No, But I Saw the Movie

Friday Night Lights  by H.G. Bissinger (796.332 BISSING)
The bestselling story of life in the football-driven town of Odessa, Texas, explores how the town's passion for the team inspires – and sometimes shatters – the young men who wear the Panther uniform. Now a major motion picture from Universal Pictures, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Derek Luke and Jay Hernandez.

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (B DINESEN)
With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya.

A Civil Action  by Jonathan Harr (346.73 HARR)
In this true story of an epic courtroom showdown, two of the nation's largest corporations stand accused of causing the deaths of children. Representing the bereaved parents, the unlikeliest of heroes emerges: a young, flamboyant Porsche-driving lawyer who hopes to win millions of dollars and ends up nearly losing everything, including his sanity. A searing, compelling tale of a legal system gone awry – one in which greed and power fight an unending struggle against justice – A Civil Action is also the story of how one determined man can ultimately make a difference.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand (798.4 HILLE)
This well-written and compelling book celebrates the life of a racehorse that just happened to be a descendant of Man O' War. It is a story of a huge talent that almost went unrecognized until the right people came along. According to descriptions, Seabiscuit was a runt, with stubby legs, an odd walk and a lazy nature. However, he became so popular that he drew more news coverage than President Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. The atmosphere surrounding his historic match with War Admiral was so intense that FDR kept advisors waiting as he listened with the rest of the country to hear the outcome. Hillenbrand also tells the stories of owner Charles Howard, trainer Tom Smith and jockey Red Pollard and the part each man played in the recognition and development of a racing legend.

The Perfect Storm by Sebastain Junger (974.4 JUNGE)
October 1991. It was "the perfect storm" – a tempest that may happen only once in a century – a nor'easter created by so rare a combination of factors that it could not possibly have been worse. Creating waves 10 stories high and winds of 120 miles an hour, the storm whipped the sea to inconceivable levels few people on Earth have ever witnessed. Few, except the six-man crew of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing boat tragically headed towards its hellish center. 

Lost Moon by Jim Lovell (629.4 LOVELL)
Read the book that inspired the movie Apollo 13!  The lunar landing mission of Apollo 13, commanded by veteran astronaut Lovell, was to be the crowning accomplishment of his NASA career. However, little more than two days into the flight, an oxygen tank exploded, crippling the service module's electrical system and forcing the crew to abandon their mother ship and use the lunar module as a lifeboat. Lovell and Kluger's account of Mission Control's heroic efforts to figure out a way to bring the crew home safely and the astronauts' race against time in a freezing spacecraft provide the core of this gripping narrative.

Under the Tuscan Sun  by Frances May (945 MAY)
Frances Mayes entered a wondrous new world when she began restoring an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. There were unexpected treasures at every turn: faded frescos beneath the whitewash in her dining room, a vineyard under wildly overgrown brambles in the garden and, in the nearby hill towns, vibrant markets and delightful people. In Under the Tuscan Sun, she brings the lyrical voice of a poet, the eye of a seasoned traveler and the discerning palate of a cook and food writer to invite readers to explore the pleasures of Italian life and to feast at her table.

We Were Soldiers Once – and Young   by Harold Moore (959.704 MOORE)
On Nov. 14, 1965, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry, commanded by Lt. Col. Moore and accompanied by UPI reporter Galloway, helicoptered into Vietnam's remote Ia Drang Valley and found itself surrounded by a numerically superior force of North Vietnamese regulars. Moore and Galloway here offer a detailed account, based on interviews with participants and on their own recollections, of what happened during the four-day battle. Much more than a conventional battle study, the book is a frank record of the emotional reactions of the GIs to the terror and horror of this violent and bloody encounter. Both sides claimed victory, the U.S. calling it a validation of the newly developed doctrine of airmobile warfare. Supplemented with maps, the memoir is a vivid re-creation of the first major ground battle of the Vietnam War.

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (B NASH)
"How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. "Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously." Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age 30 when he slipped into madness and who – thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community – emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim.

The Orchid Thief  by Susan Orlean (635.9 ORLEAN)
The inspiration for the movie Adaptation, Susan Orlean's mesmerizing true story of beauty and obsession, is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. After he was caught in the act, Laroche set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native American activists and devoted orchid collectors. The result is a tale that is strange, compelling and hilarious.

Dead Man Walking  by Helen Prejean (364.6 PREJE)
In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana's Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier's death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. At the same time, she came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute him – men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing. Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. 

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (616.8 SACKS)
Awakenings is the remarkable story of a group of patients who contracted sleeping-sickness during the great epidemic just after World War I. Frozen for decades in a trance-like state, these men and women were given up as hopeless until 1969, when Dr. Oliver Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA, which had an astonishing, explosive, "awakening" effect. Dr. Sacks recounts the moving case histories of his patients, their lives and the extraordinary transformations, which went with their reintroduction to a changed world.

Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War  by Anthony Swofford (956.7044 SWOFFORD)
In his memoir on life as a U.S. Marine, Swofford starts out by admitting that what he describes "is neither true nor false, but what I know." This is in no sense a chronicle of the Gulf War but instead an interior monolog reflecting Swofford's inner journey from despised childhood to coming of age as an enlisted Marine and finally coming somewhat to terms with the man he has become. For Swofford, warfare was the culmination of everything he had experienced, so that his existential narrative hangs on his pivotal nine-month tour of duty. The boredom, frustration, fear, physical exertion and relentless training all contributed to his sense of self, but in the end he felt capable of backing away from the total absorption of combat to live in the real world. Unfortunately, reconnection with civilian life turned out to be no easier than living in the combat zone.