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 Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Holmes - recommended by Mary Anne
Author A.M. Homes, who was adopted at birth, tells the heartwarming and at times heartbreaking story of what happens when her biological mother comes looking for her thirty-one years later. The book is presented in two parts. The first details the efforts of her birth parents to find and meet her, and the second part tells of her efforts to explore her genealogical past and piece together the details of her birth mother’s and father’s past and present. The memoir ends with a touching tribute to her adoptive grandmother. This book is well written and compelling. I highly recommend it.

Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks - recommended by Andrew
Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo. In his bestselling work of "comic sociology," David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today's upper class -- those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation.

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood - recommended by Megan

First published in 1985, this is a novel of such power that the reader is unable to forget its images and its forecast. It is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force. "A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex".--The Washington Post Book World.

MOVIE WATCH

Notting Hill - recommended by Megan
A leading American actress accidentally meets an attractive, but unassuming British travel book seller and love immediately blossoms. However, fame and her American actor boyfriend gets in the way. - imdb.com