The winner is Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

I will post the winner this afternoon or early evening as I won't be home when voting officially ends in about 45 mins. I am still waiting for votes from a few people and I 've emailed them directly. Stay tuned....

Hi All,

Voting is now open for our next book. Please get your votes to me by Saturday at 11:00 a.m.

1. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time - Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin (368 pages, paperback)
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts.

2. The Road - Cormac McCarthy (287 pages, paperback)
Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

3. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood (480 pages, paperback)
Amazon.comIn 1843, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid named Grace Marks was tried for the murder of her employer and his mistress. The sensationalistic trial made headlines throughout the world, and the jury delivered a guilty verdict. Yet opinion remained fiercely divided about Marks--was she a spurned woman who had taken out her rage on two innocent victims, or was she an unwilling victim herself, caught up in a crime she was too young to understand? Such doubts persuaded the judges to commute her sentence to life imprisonment, and Marks spent the next 30 years in an assortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a star attraction. In Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood reconstructs Marks's story in fictional form. Her portraits of 19th-century prison and asylum life are chilling in their detail. The author also introduces Dr. Simon Jordan, who listens to the prisoner's tale with a mixture of sympathy and disbelief. In his effort to uncover the truth, Jordan uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology. But the last word belongs to the book's narrator--Grace herself.

4. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia - Elizabeth Gilbert (352 pages, paperback)
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Gilbert (The Last American Man) grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights--the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners--Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. "I came to Italy pinched and thin," she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry--conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor--as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression.


5. The World Without Us -Alan Weisman (336 pages, Hardcover but only $15 on amazon.com)
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. If a virulent virus—or even the Rapture—depopulated Earth overnight, how long before all trace of humankind vanished? That's the provocative, and occasionally puckish, question posed by Weisman (An Echo in My Blood) in this imaginative hybrid of solid science reporting and morbid speculation. Days after our disappearance, pumps keeping Manhattan's subways dry would fail, tunnels would flood, soil under streets would sluice away and the foundations of towering skyscrapers built to last for centuries would start to crumble. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, anything made of bronze might survive in recognizable form for millions of years—along with one billion pounds of degraded but almost indestructible plastics manufactured since the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, land freed from mankind's environmentally poisonous footprint would quickly reconstitute itself, as in Chernobyl, where animal life has returned after 1986's deadly radiation leak, and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, a refuge since 1953 for the almost-extinct goral mountain goat and Amur leopard. From a patch of primeval forest in Poland to monumental underground villages in Turkey, Weisman's enthralling tour of the world of tomorrow explores what little will remain of ancient times while anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like.

6. Loving Frank: A Novel - Nancy Horan (400 pages, paperback, Man Booker Prize)
From Publishers Weekly Horan's ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost. As is often the case when a life story is novelized, historical fact inconveniently intrudes: Mamah's life is cut short in the most unexpected and violent of ways, leaving the narrative to crawl toward a startlingly quiet conclusion. Nevertheless, this spirited novel brings Mamah the attention she deserves as an intellectual and feminist.

7. The Gathering - Anne Enright (272 pages, paperback)
From Publishers Weekly In the taut latest from Enright (What Are You Like?), middle-aged Veronica Hegarty, the middle child in an Irish-Catholic family of nine, traces the aftermath of a tragedy that has claimed the life of rebellious elder brother Liam. As Veronica travels to London to bring Liam's body back to Dublin, her deep-seated resentment toward her overly passive mother and her dissatisfaction with her husband and children come to the fore. Tempers flare as the family assembles for Liam's wake, and a secret Veronica has concealed since childhood comes to light. Enright skillfully avoids sentimentality as she explores Veronica's past and her complicated relationship with Liam. She also bracingly imagines the life of Veronica's strong-willed grandmother, Ada. A melancholic love and rage bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan, and Enright explores it unflinchingly.

8. The History of Love: A Novel - Nicole Krauss (272 pages, paperback)
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. The last words of this haunting novel resonate like a pealing bell. "He fell in love. It was his life." This is the unofficial obituary of octogenarian Leo Gursky, a character whose mordant wit, gallows humor and searching heart create an unforgettable portrait. Born in Poland and a WWII refugee in New York, Leo has become invisible to the world. When he leaves his tiny apartment, he deliberately draws attention to himself to be sure he exists. What's really missing in his life is the woman he has always loved, the son who doesn't know that Leo is his father, and his lost novel, called The History of Love, which, unbeknownst to Leo, was published years ago in Chile under a different man's name. Another family in New York has also been truncated by loss. Teenager Alma Singer, who was named after the heroine of The History of Love, is trying to ease the loneliness of her widowed mother, Charlotte. When a stranger asks Charlotte to translate The History of Love from Spanish for an exorbitant sum, the mysteries deepen. Krauss (Man Walks into a Room) ties these and other plot strands together with surprising twists and turns, chronicling the survival of the human spirit against all odds. Writing with tenderness about eccentric characters, she uses earthy humor to mask pain and to question the universe. Her distinctive voice is both plangent and wry, and her imagination encompasses many worlds.

