Three books, all written by women in the early 1960s, changed the way we looked at the world and ourselves: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. All three books created revolutions in their respective spheres of influence, and nothing affected city planning and architecture – or the way we think about how life is lived in densely packed urban centers – more than Jane Jacobs's far-sighted polemic. This was an era when the "urban renewal" movement was at its most aggressive, and Jacobs correctly perceived that the new structures that were being built to replace the aging housing of our older cities were often far worse, in both their impact on society and their architectural sterility, than what urban planners identified as "the problem." She was ridiculed and pilloried by the establishment, but her ideas quickly took hold, and no one ever looked at what made for livable and viable neighborhoods the same way again.



Here is the first book for young people about this heroine of common sense, a woman who never attended college but whose observations, determination, and independent spirit led her to far different conclusions than those of the academics who surrounded her. Illustrated with almost a hundred images, in­cluding a great number of photos never before published (with many by Robert Otter), this story of a remarkable woman will introduce her ideas and her life to young readers, many of whom have grown up in neighborhoods that were saved by her insights. It will in­spire young people – and readers of all ages – and demonstrate that we learn vital life lessons from observing and thinking, and not just accepting what passes as "conventional wisdom."

From the Reviews


"Written by two Boston women who are also illustrators, Genius of Common Sense is a readable and well-researched biography that succeeds in capturing Jacobs and her world, not only in words but in drawings and period photos. It's promoted as a "book for young readers,'' which it certainly is, but it's better than that. It's the best short introduction yet to the life and work of one of the most influential Americans of her generation."
— Robert Campbell, The Boston Globe

"Jacobs's exemplary life story is well enough told by Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch to engage young readers and interest their elders as well."
— Jason Epstein, New York Review of Books
"No stodgy history texts, Claudette Colvin and Genius of Common Sense throb with their heroines' passionate struggles. They are handsome books, loaded with primary sources like photographs and contemporary news accounts that bring alive these stories for any teenager wondering how she can make a difference in the world."
— Ruth Coniff, The New York Times, May 10, 2009



"The theories of Jane Jacobs ... should be in the curriculums of grades 7 and 8, her books should be must-reads in all high schools, and her ideas should be discussed in all colleges and universities. Genius of Common Sense is not only a refreshing concept but also a delightful read ... a little gem of a book...."
— Bernard Poulin, Toronto Globe and Mail

"Genius of Common Sense is an inspiring look at one of the great heroines of New York."
— Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker
"Jane Jacobs taught the world to see the true value of cities because she had the courage to trust her own experience and common sense. This is an inspiring story, deeply researched and beautifully told."
— Robert Fishman, Professor of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan

"This book is the cat's pyjamas.  It's the clearest account anywhere of who Jane was, what she did for cities, and how she did it."
— Max Allen, Producer of CBC Radio's Ideas program and editor of Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs

"This well-paced, seamlessly co-authored narrative introduces young adult readers to a little known person of great importance, whose visionary ideas changed the way we look at neighborhoods and value city life. The writers' black and white illustrations combined with vintage photographs, maps, and memorabilia give a vivid account of Jane Jacobs that will encourage young people to make observations and think critically."
— Susan Goldman Rubin, Prize-winning author of more than thirty young-adult biographies

"An absorbing story of a woman of genius, leadership, courage and imagination who changed the thinking of the world. Though written for younger readers, older ones also will enjoy reading about this remarkable person whose intellect and battles made American cities more civilized and humane places to live. Her impact was enormous and endures."
— Nicholas von Hoffman, former columnist for the Washington Post and commentator for 60 Minutes

Barack Obama's thoughts on Jane Jacobs' Death & Life of Great American Cities

The Swedish Academy, in awarding J.M.G. Le Clézio the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, praised Desert as Le Clézio's "definitive breakthrough as a novelist." Published in France in 1980, Desert received the Grand Prix Paul Morand from the Académie Française, was translated into twenty-three languages, and quickly proved to be a best-selling novel in many countries around the world.

Available for the first time in English translation, Desert is a novel composed of two alternating narratives, set in counterpoint. The first takes place in the desert between 1909 and 1912 and evokes the migration of a young adolescent boy, Nour, and his people, the Blue Men, notorious warriors of the desert. Driven from their lands by French colonial soldiers, Nour's tribe has come to the valley of the Saguiet El Hamra to seek the aid of the great spiritual leader known as Water of the Eyes. The religious chief sends them out from the holy city of Smara into the desert to travel still further. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, and suffering, Nour's tribe and others flee northward in the hopes of finding a land that can harbor them at last.

