Books | Used.org

TWAS THE NIGHT

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In celebration of the bicentennial of the Christmas season’s most well-known and oft-recited poem, “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (also commonly referred to as “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas”), McColl provides a collection of illustrations, snippets of literature, and historical tidbits related to Clement Clark Moore’s renowned rhyme. The author’s illuminating peek into the formulation and reception of the poem is well organized, with lovely, colorful images from various sources peppering the pages of text. Readers are given not … Read the rest

BISHOP’S ENDGAME

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It’s 2001, a decade after the events of Muir’s Gambit (2022). The CIA takes over the investigation of the murder of a Princeton University professor. The late Nathan Muir was once an agency recruiter, and now all of his agent networks are inexplicably gone—save for one agent. This mysterious man will only talk to CIA officer Tom Bishop, who’s in Malaysia, but the agency suspects that Bishop may actually be Muir’s killer. As Bishop hops off the grid … Read the rest

UNSINKABLE LUCILE

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Dubbed “Unsinkable” by Brewster for the same reasons Molly Brown was—rising from relatively humble origins to stylish celebrity and then surviving the sinking of the Titanic—Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (to use her final married name), not only became a celebrated belle epoque dressmaker in France, Great Britain, and the United States, but is credited with inventing both tinted undergarments to go with her filmier tea dresses and high-society gowns and also runway-style fashion shows with live models. (She also sparked … Read the rest

WHAT DOESN’T KILL US MAKES US

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Mariani, a journalist and former English professor, has grappled with both the psychological burdens of a motherless childhood, raised by “a father who loved my sister and me but who was also aloof and alone, forever at a wraithlike remove,” and the physical malady of chronic fatigue syndrome. Though he tends to linger too often on his own troubles, most of the subjects he profiles in the book have had it worse—e.g., a woman who was raped, two men who … Read the rest

HOG WILD

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The feral hogs of South Texas are becoming a problem. “Two million brawling, fornicating, filthy beasts despoiling the best grazing land in the world,” as rancher Amanda Cross puts it. “Most intelligent mammal around. Smarter than a porpoise. In fact the ones that have been despoiling the Cross Bar Ranch seem to have become unusually smart.” That’s why Cross has hired Ray Puzo, a Special Forces sniper who has spent the last 17 years dealing death in Iraq, Somalia, and … Read the rest

POWERLESS

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At first it seems as if it’s just one car not starting. But soon, all the phones, electricity, radios, and internet suffer a power failure in the town of Harpursville, New York. The residents wonder if the outage has also affected the entire country—or even the whole world. Their theories range from sunspots and electromagnetic pulses to terrorist attacks (“To hear some tell it, the Russians, Chinese, or ISIS would be rolling in to enslave the good people of the … Read the rest