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| Non-fiction |
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|  | Alden, Edward THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN BORDER
August 01, 2008 - Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, examines how America went from the most open country in the world to a nation hostile and unwelcoming to foreigners. After 9/11, the country moved into crisis mode. The president, who had
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| | Alexander, Kelly HOMETOWN APPETITES
August 01, 2008 - Before Clementine Paddleford (1898–1967), food writing lacked the joy, whimsy and sophistication we now associate with it, contend the authors. Former Saveur editor Alexander and Kansas State University archivist Harris, an authority on the school's
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| | Asante Jr., M.K. IT'S BIGGER THAN HIP HOP
August 01, 2008 - Asante (Creative Writing/Morgan State Univ.; Beautiful. And Ugly Too, 2005, etc.) joins the throng of idealistic young academics, black and white, desperate to find messages of hope and change amidst the monotonous bluster and carnage of much
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| | Ashton, Nigel KING HUSSEIN OF JORDAN
August 01, 2008 - Ashton (International History/London School of Economics and Political Science; Kennedy, Macmillan and the Cold War: The Irony of Interdependence, 2002) writes from a scholarly point of view, complementing but not overshadowing Avi Shlaim's
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| | Baer, Robert THE DEVIL WE KNOW
August 01, 2008 - America doesn't recognize or understand this rising superpower, the author argues. Dissecting Iran's rapid evolution, the Baer notes numerous examples of modernization—use of the Internet, a burgeoning youth culture, sexual freedom—that are rarely
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| | Bortolotti, Dan WILD BLUE
August 01, 2008 - He engages readers with a smooth writing style and a storyteller's easeful tempo, and his subject has an obvious wow factor. The blue whale is the largest, longest, heaviest and loudest animal inhabiting earth, capable of reaching 100 feet in length
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| | Bukowski, Charles PORTIONS FROM A WINE-STAINED NOTEBOOK
August 01, 2008 - Calonne (English/Eastern Michigan Univ.; William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being, 1983, etc.), who previously edited a volume of Bukowski's interviews, digs up a few more fragments from the author's vast—and scattershot—oeuvre. As with many
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|  | Burk, Kathleen OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD
August 01, 2008 - A native Californian who has long lived in England, Burk (Modern and Contemporary History/University College London; Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor, 2001, etc.) is particularly well placed to document that relationship, which
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| | Butcher, Tim BLOOD RIVER
August 01, 2008 - Joseph Conrad is the tutelary spirit of this work by Daily Telegraph correspondent Butcher, who for years "had stared at maps dominated by the Congo River, a silver-bladed sickle, its handle anchored on the coasts, its tip buried deep in the
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| | Capotorto, Carl TWISTED HEAD
August 01, 2008 - Actor/playwright Capotorto's debut is based on his one-man show of the same title, a loose translation of his surname (torto = twisted; capo = boss or head). The gallery of nutty grotesques who inhabited his Italian-American family and neighborhood
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| | Carr, J. Revell SEEDS OF DISCONTENT
August 01, 2008 - At the heart of the narrative lies the thrilling story of the 1745 taking of the French fortress at Louisbourg by a combined force of New England colonials and a halfhearted Royal Navy. Carr (All Brave Soldiers: The Sinking of the Anglo-Saxon,
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| | Daly, Michael THE BOOK OF MYCHAL
August 01, 2008 - Born Robert Emmet Judge to Irish immigrants in Brooklyn, N.Y., Judge had always dreamed of becoming a priest. After the death of his father, he and his sisters (one, his twin) were left in the callous care of his stringent, "fierce" mother Mary Ann
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| | Dando-Collins, Stephen TYCOON'S WAR
August 01, 2008 - Australian historian Dando-Collins (Blood of the Caesars: How the Murder of Germanicus Led to the Fall of Rome, 2008, etc.) has written what in some measure qualifies as a dual biography of William Walker and Cornelius Vanderbilt, focusing on the
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| | Davis, Margaret Leslie MONA LISA IN CAMELOT
August 01, 2008 - Not everyone was happy, she notes. The French worried about transporting their treasure across the Atlantic in winter via passenger ship, and indeed the S.S. France was briefly beset by a strong storm, though it and the painting emerged unscathed.
