Nonfiction
AN AFFAIR OF STATE: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton
By Richard Posner
Harvard University Press, 276 pages, $24.95, $16.95 paper
The prolific author and chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit offers a spirited examination of the legal and political issues surrounding President Clinton’s impeachment.
ALL SOULS: A Family Story From Southie
By Michael Patrick MacDonald
Beacon, 266 pages, $24, $14 paper
Michael Patrick MacDonald, an anti-violence activist, explores issues of race, poverty and crime in this memoir of his South Boston upbringing. A strong cultural indictment.
AMERICAN TRAGEDY: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War
By David E. Kaiser
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 566 pages, $29.95
Using newly available archival sources, the author offers a new version of how the U.S. got involved in Vietnam, challenging previous assumptions about the roles of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
ARMING AMERICA: The Origins of a National Gun Culture
By Michael A. Bellesiles
Knopf, 603 pages, $30
Researching the history of America’s relationship with guns, the author claims to debunk the myth that the nation was founded on gun ownership.
BEER AND CIRCUS: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education
By Murray Sperber
Holt, 322 pages, $26
An attack on the failing of large universities to deliver quality education to undergraduates. The author, a longtime critic of big college sports, ties many academic woes to an overemphasis on athletics.
BELLOW
By James Atlas
Random House, 686 pages, $35
A Chicago native chronicles the life and work of one of Chicago’s greatest writers, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning Saul Bellow.
BEN TILLMAN AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF WHITE SUPREMACY
By Stephen Kantrowitz
University of North Carolina Press, 422 pages, $49.95, $19.95 paper
A biography of “Pitchfork Ben,” Sen. Ben Tillman of South Carolina, a racist demagogue who made a career by appealing to the worst instincts of poor whites.
BETRAYAL OF TRUST: The Collapse of Global Public Health
By Laurie Garrett
Hyperion, 754 pages, $30
A warning that the declining public-health infrastructure–inadequate in the developing world and neglected in more-affluent countries–could result in global crisis.
BLOOD OF THE LIBERALS
By George Packer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 405 pages, $26
A political history of the author’s family provides a lens through which to view the changing nature of liberalism over the past century.
`CAN’T YOU HEAR ME CALLIN’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Father of Bluegrass
By Richard D. Smith
Little Brown, 365 pages, $25.95
The first comprehensive, critical biography of the mandolinist and bandleader who invented and, in 60 years of performing and recording, popularized bluegrass music.
THE COLLABORATOR: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach
By Alice Kaplan
University of Chicago Press, 308 pages, $25
A reconstruction of the trial of Robert Brasillach, a fascist journalist who was executed for treason after France’s liberation from the Nazis.
COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES: Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules
By Roger Schank
HarperCollins, 244 pages, $25
Advice for parents on guiding the intellectual development of their children, from an author who believes good grades aren’t necessarily the sign of intelligence.
DANCING AT HALFTIME: Sports and the Controversy Over American Indian Mascots
By Carol Spindel
New York University Press, 284 pages, $21.95
A look at the use of Indians as sports mascots, focusing on the controversy over the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek. Includes a history of the Illini Indians.
FALSE PAPERS
By Andre Aciman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 182 pages, $23
A New Yorker who was born in Egypt, the author ponders exile and dislocation, memory and nostalgia, in a series of linked essays.
THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
By Antonio R. Damasio
Harcourt Brace, 386 pages, $28
The notable neurologist builds on his earlier work, “Descarte’s Error,” to answer a monumental question: How is consciousness created?
FLOPHOUSE: Life on the Bowery
By David Isay and Stacy Abramson, photographs by Harvey Wang
Random House, 153 pages, $24.95
A portrait of the vanishing world of New York City’s Bowery, told with the voices and pictures of some of its remaining residents.
FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
By Jacques Barzun
HarperCollins, 816 pages, $36
The eminent scholar surveys the revolutions–political, artistic, religious and cultural–that shaped the last 500 years of Western culture.
HO CHI MINH
By William J. Duiker
Hyperion, 695 pages, $35
The first major biography of the father of modern Vietnam, 30 years in the making. Duiker, a leading scholar on Vietnam, draws on many sources to offer insight into Ho’s true motivation, and also Soviet and Chinese roles in the Vietnam War.
