Irresistible (NEW YORKER)Plenty here to enjoy, including brilliant flashes of black humour ... beautifully paced and, finally, very moving (OBSERVER)A feel-good upbeat book about life and death, Romeo and Juliet, drive-ins and a kinder, gentler American past (NEW YORK TIMES)The new John Irving ... there are moments not only of broad comedy, but also a host of quirky, affectionate cameos (TIME OUT) It's the 1960s in Jacksonville, Florida (where the sixties are still the fifties). Some of America's last sweet moments of innocence are unfolding out on the coastal highway at the Flamingo, the largest drive-in movie theatre in the world. Its owner, Southern patriarch Hubert Lee, possesses a fervour matching the size of the Great White Wall of the Flamingo's gigantic screen tower, where John Wayne or Audrey Hepburn or invading body-snatchers flicker nightly. Hubert's unforgiving ego meets its match in Turner West, who owns the funeral home next door and wants to build a cemetery on land staked by his gleefully stubborn neighbour. So when Hubert's teenage son Abe develops his first adolescent crush, it makes devilish sense that the object of his affections should be Grace, Turner's only daughter and the apple of his eye. At once funny and heart-breaking, THE FLAMINGO RISING is a novel full of tenderness and insight about the power of love, the need for faith and the persistence of memory.

The Flamingo Rising

Literature & Fiction

Larry Baker

Contemporary

Little,Brown & Company

2 cassettes / 3 hoursRead by Anthony HealdA big, touching, hilarious debut novel about loving, feuding, fireworks--and your average extraordinary family whose home is the largest drive-in movie theatre in the world.It's the 1960s in Jacksonville, Florida (where the sixties are still the fifties), and some of America's last sweet moments of innocence are unfolding out on the coastal highway at the Flamingo Drive-In Theatre, owned and operated by the Lee family. Patriarch Hubert Lee has a spirit and ego to match the size of his drive-in: "The symbol of human power and aspiration, the stairway to heaven,"  he says, describing the gigantic screen tower. But his ego is at its most unforgiving in his dealings with Turner West. Turner owns the funeral home on land adjacent to the Flamingo and wants to put a cemetery on property that Hubert owns and will never, ever, under any circumstances sell!--his gleeful stubbornness spiking an already intense rivalry between them. So when Hubert's teenage son, Abe, develops his first full-blown adolescent crush, it makes perfect, devilish sense that the object of his desire should be Grace West, Turner's only daughter.Abe Lee--earnest, devoted to his family, keenly and happily observant--is the perfect narrator for this beguiling tale. Especially since his star-crossed love for Grace becomes common knowledge, and he's suddenly the focus of everyone's attention. That is, when their attention isn't focused on something else: the often ballistic flare-ups between the feuding fathers; the shenanigans of the two young, seductive female Flamingo employees; the calm radiance of Abe's mother (behind which the secrets of her heart are well hidden); Abe's sister, Louise, blossoming with alarming speed into a stunning, willful young woman; the preternatural wisdom of Pete Maws, the retired railroad worker who pulls his caboose onto the Flamingo grounds one day and stays; Judge Lester, breathtakingly graceful when he's towing the Flamingo's banner behind his small plane, breathtakingly clumsy when his feet are on the ground; the canine rantings of an insane, beloved dog named Frank; the annual Fourth of July pyrotechnic extravaganzas that the Flamingo is famous for, and with which the Lees and their magnificent enterprise will find a permanent--not to mention brilliantly lit--place in local lore.As Abe moves from adolescence toward adulthood--his love for Grace and his understanding of his family and his role in it maturing along with him--he leads us on a deliriously spirited tour of the hearts and minds, the dreams and desires, the foibles and eccentricities, of the whole Flamingo set. Along the way, we are reminded of who we were--and how we came to be who we are--with deep tenderness and insight, and glorious good cheer.

