Books offer new ways to meet fascinating people

Fascinating folks – there so many of them at the library and a great many of them are living on the new title racks. Come to the library and broaden your circle of friends and acquaintances. Take a few new friends home and get to know them better. Come check us out – we really do have someone for everyone.

Paul McCartney: a Life, by Peter Ames Carlin:
More than a rock star, more than a celebrity, Paul McCartney is a cultural touchstone. As one half of the legendary Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo, he helped transform popular music. McCartney's own ambitions fueled much of the Beatles’ progress. But even as he steered himself from childhood tragedy to his meeting with John Lennon to the gestation of the Beatles and their rise to international acclaim, the same appetites that drove the group to its greatest creative and commercial heights also served to tear the band members apart.

Built on years of research and fresh, revealing interviews with friends, band mates, and collaborators spanning McCartney's entire life, Carlin's lively biography captures the many facets of Paul McCartney and paints a vivid portrait of one of our era's living legends.

Wolf Hall: A Novel, by Hilary Mantel:
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king's freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
Of Mantel’s work, Library Journal says, “Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama: Henry's abandonment of wife and church to marry Anne Boleyn. It should appeal to many readers, not just history buffs. . . . There will be few novels this year as good as this one.”

Einstein: the Life of a Genius, by Walter Isaacson:
This is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom. Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk, a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate, became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.
These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

Michelle Obama: the First Lady in Photographs, by Deborah Willis and Emily Bernard:
Willis and Bernard insist that there has never been a First Lady like her before. With nearly 200 compelling photographs, these two noted scholars capture Michelle Obama's dramatic transformation from working mother to First Lady. From her first tentative steps on the campaign trail to her spontaneous hug of the Queen, and her fairy-tale-like "date night" on Broadway, the photographs tell her story. In her down-to-earth dealings with American schoolchildren, military families, and home gardeners alike, and in her diverse fashion taste, from J. Crew to Jason Wu, Michelle Obama is interestingly all pearls, all business, all mother. The authors show how Michelle Obama represents America's evolving views on women, race, motherhood, and beauty.

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and the Birth of Modern China, by Hannah Pakula:
With the beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in the eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taiwan.

This wonderfully shaped narrative brings to life what Americans should know about China. The way China’s people think and their code of behavior are both vastly different from our own. The story revolves around this fascinating woman and her family: her father, a peasant who raised himself into Shanghai society and sent his daughters to college in America in a day when Chinese women were kept purposefully uneducated; her mother, an unlikely Methodist from the Mandarin class; her husband, a military leader and dogmatic warlord; her sisters, one married to Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, the other to a seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius; and her older brother, a financial genius. This was the Soong family, which, along with their partners in marriage, was largely responsible for dragging China into the twentieth century.

Although she was dubbed the Dragon Lady in some quarters, she was an icon to her people and is certainly one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.