National Book Award Winners 2011 and more

I downloaded the free sample of each of these. I read both samples. I will be buying both books ($9.12 and $9.43).

Salvage the Bones: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward.

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned. A hard drinker largely absent, he doesn’t show interest in much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn’t much to save. Lately, Esch can’t keep down what food she gets; she’s fifteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pit bull’s new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child’s play and short on parenting.

As the twelve days that make up the novel’s framework yield to a dramatic conclusion, the unforgettable family at the novel’s core—motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to face another day.

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones – 2011 National Book Award Fiction Winner, The National Book Foundation

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt.

In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. The man was Poggio Braccionlini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern – 2011 National Book Award Nonfiction Winner, The National Book Foundation

Elsewhere Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie has a good review in this Sunday’s New York Times. Haven’t read the free sample yet, but of course Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was splendid.