Here's What's New at Dockside Bookstore

Here is where you will find what's new at St. Thomas's well known, well read Dockside Bookshop at Havensight Mall. Every week you will find new titles to peruse. Look for updates of our "picks" for fiction and nonfiction.
We will gladly order any books you want. E mail us at dockside@islands.vi, or call 340 774 4937.
The Wave, by Walter Mosley, Aspect, fiction, hard cover, 209 pp. $22.95
Errol Porter is awakened by a strange prank caller, one who asks for him by name and claims to be his father. But Errol’s father has been dead for years. Late one night, curious and a little unnerved, Errol sneaks into the graveyard where his father is buried. The man he finds there will change his life.
Soon Errol’s on the run from mad scientists and homeland security death squads, and befriended by creatures that are the stuff of nightmares. Plunging into a series of stunning revelations, he must uncover the hidden tragedy of his family’s past and penetrate the depths of an earthshaking, ancient enigma to determine the fate of the entire world.
The Other Side of Me, by Sidney Sheldon, Warner Books, biography, 363 pp. $25.95
Sidney Sheldon has lived a life filled with fortitude and self-doubt, reversal and triumph… from scathing Broadway reviews to three shows at once and a Tony Award, from luckless knocks on movie studio doors to screenwriting successes for Easter Parade and Annie Get Your Gun…from anxiously watching his first novel hit bookstores to being hailed as the world’s most translated author by The Guinness Book of Records.
In The Other Side Of Me, Sheldon pulls no punches. He talks candidly about growing up in Depression-era Chicago, his family’s poverty, and the onset of mood swings, later diagnosed a manic depression, that would haunt him throughout his life. He recalls how he boldly maneuvered his way into show business as a self-proclaimed song-writer…how, as a first-time nominee, he accepted the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxe without having prepared a speech…how he directed Cary Grant and comforted Judy Garland in Hollywood…how he worked with TV icons Barbara Eden, Patty Duke, and Larry Hagman. And, in frank and moving chapters, Sheldon reveals, for the first time, his private self: his profound personal losses and his search for happiness.
Every reader knows that a Sidney Sheldon novel is a guaranteed page-turner. His real-life story is just as compelling. Packed with choice anecdotes about everyone from Frank Sinatra to Irving Berlin to Marilyn Monroe, as well as hilarious asides from pal Groucho Marx, The Other Side Of Me is filled with highs and lows, twists and turns, and is every bit as riveting as any blockbuster Sheldon has ever written.
Finally, the world’s master storyteller shares his greatest tale…his own!
The Colony – The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai, by John Tayman, Scribner Book Company, History, 432 pp. $27.50
In the bestselling tradition of In the Heart of the Sea, The Colony reveals the untold history of the infamous American leprosy colony on Molokai and of the extraordinary people who struggled to survive under the most horrific circumstances.
In 1866, twelve men and women and one small child were forced aboard a leaky schooner and cast away to a natural prison on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Two weeks later, a dozen others were exiled, and then forty more, and then a hundred more. Tracked by bounty hunters and torn screaming from their families, the luckless were loaded into shipboard cattle stalls and abandoned in a lawless place where brutality held sway. Many did not have leprosy, and most of those who did were not contagious, yet all were caught in a shared nightmare. The colony had little food, little medicine, and very little hope. Exile continued for more than a century, the longest and deadliest instance of medical segregation in American history. Nearly nine thousand people were banished to the colony, trapped by pounding surf and armed guards and the highest sea cliffs in the world. Twenty-eight live there still.
John Tayman tells the fantastic saga of this horrible and hopeful place — at one time the most famous community in the world — and of the individuals involved. From the very first exile — a gentle part-time lawyer trapped in an unjust ordeal beyond his imagination — to the last remaining residents, the narrative is peopled by presidents and kings, cruel lawmen and pioneering doctors, and brave souls who literally gave their lives to help. A stunning cast includes the martyred Father Damien, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Mark Twain, Teddy Roosevelt, John Wayne, and more. The result is a searing tale of survival and bravery, and a testament to the power of faith, compassion, and heroism
Take It Back, by James Carville and Paul Begala, Simon & Schuster, Non-Fiction Hard Cover, 368 pp. $24
By being too timid and too weak, too hesitant and too confused, Democrats have allowed Republicans to run amok.
