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July's Best Bets

July's Best Bets
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Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews
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July's Best Bets
'Circling the Sun' by Paula McLain(01 of09)
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"Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but proclaimed her 1942 memoir West with the Night 'bloody wonderful.' Readers might even say the same of McLain’s sparkling prose and sympathetic reimagining."A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham—whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) transfixed the world.Read full book review.
'Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War' by Susan Southard(02 of09)
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"A valiant, moving work of research certain to provoke vigorous discussion."Intense, deeply detailed, and compassionate account of the atomic bomb’s effects on the people and city of Nagasaki, then and now.Read full book review.
'Crooked' by Austin Grossman(03 of09)
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"A worthy pop-cult amusement, if sometimes reading like cutting-room-floor Stephen King mixed up with a little Boris and Natasha."Henry Kissinger, dark lord of the universe?Read full book review.
'Confession of the Lioness' by Mia Couto, translated by David Brookshaw(04 of09)
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"A haunting, ethereal flight of magical realism."In the tiny village of Kulumani, the people struggle to keep themselves safe from a marauding band of lions.Read full book review.
'Fast Shuffle' by David Black(05 of09)
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"Black (The Extinction Event, 2010, etc.) supplies a sweetly moving fable for nostalgia buffs and anyone who thinks the movie Harvey (1960) would have been improved if its imaginary rabbit had been a damsel in distress. An epilogue retailing anecdotes from the author’s Hollywood days is quite as entertaining as the main event."A delusional private eye stumbles onto a case that will test him to the max.Read full book review.
'The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal' by David E. Hoffman(06 of09)
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"An intricate, mesmerizing portrayal of the KGB-CIA spy culture."A thoroughly researched excavation of an astoundingly important (and sadly sacrificed) spy for the CIA during the low point of the 1970s.Read full book review.
'The Way Things Were' by Aatish Taseer(07 of09)
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"A timeless, masterful epic."In this ambitious novel, Taseer chronicles 40 years of modern Indian history through the eyes of a father and son, both scholars of the ancient Indian language Sanskrit.Read full book review.
'Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life' by William Finnegan(08 of09)
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"A lyrical and intense memoir."An award-winning staff writer for the New Yorker offers a probing account of his lifetime passion for surfing.Read full book review.
'Pretty Is' by Maggie Mitchell(09 of09)
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"A satisfying, unusual novel."In Mitchell’s debut, two lonely 12-year-old girls develop strong feelings for the man who abducted them.Read full book review.

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