Top 10: Los Gatos Library's Most Requested Books

1. Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood.  Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard.  So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.

2. Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother, Amy Chua

Published by The Penguin Press in January 2011, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Motherhas been a New York Times bestseller for ten weeks, as well as a bestseller in the U.K., Germany, and China.  The book was the subject of a Time magazine cover story and is being translated into 20 languages.

3. Bossypants, Tina Fey

Short, messy, and impossibly funny, an apt description of the comedian herself. From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation.

 4. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains.

5. The Social Animal, David Brooks

A book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, Brooks explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people.

6. Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff

Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.

7. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot

Doctors took her cells without asking. Those cells never died. They launched a medical revolution and a multimillion-dollar industry. More than twenty years later, her children found out. Their lives would never be the same.

8. Just Kids, Patti Smith

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices--or the world was ready to hear them. 

9. Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer

The title refers to a memory device I used in the US Memory Championship—specifically it’s a mnemonic that helped me memorize a deck of playing cards. Moonwalking with Einstein works as a mnemonic because it’s such a goofy image. Things that are weird or colorful are the most memorable. If you try to picture Albert Einstein sliding backwards across a dance floor wearing penny loafers and a diamond glove, that’s pretty much unforgettable.

10. Life, Keith Richards

In Life, in his own raw, fierce voice, the man himself tells about life lived fast and hard in the creative hurricane--from his early days as a young boy growing up in a council estate, listening obsessively to Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records, to taking the guitar to its absolute limit and joining forces with Mick Jagger to form The Rolling Stones.

—The descriptions for these books came from the authors' Web pages and from Amazon.com.