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| Non-fiction |
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|  | Allison, Peter DON'T LOOK BEHIND YOU
July 01, 2009 - In ragged chronological fashion, the author takes us on a ten-year journey, from his period of guide training, to his unsatisfying experiences as a trainer of other guides, to his four-year Australian hiatus and, finally, his happy return to Africa.
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| | Bach, Amy ORDINARY INJUSTICE
July 01, 2009 - In the tradition of Lincoln Steffens, Bach's investigative reporting works not so much to expose individual rogues and villains, but rather to examine how American institutions, in this case the criminal-justice system, fall so far short of our
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|  | Balz, Dan THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008
July 01, 2009 - By this account, the 2008 presidential campaign began in 2005 "Though George W. Bush no longer was on the ballot," write the authors, "his shadow hovered over all that followed." One of the things that undid Republican candidate John McCain, they
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| | Bartlett, Allison Hoover THE MAN WHO LOVED BOOKS TOO MUCH
July 01, 2009 - Over four years, John Charles Gilkey pilfered hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rare books, often with credit-card numbers obtained from his part-time job at Saks Fifth Avenue. As freelance journalist Bartlett points out, antiquarian-book
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| | Birnes, William J. THE HAUNTING OF AMERICA
July 01, 2009 - The tone of this purported history is set by the introduction, in which the authors ask readers to consider "the provocative possibility of extraterrestrial intervention and influence" on Earth's earliest humans, suggesting that various religions'
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| | Brinkley, Douglas THE WILDERNESS WARRIOR
July 01, 2009 - Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 2006, etc.) makes an important contribution to our understanding of Theodore—never "Teddy" to anyone who knew him, Brinkley
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| | Bronson, Po NURTURESHOCK
July 01, 2009 - An award-winning article, "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," which advised parents that telling children they are smart is counterproductive, prompted journalists Bronson (Why Do I Love These People?: Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families, 2005,
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| | Buckley, Veronica THE SECRET WIFE OF LOUIS XIV
July 01, 2009 - Through the figure of Fran‡oise d'Aubign, Buckley (Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric, 2004) paints a colorful portrait of 17th-century France. Fran‡oise's grandfather was the Protestant poet Agrippa d'Aubign,
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| | Canfield, Oran LONG PAST STOPPING
July 01, 2009 - By the time he was four, Canfield had suffered his father's desertion ("from everything I'd heard he was the lying, cheating, conniving, manipulative, inhuman son of a bitch who had left my mom when I was one and she was six months pregnant") and
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| | Cesarani, David MAJOR FARRAN'S HAT
July 01, 2009 - Using the example of the abduction and murder of 16-year-old activist Alexander Rubowitz on May 6, 1947, Cesarani (History/Royal Holloway, Univ. of London; Becoming Eichmann, 2006, etc.) shows how British counterinsurgency measures not only failed
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| | Dawkins, Richard THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
July 01, 2009 - In fact, Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2007, etc.) gave up the Oxford chair in the Public Understanding of Science in order to write full-time, and to spend more time agitating against antiscience and pseudoscience. The author opens with guns
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| | Dickstein, Morris DANCING IN THE DARK
July 01, 2009 - In this scholarly yet immensely readable study, Dickstein (English/CUNY; A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature in the Real World, 2005, etc.) examines how the artistic culture of the '30s served a dual function. It helped people understand and cope
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| | Drabble, Margaret THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET
July 01, 2009 - Novelist Drabble (The Sea Lady, 2006, etc.)—who has also edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature—notes that the best way to attack a jigsaw puzzle is to start at the frame. So she begins with the memory of beloved Auntie
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| | Edelman, Hope THE POSSIBILITY OF EVERYTHING
July 01, 2009 - Edelman (Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become, 2007, etc.) chronicles a period in 2000 when her three-year-old daughter Maya invented an imaginary friend named Dodo. At first the author consulted parenting books,
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| | Evans, Danny RAGE AGAINST THE MESHUGENAH
July 01, 2009 - Evans initially positions himself as a 30-something descendant of the Borscht Belt. "I knew precisely what my future held," he writes. "I would be a rabbi. I would be a learned Torah scholar who... would marry a Jewish woman (presumably one with a
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| | Faber, David MUNICH, 1938
July 01, 2009 - Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, should have known that something was up when propagandist Joseph Goebbels complained to him that British journalists in Berlin weren't showing the Nazi regime enough love. Halifax, writes historian Faber
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| | Farmelo, Graham THE STRANGEST MAN
