Category Archives: New Books Network Podcasts

“Rosalind had her own vision of what she wanted out of the project. She knew that piercing a single uranium atom could create more than three million times the energy of fossil fuel. If harnessed, channeled, it could be put to constructive use, heating cities and running machines in a clean, endlessly available way. But when she shared the idea with Weaver, he smirked. “Duchess, the Nazis are working on an atomic weapon. Right this minute in their little lairs, twirling their mustaches. No one is thinking about anything but the war right now. We’re dedicated to self-defense, pure and simple.”

“My father criticized my indecisiveness, my wasting time at school without having a plan. It was more than just that he didn’t want to pay the bills. And really, he hadn’t paid the bills. I had worked every summer, work-study every academic year, I had taken shitloads of student loans, and yes, Mom and Dad had sent me hundreds of dollars here and there. But I had carried the load to what I think he saw as a wild gambit in Boston, to this strange, faraway New England school without Mexicans. At graduation, my parents had been the foreigners, much darker than everybody else, with awkward accents, intimidated next to my roommates, friends, and their casually suburban parents.”

“Athletes die twice. That’s the hoary, comforting, horrifying mantra that circulates among us ex-jocks, and its meaning should be obvious enough: The muscle and speed, the stamina and quickness you spend your best years building up, the discipline and the single minded drive, all are bound together by the sport, ARE you, and as soon as the sport leaves your life, that which united you is gone, and so you are gone, too, unraveled like a scarecrow stripped of its stitching.”

“There was always something he liked about the stillness of a high-desert night, black as pitch and scattered with stars. Its stillness seemed to allow other people’s minds to run wild with all sorts of imaginative notions. Either the night was cool and magical, filled with the serenity people dreamed of attaining, or it was inhabited by a litany of creepy-crawlies, ancient ghosts and demons that terrified the mind into a kind of supernatural rigor mortis. But that, he imagined, depended on which godforsaken sandbox you were being forced to play the game of survival in.”

“Ruby wants more than I can give her, but that’s how children are. They expect you to to fix all things, figure out all things and love them always. And, sometimes, you can’t do any of that. Sometimes you barely love yourself or not at all, sometimes you barely drag yourself out of bed and function in a world that has nary a clue nor care that you’ve abandoned the dreams you had for yourself. Instead you raised a child who loves you but resents you because of the mistakes you made. I’m stitched together by the lies I tell myself and the lies people want to believe about me.”

“The color had been sucked from everything, not just the dead. The sky, about to drop new snow, had clouded into charcoal, rubbing away the horizon. Both ends of the two-lane country road, narrowed into a ragged ribbon by the jumble of dark official vehicles, had disappeared into the gauze of gray mist rising from the sudden melt, unusual for late January. It was what the melt had revealed. A mud splattered red ambulance idled low in the center of the rough stone bridge that crossed the Devil’s Creek. Fifty people milled about: cops in blue uniforms and ball caps, others in suits and dark trenches; television cuties in clingy coats and cameramen in cargo jackets and big-pocket pants; and a few print reporters.”

“So now you see it, don’t you? Cesar propped himself up on one elbow. The problem is justice, equality fairness, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Jack brightened with a sense of relief.
“And if you see the problem, then you have to do something about it. But if you use violence, then any change you seek will not last.”

“It was during that hot stretch of summer that Miss Lula fell victim to the strangest sickness I’d ever seen on a person, as in an instant she had gone from her normal position beside the curtained window with her needlework in her lap to one of pure anguish, doubled over on the floor. It had been only minutes since I’d checked on her when her cries rang out, as delicate as the mouse whose squeaks we’d hear echo throughout the halls at night.”

“Just another day in Baltimore,” said the medical examiner, whose gray handlebar mustache dominated his gaunt face. “Shaw and the rest of those damn politician have let our city become a playground for fallen women. Every slattern south of the New York has flocked here to make dirty dollar.” He shot a sharp look at the scribbling male attendant. “Don’t put that in the notes.”