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| | Dray, Philip CAPITOL MEN
August 01, 2008 - From a white Southern loyalist's point of view, writes Dray (Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, 2005, etc.), military defeat was bad enough, let alone what a Union sympathizer called "the
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| | Ecelbarger, Gary THE GREAT COMEBACK
August 01, 2008 - Having been defeated twice in four years for his bid to the U.S. Senate—against Stephen A. Douglas—Illinois attorney Lincoln was in a low point of his career by late 1858. His improbable rise to win the Republican Party's nomination for president by
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| | Ellis, Charles D. THE PARTNERSHIP
August 01, 2008 - His expansive appraisal does, however, report the bad times along with the good at Goldman Sachs. Ellis devotes a few conscientious pages to the firm's early years. Beginning in 1869, founder Marcus Goldman pioneered the resale of commercial paper
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| | Foner, Eric OUR LINCOLN
August 01, 2008 - Taking full advantage of the current "golden age of Lincoln scholarship," Foner (History/Columbia Univ.; Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, 2005, etc.) commissions contributions both from Lincoln specialists and from
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| | George, Rose THE BIG NECESSITY
August 01, 2008 - "Eighty percent of the world's illness is caused by fecal matter," writes British journalist George (A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World, 2004) in her stupefying exploration of how we address, or fail to address, the rising global
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| | Ghiglione, Loren CBS'S DON HOLLENBECK
August 01, 2008 - A colleague of Edward R. Murrow within the CBS News broadcasting empire, Don Hollenbeck invented contemporary media criticism in 1947, when CBS Views the Press began airing on radio. Until the 2005 release of Good Night, and Good Luck, his career
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| | Golenbock, Peter IN THE COUNTRY OF BROOKLYN
August 01, 2008 - The inspiration for his book, the author explains, came when he asked himself, "Why did Brooklynites love Jackie Robinson when everyone else hated him?" Trying to find out what makes Brooklyn so tolerant, so special, Golenbock produces a portrait of
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| | Greenburg, Michael M. PEACHES & DADDY
August 01, 2008 - In gilded, pre-Depression New York City, real-estate tycoon and man about town Edward "Daddy" Browning courted and married "Peaches" Heenan, a 15-year-old aspiring flapper less than one-third his age. Debut author Greenburg zestfully recounts the
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| | Hamer, Bob THE LAST UNDERCOVER
August 01, 2008 - Hamer entered the FBI in 1980 after attending law school and serving in the Marine Corps as a judge advocate. He volunteered for undercover work, drawing strength for this demanding job from his devoted wife and children, and from "an unwavering
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| | Harman, Patricia THE BLUE COTTON GOWN
August 01, 2008 - Harman, a nurse-midwife, and her husband, a gynecological surgeon, stopped delivering babies when payments for medical insurance became unaffordable, but they continued to offer first-trimester care and gynecological examinations. The women who
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| | Henley, Marian THE SHINIEST JEWEL
August 01, 2008 - The narrative begins with the author informing her family in Texas that a six-month-old Russian boy named Sergey was waiting for her to claim him from an orphanage in St. Petersburg. Henley's simple pen-and-ink drawings humorously illustrate her
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| | Hitchcock, William I. THE BITTER ROAD TO FREEDOM
August 01, 2008 - "Liberation came to Europe in a storm of destruction and death," the author writes. As many French civilians died at D-Day as American soldiers, while German civilians were made to pay for the sins of the Nazi regime in a rain of bullets and bombs
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| | Hodgson, Moira IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME
August 01, 2008 - Currently a New York Observer columnist, Hodgson was born after World War II to a British Foreign Service officer and his elegant wife. Due to her father's diverse postings, the author advanced from an English childhood ingesting food laced with
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| | Holzer, Harold LINCOLN PRESIDENT-ELECT
August 01, 2008 - In 1860 custom prevented Lincoln from taking the presidential oath until March, some four months after he won the office. This dangerously long interregnum—which Henry Adams called "The Great Secession Winter"—unfortunately coincided with the single
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| | Hooper, Dan NATURE'S BLUEPRINT
August 01, 2008 - Though more than 30 years of research has turned up no evidence for supersymmetry, Hooper (Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe's Missing Mass and Energy, 2006, etc.), an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, does not allow
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| | Ings, Simon A NATURAL HISTORY OF SEEING
August 01, 2008 - He fuses history, science and personal anecdote to explain vision as it belongs to "a commonwealth of the senses," while also relating the generations of brilliant researchers (Kepler, Brahe, Platter, da Vinci, al-Kindi) whose investigations cohere
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| | Jarvis, Cheryl THE NECKLACE
August 01, 2008 - They named it Jewelia (in honor of Julia Child, who had died two months earlier in 2004) and determined that each of them would have it for 28 days, during her birthday month. Through sharing the necklace, this passionate and diverse group became a
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| | Jenkins, Brian Michael WILL TERRORISTS GO NUCLEAR?
