Monday, January 31, 2011

Monday Mix: Biographies in Visual Art

--by Hanje Richards
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These books and movies are part of the Copper Queen Library Biography Collection and showcase the lives of some of the world's greatest visual artists.
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Ansel Adams - Portrait of a great artist and ardent environmentalist for whom life and art, photography and wilderness, creativity and communication, love and expression, were inextricably connected. [DVD]
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Chagall - “When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile – and, above all, the miracle of survival. [BOOK]
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Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist - This detailed portrait of the evolution of internationally renowned artist, writer, and feminist Judy Chicago – creator of The Dinner Party and Holocaust Project – lifts the veil of the public persona she has become and reveals Chicago's personal struggles as an artist and feminist in late 20th-century America. [BOOK]
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Crumb - A hilarious and mysterious journey through artistic genius and sexual obsession, Crumb is a wild ride through the mind of Robert Crumb; creator of "Zap Comix," "Mr. Natural," and "Fritz the Cat." Crumb enters a territory as spooky as it is fascinating... a portrait of the artist as misanthrope, as bad-boy visionary, as joker and sex maniac and, finally, as hero. This is one of those rare film experiences that has the giddy effect of being a nightmare and a party at the same time. [DVD]
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de Kooning: An American Master - Captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school – just as American art began to dominate the international scene. [BOOK]
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Elaine and Bill, Portrait of a Marriage: The Lives of Willem and Elaine de Kooning - An insider's intimate account of the marriage of American postwar art icons Willem and Elaine de Kooning offers readers a true tale of love, sex, obsession, and artistic genius. [BOOK]
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Walker Evans - The Depression-era photographs of Walker Evans (1903-1975) remain some of the most indelible and iconic images in the American consciousness. James R. Mellow's landmark biography of Evans – the first to make use of all his diaries, letters, work logs, and contact sheets – shows that Evans was not the social propagandist that many presume, but rather a fastidious observer, recording, simply, the way things were. Walker Evans is not only one of the most finely wrought portraits of a major American artist ever, it is also a fascinating cultural history of America in the 1930s and '40s. [BOOK]
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Paul Gauguin - This biography dismantles the cherished legend about the artist's transformation from Euro-businessman to Tahitian noble savage, an alluring myth attributable in great part to Gauguin himself. It also emphasizes the importance of Gauguin's early childhood, which was spent in Peru under the protection of his great-uncle, the last Spanish viceroy. It was this interlude that shaped Gauguin's sense of self, non-European aesthetics, and obsession with regaining a lost paradise. Another curious aspect of Gauguin's life was his relationships with unconventional women, from his famous socialist-feminist grandmother to his resilient mother and mannish wife. This is a portrait of Gauguin as a perpetual outsider fueled by contradictory passions and driven halfway around the world by his need to make art. [BOOK]
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Giacometti - Alberto Giacometti's visionary sculptures and paintings form a testament to the artist's intriguing life story. From modest beginnings in a Swiss village, Giacometti went on to flourish in the picturesque milieu of prewar Paris and then to achieve international acclaim in the 1950s and ‘60s. Picasso, Balthus, Samuel Beckett, Stravinsky and Sartre have parts in his story, along with flamboyant art dealers, whores, shady drifters, unscrupulous collectors, poets and thieves. Women were a complex yet important element of his life – particularly his wife, Annette, and his last mistress and model, Caroline – as was the intimate relationship he shared with his brother Diego, who was both Alberto's confidant and collaborator. [BOOK]
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Frida - A product of humble beginnings, Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) earns fame as a talented artist with a unique vision. And from her enduring relationship with her mentor and husband, Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), to her scandalous affairs, Frida's uncompromising personality would inspire her greatest creations! [DVD]
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The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo - This film explores the 20th-century icon who became an international sensation in the worlds of modern art and radical politics. Among those interviewed in the documentary are Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsivais. The film is narrated by Rita Moreno; Mexican singer Lila Downs is the voice of Frida Kahlo. [DVD]