The second narrative relates the contemporary story of Lalla, a descendant of the Blue Men. Though she is an orphan living in a shantytown known as the Project near a coastal city in Morocco, the blood of her proud, obstinate tribe runs in her veins. All too soon, Lalla must flee to escape a forced marriage with an older, wealthy man. She travels to France, undergoing many trials there, from working as a hotel maid to becoming a highly-paid fashion model, and yet she never betrays the blood of her ancestors.

From the Reviews

"Desert is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio. As a reflection on colonization and its legacy, it is painfully relevant after 30 years. [. . .] There is an element of the missionary in Le Clézio, just as there is still something of the rebel in him, in search of the new novel, trying to break loose from the traditional bonds of fiction and language to mirror a wider world — as the Nobel citation described, to explore "a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization." Beneath his pantheism and ethnology, there is also a serious critic of contemporary Western civilization and its rationalism, pointing out the conflict between nature and cities, the disconnect between man and mythology."
— Elizabeth Hawes, The New York Times Book Review

"When French writer Le Clezio was presented with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, the response of many Americans was, Who? That's because so few of his stunning works have been translated into English, including this 1980 fever dream of a novel about earth and spirit, war and exile. In poetic language at once piercingly realistic and rhapsodically supernatural, Le Clezio tells the dramatic stories of two mystical, resilient children of the North African desert, members of a nomadic tribe of warriors. Nour endures a horrific forced march across the desert just prior to World War I, as French soldiers invade and a holy sheik struggles to keep the planet's last free people free. Decades later, Lalla, a shantytown seer channeling the hidden life force of the forbidding desert, is forced to flee Morocco for Marseilles, where she witnesses the misery of other despised immigrants. In scenes of shimmering intensity, Le Clezio contrasts nature's stark and majestic clarity, from scouring sand to the incinerating sun and the vast gleaming net of stars, with the chaos, toxicity, and injustice of human life. A long time coming for English-language readers, Le Clezio's incandescent masterpiece couldn't be more relevant."
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"One of the few works by 2008 Nobel laureate Le Clézio to be translated into English, this mythic novel tells two parallel stories of descendants of a holy man called Al Azraq. The novel begins with Nour, a Berber boy who bears witness to the failed rebellion led by Sheik Ma el Aïnine against the French in the years leading up to WWI. In the cadences of an incantation, Le Clézio renders the dire suffering of the displaced desert peoples who turn to Ma el Aïnine for guidance. The parallel story, set in the near-contemporary, portrays Lalla, a young woman who lives on the Moroccan coast and spends her days exploring the seashore and listening to the stories of her aunt and the fisherman Old Naman. After escaping an arranged marriage, Lalla lands in Marseille and finds not the gleaming white city of Naman's stories but a cruel place cut off from nature. Le Clézio's vision is cinematic, his language lyrical and the lives he portrays are vivid and convincing."
— Publishers Weekly

"Le Clézio's Desert is a singular jewel, doing what we often ask world literature to do these days — namely, to cross cultural divides that, at least on the political front, appear increasingly fraught with random checkpoints and identity cards. Long before Dave Eggers's What is the What (2006), Le Clézio successfully depicted a panoply of displaced peoples who nonetheless felt at home in the forbidding sands of present-day Morocco. [. . .] Whether one's analysis favors the word "terrorist" or "blowback," it appears that we are once again pitched on an intractable and irreconcilable dichotomy of identity, one in which the "us or them" formula has acquired an internal logic and rationale on both sides of the divide. We need, therefore, to return to the otherworldly humanity of the desert; now more than ever, we need to read nomadic texts that frustrate the rigidly perceived categories of human interaction. That Desert makes it look easy testifies to Le Clézio's talent as a writer — because it's the hardest thing in the world to unsettle a default setting. Begin again with Desert."
— Kevin Carollo, RAINTAXI

"This work contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants. The main character, the [Moroccan] guest worker Lalla, is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society."
— from the Nobel citation by the Swedish Academy

Listen to an interview with Le Clézio at BBC Radio's The Strand.

