Lisa’s Picks

The Tender Bar: A Memoir

J.R. Moehringer grew up listening for the sound of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before J.R. spoke his first words. His mother was his world, his anchor, but J.R. needed something more. So, he turned to the patrons of a grand old New York saloon. There, the flamboyant characters along the bar taught him, tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee. Riveting, moving, and achingly funny, “The Tender Bar” is an evocative portrait of one boy’s struggle to become a man.

The Darling

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, “The Darling” is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah’s encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah’s family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

The Last Days of Dogtown

A magnificent storyteller with vast imaginative range, Anita Diamant gave voice to the silent women of the Old Testament in “The Red Tent.” Now, in her third novel, she brings to vivid life an early New England world that history has forgotten.

Set on Cape Ann in the early 1800s, “The Last Days of Dogtown” is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and “witches.” Nearly a decade ago, Diamant found an account of an abandoned rural backwater near the Massachusetts coastline at the turn of the nineteenth century. That pamphlet inspired a stunning novel about a small group of eccentrics and misfits, struggling in a harsh, isolated landscape only fifty miles north of Boston, yet a world away.

Among the inhabitants of Dogtown are Black Ruth, an African woman who dresses as a man and works as a stone mason; Mrs. Stanley, an imperious madam whose grandson, Sammy, comes of age in her rural brothel; Oliver Younger, who survives a miserable childhood at the hands of a very strange aunt; and Cornelius Finson, a freed slave whose race denies him everything. At the center of it all is Judy Rhines, a fiercely independent soul, deeply lonely, who nonetheless builds a life for herself and inspires those around her to become more generous and tolerant themselves.

This is a story of hardship and resilience — and an extraordinary re-creation of an untold chapter of early American life. With a keen ear for language and profound compassion for her characters, Diamant has written her most moving and powerful novel.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Lily is haunted by memories– of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.

In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“ women’ s writing” ). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “ old sames, ” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.

With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become “ old sames” at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America’ s ailing middle class what she did for the working poor
Barbara Ehrenreich’ s Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible ré sumé of a professional “in transition,” she attempts to land a middle-class job— undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and— again and again— rejected.

Bait and Switch highlights the people who’ve done everything right— gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumé s— yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today’ s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “ surplus” employees— plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers— and little security even for those who have jobs.
Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

Fools Rush in: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption

Published in Britain to great acclaim–a startling, gut-wrenching memoir of war, personal dissolution, and rebirth based on the author’s experiences in Bosnia.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

As the “New York Times puts it, “Sedans is the closest thing the literary world has these days to a rock star.”- This immediate #1 hardcover bestseller–currently in its 14th week on the “New York Times list, with nearly 700,000 copies in print–propelled the paperback editions of Sedaris’s “Me Talk Pretty One Day and “Naked” back onto national bestseller lists.- David Sedaris’s hooks have sold more man three million copies and have topped bestseller lists around the world.

Growing Up Fast

Growing Up Fast tells the life stories of Shayla, Jessica, Amy, Colleen, Liz, and Sheri–six teen mothers whom Joanna Lipper first met in 1999 when they were enrolled at the Teen Parent Program in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Less than a decade older than these teen parents, she was able to blend into the fabric of their lives and make a short documentary film about them. Over the course of the next four years she continued to earn their trust as they shared with her the daily reality of their lives and their experiences growing up in the economically depressed post-industrial landscape of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Essentials of Cooking

In this unrivaled guide, one of America’s most widely respected cookbook authors distills his vast knowledge and experience into the 100 essential techniques that every cook needs to know. Now in a paperback edition, Essentials of Cooking will help unravel the mysteries of the method and provide practical application on the spot.

Each technique is further explained in terms of what it does to the taste of the food: What happens if you cook a fish in butter versus oil? Why does roasting make vegetables taste so good? How do you decide whether you want to make a chicken stew or sautC?

Here are the answers to just about every cooking question from the simple to the sublime: how to boil an artichoke, cook a soft-boiled egg, and even butcher a whole saddle of lamb. Knowing how to execute a technique makes you efficient; knowing why you’ve chosen that technique makes you a master.