Did anyone else know about the term "boston marriage"? I'm putting "the bostonians" on my next list.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_marriage

I am travelling for work this week and can't make it. Sigh....
= (

Yes, Wed. Golden Temple at 7:30.

I have the list, I will bring paper copies on Wednesday night and will post the list to the blog on Thursday for anyone who can't make the meeting.

Are we still on for Wednesday at Golden Temple? 7:30pm ?

Also - Who's turn is it for the list? I think we're back at the beginning of the alphabet, and I want to say Aaron (Since Wendy did the second to last, and Sari did the last one).....

from the new york times...
December 10, 2007
No Longer the City of ‘Bonfire’ in Flames
By ANNE BARNARD
Twenty years ago, the acid-penned journalist Tom Wolfe unleashed his first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Skewering everyone from self-absorbed Wall Street millionaires to hucksterish street politicians, the sprawling satire painted a picture of a New York declining inexorably into racial conflict, crime and greed.
The novel tapped, to electrifying effect, a vein of anxiety that defined 1980s New York. From the moment it was published in November 1987, new episodes in the drama of the metropolis seemed to unfold like chapters in Mr. Wolfe’s story.
Four white youths from Howard Beach, Queens, were already on trial for beating a black man who fled to his death in traffic on the Belt Parkway.
That same month, a black teenager named Tawana Brawley, who was found smeared with feces in a garbage bag, said she had been assaulted by white men with badges, sparking a prosecution that later collapsed when it was determined that she had fabricated the story.
Wall Street convulsed as its stars were investigated for white-collar crime, culminating in the 1990 securities fraud conviction of Michael R. Milken, the “junk bond king.”
For much of this year, the lens of New Yorkers’ nostalgia has been trained on 1977, looking back 30 years to the blackout and looting, to the Son of Sam killings, to disco. But 1987, too, was a seminal moment for New York, then torn between new heights of wealth and decadence on Wall Street and the draining of jobs and taxpayers from the rest of the city.
Now, as Mr. Wolfe turns his attention to a new novel about immigration — set, no doubt to the disappointment of some New Yorkers and the relief of others, in Miami — the milestone of “Bonfire” provides a moment to consider how the city’s own narrative has (so far) turned out. How and why New York pulled back from the brink is a matter of as much dispute as the reaction to “Bonfire,” which became a best seller.
The novel’s antihero, a cosseted WASP bond trader named Sherman McCoy, takes a wrong turn off a highway in the Bronx and blunders into a confrontation with two young black men who seem to be about to rob him — until his mistress grabs the wheel of his Mercedes and runs one of them down. Sherman, the self-styled “Master of the Universe,” at first exults in his escape from what he calls “the jungle.” But inescapably, through his own moral failings and the machinations of corrupt prosecutors, activists and journalists, he meets his downfall.
To some New Yorkers, Mr. Wolfe’s satire was bitingly accurate, nailing both a racist criminal justice system and the politicians who played on white fear and minority anger for personal gain.
To others, it was a cynical endorsement of racial stereotypes that did not so much critique white paranoia as cater to it.
Either way, though, the New York of “Bonfire,” to a degree that might well have shocked people in 1987, no longer exists. Not in reality, and not in the collective imagination.
New York is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, down from 2,245 in 1990. The white population is no longer shrinking, and diverse immigration has made the city less black-and-white.
The crime drops that marked the Giuliani era — along with some divisive police confrontations with minorities — have continued under a Bloomberg administration that civil rights leaders credit with bringing more interracial respect.
More locally, the Bronx neighborhoods near the site of Sherman’s accident are now dotted with owner-occupied row houses and apartments. Artists have moved into Mott Haven lofts.
The mostly black and Latino residents of Melrose, survivors of the “Bronx is burning” decades, now worry, not unlike suburbanites, about an influx of outsiders. They complain that the new Yankee Stadium, new malls and proposed congestion pricing could bring in out-of-towners from, say, Westchester to hog precious parking spaces.
