BOOK COLLECTOR

The Overnighters  by Jesse Moss Special Jury Prize --Sundance; 102 minutes Follow Director Jesse Moss with his handheld camera into the provincial town of Williston, North Dakota --population: roughly 20,000; only an hour drive from the Canadian border where winter-nights can drop 20 degrees below freezing. Enter the small, unassuming Concordia Lutheran Church --one of at least five in the state. Meet Pastor Jay Reinke--a plucky middle-aged husband & father with questionable prudence and an undeniable bounty of spiritual generosity toward the downtrodden. Or, at least toward most of them. In broad strokes, The Overnighters tells the story of one religious man’s attempt to serve the housing needs of homeless migrant workers in his small town. In many ways, Moss’s documentary tells a simple story that evenhandedly pits Pastor Reinke and his Overnighters project against the disgruntled congregation, his irritated neighbors, the city council, and at least one intrepid local...

The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders Riverhead Books; 257 pages; $14 Twenty years ago, in that distant past we now call the mid-’90s, the American literati beatified George Saunders as their hallowed saint of short story writing--a torch passed from Cheever to Carver to Saunders. Often associated with the McSweeney’s generation, Saunders solidified his rank among the upper-echelons of literary fame--along with other notables, namely David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, & Junot Diaz--declared by  The New Yorker ’s 20 Best Writers Under 40 issue. By the turn of the century, Saunders had published the critically acclaimed CivilWarLand in Bad Decline & snagged a few minor writerly awards along the way. Since then, in the last fifteen years, the New York darling has written at least three novellas, three widely popular short story collections, one book of essays, and a smattering of nonfiction, in addition to garnering, among other prizes, the highly covete...

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert Henry Holt; 319 pages; $28 2014 NBCCA nonfiction finalist From colony collapse disorder and the dwindling Monarch butterfly population to the precipitous decline of big trees in California and the “ 13 species we might have to say goodbye to in 2015 ”, the evidence of extinction surrounds & sometimes haunts us. And, yet, so much of daily life seems unremarkable, as we mere Homo sapiens existentially white-knuckle through our waking hours. We might wonder if the pieces fit together or if there's some great meaning behind the apparent rapid rate of global change. Fortunately, as aways, there’s a book to help put some of these questions in perspective. Elizabeth Kolbert, s taff writer for The New Yorker and author of Field Note from a Catastrophe (2006), extends on her previous work in a new monograph cataloguing the inevitable decline of global bio-diversity, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History .  When we hav...