More Bestsellers are found @ your library

Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1 by Mark Twain, Harriet Elinor Smith (Editor), Benjamin Griffin (Editor), Victor Fischer (Editor), Michael B. Frank (Editor)

Publishers Weekly –

Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait, the first of three volumes collected by the Mark Twain Project on the centenary of the author's death. It is published complete and unexpurgated for the first time. (Twain wanted his more scalding opinions suppressed until long after his death.) Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are gorgeous reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles of friends and enemies, from his "fiendish" Florentine landlady to the fatuous and "grotesque" Rockefellers; a searing polemic on a 1906 American massacre of Filipino insurgents; a hilarious screed against a hapless editor who dared tweak his prose; and countless tales of the author's own bamboozlement, unto bankruptcy, by publishers, business partners, doctors, miscellaneous moochers; he was even outsmarted by a wild turkey. Laced with Twain's unique blend of humor and vitriol, the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its author's mind. His is a world where every piety conceals fraud and every arcadia a trace of violence; he relishes the human comedy and reveres true nobility, yet as he tolls the bell for friends and family--most tenderly in an elegy for his daughter Susy, who died in her early 20s of meningitis--he feels that life is a pointless charade. Twain's memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his vision of America--half paradise, half swindle--emerges with indelible force. 66 photos and line illus.

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

The New York Times Book Review - Kathryn Harrison

Although it's not Schiff's purpose to present us with a feminist revision of a life plucked from antiquity, in order to "restore" Cleopatra—to see her at all—one must strip away an "encrusted myth" created by those for whom "citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts"…It's dizzying to contemplate the thicket of prejudices, personalities and propaganda Schiff penetrated to reconstruct a woman whose style, ambition and audacity make her a subject worthy of her latest biographer. After all, Stacy Schiff's writing is distinguished by those very same virtues.

Decision Points by George W. Bush

From Barnes & Noble –

In one of the most arresting memoirs of a United States president, Richard Nixon focused his story on the crises that defined his early career. George W. Bush's new Decision Points breaks the conventions of political autobiography in a similar way, describing his tumultuous presidency through the moments when decisiveness was most essential. Thus, the 43rd President of the United States writes candidly about the fiercely contested 2000 election; the hours, days, and weeks after September 11th; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Iran and other Middle East conflicts; the gathering financial crisis that burst into the 2007-2008 Recession; Hurricane Katrina, and other events during his White House years.