Uxbridge Susan Staff Picks

Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings. "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is the story of 16-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius, even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil. An Independent Bestseller Winner of the 2000 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award!

"The remarkable story of Benjamin Rush, medical pioneer and one of our nation's most provocative and unsung Founding Fathers ... One of the youngest signatories [of the Declaration of Independence] ... he was also, among stiff competition, one of the most visionary. A brilliant physician and writer, Rush was known as the "American Hippocrates" for pioneering national healthcare and revolutionizing treatment of mental illness and addiction. Yet medicine...

In this book the author tells the story of the American artists and scientists who studied in Paris, and changed America through what they learned there. He mixes famous and obscure names and delivers capsule biographies of everyone to produce a colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris. This is the inspiring and, until now, untold story of the adventurous American artists, writers,...

A magnificent storyteller with vast imaginative range, Anita Diamant gave voice to the silent women of the Old Testament in The Red Tent. Now, in her third novel, she brings to vivid life an early New England world that history has forgotten. Set on Cape Ann in the early 1800s, The Last Days of Dogtown is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and "witches. " Among the inhabitants of Dogtown is Black Ruth, an African...

"A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future"-- Provided by publisher.

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can't move. She can't speak. She can't open her eyes. Though she can hear everyone around her, no one knows because she's in a coma. But she doesn't remember what happened. And she has a sneaking suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, the narratives build and collide for an...

Put on trial by her slaveholder husband and convicted of madness by a Virginia judge, Iris Dunleavy is sent to Sanibel Asylum to be restored to a good wife. But Iris knows her husband is the true criminal; she is no lunatic, only guilty of violating Southern notions of property. A pompous superintendent heads this asylum populated by wonderful characters, including his self-diagnosing twelve-year-old son, a woman who swallows anything in sight, and...