushel of suspects: Vicious sibling rivalries and jealousies seem to be festering everywhere. As usual, Gamache, “the 21^st century version of Hercule Poirot,” stays on top of the case, ferreting out wrongdoers as he moves closer to identifying the killer.

 

 

Heather Armstrong, the author of It Sucked and Then I Cried, describes her award-winning blog as “talking a lot about poop, boobs, her dog and her daughter.” As the book’s title suggests, that earthiness is omnipresent in Armstrong’s very candid memoir about her pregnancy, new motherhood, and a post-partum depression so severe that she wound up in a mental hospital. As you read, you will need tissues for both tears of laughter as well as sniffles of sadness. By the end, you’ll wish Heather was a friend you wish you could have over for lunch, and you’ll be almost as in love with her husband, daughter, and two wacky dogs as Heather herself clearly is.

 

 

 

Like an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, this realistic novel begins in an everyday suburban situation and rapidly escalates into fast-breaking terror and uncharted suspense.

 

A yard sale at an old Victorian house, hosted by a young couple, the wife eight months pregnant with their first child. Among the eager bargain hunters is a barely recognized former classmate of these happily married high school sweethearts. This aggressive, nervous woman, also expecting, talks her way into the aging mansion. She is never seen again. Suspicion begins to slip around the necks of the young couple; when incriminating evidence is found, the husband is arrested for murder. The wife, left to investigate on her own, begins to realize that she scarcely knows the man she married. What she doesn’t yet know is that the surprises have just begun…..

 

Looking back, it's hard to imagine how Matt Prior could have been thinking. Did he really believe that a web site covering the financial scene in blank verse could be profitable? Of course, it wasn't, and now Matt is jobless, floundering in debt, marital problems, and indecision. Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of The Poets is a mid-life crisis painted on an almost surrealistic scale; a satire about what happens when the bubbles we build puncture and send us scurrying for cover. There's something winningly outrageous about the main characters in this novel and Walter's snappy black humor adds just the right spice to the mix. Five stars in my book.