Otto Biersma Ordine dei libri (cronologico)

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.' It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks' earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels - sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents. With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions - bodybuilding, weightlifting, and swimming - also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual, his guilt over leaving his family to come to America, his bond with his schizophrenic brother, and the writers and scientists - A.R. Luria, W.H. Auden, Francis Crick - who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer - and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human

The inspiring story of a son and his dying mother, who form a "book club" that brings them together as her life comes to a close.

Vietnam, 1969: il ventenne tenente Mellas comanda un plotone impegnato nella giungla al confine con il Laos. Le alture hanno i nomi di montagne svizzere, e i marines di Mellas dovranno riconquistare il Matterhorn, da loro stessi fortificato, poi abbandonato, e adesso occupato dai nemici, al sicuro nelle trincee e nei bunker scavati dagli americani. Quest'impresa cruenta e insensata serve a Marlantes per raccontare la paura e l'attesa del combattimento, l'orrore e l'esaltazione dell'azione, l'amicizia e l'odio tra i soldati, tra superiori che pensano alla carriera e inferiori gettati al macello, tra bianchi razzisti e neri che sognano la rivoluzione. Storia di un ragazzo che diventa uomo e scavo in profondità della natura umana, Matterhorn è il romanzo epico sul Vietnam che ancora doveva essere scritto.

Jonathan Safran Foer ci propone una riflessione sul cibo partendo dal ricordo personale di sua nonna, dalla forza che durante la guerra la spinse a rifiutare della carne di maiale che l'avrebbe tenuta in vita, perché non era cibo kosher, e «se niente importa, non c’è niente da salvare». Il cibo per lei non era solo cibo, ma «terrore, dignità, gratitudine, vendetta, gioia, umiliazione, religione, storia e, ovviamente, amore». Una volta diventato padre, Foer ripensa a questo insegnamento e inizia a interrogarsi su cosa sia la carne, perché nutrire un figlio è ancora più importante che nutrire se stessi. Così nasce questo libro, frutto di un’indagine durata quasi tre anni, che è insieme racconto, inchiesta e testimonianza e che invita tutti alla riflessione, indicando nel dolore degli animali – e soprattutto nella nostra sensibilità verso chi è «inerme» e «senza voce» – il discrimine fra umano e inumano, fra chi accetta senza battere ciglio le condizioni imposte dall’allevamento industriale e chi le mette in discussione.

Winner of the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. One of the Ten Best Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review 'Vivid, graphic and poignant' Washington Post 'Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success' New York Times Book Review '[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . . . Thomas's urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine' O' the Oprah Magazine On the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.

A young man is fighting for his life.Into his room walks a bewitching woman who believes she can save him.Their journey will have you believing in the impossible.The nameless and beautiful narrator of The Gargoyle is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and wakes up in a burns ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned. His life is over he is now a monster.But in fact it is only just beginning. One day, Marianne Engel, a wild and compelling sculptress of gargoyles, enters his life and tells him that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly burned mercenary and she was a nun and a scribe who nursed him back to health in the famed monastery of Engelthal. As she spins her tale, Scheherazade fashion, and relates equally mesmerising stories of deathless love in Japan, Greenland, Italy and England, he finds himself drawn back to life and, finally, to love.

I wrote this account one year after I'd found Hannah dead. I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself. But I was wrong. Every night when I tried to sleep, I'd close my eyes and see her again, exactly as I found her, hanging from a pine tree by an orange elctrical cord, her neck twisted like a tulip stem, her eyes seeing nothing. Or else that was the problem. They'd seen everything. This mesmerizing debut, uncannily uniting the trials of a postmodern upbringing with a murder mystery, heralds the arrival of a vibrant new voice in literary fiction.