Favorite Book for 2014
January 29, 2015
The votes are in! The readers of Lackawanna County have decided their favorite books of 2014!
Here are the top five favorite books:
Life after Russian Roulette: Game Over. Based on a True Story by Michael B. Kaminski
Description: “This is a true story based on actual events. My story begins during a long and lonely night in a dingy dorm room in seminary as I contemplated my past and the dark figures ? lives that still tormented me from years of undercover assignments as a police officer and detective. Suicide, numbed cold by the warmth of brandy, appeared to be the only solution to finally end the nightmares which drove me toward a desire for ordination and ministry. The series of events that follow that long night will take the reader on a winding course of exploration and confrontation through the early days of the police academy, the streets of Western District in Baltimore City, a history making police strike, undercover in drug groups and organized crime, the Pagans motorcycle gang, the docks of the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore and eventually a shooting that affected my mind, body and soul. After resigning from the police department and working as a private investigator for defense attorneys who had defended most of the people I arrested as a police detective, I find myself detained in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C.”
Gone girl : a novel by Gillian Flynn
Description: “On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick’s wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren’t his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what did really did happen to Nick’s beautiful wife?”
The quiet don : the untold story of Mafia kingpin Russell Bufalino by Matt Birkbeck
Description: “”To what extent was Rosario ‘Russell’ Bufalino involved in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa in 1975? In the CIA’s recruitment of gangsters to assassinate Fidel Castro? In organizing the historic meeting of crime chieftains in 1957? Even in the production of The Godfather movie? Secretive–even reclusive–Russell Bufalino quietly built his organized crime empire in the decades between Prohibition and the Carter presidency. His reach extended far beyond the coal country of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and quaint Amish farms near Lancaster. Bufalino had a hand in global, national, and local politics of the largest American cities, many of its major industries, and controlled the powerful Teamsters Union. His influence also reached the highest levels of Pennsylvania government and halls of Congress, and his legacy left a culture of corruption that continues to this day. A uniquely American saga that spans six decades, The Quiet Don follows Russell Bufalino’s remarkably quiet ascent from Sicilian immigrant to mob soldier to a man described by a United States Senate subcommittee in 1964 as ‘one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the Mafia in the United States.”
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Description: “Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.”
The Rosie Project by Graeme C. Simsion
Description: “Don Tillman, a professor of genetics, sets up a project designed to find him the perfect wife, starting with a questionnaire that has to be adjusted a little as he goes along. Then he meets Rosie, who is everything he’s not looking for in a wife, but she ends up his friend as he helps her try and find her biological father.”
