BPL staff picks

staff picks

Check out what the Bethlehem Public Library staff is reading! Updated each month.

Ransom
By David Malouf	Check our holdings
Revisiting scenes from The Iliad and delving into the hearts of two ancient heroes, Malouf (Remembering Babylon) evokes the final days of the Trojan War with cinematic vividness. After Achilles withdraws his forces from combat, a move that cripples the Greek army, his best friend, Patroclus, persuades Achilles to let him take the Myrmidons back into combat and to wear Achilles' armor. After Trojan king Priam's beloved son, Hector, kills Patroclus, guilt, rage and grief drives Achilles on a frenzied quest for revenge that sees him slay Hector and then tie Hector's corpse to his chariot and drag it around the besieged city. Priam, desperate to stop the desecration, decides to visit the enemy camp and offer money in exchange for Hector's body. He hires a humble cart driver and, aided by Hermes, they set out on a journey that takes Priam into the unknown and toward a meeting with Achilles. Though Malouf's sparingly deployed details, vigorous language and sly wit humanizes these tragic heroes, the story is unmistakably epic and certainly the stuff of legend. Publishers Weekly.

My Name is Mary Sutter
By Robin Oliveira	Check our holdings
The Civil War offers a 20-year-old midwife who dreams of becoming a doctor the medical experience she craves, plus hard work and heartbreak, in this rich debut that takes readers from a small upstate New York doctor's office to a Union hospital overflowing with the wounded and dying. Though she's too young for the nursing corps, Mary Sutter goes to Washington, anyway, and, after a chance meeting with a presidential secretary, is led to the Union Hotel Hospital, where she assists chief surgeon William Stipp and becomes so integral to Stipp's work she ignores her mother's pleas to return home to deliver her sister's baby. From a variety of perspectives-Mary, Stipp, their families, and social, political, and military leaders-the novel offers readers a picture of a time of medical hardship, crisis, and opportunity. Oliveira depicts the amputation of a leg, the delivery of a baby, and soldierly life; these are among the fine details that set this novel above the gauzier variety of Civil War fiction. The focus on often horrific medicine and the women who practiced it against all odds makes for compelling reading. Publishers Weekly.

The Room and the Chair
By Lorraine Adams	Check our holdings
The Room is a Washington, D.C., newsroom, an arena Adams, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter formerly at the Washington Post, knows well. Adams follows her acclaimed first novel, Harbor (2004), with an intense tale of grim post-9/11 politics and infinite war. In prose clipped, eliding, yet darkly poetic, Adams sets in motion a two-pronged story of covert action and power. Mary, a fighter pilot with a devastating family history, cannot understand why her Viper crashes into the Potomac, but a Special Ops director, dubbed the Chair, knows all about it, and he isn't finished toying with her life. Stanley, the paper's night editor, wonders why the story of the crash receives minimal play, so he puts the rookie, Vera, an African American former ballerina, on the case, while alpha analyst Don rests on his legendary Watergate laurels, hubristically indifferent to the profound unhappiness of his columnist wife. An Iranian nuclear scientist, child prostitutes, cruel ironies in Afghanistan, the collapse of serious journalism, the wretched secret crimes of an immoral shadow government--Adams fits it all into this masterfully constructed, diabolical cluster-bomb of a novel. A searing tale of lies within lies, not without flashes of humor and beauty, that roars to a halt in a haunted room with a sweat-oiled chair. Read with care. Booklist.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
By Rebecca Skloot	Check our holdings
The first immortal human cells, code-named HeLa, have flourished by the trillions in labs all around the world for more than five decades, making possible the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, and many more crucial discoveries. But where did the HeLa cells come from? Science journalist Skloot spent 10 years arduously researching the complex, tragic, and profoundly revealing story of Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African American mother of five who came to Johns Hopkins with cervical cancer in 1951, and from whom tumor samples were taken without her knowledge or that of her family. Henrietta died a cruel death and was all but forgotten, while her miraculous cells live on, growing with mythological intensity. Skloot travels to tiny Clover, Virginia; learns that Henrietta's family tree embraces black and white branches; becomes close to Henrietta's daughter, Deborah; and discovers that although the HeLa cells have improved countless lives, they have also engendered a legacy of pain, a litany of injustices, and a constellation of mysteries. Writing with a novelist's artistry, a biologist's expertise, and the zeal of an investigative reporter, Skloot tells a truly astonishing story of racism and poverty, science and conscience, spirituality and family driven by a galvanizing inquiry into the sanctity of the body and the very nature of the life force. Booklist.

The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the crusade for America
By Douglas Brinkley	Check our holdings
How to reconcile Teddy Roosevelt, the big-game hunter, with President Roosevelt, the revolutionary environmentalist? Gifted and versatile historian Brinkley foregrounds Roosevelt's profound passion for nature in a biography as expansive and radiant as the glorious landscapes Roosevelt zealously preserved. The length of this engrossing portrait indicates the primacy of Roosevelt's conservation efforts, yet Brinkley is the first to explicate the full story, and just in time. As environmental concerns intensify, Roosevelt's battles to preserve forests, grasslands, mountains, and the habitats of birds, fish, and diverse animal species, so lucidly chronicled here, provide crucial guidance. Brinkley writes with particular empathy about how precocious, asthmatic Roosevelt discovered the healing powers of nature, and trained himself to become an irrepressible naturalist, and covers with fluent insights Roosevelt's extensive travels, sparkling writing, and professionalization of forestry and wildlife protection. A poetic warrior on a great wildlife crusade who believed that conservation efforts are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method, Roosevelt created national forests (150), bird reserves (51), and parks and monuments (24), preserving such wonders as the Grand Canyon. Teddy Roosevelt's mighty legacy consists of the places he saved and the ecological vision he shared. Booklist.