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Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens - Traces the arc of Annie's photographic life, her aspirations to artistry and the trajectory of her career. The film depicts the various phases that shaped her life including childhood, the tumultuous ‘60s, her transition from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair magazine and later her most significant personal relationships, including motherhood. The documentary's highlights center on interviews with her most famous subjects, mentors and colleagues, along with personal insight from Leibovitz herself, to reveal the evolution of inarguably one of today's most influential visual artists. [DVD]
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What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann - Sally Mann creates artwork that challenges viewers' values and moral attitudes. Described by Time magazine as "America's greatest photographer," she first came to international prominence in 1992 with Immediate Family, a series of complex and enigmatic pictures of her three children. What Remains – Mann's recent series on the myriad aspects of death and decay – is the subject of this eponymously titled documentary.
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Filmed at her Virginia farm, Mann is surrounded by her husband and now-grown children, and her willingness to reveal her artistic process allows the viewer to gain exclusive entrance to her world. Never one to compromise, she reflects on her own personal feelings about mortality as she continues to examine the boundaries of contemporary art. Spanning five years, What Remains contains unbridled access to the many stages of Mann's work and is a rare glimpse of an eloquent and brilliant artist. [DVD]
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Just Kids - Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence and enthusiasm, they traversed the city from Coney Island to Forty-second Street, and eventually to the celebrated round table of Max's Kansas City, where the Andy Warhol contingent held court. In 1969, the pair set up camp at the Hotel Chelsea and soon entered a community of the famous and infamous – the influential artists of the day and the colorful fringe. It was a time of heightened awareness, when the worlds of poetry, rock and roll, art, and sexual politics were colliding and exploding. In this milieu, two kids made a pact to take care of each other. Scrappy, romantic, committed to create, and fueled by their mutual dreams and drives, they would prod and provide for one another during the hungry years. [BOOK]
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Mapplethorpe - With Robert Mapplethorpe's full endorsement and encouragement, Morrisroe interviewed more than 300 friends, lovers, family members, and critics to form this definitive biography of America's most censored and celebrated photographer, whose work offsets with luminous elegance and compositional rigor its sometimes shocking content: not only absurdly lush blossoms and haughty socialites but also male nudes and explicit s-m scenes that reflected his own obsessive forays into the Manhattan underworld. The book explores his rise in the vital art world of 1970s Manhattan as well as his bond with rocker Patti Smith, whom Dali described as "a Gothic crow"; his sometimes loving, sometimes mutually exploitative relationship with his lover and patron, Sam Wagstaff; and the moving coincidence of his greatest critical successes occurring with the insidious and slow depredations of his illness. [BOOK]
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The Unknown Matisse : A Life of Henri Matisse – “Matisse was born in 1869 in northern France and grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, near the Belgian border, on the drab, cold, wet beet fields of French Flanders. The same area, culturally and geographically speaking, had produced Vincent van Gogh sixteen years before.” Thus begins the first full biography of an artist who, more than any other, is associated with Mediterranean heat, brilliant color and light, and languid, luxurious interiors. As author Hilary Spurling points out, an open window is one of Matisse's frequent motifs. Given the climate of his youth, that image speaks more of escape than of the sea air of the French Riviera. [BOOK]
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Matisse the Master : A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954 - At 40, Matisse found himself with both the freedom to paint and the burden of a reputation that drew enemies, disciples, and skeptics into his working life. This shift from obscurity to notoriety had less impact on Matisse's work than on his personal relationships, especially his marriage to the single-minded Amélie, a bond that became saturated, for better and worse, with his achievements. Matisse's other relationships – with his daughter, Marguerite, his son, Pierre, his model and factotum Lydia Dylectorskaya and his patron Etta Cone among others – were likewise compounded of dedication and turmoil. The work, meanwhile, took its own course, whether mutating through a single epic piece or proliferating in new media, through two world wars and an absolute transformation in the tenets of and expectations for art. [BOOK]
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Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe - Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most original painters America has ever produced, left behind a remarkable legacy when she died at the age of ninety-eight. Her vivid visual vocabulary – sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth – had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art in this century. .O'Keeffe's personal mystique is as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvases. Here is the first full account of her exceptional life - from her girlhood and early days as a controversial art teacher... to her discovery by the pioneering photographer of the New York avant-garde, Alfred Stieglitz... to her seclusion in the New Mexico desert, where she lived until her death.
