Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

The President and Congress have been massacred, the government taken over by religious zealots. Population is decreasing because of war and infertility. Women have become second class citizens. Based on Genesis 30:1 – 3, where Rachel gives Jacob her maid to bear children, women are valued based only on their potential ability to bear children. This is Offred’s story of her time as a Handmaid, her recollections of her life before, and the odd relationships she forms in her small world. Like other of Atwood’s novels, this could be a warning of what could happen to us.

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Review Submitted by: Kathy Lewin
Rating: Highly Recommended.                                                                      

I have to confess at the outset that I’ve never read Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women, though I can identify a grouping of the names Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth as the title characters of that much-loved classic. What journalist/novelist Geraldine Brooks has accomplished with this loving work of fiction is to successfully imagine the wartime experiences of the absent father of the March girls, as he struggles to survive the horrors of the American Civil War while his family endures on the home front. In the process, her protagonist provides a looking-glass, in the form of an extended journal, not only into the war itself but into the history of America in the decades immediately preceding that conflict.

Peter March is a compassionate yet naïve man. A New Englander, his travels in the American South as a young man and his first-hand witnessing of the hideous inhumanity of the institution of slavery have molded him into a committed abolitionist by the age of forty. At this relatively advanced age, he enlists as a chaplain in the Union Army and goes off to war, a war that he sees as a necessary crusade against a terrible evil. In between disturbing accounts of the aftermath of battle, we learn that he was a close acquaintance of Thoreau and Emerson and that his wife, Alcott’s Marmee, was in every way his equal in her dedication to the cause of abolition, to the degree that their family become players in that famed conduit to freedom, the Underground Railroad.

In the war, March receives one lesson after another that forces his eyes to see the inescapable fact that cruelty is not confined to one culture alone, and that the South was sadly not singular in its practice of viewing the African as an inferior member of the human race. March suffers grievous wounds of body, mind and spirit, and his eventual return home from war cannot be termed victorious. There is no glory in war and no satisfaction that evil has been vanquished. There isn’t even the consolation that he has allowed his better nature to prevail.

Geraldine Brooks is inspired in her retelling of one man’s travels through one of the darkest nights of our shared history. This is by no means a light, pleasant tale but then again, neither is the story of our country.

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Review Submitted by: Curt Barclift
Rating: Highly Recommended                                                                         

When Teddy Daniels arrives on Shutter Island to investigate an escaped inmate from the maximum security prison for the mentally insane, he slowly begins to discover that there are questions that run deeper on the island than what happened to Rachael Solando.

I don’t want to reveal anything about the plot because the book is much better if you go into it without knowing what will happen next. But Lehane has managed to craft a book with one of the smartest and most exciting plots that I’ve read in a long time. I couldn’t wait to read each subsequent chapter and when I wasn’t reading I was trying to untangle the plot.

I’ve heard good things about the movie, but I definitely recommend reading the book first. I haven’t read anything else by Lehane, but that is something I plan on changing. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a thrilling story that will keep them on the edge of their seats.

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Review Submitted by: Lauren Grey
Rating: Highly Recommended                                                                         

With the 41st Division in the Southwest Pacific: A Foot Soldier’s Story is a no-frills account of an infantryman’s service in the southwest Pacific in WWII, a theatre of war that has never drawn anywhere near the volume of literature (or Tom Hanks movies) as D-Day or Marine operations in the central Pacific.  Catanzaro’s narrative covers his full three years in uniform, but he focuses on his division’s combat experiences on Biak, a small island off the northwest coast of New Guinea.  Occupied by over 12,000 Japanese troops in 1944, Biak’s three airfields were essential to US plans to retake the Philippines.  What Douglas MacArthur anticipated as only a three-day battle turned into a three-month struggle, with American troops battling the equatorial environment as well as Japanese defenders holed up in honey-combed coral caves.

I selected this book because I wanted to learn more about Biak in anticipation of attending a reunion later this summer of WWII veterans (of my father’s battalion) who fought at Biak.  Catanzaro’s book not only served that purpose but also provided interesting insight into other aspects of army life in WWII.  This is no Goodbye Darkness (the benchmark for WWII memoirs), but I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about U.S. Army operations in the southwest Pacific.

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Submitted by: Mary Hall
Rating: Recommended                                                                                      

E. Arnot Robertson’s Ordinary Families, originally published in 1933, depicts the life of a family living on the east coast of England whose life revolves around sailing. Events are depicted through the eyes of the second youngest daughter, Lallie. The author is especially good at showing the ways in which a child, although acutely observant, doesn’t always fully understand the adult significance of what she sees. The author is also excellent at distinguishing the personalities of a large cast of characters. The sequence of events, some sad, some funny and some with unanticipated consequences, over time gradually reveals how ordinary family life isn’t really ordinary and how the internal life of family members isn’t always obvious even to other members of the family. Robertson was a very popular and successful novelist during the 1930s and 1940s, and she also sailed with her husband and family. Her Four Frightened People is also a great read.

