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JACQUI RODGERS, Director: Dear Readers. Visit the children’s library during the holidays so that your children and grandchildren may enjoy reading our books. Our books range from board books for toddlers to young adult books for teens. The Gitlin team wish you all a Happy Chanukah.
A SHORT LIFE by NICKY GREENWALL. This murder mystery involves six friends whose lives are affected after two accidents that took place on the same night, on the same stretch of winding road in Cape Town. One of them lands up dead and only two of them know what happened that night. Nick’s best friend Adam is one of them. Adam has an accident driving while drunk and Nick wants to protect him from being prosecuted. However, when Nick’s wife Franky learns that her best friend Charley was killed, she is torn between supporting her husband or her best friend’s widower. This fast-paced book is told from multiple perspectives.
SHANGHAI by JOSEPH KANON. A suspenseful thriller set in pre-World War II Shanghai. Daniel Lohr was lucky to escape the Gestapo after his colleagues in the resistance were caught. He travelled from Berlin to Shanghai. His passage was dependent on him delivering a parcel to his uncle, a nightclub owner. Daniel was plunged into his uncle’s corrupt world where Chinese gang warfare waged over control of clubs. When violence broke out and lives were at risk Daniel was drawn into wartime Shanghai’s terrifying underworld.
THE GODDESS OF WARSAW by LISA BARR. Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a wealthy Polish Jew. Her life and that of her family were destroyed by the Nazis upon their imprisonment with the rest of the Jews in the ghetto. Determined to fight back, the Aryan-looking Bina becomes a spy and assassin, gaining information and stealing weapons. After the war, she rose to fame in Hollywood and when she found out that old enemies survived, she used her powers to right the wrongs of the past. Filled with secrets, twists and turns.
THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI by DEREK B. MILLER. The book is set in a Benedictine abbey near Montecassino in 1944. Central to the story is the friendship between an older man, Pietro Houdini, and 14-year-old Massimo. Both these characters have something to hide. The pair meet in the aftermath of the Nazi bombing of Rome when Massimo is orphaned. He is taken under the wing of this art restorer who is determined to save the artwork hidden from the Nazis in the monastery. Miller highlights the Nazis’ attack on Italy and the country’s historic art and architecture.
THE CORE OF AN ONION by MARK KURLANSKY. An eclectic look at the onion’s uses across history and culture. Kurlansky investigates why the vegetable elicits tears, outlines its non-culinary uses, and captures its place in art and literature. George Washington had a passion for them and Ernest Hemingway favoured onion and peanut butter sandwiches. The author intersperses recipes, and features historical images in his own pen-and-ink images. Kurlansky’s other fascinating books include Cod, Salt and Salmon.
90 SECONDS by NACHMAN SELTZER. The amazing work of Israel’s United Hatzalah began when five-year-old Elie Beer witnessed a terror attack and dreamed of being the one to save the victim. While still a teen Eli set out to fulfil his dream creating an underground network of pioneering EMTs who were determined to bring their life-saving skills to victims in 90 seconds, no matter where. It is a story of dramatic rescues and of life-changing innovations such as the “ambucycle”. It tells how lives can be saved and dreams can come true.
CAREFUL, BEAUTIES AHEAD! By TUVIA TENENBOM. Tuvia and his wife Isi spent a year living in the major Haredi communities in Israel, Mea Shearim and Bnei Brak. Tenenbom was born into a Haredi family and left as a young man, yet speaks fluent Haredi Yiddish. This allowed him to chat with the Haredim as they would not do with other ‘visitors’. The book can be read in two ways. First, for the fun of it as Haredi humour has the same satire as the best of Seinfeld; and the second as a meditation on how a community works and maintains its way of life. A best-seller in Israel and Germany.
MY FAMILY by DAVID BADDIEL. An honest and moving memoir by writer and comedian David Baddiel. On the surface, Baddiel’s childhood seemed traditional. He grew up as part of a middle-class Jewish family in northwest London. However, his mother was not ordinary at all. She had escaped Nazi Germany as a child and, to make her life meaningful, formed a passionate long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. His dad seemed oblivious to this and developed dementia later in life.
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