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And here is the story of a great romance - between the extraordinary painter and her much older mentor, lover, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
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Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, Georgia O'Keeffe is a twentieth-century legend. Her dazzling career spans virtually the entire history modern art in America. [BOOK]
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Jackson Pollock: An American Saga - Jackson Pollock was more than a great artist; he was a creative force of nature. He changed not only the course of Western art, but our very definition of "art." He was the quintessential tortured genius, an American Vincent van Gogh, cut from the same unconforming cloth as his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and James Dean – and tormented by the same demons; a "cowboy artist" who rose from obscurity to take his place among the titans of modern art, and whose paintings now command millions of dollars.
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Here, for the first time, is the life behind that extraordinary achievement – the disjointed childhood, the sibling rivalry, the sexual ambiguity, and the artistic frustration out of which both artist and art developed. [BOOK]
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Pollock - The film begins in 1941 when Pollock (Ed Harris) meets Krasner, who encourages him and attracts the attention of supportive critic Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor) and benefactor Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan). As Pollock rises from obscurity to international acclaim, Harris brings careful balance to his portrayal of a driven creator who found peace during those brief, sober periods when art brought release from his tenacious inner demons. The film offers sympathy without sentiment, appreciation without misguided hagiography. As an acting showcase it's utterly captivating. As a compassionate but unflinching exploration of Jackson Pollock's intimate world, there's no doubt that Harris captured the essence of a man whose life was as torturous as his art was redeeming. [DVD]
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Man Ray: American Artist - Though he has been a staple in the French art scene from the expatriate 1920s on, Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Brooklyn. This book traces his American upbringing and his departure for Europe plus his work in painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Although he wasn't successful in all media, Man Ray nonetheless had his own style and vision. [BOOK]
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Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera - Patrick Marnham explores a character who was, in every sense, larger than life. We are introduced to the rural Mexico, full of mystery and turbulence, which shapes the enormously imaginative young Rivera's worldview – and a place that would remain his most enduring creative influence. We see the young apprentice leave Mexico for Spain on a government grant and then go on to Italy, where he first encounters the work of the great fresco painters that will change his life and art forever; to Paris, where he settles in Montparnasse at the epicenter of the legendary artistic circle living there at the time, including Picasso (both his great friend and his rival), Modigliani, Matisse, Léger, and Braque. Rivera travels to Moscow to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and begin his lifelong flirtation with Communism. And by 1930, with his young wife, Frida Kahlo, Rivera finally makes his way to North America, where he is to work on three major mural projects – one of which, commissioned by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller for the new Rockefeller Center, will end in disaster and furious international controversy for the artist, and force his return to Mexico. [BOOK]
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Van Gogh: His Life and His Art - This shrewd biography fleshes out major and minor episodes in the troubled painter's erratic life and judges his work according to art scholarship of the past two decades. [BOOK]
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Andy Warhol - A portrait of the most famous and controversial artist of the second half of the twentieth century, this film explores the complete spectrum of Warhol's artistic output from the late 1940s to his death in 1987. [DVD]
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Eloquent Nude: The Love and Legacy of Edward Weston & Charis Wilson - "Edward Weston is considered one of the key pioneers of modern photography. Along with his circle of friends Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston would develop a modern aesthetic and shape American photography in the 20th Century. His sensuous and precise images would create a new way to look at landscapes, still lifes and the human form."
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"Now age 90, Charis Wilson recounts her years with Weston with great humor, candor, and some regret. Combining insight from leading scholars, rare archival images, and convincingly authentic reenactments, Eloquent Nude presents a remarkable true story of love and loss, travel and adventure, and an intimate look at the making of modern photography." [DVD]

