It's the season of glad tidings and warm hearts, but also of inclement skies and cold temperatures. The barometer and the thermometer may be falling, but our store is always warm and dry, and the activity level is rising. New books are arriving every day, along with a surprising variety of toys, games, housewares, and other items. Check out our gift page or better yet, drop in and see everything that's on the shelves.
In our ongoing attempt to recreate at least a bit of the real-world Island Books on our website, we're launching a new feature. Something we take a good deal of pride in is our ability to find the right book for the right person. Collectively we have over 100 years of bookselling experience (we suspect it may be more than 150 years, but saying that makes us feel old) that we can bring to bear when recommendations are needed, and we're giving you the opportunity to ask for our help online. Visit our Ask the Booksellers page, make a post on our Facebook wall , or just send us an email to ask us tough questions about books for tough customers.
$29.00
ISBN-13: 9780805091533
Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Henry Holt and Co., 10/2011
Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the
daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war. Plotted
in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was
a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story
of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the
slaveholding South.
$27.00
ISBN-13: 9780547577531
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 11/2011
Nineteenth-century Europe--from Turin to Prague to Paris--abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created its most infamous document? Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable fictional journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events.
$24.95
ISBN-13: 9780811876285
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Chronicle Books, 10/2011
Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big-wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous as the home of the biggest wave on the face of the earth. In this dramatic work of narrative non-fiction, journalist Dixon unlocks the secrets of Cortes Bank and pulls readers into the harrowing world of big-wave surfing and high-seas adventure above the most enigmatic and dangerous rock in the sea.
$24.95
ISBN-13: 9780393079999
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: W. W. Norton & Company, 11/2011
Kelby's novel imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), who changed how we eat through his legendary restaurants at the Savoy and the Ritz. A man of contradictions--kind yet imperious, food-obsessed yet rarely hungry--Escoffier was also torn between two women: the famous, beautiful, and reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the independent and sublime poet Delphine Daffis, who refused ever to leave Monte Carlo. In the last year of Escoffier's life, in the middle of writing his memoirs, he has returned to Delphine, who requests a dish in her name as he has honored Bernhardt, Queen Victoria, and many others. How does one define the complexity of love on a single plate? N. M. Kelby brings us the sensuality of food and love amid a world on the verge of war.
$25.00
ISBN-13: 9780802119803
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Grove Press, 8/2011
It seems that ever since mankind was kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit, we've been trying to get back in. Or at least, we've been wondering where the Garden might have been. St. Augustine had a theory, and so did medieval monks, John Calvin, and Christopher Columbus. But when Darwin's theory of evolution permanently altered our understanding of human origins, shouldn't the search for a literal Eden have faded away? Not so fast. Brook Wilensky-Lanford introduces readers to the enduring modern quest to locate the Garden of Eden on Earth. It is an obsession that has consumed Mesopotamian archaeologists, German Baptist ministers, British irrigation engineers, and the first president of Boston University, among many others. Charming, enlightening, and utterly unique, this is a century-spanning history that will take you to places you never imagined.
$25.99
ISBN-13: 9780316154864
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Little, Brown and Company, 12/2011
After the bloody Tomochic rebellion, Teresita Urrea, beloved healer and "Saint of Cabora," flees with her father to Arizona. But their plans are derailed when she once again is claimed as the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution. Besieged by pilgrims and pursued by assassins, Teresita embarks on a journey through turn-of-the-century industrial America-New York, San Francisco, St. Louis. She meets immigrants and tycoons, European royalty and Cuban poets, all waking to the new American century. And as she decides what her own role in this modern future will be, she must ask herself: can a saint fall in love?
$19.99
ISBN-13: 9781449401092
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 6/2011
Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. How have we come to this point?
$24.99
ISBN-13: 9780062041265
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Ecco, 5/2011
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for. This violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.
