This Week's Bestsellers

Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

Meet Sarah Walters, a Charleston debutante with questionable manners and an inherited weakness for bad ideas. Sarah's brilliant older sister just dropped out of Yale to run off with an unstable graduate student from Africa. Her beautiful mother lectures her incessantly on the importance of good etiquette but tends to act cold and mysterious after she's had her nightly gin. Still, Sarah tries to follow the rules set by the Camellia Society, the creators of the debutante code. After all, this is Charleston. Decorum means everything.

But, it's not easy to be good, particularly in those summers when she and her friend run into wild Island boys in pickup trucks. When Sarah heads north to college and New York, she finds a world very different from the one promised to her by the Camellias. The girls don't say "ma'am"; the boys don't act like gentlemen. And then there's love, which comes to Sarah in the form of Max, a passionate yet emotionally closed older man who leads Sarah to her dark side and then leaves her alone to find her way back.

Events bring Sarah home to Charleston and give her a good, fresh look at her beginnings. The revelation of her mother's secret--one of many sights now plain to Sarah's eyes--shows her that the motto of her girlhood, "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia," has more truth to it than she had ever guessed.

Girls in Trucks is an irresistible debut, carried by a funny, wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new writer.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas L. Friedmans's phenomenal number-one bestseller The World is Flat has helped millions of readers to see the world in a new way. In his brilliant, essential new book, Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America's surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests. In this groundbreaking account of where we stand now, he shows us how the solutions to these two big problems are linked--how we can restore the world and revive America at the same time.

Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world's middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is "hot, flat, and crowded." Already the earth is being affected in ways that threaten to make it dangerously unstable. In just a few years, it will be too late to fix things--unless the United States steps up now and takes the lead in a worldwide effort to replace our wasteful, inefficient energy practices with a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation that Friedman calls Code Green.

This is a great challenge, Friedman explains, but also a great opportunity, and one that American cannot afford to miss. Not only is American leadership the key to the healing of the earth; it is also our best strategy for the renewal of America.

In vivid, entertaining chapters, Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution we need is like no revolution the world has seen. It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill. But the payoff for America will be more than just cleaner air. It will inspire Americans to something we haven't seen in a long time--nation-building in America--by summoning the intelligence, creativity, boldness, and concern for the common good that are our nation's greatest natural resources.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded is classic Thomas L. Friedman: fearless, incisive, forward-looking, and rich in surprising common sense about the challenge--and the promise--of the future.