August 01, 2008 - Jenkins (Unconquerable Nation, 2006, etc.) combines his knowledge of terrorism with private briefings from intelligence officials to provide an earnest, meandering historical take on the difficulty terrorists face in going nuclear. An insightful
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| | Katzenbach, Nicholas deB. SOME OF IT WAS FUN
August 01, 2008 - Katzenbach's memoir opens with the 1960 U.S. election, which he followed with interest from abroad in Geneva, where he was on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Sensing a new administration with unprecedented energy, youth and hope, he made some calls to
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| | LeMieux, Richard BREAKFAST AT SALLY'S
August 01, 2008 - In a startling reversal of fortune, LeMieux lost an affluent lifestyle beneath the collapse of his publishing business and mountains of delinquent loans. His memoir begins with the author in line for food at the Salvation Army ("Sally's") in rural
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| | Majd, Hooman THE AYATOLLAH BEGS TO DIFFER
August 01, 2008 - London-bred and used to British insularity, fluent enough in Farsi to pass as a native unadulterated by Western contact, the grandson of an ayatollah and son of an Iranian diplomat, New Yorker contributor Majd confesses to a frisson of nationalistic
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| | Matsen, Brad TITANIC'S LAST SECRETS
August 01, 2008 - The author's point of entry into the story is the diving team of John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, stars of the TV series Deep Sea Detectives. They wanted to resolve why the mighty ship sank only two-and-a-half hours after hitting an iceberg on
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| | Mayer, Arno J. PLOWSHARES INTO SWORDS
August 01, 2008 - Born into a Zionist family that fled Luxembourg in 1940, historian Mayer (The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revoltuions, 2000, etc.) has watched events unfold in Israel with interest and growing consternation. Enlisting his
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| | McGoogan, Ken RACE TO THE POLAR SEA
August 01, 2008 - Having stumbled upon the logbook and other effects of Elisha Kent Kane (1820–57), Canadian author McGoogan (Ancient Mariner, 2004, etc.) sets out to rehabilitate this previously neglected figure. Going in search of English adventurer Sir John
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| | Murphy Jr., Bill IN A TIME OF WAR
August 01, 2008 - West Point's 2002 graduates were special, points out the author, a former Army reserve officer who reported from Iraq for the Washington Post in 2007. Their graduation coincided with the Academy's celebration of its bicentennial, but these new
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| | O'Donnell, James J. THE RUIN OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
August 01, 2008 - Recent historians have been more kindly disposed to the "barbarians" of old than their predecessors, and O'Donnell is in this camp, giving modestly approving notes on Attila (a "bad cop" more than a sociopath), Theodoric and various Huns, Goths and
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| | Phelps, M. William NATHAN HALE
August 01, 2008 - True-crime specialist Phelps (I'll Be Watching You, 2008, etc.) delves deeply into the comportment and character of Nathan Hale (1755–76). Covering his studies at Yale and his fulfilling early career as a schoolmaster in the bustling port town of
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| | Poole, Gary Andrew THE GALLOPING GHOST
August 01, 2008 - Make that our big-media, big-money sports culture generally. Red Grange, renowned beginning in the 1920s for breakaway, full-field runs that gave his version of the game the appearance of rugby, was football's Babe Ruth. He may have been slightly
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| | Ratliff, Ben THE JAZZ EAR
August 01, 2008 - In his introduction, New York Times jazz critic Ratliff (Coltrane, 2007, etc.) explains where he got the idea of profiling some of his favorite artists by listening to music with them. One precedent was the "blindfold test," which has been a staple
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| | Remini, Robert V. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
August 01, 2008 - This neat survey begins and ends in uncertainty. Who were the first inhabitants of the New World? Is the United States now on the verge of irreparable decline? As can be expected from a biographer of Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as
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| | Rice, Anne CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS
August 01, 2008 - This spiritual autobiography focuses on the author's youth in New Orleans and her reconciliation with Catholicism during the past decade. Growing up in the Crescent City during the '40s and '50s, Rice was surrounded by an entirely Catholic world in
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| | Rimas, Andrew BEEF
August 01, 2008 - The domestication of the aurochs and its kin and conversion of its various body parts into calories and tools is an interesting—and oft-told—story. Science writer Rimas and University of Leeds agriculture lecturer Fraser cover the usual bases, then
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| | Robbins, Liz A RACE LIKE NO OTHER
August 01, 2008 - The 26.2-mile race through the streets and parks of all five boroughs began in 1970. In her first book, New York Times sportswriter Robbins reports the most recent one. On November 4, 2007, she writes, "39,265 participants swarmed the
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| | Rudel, Anthony HELLO, EVERYBODY!
