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Title: Becoming Madame Mao Author: Anchee Min File Type: Mobi Subject:Fiction:Historical Description:Amazon.com ReviewMany writers have engaged in the project of rescuing female figures from history, but few have tackled such an unsympathetic character as Anchee Min does in her historical novel Becoming Madame Mao. Known as the White Boned Demon during her reign of terror in China, Madame Mao was blamed for countless bloody and vengeful executions she sought out those who had wronged her in the past and wiped them off the face of the earth. Eventually she was reviled in China and executed, even as her husband was revered as a hero.Before her stint as Maos first lady, Jiang Ching, as she was then known, was an actress, a singer, and a star in Communist films. Anchee Min grew up in Red China and watched Jiang Ching from afar she was fascinated by her for many years, by tales of her independence and strength, and by images of her beauty. In a way, the great villain and demon was a role model for Anchee Min, and her teenage devotion is the engine of her remarkable novel. Moving back and forth between stories of the actress and the evil dictator, Min complicates the Madame Mao of history.As a girl, Madame Mao narrowly escaped having her feet bound. The book opens with graphic descriptions of this process and of the ensuing infection that freed her. But if her feet were not bound, her spirit was. Reared by a mother who was the last concubine of a rich man, and a father who liked to hit his girls with shovels, Madame Mao as a young girl felt herself doomed I see my father hit Mother with a shovel. It happened suddenly. Without warning. I can hardly believe my eyes. He is mad. He calls Mother a slut. Mothers body curls up. My chest swells. He hits her back, front, shouting that he will break her bones. The father then goes on to treat his daughter the same way. Decades later, when Madame Mao manifests deep brutality, Min seems to be saying that what goes around comes around. Flawed by a clumsy structure that vacillates between third and first person arbitrarily, Becoming Madame Mao is nevertheless an immensely interesting work--defiant, morally ambiguous, and difficult to put down. --Emily WhiteFrom Publishers WeeklyHistorical fiction acquires new luster and credibility in Mins brilliant evocation of the woman who married Mao and fought to succeed him. As she proved in her memoir, Red Azalea, Min is a forceful writer, but her first novel, Katherine, did not prepare us for the highly dramatic, psychologically penetrating and provocative narrative she presents here. A girl called Yunhe is born to a rural concubine in 1919 she renames herself Lan Ping when, in 1934, she runs away to Shanghai with ambitions to be an actress, and later joins the Red Army and finally, she is dubbed Jiang Ching by the man she marries, Mao Zedong. Madame Mao has become a myth, but Min has the background and the insight to imagine her afresh, and to create a complex psychological portrait of a driven, passionate woman and a period of history in which she would suffer, rise and prosper, and then fall victim to her own insatiable thirst for power. Min draws Madame Mao with bold, arresting strokes, gives her a fierce, imperious voice and a personality devoid of humility or self-knowledge. Lan Ping sets out to seduce the charismatic Mao, and wins him--for a time--until her jealousy, the machinations of his trusted aides, and Maos own loss of interest cast her into limbo. By then a veteran of the inner circle betrayals that Mao encouraged, Jiang Chings attempts to wrest personal power, but that becomes her undoing. As with a fine ink brush, Min details her heroines series of love affairs and marriages, divorces and acrimonious partings, roles in Chinese opera and movies, endurance in the shadow of Maos disfavor, desperate ploys to regain his attention, and brief time in the limelight during the Cultural Revolution. As a chronicle of ambition, betrayal, murder, revenge, barbaric cruelty, paranoia and internecine rivalry, the narrative speeds through its turbulent time frame 1919-1991. But it is foremost a character study of a determined, vindictive, rage-filled, cruel and emotionally needy woman who flourished because she reinvented herself as an actress in different, self-defined roles-- and because China was ready for her. Min uses several effective prose devices to spin her narrative at top speed. Short first- and third-person vignettes juxtapose Madame Maos early experience with the comments of an omniciscient narrator who relates pivotal circumstances to events that will grow from their consequences. Such foreshadowing not only raises tension, it also helps readers construct a mental chart of historical figures and events. Striking metaphors and vivid Chinese proverbs enhance Mins tensile prose, but it is her trenchant comments about the ways in which powerful individuals can paint bold colors on the panorama of history that distinguishes her spellbinding novel. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. 10-city author tour. (June) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Title: A Hard Rain Author: Dean Wesley Smith File Type: Mobi Subject:Science-Fiction:Star Trek Description:Captain Jean-Luc Picard has long enjoyed playing the part of Dixon Hill, a hard-boiled private eye straight out of American pulpfiction. His holographic excursions into 1940s San Francisco, a colorful world of gunplay and gangsters, provide a welcome diversion from his hefty responsibilities as a Starfleet captain. But not this time. The Starship Enterprise? has lost power and control, its own momentum carrying it ever deeper into a dangerous zone of warped space and time. And the only way out is hidden somewhere in the mean streets and back alleys of old Frisco. But so is a cold-blooded murderer.... Now Dixon Hill, alias Jean-Luc Picard, must get to the bottom of a tangled mystery that threatens the lives of everyone aboard the Enterprise !

Title: The Patriots Club Author: Christopher Reich File Type: Mobi Subject:Fiction:Suspense Description:From Publishers WeeklyThomas Bolden, successful 32-year-old investment banker and Harlem Boys Club Foundation trustee, has come a long way from his turbulent childhood on the mean streets of Chicago. But his street smarts surface at the start of Reich's action-packed but convoluted latest (after Numbered Account), when Bolden chases a pair of muggers through Manhattan's financial district after they rob his girlfriend, Jenny Dance. They abduct him at gunpoint, but after a perplexing interrogation by members of a mysterious clan, a narrow escape reunites him with Jenny. Bolden already knows too much, though, and the organization of the novel's title—a centuries-old secretive order of powerful lawyers, businessmen and politicians convened to preserve political special interest initiatives that the country's founding fathers defended—soon systematically dismantle Bolden's life. He and a newly pregnant Jenny run for their lives, tracked at every turn by the well-connected club, which is headed by retired detective Francois Guilfoyle. While they each investigate the clandestine group, a flurry of politically fueled machinations unfolds, setting the stage for the obligatory showdown. Reich's conspiracy thriller eventually loses the momentum needed to deliver on the tight suspense it promises. (July) br Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. FromWho would have thought that Thomas Bolden would become a successful Wall Street businessman, living the high life and about to become engaged to the perfect woman? Having grown up as Tommy B from the wrong side of the tracks, Bolden is a bootstraps guy who managed to leave the past behind and carve out a nice life for himself--or so he thought. His world turns upside down when he is inexplicably kidnapped. His captors apparently think he has valuable information about something--but Bolden has no idea what. He's released, but his problems are far from over. Soon he becomes mired in a manhunt that forces him to tap into the street skills he learned as an orphan. As he runs for his life--literally--he uncovers secrets involving a bizarre club of corrupt politicos with roots extending back to the Founding Fathers. Bolden makes a captivating hero, as Reich uses the ordinary-man premise to good effect, engendering sympathy for a financier who never forgets his past. A first-rate, high-concept thriller that will leave readers breathless and cheering for Bolden to pull through. Mary Frances Wilkensbr American Library Association. lt;