I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945
By Victor Klemperer, translated and edited by Martin Chalmers
Random House, 556 pages, $29.95
The second volume of the diary offers a record of daily life in the Third Reich and the escalating persecution visited upon the Jews, ending with the author’s escape after the fiery Allied bombings of Dresden.
IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: The American Romance With Robert Kennedy
By Ronald Steel
Simon & Schuster, 220 pages, $23
A “study of character and circumstance,” in which the author probes contradictions between Robert Kennedy’s public and private personas to explore the difference between the myth and the man.
INDECENT LIBERTIES
By Robert Schmuhl
University of Notre Dame Press, 148 pages, $20, $12.95 paper
Robert Schmuhl examines the American tendency to take freedoms to extremes, using historical and modern examples, and suggests moderation be our goal.
THE ISLAND OF LOST MAPS: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
By Miles Harvey
Random House, 405 pages, $24.95
Recent years have seen a spate of thefts of valuable, antique maps; Miles Harvey tracks this trend and focuses on the most notorious cartographic crook, Gilbert Bland Jr.
JEW VS. JEW: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry
By Samuel G. Freedman
Simon & Schuster, 397 pages, $26
A dispassionate look at the discord over identity and authenticity between different groups of American Jews. Treating the last 40 years, the book also examines the impact of the state of Israel and the challenges of successful assimilation.
JOE DIMAGGIO: The Hero’s Life
By Richard Ben Cramer
Simon & Schuster, 546 pages, $28
Biography of the baseball player reveals a man very different from his myth and attempts to explain our relationship with that myth.
MOLLIE’S JOB: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line
By William M. Adler
Scribner, 367 pages, $27.50
A new look at the global economy’seffect on North American laborfollows one factory job as it moves from New Jersey to Mississippi to Mexico.The human impact is seen in the stories of the three women who work the same job.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Power in Dan Rostenkowski’s America
By James L. Merriner
Southern Illinois University Press, 333 pages, $29.95
James Merriner sees the former congressman from Illinois as “an American original,” a man both great and little, who took the rap for the excesses of big government.
NEWJACK: Guarding Sing Sing
By Ted Conover
Random House, 321 pages, $24.95
A journalist goes undercover for a year as a guard at New York’s maximum security Sing Sing prison and writes about the toll the prison system takes on the guards and guarded alike.
NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869
By Stephen E. Ambrose
Simon & Schuster, 431 pages, $28
The prolific historian tells the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad: politicians, investors, engineers, surveyors and laborers. He reveals Lincoln–who did not live to see the achievement–as a champion of railroads.
ON THE REZ
By Ian Frazier
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 311 pages, $25
Reintroducing Le War Lance, a figure in his best-selling “Great Plains,” Ian Frazier delivers a rambling narration of life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK: Jimmy Walker, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Last Great Battle of the Jazz Age
By Herbert Mitgang
Free Press, 259 pages, $25
Two politicians, formerly friends, ended up doing battle when Franklin Roosevelt, governor of New York and running for president, became involved with the corruption trial of Jimmy Walker, a good-time New York City mayor with mob ties.
PAPAL SIN: Structures of Deceit
By Garry Wills
Doubleday, 326 pages, $25
A passionate critique of Catholic history since the 18th Century, alleging that an out-of-touch papacy’s resistance to the truth could destroy the church.
POSTVILLE: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America
By Stephen G. Bloom
Harcourt, 338 pages, $25
Curious but intense culture clash in tiny Iowa town between the locals and a group of Lubavitcher Jews who have opened a thriving kosher slaughterhouse there.
THE RIGHT MOMENT: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics
By Matthew Dallek
Free Press, 284 pages, $25
Account of Ronald Reagan’s 1966 campaign for California governor against incumbent Pat Brown argues that Reagan’s surprising win altered the direction of U.S politics for years to come.
THE RIGHT TO VOTE: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
By Alexander Keyssar
Basic Books, 467 pages, $30
Historian explains the evolutionof voting rights in the U.S. as a series of struggles by marginalized groups to gain suffrage, and notes that the right to vote has grown and diminished at different times.
ROBERT KENNEDY: His Life
By Evan Thomas
Simon & Schuster, 509 pages, $28
Biographer sorts through the myths of RFK as either saint or sinner and concludes that he was extraordinarily complex, encompassing many traits from both views.