July 01, 2009 - During the 1920s, using dazzling mathematical skills, Dirac combined Einstein's theory of relativity with Schrödinger and Heisenberg's theories of quantum physics. This inspired work, which predicted the existence of antimatter, remains essential to
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| | Fiennes, William THE MUSIC ROOM
July 01, 2009 - "Our house," writes Fiennes (The Snow Geese: A Story of Home, 2002), "was almost seven hundred years old." It was, in fact, the ancestral family castle, equipped with suits of armor, rusting halberds and flaking portraits of severe forebears. There
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| | Friend, Tad CHEERFUL MONEY
July 01, 2009 - Fully aware that his is a complicated story, Friend (Lost in Mongolia: Travels in Hollywood and Other Foreign Lands, 2001), provides a two-page family tree that rivals the Tudors' in complexity. The chart is a reader's dear friend, though, for it
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| | Gupta, Sanjay CHEATING DEATH
July 01, 2009 - When the heart stops, when tests indicate "brain death," when a patient hasn't breathed for an hour or more—these have long been understood as hard-and-fast markers of death. Gupta uses real-life stories to reveal how ambiguous these situations
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| | Hampton, Wilborn HORTON FOOTE
July 01, 2009 - New York Times theater critic Hampton does little to restrain his admiration as he follows Foote from his birth in small-town Wharton, Texas, to his installation in the playwrights' pantheon. By the end of his career, Foote earned two Oscars, a
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| | Horowitz, Mitch OCCULT AMERICA
July 01, 2009 - Tarcher/Penguin editor in chief and metaphysical enthusiast Horowitz charts the movement of mystical philosophies from their origins in the late 1600s. He begins with young mystic Johannes Kelpius who fled his war-torn German homeland for America, a
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| | Host, Carrie BETWEEN ME AND THE RIVER
July 01, 2009 - While some authors face their situation with an arsenal of rage and dark, pointed humor—see Katherine Russell Rich's The Red Devil (1999)—debut author Host writes about her illness with the nuanced grace of a poet whose perspective extends beyond
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| | Jacobsen, Rowan THE LIVING SHORE
July 01, 2009 - The Olympia's story is another woeful cautionary tale that humans seem incapable of digesting. Though a rather delicate, slow-growing, high-maintenance creature, the Oly (rhymes with holy) once occupied huge swaths of the intertidal zone from
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| | Jamison, Kay Redfield NOTHING WAS THE SAME
July 01, 2009 - Redfield (Psychiatry/Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Medicine; Exuberance: The Passion for Life, 2004, etc.) stunned readers when she recounted her battle with harrowing mental illness in her 1995 memoir An Unquiet Mind. Continuing her journey, the
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| | Jones, Kaylie LIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
July 01, 2009 - Jones, herself a novelist (Celeste Ascending, 2000, etc.), adopts a fairly routine chronology, beginning with her birth in 1960 and ending more or less in the present. Between chapters she places stories told by her mother—or about her—which reveal
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| | Kenison, Katrina THE GIFT OF AN ORDINARY DAY
July 01, 2009 - For Kenison, ordinary days were in somewhat short supply in the period covered by this memoir. She decided that her suburban Massachusetts community was too high-pressure and competitive, and that her family would be better off in a more leisurely
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| | Koehler, John SPIES IN THE VATICAN
July 01, 2009 - Journalist and former Army intelligence officer Koehler (Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, 1999) mines documents obtained from the files of the East German and Hungarian secret police, as well as Moscow's Politburo, to build
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| | Koontz, Dean A BIG LITTLE LIFE
July 01, 2009 - The author and his wife adopted three-year-old Trixie in 1998. Elbow surgery forced the golden retriever into early retirement from Canine Companions for Independence (CCI), an organization that raises and trains assistance dogs for people with
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| | Linge, Heinz WITH HITLER TO THE END
July 01, 2009 - So we learn from this unrepentant stiff-armed salute of a book by Hitler's valet. Linge, who died in 1980 after having served a few postwar years in the Gulag, did more than check Hitler's jacket for dandruff and shine his jackboots. He proudly
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| | Lord, Nancy ROCK WATER WILD
July 01, 2009 - Lord (Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale, 2007, etc.) brings an impressive awareness to this collection of essays, which she humbly describes as "attempts to learn, to discover, to wander around in ideas as I try to reach
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| | Maass, Peter CRUDE WORLD
July 01, 2009 - Mixing interviews and accounts of his visits to oil-rich nations, New York Times Magazine writer Maass (Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, 1997), makes the convincing case that oil enriches individuals but impoverishes nations. The author points out
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| | Masters, Hilary IN ROOMS OF MEMORY
July 01, 2009 - "Memory is a room always hitched to our travels," writes Masters (English/Carnegie Mellon Univ.; Elegy for Sam Emerson, 2006, etc.). That room gets a thorough airing as the aging author looks back on a rich literary life, which has included an
