ThinkExist.com’s Top Ten Summer Books

MADRID – ThinkExist.com, a comprehensive quotation search engine with over 90,000 quotations from 11,000 authors, has selected ten books for satisfying summer reading. Whether on the beach or a coffee break, this collection will surely engage and relax the most demanding readers.

1. American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power. By Thomas Reppetto. John Macrae/ Holt, $26. The story of the rise of the Mafia in America. Reppetto’s tale chronicles organized crime from the 1880s to post-WWII with a self-assured grasp of his subject. American Mafia is an extraordinary journey through Americas criminal subculture.

2. City Boy. By Jean Thompson. Simon & Schuster, $24. A newlywed couple moves into a Chicago apartment to find that their idyllic relationship is jolted by their chaotic surroundings and their own hidden fears.

3. Ghostfires. By Keith Dixon. St. Martins, $23.95. This incendiary first novel is a compelling depiction of the downward spiral of a wealthy family saddled with addictions that threaten their survival.

4. Hard Revolution. By George Pelecanos. Little, Brown, $24.95. Derek Strange, an African-American private eye, is the hero of Pelecano’s look at crime and its victims in Washington. The novel, told in flashbacks, travels to 1968 and revisits a family tragedy set against the death of Martin Luther King.

5. Natalie Wood: A Life. By Gavin Lambert. Knopf, $25.95. A contemplative look at an American icon that portrays her intelligence, vulnerability and foreboding fear of dark waters.

6. No Woman No Cry: My Life With Bob Marley. By Rita Marley with Hettie Jones. Hyperion, $22.95. This stirring memoir recounts Rita Marley’s life in the shadow of Bob Marley, the reggae hero, whose infidelity and religion intruded on their marriage.

7. Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America. By Ted Morgan. Random House, $35. The rise of the senator from Wisconsin, whose paranoid struggle to eradicate Communism changed the course of American history.

8. Sepharad. By Antonio Muñoz Molina. Harcourt, $27. The author’s attempt to bring to light the lives that deserve to be told lest they fade from memory as if they had never existed results in a startling recollection of Spain’s past.

9. Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon. By Aram Goudsouzian. University of North Carolina, $29.95. An insightful biography of the pioneering artist who lived trapped between his talent and the reality of a racially divided America.

10. The Sleeping Father. By Matthew Sharpe. Soft Skull, paper, $14. This engaging rendering of a suburban Connecticut family, the Schwartz’s, is told through Chris, who observes that ‘‘anyone who didnt embrace irony was a fool, because whether you embrace irony or not, sooner or later irony embraces you.

For quotes on these authors and subjects, visit ThinkExist.com, Internet’s most comprehensive interactive quotations page.