During Friday Finds, you're suppose to showcase any great books that you have found during the week. I do it a little different, instead of highlighting books that I have discovered during the week. I highlight books that I am adding to Mount TBR. I have discovered these books with the help of all the great book bloggers on the worldwide web.
On to this weeks finds:
The first two books are courtesy of A Book Blog. Period.
Battle Royale by Koushun TakamiDescription (from amazon.com):
Battle Royale, a high-octane thriller about senseless youth violence, is one of Japan's best-selling - and most controversial - novels. As part of a ruthless program by the totalitarian government, ninth-grade students are taken to a small isolated island with a map, food, and various weapons. Forced to wear special collars that explode when they break a rule, they must fight each other for three days until only one "winner" remains. The elimination contest becomes the ultimate in must-see reality television. A Japanese pulp classic available in English for the first time, Battle Royale is a potent allegory of what it means to be young and survive in today's dog-eat-dog world.
Review from A. Book Blog. Period.
Bonjour Tristess by Francoise SaganDescriptions (from amazon.com):
Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress, Elsa. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend, Anne, intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart...with tragic, unexpected consequences.
Review from: A Book Blog. Period.
From Leafing Through Life comes a book that was reviewed way back in January.
The Financial Lives of The Poets by Jess WalterDescription (from Google Books)
What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse? Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. . . . Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggest—and most misbegotten—plan yet.
Review from: Leafing Through Life
From Red Adept Reviews, which reviews mostly indie author works.
The Angel & The Brown-Eyed Boy by Sandy NathanDescription (from Google Books)
A visitor from a dying planet, Eliana's people put her where she needed to be to complete her mission . . .New York City on the eve of Armageddon, in the late 22nd century . . . perhaps Mistaken for a Russian ballet dancer, the angelic Eliana finds her destinationżthe Hermitage Academy, a famous high school for the arts. Soon she discovers that this Earth is a strange and violent place, where people live in fear, and where her very presence makes some want to protect her and others want to hurt her.It is a century after the second Russian revolution, when technology was outlawed and Tsar Yuri took over most of world, ushering in the Great Peace. For the U.S. president, Lincoln Charles, peace is doable . . . just focus on the positive, project a trustworthy image, and make sure that dissenters are taken care of quietly, permanently. Something terrible, though, is about to happen; and for Eliana, not much time remains to find the Golden Boy.
Review from: Red Adept Reviews
The last Friday Finds is a nonfiction piece that I stumbled upon from White Readers Meet Black Authors.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle AlexanderDescription (from Google Books):
As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status - much like their grandparents before them.In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community - and all of us - to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.
Review from: White Readers Meet Black Authors
