Bestsellers of Spring 2010
Bestselling Travel Narrative & Armchair Books of Spring 2010
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1. Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer
by Chuck Thompson
From Bangkok to Bogota, a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes from a guy who knows the truth about travel. Travel writer, editor, and photographer Chuck Thompson has spent more than a decade traipsing through thirty-five (and counting) countries across the globe, and he’s had enough.
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2. The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Secret Land of Myanmar
by W. John Kress
The Weeping Goldsmith is a memoir of the over nine years that Dr. Kress spent exploring the wilderness of Myanmar in search of rare and beautiful plants, and how he came to appreciate Myanmar’s unique people and culture. The book contains past explorers’ archival photographs as well as 200 of the author’s color photographs of plants, people, landscapes, and temples.
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3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
An international publishing sensation, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.
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4. Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire
by Tilar J. Mazzeo
A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole Clicqout Ponsardin defied convention by assuming the reins of the fledgling wine business she and her husband had nurtured.
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5. The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
by Eric Weiner
The author takes readers on a whirlwind tour of countries that are quietly pursuing the most American of obsessions – the pursuit of happiness – or, in the crabby author’s case, moments of “un-unhappiness.” Weiner doesn’t profess to know what happiness is, but with a mixture of psychological insight, scientific research, geopolitical analysis and wry humor, he successfully shows us where happiness is.
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6. The Girl Who Played With Fire
by Stieg Larsson
Lisbeth Salander, the troubled, wise-beyond-her-years genius hacker, is the focus and fierce heart of the story. Mikael Blomkvist – crusading journalist and publisher of the magazine Millennium – has decided to publish a story exposing an extensive sex trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden, implicating well-known and highly placed members of Swedish society, business, and government. On the eve of publication, the two reporters responsible for the story are brutally murdered. But perhaps more shocking for Blomkvist: the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to Lisbeth Salander.
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7. La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language
by Dianne Hales
For anyone who has been to Italy, the fantasy of living the Italian life is powerfully seductive. But to truly become Italian, one must learn the language.A celebration of the language and culture of Italy, La Bella Lingua is the story of how a language shaped a nation, told against the backdrop of one woman’s personal quest to speak fluent Italian.
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8. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
by Stieg Larsson
The third and final novel in Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling trilogy. Lisbeth Salander–the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels–lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders.
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9. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens
by Jack Weatherford
The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Only this hint of a father’s legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story.
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10. Stories of the Sea: Everyman’s Library Pocket Classics
edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks, storms at sea, creatures from the deep and voyages that test human limits. Classic adventure stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Jack London mix with marvelously imaginative tales by Isak Dinesen, Patricia Highsmith and J. G. Ballard.
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11. Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
by Dambisa Moyo
Dead Aid unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined – and millions continue to suffer. Debunking the current model of international aid, Dambisa Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries.
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12. To Hellholes and Back: Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism
by Chuck Thompson
The guru of extreme tourism sets out to face his worst fears in Africa, India, Mexico City, and – most terrifying of all – Disney World. He’s out to discover if some of the world’s most ill-reputed destinations live up to their bad raps, while confronting a few of his own travel anxieties in the process.
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13. Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in Colum McCann’s intricate portrait of a city and its people.
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14. The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East
by Neil MacFarquhar
In Media Relations, MacFarquhar shares a lesser known side of the region, the story he always wanted to file, showing the daily lives and attitudes of people frequently obscured behind the curtain of violence – the stories of chefs and sex therapists, bloggers and academics struggling to reform on their own terms.
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15. Gringa in Bogotá: Living Colombia’s Invisible War
by June Carolyn Erlick
As an experienced journalist, Erlick lets the things she observes lead her to larger conclusions. The courtesy of people on buses, the absence of packs of stray dogs and street trash, and the willingness of strangers to help her cross an overpass when vertigo overwhelms her all become signs of convivencia – the desire of Bogotanos to live together in harmony despite decades of war.
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16. City of Thieves
by David Benioff
During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a chance by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use in his daughter’s wedding cake.
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17. Strange Maps: Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities
by Frank Jacobs
Spanning many centuries, all continents, and the realms of outer space and the imagination, this collection of 138 unique graphics combines beautiful full-color illustrations with quirky statistics and smart social commentary. The result is a distinctive illustrated guide to the world.
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18. Bicycle Diaries
by David Byrne
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes and started taking them on tour with his band. The more cities he saw from his bicycle, the more he became hooked on this mode of transport and the sense of liberation it provided.
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19. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
by Daniyal Mueenuddin
In the spirit of Joyce’s Dubliners and Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection of linked stories illuminates a place and a people through an examination of the entwined lives of landowners and their retainers on the Gurmani family farm in the countryside outside of Lahore, Pakistan.
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20. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
by Dan Baum
Nine Lives is a multivoiced biography of this dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city through the lives of nine characters over forty years and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960s, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. These nine lives are windows into every strata of one of the most complex and fascinating cities in the world.
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21. Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China
by Jen Lin-Liu
When Lin-Liu decided to enroll in a local cooking school – held in an unheated classroom with nary a measuring cup in sight – she jumped into China’s exploding food scene. In Serve the People, the author gives a memorable and mouthwatering cook’s tour of today’s China as she progresses from cooking student to noodle-stall and dumpling-house apprentice to intern at a chic Shanghai restaurant.
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22. An Atlas of Radical Cartography
edited by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat
Radical Cartography pairs writers with artists, architects, designers and collectives to address the role of the map as political agent (rather than neutral document). Ten mapping projects dealing with social and political issues such as migration, incarceration, globalization, housing rights, garbage and energy issues are complemented by 10 critical essays and dialogues.
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23. The Cellist of Sarajevo
by Steven Galloway
In a city ravaged by war, a musician plays his cello for twenty-two days at the site of a mortar attack, in memory of the fallen. Among the strangers drawn into the orbit of his music are a young father in search of water for his family, an older man in search of the humanity he once knew, a young woman, and a sniper.
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24. The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography
by Katharine Harmon
Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists’ maps, that happy combination of information and illusion.
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25. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century”: What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?