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Friday Fiction: William Gibson: From Cyber Punk to Steam Punk and Back Again

--by Hanje Richards

William Ford Gibson (born March 17, 1948) is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the Information Age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the Web.

The Difference Engine - In a Victorian England run by steam-powered computing engines and governed by an intellectual elite led by Prime Minister Byron, an ambitious young paleontologist comes into possession of a dangerous set of program cards and begins running for his life. This first collaboration between cyberpunk legends Gibson and Bruce Sterling represents an ingenious tour-de-force, as cyberpunk and the Victorian adventure novel meet with a vengeance. (Steam Punk) (CQL)
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Sprawl Trilogy

.....1) Neuromancer - Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With it, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace – and science fiction has never been the same.

Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway – jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then, he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way – and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance – and a cure – for a price.... (CQL)

.....2) Count Zero - A corporate mercenary wakes in a reconstructed body, a beautiful woman by his side. Then, Hosaka Corporation reactivates him for a mission more dangerous than the one he's recovering from: to get a defecting chief of R&D – and the biochip he's perfected – out intact. But, this proves to be of supreme interest to certain other parties – some of whom aren't remotely human. (ILL)
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.....3) Mona Lisa Overdrive - Enter Gibson's unique world – lyric and mechanical, erotic and violent, sobering and exciting – where multinational corporations and high tech outlaws vie for power, traveling into the computer-generated universe known as cyberspace. Into this world comes Mona, a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is on a collision course with internationally famous Sense/Net star Angie Mitchell. Since childhood, Angie has been able to tap into cyberspace without a computer. Now, from inside cyberspace, a kidnapping plot is masterminded by a phantom entity who has plans for Mona, Angie, and all humanity, plans that cannot be controlled… or even known. And, behind the intrigue, lurks the shadowy Yakuza, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes… or so they think. (CQL)

Bridge Trilogy

.....1) Virtual Light - 2005: Welcome to NoCal and SoCal, the uneasy sister-states of what used to be California. Here, the Millennium has come and gone, leaving in its wake only stunned survivors. In Los Angeles, Berry Rydell is a former armed-response rent-a-cop now working for a bounty hunter. Chevette Washington is a bicycle-messenger-turned-pickpocket who impulsively snatches a pair of innocent-looking sunglasses. But, these are no ordinary shades. What you can see through these high-tech specs can make you rich – or get you killed. Now, Berry and Chevette are on the run, zeroing in on the digitalized heart of DatAmerica, where pure information is the greatest high. And a mind can be a terrible thing to crash... (ILL)

.....2) Idoru - Colin Laney has a gift very much in demand. He can see well-hidden secrets through "nodal points" in the digital wake of commerce. In the not-so-distant future, fame and fortune and their analogs, scandal and ruin, are the true binding agents in a fractured, ungovernable world. Fired from his television tabloid job for an indiscretion, Laney is hired by the manager of the super-popular band Lo/Rez to go to post-earthquake Tokyo and divine the meaning behind singer Lo's intention to marry an idoru – a sort of semi-sentient hologram. In alternating chapters, Chia, deeply involved in the Seattle chapter of the Lo/Rez fan club, picks up word of Lo's intentions over a computer network and is sent to investigate. On the way, she acts as the unwitting mule for a smuggler and winds up holding some very dangerous information. (CQL)

.....3) All Tomorrow’s Parties - Rydell is on his way back to near-future San Francisco. A stint as a security man in an all-night Los Angeles convenience store has convinced him his career is going nowhere, but his friend Laney, phoning from Tokyo, says there's more interesting work for him in Northern California. And there is, although it will eventually involve his former girlfriend; a Taoist assassin; the secrets Laney has been hacking out of the depths of DatAmerica; the CEO of the PR firm that secretly runs the world; and the apocalyptic technological transformation of, well, everything. (CQL)

