Books about Roundup from Amazon.com

"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood " The quote is from Frank McCourt's memoir of growing up impoverished in Limerick, circa World War II. But the sentiment might just as easily have come from the fictional lips of Henry Smart, the hero of Roddy Doyle's remarkable novel of Dublin in the teens, A Star Called Henry. The son of a one-legged hit man, young Henry is the third child born but the first to live through infancy. He is also the second Henry--the first having died, and become a star in the mind of his mother.

She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores. A stomach crying to be filled, bare feet aching like an old, old man's. Me, a shocking substitute for the little Henry who'd been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me.

Soon, his father has all but abandoned the growing family, and at 9 Henry is on his own, running wild in the streets, thieving to stay alive. Depressing as all this sounds, Doyle has invested his narrator with such an appetite for life, and rendered him so resolutely unsorry for himself, that it seems almost insulting to pity him.

By the time he is 14, Henry has become a soldier in the new Irish Republican Army and in one long and harrowing chapter, we view the events of the Easter Rising of 1916 from his position in the thick of it. It's not a pretty sight by any means, as the populace is divided in its support and various factions within the Republican Army threaten to splinter and annihilate one another before the British even get there. When the shooting starts, Henry aims not at the British but at the store windows across the street. "I shot and killed all that I had been denied, all the commerce and snobbery that had been mocking me and other hundreds of thousands behind glass and locks, all the injustice, unfairness and shoes--while the lads took chunks out of the military." Though the uprising is eventually crushed and the leaders executed, Henry escapes to live--and fight--another day.

In previous books such as The Barrytown Trilogy, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Doyle has established himself as one of the premiere chroniclers of modern Irish life. With A Star Called Henry, he works his singular magic on the past. What's more, this is only volume one of the Last Roundup, so it looks like we haven't seen the last of Henry Smart. And that's a very good thing, indeed. --Alix Wilber.
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"You can be sitting in the train working a puzzle but it can take you far away from the everyday Before you know it you're at your stop or about to pass it. It's not like you were even in the train. It's something different, something removed from the ordinary " --Maki Kaji, The Japanese Times

This collection offers traditional word searches, along with a popular variation called Word Roundup, which gives only clues to the words hidden within the puzzle; the actual words are for solvers to figure out..
Price: $5.41 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This diligently documented book shows that neither the internment of ethnic Japanese--not to mention ethnic Germans and Italians--nor the relocation and evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast were the result of war hysteria or race prejudice as historians have taught us..
Price: $2.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Escape from Five Shadows is another great Elmore Leonard prison-break novel set in the Old West, with Corey Bowen as an innocent man looking to escape from a work camp run by a sadistic embezzler willing to kill to keep his scheme running. As always with Leonard, there are no throwaway lines, and success comes to those who act with competence and conviction. In Last Stand at Saber River, a Confederate veteran returns to his Arizona homestead to find that Yankee mercenaries are occupying his home. That situation's bound to change, and not peacefully. In The Law at Randado, a young deputy must prove himself to a rich man who represents the legal authority in their community. These three short novels from the early stages of Leonard's career are like blueprints for the crime fiction he would come to master in the 1980s and '90s, and will prove a delightful surprise to any of his fans. If you don't think you like Westerns, read any of these stories and you may find yourself reconsidering your taste for the genre. --Ron Hogan.
Price: $24.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A decidedly divine, sophisticated treatment jazzes up the cover of this Word Roundup puzzle book-making it completely irresistible to female puzzlers

*The Puzzle Society introduces this Word Roundup book featuring mind-boggling puzzles and elegant cover treatment with foil, and flocking.

* The 4 x 6 trim size has rounded corners and an elastic band closure-enabling it to be conveniently tucked inside a purse or tote..
Price: $3.55 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Robert Benchley's wit appears effortless--it is a blend of autobiography, satire, the inconsequential, and the sudden surprise At the start of "Fall In!" he muses, "It may be because I do not run as fast, or as often, as I used to, but I seem to be way behind on my parades It must be almost a year since I saw one, and then I was in it myself." At one time Benchley was everywhere, a prolific reviewer and ubiquitous actor and screenwriter; now we must be grateful for his son's selection of humorous sketches. The Algonquian witster remains as brilliantly nonplused as ever as he observes his species in all its skewed play--from football's confusions to the folly of footnoters to French for Americans. When Benchley declared, "The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him," he can surely not have been looking to himself. James Thurber's remark seems truer: "One of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919.".
Price: $9.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]