ROSTENKOWSKI: The Pursuit of Power and the End of the Old Politics
By Richard E. Cohen
Ivan R. Dee, 311 pages, $27.50, $15.95 paper
Richard Cohen, a veteran journalist, argues that the old-school politician’s fall was due to his inability to adjust in changing times. The lengthy career of the powerful congressman also offers a lens through which to view changes in the Democratic Party and the House of Representatives.
THE TENDER LAND: A Family Love Story
By Kathleen Finneran
Houghton Mifflin, 285 pages, $24
Memoir probes the painful wound of sibling suicide while showing how deep familial love overcomes this and other tragedies.
THE TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN CULTURE
By Morris Berman
Norton, 205 pages, $23.95
The author draws a parallel between current American society and the decline of the Roman Empire; predicting a period of chaos, he argues that the best way to preserve culture is to retreat from the mainstream.
THE UNVARNISHED TRUTH: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America
By Ann Fabian
University of California Press, 255 pages, $39.95
In a rare study, the author explores the long-established American practice of selling one’s own hard-luck story for quick cash, utilizing a great number of accounts from the 19th Century.
THE WORLD OF MIKE ROYKO
By Doug Moe
University of Wisconsin Press, 114 pages, $29.95
The first biography of Chicago’s beloved newspaper columnist, told in pictures and the words of Royko’s family, friends, targets and the man himself.
Fiction
THE BEST OF JACKSON PAYNE
By Jack Fuller
Knopf, 321 pages, $25
Novel, written like jazz music, about a white musicologist’s obsessive quest to write the definitive biography of a master jazz saxophonist.
THE BLIND ASSASSIN
By Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 521 pages, $26
A tale of love, family, revenge and self-delusion. Beginning in the 1940s, Margaret Atwood tells the story of two sisters–one dead, one living–through the posthumously published novel of the former, the memoirs of the latter, and newspaper articles.
BLONDE
By Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco/HarperCollins, 738 pages, $27.50
Huge, fictionalized memoir that imagines the inner life of Marilyn Monroe. Told in the icon’s “voice,” we see her upbringing and the creation of her myth.
THE BRIDEGROOM
By Ha Jin
Pantheon, 225 pages, $22
Twelve parables that tell the larger tale of a China in transition politically, economically and culturally. Three of the stories have been selected for “The Best American Short Stories.”
THE DANISH GIRL
By David Ebershoff
Viking, 270 pages, $24.95
An unusual love story, loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener, the first man to have a sex-change operation, and his California-born wife, who unwittingly sets his transformation in motion.
DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE
By Isabel Allende, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
HarperCollins, 399 pages, $26, $14 paper
Sweeping historical novel takes the unconventional orphan Eliza Sommers from the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, to the gold fields of California in the pursuit of romance.
DISOBEDIENCE
By Jane Hamilton
Doubleday, 273 pages, $24.95
A teenage boy in a colorful family discovers evidence in his mother’s e-mail that she is having an affair. Told in retrospect, the now-grown-up narrator ponders the nature of love and duty.
DON’T THE MOON LOOK LONESOME: A Novel in Blues and Swing
By Stanley Crouch
Pantheon, 546 pages, $26.95
A white jazz singer and a black saxophonist struggle with their love for each other as family and peers disapprove. Music provides some solace as the story unfolds in settings across America.
DROWNING RUTH
By Christina Schwarz
Doubleday, 338 pages, $23.95
When her parents and sister die tragically, Amanda, a former nurse, ends up caring for her niece and the family farm. When her dead sister’s husband returns from World War I, he finds Amanda not just the guardian of farm and girl, but of a terrible secret as well.
EQUAL LOVE
By Peter Ho Davies
Houghton Mifflin, 178 pages, $12 paper
The author’s second collection of stories treats the loves and relationships of “a sandwich generation–children of one century, adults of the next–caught between debts to their parents and what they owe their own offspring.”
THE HATBOX BABY
By Carrie Brown
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 333 pages, $22.95
During the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, a premature baby is delivered to the doctor who runs the infantorium. Over the summer, the fragile child affects the lives of many colorful characters who work at the fair.
THE HEARTSONG OF CHARGING ELK
By James Welch
Doubleday, 440 pages, $24.95
Based on a true story, an Oglala Sioux performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show falls ill and is left behind in Marseille, France. Held hostage by the French bureaucracy, his life takes unpredictable turns in exile.
IN THE GLOAMING
By Alice Elliott Dark
Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $23
In the title story in this collection, a mother cares for her adult son who is dying of AIDS, and she realizes that he, not her husband, has been her deepest love.
