Here is where you will find what's new at St. Thomas' well-known, well-read Dockside Bookshop at Havensight Mall. Every week you will find new titles to peruse. Look for updates of our "picks" for fiction and nonfiction and, at the end of the reviews, a Top Ten of new mass market paperbacks.
STORE HOURS
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Tuesday and Friday: 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Sunday: 11 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Phone: 340-774-4937
E-mail: [email protected]
"At Risk" by Stella Rimington. Alfred A. Knopf, fiction hardcover, 384 p. $24.00
An announcement is made at a meeting of the British Intelligence Joint Counter-Terrorist group: "The opposition may be about to deploy an "invisible." An "invisible" is CIA-speak for the ultimate intelligence nightmare: a terrorist who is an ethnic native of the target country and who can therefore cross its borders unchecked, move around the country unquestioned, and go unnoticed while setting up the foundation for monstrous harm.
Intelligence officer Liz Carlyle has had to prove herself in countless ways as she's come up through the ranks of the traditionally all-male world of Britain's Security Service, MI5. But this announcement marks the start of an operation that will test all her hard-won knowledge and experience-and her intelligence and courage — as nothing has before. Having analyzed information from her agents, she realizes that there is indeed an imminent terrorist threat. She may even have the invisible's point of entry. But what she cannot draw out of all the "chatter" is the invisible's identity and intended target.
With each passing hour, the danger increases. As the desperate hunt continues, it becomes clear that Liz's intuitive skills, her ability to get deep inside her enemy's head, are her best hope for tracking down the terrorist. But will that be enough? And can she succeed in time to avert a disaster?
Drawing from her experience as the first woman director general of MI5, Stella Rimington gives us a story that is smart, tautly drawn, and suspenseful from first to last. "At Risk" is a stunning debut novel that plunges us headlong into today's shadowy and fever-pitched battle between terrorism and Intelligence.
"Peace Is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End" by Deepak Chopra. Harmony, nonfiction hardcover, 288 pp. $23.00.
Deepak Chopra's passionate new book, "Peace Is the Way," was inspired by a saying from Mahatma Gandhi: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." In a world where every path to peace has proved futile, the one strategy that hasn't been tried is the way of peace itself. "We must not bring one war to an end, or thirty," Chopra tells us, "but the idea of war itself."
How can this be done?
By facing the truth that war is satisfying, and then substituting new satisfactions so that violence is no longer appealing. "War has become a habit. We reach for it the way a chain smoker reaches for a cigarette, promising to quit but somehow never kicking the habit." But Chopra tells us that peace has its own power, and our task now is to direct that power and multiply it one person at a time.
Behind the numbing headlines of violence running out of control there are unmistakable signs of a change: Chopra believes that a majority of people are ready to see an end to war. "Right now 23 million soldiers serve in armies around the world. Can't we find ten times that number who will dedicate themselves to peace? A hundred times?"
"Peace Is the Way" challenges each of us to take the next leap in personal evolution. "You aren't asked to be a saint, or to give up any belief. You are only asked to stop reacting out of fear, to change your allegiance from violence to peace." In a practical seven-step program, Chopra shows the reader how to become a true peacemaker. "Violence may be innate in human nature, but so is its opposite: love. The next stage of humanity, the leap which we are poised to take, will be guided by the force of that love." This is more than a hope or an aspiration. It is a new way of being in the world, giving each individual the power to end war in our time.
"The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, & Broke" by Suze Orman. Riverhead Books, nonfiction, 394 pp. $24.95.
"The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, & Broke" is financial expert Suze Orman's answer to a generation's cry for help. They're called "Generation Broke" by the media-people in their twenties and thirties who graduate from college with a mountain of student loan debt and are stuck with one oft the weakest job markets in recent history. The goals of their parents' generation — buy a house, support a family, send kids to college, retire in style — seem absurdly, depressingly out of reach. They live off their credit cards, may or may not have health insurance, and come up so far short at the end of the month that the idea of saving money is a joke. This generation has it tough, without a doubt, but they're also painfully aware of the urgent need to take matters into their own hands.
"The Money Book" was written to address the specific financial reality that young people face today, and it offers a set of real, not impossible, solutions to the problems at hand and the problems ahead. Concisely, pragmatically, and without a whiff of condescension, Suze Orman tells her young, fabulous, and broke readers precisely what actions to take and why. Throughout these pages, icons direct readers to a special YF&B domain on Suze's Web site that offers more specialized information, forms, and interactive tools that further customize the information in the book. Her advice at times bucks conventional wisdom (Did she just say use your credit card?) and may even seem counterintuitive (Pay into a retirement fund even though credit card debt is killing you?), but it's her honesty, understanding, and uncanny ability to anticipate the needs of her readers that have made her the most trusted financial expert of the day.
Over the course of 10 chapters that can be consulted methodically, step by step, or on a strictly need-to-know basis, Suze takes readers past broke to a secure place where they'll never have to worry about revisiting broke again. And she begins the journey with a bit of overwhelmingly good news (yes, there really is good news): Young people have the greatest asset of all on their side — time.
"The Position" by Meg Woltizer. Scribner, fiction hardcover, 320 pp. $24.00.
Crackling with intelligence and original humor, "The Position" is a masterful take on sex and the suburban American family at the hilarious height of the sexual revolution and throughout the 30-year hangover that followed. Meg Wolitzer, the author of the much-acclaimed novel "The Wife" (named a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Newsday), takes another huge step forward with this new book and showcases her distinctive voice, pitch-perfect observations, electric wit, and depth of emotion.
In 1975, suburban parents Paul and Roz Mellow write a "Joy of Sex"-type book called "Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment," which becomes a surprise runaway bestseller. "The Position" opens with the four Mellow children, aged 6 to 15, at the moment when they see the mortifying book (and the graphic, pastel illustrations of their parents' creative, vigorous lovemaking) for the very first time — an experience that will forever complicate their ideas about sex, par
ents, families, and themselves. The book brings a strange celebrity and small fortune ("sex money" the children call it) to the Mellows and ultimately changes the shape of the family forever.
Thirty years later, as the now-dispersed family members argue about whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children as they confront their own struggles with love, work, sex, death, and the indelible early specter of their erotically charged parents.
Some novels are about family, and others are about sex. "The Position" is about sex within the context of a family. Insightful, witty, panoramic, and heartbreaking, it is a compulsively readable novel about an eternally mystifying subject: how a group of people growing up in one house can become so very different from one another.
1. "The Swords of Night and Day" by David Gemmell, $7.50
2. "Alta" by Mercedes Lackey (Dragon Jousters; Jousters No. 2 series) , $6.99
3. "Unexpected Blessings" by Barbara Taylor Bradford, $7.99
4. "Liars & Thieves" by Stephen Coonts, $7.99
5. "Hark! a Novel of the 87th Precinct" by Ed McBain, $7.99
6. "Shadow Account" by Stephen Frey, $7.50
7. "Dean Koontz's Frankenstein" by Dean Koontz, $7.99
8. "The Madman's Tale" by John Katzenbach, $7.50
9. "Murder List" by Julie Garwoodl, $7.99
10. "Mystic Warrior" by Tracy & Laura Hickman (Bronze Canticles, book I), $6.99
We will gladly order any books you want. E-mail us at [email protected], or call 340-774-4937.
STORE HOURS
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Tuesday and Friday: 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Sunday: 11 a.m. – 3 p.m.
Phone: 340-774-4937
E-mail: [email protected]