Yousuf Karsh's life-long ambition was to search for a form within a face, one that could become a symbol for a life that was purposeful, meaningful, and generally virtuous. "I speak with some experience when I say that I have rarely left the company of accomplished men and women without feeling that they had in them real sincerity, integrity – yes, and sometimes vanity of course – and always a sense of high purpose." In his sixty-year career, he seldom wavered from this goal, even when fame and fortune came his way. Neither did he discard his trademark variations in lighting style that he perfected in the late 1940s while other fashions came and went. Unchanging, too, was his genius at capturing the revealing and ephemeral psychological expressions, those fleeting disclosures of character and purpose for which his famous sitters trusted him.

He was the preferred photographer of kings, queens, princes, presidents, prime ministers, generals, and other political figures because he rendered them with an unbiased and unfailing regard for their dignity. With musicians, artists, writers, scientists, actors, and other creative intellectuals, he shared a parallel ambition: to create works of art of lasting value. In making what now seem singular, monumental statements honoring those he considered his contemporary heroes, he stood alone in his field, so much so that it could be argued he was the last of his kind.

Karsh Arrived in Canada as a teenage refugee, escaping the genocide in Turkish Armenia, and was trained by his uncle, and later by John Garo in Boston, as a professional portrait photographer. At first this meant pleasing his sitters, rather than the editors and publishers who, with their staff photographers, kept an eye on fashion and celebrity. In 1941, after nine years as a struggling young photographer in Ottawa, fortune and personal connections justified his dedication. He shot the unforgetable image of Winston Churchill that became known as "the roaring lion." His name and his career were made almost instantly. But despite his personal success, this was still a period of anxious uncertainty, especially concerning the fate of European democracies and indeed the future of Western civilization. It was in that period that Karsh captured, like no other photographer, the faces of the people who defined and directed the age. It is this notion of heroism and its stylistic rendition that this book examines and illuminates.

From the Reviews


"The cover image of Hemingway, taken in 1957, when the writer was just four years from suicide, is set against a black background, placing the famous face almost in relief, its craggy features suggesting not only the force of will that defined Hemingway's life but also the fissures that would soon affect his personality and perceptions. Whether Karsh is capturing Audrey Hepburn's almost ethereal beauty, or Fidel Castro in a rare moment of introspection, or the iron will of Winston Churchill (in the 1941 image that launched Karsh's career), the viewer is struck simultaneously by the formal beauty of the composition and the way that beauty feeds our sense of the personality before us. A master photographer and a masterpiece of bookmaking."
— Bill Ott, Booklist (Starred Review)

Like many good fables, this story opens with a foundling left – rather inconveniently, if not surprisingly – in the woods. A large lizard, ever conscious of tripping hazards, picks up the infant and takes her home, where she soon grows into a pretty, pampered, and generally useless young woman named Isabella. Despite her adoptive mother's efforts (for the lizard is really a witch in disguise) to shape her up, the girl prefers the alluring life offered her by the charming Prince Rupert, a world of cooks and servants, palaces and jewels, luxury and indolence.

Luckily, the lizard woman is a canny, concerned parent. She does not suffer fools lightly and is not about to let her daughter's too-easy transition to palace life go unchallenged. And so she arranges a surprise transformation for her daughter – one that puts the prince's marital plans on hold and gives the witch just enough time to hammer home a few lessons about the downside of idleness, the inanity of vanity, and the satisfactions of self-reliance.

In this witty, modern interpretation of a classic Italian folktale, Leah Marinsky Sharpe has crafted a light-hearted mother-daughter fable with a moral that is sure to strike a chord with readers of all ages. The illustrations by Jane Marinsky glow with rich color and playful humor. Together, words and pictures provide a zesty treat for parents and children alike.