Ballantine Books

ABACUS +

Corporate Flight: The Causes and Consequences of Economic Dislocation

Barry Bluestone

Bennett, Harrison

Center for Policy Alternatives

Imagine a combination of THE LOVELY BONES and THE PRINCE OF TIDES. You then have Larry Baker s FROM A DISTANCE. Bobby Beaumont is a dying man with a secret. Her name is Ellie. She has been his secret for over thirty years, ever since he caught her stealing books at a Charleston store. He was sixteen; she was thirteen. His parents raised him in a world of Southern gentility. She was raised by a white-trash step-father and uncle who sexually abused her soon after her mother died and never stopped until they were confronted by Bobby. That confrontation leaves Bobby physically and emotionally scarred. It leaves Ellie in a mental institution. To escape Ellie s world, Bobby flees to New York City, to eventually become the most successful book publisher in America, leaving Charleston and his past behind. But he does not forget Ellie. How could he? She won't let him, even after she is dead. Weeks before his own death, he receives a final manuscript to edit...Ellie s version of their life and love together. The manuscript is incoherent, told from the point of view of an insane child who becomes an insane woman. A dead woman. Thirty years of private journals and cryptic diary entries. In alternating chapters of FROM A DISTANCE, Ellie tells her story. Her private life is juxtaposed with chapters telling the public history of Bobby Beaumont. Two different worlds. Those two versions of a shared experience will force a reader to decide which is fact, which is fiction.

From A Distance

Ice Cube Press, LLC

Harry Ducharme is at the end of his rope. Booze and bad decisions have taken him from the A-list of talk radio fame down to a tiny cinder-block station, WWHD, in St. Augustine, Florida. He talks, mostly to himself, from 10 PM to 2 AM. Not sure anybody is listening, reading books and poetry that he likes, not caring if anyone agrees with him, playing golden-oldies from the Sixties, and wondering how he got there. Above all, he s convinced he is not a good man. Then, as a hurricane pounds north Florida, Harry gets a visitor. An old black man who calls himself Peter Prophet, announcing the imminent arrival of a New Child of God. Harry is a bit skeptical. Harry is surrounded by men and women with their own burdens to carry. Captain Jack Tunnel is the morning host, more right-wing than Rush, with a cranky parrot co-host named Jimmy Buffett, but who also has a gentle secret life. Nora James is the mysterious cooking woman who broadcasts from her home kitchen, but whom nobody has ever seen. Harry falls in love with Nora because of her voice and spends his first year in town trying to find her, only to discover that her whereabouts are a communal secret, revealed only to a select few. Carlos Friedmann has the 2 6 AM slot, a fourth-generation Jewish Cuban who cannot speak Spanish, but whose forte is to broadcast fake interviews with Fidel Castro. Harry's role in the New Child s arrival eventually becomes intertwined with politics, Iraq, 9/11, old-time religion, and classic American literature from writers like Flannery O'Connor and Emily Dickinson, as well as the music of Harry Chapin. A good man is always hard to find, but Harry Ducharme finally succeeds as he meets the New Child of God in a final and unforgettable scene of death and redemption.

A Good Man

Ice Cube Books

In Alice's world, it all made sense. She told her husband: I stopped cheating on you when I started sleeping with Danny. He finally understood, but too late. Alice Marcher is dying, but she is still trying to understand her life. She was thirty when she met Danny Shay. He was eighteen. Two years later, they were sleeping together. Twenty years later, they parted. Alice insisted: It lasted so long, so it must have meant something, right? We weren't a cliche', were we? Katherine Arnett is Alice's audience, or therapist, or ghost. Only when Alice dies is Katherine's true identity revealed. The two women share a final moment in a room with a man who simply asks: Who are you? Only one woman knows the answer. A story came back to her as she died, fiction as real as her own life, and she herself finally understood it. A beast in a jungle had always been there for her, all those years with Danny. Her own incarnation of that beast, its breath finally upon her throat, had finally turned on her. She had done a very bad thing, falling in love with Danny, and the beast had always been waiting. ---page 60. Peter Bartram is Alice's husband. He has always known.

Love and Other Delusions

Ice Tea Books

Feuerzauber

Goldmann

ntraiv-in flamingko / ντράιβ-ιν φλαμίνγκο

Bell

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Books by Larry Baker