Bigend Trilogy

.....1) Pattern Recognition - Cayce Pollard is a well-paid professional marketer. She and her friends – filmmakers, dealers in electronic esoterica, designers, and hackers – live on the cutting edge of a highly technological, "post-geographic" world, where the manipulation of cultural trends can bring great power. When she is employed to discover the source of "the Footage," a mysterious film that has been appearing in bits and pieces on the Web and gathering a worldwide underground following, her survival is at stake. In her search for the auteur, she outwits corporate spies, terrorists, and mobsters in London, Tokyo, Moscow, and New York; struggles with ethical issues; and even delves into the mystery of her father's disappearance on September 11, 2001. (CQL)

.....2) Spook Country - Gibson abandons the futuristic dystopias that have sustained most of his career, picturing instead a dystopic present – specifically, a post-9/11 America, which, in thrall to ubiquitous media and vague threats of annihilation, has "developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government." The convoluted and politically insistent plot involves a missing shipping container, a former rock star, a Cuban-Chinese crime-facilitating family, and an Ativan addict coerced into domestic espionage. Fanciful touches include the creation of virtual art in public spaces using satellite mapping and Wi-Fi; texting in Volapuk, a Cyrillic-Latin amalgam; encrypting data within songs on an iPod; and the CIA’s recruitment of sea pirates in the war on terrorism. (ILL)

.....3) Zero History - Gibson leads readers on a wild adventure that encompasses fashion, the military-industrial complex, viral marketing, behavioral anthropology, addiction, and even base jumping, weaving all of these distinctive threads into a satisfyingly cohesive whole. A couple of reviewers cited some implausible plot twists and exaggerated characters, but most praised Gibson's increased focus on his characters, his razor-sharp prose, and his incisive observations on modern culture. (ILL)

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Spotlight On... Grand Canyon Reader Nominees (Part 3)

--by Hanje Richards
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The Grand Canyon Reader Award (GCRA) is a reader award program for students in Arizona. Students vote annually on their favorite book in the following categories: Picture, Non-Fiction, Intermediate, ‘Tween, and Teen. This blog post features the Young Adult ("Teen") Fiction Nominees for the 2011 GCRA that are available at the Copper Queen Library. Past posts have featured “Easy Fiction,” “Easy Nonfiction,” "'Tween" and "Intermediate" nominees available at the Copper Queen Library.
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Beastly (Alex Flinn) - Privileged, popular, and proud, high school student Kyle Kingsbury knows he can get away with virtually anything because of his good looks and his father's money. But Kyle goes too far when he sets out to humiliate a mysterious and unpopular girl at the school dance. The girl turns out to be a witch who casts a spell on Kyle, turning him into a beast who is now as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside. The only way for Kyle to break the curse is to fall in love with someone who will look past his appearance and love him in return. Modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast.
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Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (E. Lockhart) - Frankie Landau-Banks has developed into a 15-year-old with an attention-grabbing figure, a new attitude, and sights set on making changes at her elite boarding school. She has a new boyfriend, a gorgeous senior who belongs to a long-standing secret society on campus — The Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds, known mostly for silly pranks and a history of male-only membership. Frankie manipulates the Loyal Order to do her bidding with pranks meant to make a political statement about the male-dominated and classist nature of the school.

Graceling (Kristin Cashore) - Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight – she’s a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king’s thug. When she first meets Prince Po, Graced with combat skills, Katsa has no hint of how her life is about to change. She never expects to become Po’s friend. She never expects to learn a new truth about her own Grace — or about a terrible secret that lies hidden far away... a secret that could destroy all seven kingdoms with words alone.
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The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) - In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one girl and one boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she takes her sister’s place to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has also resolved to outwit the creators of the games. To do that, she will have to be the last person standing at the end of the deadly ordeal, and that will take every ounce of strength and cunning she has.
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I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee (Charles J. Shields) - Harper Lee is a mysterious figure who leads a very private life in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, refusing to give interviews or talk about the novel that made her a household name. Lee’s life is as rich as her fiction, from her girlhood as a rebellious tomboy to her days at the University of Alabama and early years as a struggling writer in New York City.
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Little Brother (Cory Doctorow) - Marcus is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works — and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But, his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
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Me, the Missing and the Dead (Jenny Valentine) - Lucas feels surrounded by the missing: his sister avoids home, his mother is absorbed in a midlife crisis, his grandfather has dementia, and his journalist father went missing years ago. With so many ghostlike family members, it’s not surprising that Lucas begins to sense a connection with the dead. While waiting in a London office lobby, a funeral urn draws his attention, and he feels an overpowering urge to know the person inside. A string of ensuing coincidences tie him — and his father — to the deceased, Violet, a famous pianist.