From the Reviews

"Rich storytelling and intricately imagined artwork make this debut a standout. [. . .] Marinsky's paintings, in the chalky, sun-bleached colors of the Italian renaissance, contain many small pleasures: the woods and flowers of medieval tapestries, the goat-headed princess licking cupcake batter off her goat nose, and a portrait of the shallow prince's just fate. A must for anyone who would rather be a sorceress than a princess."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Sharpe has made changes in theme (that goat's head was originally punishment for being ungrateful) and language, but this version, the story's first separate appearance in this country, will make a popular gift from parents and caregivers afflicted with similarly slothful younglings."
— Kirkus

"The cast of characters in this reinterpretation of an Italian folktale includes a lizard and witch, deserted baby, and a lovely, lazy girl troubled by a bout of goathead-itis. Not to mention a finicky prince who is shocked to discover a faun-like face on his girlfriend's body. The story is rich with subtle reminders to be self-reliant, productive, authentic, and watchful of the motivations of others. Marinsky's rich, renaissance-inspired artwork captures just the right imagery."
— Foreword Magazine

""The Goat-Faced Girl," a witty and richly illustrated retelling of an old Italian tale that will probably be new to most young American readers. Children ages 5-10 will relish Jane Marinsky's colorful, naïve-style paintings of Isabella learning to persevere, especially the image of her determinedly stirring a bowl of batter, unaware of the dab of chocolate on her goaty nose."
– The Wall Street Journal

WINNER of the 2008 NOBEL PRIZE in LITERATURE

The Prospector is the crowning achievement from one of France's preeminent contemporary novelists and a work rich with sensuality and haunting resonance. It is the turn of the century on the island of Mauritius, and young Alexis L'Etang enjoys an idyllic existence with his parents and beloved sister: sampling the pleasures of privilege, exploring the constellations and tropical flora, and dreaming of treasure buried long ago by the legendary Unknown Corsair. But with his father's death, Alexis must leave his childhood paradise and enter the harsh world of privation and shame. Years later, Alexis has become obsessed with the idea of finding the Corsair's treasure and, through it, the lost magic and opulence of his youth. He abandons job and family, setting off on a quest that will take him from remote tropical islands to the hell of World War I, and from a love affair with the elusive Ouma to a momentous confrontation with the search that has consumed his life. By turns harsh and lyrical, pointed and nostalgic, The Prospector is "a parable of the human condition" (Le Monde) by one of the most significant literary figures in Europe today.


"Le Clézio's prose is so sensual and rhythmic it's hypnotic."  — Boston Phoenix

"A novel of intense beauty."  — Review of Contemporary Fiction

"A remarkable work."  — Booklist, starred review


BOOK GROUP RESOURCES

• Listen to NPR book critic Christopher Merill discuss The Prospector at "The World."

• Visit the Nobel Prize J.M.G. Le Clézio page for a short biography and his Nobel acceptance speech, and find more information on the author at Wikipedia.

• Sarah Lyall at The New York Times describes Le Clézio as an author "whose work reflects a seemingly insatiable restlessness and sense of wonder about other places and other cultures."

• Read the 1985 review of The Prospector in The London Times.

• Paramanund Soobarah at the Mauritius Times celebrates the awarding of the Nobel Prize to a native son — learn more about Le Clézio's home nation of Mauritius from the CIA Fact Book and Wikipedia.

• Read the Time Magazine feature on J.M.G. Le Clézio by Lev Grossman.

• Listen to London Times editor Claire Armistead discuss Le Clézio and the Nobel Prize and read their write-up of his award.

Now a 10-Part Miniseries Airing on PBS!

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) wrote what may be the quintessential distillation of English country life at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1945, the three books Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943) were published together in one elegant volume, and this new omnibus Nonpareil edition, complete with charming wood engravings, should be a cause for real rejoicing.

In his introduction, H. J. Massingham observes that Thompson "possesses the attributes both of sympathetic presentation and literary power to such a degree of quality and beauty that her claims upon posterity can hardly be questioned." He calls the books themselves "a triune achievement: a triumph of evocation in the resurrecting of an age that, being transitional, was the most difficult to catch as it flew; another in diversity of rural portraiture engagingly blended with autobiography; and the last in the overtones and implications of a set of values which is the author's 'message'."

This is the story of three closely-related Oxfordshire communities – a hamlet, a village, and a town – and the memorable cast of characters who people them. Based on her own experiences as a child and young woman, it is keenly observed and beautifully narrated, quiet and evocative. The books have inspired two plays that ran in London, and a new ten-part BBC-TV drama series to be broadcast in the US in 2009.

