Jeff

Jeff VanDam, First Husband of Roscoebooks and Special Occasions Employee

Jeff VanDam is a lawyer and ex-journalist who moonlights as a volunteer book reviewer and stockroom attendant at RoscoeBooks. When it comes to reading, he alternates between sweeping historical nonfiction about grand lives and modernish sardonic novels. To be more specific, he enjoys Caro, O'Neill, Kearns Goodwin, Chabon, H.S. Thompson, Shteyngart, and anything written about Theodore Roosevelt. His favorite book remains To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. He did not like The Goldfinch. He is also the parent, along with this store's owner, of a one-year-old who greatly prefers the works of Eric Carle and Graeme Base to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel By Adam Johnson Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780812982626
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks - August 7th, 2012

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship.

“Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which [Adam] Johnson is painting here.”—The Washington Post


The Ask: A Novel By Sam Lipsyte Cover Image
$21.00
ISBN: 9780312680633
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Picador - March 1st, 2011

From the author of Home Land and Venus Drive comes Sam Lipsyte's searing, beautiful, and deeply comic novel, The Ask.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice


Adventures of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain Cover Image
$6.00
ISBN: 9780486280615
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Dover Publications - May 26th, 1994

Referring to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, H. L. Mencken noted that his discovery of this classic American novel was "the most stupendous event of my whole life"; Ernest Hemingway declared that "all modern American literature stems from this one book," while T. S.


Wonder Boys By Michael Chabon, David Colacci (Read by) Cover Image
$9.99
ISBN: 9781491509159
Availability: Unavailable
Published: Brilliance Audio - June 10th, 2014

Chabon's extraordinary story of one turbulent weekend in the life of a struggling writer, a satire of the permanent adolescence of the creative class


Little Failure: A Memoir By Gary Shteyngart Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9780812982497
Availability: Special Order
Published: Random House Trade Paperbacks - October 7th, 2014

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME

 
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING


The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York By Robert A. Caro Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9780394720241
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage - July 12th, 1975

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York.


The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I By Robert A. Caro Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9780679729457
Availability: Backordered
Published: Vintage - February 17th, 1990

The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak.


The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (Vintage Civil War Library) By Shelby Foote Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9780394746234
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage - November 12th, 1986

This first volume of Shelby Foote's classic narrative of the Civil War opens with Jefferson Davis’s farewell to the United Senate and ends on the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Perryville, as the full, horrible scope of America’s great war becomes clear.


The Right Stuff By Tom Wolfe Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9780312427566
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Picador - March 4th, 2008

"Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar Award-winning film of the same name and the 8-part Disney+ TV mini-series.