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Mexican White Boy (Matt de la Peña) - Danny's tall and skinny. Even though he’s not built, his arms are long enough to give his pitch a power so fierce any college scout would sign him on the spot. Ninety-five mile per hour fastball, but the boy’s not even on a team. Every time he gets up on the mound he loses it.

But at his private school, they don’t expect much from him. Danny’s half Mexican. And growing up in San Diego means everyone else knows exactly who he is before they find out he can’t speak Spanish, and before they realize his mom has blond hair and blue eyes. And that’s why he’s spending the summer with his dad’s family. To find himself, he might just have to face the demons he refuses to see right in front of his face.

My Mother the Cheerleader (Robert Sharenow) - Louise Collins was pretty certain that nothing all that exciting would happen in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where she lived with her mother in their boarding house. Every day was almost the same. But when desegregation begins, Louise is pulled out of school and her mother joins the Cheerleaders, a group of local women who gather every morning to heckle six-year-old Ruby Bridges, William Frantz Elementary's first African-American student.

Then one day, a Chevy Bel Air with a New York license plate pulls up to the house and out steps Morgan Miller, a man with a mysterious past. For the first time, Louise feels as if someone cares about what she thinks. But when the reason for Morgan's visit comes to light, everything Louise thinks she knows about her mother, her world, and herself changes, abruptly and irrevocably.
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Nation (Terry Prachett) - When a giant wave destroys his village, Mau is the only one left. Daphne – a traveler from the other side of the globe — is the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Separated by language and customs, the two are united by catastrophe. Slowly, they are joined by other refugees. And as they struggle to protect the small band, Mau and Daphne defy ancestral spirits, challenge death himself, and uncover a long-hidden secret that literally turns the world upside down.
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Paper Towns (John Green) - Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life — dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge — he follows. After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues — and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.
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Sight (Adrienne Maria Vrettos) - Fifteen-year-old Dylan has horrific visions of the last moments of a child's life — a child who has been abducted, kidnapped, or worse. Dylan gives the police valuable clues that help them to find children's bodies, but she keeps the most personal information about these young victims to herself. Dylan has become used to withholding her sight abilities — even from her best friend, Pilar — but the weight of that secret is becoming almost more than she can bear.
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Sunrise Over Fallujah (Walter Dean Myers) - Robin "Birdy" Perry, a new Army recruit from Harlem, isn't quite sure why he joined, but he's sure where he's headed: Iraq. Birdy and the others in the Civilian Affairs Battalion are supposed to help secure and stabilize the country and successfully interact with the Iraqi people. Officially, the code name for their maneuvers is Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the young men and women in the CA unit have a simpler name for it: WAR
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Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time (Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin) - A homeless mountaineer, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schools — especially for girls — that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on Earth.

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Wintergirls (Laurie Halse Anderson) - Lia and Cassie are best friends, wintergirls frozen in fragile bodies, competitors in a deadly contest to see who can be the thinnest. But then, Cassie suffers the ultimate loss — her life — and Lia is left behind, haunted by her friend's memory and racked with guilt for not being able to help save her. Explores Lia's struggle, her painful path to recovery, and her desperate attempts to hold on to the most important thing of all — hope.
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World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Max Brooks) - The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women and, sometimes, children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result.