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Review Submitted by: Gail Savage
Rating: Highly Recommended                                                                          

I have previously read Saturday and Atonement by Ian McEwan, and am amazed by his ability to write an entire novel covering only the course of a day or so. His grasp of human nature is flawless, and his insights into his characters’ minds, rather than the plot of the book itself, are often what drive his novels; On Chesil Beach does not stray from this style.

The book introduces Florence and Edward on their wedding night in July 1962, both virgins and from different backgrounds, but nonetheless, they exclaim their love for one another. Edward is eager for what is to come later in the night; Florence, however, is terrified of and disgusted by sexual intimacy. The novel focuses on the discovery of their different attitudes towards not only sex, but their philosophies on life, and how rash decisions, impatience, and misunderstanding can change the course of one’s future.

It has been rumored that a screenplay is in the works, which concerns me. Although Atonement was a good film, I generally think that Ian McEwan novels, because of their internal nature, would make terrible movies.

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Review Submitted by: Jordan Gaines
Rating: Recommended                                                                                      

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who became interested in the brain after learning, as a teenager, that her brother suffered from schizophrenia. On the morning of December 10, 1996, at the age of 37, Taylor awoke with a sharp pain by her left ear. Assuming it was a migraine, she hopped onto her exercise equipment, hoping that getting her blood flowing would ease the pain. When that didn’t work, she opted to take shower; that’s when she started noticing paralyzation of her right arm, the dulling of her senses, and an overall out-of-body feeling despite the worsening pain.

My Stroke of Insight details the morning of and recovery from her stroke caused by an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), the rarest cause of stroke. Taylor asserts that her deep understanding of the brain as a neuroanatomist was what allowed her to recognize the plasticity and boundless potential for her brain to recover. By identifying the portions of her brain affected and working specifically to exercise those areas, Jill made a full recovery. She now gives lectures about her journey, hoping to teach people, stroke victims and their loved ones alike, what they can and should do when faced with this unfortunate neurological dysfunction.

I was attracted to this book for two reasons. Firstly, I am a neuroscience minor (it’s the reason I chose St. Mary’s to begin with!) and plan to go to grad school for a career in research, and secondly, my interests lie in neurodegeneration. To read a first-hand account of neurodegeneration from a neuroscientist was nothing short of fascinating. The opportunity to know what somebody goes through when experiencing something so debilitating is extremely rare, almost invaluable.

I would, however, recommend this book with reservations. Although Taylor does her best to summarize the nervous system in layman’s terms for the first several chapters, I can see how it would still be a bit dense for those unfamiliar with the terminology, and much of the material she includes is not necessary to know when attempting to understand what happened in her brain during her stroke. As someone who read the book out of scientific interest, I was sometimes lost in her artistic and philosophical descriptions of what was going on in her mind and body, finding some of her phrases overused towards the end.

If anyone has any interest at all in stroke, or knows someone who suffered a stroke, this is a great read; just don’t worry if you don’t understand all of the jargon she throws at you.

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Review Submitted by: Jordan Gaines
Review: Recommend with Reservations                                                       

I think Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past gives an excellent and unbiased view of the life of Alexander the Great. It examines what sources are available and talks about both positive and negative interpretations before going into the author’s own views. The book presents a comprehensive historical overview with the appropriate contextual elements woven into it. It draws a lot from historical sources and makes very insightful conclusions. Every aspect of Alexander’s life is broken down into a chapter (for example: “Alexander and the Persians,” “The Divinity of Alexander,” etc.) and explored in depth, with references to events described earlier. Overall, I think this is a great picture of Alexander’s life that not only gives the reader an in-depth introduction to the man himself, but also to the historiography and controversy that surround him. For anyone interested in Alexander, this is a must read. Even for those without any great interest in history, this book presents a case where fact is often much more fantastic than fiction in a well-written (if occasionally very academic) way.

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Review Submitted by: Lex Cosenze
Rating: Highly Recommended                                                                         

Almost anything from Margaret Atwood is a good read. The world is heading in this direction. Fictional, but possible future if we keep messing around with DNA, GMOs and cloning while killing off species with our foolishness and need for more.

Editor’s note: Oryx and Crake is the prequel to The Year of the Flood.

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Review Submitted by: Kathy Lewin
Rating: Recommended                                                                                        

This book is pretty much the definition of a summer read. The story, written by the writer of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle (two of my favorite movies) follows Rachel, a pregnant mother of a two year old, as she tries to piece her life together after finding out that her husband is having an affair. While the story made me laugh, it also made me think. For the first time, I really began to think about what women give up to have a career and what women have left without the lives they built with their husbands.

What makes this book well worth the read is the way Ephron writes about food. In the novel, Rachel is a cookbook writer and her descriptions of food had my mouth watering from the first page to the last. Through the story, Ephron also works in actual recipes almost all of which I would be more than willing to try.

Ephron has a gift for telling a touching story in a way that makes you laugh.

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Review Submitted by: Lauren Grey
Rating: Recommended