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August Calendar of All events are free and open to the public and, unless otherwise noted, are held at The Odyssey. Call (413) 534-7307 to reserve a space. If you can’t attend, we can reserve a signed book for you. Please call the Odyssey at 534-7307 or email us to reserve a place for an event. (If emailing, please give us your phone number.) If we have your name and telephone number, we'll be able to call you with last-minute cancellations or changes. Click on an event in the calendar for details. August 2008
A Midnight Release Party for Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer Come dressed in your blood-thirstiest best and spend the bewitching hours prior to the book’s release amongst your most vampirish friends. Blood punch and other appetite-whetting refreshments will be served until 11:00 p.m. Contests, raffle prizes, and dancing throughout the evening. The Odyssey Crime Club will discuss Under the Dragon’s Tail by Maureen Jennings. In this follow-up to Except the Dying, Jennings returns to Victorian Toronto as she brings back detective William Murdoch in a story of mystery, class, and murder that pierces the heart of women's darkest secrets. This month’s selection is discounted 20%.Tom Fels Farm Friends: From the Late Sixties to the West Seventies and Beyond Farm Friends is a memoir and a study of the generation of the 1960s. Beginning on a communal farm in 1969, it continues as a personal chronicle of the author and his extended family up to the present day. From the greenhouse in the spring to haying in the summer; from cold, wood-heated winters to abundant home-cooked dinners in the fall, back-to-the-land communards of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s made their way in a new and unfamiliar world. Later, relocated in cities and towns across the country, they used what they had learned to continue to explore and to influence life as they found it in the late 20th and early 21st century. The author’s narrative traces the earlier roots and later pursuits of some of the many participants, companions and friends attracted to this new way of life. Written in a clear and literate manner, Farm Friends is intended as readable history, stories interwoven into an ongoing narrative that suggests the fabric of an entire generation.“Farm Friends is a baby-boomer’s Blithedale Romance. Fels reminds the rest of us that the boomers really did make revolution even if it didn’t turn out the way they planned.” — Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America Victor S. Navasky Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq is the definitive collection -- systematically categorized, indexed, and footnoted for your convenience -- of authoritative misinformation, disinformation, misunderstanding, miscalculation, egregious prognostication, boo-boos, and just plain lies, about the Iraq War. At once an entertainment, a cautionary tale, a critique of mass media, a reference tool, and a postwar manifesto, Mission Accomplished! presents, as no book has before, the collective wisdom of all those who are presumed to know what they are talking about on the subject of America's adventure in Iraq.“Having amassed an aircraft carrier’s worth of lies about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky can now crow ‘Mission Accomplished!.’ Indeed.” -- Vanity Fair Jennifer Haigh The Condition The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. The year is 1976, and the family, has embarked on its annual vacation at the Captain’s House, the grand old family retreat on Cape Cod. One day on the beach, Frank is struck by an image he cannot forget: his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, strangely infantile in her child-sized bikini, standing a full head shorter than her younger cousin Charlotte. At that moment he knows a truth that something is terribly wrong with his only daughter. The McKotch family will never be the same. Compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, witty and almost painfully astute, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies, the self-delusions, denials, and inescapable truths that forever bind fathers and mothers and siblings. “Compelling; highly recommended.” – Library Journal The Odyssey Bookshop’s Open Fiction Book Group will discuss Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje. From the celebrated author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost comes a remarkable, intimate novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. This month’s selection is discounted 20%.Brunonia Barry The Lace Reader Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light. The Lace Reader is a mesmerizing tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it's nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, “There are no accidents.” “Unusual and otherworldly, this is a blizzard of a story which surprisingly manages to pull together its historical, supernatural and psychiatric elements. A survivor’s tale of redemption, reached via a long and winding road.” – Kirkus Reviews Julia Spencer-Fleming I Shall Not Want People die. Marriages fail. In the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill, New York, however, life doesn’t stop for heartbreak. A brand-new officer in the police department, a breaking-and-entering, and trouble within his own family keep Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne busy enough to ignore the pain of losing his wife---and the woman he loves. “Keenly moving and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, this is a tour de force in a series that seems to have jumped levels in quality.” – Booklist
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