Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Choices from Woodbine Books

The Baby Sleep Solution (Lucy Wolfe)

Lucy Wolfe, Ireland’s leading sleep expert, introduces the stay-and-support method for parents who want to help their babies sleep through the night. With sleep-shaping supports for newborns, top tips for toddlers, and advice for older children up to the age of six, Lucy’s approach provides a gentle and emotionally considerate way to get your little one to sleep – without leaving them alone to cry, ensuring they feel loved, safe and secure at all times. To date, this 98% effective method has helped over 4,000 parents, with most reporting improvements within the first seven days of introducing the recommendations.


Hillbilly Elegy (J D Vance)

This is a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group has been reported on with growing frequency but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J D Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J D’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humour and vividly colourful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels for those who chase the ever more elusive American dream.


The Swimming Pool (Louise Candlish)

It's summer when Elm Hill lido opens, having stood empty for years. For Natalie Steele - wife, mother, teacher - it offers freedom from the tightly controlled routines of work and family. Especially when it leads her to Lara Channing, a charismatic former actress with a lavish bohemian lifestyle, who seems all too happy to invite Natalie into her elite circle. Soon Natalie is spending long days at the pool, socializing with new friends and basking in a popularity she didn't know she'd been missing. Real life, and the person she used to be, begins to feel very far away. But is such a change in fortunes too good to be true? Why are dark memories of a summer long ago now threatening to surface? And, without realizing, could Natalie have been swept dangerously out of her depth?


Intercept (Gordon Corera)

From Bletchley Park to cyber-attacks in the twenty-first century, this is the untold story of computers and spies: past, present and future INTERCEPT is the previously untold - and previously highly classified - story of the melding of technology and espionage. Gordon Corera's compelling narrative, rich with historical details and characters, takes us from the Second World War to the internet age, with astonishing revelations about espionage carried out today.