Community Corner

What Books Will Hook Dad?

Father's Day gift ideas

With Father's Day coming Sunday, Patch wants to make it easier to get the guy who has everything a gift.

Watchung Booksellers has sent out a list of suggested titles designed to captivate the Dad in your life. Many of these books are available at Barnes and Noble on Route 10 at Littleton Road.

Here are just a few:

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Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, $31.49. For decades, Walter Cronkite was known as "the most trusted man in America." Millions across the nation welcomed him into their homes, first as a print reporter for the United Press on the front lines of World War II, and later, in the emerging medium of television, as a host of numerous documentary programs and as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" from 1962 until his retirement in 1981. Yet this very public figure, undoubtedly the 20th century's most revered journalist, was a remarkably private man; few know the full story of his life. Drawing on unprecedented access to Cronkite's private papers as well as interviews with his family and friends, Douglas Brinkley now brings this American icon into focus as never before.

Capital by John Lanchester, $24.26. From the best-selling author of "The Debt to Pleasure," a sweeping social novel set at the height of the financial crisis.

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Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties by Bill Zimmerman, Paperback, $15.26. In this spellbinding memoir, Bill Zimmerman relates his many adventures in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and offers invaluable lessons on the art of effective protest for today’s activists. In Troublemaker, Zimmerman vividly describes registering black voters in Mississippi, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., organizing for the March on the Pentagon, protesting at the Chicago Democratic convention, and flying food to protesting Indians at Wounded Knee. He relates how he abandoned his career as a scientist to prevent military misuse of his research, then smuggled medicines to North Vietnam, established an international charity that rebuilt a Vietnamese hospital bombed by Nixon, and helped lead the grassroots lobbying campaign that finally ended the war. Breaking down the complex strategies and tactics of the antiwar movement, Zimmerman provides an invaluable look at the sixties and its continuing relevance today.

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel, $24.30. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can’t Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale?

Canada by Richard Ford, $25.19. The distinguished modern American master and Pulitzer Prize-winning author returns with this haunting and elemental novel about a young man forced by catastrophic circumstance to reconcile himself to a world that has been rendered unrecognizable.

In the Long Run: A Father, a Son, and Unintentional Lessons in Happiness by Jim Axelrod, Paperback, $13.50. It’s 2008. Jim Axelrod—once among the most visible correspondents on network news, the first TV reporter to broadcast from Saddam International Airport in 2003, and CBS’s chief White House correspondent—is covering Obama’s end run on the Democratic nomination. He’s 45 years old and 30 pounds overweight. He’s drinking too much, sleeping too little, and scarcely seeing his family. He’s just figured out that the industry that pulled him up the ladder is imploding as he’s reaching for its final rungs. Then, out of the blue, Jim is sent his dad’s New York Marathon finish times. At 46, Bob Axelrod ran a 3:29:58. With everything going on in his life, the best Jim can come up with is, “Can I beat him?” So begins Jim’s deeply felt, often hilarious, quixotic effort to run the 2009 New York Marathon. Along the way he’ll confront his listing marriage, a career caught in the implosion of the entire television news industry, the most god-awful shin splints and the worst-timed kidney stone, and the shadow of a loving father, who because he repeatedly lost his way still has a lesson to impart.


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