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Health & Fitness

Just in Time for Summer

 

Here are just a few of the new titles available from the Bucks County Library system - everything from Ice cream to nuclear science.

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman (July)

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 What could be better than ice cream in July? Early in the twentieth century, six-year-old Malka relocates with her family from Russia to Manhattan's Lower East Side. Soon after, she is crippled in a tragic accident and then abandoned by her family. Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she survives through cunning and inventiveness, learning the secrets of his trade to seize her own destiny. She transforms herself into Lillian Dunkle, the Ice Cream Queen, vanquishing her fiercest competitors on her rise to the top.

As the doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality, Lillian is the face of the nation's sweet, wholesome treat. But behind the whimsical motherly persona she has crafted for herself, she is caustic, conniving and profane. When Lillian makes a grave, public mistake, everything the enterprising entrepreneur has spent her life building is at stake. Gilman’s editor Helen Atsma said, “Last summer, it was my favorite book as I read it in manuscript for. This summer, it can be yours!”

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 The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Nelson (NYT bestseller Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon) brings us the first complete history of the Atomic Age, a brilliant account of the men and women who uncovered the secrets of the nucleus, brought its power to America, and ignited the 20th century.

Beginning with the discovery of X-rays in 1895 and continuing through the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the author follows the discovery of radium (used at one time in everything from watches to toothpaste), the development of nuclear fusion and fission and the use of the resulting new elements in nuclear weapons, medicine and power generation. He shows how the development of nuclear power was influenced by politics and personalities. There are impressive biographies, including those of men like Wilhelm Roentgen, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard and women such as the well-known Marie Curie and the almost forgotten Lise Meitner.

Nelson characterizes nuclear science as a “two-faced god,” both a blessing and a curse; its history is irrational, confusing and conflicted. This is an engaging, very readable history of the subject that raises provocative questions about the future of nuclear science. This book is not just for the scientist but for all of us, because nuclear science affects us all, in a variety of ways, every day.

 

The Stories We Tell by Patti Callahan Henry

This is the story of Eve and Cooper Morrison, a Savannah power couple who appear to hold the world in their hands.  They are on every board in and deeply involved in the Savannah community. He runs a digital magazine, based on all things southern gentleman. Eve is head of her own lithograph company and is creating a line of cards based on 10 words that she considers words to live by. “I keep thinking about these words and have found myself thinking about those that define my own life”, she says. Eve and Cooper are the beautiful people, the lucky ones. They have money and roots in an old Southern family. But all is not as it seems with this family.

Eve’s sister, Willa, is staying with the family until she ‘gets back on her feet’. Their daughter, Gwen, is teenage rebellion personified. One day Willa and Cooper are in a car accident, and the events surrounding the accident bring the family to the breaking point. Sifting between Cooper’s story, what Willa remembers and what the evidence indicates, Eve has to decide what she’s going to believe. And, what she’s going to do about it.

 

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

This is a stunningly beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths cross in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie- Laure lives with her father in sight of the Museum of Natural History, where he is master of the locks. When she is six, she goes blind. So that she will be able to navigate her neighborhood with just her feet and her cane, her father builds her an exact replica of the surrounding area. He includes every building and even every manhole. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to the Brittany coast to the house of a great uncle, who lives in a very tall house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both fascinated with an old radio that Werner has found. He becomes a master at fixing and building radios and this talent earns him a place in an elite but brutal military academy. He becomes a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance and travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far flung outskirts of Russia and finally to Brittany where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, that people try to be good to one another. These two characters are so interesting and sympathetic that readers will keep turning the pages hoping for an impossibly happy ending.

This novel was ten years in the writing and is an ambitious and dazzling work. Doer has received many prizes for his fiction including four O. Henry prizes and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. This book is for fans of World War II, historical fiction and for those who enjoyed Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.

 

Happy reading, everyone.

Sandy Cody

http://www.sandracareycody.com 

 

 

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