August 01, 2008 - Seen at the dawn of the 20th century as little more than a gizmo of scant interest to anyone but hobbyists, radio as a business had to be built from the ground up, often by people who didn't necessarily know what they were doing. Parallels with the
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| | Sager, Mike WOUNDED WARRIORS
August 01, 2008 - The author chronicles the marginalized, forgotten and despised in cool, transparent prose that eschews judgment and melodrama. Horribly wounded young veterans of the Iraq War stagnate in a stateside dormitory, bodies damaged beyond repair, their
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| | Shulman, Alix Kates TO LOVE WHAT IS
August 01, 2008 - Feminist author Shulman (A Good Enough Daughter, 1999, etc.)—a fiercely independent woman whose marriage was based on autonomy and freedom and for whom privacy and time for her writing were paramount—was suddenly deprived of both when her husband
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| | Silverstein, Ken TURKMENISCAM
August 01, 2008 - The book is based on his undercover reporting for the magazine. Silverstein invented a company interested in promoting Turkmenistan's image in the United States so that it could attract investors to energy projects in the former Soviet Union. In
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| | Stavans, Ilan RESURRECTING HEBREW
August 01, 2008 - Haunted by a cryptic dream, Stavans (Dictionary Days, 2005, etc.) journeyed to Israel to learn everything he could about the revival of vernacular Hebrew in the 19th and 20th centuries. His complicated linguistic background as a Spanish- and
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| | Stross, Randall PLANET GOOGLE
August 01, 2008 - In his just-the-facts account, New York Times columnist Stross (Business/San Jose State Univ.; The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World, 2007, etc.) assumes a judicious tone, avoiding the common extremes of either
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| | Taylor, Andy WILD BOY
August 01, 2008 - In prose brimming with drinking-buddy informality, Taylor begins by summarizing his middle-class upbringing in early-'70s Birmingham and his parents' doomed marriage. After stints in cover bands, he answered a guitarist-wanted ad in Melody Maker
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| | Thompson, Donald N. THE $12 MILLION STUFFED SHARK
August 01, 2008 - This world has been fodder for mockery ever since Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and proclaimed it art, but there's a whole lot more money at stake now, notes Thompson (Marketing and Economics/York Univ.). He bravely attempts to apply theories of
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| | Vowell, Sarah THE WORDY SHIPMATES
August 01, 2008 - Fans will be pleased to see that Vowell's admittedly smart-alecky style is alive and well: It's not every historical monograph that tosses together Anne Hutchinson and Nancy Drew, Dolly Parton and John Endecott. The author's characteristic devotion
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| | Walker Jr., John A. MY LIFE AS A SPY
August 01, 2008 - Busted for spying for the Soviet Union 23 years ago, Walker claims that, because his "children deserved an explanation of my activities," he wrote a memoir that swelled to nearly 600 pages. When his attorney lost it, he says, he started over; thus
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| | White, Bill INTREPID
August 01, 2008 - This fall the USS Intrepid will return, following extensive renovations, to its dockside berth in New York City where it serves as a museum. It will also likely receive many mentions as the first ship of then-young naval officer John McCain, who
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| | White, Edmund RIMBAUD
August 01, 2008 - Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) composed revolutionary verse, carried on a wild, sometimes violent love affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, then abandoned his muse and pursued lucre in Africa. Prolific novelist/memoirist/biographer White
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| | Wright, Alison LEARNING TO BREATHE
August 01, 2008 - With bones crushed and lungs lacerated following a mountain-road collision, the author waited hours for help, using breathing techniques she learned from Buddhist monks to cling to life. Miraculously, she pulled through and was carted off to a
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| Online Exclusive
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| The Changing Face of Film Bios
July 15, 2008 - Donald Spoto was a prep-school lad in 1958 when he saw Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Spoto walked home entranced, murmured "hello" to his parents, went upstairs and stayed in bed for several days. Spoto was not ill. The film touched him...How much more illuminating and insightful current film biographies would be if their authors were similarly inspired by their subjects. Alas, these days, more prosaic motives drive biographers and publishers, who seem intent on rehashing existing sources, concentrating on hot sex and pushing books on Oprah.
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| Coming Soon |
| BOOKS SCHEDULED FOR REVIEW
Click here for the updated list of the books scheduled for review in one of the upcoming issues of Kirkus Reviews.
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