We heard the bird sing

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Mark Shaughnessy and Don Shaughnessy

This is the story of two brothers who served in Vietnam at the same time, yet their experiences were vastly different, one in a support function and the other fighting in the jungle.

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Palle Yourgrau

It is a widely known but little considered fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. The two walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German-Austrian science in which they had grown up. What is not widely known is the discovery that grew out of this friendship. By 1949 Godel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist. Einstein endorsed this result reluctantly, since it decisively overthrew the classical world-view to which he was committed. But he could find no way to refute it, and in the half-century since then, neither has anyone else. Even more remarkable than this stunning discovery, however, was what happened afterward: nothing. Cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded with their work as if Godel's proof never existed -- one of the greatest scandals of modern intellectual history. A World without Time is a sweeping, ambitious book, and yet poignant and intimate. It tells the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue from undeserved obscurity the brilliant work they did together.

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Pat Mora

A family memoir told in the voices of ancestors, House of Houses is about oppression and survival and sometimes triumph, as "any book about a Mexican American family must be." Mora's House of Houses is large, imagined, traditional, a refuge from the desert's heat, where the generations of her family, living and dead, mingle through the months of a single year. The house in inhabited by Mora's father, Raul, the fighter who hit no one; her mother, Estela, the extrovert who in grade school chose to be a rainbow tulip for May Day since no one color was enough; Estela's mother, Amelia, the Mexican Cinderella, a red-haired orphan taken in by wealthy relatives. Drawing on the magical realism that distinguishes the work of so many Latin American writers - from Garcia Marquez to Esquivel - Mora writes of the multicolored cloth that heals the women in her family and of her father's ability to turn himself into a bird. Great-grandmother Tomasa, in her nineties, leaves fruit behind her radio for the announcer she loves. And Mora's Aunt Chole, though legally blind, is the only one who sees The Virgin Mary when she appears in the garden.

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Kenny Fries

Tells two stories: the development of the theory of “survival of the fittest,” as articulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace; and the history of his ever-changing, made-to-order, orthopedic shoes. Fries’ argues that the ideas of Darwin and Wallace yield insights into how disability fits into culture; people adapt in order to survive just as species do.