When the Husband Is the Suspect – F. Lee Bailey
KF 221 .M8 B35 2008
This chronicle about uxoricide—a legal term for the murder of one spouse by the other—covers in dispassionate detail the investigation and trial of many of the most publicized murder cases that took place during the last fifty-plus years.  From the infamous Sam Sheppard case that inspired The Fugitive through the headline-grabbing cases involving O. J. Simpson, Scott Peterson, and Robert Blake, When the Husband Is the Suspect provides a measured overview of these marquee-worthy instances of alleged uxoricide.

Racial Paranoia – John L. Jackson, Jr.
JK 1726 .J33 2008
Exploring America’s ongoing racial divide, John L. Jackson, Jr., identifies a new and compelling paradigm of race relations that has emerged in the wake of the legal victories of the civil rights era: racial paranoia.  Jackson distinguishes racial paranoia (fears and suspicions about hidden forms for race-based animus) from racism (observable acts of racial discrimination and prejudice), and argues that racial paranoia actually becomes more pronounced as blatant forms of racism and explicit societal discrimination subside.

Duma Key – Stephen King
PS 3561 .I483 D86 2008
A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle’s right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation.  A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends,  and Edgar begins to wish he hadn’t survived the injuries that could have killed him.  He wants out.  He leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily underdeveloped splinter of the Florida coast.    No more than a dark pencil line on a blank page.  A horizon line, maybe.  But also a slot for blackness to pour through…

Christ the Lord: the Road to Cana – Anne Rice
PS 3568 .I265 C5 2008
Anne Rice’s second book in her hugely ambitious and courageous life of Christ begins during his last winter before his baptism in the Jordan and concludes with the miracle at Cana.  It is a novel in which we see Jesus—he is called Yeshua bar Joseph—during a winter of no rain, endless dust, and talk of trouble in Judea.  As with Out of Egypt, the opening novel, The Road to Cana is based on the Gospels and on the most respected New Testament scholarship.

Marie Therese, Child of Terror – Susan Nagel
DC 137.2 .N34 2008
In December 1795, on the midnight stroke of her seventeenth birthday, Marie-Therese, the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, fled Paris’s notorious Temple Prison.  Kept in solitary confinement after her parents’ brutal execution during the Terror, she had been unaware of the fate of her family, save the cries she heard of her young brother being tortured in an adjacent cell.  She emerged to an uncertain future:  an orphan, exile, and focus of political plots and marriage schemes of the crowned heads of Europe.

Born Standing Up – Steve Martin
PN 2287 .M522 A3 2007
In the midseventies, Steve Martin exploded onto the comedy scene.  By 1978 he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up.  In 1981 he quit forever.  This book is, in his own words, the story of “why I did stand-up and why I walked away.”  Martin illuminates the sacrifice, discipline, and originality that made him an icon and informs his work to this day.  To be this good, to perform so frequently, was isolating and lonely.  It took Martin decades to reconnect with his parents and sister, and he tells that story with great tenderness.

Common Wealth – Jeffrey D. Sachs
HD 87 .S23 2008
In Common Wealth, Jeffrey Sachs shows us that we need a new economic paradigm—global, inclusive, cooperative, environmentally aware, and science based—because we are running up against the realities of a crowded planet.  The alternative is a series of cascading threats to global well-being, all of which are solvable but potentially disastrous if left unattended.

Throes of Democracy – Walter A. McDougall
E 338 .M38 2008
Throes of Democracy is much more than a political history.  Here, for the first time, is the American epic as lived by Germans and Irish, Catholics, and Jews, as well as people of British Protestant and African American stock; an epic defined as much by folks in Wisconsin, Kansas, and Texas as by those in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia; an epic in which Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, showman P. T. Barnum, and circus clown Dan Rice figure as prominently as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Henry Ward Beecher; an epic in which railroad management and land speculation prove as gripping as Indian wars.

Beautiful Boy – David Sheff
HV 5831 .C2 S54 2008
“When Nic was growing up, I thought I would be content with whatever choices he made in his life…Now I live with the knowledge that, never mind the most modest definition of a normal or healthy life, my son may not make it to twenty-one.”  What had happened to my beautiful boy?  To our family?  What did I do wrong?  Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff’s harrowing journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery.

Inside the Mind of BTK – John Douglas
HV 8079 .H6 D684 2007
As a leading serial killer profiler for the FBI, John Douglas was first called to consult about the case in 1980 and remained involved with the story and all of its principal players up to the arrest and prosecution.  After Radar was arrested, Douglas was granted both an exclusive interview with the killer after his sentencing, as well as access to friends, family, and police.  Douglas reveals both new information and insight into why Rader did what he did, why he stopped for a mysterious nine-year period, and his current psychological state in custody.

Liberal Fascism – Jonah Goldberg
JC 481 .G55 2007
Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics.  Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism and Mussolini’s Fascism.

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