Titles starting with M from INternet Specialty Books

Mayo Cornelius (M.C.) Higgins dreams of the day he and his family will be able to move away from the strip-mined mountains that surround their home. With the help of two mysterious strangers, M.C. begins to realize that he and his family need to do a lot more than just leave the mountains to become truly safe and happy. Winner of the 1975 Newbery Medal.

During a snowstorm in 1964, Dr. David Henry delivers his own twin children, but when he realizes that the girl twin has Down syndrome he sends her away with a nurse and tells his wife that the girl died. This dark secret cripples the family in subtle but terrible ways. David, guilt-stricken, becomes icy and removed, finding solace only in his photography. His wife throws herself into her career and also a series of affairs. Paul, their son, turns to music to escape the unloving home. Meanwhile, Phoebe grows up in the home of the nurse, a lonely romantic who secretly loves David. Kim Edwards explores the psychological reverberations of the pivotal action with insight and heart.

Edgar is 7 years old and living a bleak existence on an Apache reservation in Arizona. His father is lone gone, and his mother is an alcoholic. When the boy is hit by a car and wakes up after a three-month coma, his major need is to find the driver of the car that hit him and assure him that he has survived. Udall's novel is full of Dickensian situations and characters transported to the American southwest.

The authentic counterpoint to Charles Mingus's fanciful autobiography BENEATH THE UNDERDOG, noted jazz writer Gene Santoro's biography of the great jazz bassist, MYSELF WHEN I AM REAL, covers the basics of Mingus's life with considerably more accuracy and realism than did Mingus himself. Santoro chronicles the musician's tumultuous emotional relationships with the same attention to detail he gives his increasing experimentation with elements of Ellingtonia, his use of dissonance, screeching tempo changes, and vivid mood coloration. When the combination of a mercurial temper and lifestyle-related psychological problems threatened to undermine his career completely, Mingus quit music for a time at the end of the 1960s. A triumphant return with the publication of his autobiography BENEATH THE UNDERDOG and a new album called LET MY CHILDREN HEAR MUSIC was ultimately cut short by the onset of Lou Gehrig's disease, from which he died in 1979. Santoro's biography is a deeply researched critical profile of this magisterial jazz musician, with extensive quotes from family and close associates providing an invaluable alternative overview of this extraordinary musician's life and times.