Books from Mark Ruffalo

Monarca

An illustrated fable for all ages about a Mexican-American girl who transforms into a monarch butterfly and undertakes the great migration to Mexico, Monarca braids together the values of heritage, ecology, and personal transformation.On her thirteenth birthday, Inés receives a mysterious necklace from her abuela in Mexico that turns her into a monarch butterfly—the fulfilment of a prophecy linking Inés’ destiny to her family’s legacy and the butterflies’ survival.The adventure continues as Inés joins the monarchs on their long journey south to the butterfly sanctuary in Mexico—an odyssey that has become increasingly perilous due to human activity. Together, the swarm travels from the northeast to the swamps of Louisiana to the pine-filled mountain tops of the western Sierra Madre, finally alighting at the Sierra Chincua sanctuary. On this wondrous journey in the vein of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Little Prince, Inés discovers the connections between all living beings, and the urgent need to protect the monarchs' migration and habitats. Divided into four chapters to mirror the four stages in a monarch’s life—egg, larva, pupa and butterfly—Monarca blends Mexican folklore, environmentalism, and magical realism in an enchanting novella. Illustrated with stunning full-color drawings by Leopoldo Gout, this book will inspire readers to protect and cherish the sacred natural world around them.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
My friend @leopoldoleopoldo, along with long-time eco-warrior Eva Aridjis, has a new book out that uses beautiful art and the magic of storytelling to draw our attention to the plight of the monarch butterflies and can guide us all to help heal our beautiful planet.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Climate Book

*A Times, Financial Times, Observer and Nature Book of the Year*We still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen. You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late.In The Climate Book, Greta Thunberg has gathered the wisdom of over one hundred experts - geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists; engineers, economists and mathematicians; historians, philosophers and indigenous leaders - to equip us all with the knowledge we need to combat climate disaster. Alongside them, she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act? And if a schoolchild's strike could ignite a global protest, what could we do collectively if we tried? We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Congratulations @gretathunberg on your latest work, #TheClimateBook! Your labor of love for the planet and a just transition will inspire people across generations to take action now to stop the climate crisis. I’m sure of it.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Win Every Argument

The New York Times bestseller, Win Every Argument is the ultimate guide to debate, persuasion and public speaking, by award-winning British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan.'A masterclass from one of the most formidable debaters and interviewers of our time' – Riz AhmedArguments are everywhere – and especially given the fierce debates we’re all embroiled in today, everyone wants to win. In this riveting guide to the art of argument, Mehdi Hasan shows you how to communicate with confidence, rise above the tit for tats on social media, and triumph in a successful and productive debate in the real world.Arguments help us solve problems, uncover new ideas we might not have considered, and nudge our disagreements toward mutual understanding. A good argument, made in good faith, has intrinsic value – and can also simply be fun.As a journalist, anchor, and interviewer who has clashed with politicians, spy chiefs, and celebrities from across the world, Hasan reveals his tricks of the trade for the first time. Whether you are making a presentation at work or debating current political issues with a friend, Hasan will teach you how to sharpen your speaking skills to make the winning case.'Indispensable' – Naomi Klein
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Congratulations to my friend @mehdirhasan on his amazing book #WinEveryArgument available globally today! You are a true class act. A must-read.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Underground Railroad

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016AMAZON.COM #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year' Stylist 'Dazzling' New York Review of BooksPraised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017.Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Just finished reading "The Underground Railroad" such a beautiful and devastating book. Thank you for the illumination.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Great Fires

JOYCE'S MOTTO has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many sleek and official temptations, keeping unflinchingly to a code of "silence, exile, and cunning" could not have been managed without a show of strictness well beyond the reach of the theater of the coy. The "far, stubborn, disastrous" course of Jack Gilbert's resolute journey--not one that would promise in time to bring him home to the consolations of Penelope and the comforts of Ithaca but one that would instead take him ever outward to the impossible blankness of the desert--could never have been achieved in the society of others. What has kept this great poet brave has been the difficult company of his poems--and now we have, in Gilbert's third and most silent book, what may be, what must be, the bravest of these imperial accomplishments.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
I have been reading a book of Poetry. "The Great Fires" by Jack Gilbert and I am really loving it.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Outlaw Ocean

'Just incredible' NAOMI KLEIN **New York Times bestseller**The Outlaw Ocean is a riveting, adrenalin-fuelled tour of a vast, lawless and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas.There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to the unbridled extremes of human behaviour and activity.Traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, wreck thieves and repo men, vigilante conservationists and elusive poachers, seabound abortion-providers, clandestine oil-dumpers, shackled slaves and cast-adrift stowaways: drawing on five years of perilous and intrepid reporting, often hundreds of miles from shore, Urbina introduces us to the inhabitants of this hidden world and their risk-fraught lives. Through their stories of astonishing courage and brutality, survival and tragedy, he uncovers a globe-spanning network of crime and exploitation that emanates from the fishing, oil and shipping industries, and on which the world’s economies rely. Both a gripping adventure story and a stunning exposé, this unique work of reportage brings fully into view for the first time the disturbing reality of a floating world that connects us all, a place where anyone can do anything because no one is watching. ** LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2019 **
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
My friend @ian_urbina of the @nytimes just produced a pretty incredible book called The Outlaw Ocean about the fairly shocking array of environmental and human rights abuses that occur on the high seas globally. I cannot recommend it enough:
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Dire Predictions

