Staff Recommendations

Jane Dystel recommends:

I had been hearing a lot about THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett and was intrigued enough to download it onto my Kindle before leaving on a recent vacation. This is a first novel, turned down by many publishers before Amy Einhorn, in her great wisdom and good taste, picked it up.

The Help is set in the South during the early 60s, when white women employed black women to take care of their children and clean their homes, but treated them badly. When one of the white women decides to write a book about, and aided by, the town’s housemaids, we learn a great deal about the women on both sides of the fence.

The novel is a real page turner, written with compelling sympathy and a great deal of research. It was so good that I never realized what a long book it was, since my Kindle had no page numbers, and was sad to come to the end.

Miriam Goderich recommends:

THE ANTHOLOGIST by Nicholson Baker isa jewel of a book.  Everyone shouldread it.  There’s not much in the way of plot but there’s so much life and so many riches to mine in its pages, that it doesn’t matter that you’re basically inside someone’s head the whole time, watching him struggle to break the creative impasse he’s gotten himself into.   Baker’s hero is whimsical, smart, curious, kind, intellectually generous, emotional and hilarious.  You root for him in his predicament (a mammoth case of writer’s block) as you would the hero of some more epic adventure.  And he rewards you by giving you passages that make you laugh out loud in surprised delight and then cry sympathetic tears.  The best thing about this book is how lighthearted and optimistic it leaves you feeling.  Even if you don’t like poetry (and it’s basically a long, rambling discussion about poetry) you gotta like that.

Michael Bourret recommends:


In my reading for pleasure time, I’ve been in a very nonfiction mood, and I’ve been jumping back and forth between a few books. But the one that I keep coming back to at the moment is Daniel Okrent’s LAST CALL: THE RISE AND FALL OF PROHIBITION. I knew only a little about the Prohibition before I started the book, and it turns out that much of what I thought I knew was wrong. I really appreciate the book’s harsh take on organized crime (I’ve never understood the American glorification of the mob), and I’m fascinated by the strange bedfellows of the temperance movement. Who knew that the suffragists and the KKK got together to stop drinking? It’s a thoroughly engaging book about one of the most interesting and misunderstood events in American history. It’s well worth a read.

Stacey Glick recommends:

I have several connections to the author Bruce Feiler, and I was really looking forward to reading his new memoir, THE COUNCIL OF DADS. It's about a very unique group of men he pulled together after a cancer diagnosis to help raise his identical twin daughters if he didn't make it. His girls went to school with my daughter, and share a birthday with her. I, too, have identical twins and was recently touched when a very close friend was diagnosed with cancer, so there is so much about this book that is relatable to me personally. But I also think there's a lot about it that is universal. There are the ideas of love, friendship, parenting, illness, death, serious issues, which Bruce looks at with a new and unique lens. I recommend you check it out, and you might learn something you didn't expect about your own family and friends, and how it doesn't have to take a devastating illness to really appreciate what's important in life.

Jim McCarthy recommends:

Laurie Halse Anderson is a tremendous writer. Chains, Wintergirls, Fever 1793: all fantastic novels. But one novel towers above the rest (at least for me). SPEAK was Anderson’s first novel, and she set the bar for herself enormously high. The story of Melinda, a teenager who chooses silence rather than admit to tragic events in her past, SPEAK is an enormously powerful, deeply moving book that not only tells its story with beauty and integrity, but it reminds us how important storytelling is. A dark and difficult read, it is ultimately triumphant and affirming.

Jessica Papin recommends:

I realize I am playing catch-up here, but I finally had the opportunity to read Rory Stewart’s altogether splendid THE PLACES IN BETWEEN.  Stewart’s account of his 2002 walk across Afghanistan is a remarkable feat of journalism, memoir, and ethnography; reflective, thoughtful, and beautifully told, Stewart’s book sets a high bar for travel narrative.  Give that Afghanistan is no less in the news now than it was eight years ago, the book still manages to be timely, even prescient.

Lauren Abramo recommends:

Chasya Milgrom recommends:

I recently had the opportunity to read something I normally don’t read – middle grade fiction – and I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.  THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE by Jacqueline Kelly is a charming tale of a young girl growing up on a cotton farm at the turn of the 20th century. Surrounded by her six brothers, Callie Vee, as she’s called, is expected to grow to be a consummate lady and homemaker even though she’d rather spend the day searching for specimens on the vast acreage of the farm and conducting science experiments than learning to cook or knit. Callie is absolutely delightful – a spirited and adventurous, smart and determined young woman, and the book, which has received the Newbery Honor, is really something that every middle grade novel should be: it is well-written, full of great characters and voices, entertaining and still manages to sneak in big messages and educational elements without it ever feeling heavy-handed.

Rachel Oakley recommends:

Click here for past recommendations