false 180363 907382 0679761659 9780679761655 24 <![CDATA[Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179353282m/907382.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179353282s/907382.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/907382.Train_Go_Sorry_Inside_a_Deaf_World 3.90 163 180363 3.61 447 86 1994 406564 0142004324 9780142004326 11 <![CDATA[Heart, You Bully, You Punk]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174490630m/406564.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174490630s/406564.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/406564.Heart_You_Bully_You_Punk 3.36 77 Heart, You Bully, You Punk (and what a title it is) tells the story of Ann, a math whiz at a private high school in Brooklyn, and two people who loom large in her life: her father, Wally, who owns a restaurant called Game in Manhattan, and her teacher, a quietly mysterious woman named Esker. When Esker and Wally begin to fall in love, Cohen gives us a story that's immediate and elegant, characters who are lovable and maddening, dialogue that's silly and serious and wonderfully human. But what makes this small novel really terrific is its choice of venues: the school and the restaurant. Both locales are wonderfully novelistic, crowded with characters and lousy with rituals recognizable to anyone who has haunted such joints. Ann quizzes her classmate Denise on whether or not she thinks Esker is poignant. "Denise remained unconvinced. 'She's just eerie.' 'Eerie' is a big word this year at The Prospect School, where its connotation is not derogatory; it's a catch-all for anything enigmatic or unplumbed." Likewise, Cohen nails nice little details of the emotional life of a restaurant, like Wally's ritual of having a nightly cocoa with his maitre d', Nuncio. "They've had little manly crushes on each other for seven years; they always will." Cohen launches her characters into the waters of heartbreak, but these small noticings keep the book grounded, funny, and always very alive. --Claire Dederer]]> 180363 3.61 447 86 2003 643270 0393064514 9780393064513 31 <![CDATA[House Lights: A Novel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176671163m/643270.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176671163s/643270.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/643270.House_Lights_A_Novel 3.16 85 A poignant novel, reminiscent of Alice McDermott and Sue Miller, about how secrets threaten the stability of a family.

Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice mails a letter on the sly, sparking events that will change her life forever. The addressee is her grandmother, a legendary stage actress long estranged from her daughter, Bea's mother. Though Bea wants to become an actress herself, it is the desire to understand the old family rift that drives her to work her way into her grandmother's graces.

But just as she establishes a precarious foothold in her grandmother's world, Bea's elite Boston home life begins to crumble. Her beloved father is accused of harassment by one of his graduate students; her usually composed mother shows vulnerabilities and doubt; and Bea is falling in love with a man more than twice her age.

Written with lyricism and narrative reach, House Lights is psychologically intricate, powerfully capturing the weight of family secrets on the lives of children and the struggle to find truth, forgiveness, and love.]]> 180363 3.61 447 86 2007 643272 038549257X 9780385492577 4 <![CDATA[Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176671165m/643272.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176671165s/643272.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/643272.Glass_Paper_Beans_Revelations_on_the_Nature_and_Value_of_Ordinary_Things 3.46 35 Glass Paper Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things. In it, Hager Cohen traces the stories of the glass cup from which she's sipping, the paper upon which her news is printed, and the coffee beans that gave birth to her morning jolt. This leads to tales of source origins and legends. But she also pays homage to the people involved in turning raw materials into consumer goods: Ruth Lamp, who oversees the Anchor Hocking glass factory's Lancaster, Ohio, select and pack department; Brent Boyd, a fourth-generation Canadian logger; and Basilio Salinas, who tends coffee plants on a cooperative in Pluma Hidalgo, near Oaxaca, Mexico. Woven throughout this thoughtful meditation are the elements that make the market tick, politics, philosophy, and musings on the role advertising plays in removing us from the true qualities of the items that we employ in daily life.]]> 180363 3.61 447 86 1997 643271 1400061571 9781400061570 6 <![CDATA[Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176671164m/643271.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176671164s/643271.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/643271.Without_Apology_Girls_Women_and_the_Desire_to_Fight 4.05 22
In the fall of 2001, Cohen met up with four girls, ages ten to fifteen, and their female coach at the Somerville Boxing Club. Over the course of a year, she grew close to them all–spending time at the old-style boxing club where they trained several times a week and at their homes, schools, and neighborhood hangouts. She learned about their families, the housing projects where they lived, their explosive friendships and steadfast loyalties, and especially about the damage that had turned each of them into a fighter.

Fascinated by the freedom the girls had in the ring, Cohen began training and sparring with them and their coach–only to find herself astounded by the strength and authority of her body, and by the way boxing opened up and brought clarity to her old issues about eating, anger, sexuality, and survival.

Spirited and provocative, Without Apology is Cohen’s account of what she discovered in the gym: about herself, about girls who box, and ultimately about the buried connections between femininity and aggression.

“Aggression and desire are inseparable,” writes Cohen. “For they are forbidden to girls in equal measure, and they are also in equal measure requisite for life.” Without Apology is sure to influence the ways in which all women–mothers and daughters, athletes and artists, teachers and learners of every description–see themselves in the world.]]> 180363 3.61 447 86 2005 374751 0380729288 9780380729289 0 <![CDATA[Heat Lightning]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174269165m/374751.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174269165s/374751.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/374751.Heat_Lightning 4.00 13 Charms for the Easy Life and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Cohen's hauntingly poignant story deals with remarkable women bonded by strength, loss and love. Told in the lyrical and captivating voice of eleven-year-old Mole, HEAT LIGHTNING chronicles the days of a magical summer when she and her twelve-year-old sister, Tilly, must come to terms with the steady unraveling of the childhood mythology they created to define an incomprehensible world.

Ever since the death of their parents in a boating accident on the Kittiwake River when Tilly and Mole were babies, the girls have lived with their aunt Hy in a small and quiet lakeside town. Their aunt's reluctance to discuss the tragedy in anything more than the most cryptic, fragmented terms has only served to feed the sisters' curiosity--giving rise to secret fantasies and unifying Mole and Tilly in their devoted quest for buried truths about the history that has been denied them both.

But this warm and gentle summer is different from most. In this season of exploration, a subtle change is taking place that draws Mole's close confidant and inseparable companion farther and farther away from her. And others have arrived at Pillow Lake--strangers invading a protected domain--disturbing the delicate tripartite balance Mole, Tilly and Hy have maintained with the past for years, bringing doubt and confusion to two children on the precarious brink of adulthood while, at the same time, offering the luminous promise of understanding.

In Heat Lightning, a superb and sensual novel of innocence lost and found written with wry insight and beautiful, rhythmic prose, Leah Hager Cohen evokes the sights, smells and tentative emotions of a summer of awakening, as she explores with strength and compassion the pain of shattered illusions and the transforming power of coming to terms with the events that shape our lives.

]]> 180363 3.61 447 86 1997 313387 0142000965 9780142000960 2 <![CDATA[The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173674763m/313387.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173674763s/313387.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/313387.The_Stuff_of_Dreams_Behind_the_Scenes_of_an_American_Community_Theater 3.75 12 180363 3.61 447 86 2001 643275 0451011198 9780451011190 0 <![CDATA[Murder, Madness]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/643275.Murder_Madness 0.0 0 180363 3.61 447 86 1954