ThinkExist.com��s Top Ten Summer Books

MADRID – , 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 America's 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. Martin's, $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 didn't embrace irony was a fool, because whether you embrace irony or not, sooner or later irony embraces you.''

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