Complete Bookshop
Mon, Wed, Thur, Sat – 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Tues & Fri – 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Sun – 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
340-774-4937
E-mail: dockside@islands.vi
Here is where you will find what's new at St. Thomas's well-known 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.
BOOK PICKS
"Love Don't Live Here No More," by Snoop Dogg and David E. Talbert, Atria Books, fiction hard cover, pp. 240. $24
"Hip-hop megastar Snoop Dogg and award-winning playwright David E. Talbert join forces to bring you the unforgettable saga of an aspiring young rapper who finds himself at several crossroads at once, where everything, including himself, is about to suddenly change."
The year is 1989, Long Beach, California. When Ulysses Jeffries's mother decides to move her family from the drug-infested East Side to what she believes is safer North Long Beach, Ulysses and his little brother Bing are hurled into a world like none they've experienced before. Instead of moving on up, they've just moved on over.
From a classically trained piano-playing gangster named Buddha, to the next-door neighbor, a foster mother turned basehead named Crazy Betty, to Uncle Mike–a freeloading relative who has a knack for showing up when times are good and a knack for leaving just before they turn bad– these characters and more take you on a journey like never before. With growing conflicts in the streets, and at home with his mother, Bing and his mother's new live-in boyfriend Harvey, Ulysses is forced to make decisions that will forever alter his life. It's clear that his only chance of survival is through close friends, family and the music he loves.
"Love Don't Live Here No More" is the first in a drama-filled series of novels called Doggy Tales that takes readers from the unforgiving streets of Long Beach to the bright lights of show business. The novel also comes with an original single that provides the backdrop to this compelling tale.
"Abundance," by Sena Jeter Naslund, William Morrow & Company, fiction hard cover, pp. 560, $26.95
"Like everyone, I am born naked."
With this opening line of Naslund's compelling new novel, a very human Marie Antoinette invites readers to live her story as she herself experiences it. From the lush gardens of Versailles to the lights and gaiety of Paris, the verdant countryside of France, and finally the stark and terrifying isolation of a prison cell, the young queen's life is joyful, poignant and harrowing by turns. As her world of unprecedented royal splendor crumbles, the charming Marie Antoinette matures into a heroine of inspiring stature, one whose nobility arises not from the circumstance of her birth but from her courageous spirit.
Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old dauphin, the future King of France. Coming of age in the most public of arenas, the young queen embraces her new family and the French people, and she is embraced in return. Eager to be a good wife and strong queen, she shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in doing so, fails to give her the thing she-and the people of France- desire most: a child and an heir to the throne.
Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle apart from the social life of the court, the queen allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises. She entrusts her soul to her women friends, her music teacher, her hairdresser, the ambassador from Austria, and a certain Swedish count so handsome that admirers label him "the picture." When her innocent and well-chaperoned pilgrimage to watch the sun rise is viciously misrepresented in satiric pamphlets as a drunken orgy, the people begin to turn against her. Poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge as the royal family and many nobles are caught up in a murderous time known as "the Terror."
With penetrating insight into new historical scholarship and with wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. "Abundance" reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette, who rejected the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the worst of times.
Once again, Sena Jeter Naslund has shed new light on an important moment of historical change and made that time as real to us as the one we are living now. Exquisitely detailed, beautifully written, heartbreaking and powerful, "Abundance" is a novel that is impossible to put down.
"Not Easily Broken," by T.D. Jakes, Faithwords, religious fiction hard cover, pp.256, $23.99
Bishop T. D. Jakes tells a powerful story of destruction and restoration. Through Dave and Clarice Johnson, he offers insight into the issues many relationships face.
Dave and Clarice Johnson are a professional couple who think they are realizing the American dream until their lives come to a screeching halt after a car accident. Their marriage is tested as the aftermath brings unanticipated changes and reveals unexplored problems in their relationship.
The Johnsons' struggle to overcome personal disappointments and unrealized expectations is at the center of the discord in their home. This becomes painfully obvious as they come face-to-face with the differences that exist between them. Strife mounts as they realize how much they diverge in their opinions of what it means to be successful and to live a meaningful life.
Adding insult to injury, the presence of Clarice's therapist, Julie, and the mentoring relationship between Julie's son and Dave create strife that could destroy the Johnsons' marriage. As Clarice and Dave learn the importance of promises made and kept, God speaks to them in the most unlikely places.
"The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," by Bill Bryson, Broadway Books, biography hard cover, pp. 288, $25
From one of the most beloved and bestselling authors in the English language comes a vivid, nostalgic and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s.
Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century–1951–in the middle of the United States–Des Moines, Iowa–in the middle of the largest generation in American history–the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is perfectly positioned to mine his memories of a totally all-American childhood for 24-carat memoir gold. Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)–in his head–as "The Thunderbolt Kid."
Using this persona as a springboard, Bill Bryson re-creates the life of his family and his native city in the 1950s in all its transcendent normality–a life at once completely familiar to us all and as far away and unreachable as another galaxy. It was, he reminds us, a happy time when automobiles and televisions and appliances (not to mention nuclear weapons) grew larger and more numerous with each passing year, and DDT, cigarettes, and the fallout from a
tmospheric testing were considered harmless or even good for you. He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and of his mother, whose job as the home-furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home. The many readers of Bill Bryson's earlier classic, "A Walk in the Woods," will greet the reappearance in these pages of the immortal Stephen Katz, seen hijacking literally boxcar loads of beer. He is joined in the Bryson gallery of immortal characters by the demonically clever Willoughby brothers, who apply their scientific skills and can-do attitude to gleefully destructive ends.
Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young.
2007 Calendars are now in Stock!
