FEATURE/A World of Holiday Gifts From Barnes & Noble; Holiday Shopping Made Easy With Access To Over One Million Book Titles, Music, Videos, And Special Gift Items

Business Wire, Dec 6, 1999

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE FEATURES)--Dec. 6, 1999--

Looking for the perfect gift this holiday season? There's something for everyone at your neighborhood Barnes & Noble. Shoppers can choose from more than one million titles, which can be shipped to the location of your choice, usually within 24 hours. Our Music Department has the latest CDs, holiday music, and for the first time, portable CD and cassette players and headphones. In addition, there are special holiday gifts from the cafe - coffee, tea, tins of your favorite biscotti, teapots, mugs, and Godiva chocolates.

Let's shop together at your favorite Barnes & Noble:

The Latest Releases -- Fiction

For the holiday season, there's an abundance of new fiction. To name just a few: Michael Crichton's latest, Timeline, hits the shelves in November and involves the millennium and time travel. Early reviews of Sue Grafton's O Is for Outlaw indicate it's her best yet. Tony Hillerman's newest, Hunting Badger, is based on a real case, involving the FBI and escaped prisoners. One critic has called Scott Turow's legal thriller, Personal Injuries, an almost perfect work. Walter Mosley's Walkin' the Dog continues the adventures of Socrates Fortlow. For lovers of 19th century sea novels, Patrick O'Brian's Blue at the Mizzen is the latest in the Aubrey-Maturin series, and fans of Nora Roberts will enjoy her eagerly awaited new book, The Donovan Legacy.

My Century, stories celebrating every year of the 20th century, is a new work by Gunter Grass, this year's Nobel Prize winner in literature. Isabel Allende's first novel since 1993, Daughter of Fortune, is a multi-generation saga based, in part, on her own family history.

Two "sleepers" with excellent word of mouth are Plainsong, a National Book Award finalist, by Kent Haruf, the latest in the author's series about life in the West, and The Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee, which deals with a traumatic event that changes a man's life forever. And, for both children and adults, there's not only J.K. Rowling's, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; but also Toni Morrison's, The Big Box, the Nobel Prize winner's first illustrated book for children.

Nonfiction

In nonfiction, there are a wide variety of new releases. Again to name just a few: 'Tis, Frank McCourt's sequel to Angela's Ashes, chronicles his life in America and is proving to be widely popular. Ireland's shame and triumph are also chronicled in The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World by Thomas Keneally, the author of Schindler's List. In this gripping narrative of 19th-century Ireland, Keneally explores the causes of the loss of 50% of the Irish population to famine, emigration and the transportation of political prisoners to Australia.

Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan has caused a storm of controversy with its use of a fictional character. The "passages" in Hillary Rodham Clinton's life are the subject of Gail Sheehy's new book, Hillary's Choice. Senator John McCain tells the story of what he learned from his grandfather and father, both military men, and how their examples enabled him to endure his imprisonment in Vietnam in Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir. Marian Wright Edelman's Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors shares her personal memories at the center of the civil rights struggle and pays tribute to such mentors as Fannie Lou Hamer, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others.

New this year for fans of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation is The Greatest Generation Speaks, available in cassette or unabridged CDs. In this audio book of new interviews and material, Brokaw talks with members of the greatest generation. The acclaimed author of Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon, chronicles his journey through America's waterways from the Atlantic to the Pacific in River-Horse: A Voyage Across America.

Michael Lewis' The New New Thing does for Silicon Valley what Liar's Poker did for Wall Street. Yankee manager Joe Torre's Ground Rules for Winners: 12 Keys to Managing Team Players, Tough Bosses, Setbacks, and Success reveals his successful management philosophy. Feminist Susan Faludi's new book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, draws its strength from its interviews and stories of real men alienated from their own masculinity.

For cooks, two of the best, Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, show us the basics of good home cooking in Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home, the companion volume to their public television series. Restaurateur, TV host, the publisher of the new magazine B. Smith Style, and former model, Barbara Smith, lets us in on the tricks of entertaining in B. Smith: Rituals & Celebrations. She includes two to three celebrations for each month of the year, including African-American traditions like a Juneteenth celebration and a bid-whist party. The book contains party ideas, full-course recipes, and step-by-step instructions for making party crafts.

Books for Children and Young Readers

Just in time for the holiday season, The Barnes & Noble Guide to Children's Books helps you find the right book for children and young readers among the enormous variety of titles to choose from. The affordable 224-page Guide ($7.95) focuses on fiction, containing more than 2,000 titles with each book and series briefly described. It begins with books for babies and continues through to young fiction. With delightful full-color illustrations on every page, a spiral binding and an easy-to-carry size, the Guide is a joy to use.