Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Staff Picks
Check the blog every week for updates on what our staff is reading and watching and recommendations for our new and all-time favorite books and movies. What is your favorite book or movie? Post your answer in the comments section below. To see all previous Staff Picks posts, simply type "Staff Picks" in the search box at the top left of this blog and click the "search blog" button

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong. by Barry Glassner - Recommended by Andrew
From the author of the national bestseller "The Culture of Fear" comes a rallying cry to abandon food fads and myths for calmer and more pleasurable eating.


Fifth Business by Roberston Davies - recommended by Robyn
Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. - Publishers Website. The Fifth Business is the first book in the Depford Trilogy.

MOVIE WATCH:
After the Wedding - recommended by Cheryl
Jacob, a Danish expatriate, runs a struggling orphanage in one of India's poorest regions. Desperate to save the orphanage from closing, he returns to Denmark to meet Jorgen, a wealthy businessman and potential benefactor. Jorgen invites Jacob to his daughter's wedding, seemingly as a friendly gesture, but the terminally ill Jorgen is also trying to find a new husband for his wife Helene. When Jacob meets Helene, he recognizes her as a person from a past he is trying to forget. The wedding invitation leads to a devastating series of surprises that change Jacob's life and force him to make a bitter choice.

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