My LINKcat AccountWhen you sit down at your Thanksgiving Day meal, it will undoubtedly be with some combination of family and friends. As is true with any gathering of a large group that meets on an infrequent basis, those who are missing are as noticeable as those present. In your early decades those absent are undoubtedly fulfilling conflicting familial obligations. As the years roll on it is because those absent are permanently gone. Thanksgiving can become a celebration by survivors filled with gratitude that you can still gather together as well as being thankful for the bounties of the harvest. Once the grandchildren begin arriving, the whole cycle of life (of the clan) begins again. I’m sure the first Thanksgiving was an acknowledgment of survival and of gratitude. You harvest a crop and you are grateful that the crop survived. The survival of the crop means the odds have increased that you and your family will survive the winter. The immediacy of starvation and death, put a much sharper edge on the gratitude felt by those first practitioners of Thanksgiving, but I think we can all connect with those early settlers. In the midst of our daily life and the perils to life and health that we are all subject to, it is good to have a reason to sit down at a table filled with food at a time when the land is dormant and fecundity is but a distant dream, and hold hands and say “thank you”. I hope you have a joyous time with your families.
New Non-Fiction
Drinking in America : our secret history / by Susan Cheever. Presents an exploration of the history of drinking in the United States and its effects on the American character.
Lafayette in the somewhat United States / by Sarah Vowell. A portrait of the popular French Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, discusses his nonpartisan influence on a fledgling United States, his relationships with the Founding Fathers and his contributions during the contentious 1824 presidential election. By the best-selling author of Assassination Vacation.
Magna Carta : the birth of liberty / by Dan Jones. A narrative history of the year 1215 and the making of the Magna Carta chronicles key events and shares insight into the treaty's enduring influence on Western views about liberty. By the New York Times best-selling author of The Plantagenets and The Wars of the Roses.
Pacific : silicon chips and surfboards, coral reefs and atom bombs, brutal dictators, fading empires, and the coming collision of the world's superpowers / by Simon Winchester. The New York Times best-selling author of The Men Who United the States traces the geological history of the Pacific Ocean to assess its relationship with humans and indelible role in the modern world
Government zero : no borders, no language, no culture / by Michael Savage. The best-selling author of Stop the Coming Civil War argues that progressives and radical Islamists are compromising democratic principles to instill a government of absolute power without representation.
New Fiction
Foreign affairs / by Stuart Woods. Traveling to Rome to attend a mandatory meeting abroad, Stone Barrington finds his hopes for turning the trip into a vacation dashed in the wake of more trouble than he anticipated. By the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Chiefs.
Front runner / by Felix Francis. Approached by a champion jockey to investigate allegations of race fixing, Jefferson Hinkley gets more than he bargained for when his client is murdered. By the New York Times best-selling co-author of Dead Heat.
Rogue lawyer / by John Grisham. A latest courtroom thriller by the best-selling author of The Firm features maverick lawyer Sebastian Rudd, whose disregard for traditional interpretations of justice and edgy advocacy of defendants other lawyers will not touch have earned him dangerous enemies.
Playing with fire : a novel / by Tess Gerritsen. Discovering an old and strikingly unusual music composition that causes her to black out and her daughter to be implicated in acts of violence, Julia Ansdell travels to Venice to find the composition's owner and uncovers a dark secret dating back to the Holocaust. By the New York Times best-selling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series.
Sidney Sheldon's Reckless : a Tracy Whitney novel / by Tilly Bagshawe. Forced to confront her greatest nightmare in the face of a tragedy, Tracy Whitney returns to the world of her past to confront a terror threat from a group of global hackers intent on the collapse of capitalism. By a #1 New York Times best-selling author.
A banquet of consequences : a Lynley novel / by Elizabeth George. Lynley and Havers are drawn from Cambridge to London to the windswept town of Shaftesbury, in a case that proves to be one of the most complex of their partnership. By the #1 New York Times best-selling author of Just One Evil Act.
Death wave / by Ben Bova. The six-time Hugo Award-winning author of New Earth finds Jordan Kell and his team returning to a vastly changed Earth where greenhouse flooding and climate shifts have transformed society and nobody wants to hear their warning about a radiation wave that is threatening all life on the planet.