July 2020: Kent
Kent Bryant was a long-time employee of Quail Ridge Books, loved by customers and staff. He passed away in July 2020. Here are some of his favorites, culled from his Take Ten, Book Bash presentations, and the QuailMail.
Jitterbug Perfume: A Novel by Tom Robbins (Bantam $17). A crazy quilt of entertaining characters strives for immortality and enlightenment across time, the key to which may just be a perfume based on beet root or jasmine. Robbins somehow weaves the themes of fragrance and transcendence together into a tale that will transport you too.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal (Picador $18). Traces the inheritance of a collection of exquisite Japanese figurines known as netsuke down through his illustrious family, ultimately to himself, uncovering an incredible history of achievement, grandeur, and staggering loss.
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (W. W. Norton $16.95). In 1417, ex-papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini discovered a copy of a humanistic book written by Lucretius in the 1st century BC. The text was key, Greenblatt says, to inspiring the Renaissance and shaping our modern world.
The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer by Meryle Secrest (Knopf $30). This is the fascinating story of the family company, Olivetti, the Italian manufacturer of beautiful business machines, one of the most progressive employers of the 20th century and maker of the first commercial programmable desktop computer, the Programma 101.
The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox by Vanda Krefft (Harper $40). Yep, this book is almost 1000 pages, but I loved every page of it! Krefft has restored to us a lost history; an early world of actors, movies--and scheming among studio bosses. And at the start of it all, and the center of it all, was William Fox, who truly believed in the movies.
I've been reading Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli again—he writes the kind of books that make you realize Reality is Not What it Seems (the title of his previous book). Now in The Order of Time (Riverhead $15), he asserts that time does not exist—that it does not 'flow', and that there's no such thing as the past or the future. He references literature, poetry, and science to elegantly explain why we feel innately that time does exist.
They Can't Kill Us All: The Story of the Struggle for Black Lives by Wesley Lowery (Back Bay Books $16.99). The Washington Post writer vividly brings to life the most heavily patrolled corners in America, looking at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect.
Les Parisiennes: Resistance, Collaboration, and the Women of Paris Under Nazi Occupation by Anne Sebba (St. Martin’s Griffin $17.99). Sebba puts us in the shoes of the waitresses, shop assistants, and wives and mothers who lived face to face with the German conquerors daily, increasingly desperate to survive.
Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin $17). A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism from the left and right alike.
The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South by John T. Edge (Penguin $18). A people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades.
The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam by Jerry Brotton (Penguin $18). How Elizabethan England traded and allied with the Muslim world, influencing Shakespeare and others to work the interrelationships of Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews into their plays.
The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality by Nancy Isenberg, Andrew Burstein (Penguin $20). Divisive party politics is nothing new, and in this book the authors show how parties first arose in our young republic, centered around popular leaders. John Adams and John Quincy Adams were alone in resisting alignment with party, and both suffered politically for it. Their admonitions ring fresh today.
Jitterbug Perfume
is an epic.
Which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn’t conclude until nine o’clock tonight (Paris time).
It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle.
The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god.
May not be available - email or call for information
A New York Times Bestseller
An Economist Book of the Year
Costa Book Award Winner for Biography
Galaxy National Book Award Winner (New Writer of the Year Award)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction • Winner of the National Book Award • New York Times Bestseller
Renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt brings the past to vivid life in what is at once a supreme work of scholarship, a literary page-turner, and a thrilling testament to the power of the written word.
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The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150.
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A riveting story of ambition, greed, and genius unfolding at the dawn of modern America. This landmark biography brings into focus a fascinating brilliant entrepreneur—like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, a true American visionary—who risked everything to realize his bold dream of a Hollywood empire.
One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade
"Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times
An indispensable work of journalism that “is electric, because it is so well reported” (Dwight Garner, New York Times) by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Wesley Lowery that describes the earliest days of #blacklivesmatter and brings to life the quest for justice in the murders by police of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray as well as an intimate, moving portrait of
Les Parisiennes: Resistance, Collaboration, and the Women of Paris Under Nazi Occupation (Paperback)
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“Anne Sebba has the nearly miraculous gift of combining the vivid intimacy of the lives of women during The Occupation with the history of the time. This is a remarkable book.” —Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes
A New York Times bestseller!
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017
A dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, who preserved democracy from the threats of authoritarianism, from the left and right alike.
“The one food book you must read this year."
—Southern Living
One of Christopher Kimball’s Six Favorite Books About Food
A people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades
May not be available - email or call for information
The fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth’s secret outreach to the Muslim world, which set England on the path to empire, by The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps
"Told with authority and style. . . Crisply summarizing the Adamses' legacy, the authors stress principle over partisanship."--The Wall Street Journal
How the father and son presidents foresaw the rise of the cult of personality and fought those who sought to abuse the weaknesses inherent in our democracy.
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