Republicans today control everything: the White House, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy, the military, and the corporate special interests and their lobbyists. They operate powerful right-wing organizations, right-wing think tanks, and a conservative media that serves as an attack dog against Democrats.
Republicans have used their absolute power to corrupt our democracy, degrade our military, weaken our health care system, diminish our stature in the world, damage our environment, reward the rich, hammer the poor, squeeze the middle class, bankrupt our Treasury, and indenture our children to foreign debt holders.
In this important book, James Carville and Paul Begala show Democrats how they can "take it back." They offer a clear-eyed critique of their party's failures and make specific, concrete recommendations on how Democrats can avoid losing elections on divisive issues such as abortion, gun control, gay rights, and moral values and start winning them on health care, political reform, energy, the environment, tax reform, and more.
Carville and Begala say that liberal Democrats are right that too many establishment Democrats kowtow to corporate interests and shamefully supported George W. Bush's rush to war. And moderate Democrats are right to complain that too many Democrats are out of step with middle-class values, too removed from people of faith, too enthralled with intellectual and cultural elites.
But the problem with the Democrats, Carville and Begala argue, is not ideological. It's anatomical. They lack a backbone. Take It Back is a spinal transplant for Democrats and an audacious battle plan for victory.
At Canaan's Edge-America in the King Years, by Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, Non-Fiction Hard Cover, 1056 pp. $35
At Canaan's Edge concludes America in the King Years, a three-volume history that will endure as a masterpiece of storytelling on American race, violence, and democracy. Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author Taylor Branch makes clear in this magisterial account of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a place next to James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of American history.
In At Canaan's Edge, King and his movement stand at the zenith of America's defining story, one decade into an epic struggle for the promises of democracy. Branch opens with the authorities' violent suppression of a voting-rights march in Alabama on March 7, 1965. The quest to cross Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge engages the conscience of the world, strains the civil rights coalition, and embroils King in negotiations with all three branches of the U.S. government.
The marches from Selma coincide with the first landing of large U.
S. combat units in South Vietnam. The escalation of the war severs the cooperation of King and President Lyndon Johnson after a collaboration that culminated in the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
After Selma, young pilgrims led by Stokely Carmichael take the movement into adjacent Lowndes County, Alabama, where not a single member of the black majority has tried to vote in the twentieth century. Freedom workers are murdered, but sharecroppers learn to read, dare to vote, and build their own political party. Carmichael leaves in frustration to proclaim his famous black power doctrine, taking the local panther ballot symbol to become an icon of armed rebellion.
Also after Selma, King takes nonviolence into Northern urban ghettoes. Integrated marches through Chicago expose hatreds and fears no less virulent than the Mississippi Klan's, but King's 1966 settlement with Mayor Richard Daley does not gain the kind of national response that generated victories from Birmingham and Selma. We watch King overrule his advisers to bring all his eloquence into dissent from the Vietnam War. We watch King make an embattled decision to concentrate his next campaign on a positive compact to address poverty. We reach Memphis, the garbage workers' strike, and King's assassination.
Parting the Waters provided an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness, beginning with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and ending with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In Pillar of Fire, theologians and college students braved the dangerous Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 as Malcolm X raised a militant new voice for racial separatism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation by race and mandated equal opportunity for women. From the pinnacle of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, King willed himself back to "the valley" of jail in his daunting Selma campaign.
At Canaan's Edge portrays King at the height of his moral power even as his worldly power is waning. It shows why his fidelity to freedom and nonviolence makes him a defining figure long beyond his brilliant life and violent end.
We will gladly order any books you want. E mail us at dockside@islands.vi, or call 340 774 4937.