Eight lives are about to change inCopenhagen. The executives of the Tank, a financial firm downtown, have just heard that a financial crisis is looming. Which employees will make the cut? Harold Jaeger isn’t too worried; he is the protégé of Frederick Breathwaite, an American who has worked for the Tank for twenty-five years. Jaeger’s life has been on a downward slide lately; he is divorced, alienated from his ex-wife, and growing tired of his womanizing ways. He is falling for Birgitte Sommer, a coworker whose own marriage is in trouble.
Despite his years of loyalty,
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One day Ackerman’s husband, Paul West, an exceptionally gifted wordsmith and intellectual, suffered a terrible stroke. When he regained awareness he was afflicted with aphasia—loss of language—and could utter only a single syllable: “mem.” The standard therapies yielded little result but frustration. Diane soon found, however, that by harnessing their deep knowledge of each other and her scientific understanding of language and the brain she could guide Paul back to the world of words. This triumphant book is both a humane and revealing addition to the medical literature on stroke and aphasia and an exquisitely written love story: a magnificent addition to literature,
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After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed—or killing someone else. He signed on as a boxer.
Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn’t have been more stark—or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father.
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Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding in the road. Eighteen years later, Bandy’s son — a stranger bearing his name — returns to the town, where the memory of his father’s crime still hangs thick. When an accident brings the family — paroled father, widowed mother, injured son — back together, the three must confront their past, and struggle against their fate.
Like a traditional Greek tragedy,
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When Paula Butturini’s husband was shot and nearly killed, it marked the abrupt end of what the couple had known together and the beginning of a phase of life neither had planned for.
A story of food and love, trauma and healing, Keeping the Feast is the triumphant memoir of one couple’s nourishment and restoration after a period of tragedy, and the extraordinary sustaining powers of food, family, and friendship.
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Despite having a demanding job, good friends, and a supportive family, Emily White spent many of her evenings and weekends alone at home, trying to understand why she felt so completely disconnected from everyone. In this insightful and soul-baring memoir, White recounts her struggle to comprehend and overcome her chronic loneliness, a debilitating condition that she contends deserves the same attention as depression and other mental difficulties. Interweaving her personal story with cutting-edge scientific research—as well as incredibly moving accounts offered by numerous lonely men and women—White provides a deep and thorough portrait of this increasingly common but too often ignored affliction.
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