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Cold plague by Daniel Kalla
In Kalla's meticulously detailed and carefully plotted new thriller, Dr. Claude Fontaine engineers a method to tap a huge, mysterious pool of fresh water two miles under the Antarctic ice without fear of contamination from our 21st-century toxins. His goal is to bottle this purest of waters and sell it for astronomical sums to health-seeking rich people everywhere. Meanwhile, infectious disease specialist Dr. Noah Haldane, hero of Kalla's Pandemic, along with his crusty, wisecracking Scottish sidekick, Duncan McLeod, travels to France to investigate seven cows that have tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalitis (aka mad cow disease). Several humans, the apparent victims of infected beef, have died horrible deaths. By the time the link between the Antarctic lake water and the mad cows becomes clear, many readers will find the journey too long and that in the end they don't really care that disaster has been narrowly averted and all those rich people have been saved. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Captivity by Debbie Lee Wesselmann
Starred Review. A South Carolina chimpanzee sanctuary affiliated with a university provides the unusual setting for Wesselmann's powerful second novel (after 1997's Trutor & the Balloonist). Dana Armstrong, a primatologist, acquired her understanding of chimpanzees at great personal cost, having been raised along with her younger brother, Zack, with a female chimp as a sibling (they communicated using sign language) until a tragic event ended the experiment. Now she must deal with an even more traumatic event. One day Dana arrives at the sanctuary, where she's the director, to discover that someone has damaged buildings and released chimpanzees unadapted to the wild. As Dana battles to save the sanctuary, personal and professional jealousies, campus politics, the fate of the chimpanzees and the stirring stories of Dana and her family play out in unforgettable fashion. With empathetic insight, the author precisely observes both human and animal behavior. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Things I want my daughters to know by Elizabeth Noble
Noble (The Reading Group) hits her stride in her tearjerker fourth novel. Before Barbara Forbes, a mother of four, succumbs to terminal cancer, she leaves words of wisdom for her four daughters in the form of letters to each of them. In the year following Barbara's death, her daughters draw strength from her words and from each other as they move forward with their lives. Lisa, the eldest, is advised to "let someone look after [her]" for a change. Jennifer, "fragile and hard to reach," struggles with an unraveling marriage. Free-spirited Amanda is thrown for a loop by a family secret, and teenaged Hannah, experiencing her first taste of rebellion, is reminded that she still has a lot of growing up to do. Though Barbara's life-is-short aphorisms are nothing new, her sharp wit and distinctive voice is a nice complement to the four nuanced stories of coping with death. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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The day I ate whatever I wanted: and other small acts of liberation by Elizabeth Berg
In this collection of mostly uplifting stories, Berg (Dream When You're Feeling Blue) explores the everyday challenges that women face. Whether teenaged or octogenarian, Berg's heroines brave the emotional landmines underlying domestic scenes (from holiday dinner parties to visiting family), navigate the slippery slope of constant dieting and address the process of aging. The title story features an unnamed, insouciant narrator who flees from a Weight Watchers meeting and allows herself to indulge her most fattening food cravings. In Full Count, an introspective army brat begins to decipher what she looks like to others. The wistful and nostalgic Rain features a woman reminiscing about a good friend who dropped his successful corporate life to live closer to nature. Berg's men are surprisingly supportive and well behaved; it is often the women in these stories who manipulate and mistreat their partners. The protagonist of Truth or Dare, for example, struggles to accept that her ex-husband moved on after she left him. Berg has a knack for sentimental but authentic stories about women who find affirmation in true-to-life situations, and if her endings are slightly predictable, it's in a good way, like comfort food that never disappoints. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Sea change: poems by Jorie Graham
Starred Review. Graham's 11th collection contains what might be her most urgent and impassioned writing to date. These 19 poems continue Overlord's (2005) meditation on current political and social crises, but the relative composure and straightforwardness of that volume has given way to panic, breathlessness, vertigo and fracture: life disturbing life, & it/ fussing all over us, like a confinement gone/ insane, blurring the feeling of/ the state of / being. Humankind's degradation of the environment and itself during wartime are Graham's primary concerns, with the title referring specifically to the way in which an apparently small shift an undercurrent's warming by 1 degree will bring forth ruin: the in - / dispensable / plankton is forced north now, & yet further north,/ spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such/ that the hatch will not survive, nor the/ species in the end. Here, the interconnectedness of all life isn't just a spiritual commonplace, it is grounds for a call to action, and one that Graham a poet of rare responsiveness to the natural world and a thinker of great ethical responsibility is uniquely qualified to make. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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