Our Staff Recommends

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Stephen L. Hoppe (Paperback, Harper, 2008).

The author and her family describe a year of eating locally; they rely solely on food from their own gardens/barns and food produced with 50 miles of their home in rural Virginia. While they agree everyone cannot do what they did, they make a strong case for relying more on local produce and less on food that has traveled from outside the United States or from across the country. . . .a case made even stronger by today's increasing fuel costs that are being passed on to consumers at the grocery store. Especially fun to read during summer/fall when so much produce is ripe! Great recipes included. (Kelly)

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu (Paperback, Riverhead, 2008).

This is one of the best written and poignant stories I've ever read of the immigrant experience in the United States. Set in a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, DC, the lives of three African immigrants are revealed. Although each comes to America to escape political turmoil and each forges a different life in America to attempt to combat the isolation they feel in a new country. (Kelly)

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (Paperback, Penguin, 2007)

It's three a.m. and Liz, a 30-something writer, is sobbing on the bathroom floor while the husband she thinks she wants to divorce sleeps. Panicked and lost, Liz begins to do something she's never done before--she starts to pray. From this point on, everything in Elizabeth's life changes, and she realizes it is time to pursue her own journey. Through a divorce, a depression, a failed love affair, and the dissolution of longstanding personal expectations, Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of a year Gilbert gives to herself to reclaim herself. She spends four months in Italy to learn Italian & eat; next she's off to India to try to quiet her mind with meditation & prayer at an ashram; and finally to Bali, for no better reason than she'd been told by a crazy old medicine man that she would come to Bali and study with him. But of course as the title alludes, there she finds love. An intensely articulate and funny memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society's ideals. (Lauren)

Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan (Paperback, Ballantine, 2008)

Using newspaper clippings and her own research, Nancy Horan crafted a novel based on the real-life affair between architect Frank Lloyd Wright and feminist Mameh Borthwick, for whom Wright built Taliesin. The book is not a romance; it explores the mind of Wright but, more indelibly, the life of a woman (with a degree from the University of Michigan) struggling with the limitations of life for women in the early 20th century. An unbelievably rich character-driven story featuring unique perspectives on a particular period of U.S. (and Midwestern) history. (Kelly)

Respite for Teachers - Reflection and Renewal in the Teaching Life by Christine Pearson Casanave and Miguel Sosa (Paperback, University of Michigan Press, 2007)

Written by language teachers, I recommend this wonderful book because I feel it reaches far beyond the ESL classroom. Composed of short essays, poems, quotes, and lists full of wit, Respite for Teachers offers encouragement and support at any time, even in those few quiet minutes before class. My personal experience is quite different from that of the authors - I am a yoga instructor - so it is a testament to the authors that I find so much wisdom in this book. They dive into the heart of all teaching: respecting our students, learning from them, and responding creatively to challenges. Any student looking for an interesting shift in perception or an inside glimpse into what truly matters in teaching will find this a great read as well. (Lindsay)

The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham (Paperback, Bantam, 2002)

This book mines the stories of many spiritual traditions to better understand the endeavor to transcend human experience by learning to embrace the same imperfections that characterize it. These stories come from faiths spread around the globe and across the ages including Greek thinkers, Buddhist monks, Jewish ascetics, Christian reformers, 12-step recovery groups, and modern philosophers, among others. The storytelling traditions of such diverse faiths work together to highlight a very modern path to enlightenment grounded in ancient wisdom. (Jason)

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (Paperback, Touchstone, 2003).

Wild Swans tells the story of three generations of Chinese women living in a century of upheaval: the author's grandmother, concubine to a warlord at the end of the Qing Dynasty; the author's mother, a student leader in the early, hopeful days of Communism and later, during the Cultural Revolution, among the many to be denounced and tormented; and the author herself, born in 1952, at one time a member of the Red Guards, ultimately exiled to the countryside to work as a peasant and undergo "thought reform through labor." The characters are harried through their lives--from place to place and job to job--by war, tyranny, and social hysteria. It's a dramatic introduction to Chinese history, and Jung Chang tells it with admirable self-possession. (Amy)