Books

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'Nine Years' In A Baltimore Funeral Home

6:11pm June 01, 2013

by NPR Staff

A summer job in a Baltimore funeral home turned into a nine-year career and lifelong passion for Sheri Booker. Her coming-of-age memoir recalls tears and trade secrets of the mortuary business.

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Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy are reporters for The Boston Globe.

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Whitey Bulger Bio Profiles Boston's Most Notorious Gangster

1:29pm May 31, 2013

Reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy, who covered Bulger for years for The Boston Globe, have a book out about the career criminal. Bulger was wanted for 19 murders when he was captured by the FBI in 2011. Jury selection for his trial begins June 6.

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Illustration: A little boy in a boat reads a book as the boat is picked up by an octopus.

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Field Trip! 10 Books That Will Send Kids Exploring

8:34am May 31, 2013

by Mara Alpert

Children's librarian Mara Alpert recommends 10 titles that will send youngsters off on brand-new adventures. In these books, kids will learn what baby animals do on their first day of life, what baseball games are like in Japan, and what happens when you read a poem from bottom to top.

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How OxyContin's Pain Relief Built 'A World Of Hurt'

12:40pm May 30, 2013

New York Times reporter Barry Meier's new e-book explores opiate painkillers and the consequences that come with long-term use. He focuses in particular on OxyContin, how it came to be prescribed for chronic pain, what the consequences have been, and how it became a street drug.

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Nadeem Aslam's other books include Season of the Rainbirds and The Wasted Vigil.

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Novel Examines Afghanistan War From A Pakistani Perspective

8:43am May 29, 2013

by NPR Staff

Nadeem Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden explores the consequences of Sept. 11 through the story of two young brothers who go to Afghanistan in late 2001 to help wounded civilians. Aslam says he wrote the book over four and a half years, part of which was spent in total isolation.

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Books

Marking The Moment With A Meaningful 'Exit'

2:14pm May 27, 2013

Exits are ubiquitous; grand or modest, we've all left something, from resigning from a job to waving goodbye to a friend. In Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, author Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot explores goodbyes through the stories of people in transition. (Originally broadcast June 11, 2012.)

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Three-Minute Fiction Readings: 'Compromise' And 'The F'

5:25pm May 26, 2013

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read The Art of Compromise by Lindsey Appleford of Boerne, Texas, and Claudia Who Found the F by Sean Enfield of Denton, Texas.

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Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai attends the opening ceremony of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People on March 3, 2012, in Beijing, China.

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From A 'Death' To A Crisis, Tracing China's Bo Xilai Scandal

5:25pm May 26, 2013

by NPR Staff

Murder, corruption and political intrigue all feature heavily in A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, by Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang. It chronicles an episode that's still reverberating through China's Communist Party.

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Russian soldiers take their position near the village of Shatoy, Chechnya.

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Transcending Hardships By Saving Others In 'Constellation'

12:05pm May 26, 2013

by NPR Staff

In his debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra takes readers to the war-torn republic of Chechnya. People disappear, informers betray and those with humanity endure great hardships.

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Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia but spent much of her childhood in China, where her parents worked as missionaries.

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A Lost And Found 'Wonder': Pearl S. Buck's Final Novel

6:15pm May 25, 2013

by NPR Staff

Before her death in 1973, Pearl S. Buck wrote one final novel. But The Eternal Wonder languished in a Texas storage unit for decades until its discovery last fall.

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