JIM THE BOY
By Tony Earley
Little, Brown, 227 pages, $23.95
A coming-of-age portrait of a 10-year-old growing up with his mother and three uncles in a small North Carolina town during the Depression.
JIMMY CORRIGAN: The Smartest Kid on Earth
By Chris Ware
Pantheon, 368 pages, $27.50
In a style influenced by classic newspaper comic strips, Chicago artist Chris Ware tells the story of his lonely title character’s first chance to meet his father at age 36. The story flashes between 1890s Chicago and a small Michigan town in 1980.
LOST
By Lucy Wadham
Carroll & Graf, 315 pages, $24.95
On a bleakly rendered Corsica, a recently returned young widow gets caught in a political war between a revolutionary group and the local Mafia when her older son is kidnapped.
LOVING GRAHAM GREENE
By Gloria Emerson
Random House, 176 pages, $22.95
An eccentric philanthropist undertakes an unusual mission, traveling to Algiers to hire bodyguards for journalists in danger from fundamentalists during the civil war.
MAKE BELIEVE
By Joanna Scott
Little, Brown, 246 pages, $23.95
A 4-year-old boy, orphaned by a car accident, is the subject of a hard-fought custody battle between his two sets of grandparents, one black and one white.
MASTER OF THE CROSSROADS
By Madison Smartt Bell
Pantheon, 752 pages, $30
In the second installment of a trilogy about Haiti’s 18th Century slave revolution, the focus is on Gen. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the success and aftermath of his military campaign.
THE MINERAL PALACE
By Heidi Julavits
Putnam, 326 pages, $23.95
In 1934, in a stultifying western town, a young wife takes a part-time job as a reporter. As she uncovers the town’s secrets, she exposes the sexual corruption and lies underlying the town and her own marriage.
MR. SPACEMAN
By Robert Olen Butler
Grove, 223 pages, $23
In this comic novel, an alien who has been studying humans beams onto his spacecraft a tour bus headed for a Louisiana casino. The passengers will be the last people he examines before he makes himself known to the world.
NORWEGIAN WOOD
By Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
Vintage International Originals, 296 pages, $13 paper
English translation of the 1987 novel that made Haruki Murakami famous in his native Japan. A romantic coming-of-age tale in which a college student faces tragedy and hopeless love.
AN OBEDIENT FATHER
By Akhil Sharma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 282 pages, $23
The Indian civil servant narrator is an unlikable, corrupt man who shares his home with his daughter and granddaughter. An awful act he commits causes his life to spin out of control just as his country does the same.
OFF KECK ROAD
By Mona Simpson
Knopf, 167 pages, $19
Novella set in Green Bay starts in the 1950s and follows one woman’s extended circle of friends through the course of their lives. A study of connectedness to place.
THE OLD AMERICAN
By Ernest Hebert
University Press of New England, 287 pages, $24.95
During the French and Indian Wars, the leader of a band of Indians takes a white man from New Hampshire to Canada as a slave. Based on fact, the story is an unusual view of the time, seen through the eyes of the Indian, the Old American.
THE POWERBOOK
By Jeanette Winterson
Knopf, 289 pages, $24
A novel set in cyberspace about an e-mail writer who composes fantasies to order. But readers who enter her stories risk leaving as someone else.
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
By Joy Williams
Knopf, 311 pages, $25
Slightly surreal novel of linked stories follows three motherless teenage girls through the arid landscape of Arizona.
SECOND HAND
By Michael Zadoorian
Norton, 224 pages, $22.95
When his mother dies, a second-hand-store owner who is obsessed with junk finds his relationship with castoff items changing; his new relationship with a kindred spirit offers some love lessons.
TWO MOONS
By Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 303 pages, $24
In post-Civil War Washington, a widowed math prodigy goes to work for a young astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory. They fall in love, but they may be star-crossed.
THE WHITE MAN IN THE TREE
By Mark Kurlansky
Washington Square Press, 301 pages, $23.95
The accomplished nonfiction writer offers his first collection of short fiction. The stories are set mostly in the Caribbean and South America, and the characters are united by their misunderstanding of each other.
WHITE TEETH
By Zadie Smith
Random House, 448 pages, $24.95
Set in London, this humorous novel tells the story of two unique, multiethnic families–the Joneses and the Iqbals–over the last half century.