"Our literature has no finer remembrancer . . . no observer so genuinely endearing."
– John Fowles, New Statesman
"Flora Thompson's great memoir of her Oxfordshire girlhood [is] a model of the form. The richness of the language, the lingering over detail and incident creates a haunting classic."– The New York Times

BOOK GROUP RESOURCES
Learn the basics by reading the Wikipedia article about the trilogy.Read about Flora Thompson or read some of her poetry.
Enjoy the resources on the BBC website about their television version.See if Lark Rise to Candleford is playing on PBS near you. Read a resident's tale of the villages portrayed in the trilogy.Explore the region, including Juniper Hill (Lark Rise), Buckingham (Candleford), and Fringford (Candleford Green).

Over twenty years ago, Godine published the first English translation of Georges Perec's masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement, Boston Globe, and others as "one of the great novels of the century." We are now proud to announce a newly revised twentieth anniversary edition of Life. Carefully prepared, with many corrections, this edition of Life A User's Manual will be the preferred reference edition for the future.

Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Structured around a single moment in time — 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 — Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, and extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.

But the novel in more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.

From the Reviews

"I am sure I will be piecing my way through Perec's monumental storytelling puzzle — an anatomy of a single moment in time (8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975) in a Parisian apartment building — for the next several weeks. With pleasure."
— James Mustich, Barnes & Noble Review

"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov."
— Boston Globe

"I once had the occasion to write to the translator of these books, David Bellos, and I took the opportunity to let him know that Perec is my favorite writer, and that, since a translator is to a large extent the creative force behind a translated work, he, David Bellos, is also, in a palpable way, my favorite writer. Few writers have opened up the possibilities of literary art with as much enthusiasm, mastery, and pleasure as Perec."
— Martin Riker, Associate Director of the Dalkey Archive Press

Thoughts of Sorts, one of Georges Perec's final works, was published posthumously in France in 1985. With this translation, David Bellos, Perec's preeminent translator, has completed the Godine list of Perec's great works translated into English and has provided an introduction to this master of "systematic versatility." Thoughts of Sorts is a compilation of musings and essays attempting to circumscribe, in Perec's words, "my experience of the world not in terms of the reflections it casts in distant places, but at its actual point of breaking surface." Perec investigates the ways by which we define our place in the world, reveling in listmaking, orientating, classifying. This book employs all of the modes of questioning explored by his previous books, and at the same time breaks new ground of its own, ending with a question mark in typical / atypical Perec fashion.

From the Reviews

"Thoughts of Sorts is a very enjoyable collection, from the useful 'Statement of Intent' to its consideration of the physical act of reading and Perec's 'Thoughts of Sorts / Sorts of Thoughts' . . . yet another must-read for any Perec-fan."
— M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

Catie Copley is a black Labrador retriever who lives an unusual life as Canine Ambassador at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Her job includes welcoming guests, taking them for walks, and helping Jim at his job as the hotel's Chief Concierge. Santol, who trained as a guide dog, just like Catie, is her canine counterpart at the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac in Quebec City, Canada.

Catie, a very lady-like dog, is surprised when, one day, a large, furry, black-and-white intruder snatches her toy lobster and runs away with it. She is taken aback, but once she gets to know the rambunctious Santol they become firm friends. When Jim drives Santol back to Canada, Catie is very excited to go too.

This is Catie's first vacation and her first time in a strange city where they speak a different language. Santol introduces her to a famous goat, a friendly horse, a clumsy juggler, and intriguing new foods and smells. Catie finds that there is a lot of opportunity for adventure... maybe a little too much adventure.

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book in America will be donated to NEADS / Dogs for Deaf and Disabled Americans, based in Princeton, Massachusetts. Since 1976, NEADS has trained more than 1,000 service dogs to assist deaf or physically disabled individuals. For more information, please visit www.neads.org. A portion of the Canadian proceeds will be donated to mira, based near Montreal, Canada. The mira Foundation trains more than 150 guide dogs each year to help people with visual, auditory, and physical disabilites. To learn more, visit www.mira.ca.

Catie and Santol explore Boston and Quebec from a dog's-eye view, which, come to think of it, approximates a child's-eye view. This is a small travel guide and an invitation. What fun to introduce a child to either of these historic cities. But that's not all. In this story, Catie gets into a little trouble – even good dogs do — so there's just enough suspense to keep young readers turning the pages to find out what happened next.
— Rebecca Rule, Nashua Telegraph