“Twenty years later, the cynicism of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ is as out of style as Tom Wolfe’s wardrobe,” proclaimed the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose counterpart in the book — Reverend Bacon — warns that he controls the burgeoning “steam” of black anger. (Mr. Sharpton, who has replaced his 1980s velour jogging ensembles with tailored suits, was taking a swipe at the white suits and spats that Mr. Wolfe religiously wears.)
“It becomes increasingly implausible for the Wall Street multimillionaire white folk living in $8 million Manhattan apartments to feel themselves oppressed by poor black people,” said Ronald L. Kuby, who was the partner of William Kunstler, the radical lawyer who died in 1995. Mr. Kunstler’s fictional counterpart helps Reverend Bacon portray Henry Lamb, the young man hit by Sherman’s Mercedes, as a sacrificial “honor student.”
“They have totally taken over Manhattan and are breaching the defenses of even remote parts of Harlem, are gentrifying the Bronx,” Mr. Kuby said of his fellow whites. “Far from fleeing, they are flooding in.”
Another lawyer whose doppelgänger appears in the book is Edward W. Hayes. “Today, there’s not enough crime to become a criminal lawyer,” lamented Mr. Hayes, a longtime friend of Mr. Wolfe’s who was the model for the dapper, street-smart defense lawyer who takes up Sherman’s case. “Nobody goes around and sticks up supermarkets anymore, or armored cars.”
In March, Picador will issue a new trade paperback of “Bonfire,” part of a planned set of editions of Mr. Wolfe’s entire oeuvre. But Mr. Wolfe said that if he were to try again now to tap the zeitgeist of New York, he would write an entirely different book.
Today’s version, he said, would be about how the city’s sanitized streets have become a stage set on which New York plays itself, for an audience of tourists.
“This is a city now built on excitement,” Mr. Wolfe said — “a Disneyland,” he termed it, with “no industry other than the excitement of just being here.”
But at 77, Mr. Wolfe hasn’t joined the moneyed flocks migrating downtown to once-gritty artists’ lofts. He inhabits an Upper East Side apartment not as enormous, but as perfectly put together, as Sherman McCoy’s Park Avenue duplex.
Mr. Wolfe’s real-life characters remain deeply divided, like their fellow New Yorkers, over what changed their city.
Mr. Hayes — using some of the eyebrow-raising ethnic language of his “Bonfire” character, Tommy Killian — gave credit to “the war on crime in New York City, which was basically won by white Catholic men from the boroughs.”
Minorities in the courts “got treated like dogs, and if you were a legitimate guy in a poor neighborhood you had no shot at all,” Mr. Hayes said. But in his view, New York crippled itself by blaming “society” for crime until Rudolph W. Giuliani came into office in 1994.
To Mr. Kuby, it was quite the opposite: The waning of the crack epidemic and progress toward “equal justice” allowed for better policing. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, he said, “removed as he is from the lives of black people, at least views them as citizens, unlike Giuliani, who viewed them as unruly, ambitious children.”
Mr. Sharpton said that activists like himself — through cases like that of Abner Louima, a black immigrant from Haiti who was sodomized with a broomstick in a Brooklyn police station in 1997 — convinced whites and members of minority groups that police misconduct was a real problem. That, he said, opened the door for new coalitions across racial lines.
“People were more tribal” in the 1980s, he said, adding, “As you are no longer excluded, your attitude becomes more expansive.”
The Bronx County Building, the setting of Sherman’s trial, is no longer (if it ever was) the “fortress” Mr. Wolfe describes, where prosecutors refuse to leave the building for a sandwich for fear of being mugged. Outside, up and down the Grand Concourse, Art Deco buildings are being renovated. And rents are going up.
Further north, on Tremont Avenue, Moe Stein, the owner of Frank’s Sports Shop, said he now has to disappoint the few adventurous tourists who come looking for rubble-strewn lots. But the Bronx still suffers, he said, from the terrifying image left by the 1981 Paul Newman film “Fort Apache, the Bronx” and the widely panned 1990 movie made from “Bonfire,” with Tom Hanks as Sherman.
The bond traders and investment bankers who populate “Bonfire” are passé now, Mr. Wolfe said, replaced by brash new hedge fund managers who meet clients barefoot, or in jeans with $6,000 belt buckles, as if to say, “You don’t have to like me at all, I’m merely a genius who makes you money.”
But one thing hasn’t changed, Mr. Wolfe said: the allure of New York. It’s what distracted Sherman as he gazed at the glittering skyline from the Triborough Bridge — thinking, “There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century” — and missed his turn to Manhattan.