Authors starting with O from Montclair Book Center

This study of the relationship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, respectively the radical and the Republican of the book's title, provides revealing insights into Lincoln's gradual, and not insubstantial, shifting of positions on the issue of slavery and its place in the future of the nation. Oakes is clear and unsparing in his reading of Lincoln's character and Lincoln's sense of what was right and what was possible. Douglass was a principled and unyielding guide for Lincoln, and their three White House meetings were clearly more than ceremonial. Oakes traces Douglass's views on Lincoln at various points, as he came to regard the president as a great man. THE RADICAL AND THE REPUBLICAN co-won the prestigious Lincoln Book Prize for 2008 (along with READING THE MAN, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor.).

A historical examination of slaveholding in the Southern states before the Civil War. Oakes, a professor of history at Northwestern University, contradicts the standard opinion in holding that southern property owners were as committed to free-market commercialism as their northern counterparts, and that the Civil War was not an inevitable conflict between alien civilizations.

In upstate New York, the Mulvaneys are a wealthy and magnetic family--attractive, charismatic, promising. But after 25 years, the family begins to slide, then fragment, then shatter, and soon there is nothing left of the dynasty. Judd, the youngest of the clan, begins to search for the reasons behind the downfall, and as he uncovers family secrets, he begins to bring the Mulvaneys slowly back together in a spirit of healing and compassion.

A small upstate New York town is stunned when one of its beloved longtime inhabitants, Gwen Eaton, is murdered by a violent ex-con. The story is narrated by Gwen's daughter Nikki, a reporter for the local paper, who tells her mother's story via a series of talks with the people in Gwen's life, past and present.

In a college town in upstate New York, a reclusive scholar named Joshua Seigl engaged in a new translation of the AENEID, hires as his assistant a young woman named Alma, who has a tattooed face and a dubious past. Joshua's solitary, bookish existence is threatened not only by his officious sister Jet but by Alma's thoroughly nasty boyfriend, Dmitri Meatte.

In Joyce Carol Oates's grim gothic tale of upper class decadence, a bashful, traumatized teenager with "repetitive compulsion syndrome" confronts the decade-old murder of his beauty queen sister, Bliss, when she was six years old. Readers will recall the JonBenet Ramsey case in Oates's depiction of the highly dysfunctional Rampike family. Betsey and Bix Rampike are cruel, crass, and snobbish parents who preach their problems to their son, Skylar, and turn their daughter into a sex symbol almost as soon as she can walk. The novel's narrator, Skylar, troubled about the past, delves into the unpleasant secrets of his blighted family with a quirky gusto that Oates's fans will relish.