By The Beachwood Book Club
1. Everlasting/Nancy Thayer. “A lightweight, predictable fairy tale of a young woman’s success in business and in love.” (Publisher’s Weekly)
2. The Road to Gandolfo/Robert Ludlum. “A wickedly funny Robert Ludlum you’ve never met before.” (From the Publisher – Bantam)
3. The Five Fingers/Gayle Rivers and James Hudson. “The book is a brusque but joyous Benzedrine-fueled rollercoaster of ambushes and flesh wounds. The seven members of the Five Fingers team stomp through Laos, leaving armies of dead in their wake. Male bonding occurs. There is a betrayal. The ending is ambiguous, startlingly so for a cheapo battle paperback . . . Hey, the Hemingway plod got popular because it fucking works. The Five Fingers – weird, compelling, and perhaps overdue for recognition.” (Colby Cosh)
4. Image of the Beast/Philip Jose Farmer. “Herald Childe has seen Hell, glimpsed its horror in an act of sexual mutilation. Childe must now find and destroy an inhuman predator on the streets of a polluted and decadent Los Angeles of the future.” (From the Publisher – Rhinoceros)
5. Save The Tiger/Steve Shagan. “A story of moral conflict in modern America . . . [Jack] Lemmon plays Harry Stoner in a bleak story that depicts an outwardly successful man questioning the value of the material prosperity he’s desperately trying to maintain.” (Wikipedia entry on the 1973 movie adaptation also written by Shagan)
6. The Sendai/William Woolfolk. “Something very strange is happening at the Karyll Clinic . . . a series of infant deaths, all of them test-tube babies . . . falsified records and a top-secret, off-limits research unit.” (Mistymorninbooks.com)
7. Submission/Elizabeth Oldfield. “This is the story of Shane, a popular pop singer for a band named Submission who hates the limelight and wants out, and the band secretary, Rhiannon. A subplot about Shane finding his roots in Asia was poorly fleshed out and hardly mentioned except as an afterthought at the end. A standard book but nice if you don’t want to think.” (C.A. Wanamaker, Amazon.com)
8. Sea Fever/Anne Weale. Harlequin Romance #3132.
9. Invasion/Robin Cook. “A gigantic spaceship arrives in the stratosphere to dump some black disks onto Earth. Touch these things at your own risk, however; unsuspecting souls who handle the disks receive a sting, soon followed by flulike symptoms and ending in a kind of zombie assimilation into the alien consciousness. And make no mistake: these aliens are up to no good – we know this because the victims of the UFO-flu are soon transformed into hideous reptilian creatures.” (Amazon.com)
10. Message in a Bottle/Nicholas Sparks. “The farfetched plot of Message in a Bottle is more likely to elicit fits of giggles than flutters of the heart, and it leaves the mind quite numb.” (Sarah Harrison Smith, The New York Times Book Review)
11. Family Pictures/Sue Miller. “Now A Powerful TV Mini-Series Starring Angelica Huston.” (Book jacket)
12. Streets of Death/Dell Shannon. “Lt. Luis Rodolfo Vincent Mendoza does police work because he’s good at it and he enjoys it. A man of independent means, the suave Mendoza is always impeccably dressed and combines Latin charm & sensuality with a fondness for racy cars, high-stakes poker, pretty women, and his Abyssinian cat.” (The Reader’s Advisor)
13. The Fourth Protocol/Frederick Forsyth. “It is a time of political unrest in Great Britain. And behind the Iron Curtain an insidious plot is being hatched, a plan so incendiary that even the KGB is ignorant of its existence – Aurora, the sinister brainchild of two of the world’s most dangerous men: the general secretary of the Soviet Union and master spy Kim Philby . . . Only British agent John Preston stands any chance of breaching the conspiracy. Through plot and counterplot, from bloody back streets to polished halls of power both East and West, his desperate investigation is relentlessly blocked by deceit, treachery, and the most deadly enemy of all . . . time.” (Inside flap)
14. Along Came A Spider/James Patterson. “This book is about a crazed school teacher who kidnaps a daughter of a famous actress. Alex Cross, a detective, is suppose to figure out this twisted and complicated criminal act.” (Jared Hensley, Resident Scholar, AllReaders.com)
15. Red Storm Rising/Tom Clancy. “Whereas the fictionalized USSR in Red Storm Rising required the plot device of a refinery disaster to kick off the storyline, the United States has arrived in precisely the same situation as the fictionalized USSR in the book through chronic mismanagement.” (What Really Happened: The History the Government Hopes You Don’t Learn!)
16. War and Remembrance/Herman Wouk. “Because the miniseries was shot out of sequence, producers could not cut Jayne Seymour’s hair for the scenes in the concentration camp. Make-up artists took shears to a full scalp wig for her to wear for those scenes instead.” (Wikipedia)
17. The Brotherhood of War: The Aviators/W.E.B. Griffin. “The eighth volume of Griffin’s Brotherhood of War series is a detailed and absorbing view of military life and military men that readers will find fascinating.” (Library Journal)
18. Deer Dancers: Daughter of the Sky/Amanda Cockrell. “She is named Deer Shadow, blessed and cursed by a magical talent inherited at birth. She is cherished by the Yellow Grass People, until a hostile tribe threatens their ancient ways, casting doubt on Deer Shadow. But the gods have sent her a gift – a mysterious outcast, bearing strange new ideas and sacred seeds. She knows she must defy all – for he is her destiny.” (Fantastic Fiction)
19. The Brotherhood of War: The New Breed/W.E.B. Griffin. “An American Epic.” (Tom Clancy)
20. Julius Caesar/Cliff’s Notes. “Brutus bases his decision to assassinate Caesar on a) his hatred for Caesar; b) what Caesar may do if he is crowned king; c) his own desire to be king; d) the need to please Cassius.” (Study Help: Quiz)
21. Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante/Ayun Halliday. “Dimensions: 8.5″H x 5.75″W x 1″D; 0.64 lbs.” (BestBookBuys)
22. The Gospel According to Oprah/Marcia Z. Nelson. “Clearly, Oprah Winfrey has been converted into the New Age Movement. And one of the biggest deceptions is that she apparently doesn’t know it.” (Watchman Fellowship)
23. Celebremos! Let Us Celebrate!/Mexican Lectionary (Leccionario Mexicano). “Can be paired with the We Celebrate Hymnaland/or Cantos del Pueblo de Dios hymnal.” (World Library Publications)
24. The Mean Season/Fred Block, Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, Frances Fox Piven. “This is a spirited reaffirmation of the humane values of the American ‘welfare state’ as well as a sharp attack on the Reagan Administration for trying to dismantle the ‘safety net’ that now protects the unemployed, dependent children, the aged, the disabled, and the very poor. The authors reject the charges that public welfare is a drag on the economy, an incentive to immorality, and ultimately a cruel hoax on the needy. Instead, they argue that there are still big holes in the ‘safety net,’ to be mended with better health insurance and adequate income support for the very poor. Liberals are chastised for falling into theoretical and moral disarray and thus failing to ward off conservative attacks on these issues.” (Library Journal)
25. Moments of Engagement: Intimate Psychotherapy in a Technological Age/Peter D. Kramer. “Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): ambulatory depression, ward chief, dynamic therapy, doing psychotherapy, being empathic, inpatient ward, paranoid patient.” (Amazon.com)
26. The Interpretation of Dreams/Sigmund Freud. “Dreams of loneliness/like a heartbeat drives you mad/In the stillness of remembering what you had/And what you lost/And what you had/And what you lost.” (Stevie Nicks)
27. Angela’s Ashes/Frank McCourt. “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” (McCourt)
Posted on September 26, 2006