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| | Myerson, Julie THE LOST CHILD
July 01, 2009 - Mary Yelloly died in 1838, leaving behind a marvelous watercolor picture-book composed years earlier detailing the lives of an imaginary family closely based on her own. Who was she, and how did the premature death and loss of this unrealized talent
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| | Philps, Alan THE BOY FROM BABY HOUSE 10
July 01, 2009 - Aided by British journalist Philps, Lahutsky recounts his experiences in the "children's gulag," a Stalinist-era relic that operates to this day. Now a high-school student living with his adoptive mother in Pennsylvania, at the time the book opens
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| | Polsky, Richard I SOLD ANDY WARHOL (TOO SOON)
July 01, 2009 - When artnet contributor Polsky (I Bought Andy Warhol, 2004, etc.) sold his beloved Warhol, a green Fright Wig, at auction in 2005, he thought he pegged the market at its peak—the painting sold for seven times what he'd paid for it in 1987. Little
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| | Preston, Paul WE SAW SPAIN DIE
July 01, 2009 - In a broad gallery of heroes, along with a few villains, Preston (Spanish History/London School of Economics; The Spanish Civil War, 2006, etc.) singles out the "meticulously honest" New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews, who wrote of the
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| | Reid-Henry, Simon FIDEL AND CHE
July 01, 2009 - As Reid-Henry (History/Queen Mary, Univ. of London) demonstrates at many points in his debut, Castro and Guevara completed each other. Ironically, both came from wealthy and influential families, the very people they would mount revolutions against.
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| | Robenalt, James David THE HARDING AFFAIR
July 01, 2009 - Unlike many of those previous biographers, Robenalt intends to rehabilitate his fellow Ohioan. The author has digested decades of Harding's letters to Mrs. Carrie Phillips, a neighbor in their hometown of Marion, Ohio, who lived for long periods in
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| | Ryan, Joan THE WATER GIVER
July 01, 2009 - Until her adopted son was 16, parenthood had never flowed naturally for the author, and she viewed herself as an incompetent mother to a child with significant developmental challenges. First diagnosed as a toddler, her son had an underdeveloped
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| | Scales, Helen POSEIDON'S STEED
July 01, 2009 - Humans have considered the seahorse something special for millennia, writes marine biologist and BBC radio host Scales in this fawning yet mostly professional investigation. Perhaps 6,000 years ago, Aborigines in Australia were painting them on
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| | Seymour-Jones, Carole A DANGEROUS LIAISON
July 01, 2009 - Seymour-Jones (Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, 2002, etc.) begins by switching her focus between her two principals; as their lives intertwine in a most sinuous way, so do the author's paragraphs. Beauvoir refused to marry Sartre. In
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| | Shachtman, Tom AIRLIFT TO AMERICA
July 01, 2009 - In 1959, many Africans and African-Americans saw their circumstances as connected, with colonialism and segregation mirroring each other. "Uhuru! Freedom Now!" was the cry in sub-Sahara Africa, and if education was the key to black freedom and
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| | Shawn, Wallace ESSAYS
July 01, 2009 - The author delivers a curious collection of fraught essays addressing, in the main, the implications of living a privileged, comfortable life in a world largely populated by the desperate, hopeless and exploited. A self-described child of
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| | Solnit, Rebecca A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL
July 01, 2009 - Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics, 2007, etc.) examines what disasters tell us about how human societies work, where they fail or succeed during and after moments of crisis and how the small-scale utopias that sometimes
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| | Strathern, Paul THE ARTIST, THE PHILOSOPHER, AND THE WARRIOR
July 01, 2009 - Amid the shifting alliances and vulnerable kingdoms of 15th-century Italy, Cesare Borgia (1475–1507), the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, assumed unchecked power at a young age when his father put him at the head of the warring papal forces.
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| | Thompson, Nicholas THE HAWK AND THE DOVE
July 01, 2009 - Wired editor Thompson—Nitze's grandson—transitions eloquently between his two portraits. Kennan was the urbane writer from Milwaukee who cut his teeth at the American embassy in Moscow at the end of World War II, and warned early on about the need
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| | Weber, Lauren IN CHEAP WE TRUST
July 01, 2009 - In her debut, former Newsday reporter Weber makes clear that frugality is not a long-lost virtue of consumer culture. Rather, scaling down has been a cyclical manifestation of hard times: Americans have tightened their belts in periods of war,
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| Online Exclusive
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| More from Moore
June 30, 2009 - In How Fiction Works, the tutorial by the New Yorker critic and Harvard professor, James Wood writes, "Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on."...Contemporary fiction has produced few noticers with a better eye and more engaging voice than Tassie Keltjin, the narrator of Lorrie Moore's deceptively powerful A Gate at the Stairs.
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