Explore global warming with graphics, illustrations, and charts that separate climate change fact from fiction, presenting the truth about global warming in a way that's both accurate and easy to understand. Respected climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump address important questions about global warming and climate change, diving into the information documented by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and breaking it down into clear graphics that explain complex climate questions in simple illustrations that present the truth of the global warming problem clearly.These experts take scientific findings about climate change and global warming and use analogies, striking images, and understandable graphics to make the global warming question clear to both skeptics and scientists.Dire Predictions shows the evidence and the causes that respected scientists have documented in IPCC findings and climate change studies — this powerful, illustrated book is updated with the latest IPCC information and is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding global warming and climate change and in joining the debate over the best way to combat global warming.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
The non Bruce Banner (non scientist) book on the newest Science of Climate Change. Must Read
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Citizen: An American Lyric

A searing, poetic riff on race in America, fusing prose, poetry, movement, music, and the visual image. Snapshots, vignettes, on the acts of everyday racism. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. Those did-that-really-just-happen-did-they-really-just-say-that slurs that happen every day and enrage in the moment and later steep poisonously in the mind. And, of course, those larger incidents that become national or international firestorms. As Rankine writes, “This is how you are a citizen.”
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
This is a powerful book about what racism feels like. Very moving. “Citizen” by Claudia Rankine
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Beauty Detox Foods

In her bestselling book, The Beauty Detox Solution, Kimberly Snyder—one of Hollywood's top celebrity nutritionists and beauty experts—shared the groundbreaking program that keeps her A-list clientele in red-carpet shape. Now you can get the star treatment with this guide to the top 50 beauty foods that will make you more beautiful from the inside out. Stop wasting your money on fancy, expensive beauty products and get real results, while spending less at your neighborhood grocery.– Enjoy avocados and sweet potatoes for youthful, glowing skin – Snack on pumpkin seeds for lustrous hair – Eat bananas and celery to diminish under-eye circlesWith over 85 recipes that taste as good as they make you look, you can finally take charge of your health and beauty—one delicious bite at a time.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Loving Kimberly Snyder's new recipe book #Beautydetoxfoods Amazing! Get a copy!
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Frackopoly

“The definitive story on how big oil and gas corporations captured our political system . . . and the growing grassroots movement to retake our democracy” (Mark Ruffalo). Over the past decade a new and controversial energy extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracking, has rocketed to the forefront of US energy production. With fracking, millions of gallons of water, dangerous chemicals, and sand are injected under high pressure deep into the earth, fracturing hard rock to release oil and gas. Wenonah Hauter, one of the nation’s leading public interest advocates, argues that the rush to fracking is dangerous to the environment and treacherous to human health. Frackopoly describes how the fracking industry began; the technologies that make it possible; and the destruction and poisoning of clean water sources with the release of harmful radiation from deep inside shale deposits, creating what the author calls “sacrifice zones” across the American landscape. The book also examines the powerful interests that have supported fracking, including leading environmental groups, and offers a thorough debunking of its supposed economic benefits. With a wealth of new data, Frackopoly is an essential and riveting read for anyone interested in protecting the environment and ensuring a healthy and sustainable future for all Americans. “A passionate history and critique of the energy industry, from Standard Oil to Enron . . . . [A] journalistic exposé of fracking outrages in which aggressive entrepreneurs in pursuit of profits wreak havoc on the land and poison the water.” —Kirkus Reviews “A truly powerful manifesto about one of the greatest environmental fights on our planet today—from one of its greatest champions!” —Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author of Oil and Honey
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
We need a #PoliticalRevolution and #CleanEnergyRevolution. New book #Frackopoly from @WenonahHauter points the way.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Our Revolution

The New York Times bestseller!When Bernie Sanders began his race for the presidency, it was considered by the political establishment and the media to be a “fringe” campaign, something not to be taken seriously. After all, he was just an Independent senator from a small state with little name recognition. His campaign had no money, no political organization, and it was taking on the entire Democratic Party establishment. By the time Sanders’s campaign came to a close, however, it was clear that the pundits had gotten it wrong. Bernie had run one of the most consequential campaigns in the modern history of the country. He had received more than 13 million votes in primaries and caucuses throughout the country, won twenty-two states, and more than 1.4 million people had attended his public meetings. Most important, he showed that the American people were prepared to take on the greed and irresponsibility of corporate America and the 1 percent.In Our Revolution, Sanders shares his personal experiences from the campaign trail, recounting the details of his historic primary fight and the people who made it possible. And for the millions looking to continue the political revolution, he outlines a progressive economic, environmental, racial, and social justice agenda that will create jobs, raise wages, protect the environment, and provide health care for all—and ultimately transform our country and our world for the better. For him, the political revolution has just started. The campaign may be over, but the struggle goes on.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
So honored to read & be inspired by #OurRevolution. A book every American should read/listen to remind us of our humanity & moral values
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Decolonizing Wealth

Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides. Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic façade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the “house slaves,” and those select few people of color who gain access. All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing. With great compassion—because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing—Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
How to make your money a healing power. @VillanuevaEdgar's @DecolonizWealth is a great book on making sure the money you give is really part of the solution and not adding to the division and harm.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Price

Victor, a New York cop nearing retirement, moves among furniture in the disused attic of a house marked for demolition. Cabinets, desks, a damaged harp, an overstuffed armchair - the relics of a lost life of affluence he's finally come to sell. But when his brother Walter, who he hasn't spoken to in years, arrives, the talk stops being just about whether Victor's been offered a fair price for the furniture, and turns to the price that one and not the other of them paid when their father lost both his fortune and the will to go on ...
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
It's #WorldBookDay and I am doing #ThePrice published by @penguinclassics thank you Universe for the gift of Arthur Miller!
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Exposure

“For Erin Brockovich fans, a David vs. Goliath tale with a twist.” —The New York Times Book Review The story that inspired the major motion picture Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo as Robert Bilott.In 1998, Rob Bilott began a legal battle against DuPont that would consume the next twenty years of his life, uncovering the worst case of environmental contamination in modern history and a corporate cover-up that put the health of hundreds of thousands of people at risk. Representing a single farmer who was convinced the creek on his property had been poisoned by runoff from a nearby DuPont landfill, Rob ultimately discovers the truth about PFAS—unregulated, toxic chemicals used in the manufacturing of Teflon and a host of other household goods. DuPont’s own scientists had issued internal warnings for years about the harmful effects of PFAS on human health, but the company continued to allow these chemicals to leach into public drinking water. Until Rob forced them to face the consequences. Exposure is an unforgettable legal drama about malice and manipulation, the failings of environmental regulation, and one lawyer’s quest to expose the truth about this previously unknown—and still unregulated—chemical that presents one of the greatest human health crises of the 21st century.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
"I’ve gotten to know Rob very well and have a tremendous amount of admiration for him and the work that he’s done,” he says. “[I want] to help have this information be disseminated out into the world. It’s really important. It’s been underreported and it touches all of our lives. It transcends politics and ideologies. It’s one place I think where we can meet communally."
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Art of Acting

Stella Adler is arguably the most important teacher of acting in American history. Over her long career, both in New York and Hollywood, she offered her vast acting knowledge to generations of actors, including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. The great voice finally ended in the early Nineties, but her decades of experience and teaching have been brilliantly encapsulated by Howard Kissel in the lessons in this book. The groundbreaking theories of the great acting teacher who influenced such outstanding actors as Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro & Warren Beatty are now made available for a wide audience. This book is compiled from her voluminous class notes as well as audio & videotape of her teaching & is destined to become a classic in the fields of acting & theatre. Drawing on an archive of notebooks, transcriptions, and audiotapes of Adler's work, Kissel (cultural critic with the New York Daily News) presents the lessons and insights she brought to the craft of acting. Adler's classroom lectures are presented, and their significance is discussed. She addresses the discipline of the actor's body, mind, and imagination. She looks at the techniques for creating believable characters and bringing authenticity to the performance, and the importance of understanding time, setting and style.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Stella Adler wrote in her book [The Art of Acting], which I asked her to sign: “The young actor feels some greatness inside themselves that they want to give back to the world.” That resonated with me, but I didn’t really understand what she was talking about until much later, in the way you surmised that my struggle to become an actor was from being this kind of introverted young boy.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Snake For The Day

Snake For The Day - Kindle edition by David Darmstaedter. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Snake For The Day.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Looking for a book to read? Take a look at my friend Dave Darmsteadter's new novella. Full of wit and magic
Books from Mark Ruffalo

The Catcher in the Rye

The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst and rebellion was first published in 1951. The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. It was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the court for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and in the 1950's and 60's it was the novel that every teenage boy wants to read.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Well, my favorite book is probably - that's tough, I have a lot of books I love. Hmmm. I would say Ask the Dust and Catcher in the Rye, just for sentimental reasons. And the one book that I wish I had time and the years that it would take to understand would be James Joyce's Ulysses.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
Well, my favorite book is probably - that's tough, I have a lot of books I love. Hmmm. I would say Ask the Dust and Catcher in the Rye, just for sentimental reasons. And the one book that I wish I had time and the years that it would take to understand would be James Joyce's Ulysses.
Books from Mark Ruffalo

I Know This Much Is True

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap.Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control.Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it.But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
Mark Ruffalo
Actor
My favorite book? Oh man, that's tough! These questions are always so hard for me to answer. Right now, my favorite book is Wally Lamb's I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE, which I'm working with him to make into a television show. And I've been inspired by it because of its message of forgiveness for ourselves, and our past.